Tickling the Wire
“You are watching people go through withdrawal from the emotional addiction to the myth of certainty.”
—Ashley Ford
I let the dogs out late the other night and looked up in the sky to see a train of satellites — forty, fifty, sixty of them — racing through the stars. It is a testament to effective quarantine — and a purpose-built informational firewall — that I didn’t know what I was seeing, and so had one of those increasingly rare moments in life where everything was startlingly new, and fresh, and even exciting. Watching this unexpected and bizarre spectacle, I said, outloud and involuntarily: “What the fuck?”
The last time I felt that sudden and overwhelming sense of virginity, of loss of control, and of possibilities beyond easy reckoning, was during a fairly bad rollover car accident which was also a thing that came out of nowhere.
Standing in my front yard, while the train of satellites went sailing overhead and the dogs went sniffing around the pine trees for a decent place to piss, I thought WW3 was underway or perhaps the balloon had finally gone up on the long-anticipated alien invasion of earth.
It’s likely that some dumb German kid in a concrete bunker at Normandy woke one morning in 1944 to see the allied fleet in the English Channel and had a similar existential levitation. He likely looked out at the largest invasion fleet in the history of the world and said: “What the fuck?” He would have said it in German, of course, which Mark Twain famously noted is much better — as a language — than it sounds.
When I got back in the house I was slightly disappointed to learn it wasn’t an invasion at all, merely Elon Musk’s Starlink. My dreams of an important role in the Maquis, post-invasion — maybe even a flirtation with Massoud-like celebrity — The Lion of the Cascades, as it were — were hard-crushed on the spot.
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