I am connected to this monitor. As I lean in, wires extend to my cheeks and burrow up through my skull into my cerebellum. There, the ends of the wires split open and small pincers with soldering guns find the nearest nerve-ending and solder these wires on. The nerve-ending thinks it moves on, but it is now stationary as it’s gently pulled and swayed like a ship at port. The wires feed these nerve-endings through a tube and have a say on all their odd decisions. Sometimes I feel like this.
I sit cross-legged and watch, peacefully letting my brain intake all this horror on my huge monitor. Instead of comfort, they always bring me sadness. The world is sad, so they say. The Earth is said, I tend to think. So like a sad person, I distract myself through idle-input. Which the wires give to me so happily.
Simply being an Ice-Cream-Pail would mean it had no connection to anything larger, The Old-Fashioned-Ice-Cream-Pail, now that’s some historical eatin’. Have as much as you would’ve in olden-days. Feel free to shovel, as we’ve also included an old-fashioned ice-cream shovel. (When you need to move more ice-cream into your mouth than that new-fashioned spoon will allow, you now have a historically-minded way of doing it.) I know you don’t feel any sort of deep connection to the Earth on which you live, you haven’t been there that long, as a people, so allow yourself comfort by knowing that you can at least eat a pails-worth of ice-cream just like they used to did.
The wires are our new roots. They’re much more portable than roots.
A voice seems to whisper “Keep clutching that receipt from 7-Eleven, the one for seven seventy seven. Press it close, folded in your wallet, meditate on it’s collection of sevens for they mean something profound. They mean something about you as a person ripped free from all this watchin. Exhibit it on your wall with four nails, as if it were a butterfly you’d caught, for it is, A butterfly of chance. That luck, that coincidence, must mean something about your destiny.” it seems to whisper to me.We used to have so much more time alone, our brains and I. Whole days would be spent listening to wind, stepping on bugs, and chatting with ourselves about the wind and the bugs in our feet. Now the only reflection we get is off our windshields. The energy of the Earth and the compulsion to love is being put on hold, for we, as a people, had call-waiting.
And so we eat and eat to fill ourselves up with a tangy sense of worth. But like the stomach, once digested, we are hollow once more. Oddly enough, our brains, with all their potential, like this stasis. In the mud, we allow the fog to roll in and whisper into our ears how good the mud is making our skin look. And the checks for 40k come in the mail for a used car that’s not even a check, and because it came to us, because it came to me, on this couch, I feel special. I feel needed.
I feel like getting another car.So I’m sitting here, scooping from my pail, reading about all sadness in the world, which I feel all of in my heart. Or Brain. I am sitting here scooping and wondering what I could do to stop all this sadness, or at least keep it away from me, and, taking a cold-bite, I hope that my lucky receipt will keep it away and do all the work for me. If not I’ll just drive away from this monitor at lightening speed in that used-car I bought with that check they sent me. That’ll make me feel whole. Yes it will.
And this is what I will do today.
