Despair

First thing is first (as always) and this post must start off with some music.



This post originates from the existential consumer choice I am faced with to upgrade my regular cell phone (especially when it finally reaches the end of its life) to a Smart-Phone. That is I join the club with an iPhone or Android – I must adapt to survive (Thanks Darwin), and these things are everywhere, young and old (well get to that latter).

90 percent of America lies between the east and west coasts (a fact which each respective coast will deny or at least acts as if it weren’t true) something that makes me unbearably sad, full of dread and angst. I will embed a video made by two girls (I am going to say are from the mid-west for this post) in which they smoke cigarettes and take pictures of themselves to make a stop motion music video to Rudimentary Peni song, “Nothing but a Nightmare.” Don’t worry, they are gonna get a boat and crew and help out the BP oil Slick, I hear they have great pay for you and the crew.



In some respects this post can be boiled down to wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I'm small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die with empty immensity. I want everyone to suffer the same marrow-level dread of the Smart-Phone revolution I feel. The despair of the pixel gaze as a primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by tragedy and death rising angelically toward you. I feel as if I am trapped in a performance art piece entitled Interior Scroll.

Now now now, don’t worry, I have been investigating job opportunities at WONDERFUL places like Dice.com, Craigslist and even UAT Game Degrees. However, I cannot help but watch the debt clock go on and on as credit cards zip through auto-dealer ships, Wall-Marts and Apple stores.

Not even the post-modern pieces such as 4’33 can bring me the joy they once did. It seems these technological abysses being sold at record numbers are providing people with a much needed "vacation". A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it should seem deeply despairing that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being hypnotized down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay with the use of the Android, iPhone, iPad, Kin, Kindle, Nook, PalmPre …ect). But on a Smart-Phone, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies, with the help of Apps and down-loadable content, of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to "triumph" is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet books, exercise books, self-help books and information on cosmetic surgery). Even the ability to attend, virtually, time-management seminars –thanks iPhone4, to which the corporations amphetaminic upkeep of the products is Unstoppable. But there's another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. With e-social-networks growing as rapidly as they are, they have invaded every website on the net. (It’s hard not to find a web page with a Facebook, twitter, or e-mail sharing function.) Commercials for Kin phones targeted at girls on their way to the next trendy concert make me nauseous. This hypnotic gaze into the primordial abyss of death and decay with 3g or even 4g technologies is deeply disturbing.

Having watched too much TV, I have heard political figures questioned again and again on how to solve difficult problems like national deficit, nuclear arms, and global starvation – and repeatedly their answer is the growing support in the upcoming youth of America. Something tells me the voyeuristic gaze is more entrancing than grappling with real issue to fulfill these high expectation that political figures have for us. Our eyes on the pixel abyss – talking heads that just Babylon (haha get it) tragedy after tragedy filling our spiraling eye sockets with decay– murder, poisoned children, death death death- decay. Pixel junkies, that when tragedy comes to their minds its like a kind of drug fix. There is this need to watch tragedy and decay from a plastic screen distance as the rest of the world suffers for the entrainment news. Now I am not immune to this analysis, I need my TV too and I won’t lie. But Smart Phones freak the living shit out of me. No need to see your environment, its being told to you on live WiFi or 4g feed. Vicariously living while the whole world dies and the users immediate environment ignored and treated as irrelevant.

After purchasing one of these high-tech gizmos your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able-finally, for once to relax, as the ads promise, because you will have no choice. Your pleasure will, for the length of the products life (or at least till the newer model comes out), be precisely and efficiently managed. Whenever I go out of the house to Wal-mart or McDonalds or even the (ugh)MALL, there's a huge mass clicking sound from all the Smart-Phones and Side-Kicks as heads face downward into everybody's Palm. I haven't bought any sort of Smart-Phone and feel a perverse pride about this. Now feeling this way only leads me to the despair of the theory of Natural Selection, where not the fittest creatures are the most likely to survive, but the ones most able to adapt to their environment. Now my environment in Jupiter FL is retiree-ville USA. On a side note, this has lead me to the very important conclusion that men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It's just about the only body area where you actually want more hair on older men. As I went to my local grocery store this week to purchase goods, a couple of these glabrous-calved guys were whipping clean their iPhones with military expertise. I see no escape.

Young or Old, Smart-Phones have landed. And it’s “Nothing but a Nightmare.”



Cheers, Senators.