He becomes an electronic boy. Every work day spent surrounded by preprogrammed computer chips, sending out electrical hums, when plugged into the oasis of sockets. They all speak to each other; clicking, creaking, spinning their fans faster, slower, beeping a secret, a plan, a concept, to a neighboring cell of plastic and metal. And he stands, surrounded by them, selling them.
He sleeps by one, humming its lullabies into his delicate, decomposed brain; singing him to sleep at night.
In the evening, he stares into a surface, 12”x9”, glowing and burning, images into his soft, squishy memory.
Most of his long days, skateboarding, community college, a part time job selling to the average consumer hunks of material that will one day be replaced by something better, always something better. They are concluded with the consumption of cheap fast food that slowly eats away at his digestion system, intestines filled with cardboard, the intake of illegal smoke and loud, terribly constructed love songs; of broken hearts, and tears that infinitely flow. Most of his long days spent sleeping, spent losing focus, spent dumbing down until he become what he once was: a child [only this time of ignorance] of a lonely, lost soul.
Playing 8-ball on a table just big enough to function, with a friend of like circumstances. All the others migrated to more enriched environments; universities, state campuses, places requiring then to obtain makeshift bedrooms and eat microwaveable dinners while studying 10 hours a day. And Charles is stuck here, stuck with a bad influence, his only influence. At least, his only one left.
They spend plenty of time together, doing things that break a mother’s heart and cause her to leave nasty voice-mails on the father’s phone about how he has failed as a parent. Charles spends his time indulging in his activities. Hours in front of the television, hours trying to maintain the same of beat, out of time, bass line, hours practicing the same keys of the same song on the same electric keyboard, hours playing the same PC version of the same video game that allows the players to reenact the same courses and race the same races, over and over and over and, well you get the point.
The computer’s enclosed in hard plastic, holding the capacity to communicate in a binary language, holding the future in the hammock of its internal wires; sending the same signal to the same section of the motherboard, to allow the same process of screen going from black to white, just like it does every time someone presses the same button places conveniently on the front face of the plastic shell.
Waking up on the same bed, on the same desk,
without thinking, automatically grabbing the same old green bath towel with ripped edges and torn corners. Dressing in the same monotonous colors: black slats, white button up, gray tie, name tag. Driving the roads to the job in the car that was always driven. Everyday, what distinguishes it from the last? Work, sleep, eat, study, lose consciousness while performing the all too familiar task. Always feeling in the right place, since nothing ever changes.
Slowly, the brain goes fully automatic.
Leisurely losing control, losing the natural human crave for change.
Gradually morphing into the pressure of his coworkers,
The electronic generation,
The artificial knowledge,
The unsophisticated happiness,
The plain old, every day routine.
Turn on, load up, store information, increase data capacity, organize and categorize daily events, daily regularities. Creating a restrained life.
He will wake up from his coma, one day, and realize that this is His: preprogrammed day, plastic protected life, credit cards, Tupperware, shoes, buttons, telephones, compact discs, keyboards, casino chips, storage boxes for his seasonal winter sweaters with reindeer and snowmen, and red and green flashing ties.
This will be his cardboard, toy poodle, mass media, fast food, television, made in China, capitalistic, hand crafted for 15 cents a day, life.
Will he love it?
Will he know how?
