Midnight in Samarkand

Recently, while waiting between flights at the San Francisco Airport, I found myself sitting at the airport bar, as I normally do, imbibing a Harvey Wallbanger as I normally do, watching the action on the tarmac and admiring the strangieties of the surrounding venue. In many ways, this place is a present-day remembrance of a Silk Road outpost, a crossroads and exchange of foreign ideas and peoples.

The airport has always sort of been that kind of place, an odd place populated by odd travelers of myriad trips, all randomly converged in one spot at a given time. I have spent entirely too much time in these huge transit hubs in my life to this point, and despite the overpriced drinks and generally disinterested employees, one of the redeeming qualities of the experience has always been to meet different people, and have random conversations that went on about random things, in the process gaining a perspective on life I never otherwise probably would have.

How often in your everyday existence, for example, have you encountered a Hungarian Freedom Fighter, some dirt farmer named Joe from Lusk who struck it rich because of the vast petroleum deposits on his land, or a girl named Anemone from the Netherlands who was out of the Old World for the first time, let alone have an actual conversation with them? Some of the strangest conversations I have ever had occurred at airports, yet this veritable mosaic of multicolored views seems to be slowly but surely going the way of the buffalo.

SFO, itself somewhat of a modern-day Samarkand, once a buzzing hub of communication, has like so many other institutions succumbed to the perils of modern technology and devolved into yet another example of the “alone together” society that seems to unfortunately be one of the hallmarks of the 21^st Century. Looking around, I noticed virtually everyone to be stoned on some sort of digital opiate. Everyday people reduced to the stupor of Haight Street junkies, strung out on the marvels of modern communication devices, chasing dragons on their iPods.

In a way, this experience is indicative of the direction our society as a whole has shifted toward in the recent past. Gone are the days of spontaneity, and in its place, a dull feasting on information, an increasingly voracious lust satisfied only by the frenetic pace of living that modern-day technology provides. This constant craving is further stoked by the peddlers of technological smack. Each year, the pushers put out some new product that is deemed “must have”, which is followed by a tsunami of junkies scurrying to their respective local brownstones to get a sweet taste of it, and enjoy that one until the new, even more bitchin' stuff shows up a year or so down the road.

People live for the junk. People constantly have to update where they are, who they are with and what they are doing on the 36 different social media platforms they use all for approval of their digital minions. I can think of multiple incidences in my own past where something totally ludicrous and zany would happen, and the first reaction of those around me isn't awe of the spectacle, it's a usually rather abrupt chorkle of “I gotta post about this on Facebook!” People more excited about what someone else will say about what happened to them, rather than enjoying the raw insanity of what just actually happened.

It's a different world nowadays. With innovations such as the Google Glass coming online, a set of digitized glasses which allow the wearer to essentially “live” with their profiles, where does it all end?

After a couple drinks, I sifted my way through the sea of digital dope fiends, the absence of a stale-piss aroma the only thing making me totally sure I wasn't in the Civic Center MUNI station at midnight.