There’s this town, Snowclaw, in way upper Canada, practically the Arctic Circle, where they get about twenty minutes of daylight every six months and temperatures have only started rising above freezing in the last decade or so. A place so cold, local moths don't even come up for the Aurora Borealis. Old chunks of coal do little in this part of the Great White North. So you can imagine that laughter, or some frostbitten equivalent is not just a desirable outcome for the rosy-cheeked population (all fifteen of them), but a surefire method of survival. Just about the one activity as good as sucking the nutrients from a generous portion of whale blubber. But those days, like so much in Snowface, have changed.
Still, the fast chattering one feels from hearty chuckling is enough to melt any icicles dangling from one’s shamelessly exposed extremities. And in this town of Snowshoe there’s this class where people learn skills and trades that hopefully take them far away, much closer to the equator, where the only things freezing are the fruity cocktails.
The class is small, since the town of Snowdog is small. Occasionally, the students ask questions of the professor. The teach, I think his name is something like, Aldo N. Crommand, a half Italian, half French-Canadian polymath, who always does his best to answer. He’d give them breathing exercises for the warmest way to laugh and help anyone confused at what exactly it meant to tag a joke. It took a few classes to explain that it didn’t involve shoving snowballs into someone's exhaust pipe. Though that keeps happening whether Aldo likes it or not.
One day he was up there detailing what life was going to be like in Snowcap after the pandemic subsides for good. It wouldn’t change much, he explained. People already wore masks, no one ever got closer than six feet, and kids had been homeschooled since the early 19th century. Though most of those kids are long gone by now. One student in the back raised his hand and Aldo generously called on him.
“Do you think that’s the norm?”
Aldo started talking without a single pause. This was not a subject he was unfamiliar with.
“Sure, I think it’s the norm. But nowadays the norm goes way past hygiene and that sort of soapy, sudsy stuff. Think of it. When did it become the norm that when a celebrity, regardless of rank or box office bankability, arrives in the Great Beyond™ the red carpet is unfurled for them here on earth? Not like it used to be, boy, I tell you what. Candles aren’t lit, tears aren’t shed, and eight and a half by eleven glossies aren’t laid out like wreathes at nearby historical markers. Instead, we all post our remembrances on social media that aren’t so much about the deceased as they are about us. Stories about how we were touched once upon a time. Posts that prove we knew the departed better than most, possessing some of that nice hidden knowledge for a little pop culture currency and a chance at fleeting, viral stardom. Make it about you, not them, they say. You’re alive with a fluctuating follower count, and they, of course, are not.”
“How long’s this been the norm?”
“Oh, I dunno. But if I had to guess, and what's teaching if not guessing, then I would say since at least 2009. Basically whenever that Zuckerman fellow starting sticking his paws into our collective social circuitry and mucking up the works,” said Aldo.
“I thought the Norm* used to be on SNL or something."
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