The language arrived before the vocabulary.

When I was a kid in West Texas, fashion and culture arrived with a delay built into them. Not because nothing was happening. Things were happening. We just weren’t standing near the source. The West Coast and the East Coast seemed to manufacture the signals, and then those signals had to travel. Television, music, magazines, whatever it was it started somewhere else and slowly made its way toward us. Not that there wasn't things happening other places. Definitely Chicago and, and other places, but just mainly for the time period. Sometimes it took six or seven months and longer sometimes.  .

That sounds almost impossible now, but that was how it worked. You would pick up a magazine and see somebody wearing something you had never seen before. Maybe it was Thrasher. Maybe it was Transworld Skateboarding. Some guy in California would be standing there in a pair of shorts and sunglasses that looked like they had been delivered from a more advanced civilization. You would stare at the page. Whoa. Where do you even get that?

Then you would turn to the back of the magazine and find some little mail order advertisement of miscellaneous things you could buy . 

People from California seemed different when they showed up in West Texas. They were wearing the newest version of whatever the rest of us were still trying to identify. The East Coast had its own language too. Different shoes, different hats, different posture, different ways of arranging the same stuff basically but looks different. A East Coast style .

A person could walk into town wearing something ordinary where they came from, and everybody around us would stop and look. 

  MTV speed things up. Suddenly you could see people wearing the new stuff at the same moment everybody else saw it. The image arrived instantly, but the actual objects did not. You could see the jacket. You could see the cool shoes. That did not mean anybody in West Texas knew where to buy them. Sometimes they weren't buying them. They would go to thrift stores and get old shoes. And then you have to figure out oh this is a shoe from a thrift store. 

So the image would flash across the television, bright and immediate, and then remain unavailable for months. That was a strange arrangement. The language arrived before the vocabulary. Then I went to Portland for the first time in the 1990s, and the whole system tilted sideways. I had no idea what was happening.

People were dressed differently. They moved differently. They seemed to recognize social categories I had never been informed existed. I spent a lot of time looking around and thinking, Okay. So people do that here. Then something else would happen. Whoa. That’s also a thing?

It felt as though I had entered a place operating under a separate set of unspoken instructions. Nobody handed me the instructions. Everybody else appeared to have read them. That kind of culture shock is harder to experience now.

Now the signal does not crawl across the country. It appears everywhere at once. Somebody wears something in Los Angeles, and ten minutes later somebody in West Texas has seen it, somebody in Portland has copied it, somebody in New York has declared it finished, and somebody online has already begun wearing it ironically. The process turns over before you can examine it.

And because everybody is watching everybody else, the differences begin to collapse. You can still find regional styles, of course, but the borders are thinner. The same shoes, the same phrases, the same jokes, the same gestures and little pieces of identity move through every city at the speed of attention.

You go to Los Angeles, and people look familiar. You go to Portland, and people look familiar. You come back to West Texas, and somehow the same strange hat is already waiting for you. Geography used to distort the message. It bent it, slowed it down, translated it and occasionally produced something new by accident. Now the message arrives almost untouched, everywhere, immediately.

Everything has become available, and in becoming available, everything has started to resemble everything else. It is strange to remember a time when a person could arrive from another part of the country and appear genuinely foreign. Not foreign in some dramatic sense. Just mysteriously assembled. Wearing signals you could see but could not yet read.

Now we read them before the person even arrives. Somewhere along the way, the whole country seems to have passed through a  singularity.(everything seems folded into one impossible state) The distances are still there. But the delay is gone.