Saturday, January 01, 2011

empty, nothing, slaves


Posted by PicasaMist after the snow occupies vacant benches. (Click to view whole picture).

The streets are quiet this morning. Revellers are sleeping off the results of last night's celebrations (Do we celebrate the end of the past year or the beginning of the next one? ) There is an air of emptiness in the town even among the shoppers still looking for something they might want in the sales. For some reason I recall my attempts to write a diary as a child. "Nothing happened today,"  I found myself writing, before giving up diaries for good. Nowadays my memory of that entry seems to reflect  my own emptiness. A lot must have happened which I failed to notice.

The supermarket opens at 10 am to day, a concession to what is supposed to be a holiday. We arrive just before 10 to see people lines up with their trolleys. Lost souls, consumer slaves waiting  in the mist to perform their purchasing tasks like the workers in Modern Times waiting upon the production line.

4 comments:

CC said...

This is why I am not overly fond of holidays.Too much frenetic preparation and anticipation.
Too much excitement and celebration.
Then over in a flash. Everything spent, from emotions to money. Followed by too much recovery. I prefer an "every day", please.
Time to think and do without it all leading to varying degrees of depression.
Pretty soon life will return to normal and
small joys will be back as well.

Lucy said...

It's a lovely picture, the street lamp seems to beckon.

Another blogger friend says her little boy has a kind of appointments calendar on his wall. He has no appointments to write into it, but simply gets up and writes something like 'Yay, today!' which seems to denote a more positive attitude to the sense that nothing much really happens in childhood! You're making up for it now anyway.

Roderick Robinson said...

You've chosen to test your cheerfulness in a severe way: at the checkout. Supermarkets demand an unsparing eye, something like that recommendation in one film or another: at the casino watch the hands not the faces. I'm sure you may have been tempted, when compiling your headline trio, by the chilly beauty of the french: épuisé, néant, esclave.

herhimnbryn said...

I am homesick for mist. I want to walk by that bench and look at the lampost!