december 13th, 2021
a youtube video teaches him to operate his washing machine. the video is bordered with #ffffff. one can wonder if he
is wholly naturalized to this, & dreams of nothing more, or if that color strikes him as sterile & antiseptic, counter
to the cells of the skin of a hand which might have guided his to the dial, & the moment might have inspired
a joke which made them laugh, & then the afternoon might have proceeded to who-knows-what-else
the visual richness of a tree with its leaves turning, which they pass under on a walk through the neighborhood, returning
from the store with sodas & candy bars. the atomically fine variations in tone & shade & texture & luster, all in motion
from the wind, under the rich gradient of the sky at dusk speckled with wisps of clouds, scattered unpredictably,
inviting his imagination to idly draw lines & polygons between them, or, of course, point to one & say it
looks like a rabbit, before lowering his eyes to all there is to take in adorning the yards & houses as
they arrive home to another night leading into another morning into another afternoon
all this in place of the technologically regimented consistency of
a smooth sheet of pixels, flawlessly uniform in their hex values
as it stands, though, he is watching this video
the providing of the knowledge of how to operate a washing machine, of how to generally take care of oneself, is
ultimately a service, which can be rendered either personally, out of care, or impersonally, out of obligation, in the
interest of survival, or desperation, in the interest of carving out a new means of survival, or even just boredom
the internet - far from a hand occupying the small volume that it occupies within a room, in a house, along
a street - is a global machine, which carries a sense of inevitability in its fulfillment of this service, in its
advance toward the fulfillment of all informational services - where care, obligation, desperation, &
boredom all merge into one slurry of output. what matters here is that a video exists. "to put
a video there" is the extent to which any intent can be assumed, & the rest is concealed
still, though: he knows how to operate the washing machine now, where without the internet he wouldn't have been able
to. this is certainly better than nothing. he knows that the producers of the video are unaware of his existence, but he
tries to cultivate in himself a feeling that the love for him is simply distributed, parallel, amid a love for all others
in league with himself, for a universal love seems to be what is expressed in producing a vital instructional
video for anyone who might need it. a global collaborative pooling of information. love which sacrifices
its directedness for its inclusiveness, in a display of people taking care of each other generally, rather
than specifically... all this as long as ad revenue doesn't play too great a role, he supposes
still, the moment feels emblematic of the sense that he seems to be missing a lot of potential memories, & that lack
is soldered onto him now. he doesn't like that, & he can't pretend to. his heart doesn't feel good, & this is all just
an attempt to rationalize that away. all he can do is look forward & hope to compensate by populating
his future with double, quadruple, octuple the memories that are had by the average person