Doctor’s Office Magazines

Cold fingers aren’t much use for doing nimble tasks.
That’s a true enough sentence to get started with a story.
“1: To get started, write one true sentence.” ~ Hemingway
What are we all looking for that can’t be found by flipping through a magazine when nimble fingers come back from being frozen?
Magazines are mostly ads. They only tell what we are looking for if we are looking to be told what to look for — unless we happen to be looking for a gold watch with diamonds or a dress we might wear once to a celebration-of-something party.
There’s all kinds of leather and gold and silver and haute stuff and fast, flashy cars to lust and drool for — unless you happen to be a vegan and are living a life of voluntary radical simplicity and can only see that all as so much junk and violence and a waste of trees.
Harper’s Bazaar — doctor’s office magazines.
Jennifer Anniston sure is beautiful.
Looking high and low for what we’re looking for, we look everywhere.
Facebook feeds and other people’s lives sometimes look a little daunting — (intimidating, formidable, disconcerting, unnerving, unsettling) — and are mostly also only selling something or soliciting envy and maybe for the same basic intention — to sell clicks and clamor to get more clicks and clamor.
Perhaps daunting is not the word that’s being looked for.
Might it be boring?
It’s really all quite boring after looking for awhile trying to find the thing we’re looking for that never seems to show up.
Other people’s lives can come off as boring if what we’re looking for isn’t what they’re doing and they’re doing things we might be wishing they weren’t doing for the sake of everyone else — the right word there might not be boring but abhorrent.
Maybe we’re all really looking just to keep from really looking.
It’s clearer now that what is needed to be seen, if one is really looking, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But that is the dilemma and why we all keep looking, looking, looking as if we’ll ever really see it.
In the meantime, magazines might convince us of a thing we think we’re looking for but really aren’t.
So much for nimble fingers.

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