The Taste of the Floor
“For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering?”
- Camus, The Plague
Perhaps in the early days of the pandemic, we expected our souls to be sucked out in some grandiose way, standing up in the middle of a Zoom meeting and going to slit our wrists to the fuzzy backdrop of an Eliot Smith track à la Richie Tenenbaum.
But as time meandered on, there came a realization: there is no romantic death, there is only the slow decay of mediocrity. And in mediocrity and act as simple as wearing more than a t-shirt warrants praise, an entire article, and micro-categorization of a new forced trend. Just like in music we place labels on even the most minor of details in an attempt to make them seem expansive. Hoping that by doing this the walls of our prison cell will no longer feel like they are closing in. The problem of focusing on the minutiae is that we quickly learn to ignore the big picture — we happily gobble up the nostalgia that we are sold not recognizing that brands are openly admitting they have run out of new ideas. It’s a bleak realization that nostalgia is rarely more than a falling into the same consumer traps run through the media circuit every decade. Dreams and memories have been replaced by products.
In this, originality becomes meaningless and invention is ignored. Every effort, every creation is reduced a little more than an opportunity for a post.
So we continue to buy hundred-dollar t-shirts for cars we can never afford. Distracting ourselves from the inevitable fact that we will never be able to own a home and will work until we die. It becomes easier to dismiss the nuclear family as an old standard rather than accept that it is simply unattainable. I have reinvented myself so many times over the past year that even the self of but a few months ago becomes unrecognizable. But it all follows the thread of excuses — we have all given ourselves excuses. We allow ourselves to say that the world is falling apart and therefore it’s okay to wear "elevated basics". Life is hard, so why shouldn’t I be able to wear crocs? But the truth is I’m tired of mules and moodboards. I’m tired of self-acceptance. Margaret Deland apparently said it first but Hatebreed said it better: Satisfaction is the Death of Desire.
Our collective sin is that as we emerge from disaster, we will slowly realize we have learned nothing, we have failed to grow, we have decayed. Now we allow ourselves to get away with mediocrity, spiritual murder. We allow so many things we cared about to die. It took me months to try and write something again, giving myself the excuse that the world is crumbling and there is only so much you can say about it. Frankly, who knows if I’ll write something again. Time will tell.
