A Gloss On Discourse

Actually, I live in the North, even though I'm from the Show Me state, yet perhaps the first loving words whispered in my ear were in a laconic Texas drawl. And I often find myself in conversation with total strangers, unusual in itself, whether of necessity, or some unstated need, for plain old conversation, or, to allow people to reveal themselves, yet not as often out of a sense of empathy as you might think.

These past few months, however, I've had an ominous sense, begat by a barrage overcrowding reams of conflicting stimuli and information, of yet still greater and greater isolation - or, maybe, has it been a few *years*? Call it exponential, or call it what you will. For one, this century's demographic has changed drastically - people are younger, or I'm older - many of them outliers as I imagined myself to be, on the move, with racial differences, too, a global representation most unfamiliar including a diversity of new languages, exotic though indistinguishable for that reason, and more likely for the sudden lack of my lingo, which is the parlance of what is now a century past.

I detect a lessening of vocabulary, and it's demise, too, affecting our skill for discourse, part and parcel of that rising frustration, quick and apparent, as well a certain NewSpeak embedded in communication networks spanning broad sections of society - hurried, abbreviated, at once conveying both tension and animosity. I used to boast, "there's only five people I know that think *this* fast" - but now? Two dead, two equally distant, then another who shares the last man's quiet wish to find Peace; pack of Winstons, pair of clean socks, a quart of Johnny Walker Black. But believe me when I mention quick thinking.

Comprehension, when wandering beyond memes with agendas, leans to confusing the adherents and results in the affronted flaming arrows and accusations from every aerie imaginable. I've had plenty of field trials in that regard. More and more of late on a quest to find meaning in someone else's hatred.

Why else do I say it, or better yet, suffer some embarrassment? Despite some who would still deny this phenomenon even to spite their face. That is troublesome. But, you know, what it just might come down to ... one's ability to listen.

across the clay, braving the mizzle
a bent old man talks to himself