plug-in

have you seen them? the bipeds eternally connected to gizmos and gadgets, walking down the street, taking the bus, taking the tube, safe in a bubble. the technology's coming out of their ears.

most of them have slightly wary looks on their faces, as if waiting for someone to break through the protective layer of the sound in their ears. and what if they do? i wonder if they would be annoyed at being disturbed? it was probably their favourite song. maybe they were thinking, maybe they just had that commuting time for themselves and you took it away by proving the existence of other beings in their universe.

or would they be glad, pathetically joyful at any human interaction, deliriously relieved that they are alone no longer? but they couldn't show that could they... all the other bubble-beings would look down their noses at the traitor who cracked their collective outer skin and let the world in.

we exist almost as much virtually now as we do really. you sit in a classroom plugged into conversations with people near and far, your fingers on nokia keypads speak to others in the same room or the same universe (- thanks inky, for pointing that out). so our notion of reality has stretched into a weird unknown. things that affect us are ungraspably huge. globalisation, privatisation, publicisation, immigration, gentrification - we're pretty well lost, aren't we. therefore, we try to control as much space around us as we can. we work on our bodies, our relationships, our interior design, our daily calorie intake, our time-table, we give things endless names like actuarialism, phallophobism, post-hetero-morpho-blitz-ism... and end up allocating 'alone time'. Time in which to plug our ears and pretend not to notice the real, crumbly buildings we pass on our way to work, the weird way in which the wind blows through underground tunnels at odd times, the strange people talking to themselves outside theatres, the girls with crushes beaming beatifically at nothing in broad daylight, the teenage boys wearing pink hair trudging gloomily alongside their mothers to buy tuxedos, the gummy old men with rotten teeth smiling at you from a bench holding out stale beer cans. and eventually we don't notice them anymore. it all fades into the noise in your ears.

hehehe how sad are we?

p.s.: inky started a fire.