The Unquiet American

 

Imagine a foreign correspondent grimly staring at his broken typewriter, sweltering in the relentless humidity of the antique land where he is stationed, weary of writing report that nobody reads and receive no response, homesick for a country that no longer understands him, that has probably forgotten that he exists. Welcome to the world of American Fez, for such is the situation here.

Dog-eared notebook, five o'clock shadow, half empty bottle of whisky, anonymous sources, unverified reports, paragraphs of purple prose narrating the news from nowhere about invisible characters haunting unknowable cities. It is thin gruel for a public that demands intravenous ice cream sundae. 

One of these days I might write my memoirs, not in twelve elegantly composed volumes like Casanova, but in Rorschach inkblot flip-book form. Then the reader can make up their own story by interpreting the patterns. Perhaps I'll leave some chapters blank so commentary can be added via the venerable media of coffee stain and greasy fingerprint: an interactive scrapbook of life.

But whatever I do, my hope is it will be tactile and not digital. After all, nowadays even the most inchoate bathroom graffito is preferable to robot poetry presented on a screen. Give me zero intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence, because stupidity is believable at least. 

And so ends this latest dispatch from the far-flung jungles of Bloggerdom. Dateline: whenever and wherever. Byline: nobody you know anymore. So don't bother to hold the front page since it's not much of a scoop. It's probably not even an accurate account of what I was thinking when I started writing. 

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