Carried: Shin Problems (I)

What breaks down here is the transmission between ideals and daily conduct: care, calibration and restraint stop making it into practice, and the world begins to read as a place with nothing sacred left in it. Underneath is not cynicism but abandonment — the sense of having upheld something alone and of that something no longer being upheld anywhere. The position is old: one child in a disordered household who cared about how things ought to be done, with no one to share the standard. The shin is the bone that meets the world first. What the shape asks for is one standard kept in a form small enough to be actually maintained.

The standards I hold are slipping and I'm apparently the last person left who noticed.

Noah, building to specification in a generation that had stopped caring about specifications. The form implies a task: to build the thing at the size one person can actually build.