Have they always been?
I don’t know. Thing is, I’ve been noticing things and body parts close up. The wide view? Nah.
Oh, I see what’s going on all over the world, thanks to my daily ritualistic skate over the headlines in two papers, several journals and one social media site, but having once again made the determination that the government of the United States of America is occupied by idiots, nut cases and bad seed little boys, I can’t spend hours in deep penetration of the news, per se. One quick glance at the top left column of my digital Times — the column the Times seems to have devoted to dryly informing us of the epic work to which Trump is applying himself [“As War Grinds On, Trump Relishes Renovation Projects: President Trump is basking in the momentum of the various projects he has spurred around downtown Washington.”] — and I’m outta there.
So I’ve been spotting intimate oddities. Like how my cold water faucets produce two seconds of cold water before running lukewarm, then warm, then sometimes hot, before locating the cold water supply which must be somewhere in our basement. Which takes seven or so minutes.
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When I read about the ugly passenger spouting racism on that plane, the guy whom other passengers duct-taped to his seat to shut him up and restrain him, my first thought was, “That’s a lot of duct tape. Does the TSA allow passengers to carry rolls and rolls of duct tape onto the plane?” If not, wherefrom the rolls and rolls of the stuff?
Of course I then began to consider how difficult it must be to hold a rogue racist down in his seat while someone else (?) does the taping. In an extremely confined space.
At least one person on that flight has been streaming way too many dark thrillers with or without cops but definitely with duct tape. Which, by the way, I don’t call “duct tape.” Anyone who’s ever worked in the film business calls it gaffer tape, for obvious reasons. I mean, “obvious,” if you know what a gaffer is. If not, you can do what my mother always said when I asked her about something I didn’t know: “Look it up.”