More and More, The Remote

By Bill Pearse on September 14, 2013 • ( 2 )

The Leader of the Luddites

I look at the painting but don’t recognize it, don’t remember where it came from, some faraway place, an alpine lake in blues, indigo, watercolor. I bathe myself in the sea salts of home. The smell of the pines outside as the dew sets in, the night falls, autumn coming any day. The clamor of children in a distant room, soft light, lights on timers, locked doors, sleeping dogs bedding down.

It’s the year 2013 and we cozy up with a laptop or a mobile device and disappear through a thin wire, up the chimney, out through the clouds, gone.

Books become screens. Phantoms on the street, on buses, following a reflection of themselves in their hands, blind to the people right next to them and the cracks in the sidewalks, what tries to grow there and reaches for the light, a real light, the one in the sky, not in your hand.

Our brains are dashed on the dashboard of distraction. Fake light drawing moths out of mammals, out of people, crackling, becoming indistinct.

We are much smaller than the technology we created and the remote is now pointed at us, scanning, reading, making us more and more, the remote.