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Send | Sep 02 2001

Strange: when I’ve written something in my notebook, intending to email it later, I often have the sense that the words are already gone – gone, that is, as an email is gone.

It is like speaking to someone in a dream and then absently believing that this person, the real life person, knows what was said.

The mistake happens after I close my notebook (a comparable action, I suppose, to closing an email program). Thinking over what I’ve written, I will wonder, as I do with emails, how my correspondent will respond. I may even find myself regretting certain parts – again, as with emails – only to remember that I haven’t sent the damn thing, that the damn thing is just words in my notebook.

I do this a lot. Email has conditioned me to imagine that there is a Send button next to whatever I write, representing a nearly instantaneous connection to nearly anyone I know.

Well, to their computers.

No doubt the introduction of the telephone caused a similar shift in consciousness.

For it is – I can feel this – a shift in consciousness.

And a shift for the worse, I can feel this as well.

Not that the mistake I make is so horrific. Rather, it’s funny: it’s funny to be riding the subway and to suddenly remember that the email you’ve been kicking yourself about sending is just some scribbles in your notebook. I make myself laugh when I do this, for I suddenly see myself as some comical character, a character so immersed in “wired” reality that he becomes confused as to what’s real and what isn’t.

This is funny, isn’t it? I find it funny.

At the same time, it’s not funny, and I know it’s not funny, and it unnerves me.

According to the novelist John Gardner (I learned this from William Least Heat-Moon, from his book “PrairyErth”), there are but two plots: a stranger rides into town, and a stranger rides out of town. At certain moments, moments of something between melancholy and insight, I feel that I am that stranger. And the question I ask myself is this: Which way am I heading?

Perhaps it does not matter. I don’t believe it matters. Later in the same paragraph, Heat-Moon notes that his friend, poet and playwright Jack LaZebnik, has said that there’s but one plot: death approaches. This is what matters.

My bouts of media-induced senility foreshadow other, greater losses. Which is why they unnerve me: I am losing myself and I can feel it.

I am reminded of the famous scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which the surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman, disconnects Hal, the ship’s treasonous onboard computer. During the disconnection, Hal says in a whispered monotone, “Dave…my mind is going…I can feel it…I can feel it.”

I don’t mean to compare myself to Hal; I merely remembered him. But it’s interesting that Hal represents the idea of a machine with consciousness – an idea as silly as that of a cyborg, the supposed melding of human and machine.

These things don’t fit together. I can feel it. And that is the problem: one finds oneself disconnected, in one sense or another. And one can feel it, too, albeit from a distance, or what feels like a distance, and that feeling is strange.

Scary, too, but more than scary, strange.