Fruit Basket Upset

Fruit basket upset is the phrase my cohabitant’s mother used to describe an unexpected calamity. It could be the title of a documentary about the last month of our lives. So many things have changed, flipped and failed. I’m reminded of the new trend forecaster’s phrase, Boom-Boom, which is supposed to describe our moment in history when social evolution has become a series of explosions in money, technology, misinformation and inequality. Chaos reigns. Boom-Boom! I guess it’s cooler than saying fruit basket upset. Either way, it can drain my tank of positivity and leave me feeling like I need a psychic cleanse.

A week ago, I was going to tell you all about it. I had the blog post written and when I went to put it on my website, I got an error message. My website had crashed when one software program didn’t agree with another software program about who was in charge of security. My December post was lost in the chasm between two servers. Major fruit basket upset. When I asked for chat tech support, I was sent to read a long page of generic instructions. When that was no help, I demanded human intervention, and the human emailed me links to the same long page of generic instructions. There was an explosion in my head. Automated help systems suck. Boom! Two days later, after hours on the phone with tech support humans who were very empathetic, my websites were back online. But by then my ambition had withered.

Mentally torched by my technology failure, I went to the grocery store, which is usually my happy place, but all the eggs were gone. All of them. The pandemic came roaring back into my present moment with that rush of dystopian anxiety we all know, and I felt panic. I went to another grocery store on the other side of town and a crowd was gathered in front of the egg case gasping at the prices. Two dollars an egg. Then a man walked past me with tears in his eyes and said, I can’t believe I can’t afford eggs. Of course, for most of us, going without eggs is manageable. It’s not the actual eggs that matter. It’s the idea that something so common could become rare overnight. I was overwhelmed with a fear of scarcity that is more imagined than experienced, but it lives on in my memory. In short, I was triggered. Boom!

Then my cohabitant, who is my partner and the love of my life took a hard fall on the cement driveway. He was coming home from work with the dog who loves spending the day with him at the shop. On the way to the house with his tablet and phone and empty Gatorade bottles in one arm and holding our rambunctious poodle on a leash with the other, the dog lurched toward a squirrel and the man tripped on uneven ground, landing on his left shoulder. Boom! Maybe it’s a broken bone, maybe it’s something else, we’re still waiting for the x-rays. But the pain is enough to wreck his sleep and his mood. So, I’m doing my Florence Nightingale tap dance.

Then our cable bill went up $30 dollars a month because we had reached the one year anniversary of our Xfinity service, and to reward us for being captives of their monopoly, they ended our new customer discount. This threw me into outrage. Boom! Since November, we had stopped watching mainstream media news anyway, and by January most of football season was on streaming platforms. So, we cut the cord and dropped cable television from our media mix. I guess cable was just a phase we lived through like black-and-white TV and landlines. 

The decision to switch from linear TV to streaming platforms was partly financial and partly mental health. We save $100 a month and we enjoy our viewing time more because we have better choices. The fear mongers and pundits have been excommunicated. We’re consuming science, geography, history, music and comedy on demand. Laughing before bed sweetens our dreams. We sleep better when we laugh more. 

We’re on an information diet. I worked on the launch of the internet in the 1990s, and back then I thought it was the cure for all that ailed us. I thought lowering the barriers to entry to what we called the information economy would deliver more benefits to more people. Didn’t see the tipping point when free, unlimited, anonymous access to information systems would flood the zone with the lowest quality content and overwhelm users with misinformation. Now the freedom we prized has led to a lack of accountability at every level of society, and in this zooming attention economy, our lizard brains have made death threats the most valuable currency. Death threats have become common. Everywhere all at once, death threats. Boom! 

Global fruit basket upset.

We need technology to communicate, but we have to limit our exposure to protect our mental health. So, we go outside for a walk. Life in our neighborhood is good. The dog park is a social scene. The stores are busy. The parking lot at the mall is full. On Saturday night, we waited in line for almost an hour at a family restaurant. We went to a college basketball game with thousands of fans and so many children. My partner’s business is thriving. Face-to-face people are friendly, helpful and polite. Kindness prevails. It’s a curious dichotomy between the doomy zeitgeist and all these smiling humans. It makes it seem like the internet isn’t really real. Just a scheme to get us to spend our money. Maybe we all need a break. Meet for a walk in the park. Have a potluck dinner. Hug. Remember who we are. Being physical is a paradigm shift. Keep it real. Boom!