Incommunicado

Dear diary,

If you live in a herd, and you share the same barn as the rest of your community, then you can speak at any time and your neighbor will hear you, because she’s right next to you, sleeping in the hay.

If you live on top of a mountain, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (or Matthew’s Jesus), then you must come down the mountainside to speak to your fellow human beings, who all can usually be found in the marketplace.

But I live neither in a communal farm nor all alone on an active volcano. I live in the suburbs: this place has the worst of both worlds. It’s got all the bothersome aspects of herd existence, combined with the isolation of mountain living.

Also, despite it being crowded here, with too many houses placed too close together, this layout lacks the conveniences of city living. It seems even that this domain was engineered with an aim to deprive its inhabitants of every urban advantage.

There is no fellowship; we are void of camaraderie. Again, if you lived atop a volcano, like Moses’ Yahweh, you would be in the habit of sending postcards to your friends on their respective mountains. And if you were a canned sardine, your siblings would remain at your side, till the day you are eaten. You could talk to them any time you desire. But here in the suburbs, where everyone is constantly online, tethered to a network via computer-phone, caught in the world wide web, and wound tightly . . .

I’m trying to say that it is plain uncouth, a breach of propriety, and bad manners, to attempt to engage in genuine socialization in the Epoch of the Internet. In the Age of Endless Instant Electronic Communication, conversation is impossible.

Am I right about this? Maybe I’m only throwing an emotional fit. Let me try some thought experiments, to tease out the truth.

Say that I use my mobile device to send my neighbor a text message. My neighbor answers back:

“Why are you texting me? I live right next door – just come over and chat.”

OK, so let me back up and try again. This time, instead of using my mobile device, I physically walk over and ring the doorbell on my neighbor’s house. My neighbor answers and says:

“Why are you bothering me in person? We’re all online, nowadays – wouldn’t it be easier just to send me a text message? In that case, I wouldn’t have needed to make sure that I’m fully dressed with no stains upon my clothing and that my hair is combed and all the illegal drugs that I’ve been abusing are hidden from sight. What a nuisance your visit is.”

So, there you have it. This thought experiment proved right everything that I said above. The means of communication have barred communication.

This is good for antisocial people. But what is the goal of these misanthropic jerks? Don’t they realize that if their dreams were to come true, they would find themselves exactly where they began? What I mean is this:

An antisocial man somehow eliminates society; he finds himself all alone in a garden. To prevent the emergence of others, he replenishes the world with images of himself. He pours his spirit into whichever likeness he desires to inhabit. To intensify the activity, he devises a way to mute his memory between instances, and between any given image and its original.

That is why warfare is more honorable than suicide: we forgot that we are our creator.

When you work at a fast-food franchise, you see your co-employees every day. You’re trapped in the same hell, so you can simply converse (via words in air) without worrying about which network or platform to use. You share immediate reality: space and time, here and now. That’s why I recommend finding a career in fast-food.

Why don’t we fix the fast-food formula, by the way? It’s obviously broken; why not amend it? Find out what’s making the food poisonous, and change that. Then figure out how to pay the workers enough so that they can live comfortably; and slow the pace slightly so that the job is not detrimentally stressful. The meals would cost a little more, and it would take a little longer to prepare and serve them; but it would still be much faster than an upscale restaurant; and the food would be healthy and superb. Everyone would be happy. Bosses would no longer need to harass their subordinates, because the subordinates would naturally love their bosses: they would all embrace freely in the breakroom. Every individual’s volition would get to move however it desires; there would be no obstructions. Owners would smile, and customers would smile. Everyone would eat every meal at Bryan’s Burger Barn. It would serve as the town square and the central church. The U.S. Capitol and the Tower of London.

I’d like to say that people would get married at Bryan’s Burger Barn; that they would order a basket of onion rings, and slide one of them over the finger of the bride in lieu of a wedding band. But there are two reasons that this would be false:

(1) The institution of marriage has died and been superseded by free love.

(2) Unless you use very small bulbs, any ring that is made therefrom will prove larger than the average human finger. Moreover, the onion rings at Bryan’s Burger Barn are so delicious that they always end up getting eaten within a moment after being worn as ornaments; they are therefore not the optimal choice of fried vegetable to symbolize a lifelong contract.

Movie Idea

So here’s my idea for a movie:

A policeman is standing on the street corner, smoking a cigar.

A vagabond enters the scene, walks up to the policeman, and punches him in the face.

A matron now enters the scene and stands behind the policeman. The cop kicks the vagabond; the vagabond falls, gets up, turns around, and throws another punch at the cop, who ducks the blow and it hits the matron.

Once the cop lifts his head again after having successfully dodged the vagabond’s punch, the matron punches the cop from behind.

The cop winds up his fist, planning to hit the matron, but the vagabond kicks the cop’s rump and he collapses. The policeman’s legs cause the matron to trip and fall on top of him; then the vagabond trips and falls on the matron and the cop.