I stepped out into the rain and felt whole again.

Seventeen men in identical dress strode quickly towards me.

‘Sir, might you have a pocket watch? A lovely and ornate one?’, their leader queried of me.

‘Why, no, I haven’t balls of sufficient brass to carry such an article’, I responded in kind to their question.

‘Thank you though, sir’, to me. Then to his men at large, ‘Onward with our quest.’

‘What a bunch of losers’, I muttered under my breath after they’d gone. What an age we live in where the reinvention of politeness has gripped the masses with such intensity. Slowing, I lit a cigarette, blowing the first cloud of smoke into the face of a large man. He apologized profusely and went on his way.

‘You see!’ I said into my phone, ‘That is exactly the problem. A fucking yard of felt just ain’t as useful as it once was.. ..yes.. ..yes.. ..alright, I’ll see you there.’ Hanging up and I felt alone yet again with the dense crowds, all bustling to stay out of each other’s way. I wished only to be part of something greater than this.. this farce we call living. My soul would spin tendrils around any figure I saw as great. Any person with a fame and a wealth and a personality suited to my own and my own desires. Popular culture, I guess. It makes you do strange things.

Having time to kill before the party led me to an anonymous bookstore, stairs on the side of the building leading down below a coffee shop. Occasional leaks from the ceiling had marred older books with yellow-brown veins on their well yellowed pages. Passing Post-Contemporary Literature with it’s gleaming spines and ivory pages, through Post-Modern Contemporary Literature showing it’s meager age, directly until I reached Contemporary Literature. Not that I was buying anything, but why would I want to browse titles crafted by demographic polling, teams of editors and banks of supercomputers? Instead I opted for the worn paperback covers of only minor pandering and major artistic flair.

“Don’t even think you can be bringin’ that cigarette in here. ‘the hell outta here, boy.” The black woman waddled over to me in her strangely dignified way.

“I’ll take care of it Jamima”, squashing the cig underfoot, I kicked it under the bottom shelf.

“One day you gonna burn this place down, you ‘ear?” She said this while lighting a папироса of her own. “What you here fo’ again, boy? Ain’t you got no friends.”

“No Jamima, not a single one”, smiling my ironically amused smile, I lit up another and we sat down discussing what we called the Shifts of 2012. A lot of people talked about it actually, but no one quite understood it the way she did, and it was almost always the subject of our conversations.

. . .

Phone rings two hours later got me going, smacking Jamima’s ass on my way out, her chasing me and yelling all the way to the door.

Back into the throngs, but this time I was so far into my own machinations I didn’t notice a single parasol or ‘pardon me’. 2012 hung as bright in history as 1911, the glow of both dates diffusing temporally above and below by a few years. Dates when Things Changed. There are others throughout our timeline, most a simmering reflection of the Big Ones.

We live, and always have lived in a state of ongoing change punctuated by shifts from the way things were to the way things are. Small shifts are our constants of inconsistency – new presidents, new television shows, new scientific discoveries. These in themselves are common and go noticed, but they don’t change us in any elemental way because they either aren’t very significant changes or because they are spread over time. When tens or hundreds of these occur within, say, one year’s time, that year is punctuated in history. When hundreds of these shifts occur in short order and tens of them are significant in of themselves, that year explodes in history because those shifts have combined to make a drastic change. It changes us; the way we interact, the way we see ourselves, even the very way we think as individuals and as a society.