totally mundane things

Photo by Sam J on Pexels

conversations around the island
about totally mundane things,
random thoughts, simple feelings,
how your eyes were a little dry,
said your contacts, they hurt,
and I tell you just the other day
I renewed my prescription…
a man, mid-sixties, asks if we’re open
on New Year’s — 
I said yeah, but we close a little early that day
 — woman in wheelchair arrives late for a class
that got cancelled — she still smiles anyway…
Head Honcho in Room C spent
hours power-washing the pool deck
and a lifeguard got sick
from eating too much McDonald’s on
her lunch break…
someone I haven’t seen in a while
asks me what I’m still doing here
and fuck man, I don’t even know how to respond…
hours go by, and the air fills with chatter — 
why does everyone always talk shit about
people?
then, later, they smile and tell family stories
face-to-face…
I could use some relief from all this
frenetic pacing,
back and forth, mind wandering,
feeble attempts to escape my own body — 
but when it happens, I float off to the land of ideas,
hoping for a little gift from the gods,
sometimes, if I’m lucky, I’m struck with a good one
and that makes the day mean something to me…
who else can understand
having a foot in the real world
while the other one tip-toes in a world even realer…
a universe that shines in a hyper-lit glow,
a place where I often work hard to define as my very own

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Garbage Notes:

This one’s a bit of a deeper cut into my library. I wrote it back when I was still working with the general public. It can be tough when you come into contact with people all day long. You’re constantly inundated with small talk and chatter. You’re ever-exposed to the mundane bullshit of life. And not even your own life—you gotta hear about other people’s bunions and eye problems and all the boring shit they did over the weekend.

These random thoughts, these simple feelings—not everyone lives in the sky or in the future or imagines fantasy worlds in their spare time. Most people go about their lives doing totally mundane things. And these are the things they’re happy talking about. They’re content with all that regular stuff.

Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying simple aspects of life. In fact, I love focusing on simple things. I often write about the ordinary, the commonplace. But I always try to find at least an element of the sublime in it. I always try to scratch away at the surface to find something deeper. Something interesting lurking underneath.

Conversations can be frustrating when there’s so much vapidity and superficiality. At some point you have to sort of relinquish the hope that there’s anything deeper even there.

Not everyone is going to be as compelling as you want them to be. It’s not so much a giving up as it is an acceptance of the fact that fascinating dialogue just isn’t going to happen in certain places. Like at the front desk of a fucking gym. Or at the supermarket, or at Macy’s, or at the bank, or fucking wherever people unwillingly spend half their waking hours.

Sometimes I just need a break from all the nonsense. It’s why I read. It’s why I make up stories. This is my medicine. Fictional worlds are more engrossing. And it doesn’t even have to be fictional. Learning about real people who were alive in other times can be just as satisfying.

I’ve said it before. But sometimes I think we live in the most boring of all possible worlds. We’ve achieved the greatest of all super-lame bureaucratic capitalistic dystopias. Woohoo. We never got the flying cars or the holodecks or the matter replicators or the invisibility cloaks that all our favorite science fiction sagas once promised us.

We went to the moon and then that was it. Now billionaires and celebrities get to (kinda, sorta) go to space, and we’re stuck here on Earth shifting and fidgeting in our cubicles all day long wondering how much our eggs are gonna cost.

Yeah, it’s super awesome that we got the internet and cell phones, and now we have artificial “minds” to tell us what to do. It’s disgusting that we’re so pathetically willing to offload just about every cognitive task imaginable to things that aren’t real.

These so-called intelligent creations of ours now advise us on every aspect of life from how to cut our toenails to how to plan a vacation. Is that really a revolution in technology? A set of algorithms that doesn’t really know you, trying to tell you the best way to spend the only two weeks of freedom you have all year long? It’s pretty sad when you really think about it.

And so what are we left with? What choice do we have when we are always surrounded by totally insipid interactions. Well, we can still find ways to choose our moments. We can still find agency in not doing or talking about what every other basic asshole is talking about. We can steer the conversation in a different direction. We can choose to see things in a different way.

You don’t have to always strive to fit in. You can blatantly be yourself. Don’t be afraid to like what you like, and move on. Sometimes you truly don’t belong in that conversation. It’s okay to be like, listen, I’ve got other stuff to focus on, I can’t talk right now. Then go somewhere else, somewhere quiet, where your mind can wander off. And at least then your consciousness can exist in a reality of your own making.

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Franco Amati 2025

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