The past may be safe but the present is treacherous.  Everyone seems to be noticing.  You overhear people say, "Who's next?" or "I don't know how much longer I can go on like this."  Of course, even if they are going next or can't go on they've clearly gone on long enough to be saying so, but you know what they mean.  There's a sense of being stretched to the limits, a tense anticipation in the air.  Little cracks appearing in the way things used to be.  Small shocks and surprises.

A friend travels to the other side of town to a discount store and yes, we're all doing it these days.  He spies an old mutual acquaintance of ours, someone we used to know in those heady better days gone by, someone we used to admire and even envy, someone always impeccably dressed, always showing up in all the right places with all the right people.  My friend is about to approach when he notices something off -- the odd attire: an ill-fitting ensemble of chinos and bold blousy top.   At which point the store's plastic name-tag comes into view.

"I spun my cart aound and headed briskly for the next aisle," my friend reports.  "Pretending I hadn't seen.  It felt like the kind thing to do." 

We've all been there, of course.  If you live long enough you will eventually get caught in some awkward pose or other, some compromising position, in the wrong place with your pants down, so to speak.  Or perhaps in a paper hat, offering to supersize an ex's order.  You will think in that moment that you will burst into flames.  But you rarely do.

Lately however, it's more than that.  The moments caught off guard, the folds and twists in the normal flow are adding up; the transformative process is taking on speed.  Which I tend to think always happens at the end of an age or an era.  I think the skin on time is wearing thin.  You can almost see the tiny tears in it, here and there, like crows feet or paper cuts or laugh lines.  
 
There are even times, usually when I'm meditating (like this morning in fact), when I feel as if I could reach up and pull fairly effortlessly at the membrane separating this world from the next, this reality from the one beyond, the way you would wave away a cobweb. Slightly sticky but insubstantial. There's a fuzzy film on everything these days, as if you were looking from some cool darkness inside through the fine mesh of an old screen door at a bright summer day.  There's a sparkling underneath the surface and around the edges of things.  An echo on words and a shimmering on the horizon.  If I could just hold the focus long enough, I think that this fragile worn-out thread-bare present will simply dissolve and the next shiny world beneath it will emerge.

At which point I usually crave a Diet Coke, a Krispy Kreme or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.  Anything to pull me back down a couple notches please, back to that everyday consciousness that isn't quite being asleep but isn't exactly on high alert either.  Chemical additives or sugar or processed meat and cheese will take the edge off, generally speaking.  Give you that pleasant dopey buzz.  And yes, a lot of other things will do the trick too, but I've had my lifetime supply of most of them already.

Do you suppose 1904 was as intense?  At the time I mean.  Did they know that everything important was happening?