Spent a significant portion of yesterday in the car, birthday shopping and shuttling people various places (feeling terminally middle class), and then another portion of the day with my headphones stuffed in my ears, unpacking boxes and listening first to Bleak House (36 Hours for the Win) and then to podcasts of people explaining the phenomenon of Pokemon Go.
My phone is slowly fizzling out, so there’s no way I’m downloading anything at all that isn’t a podcast or a book calculated to spur me on to greater and greater amounts of work. And also, it would be really evil of me to play or do anything that doesn’t include putting Stuff Away and Looking For Stuff.
The gentle, questioning voice of a millennial explained the appeal of Pokemon Go–the nostalgia of an entire generation bundled neatly into an App, the sensibleness of returning to the old Pokemon and leaving all the new fangled ones behind. A deeper millennial male (sorry, cis male) voice cut in to delight in what this single game is doing to the economy, how economic hardships are dissipating away like a mist as hundreds of previously home bound young people flock into shops and restaurants. Play Global, Buy Local, or something like that.
Marveled that all of this has blossomed overnight. Hadn’t heard of Pokemon Go last Saturday. By Tuesday evening I was banging into it everywhere on the Internet, and by Wednesday there were what felt like hundreds of podcasts to chose from to explain it to me. Cast about in the cloudy recesses of both sides of my consciousness for some word to explain this sudden proliferation of something that feels (but obviously isn’t) ex nihlo. Then the lilting feminine millennial spoke it–“Viral”. Like Zika, I thought, or more likely the flu. Too small to notice, and then suddenly a quarter of the population has died from it.
Wondered again, because that’s all I do now, at the impermanent nature of this age we’re living in. We can go anywhere, do anything, construct whatever we like and the thing that we build is Auto Zone. The landscape is littered with highways cutting through towns that look exactly the same. Comfort Inn and Suites and Denny’s if you’re on the low end. Holiday Inn and Starbucks if you’re willing to drive a little further. Every single town in “Merica” has a Strip. You leave the dull shell of the town, bereft of shops that would sell anything you want, and drive twenty minutes out to Walmart, as I did yesterday, to buy everything in the world. The boxes go up over night. The bright disorienting lights flicker. We all shuffle around with our big carts, sampling the economic magic of Chinese Kitchen Towels and flimsy dog crates made in Taiwan. In a hundred years there will be trees growing up through the cracks because these boxes will have been abandoned in favor of some other palette of color and cheeper lighting.
Wish beauty would go viral. Wish a new generation of humanity would catch the bug of the beautiful arrangement of buildings in harmony with the peculiarities of a landscape. Wish all the flickering lights, both from my phone and from the ceiling, would more truly resemble the warm glow of a candle that burns slowly down to its stub, and the stubs gathered and made into another candle. But wishing is a pretty useless activity. If Pokemon Go is the thing of the day, I should obediently download it and wander out into the town, joining myself to our common humanity.
Pip Pip
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