As a kid, you feel invincible.
Your body is just one thing: you don’t think about your knees or your back or your eyes as separate, they’re part of a bio-spaceship you’re piloting around.
The older I get the more I become a jigsaw puzzle of discrete physical pieces, each with their own set of verbs.
My ears? Ring. My jaw clicks. My gut… roils. And the rubber-band physics that used to define motion have been separated too; up and down is now: down.
And up. Two choices. Two clear efforts. Neither in any way dependent on the other. It’s automatic transmission to manual, more control but clearly a bit less raw horsepower.
I’ve been a bit under the weather recently, a phase I’ve just learned was derived from ship travel, where if a sailor was ill they were sent below deck to recover, thus “under the weather”. Anyway, I am below deck right now, far from the currently bright amber skies over Brooklyn, recovering. Well, I didn’t lose health – I’m not retrieving it, it’s right here, I just either need a new one or a bit of time to mend and properly iron this one.
The vulnerability of illness is such that one seeks out comfort with little energy to pursue it, so comfort needs to be close at hand, like a cool pillow or a cup of hot tea or a bag of camp-sized marshmallows. But of course, even after the lessons taught to us by Covid, a sick day is not a day “off”, unless you are entirely unconscious, and even then you probably need a doctor’s note.
So though I’ve been laying down, my phone was near my hand all day, more than occasionally dinging or ringing or asking for something to be done, which I did, then closed my eyes the requisite 11 minutes it takes to both, coincidentally, fall fully asleep and have the phone buzz again.
So I thought I might watch a relaxing show, but I’ve recently changed phones, so I was locked out of nearly every app.
People used to recognize either my face, voice, or name. This is how humans engaged with one another; in person, on the telephone, or on paper. You could see someone, hear someone, or read what they wrote.
You didn’t need all three, you just looked at the tv and said “Hey, that’s William Shatner” and were pretty sure that was him. If you weren’t sure, you just waited until he started talking.
“Yep,” you’d say, “that’s William Shatner alright.”
To prove we were us, we used ID. Driver’s license, or a passport if you were a, y’know, passport person. Those pieces of nothing but paper products allowed a human being to write a monetary amount on another piece of paper and turn it into legal tender. The salesperson would check the randomish scribble from one of the pieces of paper to that on another, lift the money till in the cash register, and place it underneath.
Yet I, ill yet surrounded by an Age Or Miracles, found myself adding to my full body ache – head filled with cheese – roiling and exhausted state the specific frustration of not being able to prove my identity to a machine with detail enough for it allow me to enjoy services that I had already paid for.
Name: it doesn’t care about my name, it wants an email. I have seventeen different emails.
Password: Well, that’s what it comes down to, right? And I understand that I changed it 4 months ago, thank you very much but that doesn’t help me remember what lyrical maniac word I created back then in anger (with caps and numbers and symbols).
The Picture Box: where I need to “prove I’m human” ( I believe the words I was clearly muttering accomplished that nicely, but the phone aloofly pretended that it wasn’t listening ) .
And then multi-factor authentication, where I had to find a device that was a friend of the device I was holding who could vouch for me.
I was in front of a digital condo board. I was applying for citizenship in Tron. All saints forbid that someone on the Dark Web should watch an episode of “Picard” on my dime… I was protected fully from such chicanery, even though I’ve been sent four bank cards in two years as a “security courtesy” and all my passwords trigger alerts that they were found in a data breach from somewhere or another.
I don’t go online for security. I don’t go outside for security. I do it because I have to, for one reason or another, and the calculated risk of engaging in any kind of communication or connection is something I’ve accepted, I just don’t feel well and I want to see a classically trained Shakespearian actor make money pretending to be the retired captain of a spaceship, that’s all. My bio-spaceship is tired, the weather outside is (literally) frightful, and I want to be below a metaphorical deck for just little while. That is all I’m asking for.
Why so many questions? Do you really want to get to know me? Should I tell you my deepest desires and grandest hopes, not just for me, but for generations to come? Are you waiting for the moment I reveal, I mean truly reveal myself? Take down all barriers and really allow you to understand who I am? The raw, open, jigsaw puzzle that defines my life? Is that what you’re waiting for? Is that what you really want? Is – oh, hold on… here you go:
9 8 7 4 8 2.
Fever Dream.