Monday, December 4, 2017

48/52 - Digiventure

Dear Internauts,

I think I spent the past two weeks half asleep. It may have something to do with winter setting in, but if we're honest, this kind of deep descent has happened at all times of the year.

What got me moving again was the other day when I went to check my phone for the time (and date), and it just wouldn't turn on. No charge or pressing two buttons at once or whatever would do the trick. Sure, I'm not exactly anyone's emergency contact, but on the very off chance of something happening, I forced myself to roll across the floor in various directions till I looked slightly human.

The first place I took it said they had no idea, and the second place required me to go to somewhere I'd never been to without being spoken at me from the little box—currently deceased. As if in some kinda period piece, I sauntered over to some chaps on the sidewalk and queried for directions. They disagreed and gesticulated something about an overpass. I funneled the averages of their answers through my jittery skull, the effect of somehow both too much and too little sleep. Plus, I'd now talked to three strangers for the first time in as many weeks. My morning brain pills strained out across the sweating ruffles of gray matter.

Half an hour or so and the signs gave up on my destination, but I hadn't. The sudden appearance of a fitting road bent my neck to cracking. A city of consumption. Between my bed in mushroom county and the touch screen maps of the mall, I'd travel two decades and yet people still leave their trash beside stone fountains. I sketched this one as I waited for my appointment, omitting the brown paper bag for artistic license, counting the seconds by not counting them. Screw perspective, I thought, and kept the eraser in my pocket.

The phone was dead. There was no denying that. Blame is corporate lubricant, but in this case I got off cheap as free. Their fault. New phone. Same phone. New same. Still no calls, so I could've slept in.

The process of passwords and codes and next and next and do you agree kept me back and forth enough times that they set me up with one of the ones they give extra training. Still, the reasoning for technological distress is the same as it's ever been. 'It shouldn't be doing that' works well enough so long as the outcome is that it does eventually do what it should. (Is that what parenting is like?) He, the genius and seventh stranger I'd talked to that day, managed to be disarming enough from the revelation/admission that he too is into art and music. More than into, he's a composer, engineer, studio pianist, and commercial artist who's worked on albums, commercials, tv pilots, and years of other varied gigs. Talk of what tech is available/affordable to the most cutting-edge apps and gadgets to finding a balance between work and art as work. Eventually, my phone fixed itself, and I realized I'd had an actual conversation with another human being. At least I think that's what those used to be called.

I slept through the next two days, I think. The plot-lines and characters of my own dreams become more complex and harder to escape in times like these. It's not simply a matter of the physical energy to do activities so much as the mental capacity to imagine a motivated self into existence.

Today I tuned every string on my guitar down a half step, and it was like a whole new instrument.

In case you were wondering, as someone who lives most of my life in the past, there really isn't much of a future here.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

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