What sound does a giraffe make? (From a Concerned Product of the Late 70's)
I can watch the pixley prelude of Ghadafi’s slaying, read about Einstein’s theory of relativity and top it off with a woman making love to a horse, all in the span of, well, as little time as I prefer. Hell, with opening tabs I can see all three interchangeably, in succession—Gadhaffi, Einstein, Horse cock, Gadhaffi, Einstein, Horse cock, email my mother, Libya through a cell phone camera, outer space and a money shot. Anyway, with this Autobahn-in-rush-hour of information, you’re telling me, with all the updates and the hyperlinks and the even-if-it-don’t-exist-it-
Maybe I’m sounding like an old-timer, and well, I must admit that I've finally started putting to use my front shirt pocket for my reading glasses, and I know I’m getting a little thin up top, and my standard radio volume has decreased exponentially, but with all this omnipresent access, I really think there is a sentiment lost in the mystery we are living. We are uncovering everything, revealing all that is behind the curtain and the intimacy of searching, of truly earning information, that bright and slow white time it takes for it to slowly sink in, to individualize yourself with those special bread crumbs of knowledge and perspective, to keep it as reward for the searching, to keep it, when you sit down under the electric hum of a library halogen, the smell of old paper, the crackle of old spines, and your head in the mix of learning, it's all lost with a simple *click*--you know the sound--and so we're all left waiting for the next thing to roll onto us. Maybe that’s it, no one can wait anymore. No one can be bored. No one can make the less-than-transcendent leap from being bored, to being, I don’t know, something else. Inadvertant learning, discovery and reward, turns into advertant waiting. Maybe that’s why there is horse porn, because everything has already been accessed, everything has been checked off and now it’s time for more. Those black informational walls of the internet are infinite, save giraffe sounds, and continue outwards, a horizon different for each user because each user trudges a different terrain. But it all keeps going, further and further and further, into this unclaimed real estate of absence that must be filled with something, anything, just to occupy the threshold and keep the electricity of stimulation intact in us all, to eliminate all void and fill it with something, even if it’s horrid, because our enemy is the quiet.
I can’t stop thinking about this one thought, though, and I don’t even have words for the thought, just an image, and it scares me and pecks at me nervously, like maybe the first time you questioned a true afterlife, maybe you were a kid playing in the frontyard with some neighborhood kids and the thought just came and hit you out of nowhere, the thought of not existing. It’s like that kind of feeling, where everything is fine one day, your fingers pinkish-white from the sidewalk chalk and all of the sudden you are hit with this unprovoked, hollowed ‘awakening’ of some sort, and you realize that you don’t remember anything before birth so what if there is nothing to remember after death, what if one day you simply stop existing? And I don’t mean anything like a body-as-a-vessel jargon, but I mean really existing, like not knowing what it is to be alive anymore. And you are still very young but now will you think about dying every day for the rest of your life, and why don’t these other kids have this fear? It’s kind of like that caliber of fear, this thought I can't shake, where you want to say something but you can’t, so then maybe you feel like crying, but if someone asks you what is wrong you will have to explain your fear of dying as a little boy or girl, and you have an acute frustration that none of your friends are scared of death, and you think everyone is a in coma for this simple-to-ponder question—what if we stop existing?—so you keep it to yourself and hold on to your own psychological condemnation, always wanting to cry. It’s like that, that kind of thought, the one that suddenly makes coloring the sidewalk seem like a dreadful waste of time, dirty even, when you only have a very short time to exist. And so, enjoyment must be maximized on an insatiable level, which can sound like a good thing but it can turn into an obsession. Maybe your innocence at that point turns to dust, much like a colorless, less-condensed form of the sidewalk chalk, so wasting time like coloring concrete squares with scraped knees loses any sense of joy, because it is in the purest sense of dying unproductively. So maybe you keep moving, with your insatiable appetite to experience it all, and you try and succeed all of your accomplishments, but your only dwelling is that the clock is only ticking and it’s impossible, really, it’s impossible, to experience it all, and that anchor in your brain sits and bubbles in this lava pit of self-doubt and irrational anguish, and the lava fumigates the rest of your skull and it’s hot and gloomy and stormy like Venus, and every thought is layered with a coating of impending doom and a shade of hopelessness.
It’s like that kind of thought, this recent thought that has come to my mind, and it happened while I was looking for thesound of a giraffe, with my daughter sitting in my lap, her bobby pigtails smelled like tear-free shampoo, and now the smell of that shampoo will always be synonymous with this new obsession I have, but I can’t stop thinking what will one day make all of this hyper-technology, this accessibility and irate method of communication and visual, what will make all of this obsolete? I mean really, what can outdate the internet? What will make the internet seem like steam power? Even dial-up internet sparks a few laughs nowadays, that rackety static and dial-tone, amplified for the whole house to take note you were on the Personal Computer to use that world wide internet. WELCOME! the voice would say.
Welcome?
What I am nervous about is this: what will the kids have to laugh at us for? Will they laugh at us for our horse porn, or because we only have horse porn? What will happen? Will it stop or restart, like the universe, will it all, somewhere along the line, run into itself, into its beginning? Will there be a puritanical cleansing, or will we continue with our direction into this hyper-abyss? If history repeats itself, much like all universes and gods and everythings, maybe, maybe if we continue far enough, we will slam into our beginning; we will all run into ourselves. And at high velocity, we will explode on impact, all becoming bits and pieces of one bombastic influx of energy. A giant, bright, white collapse of everything and nothing into a fabric-ripping power of one. Then, in the clean vapors of new, with our sticks and stones, our untainted eyeballs and feelings in our fingertips, we will learn how to build a fire. We will get our news straight from the giraffe’s mouth.
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