I'm with you. With production of The Last of the Manson Girls finally wrapped, I finally have a big chunk of stress of my plate. There's still post-production, but that's largely farmed out.
I feel like the world at large is rethinking being busy for busy's sake. Everybody seems to be ratcheting down. Maybe it's just winter. Or maybe we're all just fucking depressed on a global level. But everything feels like it's shifting down.
Calm before the storm?
Probably a larger discussion for a different thread, but, yes...I feel this too. Especially since I've been racing like a madman to knock out the millions of to-do projects on my list. I can't even gather enough time or wherewithal to buy tickets for a movie!
Meanwhile, all of the little goblins I work with at the day job and at my company are totally slowing down, and many still numb with shock, even as I run around them like the Tasmanian Devil.
I don't think it's the calm before the storm in the sense you're probably thinking. I think it's echoing what I said in the last two front page articles -- we're all waking up very slowly from our long, OCD-addled, hypermedicated sleep. But we don't quite know how to approach this world because we haven't approached it for 15 years.
I think we're finally asking what it was all for. Like...the last 40 years. The Yuppie Era of the American Psycho. I think we're realizing that we've been fighting a war since 1949 and, somewhere along the way, and not at one of the more obvious junctures but within the last few decades when things seemed okay, we lost and ignored that fact because it was impossible to lose, or because it was hidden beneath Pyrrhic victories.
These "great hangover" periods are a regular feature of our human history. The 1920s and 50s are prime examples. But then we came close to a massive social revolution that fizzled, and we became embroiled in a Forever War, and kicking both of those traumas to the curb brought in a new Great Hangover period. But...it didn't really end. Even with 9/11 in that timeline. Sure, that was a tragedy. But we don't remember it like, say, Pearl Harbor. Or even the Tet Offensive or the Fall of Saigon or Watergate or the Challenger. It's a victim of the Time of the Soundbyte. 9/11 seems a more distant memory than December 7th, 1941. Because we were and remain in the Great Hangover. Asleep. Free from want. But not free from the nightmare of it all...that's what's waking us up now.
