The day everyone remembered ice cream
I spend a lot of time thinking about trends in language; it’s part of my day job. Lately, we’ve started cursing more, all of us. We write headlines with the word fuck in them. We get blunt faster. We shock each other regularly, which makes our word choices less shocking. Without an edge, it’s hard to find an authentic common experience — or that’s what it feels like anyway.
Yesterday, the weather went from wet to spring fever in the Bay Area, and the world came out to witness the shift. We all at once decided to take dogs for hillside hikes and we ate at banh mi food trucks and we wandered urban streets window shopping and we rolled down our windows and dialed up ur speakers. I ended up in an ice cream line that cut across nearly an entire city block.
Every one of us stood there, together, smiling and greeting each other and sharing an innocent love of frozen, sweetened custard and a day warm enough to show our shoulders. We didn’t curse and we didn’t talk politics and we didn’t frown. We just remembered that ice cream is fucking good. Er, ice cream is good. And we were innocently happy.
