Readings Being Read

​Oh, just that time I gave a talk at that place about that thing, and then later, at the hotel bar, everyone gathered and slagged the Other Talkers not presently there for how bad Their Thing was and the way it didn't deserve all the press and advances it was getting, and then, when the Other Talkers showed up late, told them how happy they were about all the press and advances they were getting, and I sat in the corner trying to come to terms with the Bar Menu mini fish tacos I'd failed to sufficiently drown in pleasantly corrosive Tapatio sauce, and then there was the name tag stuck to the bottom of my sneaker, which I'd apparently been standing on for a while, and it seemed as apt a metaphor as any other since everyone knows the perfect metaphor has malleable-to-no meaning, thereby allowing the world to interpret it as best suits them personally, and I thought about how seven years into the future America would probably just have been through a plague (of microbial politics) and also Covid, and on a Sunday afternoon I'd be sitting in my office listening to Marvin Gaye while typing into a laptop about a day seven years in the past, and how, looking at that picture of myself, would think it might as well be a snapshot from 1922, or even 1412 for all that I recognize in it, and so would inspire me to muse for a moment on the reality of aging in general, let alone the fallacy that there even is a static self with a consistent worldview, or that the person looking back from the screen had any relationship at all to the one currently typing. Further, was this dissociation progress? Evolution? Delusional? The complete turning over of every single cell in the body on a mandated biological level, or just a cheap parlor trick?
Either way, some guy with orange sneakers ordered another raft of tacos and a beer, figuring they were a debt he could amortize over a future that would probably never arrive.