We are at the services in Gloucester having coffee and a snack, we have been to many many services in the last few years as Em often needs the loo, I’m told it’s a woman thing, who am I to disagree?
People Watching is not just a 2025 song by Sam Fender, it’s a phenomenon that people engage in on a daily basis, and I am a bit of a fan. I enjoy wondering what people are up to, where they are going, where they have been, what they think of the world, and what’s important to them right now while they are at these services. Now I do not do this because I am interested in individuals, I have already stated that I think most people are rather dull, drone like creatures, living dull lives where they fulfil the Ikea nesting instinct and watch the popular sporting events. To me, the majority of people are utterly unimportant, and mostly spoiling my existence by expressing theirs. I do however like to look at the herd and imagine that this previous postulate was different. A person is likely interesting if you dig deeper than their facade, but the effort to do so does not appeal, and the facade is becoming a thicker varnish all the time as society replaces the self with culture based awareness.
As each person passes my vantage point I try to guess, using nothing more than a quick assessment based on their demeanour, their facial expression, the way they’ve chosen to dress, what they are currently engaged in doing, and I suppose whether I judge them attractive, exactly what matters to them. This is an impossible task of course, for me at least because I am not a physical behaviour based psychologist. The person I am looking at could be a murderer, but would that be something they can reveal, or the way they feel about it? Would it seep out in the way they walk, the way they look around, the way their eyes shift about? There are things we can guess and be somewhat likely to be correct, like we would know if someone was flirting with someone else by the head movement, the hand gestures, the laughing and smiling. It has always struck me that this is obvious observation to everyone but the people who are receiving it. Weird that I myself have never known if someone was flirting with me until someone else actually pointed it out.
We would know if someone was obsessed with facade because we could look at their carefully managed clothes and accessories, their almost orange skin tone, their fish like lips, slug type eyebrow shape, swollen shiny face etc. These are the least interesting people of all though because they are the ones that reveal only one thing, that they lack the courage to be themselves in the world in any way because, and this is just my summation, they judge themselves to be less than interesting, so therefore they must hide behind a very uniform modern look. I see the same thing in any over crafted facade, the need to create a false identity that distracts in some sense from the real, or allows narrative control in another sense. The facebook generation simply wants to be it’s own ego creation, it does not want to make its own self.
Some folks wear clothes as a political billboard, you can tell what they believe in fundamentally by their attire, others can fool you by looking that way as a fashion. It used to be the case that a woman with large hooped earrings and a lot of cleavage on show could be assumed to be an attention seeking tart, but that’s not really so anymore as it’s a look. As women go to the gym wearing the most tightly fitting garment they can find, ones that highlight and often improve their shape, but make it clear that they absolutely do not wish to looked at, we realise that a look is often not an indication of a leaning. It is however easy to spot where someone has deliberately opposed a fashion with what cannot be a fashion. I can see the person most likely to use natural products, and there are assumptions that we can make based on that postulate that are likely to be true. I could assume hairy legs, an aversion to medicine in a conventional sense, a likeliness lean toward eastern spiritual teachings, a love of vegetables and the land based practices that produce them, an interest in crafting and creativity, a sickening preachy type perspective against all things progress and technological. I may have made a lot of this person up, I may have met this person, but you know who I mean and I bet you spot them too.
Like I previously speculated, there’s maybe a murderer in here somewhere. There is a couple of thousand people here now, we have been here for an hour, the turnover daily is likely to be ten thousand people on a summer day at least, and the average for murderers in the UK is one person in every ten thousand. So if there isn’t a murderer here now then there is a statistical chance that there may have been one today, and an increasing chance that there was one this week, it becomes closer to a definite as the time frame increases. I wonder if there is one, who did they murder, and why? Was it a crime of passion, for monetary gain, in a fit of anger, are they a serial killer?
Sexy women catch my eye, that will be no news to anybody reading this. If we are honest we must admit that, as guys, our eyes are drawn, attracted we might say. This means nothing of course, it’s perfectly natural. The preacher sitting across from you is checking out the ass of the waitress just like you are, even if he would not like to admit it to himself. His conscious mind may be thinking about pious things and what to say at sermons or how to collect yet more money to fix the roof, but his animal wants to know what that peach sounds like when it’s slapped hard. I’m being rude, but I’m making a point about the judgements and assumptions we are all performing, all the time, whether we like it or not. Granted it is not nice to assume that someone in particular is the murderer you seek, but it does them no harm I suppose. The second one, the sexy, may seem to you to be somewhat in poor taste and unnecessary, but that also does no harm if not acted upon. I think it’s still okay to find people attractive in the UK?
There’s some homosexuals in here, they are usually quite easy to spot if they are guys, it’s the way they walk and handle things in that faux feminine way that looks more like an act of imitation than a reality that gives it away. I’m not against it, I am kind of made uncomfortable by the mannerisms I suppose, but I suppose I am just being critical where I can for no real purpose. Not every homosexual is spottable, because some of them are not so apparent, this leads me to assume that there are some in here that maybe don’t even know that they are. I wonder also how many people in this place are living a lie, or maybe lying to themselves. Since I know so many people who are fantasists, I suspect there are plenty of them present too.
One thing there is a lot of is big assess, this is structural paradoxical because the spaces available to people is getting smaller. The aisles in the express Tesco here in the services have narrowed over the years as they have everywhere, the space between vehicles in the car park is smaller, the loo cubicles are quite small in the gents anyways, the chairs in the seating areas and the distances between tables is ever decreasing for commercial purposes, yet assess continue to grow as if that growth was an accepted challenge on a national scale. This ass-size Armageddon may in fact constitute the only growth increase the chancellor is able to announce this year. One thing that is abundantly clear is that people are mostly overweight now, I don’t exclude myself from that, and it’s a noticeable difference from how things were during my early years when the spaces they occupied were a lot bigger and the people in them were a lot slimmer, in the ass at least.
Is there someone here that is meeting a cheating partner? Maybe. Is there a trans person here currently, that one is increasingly likely. How many lesbians are here, how many gingers, how many left handed people? My mind wanders through the possibilities of the present demographic and makes assumptions, guesses, second guesses, writes narratives on these people, judges them for the crimes I imagine of them, acquits them and lets them go on their way as if I had the power to do so. I’m doing all this while eating a sandwich and assuming that I am part of the same game going on in someone else’s head. I wonder what they have assumed I am and where I fit in society, and I’m considering whether to be angry at their blind judgements.
It’s weird, tell me I’m not the only one that does this?
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