I sat next to them on a red light; busy with their phones, all of them; frantically trying to send out their smoke signals, to whomever. I watched them, one by one, trying to determine what we had in common, and it came to me: a moment. We will never meet again and the very next moment we’ll share will be when we die. Yet, with so much on the line, none of them showed any interest in each other, their world safely downsized to their small devices.
We don’t share death anyway; we don’t face it, we don’t accept it; these are linguistic psychological tools the living use to soothe themselves. Ironic, since death will be the most soothing state our bodies will ever be in. Death will take us all and one hundred years from now, on the corner of LaBrea and whatever that other street is, new people will be there waiting for a green light, typing away on their phones.
It occurred to me that technology might be advanced enough that they won’t need to type at all; perhaps they will all have a chip on their heads which will allow them to communicate to whoever, at will.
On the few minutes that it will take for that light to turn green what will remain the same is our aptitude to create ingenious ways to allow us to do the same things over and over again until the end.
🚘🏍🛴🚲✈️⛵️