COTTON CANDY DREAMS


and sugar-stained hands.

Last night at Mellon Arena, sitting one row in front of me but inhabiting a whole other universe entirely, a couple of teenage puppy lovers ignored the hockey game in front of them, his parents to the right of them, and the other 17,000 people around them, all in the hope of snapping the perfect camera-phone photo of themselves eating cotton candy, a little cyber souvenir they could IM to friends and email to acquaintances and post to their Facebook accounts, presumably to confirm that they were, indeed, at the Penguins game but were not, in fact, paying any attention to it. While the rest of us -- or at least those of us not consumed by the process of downing great quantities of beer and then pissing it all back out -- were watching and cheering and enjoying the action, uniting ourselves in support of something far beyond the lenses of our own narcissistic selves, that young man and woman were digitally dividing themselves and their fifteen-megabytes-of-fame culture by one more power of two, so absorbed in the reality shows of their own unexceptional lives that they could not process, much less bother to be a part of, something that did not, like those shaking little apertures in their sugar-stained hands, focus solely on them and their own dwarf stardom.

Last night, after I'd come home and long forgotten about what I'd seen, I had a dream that there were no novels, no films, no newspapers or magazines or journals left in the world. There were no networks, no radio stations, no tv shows. Just a constant, streaming cacophony of words and pictures and video streams, of blogs and podcasts and lifecasts, of diggs and twitters and endless, rolling rabbles, a steady, heady rush of inscrutable images and indecipherable syllables. And all of these things were like bright pink gossamer, wrapped and spun and hung in the air, not quite there but still everywhere at once, unable to be touched or held or kept or savored, always flickering in the fading twilight, leaving a frail and perishable residue of dust beneath them, all the while blowing in the soft and gentle breeze of what sounded to me, just before I woke up, like a long and laboring sigh.

Posted: Tue - December 4, 2007 at 10:53 AM          

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