See Ya!
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By Beppe Colli
May 12, 2021


Summer’s here, things are getting better, restaurants are open again, everything is slowly getting back to normal.

Just yesterday the owners of the sea resort I go to every year wrote to communicate that on June, 3rd it will be "business as usual". I need to shed some weight, and I need a few new swimsuits. It’s time to go out.

And so, like all the beautiful things in life, our weekly (dis)appointments end here. It seems like yesterday – it was the end of September – that I decided to write again here, and I can say I did my best, with great regularity.

However, I’d lie if I said that the experience has been an "overwhelmingly positive" one, even if the end result was not that different from what I had previously thought. But one thing is to assume, another is to determine with a satisfying degree of accuracy.

It’s not a matter of numbers, those "clicks" were enough. But this is not the point here, we don’t sell ads and don’t do any "whoring".

Feedback was really to a minimum, and with just a few exceptions – all of them musicians, by the way – nobody appeared to be interested in following a train of thought too deeply. For the most part, readers appeared to have lost any capacity of concentration, of "going deep" into an argument or topic.

Taking for granted that the "all you can eat" formula is nowadays an accurate measure of people’s attitude when it come to almost anything, what I found really worrying is a certain "callousness" in people’s souls, in an environment where Scrooge would feel at ease. But as it always happens, those who suffer from avarice adopt the same kind of behavior when it comes to friendship and the social sphere, in a glorification of the "self" that’s really disgusting to see.

Friends of mine who are musicians by trade were horrified to learn that my piece titled The state of music business had received the lowest number of clicks ever. Numbers have spoken.

The point most readers appear to have missed is that I don’t suffer from solitude, nor I feel the uncontrollable urge to communicate my point of view about anything. What I do has only meaning inside a social framework.

The recent pandemic has shown all too well how "individuals" don’t perceive themselves as being "citizens", shouting that a long list of their "rights" are to be satisfied "anyway", while they feel they have the right to behave "as they please".

(I won’t discuss the chance, that quite a few experts have argued to be quite likely, that a "return to normalcy" in a measure similar to that of the "belle époque" could prepare the right conditions for a really horrible pandemic, to take place in 2023.)

Quite recently, a friend told me to consider my pieces as a kind of "messages in the bottle". But I don’t need any help!

See you at the beach.


© Beppe Colli 2021

CloudsandClocks.net | May 12, 2021