Need contact fluid. The big bottle finally ran out, and empty eyedropper bottles are strewn all over the shelf in my medicine cabinet. I thought I'd stop by kd after work today (the place that offered a 10% discount for every point the German soccer team won by) as they seemed to have an abundance of hygiene products the last time I was there. As I pulled up John Denver's "Country Roads" or whatever that song is called was playing loudly outside, but it didn't quite sound like the way I remembered it, and sure enough a thumping techno beat commenced, signaling to me that the last song remaining unmixed on planet Earth has indeed finally been remixed. Leave it to Germany. Does this mean the Apocalypse is coming mommy?
It was some sort of grand reopening after having been closed for all of three weeks. You've probably already guessed the plot of this story; Alan looks for simple item (a la power adapter, a la Residence Permit) and goes away empty-handed and befuddled. "Broken beaten down, can't even get around!" Yeah that's what happened. But listen. Every imaginable hygiene product was in this place, from Buddy Boy condoms to denture fizz, and they didn't have a single thing for contacts. I just stumbled around, labels assaulting me on all sides, and suddenly began to empathize with this poor old guy who was despondently examining strange new-fangled items and randomly placing a few in his plastic bag. Yes, I thought, agreeing with him, this has gone too far. We should go back to a time when things were simpler.
But what a complex world we grapple with these days. During the time when things were simpler, we were barely surviving, and survival necessitated a simplistic view of the world in which rules of thumb reigned supreme. "When you see a bear drop to the ground and stay still. The early bird gets the worm. Look before you leap." But we're so far above survival concerns these days that we have much less need for simplifying. We have time to sit down and think, not just a split second to act. As Eric pointed out, we continue to add adjectives to the language: instead of just "good" and "bad" we have a whole slew of in-betweens. We're slowly but surely moving away from the simple categorical modes of thought that have kept us alive this whole time, and are moving into an era where a complex take on things is all of a sudden possible.
But we all have our moments when the complexity is too overwhelming for us, and for me it is usually in supermarkets. Super-markets. Marketing is super. Don't you think?
Posted by Alan at July 25, 2002 07:22 PM