Game over son. One more dad.

I feel like we're losing touch, but I don't want the icy touch of telepresence to be mistaken for the warmth of a fond look and soft embrace. The socio-technical order doth make dead mannequins of us all as we fiddle with a small lighted screen, as we return a phatic response to another. The marriage of action and techno-fiddling is an interesting phenomenological insight about our time--our problems are gadgetry oriented. I suppose the coming of the age of quiet technology renders us much more quiet in social settings when each of us take time out from social participation to check our messages and scroll through our personal screens to feed our need for our fragment of esoterica.

Search.

Search is a representative anecdote for our time. The post-modernists ached at the post-material information order and recognized how it transformed our politics, our values. Search is here, and search is how we figure ourselves as participants in that information order. Search spells out the tactics that we employ to be searchable and to be found. The 15 minutes of fame notion is broken into an infinitely divisible soundbyte through which we seek to have our stamp of authorship. A forest of mirrors, a moment's notice, a sly remark, a performed persona, a mere textual element signifying no more than a sound and behind which hides a you a you you always wished you could be, fantasia on a theme by technology. Technology, telepresence, being no where, getting burned right here.

I moved gentlemen. I moved just down the street from my old place, and I moved into an odd situation. My new landlord and life-long friend is living the swinger's lifestyle. He tried persuasively to sell it on me. I moaned in my best Rossini that I'm living the catholic life. Obsessive, possessive, oppressive, I fancy what I am is a dusty relic made by my projection onto Renaissance ideals, Renaissance concepts, science, kitchen chemistry, learning as a hobby--the stuff that made us challenge the monolith of the ancien regime. Now I'm the dusty relic. I won't slide into that bed with one beautiful but distant woman and two of my guy friends. I sit outside nursing my beer, orally fixated, my nookie. I'm back there, playing Pac-Man.

Pac-man is the oral fantasy, an allegory of addiction. You're a mouth and an eye in a darkened maze littered with edible items. You seek things to eat and run from your ghosts. Occasionally you eat something special that allows you to eat your ghosts. Is it a drug? It's an oral coping mechanism, and the upshot is you get points and perhaps a cameo on the "top 3" screen. The girl sips her Tab. Her hair is feathered. I stand, transfixed, a 6-year-old.

"One more quarter dad."

"Game over son."

"Just one more dad."

"I'll do it right this time dad."

"Game over son."