Here are things at the Whole Foods right now:

People taking photos of the sunset using oversized Android phones.

A children’s birthday party featuring salad.

An older couple — he looks like a golfer, she looks like a fun librarian — quietly drinking ice water. He is taking pictures of the sunset with his oversized Android phone, then he shows them to her to see if she likes them.

She just clapped. She likes them.

Ladyfriends eatings wraps. They are sitting on the same side of their picnic table so they can both enjoy the sunset.

A woman who came here with, clearly, the intention of doing work, but who abandoned her spreadsheet to enjoy a beer and the sunset.

A bunch of childless buds on the cusp of 40, doughy and beardy. If it was ten years ago they’d be getting hammered at the Commodore. Now they are having two beers at Whole Foods. Their nights are less likely to end in mismanaged hookups, their mornings are likely to be more productive. That’s nice.

A slender childless couple drinking massive ice waters and cracking up over something. Cracking up really endearingly hard. They have their faces pressed flat to the table to muffle their laughter.

A straight-ahead date! She is in a simple black dress and is wearing the kind of wedgy sandals you might wear on a date. She is drinking sparkling rosé. He is drinking a pilsener. He looks like he works in retail. She looks like she works in an office. They just changed tables to get a better view of the sunset. They didn’t have anything to say to each other before, so hopefully the sunset will serve as a conversation piece.

Some college kids. There is no college around here. They are the most confusing people by far.

Single men working on computers. They are at the inside tables, far away from the sunset. Some are wearing headphones. They are the regulars. Maybe they have roommates who obstruct their computer use. Roommates who have friends or make-out partners or bands. This is just a guess, based on the intensity with which they stare at their screen and their ultra-dismaying posture. But I know nothing of their lives.

I know that need to be alone in public, though, if that’s what they’re feeling. That’s what I’m doing here.

Do people Snapchat sunsets? It seems like sunsets are more of an Instagram thing. I’d rather not be so dissolute across so many apps, but oh well. You have to program your brand appropriately for each channel that you operate in. Yes, you do.

The apps feel very different this summer. The last Snapchat holdouts acquiesced, and now everyone is looking at each other through its trashy, silly slot. It bounces around in a way that other apps do not. It feels rad and careless. Which was the last app that felt so profane? Tumblr?

Pokémon Go exploded over the weekend. The weeks was a bad one in America, zeitgeist-wise. On Friday all the brands had to decide how they felt about gun massacres. Everyone was scolding each other on Twitter, coaching each other about how to feel and how to react. But then Pokémon Go happened and by Saturday afternoon everyone was tweeting about they were making brunch decisions based on where Pokémon parties were, and how they were heading to Prospect Park with the express intent of catching Pokémon. Now it’s Monday and Nintendo stock is up 25% and suddenly all the scolding has disappeared.

At least 40% of the joy around Pokémon Go, and about 100% of it’s virality, seems to come from seeing these Pokémon in wonderfully stupid places. Funeral parlors, war zones, toilets, etc.

There’s a lot of joy in things that are halfway broken. That are perfectly usable but completely fucked-up.

Brands tend to talk a lot about “controlling the message,” which leads to them neutering anything fucked-up that might occur within the apps they market. In doing so, they also clip out most the potential for joy. And all the potential for virality.

It makes me itchy, that term. Virality. Sorry to be using it. It’s just weird to see how frequently its most open proponents so wildly misunderstand it.

That straight-up date-date went totally sour. The man mumbled and mumbled a lot of grievances about Bay Ridge. The woman was silent in response. They left a little while ago.

The children’s birthday party is still here. It looks like everyone had a good time.

The doughy beards are still here. Their conversation is really slow and sleepy at this point. It’s not a bad thing. My favorite part of the day is the stretch right before proper sleep, when I am doing a crossword and drifting off and startling awake again. I just filled up the grid with H’s. Ha ha. And then I go to sleep for real.