Escalator Riding For Beginners

The river of Ad is ancient, broad and voluminous. Its tendrils reach every creek bed, every gully, every nook, every bend every rivulet, stream and oxbow, and nowadays of course every strip, every high street, every mall.  The ancient Egyptians, it is said, manufactured a sweeping detour of the Nile near old Cairo so that boatsmen, usually naked but predominantly elbows and knees, could wield their low-tech craft by the squared feet of the pentacled pentagram adorning the Grea t Pyramid, there to be visually asphyxiated also, suffice it to say their eyes momentarily affixed on the unsuffixed Sphinx, by the brethren and schwesterthren of the Great Pyramid - Larry, Moe, Curly, Groucho, Harpo (who always carried a chromatic harmonica) and Karl. The river of Ad is now, with the advent of bits and ones and bound-to-fail start-ups, inside our pockets, on every flat mat surface worth the name. One is deluged by Ad and it's descendants all day every day and 24 hours every night. 48 hours ...

I am one of those people who never saw the attraction in 'Second Life'... a kind of online role-playing alternate reality. I say alternate reality because that's what the SL people like to think of it as.  But it ain't exactly alternate reality. Not in equal doses. It's like 100 percent alternate and zero percent reality.  If you like imagining making out with a drawing of a woman that sometimes flickers or walks through poorly drawn walls, bars, fences or swimming pools then S econd Life may be your cup of tea.  Sorry, drawing of a cup of tea.  And now, today, I discover ASMR. This is a phenomena where people are extra turned on by textural things - whispering, blow-drying towels, scratching sounds, peeling bananas and god knows what else.  Now if the stiffs at Second Life ever got together with the stiffs a ASMR, or AMSR, or ARSM, they might have 50 percent of something. But I guess they never will, cos, you know, the whole flickering cartoon thing.....

I woke up to the sunlight streaming in through the slanted roof window. Tiny birds sang a chaotic chorus out in the world, the manicured gardens, the spaces between houses and apartment towers. "We're still here," they sang.  "None of us are getting out of this alive," I thought.  I slipped on my trousers, changed shirts, clambered down the spiral wooden staircase, my mind two steps behind. The children were already up, bent over cereal bowls and leaning in to the morning. Su nshine here is a rare commodity. Mostly it is strangled by the cloud cover, fleets of dark panzas floating in tight formation and determined to vomit at the slightest glitch. I looked at my daughters, five and 12, their eyes huge and glowing, and wondered what kind of world could I personally leave for them. I keep pumping them, priming their minds with sets of tools, with turns of phrase, with oblique and askew ways of seeing totally normal things, to show them where the exits are, where t...