On Agitation
One thing that growing up entails is learning that one, twice, three times in your life you will experience some passion–jealousy, love, lust, hate, grief–to the point where you lose it. If you happen to be in public, it doesn’t matter. You may collapse beside the park path and lie there five hours, unable to move, or you’ll stagger, wailing, through the traffic, or even go screaming after someone along the waterfront for an hour and a half.
It doesn’t happen often. If it occurs with any frequency, probably you need help–if not medication. If it doesn’t happen a couple of times, however, you’re not human.
–Samuel Delany, interview in Black Clock
We pass these people like car accidents when they’re in the public square. They are ordinary/us. But when it happens in a small(er), knowing circle of peers, it can be particularly damning, and destroy “the group’s” opinion of another. First impressions, etc. It’s utterly unfair to modulate one’s network against another when the above happens. But it happens all the time. Part of the impulse to do this, I think, is this decade’s information overload–there’s only time for so many friends, X many acquaintances. (As well as the “sensitivity to security” in the workplace: immediately considering a terminated employee as a mortal threat to be escorted out by security) If there are speed bumps, it’s best to move on. That is how the theory goes.
And yet, all this means is that people get better at hiding things.
