V. On Foot At World's End: It's Personal

So I wept much, because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll, or to look at it.

Revelations 5:4

Breakfast turned to brunch, and I stumbled into a mostly empty place for coffee and eggs, sat at the bar, and noticed the altar of enticing bottles still covered in a sheet of plastic. The wait staff looked miserable, all of them, and they apparently worked as models in their other lives. They all had the same look, both male and female - tall, too thin, vaguely sick, mostly blond,  something miserable about their eyes. My order - an incredibly overpriced Greek omelet and weak coffee - was apparently not high on their list of priorities, nor was getting me out of there when I had finished. The tip I left was proportionately miserable. I almost left a note of explanation with it.

 None here shall be spared.

I walked on. The soulful feeling I had earlier in the morning is gone now replaced by a broadening anger. Everyone is suddenly too cool, too precious. Sickening. Insufferable. And I can't help but think that it's this very phenomenon that drives us when we hope for the end of the world. Some tiny personal disappointment, or a lifetime's worth, magnified, and the resulting negative reaction is over-generalized. A minor transgression against the ego and what, Apocalypse?

Such conceit.

Is it the same for You?  I ask this with only the vaguest sense of who I'm talking to and then seek shelter in the nearly deserted streets behind New York University.