hedgehog’s dilemma
circuit boards give me the heebies! right clicking gives me the jeebies!
gave mum a list of music i’ve dubbed “stalker” music™ and aside from grimes ‘oblivion’ which i believe is supposed to give off that vibe of you better start running through that tunnel honey. take the heels off and SPRINT! kinda vibe, all the songs i meticulously picked and outlined in brown permanent marker on an old yellowed piece of note paper had something in common. synths. electronics. this for me comes alongside the same vein as computers are used to control man. COMPUTERS ARE MANS NEW GOD! the green and red tendrils of a forlorn angel. there’s a whole world outside and you spend 95% of your life staring into a black box with flashing lights. you dopamine craving rat in a box!
i find that i have less time these days. well not exactly. it isn’t as if the hours have shortened. have they? 60 minutes is still 60 minutes but an hour feels like 10 seconds. you do the math. i failed that class at least three times. as a kid sitting and reading for an hour felt like the whole day was encompassed in those minutes but now an hour flies by and i realise that i haven’t moved an inch. not an iota - not out of comfort but more like a trance. time no longer feels real. told you we all royally fucked up by storming area 51 circa 2019; my brother snorts and i’m inclined to agree. now listen i’m of the mind that time was made up to sell watches and clocks just like the next man but the fact that us city dwellers can’t even use the sun to track the time or certain plants to tell the beginning and end of seasons is ridiculous. i know at least one of you from the back of the room is going to go EXCUSE ME BUT I CAN TELL! JUST LOOK AT THE TREES DUDE! and to that i say FUCK YOU AND SIT DOWN! there’s something wrong with synthetics. for all the good it’s done let’s look at the bad too shall we: constant distraction? check. out of tune with body? check. we’re all more readily available than ever but still can’t find the time for each other? check.
i shouldn’t be able to see everyone’s life like this. once upon a time an author or content creator was a mystery unless you were a member of the paparazzi or in that persons inner circle of dealings. now, with “get ready with me’s” and insta stories it feels as though we’re the click clack of a camera lense. no identity and no secrets under the ever watchful eye of big brother.back to being a child for a second i grew up in the early 2000s when computers were starting to become a thing every home had. but dig this. mine didn’t. the thing with growing up poor is we had no disney channel or the like. my child-hood was niche fighting games, video tapes and films of comic book superheroes. nothing more. by the time i did get the internet it was late 2020.
now dont get me wrong i had used it before. i owned a phone but even that i had to go to an internet cafe to use it. or log into my despondent dead beat fathers wifi when i would visit him for the weekend. so i mainly had connection for about 48 hrs at any given time. an internet cafe across the road from me which was soaked in rat piss and cheap coffee you had to pay a pound for an hour of computer use in which me and my brother would just watch anime amvs- sasuke and linkin park i’m talking about you! so it’s only been since covid when i moved into university accommodation that i had unfiltered internet usage and since then my brain has become a sieve. information isn’t processed properly. the wrong things stick around like a broke brita filter. my mind has become re runs of clipped songs and audios. a paragraph of text is sometimes too much before my eyes wander to another page. NEW SENSATION. NEW STIMULUS. forget a physical blue pill MORPHEUS TAKE MY PHONE FROM ME!!
it’s maybe why i’m so anxious around music that involves a lot of computerised sounds. at least in a blatant sense. it feels like you’re being stalked. it feels wrong as if our fleshy human ears are listening in to something from beyond our comprehension. radiohead’s ‘okay computer’ (expect a “notes on” essay for that album soon) scared me but i also put that down to certain types of music and film give me depersonalisation. i’m not meant to stare at a slab of lights and sound for more than an hour. to neglect writing physically that it hurts my wrist to do so. to be so stuck with choice paralysis that my already obsessive compulsive brain short circuits and refuses to work any harder. THE COMPUTER IS MANS NEW GOD and that little ping of a notification from me in your inbox is a hymn. HOLY,HOLY HOLY! BLESS THE NEW SYNTHETIC FLESH. BLESSED BE THE MACINTOSH!