One Step Behind

Ever had the feeling you woke up too late, maybe feel like you’re sitting at the wrong screen in the cinema or that’s yesterday’s newspaper you’re reading? Well that’s how I feel every day. In a mercurial world decorated with beautiful ephemera I feel trapped in a cellar with only paisley wallpaper covering the damp.

This is not to say that I’m an old fart or that I dismiss this brave new world with a sneering pugnacity. It’s no more than, like a lot of people, I always feel one step behind. It doesn’t matter if I read every How-To guide or catch every techno show on TV or You Tube updates; I am behind on the technology by the time I close the book or the video ends.

This world is too fast for me, it’s as simple as that. I like to read a good novel at a leisurely pace or watch the world tick by like a zoetrope outside cafe windows while sipping a long coffee of my choice. 

So this new world; let’s call it Earth 2.0, is just too fast for me. Not just the technology or its need to race like a year old greyhound toward exhaustion, but all manner of modernity. The media world changes more often than an airhead hostess at an MTV award ceremony. Each month I purvey the latest interior style magazines only to find expensive purchases like the Vitra book case I ordered three weeks earlier, or the Eero Saarinen dining chairs that eventually melted my credit card are no longer post modern chic but junk shop tat.

How do people keep up?

Well they surf the net I guess. Only when I try this I swim in a different tide of on-line games, sport stories and banal forum catch-ups like a dolphin caught in a tuna net.

So I guess I’ll always be one step behind. Thing is I kind of like it that way. Nobody tells me my novel needs a firmware upgrade halfway through reading it. The sunset won’t crash if its HTML script is missing a hash when the colour deepens and playing with my kids at the park doesn’t seem futile if I don’t stop pushing the swings to Twitter that I’m…well that I’m pushing the swings.

I’m One Step Behind and maybe now and again you may like to try it too.