Part VII: Time Warp 2000’s – Cut! #11 (Chapter 113)
I can’t believe how complicated the world has become.
Technology a case in point: computers and machines everywhere,
purporting to make our lives easier.
Instead, the Information Age has buried us under more and more
paper.
Ten years from now, we’ll be buried under floppies and modems,
specks of electronic mail screaming for our immediate attention. I don’t even
have to mention what appliances have done to women: drop this in, push this
button, add this soap, whip up this stitch.
Our bondage has gone high-tech. We even have electronic
wardens now ‒ TV, CD players, intercoms, fax machines,
even cellular phones.
The problem is simple: we do the same old stuff, but more of
it.
And what happens when our sophisticated machines go haywire? I
tell you, we become helpless, back to the stone age when men took their women
by force and enslaved them.
Flannery O’Connor said it best in a title of a short story:
“Everything That Rises Must Converge.” And now, so much more bullshit rises to
the top and converges with all the other bullshit in the world.
Is there no escape?
Perhaps my sister doesn’t have it so bad, after all.
For a brief time, she and he
are back at the garden; they have nothing which impedes, and they can start all
over again, circling each other, truly equal, perhaps getting right back to the
ground.
But it won’t last.
It never lasts.
The year 2016 will show us just how fast we are
capable of devolving – don’t ask how I know, I just know.
The machines and other impediments to humanity are as close as
the Wal-Mart in Timber City. Besides, their satellite dish was one of the few
things that survived the holocaust.
Face it: no one is really cut off from civilization, at least
for long.
Maybe I’ll try on the bikinis after all.
*
January 1, 2001, 7:00
P.M.
I throw up again.
I pop two Tylenol and sip some black coffee.
I call Sal.
Not a Happy New Year’s call.
No “Hello, how are you?”
Just “Why?”
No explanation needed.
Silence.
Then a sound so awful, a deep guttural sound, a wounded
animal, filled with pain and agony.
Everything that has arisen has now converged.
Click.