There's some sick rot making its way through the heart of America, sweeping through the common people. It's the obsessive need to "do things," to participate in events, no matter how stupid, pointless, painful. Today's FOMO event was a "trick-or-treating" event at the horse stables next door (a location that somehow took 291 days to take a photo at this year). We live next door, and it was free, true, so that put some balm on the wound of waiting 75 minutes for twelve pieces of candy from the animals that we see every day of our lives. There were people that came from out of town for this. There were people waiting two hours for this. I feel sad and I don't know if I can articulate why. Something about how there is an emptiness in our lives and we think we can fill it by gathering in public for the most asinine fucking reasons. There's an Infinite Jest passage about this, I should probably find it and reread it tonight, to soothe my soul from the pain I feel after waiting in this long line and thinking that this is precluding some sort of cataclysmic collapse in our society.
Horses were cute, though.
3 comments:
I think you’re thinking about this wrong. We’re both very lucky to live so close next to one of three horse stables in the city! With Halloween being about the kids, I’m sure all the kids loved it, which is the point! 2 hours to wait is crazy though.
Although to your point of FOMO events—I hate when people do things purely to post on social media (“look at what I did”). Their lives become a reflection of their curated online image, instead in their online image being a reflection of their lives. It’s like the relationship has been flipped on its head.
You're right in that maybe this horse stable event was not the right event to make this point over. I do love having the horses as neighbors, and it felt good to have something going on right next door.
But I dunno. It feels deeper than that. It feels like these crowds are a harbinger of darker things to come. We were thinking about that at Knoebels last week too. One of the purest places on earth, and I don't think that TikTok had anything to do with the crowds, before or after. But I waited like 40 minutes for french fries, and then another 40 for hot dogs. The line for Phoenix was 90 minutes. Why is everyone gathering like this? It just seems excessive. It seems like people are motivated to push past the annoying shit because it's going to be "worth it" for some reason. Worth it for what? Even having a great weekend, it still felt dark.
I dunno. You're also not wrong at the social media stuff. The "curated image" thing has made me sick for as long as social media has existed, not just recently. I sometimes like to think that this Blogger website is different, but it's probably not! Here I am, curating my image as I see fit!
I totally get it. Most things are just not worth waiting for. I remember when Beddia open like 10 years ago, and people would wait for hours for a pizza. I remember thinking to myself “how good COULD it possibly be?”. It’s pizza. Dough, sauce, cheese. The difference between the best pizza in the world and really good pizza just isn’t that much. Cut to last month, where I had Beddia for the first time (bachelor party dinner). It was fucking great. Worth waiting for? No. It was pizza.
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