D. H. Tracy
THE NEW NEW NORMAL
It is desirable that as little happen as possible.An aristocrat said this, knowing (I hope) it was hopeless.Inevitably,sporadically (like clockwork,unlike clockwork), somethinggoes thlunk into the pond of you,and the normal expires.Your contract/lease/tour/term was up. You moved across town.The guests departed, orThe new normal feels like fresh linen, a little,even when bad. The new normal monkeys finicallywith the sublives where you dream and mate and work; the new normaltweaksthe way you think about the future, light jazz, incarceration, and vegetablecream cheese;about the toupee of dust on the top of the fridge (care, donât care),about fixing things or tossing them,about the relative merits of an enchanted forest and Rantoul in broaddaylight.Striving and coasting, hating and forgiving.The new normal has backdoor access to all of this,for now. And you fall in with the rhythm of where you have to showup when.We say life is normal when it resembles itself.We say numbers are normal when the appearance of outliersfollows a certain formula, as though freak occurrences were normal.We say a line is normal when it sits square to another line,as though it were normal to be at cross-purposes.We say a town is Normal if it has a Dairy Queen and a little zooand an insurance company where normal people go to work, maybe you.
