Vernal Hill

 I was walking back from the coffee shop on 24th and folsom. I never like the coffee there, no clue why, but theirs always feels too hot and dry(?) and makes me feel dehydrated. But it was open and I wanted a tall ceiling, natural light place to sit and maybe zone out a bit. This place had a sort of grungy, chipped paint concrete floor feel, which felt like a real honest-to-god simulation of the type of place I used to hang out in back in the latter days of the good and old. But then I would look and see all stripes of people, the whole shop, a silent chorus all staring at their phones, and that breaks the spell for me still. 

I sat there a bit and then hiked up Folsom in the late late late afternoon sun. Rounding the curve near the top I hear someone yelling Riley! Riley! with a marked amount of force and seriousness. I thought to myself: chill out, guy, imagining this guy as some softy guy who can't handle his dog or human interaction with even a little bit of script free friction, someone without my 'trust a dog to be a dog' easy remove that I've cultivated over many entirely dog-free years. A couple are making a camera phone video of the scene and I stop to see how it plays out. I see a dog chasing another along the side of the hill, below the guy where he can't see and then realize that the golden retriever tail, hey, was chasing a coyote! I forgive the guy mentally with immaculate grace, though he's probably still a softy, because I understand a coyote could probably fuck up most any domesticated dog. Riley runs back up the hill to master. Wile E. has escaped and sits, panting, looking out over our shoulders to the city

What color is that supposed to be?

A few years of prognosticating about future celeb turning politician as creepy dangled key coercion for whatever the powers that be want, feel like kinda alert. oprah, rock, or matthew mcconaughey uvalde-valued maybe too perfect

typo negative

In my ever-increasing experience, people who I otherwise don't really respect (though this is generally through a screen and I don't actually know them, so this might all be some form of internet mirage: caused by hot air, inferior) often liken some new word or phrase to something in 1984, the book, usually as examples of Doublethink or Newspeak. I haven't read that book since I was a kid and maybe I should go back to it, but I vaguely remember thinking those concepts were kinda unrealistic, but fun enough for science/dystopian fiction. And Orwell was, I can imagine, probably going for some metaphorical effect with those terms anyway. At least that's why I read science/dystopian fiction, as a funhouse mirror on contemporary stuff.

These people who I don't really respect usually, it seems to me, get hung up on some new euphemistic (or seemingly more and more often simply non-rude) term replacing some newly-beloved sneer. The new word or phrase is taken to be some instance of doublethink-inducing newspeak or whatever and therefor in effect an attack on their very minds (though I suspect these new terms make the old ones just all the more juicy and potent. There are words that have come to be bad in my lifetime that I use among friends and I can definitely attest to this feeling). 

There is another sort of people, who I also don't really respect, who seem to see it as their duty to fight back against this sort of discomfort with new words, or at least condescend to it. When someone complains that a word is 'made up', this group swoops in to say something like: 'wait till you find out about literally all other words' or something like that. This always seemed a little needlessly deliberately obtuse because though it's in some sense true that all words are made up, there is still an obvious and real felt distinction between 'cat' and 'toyotathon'

I think this defense of new terms, in some people I know, leads them to a sort of passive credulity when it comes to any new term, mistaking corporate marketing (because more and more of their view of the world is delivered to them through their omnipresent corporate screens) and social engineering for something other than that. Or leads them to these, to my mind, unthinking pivots to old words as some sort of remake or gritty reboot spurred by non-profits trying to stand-out from the crowd and secure new money. out: 'equality', in: 'equity' (my dimwitted ass can never remember what the distinction is supposed to be, but I always thought equity was some stockmarket, real estate, capitalism term, dunno).

This is all just lead up to this thought I had: it's funny to think of terms like 'body-positive' or 'sex-positive' as pitch-perfect examples of newspeak.