Wr1tt3n0ne

Bunches and bunches
2019-12-16 08:16:52 (UTC)

The Box

I have a confession to make I hated computers when they first showed up. Yes, I am that old. I recall a time where computers were only a thing a business would own and use. My uncle wound up working for IBM and I visited him occasionally at work. He showed me the computers he troubleshot; They were massive, huge boxes with just enough power to render 3D images for blueprints among other uses. He had access to a color blotter that ran on huge rolls of paper and could probably have eaten your fingers off if you were careless enough to get too close. I was in middle school, back when it was called, and was, junior high. My Dad wanted me to take typing which was being called keyboarding by then. He said computers were the wave of the future and I needed the skills to be successful. I told him I'd rather die than have my life reduced to staring at a box all day long for work. It wasn't a porthole for me, that would come later when I discovered the first bulletin boards and chat online. Email would be huge for me in high school, allowing me to get one the cleanest Yahoo email addresses ever, that I still use. Not that it was Yahoo when I first signed up, but they acquired it all back then.

I sit and stare into my box now and it lets me reach all of you. It is a porthole, certainly more like Total Recall than Hackers, but I will take what I can get. I failed to see myself as an artist back then. I failed to know my own ambitions well enough to know that one dream's death is another's birth. All I need to reach you is here, a platform and me, typing away, albeit slower than if I had bothered to learn typing properly, but quickly all the same. And yes, it tires my eyes and sometimes all I can seem to find is pornography. This wretched box holds me captive for hours, reading the news, creating, exploring, shopping, asking it inane questions and telling it off here and there. I love it now even as I cultivate the same dread I have always had of this machine, the dread that my life is becoming all virtual, nothing actual. That, in reality, I am only staring off into a box, after all. My Matrix, if you will, and am now fast asleep, laboring but in my dreams.

Maybe that's why my keyboard needs more colors than my crayons, because I need something concrete. If I see it, then it's real, right? Maybe I just need the stimulation after all the back lit text. Or that I need the soothing cycling of the colors to lull me back to just breathing. I always wonder, this box that has both made me and breaks me every chance it gets, when I die will I count these many hours as time well spent or a lifetime missed?




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