Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
My husband and I just spent two weeks away on holiday. During that time, one of the most obvious things to me in my observations of people, aside from the realisation that I don’t actually enjoy observing people and would rather pretend they aren’t even there at all, is how spatially unaware people are. This is just my grossly over-generalised observation and, it must be said, is probably significantly prejudiced by my anti-social tendencies.
People were just wandering about as if they’ve had some part of their brain cauterised or removed, or even just turned to mush by a long sharp needle stuck through their eye socket into the brain and jiggled around a bit. Or is it some kind of slow onset zombieism collective governments are hiding from us? Or do they even know about it yet? But it was as if walls, fences, gutters and other human beings had never occurred to these people.
You don’t have to be at an airport or on holidays to see this bizarre behaviour for yourself. Take a walk into your local shopping mall. People just walk towards you as if the idea of your being a corporeal thing that would essentially block their movement beyond a certain point was unfathomable. Walking along the esplanade in New Zealand’s Queenstown, I wondered if people even conceive of the idea that you would get out of their way. I don’t think it ever occurred to them that there was a consequence of walking towards someone and not moving. They haven’t thought that far ahead, which is probably one of the first symptoms of zombieism.
Of course I move out of their way. I don’t even mind for the first few hundred times. After all I’m literally oozing holiday vibes. But then I do it begrudgingly. After that, I do it with a passive aggressive vehemence that is just short of my stomping my feet and screaming like a velociraptor.
I’m so conscious of other people, mainly because I don’t want to be close to other human beings. I mean, bring me a herd of cattle and I’ll sit down and chat with them for hours about anything from which grass is the best to get that fine summer paddock figure to the pros and cons of consumerism. But strange human beings? Fuck that shit right off, thank you very much! Especially people in airports. Or on public (or group) transport. And don’t even get me started on selfie sticks!
I could venture that all this says way more about me than it does random human beings. Perhaps I envy them their oblivion? Perhaps I want to be as oblivious of the existence of other human beings as other human beings are of me. How dare they live in such bliss? I know, when it comes to human values, it’s not a thing to aspire to. And I do want to be mindful of others. But thinking about others is so exhausting. Especially for a nervous, awkward, anti-social introvert with a heavy OCD flavour such as myself. If I think about them, then I’m thinking about what they’re doing and where they’re from and if they’re happy and if they’re well. And that stresses me out!
I don’t want to think about other people being unwell, because that invariably leads to me thinking about what could be wrong with them and if it is communicable! I mean, have they come from a jaunt through some bird flu-ridden country? Is my proximity to them going to make me start bleeding from all my orifices? I don’t even know if that’s a symptom of bird flu or if bird flu is still a thing. I just go to the worst case scenario and I don’t think (short of death) you can get a much worse case scenario than bleeding from your orifices!
Maybe I should just stay home? Not for the first time did I exclaim, while on our holiday, that I hate people. I mean, I don’t hate people as a race, even though they leave much to be desired. Certainly, conservative voters aren’t high on my list of species to ensure the conservation of. I don’t want there to be some mass extinction, although I am conscious of the good it would do the planet if humans were suddenly gone. Although, thinking about it, sudden removal of the human species from the earth probably isn’t such a good thing. I suspect all the crap we’ve put in place, like nuclear waste storage, would start to fail if we’re not around to keep an eye on it, so that would all go to shit.
Maybe we need to go somewhere more remote?
Do they have great NBN in Antarctica?
Penguins don’t have bird flu, do they?