Digital Deliria Dawns
Small bursting bubbles around the neck. A fizzy haze on the skin. Frog is in the hot tub, cozy and complacent.
So began the Digital Deliria, in converted warehouses, offices and homes, where our own bodies produced a caffeine of email responsiveness. Like inconsequential ping pong balls, back and forth across the net: we hang on for that tone of bing as they come in, and swish as they go out.
It’s a physiological video game. A slot machine. A digital Whac-A-Mole, where replies and response flew. Why pick up the phone when 20 volleyed emails are more efficient than listening to the drone of your fellow human?
Where non-ergonomic chairs once swiveled, the nerves now pinch. Forearms and fingers go numb, after 12 hours rolling the mouse. Feeling the ball twitch over the pad, dust collects and grinds the x and y axes. A mechanical break from the digital universe exists only to clear the dust, affording a more precise pointer position on your screen to the world.
Now thrones turn to cradling cocoons where the body can no longer manage itself, and feet once valiant on the floor must now sit on a small riser to keep blood from pooling. Dust can no longer impede the roller ball, as a laser shoots out from under your hand instead. No need to stop.
Until once we find a bee, admired for their busy ADHD throttle. Elevated, even. Moving from the chair, flying across the keyboard, flitting to the whiteboard, sprinting to their cohort next door.
The whiteboard holds a figment of a plan. The email holds an inert communication element. A sticky holds a fleeting note for a person 5 doors down.
Contradicting themselves every 7 seconds, speaking in partial sentences as the mind races ahead, they are 3 chess moves down another question that no one articulated, yet lives partially baked somewhere in the back of the bee’s mind. There are problems to solve! Do we know what they are?
For every inarticulate problem, there’s a speedy solution. Well-contemplated, it is not. So it’s one without ramifications. Just do it! What’s wrong with you for not buzzing like me?
The bee then we discover is a June bug — bouncing against the net at triple speed. Aimless and then found with one thorny leg stuck in the mesh. Joyous in its entrapment in a solution. But, if stuck on it too long, could lead to a feast for the next morning’s bird.
So one may leave the room on this day, anxious, for the lack of pure direction. Struggling to piece together disjointed elements into what once felt like a woven whole.
In the distance, you hear the storm siren test on a sunny day. It lends a misplaced feeling of disturb — because you already emerged from the tornado. So instead, might you expect a missile to hit any moment, given the details you missed in the whirl?
Yet, all still is business as usual. You grate: Were you too slow? Or they too fast and inarticulate? A missile to you may have always been the plan.
So now we devolve into the basest of instincts — attention seeking, in the business of the aperiodic reinforcement of validation, that gets fewer and farther between. But it’s enough to live another day. We distance into an expanding universe, as real relationships dissolve.
Our dark matter fills the voids in between, as our attention shrinks to ever smaller segments. We bite at the thick, yet vacant air for the next morsel.
The bee we become, the rewired, vibrates past the frog’s sticky tongue. But frog pays little attention, remaining absorbed only with its own circumstance. Today the mist feels warmer around its neck, as the bubbles increase in speed and frequency. But it stays.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
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