It has been a long time. The Muse has been quiet, but she's waking up. Lots to share in this issue!
There's a song by Glass Animals I've come to love. It's called
It's all so incredibly loud. Some songs are just nice to listen to, and some songs stop you in your tracks. This is one of those songs. I won't say more other than, take the time to read about the
meaning of this song.
For me, right now, it feels like "it's all so incredibly broken."
Last month, a shipping company I've been using for literal decades failed for the first time. A shipment of fine art prints I had ordered for an art festival Aria Luna was participating in, did not arrive until a week after the event. All they had to do was pick up the package in San Francisco and deliver to us, about a 40-minute drive south. Instead, the package went miles east to one of their centers and got stuck there for days. In the grander scheme though, it wasn't a real failure, just a hiccup. The support agent explained the (very expensive) prints aren't lost; they're simply waiting to be processed.
And because I had been writing about supply chain issues for a client, I knew they were telling the truth. Port handlers, truck drivers, and many other workers in the transportation and delivery industries are stretched very thin right now. We might all do well to
hold back on all the online shopping.
A few weeks ago, a series of posters we had printed for a project (see Message & Meaning below) arrived, printed backwards. Boggles the mind how the people running the presses could release 16 large posters printed in mirror writing, to a customer. Unless of course they thought the customer was Leonardo da Vinci. (The company did immediately reprint them.)
And the other night, my family went to the cinema for the first time since the pandemic started. We were delighted to give ourselves the luxury of an IMAX film. We even splurged on ice cream and churros. Sitting happily ensconced in our seats, we waited for the previews to begin. And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The film, the latest Marvel issue, "Eternals," felt ironically à propos... The "Eternal Waiting," I quipped.
30 minutes later, the screen burbled to life... a split-second of the intro, then it crashed. Someone in the audience made shadow puppets in the light shining on the screen... the theater burst into laughter. The showing was cancelled and everyone got a refund plus free tickets.
These are all, of course, first-world problems. No one got hurt, no one lost their house. There are numerous other examples like this I could share of how things are slowly breaking down on a variety of levels. They're inconveniences and they're far overshadowed by much more serious events and realities going on in our country right now. But even these inconveniences are reaching a certain critical mass. They are the canaries in the gold mine telling us the system is creaking under its own weight. Eyes wide open, lest they're forced shut forever.
~ Birgitte
