1990-Something

Anymore I can tell how fully I'm alive
by the amount of junk email I have to filter
through. Aptly, the other day I found myself
with no phone or internet for the first time in
almost fifteen years. In an instant, I remembered
what it was like before all of us were online, all
day, every day, just as a part of being a normal,
well-adjusted adult human being . I
could hear the crickets and the skateboarders.
I remembered what it was like to wake up in
the morning and have nothing to do aside
from boiling some tea water and maybe looking
at the paper. No email to pretend is important,
no auction sites to pointlessly weed through,
no distractions other than actual, breathing
people. It was really good for me, over the past
painful, Purgatory-like week, to just sit
there in silence with myself for hours on end,
the way Chinese people do often, and the
way I haven't done in so many years it's
just not funny, not funny at all. Sure, I had
my stereo, and a TV for that matter. But when
it came to not being able to contact a stranger
somewhere in Rumania with a few keystrokes,
or drop a quick note to a friend in Japan by inter-
continental intranet, I found myself faced with a
most deathly silence. How paltry our lives once
were! No ongoing chess games with BellyTank
in Uzbekistan No usenet arguments with
GonzoBear in Pakistan. No onslaught of requests
for money from every humanitarian organization
on the planet, at least twice a day. Where would
we be? What in fact would we really have anymore
to remind us who the sane are, who the gracious
and giving are? And what signs would we have
that the evil in us all still rails against the good
as loudly as it ever has, aside from the
daily news and prison stats, of course? From what I
can tell from my junk-mail folder, the requests for
money still far outnumber the assertions that my
dick can get longer by at least three inches. I take
this fact to bode very well for humanity.

(2006)