I had an alert when I awoke yesterday morning from The Weather Channel on my phone about some tropical depression in the Caribbean with a chance to be the first hurricane of the season (!) Umm, I was still savoring the first butterfly of spring. I think we may be rushing the seasons faster than even Vivaldi would've liked.
Touch wood (taps skull) we're months away from hurricanes here in the Northeast where all we really do is go to the store and buy bread, eggs, and milk (I typed that out of order and am so anal I fixed it). While homes get swept away along the Jersey Shore and towns disappear in Florida and North Carolina, we seem to make French Toast. Who knew?
And even though I gripe about it, I'll head to the grocery store when the $*it gets real, because that's what I do. It's always the same. The aisles are jammed with neighbors whom I've never met and people I see all the time whose names I'll never know. So much for Norman Rockwell's portrait of America, eh? Though, I'm not even sure if the Saturday Evening Post is still extant.
And why would we want it when we have tabloids to tell me "Rachel Ray Throws Out Husband" and to read that Katie is worried about her marriage to Tom. I have no idea whose these people are but nevertheless, I feel sorry for them. A grocery store gawker like me is reading all about them and there's nothing they can do about it.Their as-imagined-by-their-press-flacks lives add a lustre to my own.
Where else, but standing in the checkout line at a supermarket can I experience, admittedly vicariously, so much so quickly? How goofy must we now be that Weekly World News, the tabloid that had 'Bat Boy' and the alien shake hands with everyone from H. Ross Perot through George Bush, both H. and W., ceases publication because of flagging sales?
I LOVED WWN because I trusted EVERY news report, photo and feature was utterly bogus and knew I was never going to be disappointed. And what about the folks who placed ads in there! What were they thinking and who buys that stuff now that the newspaper is gone?
Lots of rainy day thoughts and concerns until we stand bravely and mostly silently behind one another waiting for the register operator (they're not really 'cashiers' anymore are they?) to say hello and ask us how we are, without ever waiting for, or listening to, the answer.
We're past 'paper or plastic' aren't we? We may have given Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel for his eco-movie, but I drove in my car all by myself and bought enough items ludicrously over-packaged to single-handedly choke a landfill. Then I return home, enjoying the buzz from a food snack I bought and ate even though I shouldn't have. Empty calories are the best. They go straight to the waistline and skip the brain.
I've waited all winter for sunshine and blue skies but I'm forced to admit: we need to have more hurricanes and more often-helps us get out of the house and mingle. Man, I can't wait but I guess I'll just have to, we still have all this spring and summer to get through.
-bill kenny
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