Scale–weighing device, or pay grade, or skin recrudescence…or Order of Magnitude. Just imagine: You and your love partner(s) could each be any size you want…or any PART of you thereof might be…as Virtual Reality improves, you won’t have to imagine any more!
For some reason the phrase “It’s just the wine talking” has been echoing in my head. (It IS one of my days off, and sometimes I’ll have some wine. Alas, there is no wine here now.) So let’s let the wine do the talking, via free-associative drawing…
Though I’m stone cold sober, I got a bit of a buzz while I watched the drawing unfold. Virtual Wine, Friends–no struggle with the corkscrew, no calories, no hangover! Try it sometime! đŸ™‚
This may or may not be the dawning of the age of Aquarius. It is definitely the dawning of the age of hand-held, approximated reality. Most of us in the United States of America now possess a device that is our interface with the Universe. As the middleman, the device imposes an operating system, a navigational device, and various profit-motivated, unasked-for obstacles between us and what we are rubbing this Aladdin’s Lamp to obtain.
My drawing is an approximation of what this is like. It is a CRUDE approximation. It includes at upper right an approximation of a hand-held, almost out of format range a la Breughel. Breughel once depicted “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by putting a large ship in a large sea in the midground, and a hard-to-see Icarus impacting the sea in front of the ship, with only his legs visible.
I hope we will learn to use this device, and those that follow it, more than the device learns to use us. I am trying to go unplugged more. Figure out how much time you spend staring into that insidious screen, and you may well join me . . .
long ago nathanael west wrote “miss lonelyhearts”
the title character was a disillusioned young man
in the employ of a local newspaper
that paid him to manufacture advice
and the human misery revealed in the letters he got
and the futility of whatever advice he dispensed
drained his soul
and then felled him
some time later twin sisters became advice columnists
one called herself “ann landers” and the other “abigail van buren”
and friends called them “eppie” and “popo”
their first names were really pauline and esther
they are gone now
“dear abby” lives on in the person of pauline’s daughter
and her column is still in newspapers
though pulp-paper print media are on their way out
we cannot avoid getting advice nowadays
lose that belly fat or up your orgasms using this one stupid trick
(careful–it may be the same trick)
and we are behavior-tracked so much our desires sublime and base are low-hanging fruit
so dear abby is become a virtual god
and her deificity is on the wax
so much so that live long enough
and she’ll tell you not to read nonsense like this
One with Clay, Image and Text 