I stopped for some diesel, and a young guy next to me rolled in to fill up his car as well.
As I filled up, I noticed him circling around the car for a bit, looking for something. Finally he comes back with about a metre of paper towels. I’m still filling up the diesel as he wraps the entire petrol pump handle in paper, so he doesn’t have to touch it.
Difficult to say why, but I’m assuming it’s part of the new war-on-anything-not-covered-in-sanitiser.
Anyway, I go in to pay, and walk past his car. The rear bumper has fallen off, but then been stitched back on with electrical tape. The left front tyre is half flat…
I walk out after paying, and he’s coming into the store.
Head down into his phone, he misses the door entirely and almost hits the glass next to it. At the last minute, he re-adjusts, and comes in through the centre, still messaging or scrolling. I stand aside.
Unfortunately, his passenger isn’t able to help him with any of it, because she misses the whole thing, deep in her phone as well.
To an extent, it seems important to allocate some attention to what’s happening across digital platforms. And, at the same time we need to realise they are completely ungrounded and limitless. It is a web of information, often fairly removed from the time and space that we actually occupy.
The result is we can sometimes get lost working really hard to protect ourselves in one sense, while running into glass doors in another.
