Unknown Artist: Scroll 2: Nezumi no soshi emaki (1600 - 1650) Nara [?], Japan

"…hello to a fresh strange bedfellow…"

As I neared the end of my Decency Series, I, as usual, began fretting about what might follow. By the eightieth installment of any series, my sense of its content has become a permanent resident. I no longer fret about what to write next because the flow has become inexorable. One installment follows another without requiring overmuch conjuring. But I end each series on the upcoming equinox or solstice, so when the winter solstice started casting shadows, I began my usual fussing again. I had finally become accustomed to where I was going just in time to reach my agreed-upon dead end. What comes next?

Whatever comes next will later seem a prescient choice, but in those moments before I decide, it looks as if I should be hiding from rather than warmly embracing my future. Always, the questioning comes: do I really need to create a thirty-fifth series? Am I committing to ultimately creating fifty? I know the answer to these questions before I ask them, but a body needs an occasional injection of skepticism, if only to avoid being compromised by unquestioned optimism. I feel the need to be careful and not to presume past patterns must carry forward. I’ve found the Decency Series to be enormously satisfying to create and also to re-read. This has not always been the case with my concluding series. A few of them never seemed to find their own identity and so remained collections of more-or-less random reflections. This didn’t necessarily diminish them, but it frustrated the pattern-seeker in me.

I leave the Decency Series freshly convinced that Decency must always be a choice, and not a forced one. It must be as freely chosen as any imperative sense should ever be. It’s not supposed always to seem easy or obvious, though it often proves to be far easier than any readily available alternative. “When in doubt, do something Decent” wouldn’t be an indecent motto to live by. The relentlessly Decent seem to create their own good fortune, though, as usual, no guarantee appears on the packaging. Let those thoughts serve as my conclusion to the ninety installments of my Decency Series.

What of Unscrolling? The recent past has been variously characterized as the undoing of Western civilization or as its renewal. It’s likely been a bit of both depending upon one’s perspective. It might actually be both. If anything has accompanied those characterizations, it’s been a fundamental shift in how we access our essential information. Newspapers and broadcast news have fallen into disrepair while social media and streaming services of various credibilities have been sucked into the resulting vacuum as replacements. They have made terrible replacements, but each subsequent generation requires some warm-up laps to find its rhythm. Our social and streaming presences have not yet discovered their rhythms and remain disarmingly primitive, injecting a tenacious arrhythmia into our information-seeking efforts. TikTok and Reels posts routinely omit their time stamp, so they report on yesterday’s tragedies as if fresh news, apparently to keep interest churning. I’m continuously switching to Google to see if an earthquake really did happen today in the Berent’s Sea. Usually, the provocation was an untime-stamped recapitulation of last year’s breaking news. There went another unrefundable five minutes.

If scrolling has become the primary medium of our information seeking, what, then, of Unscrolling? The most prominent aspect of a scrolling culture must be the trance it induces on each of its participants. Now that we carry the key to accessing the universe in our pants pocket, we find it disturbingly convenient to continuously “check” on the state of our world. Much of the product of these check-ins produces the sort of red herrings I mentioned above, untime-stamped churn, alluring distractions. How many times have you gone to check the weather on a whim, only to glimpse some alluring chyron, which you dutifully follow, only to remember, a few minutes later, that you had intended to check the weather? I often survive a half-dozen thwarted attempts before finally managing to check the weather, a full half hour after I began chasing that intention with unrefundable minutes.

Where has the underlying rhythm of my life gone? Gone to scrolling, everyone. When will we ever learn? When will I ever learn? I read of an alarming new addition to street fentanyl that only affects withdrawal. When it’s present, the crash following a dose becomes an existential crisis. Heart rate might hit one-seventy. Extreme vomiting is common. Many must be admitted to ICUs to survive. The withdrawal’s so extreme that it drives even the most desperate to do anything to secure just a small additional dose, just enough to ward off that horrific withdrawal experience. This story seemed like an allegory about our obvious addiction to social media and streaming services. We suddenly seem incapable of distracting ourselves from our distractions. Even when I catch myself indulging in distractions, I respond by distracting myself again, ad infinitum.

I begin today, as I end my Decency Series, declaring a war of sorts on these distractions with a new series I’ll call Unscrolling. The anticipation of what this series might discover seems both uplifting and terrifying. I might come to accept how the world seems to have become and embrace this curious streaming culture, or I might become a social media hermit as a result of this enquiry. I don’t need to know the outcome to engage in the enquiry. I learned long ago how to avoid beginning with any ending in mind.

So, welcome and farewell. Goodbye for now, to my enquiry into my now even more revered friend Decency, and hello to a fresh, strange bedfellow: Unscrolling. Let’s see where this adventure might take us. Happy Solstice!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz