Error Screen
I saw the best minds of my generation drowned in information overload, throwing themselves at the walls of modern technology only to be caught round the necks, dogs on chains, tethered, jerked back, strangled in their desperation,
who can almost feel the degradation of words, language, syntax, as linking verbs over take other little bits, big bits that once kept everything in place have metamorphed into numbers, symbols, smiles, Wingdings,
who in vulnerable infancy saw planes and towers fall from the ash black asthmatic smokestack sky, fearfully high on marijuana and safer drugs,
who are done with the visions of LSD, finding a fix on CNN, NBC, even BBC (our across-the-pond British bastard brothers, screwing their university youth,
who burned parliament in the riots raging in the streets of London), but on the other side they’re borrowing, begging, pleading, pleasing the power of a higher educational high, stepping up from hash to harsh ruler-wielding clergeritas sporting bad habits, while drunk on holy water-into-wine from Constantinople’s cup of Istanbul’s stale absinthe,
who all became addicted to what was supposed to be and what it did for their pink mushy brains, like the LSD of their parents’ adolescent fix, wishing they witnessed Woodstock, but better visions are had on YouTube,
who think different is cool, but only when different comes in a conformist sort of way, preapproved by the rest of the square, box, lid, fit, stay, sit at your 3 dimensional friends, or was it fourth fifth or sixth dimensions? just the sixth sense that dead shells of people could walk around on the street not even noticing that they’re on TV,
who don't communicate face to face and then only have time to call or text or emote, but without the tell tale emotions, which get lost somewhere between them and the screen and the page and the web and the string pulling garments undone, tugging the wires till contact is intercepted (operator?),
who now don't know what to say to each other when seeing one another in the halls or in class because a screen between them is the only way to communicate these days (hello, operator?)
who saw the ordered artwork arranged on teacher’s wall, only to brush one out of place with a backpack bearing the branded label of materialism, awkward as waterfowl on land because they don’t know how to be in reality,
while the next classroom door along the randomly numbered hall hung open exposing a wall cluttered with clippings and quotes and photos and photographs and pics and pictures from the old man’s friends, and loved ones, and dead ones who wrote all they needed to say and saved it, not on web pages, not even death can erase those cookies or leave the faces forgotten,
who have mybook and facespace, writing on each other's wallpaper in words and whispers of what we really could have sighed loudly in person,
who really don't like the fact that if they don't write homework down it still matters (shouldn’t it just be forgotten if not recorded?), and have so much information at their fingertips that it's a wonder they haven't cured cancer, or ignorance, or infinity,
but maybe we're just going in circles around and around and around what one calls information but another calls storage,
who are the products of a more productive generation which produced so much more than their children have managed to program
who forgot that this country doesn’t make anymore, it’s all in factories overseas, so inevitably production stops for good
who look down on their failures, disappointed, disillusioned, rejected, deferred from making a decision and are thus indecisive decision makers, setting deadlines, trapping the desperate throng of echo (echo) baby boomers (echo) (echo)
who know there’s nothing worse than a state school child coming out of an Ivy league family, the first generation to go to that kind of college, until they’re crossing the Virginia Tech campus sympathizing with a killer because we’ve made ourselves into an age of understanding, where we sympathize with Anything from the murdered to the murderers, because they were pushed that far and their rotting minds were untreated thus they are excused, right?
who search our personal minds and the collective knowledge (in a bucket with a few holes that need fixing) of the rest of the world (a.k.a. google), reading Wiki pages, watching videos, hearing the screams, gunshots, fear, and crying at their computer screens imagining what it must've been like for those kids at Columbine, feeling like being halfway there but halfway is terrifying enough
who cower at the oceanic edge while crashing economic tidal waves are dragging companies out to sea, caught in the riptide of rates and inflation and blue-green brine, witnessing the uninsured lifeguards afraid to get their feet wet when the time comes to save the drowning masses
who had religion, but still aren’t sure it’s a good thing, bad thing, new thing, why can’t just pretend we invented it since we’re a nation of Faith, with more in Texas alone than in all of Europe, that’s a fact,
who may or may not listen to tall hatted chessman in the Vatican, holy city, Hollywood, DC, home of greedy bitter independent public servant-slaves to The Times from a Newer northern City,
where the prison warden (operator?), watching the conversations of convicts and loved ones looking through the glass while talking through dirty telephone; can't you read their lips Mr. Zuckerberg?
who undress with their eyes in the dark, and bear all for some unknown viewer, or for the show, the poster, advertisement on craigslist
who can’t be bank robbers like in the old days and movies, because the banks are empty: no more money in the basement or even on Wall Street, no longer under the mattress since it's all in the laptop and on the BlackBerry from the crack house, known as the “service provider”
who maybe even set password as their password to every single online account, but don't go writing that down because they haven't changed any of them since 1999 or 98, can’t recall,
time is no longer an issue because clearly the clocks can’t tick or think out loud anymore, the LCD screens have no sound, and our auditory processing skills are going down the drain with a woooooosh,
who forget to talk about music and TV and how much of it kids actually watch (which is an astoundingly large portion), but we still get all three original channels in TV land because I love Lucy, while everybody loves Raymond,
who make up an answer to post on Wikipedia and see if someone corrects it in time for the mid-term and who knows what's what in this world anymore (besides Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who looks so sad in those photographs now that business is failing)
who find something so extremely alpha that it instantly becomes Zeta because we’re too dumb to know Omega, and say “that photo of your cat with that caption is so cute I just can't stand it so as a coping mechanisms I will send you an acronym of laughter, LOL,” and, maybe just for kicks, they’ll send some more cats back to show appreciation,
who post all those cool cats refusing to be square having morphed into something more of a third dimension, but still refusing to be put inside a whole box; choosing rather, to think outside of it in the air and the open and the polluted nature of New Jersey, and industrial remnants dissipating in a cacophony of horns and cicadas
which doesn’t bother those who want to stay awake longer, party later into the night, live more hours of life, but it's really just desire driving them to have more hours to be in the virtual world and be wrong and be wild and befriend the midnight creeping strangers, and make midnight friends, exposed on the Internet, their 15 minutes of half a million hits in half an hour, in a world that’s half made up of what and half made up of how,
who act as if there'll be a second coming and one day in some person’s sad little span of a lifetime something is going to come down from the blue bowl sky and answer all the questions on the internet and the old questions written in the fossils of prehistoric prokaryotic cells, emerging from the primordial soup, splattered on cave walls.
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