A small story:

I sighed in irritation and then said aloud, "Oh shut up, you big baby. You predicted this a year ago."

I don't remember how my friend and I had gotten on this conversation but she'd asked me what I thought wouldn't make it through.

Without a beat, I said...

"Dry cleaners."

I then waited for my brain to catch up with whoever had mad that prediction and continued.

"As it was, offices were getting less and less formal. Honestly, the only people still wearing suits are lawyers and defendants. Who needs suits right now?"

"It's going to devastate the industry," I finished, then I even told my friend to grab any stuff she'd been forgetting to pick up at her little local cleaner, run by insanely hardworking people who deserved none of what was coming but who might close with a day's notice.

A year later, I stared in confusion at my local dry-cleaner, where I had planned to get my deadstock 80's 501s hemmed. I read the note taped on the door, thanking everyone for their loyalty for several decades.

Grimly, I noted some clothing still hanging inside.

"Fine," I thought, "I'll just go to the other place."

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME."

I read the small handwritten note at the other place and felt terribly for them. I looked down the block at the "For Lease" signs in storefronts, tried to remember what had been there.

I thought the block had lost two restaurants, a clothing store, a vegan shoe store, but couldn't be sure if that was this block or one of a dozen blocks in Silver Lake with the same toll.

The restaurants which somehow made it are bustling. People are eager to be alive again.

There are different definitions of life but the simplest checklist looks like this:

1. Growth,
2. Reproduction,
3. Activity.

Well, also:

4. Death.

Hope that didn't spoil the surprise for anyone.

So, life is synonymous with "Change."

Things which are alive are changing.

They are always changing.

Now, you could make the argument things which are dead are changing (see: Putrefaction, Body Farm, nearly all of Quinn's favorite podcasts) but let's say the change after death is mostly maggots, who are not us and, unlike us, alive.

We accept this "Everything is changing all the goddamn time" in the same way we accept that there are black holes in the universe and we're not certain where all of them are.

It's a "I will agree to this, can we please speak of something else" kind of feeling.

2020 - a year I will continue to refer to as The Eternal Now - stretched and folded time like a car-warmed piece of Laffy Taffy. It was often Memorial Day, Easter and Tuesday afternoon, at once.

Let's be honest.

It was always Tuesday afternoon.

We're reeling back into normal life as if normal life is an inanimate object, a scarf we left in someone's car and then they went to San Jose to see their great-aunt for a month but then we got it back and our scarf was the same, albeit with a touch of Laffy Taffy on the fringe.

We are alive. Our communities are alive. Things which are alive, change. My parents visited Pompeii when I was tiny and Kid and I visited six years ago and guess what? The pictures are pretty much the same because Pompeii is dead.

Our pictures from Bologna, are not.

We're staggering around like newborn baby deer, weaving towards "Normal," but whatever it was is gone. Then, if you add in that our country is maybe, possibly, probably not but it's exciting to think so considering how racism isn't America's flaw but America's operating system...

Everything has changed.

Nearly everything has to change.

(Also? Capitalism as we know it now was never the Founding Fathers damp dream and while we're at it, when you have a musket and train on the weekends with your well-regulated militia I'll be excited to hear about your Second Amendment)

This doesn't mean it's supposed to feel good. In fact, it's terrifying. That warmth we feel when Thanksgiving is "the way it always is" is the dim glow off a soap bubble; everything is temporary. It's all a mandala, designed to remind you that even great beauty must be swept up.

After you've had as many car accidents as I have, you learn to, if possible, relax during an accident It's why the anecdotes about drunk drivers walking away from catastrophic accidents has some basis in reality; you're drunk enough, you just kind of blubber through impact.

Several times now as I have seen a car careening towards me I have consciously blown out air between my lips, sunk into a phenotype best described as "Soft-shelled crab after molting."

It's ugly, but it works.

We need to soften right now.

We need to absorb the vibrations.

Everything was always changing, but not everything is changing in Day-Glo colors while pelting us with yams. Don't be an old comic, complaining about how comedy is a "minefield these days."

That's dead people talk.

That's what you sound like when maggots are brunching.

Things are going to be very alive for the foreseeable future. Language is changing. This is fine. The English language has always changed. Bitching about having to remember pronouns just makes you sound like a rotting corpse.

Expectations are changing. People who have lived in this country for 400 years, and much longer, are tired of our bullshit. This is fine. Instead of stiffening up for impact, go molted crab.

Be soft.

Maybe go nuts, don't interrupt a woman who is speaking.

We have this rare opportunity to change and not just react. This could be extraordinary.

Take a moment to think of the people, the businesses, the ideas, which didn't make it.

Wish them well.

And then, get to work.

It's a very alive time.

Be alive.

And now, THE AD! If you like these Small Stories, can I coax you into helping to support them? I promise to tell you where I finally found a tailor, but am also picking up the jeans the second they're ready because, honestly, you never know. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4846197 

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