Shotgun Squad
“Communications are almost always a kind of seduction.”
“But the public isn’t aware… Why?”
“Because we are made to think of them as trivial. We have better things to think about. We worship in a shallow manner.“
“I’ve been spending more and more of my time offline… It’s strange really. Never really been one to do that sort of thing, But for some reason it’s been appealing to me.”
“Why are you telling me this? I'm not gonna help you because I don’t give a damn about you. But if you know about yourself what you know about me than you know what you need without me.”
Going offline is like dipping down below the surface of an upside down lake. No one really spends much time offline unless they’re sleeping or having sex. Whenever folks actually talk to each other, it’s as if they’re leaving a preferable world in order to transact some kind of business they both would rather resolve quickly. Faces dead. Voices curt and short. And then, back into the world where the emotional weight of experience is carried for you. Where fragile, emotional bodies are buoyed by the heavy salt waters of the Dead Sea.
J for some reason was never quite comfortable there. He was not one of the strange folk but he didn’t spend as much time online as he could have. Sometimes he would go off and just sit staring at the real around him. Not that there was much to look at. Things in the real over the course of decades had become quite plain. But there was something he had discovered one day when he was young. His mother had taken him to the seashore and as they were walking along the boardwalk a bomb had exploded in a nearby market. J had gotten knocked down by the blast and for six hours they had sat along the boardwalk while the military secured the island. It turned out to be a shotgun squad from the lower pine barrens and for a period of three hours Field transmissions were halted to and from the island. Such a thing would never happen nowadays, but they were only first beginning to rise up and the government was not prepared to handle them. J sat there listening to the angry, frenetic language of the military vehicles corralling the people on the streets, screeching and bleeping to each other in hostile, marine-language tones, back and forth and to other vehicles on the roads. And all the while, the sound of the sea enveloped them with the vastness of its gentle murmur. It was something he would never forget…
“But the public isn’t aware… Why?”
“Because we are made to think of them as trivial. We have better things to think about. We worship in a shallow manner.“
“I’ve been spending more and more of my time offline… It’s strange really. Never really been one to do that sort of thing, But for some reason it’s been appealing to me.”
“Why are you telling me this? I'm not gonna help you because I don’t give a damn about you. But if you know about yourself what you know about me than you know what you need without me.”
Going offline is like dipping down below the surface of an upside down lake. No one really spends much time offline unless they’re sleeping or having sex. Whenever folks actually talk to each other, it’s as if they’re leaving a preferable world in order to transact some kind of business they both would rather resolve quickly. Faces dead. Voices curt and short. And then, back into the world where the emotional weight of experience is carried for you. Where fragile, emotional bodies are buoyed by the heavy salt waters of the Dead Sea.
J for some reason was never quite comfortable there. He was not one of the strange folk but he didn’t spend as much time online as he could have. Sometimes he would go off and just sit staring at the real around him. Not that there was much to look at. Things in the real over the course of decades had become quite plain. But there was something he had discovered one day when he was young. His mother had taken him to the seashore and as they were walking along the boardwalk a bomb had exploded in a nearby market. J had gotten knocked down by the blast and for six hours they had sat along the boardwalk while the military secured the island. It turned out to be a shotgun squad from the lower pine barrens and for a period of three hours Field transmissions were halted to and from the island. Such a thing would never happen nowadays, but they were only first beginning to rise up and the government was not prepared to handle them. J sat there listening to the angry, frenetic language of the military vehicles corralling the people on the streets, screeching and bleeping to each other in hostile, marine-language tones, back and forth and to other vehicles on the roads. And all the while, the sound of the sea enveloped them with the vastness of its gentle murmur. It was something he would never forget…
posted by Devin Greenwood at 8:50 PM
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