[b]Dave Eggers
When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.[/b]
He thought [repeatedly]: Don’t get me started!
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? Young people are creating ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive.
Fortunately [for us] there’s not much clarity here.
Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.
Any dorks here, Kids?
Thank you, he says.
Thank who?
I don’t know. You?
No, not me. Jesus.
Thank you, Jesus?
Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.
But only after He invented the credit card.
You know, if that’s actually true.
I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.
You’d think it might be the other way around.
Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.
Once that was 15 minutes, but now most will settle for the blink of an eye.