The Glow of
I DON'T KNOW WHEN I WROTE THIS EXACTLY, the
mid-aughts I expect. But I think it was after my visit to the theme park,
Canada’s Wonderland, north of Toronto. They have an evening where they
celebrate Halloween, and have minimum-wage workers dress up as psychopaths, mad
doctors, serial killers, vampires and other friendly sorts of creatures. There are
haunted houses and rides and things like that. Ooooo! Very scary! I
noticed that as it got darker, more and more phone screens glowed in the park
as people walked about and went in and out of the exhibits, and climbed aboard
rides. This was early in the 2000s when cellphones were not as ubiquitous (and annoying) as they are today, so it caught my attention in a way that it probably wouldn't now.
I thought that if you really wanted to scare these folks, crash the cellular service for about fifteen minutes, and see whether there would be a mad scramble for the gates by hordes of terrified, digitally-compromised patrons! Now, that would be fun to see!
Attenuated Man
“And
eventually,” the witch says,
“their
fires faded and were
no longer
there to guide them.
In
darkness at the river’s bank,
they
could not see the fetid waters,
nor the
rot of the barge’s hull,
nor the
old man’s toothless grin.
They saw
nothing of these,
nor of
the land beyond.”
I DON'T KNOW WHEN I WROTE THIS EXACTLY, the
mid-aughts I expect. But I think it was after my visit to the theme park,
Canada’s Wonderland, north of Toronto. They have an evening where they
celebrate Halloween, and have minimum-wage workers dress up as psychopaths, mad
doctors, serial killers, vampires and other friendly sorts of creatures. There are
haunted houses and rides and things like that. Ooooo! Very scary! I
noticed that as it got darker, more and more phone screens glowed in the park
as people walked about and went in and out of the exhibits, and climbed aboard
rides. This was early in the 2000s when cellphones were not as ubiquitous (and annoying) as they are today, so it caught my attention in a way that it probably wouldn't now. I thought that if you really wanted to scare these folks, crash the cellular service for about fifteen minutes, and see whether there would be a mad scramble for the gates by hordes of terrified, digitally-compromised patrons! Now, that would be fun to see!
Cell phones, the internet
and our mass communication system as a whole are unsustainable. But such a
possibility is one that most people refuse to even consider. It’s almost like we're all under a kind of magic spell. Our technology has us hypnotized,
enthralled like shuffling zombies looking for brains to eat. I think maybe that we need to return to older kinds of magic in order
to give our lives meaning again. Or find new kinds.
Cheers, Jake
Cheers, Jake
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