Parking Cars

Today, the weather changed… I love the sun, the relentless sun,not so much, so I felt happy to feel the rain again, to breathe in cooler air, and to set my hair free, instead of having it squished down under my wide brimmed hat that keeps the glare out of my eyes so I can see joggers and cyclists weaving across my path.

I get social distancing… What I don’t get is why people do it across the road instead of along the path… There are a lot of things I don’t get about people’s habits, especially en masse social things… For example, I don’t understand why it is that when you park in an empty carpark, cars come in and park around you instead of spreading out. I could understand it, if I was parked near an entrance that people need to walk into, but I usually park well away. It’s an old habit from loading and unloading kids and pushchairs etc. I’ve never agreed with parent and child parking. OK, I appreciate the wider spaces but the whole next to the door thing, nope, let people who have a harder time walking have those spaces…

I pick up my night-shift guy and he’s not his usual self… He was not his usual self yesterday either as he’s usually talkative but last night he didn’t want to speak beyond the pleasantries of hellos and goodbyes. I knew something was bothering him. I didn’t ask what, as I figure if people want you to know then they’ll tell you in their own time…

This morning he was ready to talk. He told me that he just didn’t feel himself. Via the rear view mirror, minus a deck, I put him through a tarot reading… We peeled apart the words with a series of whys followed by a when. When did this start?

Long story short, I discovered I was sitting with a Singer who has stopped using his voice. A story of a natural talent, almost making a very big break and then feeling a failure after facing a rejection… Someone knowing that where they’re at is not where they want to be, someone feeling that they’ve missed their chances, someone apologising for their gifts… someone telling me they feel too down to use them… I listened to him unpack his thoughts until he said that he just didn’t know what to do with himself… I didn’t say much… I was thinking… Thinking that each thought he unpacked, revealed some kind of box that absorbing other people’s thinking had put him into…

I guess we’ve all done it at some time or another? I know I’ve fell prey to it, more often than I should have… Walking away from something because you’ve been told you’re not good enough, smart enough, tall enough, rich enough, oh the list goes on… Running parallel with the too list… You’re too lazy, too disorganised, too fat, too impatient…

Why do we do this to ourselves? Allow these words to limit us? More so, why do other people feel the need to label, label, label… Why use words as a cosh to suppress others… Ffs! Look what it’s lead to!

I rolled all of this around my mind… Not sure what to say (after all, he’s not asked for a reading, I’m not sure he knows I am a reader and he’s not aware I’ve slipped into reader type thoughts) until I condensed it down to one sentence. I told him – OK, rejection sucks, I’m not gonna lie, it’s never not gonna suck, but you don’t let it stop you from trying.

I got back to the carpark and I’d been first there this morning, now it had filled… Hmmm… Odd… Next to my car instead of the Focus that used to park next to my old Focus, there’s a Peugeot sat next to my new Peugeot…

This disturbs me… It is the kind of thing that would niggle me on an average day… Like a few weeks back when I turned up in my new hat and noticed that people called it different things, all of which I guess were a kind of reveal of their personality or experiences… The Spanish guy called it a sombreo… That made me smile. I also got called Indiana Karen, Zorro, Cowgirl… A few other ones I’ve forgotten… Oh and Dingo Killer! Wtf? But that’s typical of Mad Uncle F and I guess it’s a change from him referring to me behind my back as ‘that fucking cow’. A few folks have asked me if I know, I laugh and say yes of course I do. I love it! He makes himself look stupider and stupider everytime he says it. Does it bother me? No, it’s a cap that doesn’t fit so I don’t wear it…

But this parking thing today, in current clime… It bothers me. It makes me wonder if people are deeply rooted into clustering alongside people who they think are the same as them… My usual parking neighbour is the other side of the yard… My new neighbour, I don’t even recall seeing that car before. Curious… I don’t like this little carpark microcosm and how it appears to fractal out into the macrocosm of global population…

I start to feel quite depressed… People! Tribes… In or out of a tribe depending on what you’re wrapped in… Whether that be cars, beliefs, gender, wealth, class, etc… skin colour… The ways that people treat other people due to packaging…

I watch the rain run down my windowscreen… Its like all the Gods are weeping at how people messed up this world… I flick on the radio.

A man’s voice… Ah, the rain has come. We need rain, it’s a blessing. All that dust in your garden, the rain will turn the dust to soil… I find myself mentally sitting in Mystereum and hearing the words ‘amend your inner soil’.

Yes, the world has gone mad and we shouldn’t ignore our sadness nor try to rush it or push it away… We need to sit with it and work out what we need to turnover so we can all grow unapologetically into who we are alongside everyone else unapologetic for who they are, without crushing or being crushed…

We shouldn’t be getting bent out of shape by differences… We shouldn’t be grouping ourselves by superficial similarities…

I don’t know what the answer is but I know I’m not yet done thinking about it…