Dead Air

Dead air.
Five precious little seconds of dead air.
Broken attention span....looming like a California earthquake kissing the Golden Gate Bridge.

What to do? Where are the graphics? Where are the little buttons to push? Something to manipulate, shift, shuffle, switch, where's the on-off? I need response!
The sponse is gone...no matter how fast you re-spond it. What happened? Did it get tired? Was it the wiring? A glitch, a snitch, a snap, a gulf, a hiccup, a non-happening...

Dead air. Being and nothingness. A vacuum. A bit of inner space. What happened to those bright red glowing little numbers that tell you how much traffic light you have left to sit through? The bright sparkly birdie tweets that beep off the seconds even when you're not looking? The three miles an hour you have to slow down for the next obstruction looming in front? The pause for pedestrian crosswalk....pedestrian....pedesterol.....like the glutinous gunk that plugs up the arteries of the city.

Dead air. The quickly whipped, wiped and washed accoutrements of divided attention. The span of a microsecond. The ecstasy of thumb dance across those little plastic letters and numbers....the fussy fidgets of jerked jokes and jacked nervous energy, synapsed electro-impulsed pop-programmed pasted, copied poop-and-scoop throwaway thoughts - gone before they're born.

Dead air. Lifeless, terrifyingly devoid of meaning, anything, artificial input, just something with a human stamp upon it....the hand of man....the choke of nature, the banishment of god, the dust of days and some vestige of power, a toy! a toy! my kingdom for a toy - for any little thing that loses me inside the atrophied image-in-a-nation, that helps me to forget, for any and all precious seconds....the facts of life which cannot be argued or negotiated with! (I don't know how.)

Dead air. Now waitaminute! Whaddaya mean, ya want me to just....exist? Be patient? A patient is someone who has to wait - and wait - and wait - (that's why they call them patients.) That's the whole point. I CAN'T wait. What am I waiting for, anyway? The passage of time? A twist of fate? Someone else? Who the hell are they, anyway? What's so special about them, that I have to wait for - them? Why can't they wait for me? Existentialism? What the hell is that? Some kinda cult? A plot. A conspiracy? Something, someone - after what I got? Well, they can't have it! They're not gonna get it! Who do they think they are, anyway?

Dead air. Hermetically sealed, signed and delivered. Heated, cooled, conditioned. Monitored, maintained, balanced, banished, NO! Don't open that window. Aw....there. Now it's corrupted, confused, tainted, tarnished, full of...........life. We worked so hard to get the life out of it. Now it's ruined. Damn!

Dead air. The power's gone. The wires are down. The screens and speakers dark and silent. Fifty billion manufactured things don't work. They just....exist.
Five seconds stretched like eternity. Somewhere, stars die. Worlds are born.
Humanity pauses.

what's that sound?





"One moment, please."