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My Life as a Status Update
Feb. 17th, 2011 02:29 amAnagnorophobia: The lingering fear of discovering that your entire life has been but a Story and that there is neither God nor Chance, but only the ceaseless gaze of an invisible audience.
However that’s not my fear... but it’s close.
My fear has always been the loudness of a single cough against the silence of a crowded room. The absence of a laugh’s light in the black hole of a collapsed joke. An earnest greeting to a familiar face left to whither indifferently on the air. A terrible hush where the wings of a flock of applause should have burst free. Spinning for a packed club and an empty floor no matter how drunk everyone gets. The kiss deferred in a recoil of shock and disgust.
See here’s the thing, I already know I’m living in a Story. I’ve just been scared that my life hasn’t been worth not skipping over the quiet parts between Sex and Death.
Until today.
When I had a different realization and perhaps, in time, a new fear.
That my Life of Late has been reduced to a series of Status Updates.
My Life of Late is a place where the Obituary is followed by a flyer for a Punk Show, where the Burlesque casting call notice is sandwiched between a Joke and a Break-Up. A collage cartography of photographs from strangers I know and distant visions of a home I can no longer return to. Lost on an endless river fed on drips of epiphanies drowning in a cascade of casual observations, where blocks of videos and articles float further and further into the void, unless they’re briefly plucked out and reposted.
Still, everyday I do feel compelled to dive in and lose myself in the collective narrative; to communicate in clicks of Post and Link. A ghost who can only speak through the lexicon of Search Engines.
Yet, here I am with this fabulous ‘Magic Window’ before me. An oracle that can answer, if not all my questions, then at least tell me almost every fact known to the human race. Every song, every poem, every work of art, every philosophy and their refutation, every score and rule and language… all at my fingers.
So I’ve been trying to use it right and not just write.
I’ve been trying to relearn the geography that’s atrophied since the Navy, brushing up on history and while trying out new recipes I play a Learning Spanish CD in the background. Working out more, reading more… but no matter how much I do it seems a little compared to my time on FB.
Of course, all this could just be the Fever talking. Day three/ Night four. Sleepless and exhausted. No drive for anything. No energy to do much but scroll the hours away.
Crash now. Empty bed spread vast under the gravity of her absence. Try to summon her back and hope the flame of her memory can extinguish the Fever's heat.
However that’s not my fear... but it’s close.
My fear has always been the loudness of a single cough against the silence of a crowded room. The absence of a laugh’s light in the black hole of a collapsed joke. An earnest greeting to a familiar face left to whither indifferently on the air. A terrible hush where the wings of a flock of applause should have burst free. Spinning for a packed club and an empty floor no matter how drunk everyone gets. The kiss deferred in a recoil of shock and disgust.
See here’s the thing, I already know I’m living in a Story. I’ve just been scared that my life hasn’t been worth not skipping over the quiet parts between Sex and Death.
Until today.
When I had a different realization and perhaps, in time, a new fear.
That my Life of Late has been reduced to a series of Status Updates.
My Life of Late is a place where the Obituary is followed by a flyer for a Punk Show, where the Burlesque casting call notice is sandwiched between a Joke and a Break-Up. A collage cartography of photographs from strangers I know and distant visions of a home I can no longer return to. Lost on an endless river fed on drips of epiphanies drowning in a cascade of casual observations, where blocks of videos and articles float further and further into the void, unless they’re briefly plucked out and reposted.
Still, everyday I do feel compelled to dive in and lose myself in the collective narrative; to communicate in clicks of Post and Link. A ghost who can only speak through the lexicon of Search Engines.
Yet, here I am with this fabulous ‘Magic Window’ before me. An oracle that can answer, if not all my questions, then at least tell me almost every fact known to the human race. Every song, every poem, every work of art, every philosophy and their refutation, every score and rule and language… all at my fingers.
So I’ve been trying to use it right and not just write.
I’ve been trying to relearn the geography that’s atrophied since the Navy, brushing up on history and while trying out new recipes I play a Learning Spanish CD in the background. Working out more, reading more… but no matter how much I do it seems a little compared to my time on FB.
Of course, all this could just be the Fever talking. Day three/ Night four. Sleepless and exhausted. No drive for anything. No energy to do much but scroll the hours away.
Crash now. Empty bed spread vast under the gravity of her absence. Try to summon her back and hope the flame of her memory can extinguish the Fever's heat.