Waiting

 

"Everybody’s crazy

What’s your excuse baby?

Standing in the middle waiting for something to happen."

Ah, the lost and greatly lamented Veronica Falls one of my favourite jangly, indie, bubblegum, breathy, Sixties crossed with a Noughties take on Britpop inflected New Wave, covertly energetic, bands. A niche category but a good one.

The song is about indecision and prevarication; everyone is as uncertain as everyone else. But perhaps it is also about paralysis in the face of things that are just too big. 

In the case of the song, approaching someone you kinda like. 

In the case of many humans in the early 2020s, the sense that perhaps everyone really is crazy makes one feel that actually standing in the middle isn't the worst place. The trouble is that the crazies might catch up with you anyway.

Waiting no longer feels like just waiting for the weekend, for something to turn up or even to improve. The notion that things might actually get better seems fanciful in itself.

Waiting now has the sense that no news is actually very, very far from the worst news.  Slow news days are not just to be welcomed but absolutely treasured. Culling of notifications from news sites is a prudent way of avoiding being presented with something truly dreadful before being properly prepared. Just making it through a week  feels like a minor triumph. 

Yet the waiting goes on subliminally. 

A classic coping strategy for worry and uncertainty is to discount. To imagine the worst so that you have as a mental exercise gone through it and come out on the other side at least in some order. 

Discounting is however hard when the worry is about things which simply do not feel susceptible to such techniques. Things from which we do not come out the other side in some kind of recognisable order: climate change, warfare, fascism corrupting liberal democracies, economies that malfunction to such an extent that they do not provide a decent life for millions; global famine; endemic diseases for which the boffins have no answers. 

Yet the waiting is even stranger since on the surface not that much has changed. Not yet anyway. The striving is for normality by which we mean how it has been up to now. We celebrate rain in the summer as properly British after heatwaves that leave everyone shaken because the sky was a shade of blue more commonly associated with the Sahel than Surbiton. 

Whilst not that much may have changed there is an ineluctable sense that it will. Our rational minds tell us so. Not to listen would be crazy. To give up in favour of the fantasy and the stupidity that characterise so much of what passes for politics in places like Britain and the US.

So here we are waiting for something to happen, knowing that at least some of it will, knowing that it is only rational to accept and prepare and adapt and make the case for the Enlightenment and the dangers of demagogues and standing up to fascists and to try to do things that could make a difference but also desperate to know how bad is bad because that way we can try to cope. But bad is likely to be very bad. And we don't really want to know what it would be like because we are really not sure we can cope with knowing.

And so we end up "standing in the middle waiting for something to happen" and wishing it was just that a pretty girl (or your chosen preference) might smile. 

Because then we'd know what to do.