Things that aren’t things, unless you say they are, and then they are: an overwrought ode to not going to a thing and then overwroughting it

I saw this poster on the street, and aspirationally tweeted a photo of it because I wanted to go to it, wanted to do the bike ride from El Cerrito Bart to the Palestinian Holiday Crafts Bazaar in Berkeley. Every year I see signs for MECA’s holiday bazaar, and I think to myself “Oh, I should go to that,” and every year, I never do. This year I also thought that, and also didn’t go.

The reasons one doesn’t go to a thing are never very interesting or illuminating. The details of a schedule, the waves and webs of contingencies and obligations can be narrated one way or another, depending, and no one but the person at the center of them cares very much. So I could easily string together the exigences of raising toddler twins, of illness, of work obligations; impossible to go, I might say, to the exactly no one who is interrogating me about why I didn’t go on the bike ride from El Cerrito Bart to the Palestinian Holiday Crafts Bazaar in Berkeley, like I always don’t go, every year. But I also could have decided to go, and made it a priority, and gone. Sure, I’d have to rearrange other things, and work some things out—and asked a favor or two, of my spouse or someone else—but I could have done it. I didn’t do that, and no one is asking me why I didn’t.

I feel the same way about the Clausen House art show, which I also didn’t go to, like I don’t go to it almost every year. I went to it once, and it was almost breathtakingly sweet, and beautiful, and kind. I want to go again. This year’s was almost a month ago, so I’m sure my reasons for not going were perfectly adequate, but the fact that I’ve forgotten them speaks to how low the bar is. I could have pushed through. The reason I didn’t is that I didn’t.

What happens to a thing you don’t go to, after you don’t? It’s so hard to go to things these days, or so easy not to—some mix of lockdown inertia, all those broken habits that became new habits of staying home, along with the way toddler twins require so very much care—but I’ve been thinking a lot about how the world we share gets narrated, chronicled, recorded, turned into a memory in the book of life. Mostly, of course, it doesn’t. Most things don’t become things. There were no reporters at these events; what’s left of the media in the East Bay was mostly busy with crime stories, restaurant openings, or rewriting other people’s press releases about crime or restaurants. Not that I think the handful of real reporters left should have been writing scene reports about modest little annual events like these, of course; things were happening in politics, and I enjoy a good “here’s a new off-beat restaurant” story as much as any other dues-paying member of the bourgeoisie. Weather is going to happen, as usual, and I’ve read about it.

But part of why I wanted to go to those things is because I knew they wouldn’t be narrated, chronicled, recorded, or turned into a memory in the book of life. I wanted to feel what they were like because I knew that being there would be the only way to get that feeling. They weren’t going to become things. And there was a time, maybe, when if you didn’t go to a thing like that—that wasn’t the kind of thing that gets turned into news—you could still feel like you went to it by reading about it on social media, which would make them a little bit of a thing. Someone would post pictures to instagram, or facebook, or you could find a hashtag on twitter; even there might be a blog or two. It’s a lot less like that now, but I might be nostalgic for a moment in internet history that only partially happened; perhaps what I’m nostalgic for is a moment in the 2010s when it seemed like that might be a thing which, though it wasn’t quite true, might eventually become true.

And yet, here we are, right? If you’ve read this far, if you’re one of the few who have, then let’s take a moment and marvel at what stringing together sentences can do, the way a non-event as non-eventish as some random public events I didn’t go to can become a thing, in such a mild, modest, small way. You can go to a playground, and in the smallest most modest way, turn that place in time into a story.

What other things can one make, by stringing together sentences? I’m thinking maybe I should try to make some things, maybe even go to some things and write about them and see what it turns out they were.