A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

heart of darkness

They speak a different kind of language up there on the hill – short, garbled sentences filled with words like ipod, mp3, virtual this, viritual that - and punctuated with names of bars, eateries, exotic latte drinks, Club Med lingo, buzzwords for having sex in physically challenging locations, and the verbal detritus of early 21st Century consumer society. It’s like all the students at Cornell were equipped at the same time with a brain implant – a neuro-Norstar equivalent to what General Motors puts into the dashboard of their new models. This device serves as a multi-purpose translator, dictionary, archive for menu and drink specials all around town, a homing device for potential mates who share the same class knowledge, zodiac sign and ipod downloads.

Ez had to spend some time up at Cornell recently. He won’t tell you why but keep in mind that he’s been working on a thermonuclear device for some time. This may be too much of a hint but maybe he needed to spend some time with the ghost of Hans Bethe, one of the godfathers of implosion theory. There, Ez gave away his secret.

After spending a couple of hours on campus, Ezra got this strong sense of dread – much the same as characters do in 19th Century novels. People who inhabit contemporary fiction don’t get the same sense of angst or foreboding – probably because they consume too many pharmaceuticals. Drugs like Prozac, and all the other uppers and downers in the modern mood changing arsenal, take the edge off things. So you can’t really compare the kind of Victorian sensibility manifested in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach with the whacked out mental world of a Hunter S Thompson. Arnold dreamt it, Thompson lived through it.

But Ezra started getting this strong vibe up at Cornell – like he was floating down some kind of virtual Congo, the powerful, dark brown waters carrying him past cyber communities of Born Again headhunters, pizza-and-Diet Coke ingesting pygmies videoconferencing on their cell phones, dancing around their ceremonial laptops, juiced up on hiphop streaming in through their Walkmans. Every mile that Ezra traveled down this violent flood, filled with Pac-Man like crocodiles and 100 ft constrictors took him closer to the vortex of the world seemingly shared by all those Cornell students up on the hill – the ever evolving future.

Holy Shit! What’s that on the horizon? It looks like some kind of weird episode of Buck Rogers meets Harvey Potter meets Blade Runner. All these people are running around with weapons that resemble a cross between light wands and Waring Blenders, zapping each other all over the place as they try to get closer to this scary thing at the edge of the jungle. You can barely make it out in the mist. What is that? It’s some mishmash of corporate logo – golden arches merging with a red bullseye combined with a gigantic W, standing next to an equally huge A. Wait – is that an L? Could that be a 200 ft high Smiley Face lurching over the whole bizarre gig?

Have a nice day.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:50 PM