is almost torture. I sit in this space, every day, untouched except for
the careful, calculating hands of the handler. While this small gesture of
welcome may suffice for the moments, I yearn for someone, just someone, to
crack open my cover and take a look at me—even just a passing glance. Yet
I, The Old Man and the Sea, live out my days ignored and sometimes met
with an apathetic gaze.
Besides the constant reorganization by the handler, whom I suspect to have
some sort of serious compulsion for meticulous worship of the Dewey
Decimal system, I’m usually only glanced at by passing learners on their way to
the flashing screen which seem so addictively entertaining even from afar.
The learners barely even notice that lying just ten feet behind the
flashing screens are thousands of my brothers, sisters, and cousins
waiting to be cracked open for some bit of information, but in the silence
only disturbed by the steady drone of the flashing screens, my kin and I
are forgotten.
Just ten years ago, barely the blink of an eye for my species, we were
used almost round-the-clock—always needed by some learner looking for the
ever more obscure subjects assigned by certain teachers, who will remain
unnamed, yet these days assumingly have passed with singers only referred to by their first names and acid-washed jeans.
Now, the only objects which receive any attention from learners whatsoever are the continuously flashing screens
and the tired old romance novels showing a strapping man’s bare nipple on
the cover, read by the handler only when her compulsion is satiated by
complete structure in her environment.
Currently, as the days pass on, my family and friends are being
continuously converted into the whirring screens—a somehow backward way of
streamlining reminiscent of the “intellectual” articles found in certain
magazines published by pipe-smoking men in evening jackets surrounded scantily clad women.
So, as my family dies out, I silently wish that just
one more glasses-clad learner will enter into the handler’s room desiring
one of my kind, rather than the ubiquitous droning screens.
And, I lie untouched in my two by three inch shelf.
Decimal system, I’m usually only glanced at by passing learners on their way to
the flashing screen which seem so addictively entertaining even from afar.
The learners barely even notice that lying just ten feet behind the
flashing screens are thousands of my brothers, sisters, and cousins
waiting to be cracked open for some bit of information, but in the silence
only disturbed by the steady drone of the flashing screens, my kin and I
are forgotten.
Just ten years ago, barely the blink of an eye for my species, we were
used almost round-the-clock—always needed by some learner looking for the
ever more obscure subjects assigned by certain teachers, who will remain
unnamed, yet these days assumingly have passed with singers only referred to by their first names and acid-washed jeans.
Now, the only objects which receive any attention from learners whatsoever are the continuously flashing screens
and the tired old romance novels showing a strapping man’s bare nipple on
the cover, read by the handler only when her compulsion is satiated by
complete structure in her environment.
Currently, as the days pass on, my family and friends are being
continuously converted into the whirring screens—a somehow backward way of
streamlining reminiscent of the “intellectual” articles found in certain
magazines published by pipe-smoking men in evening jackets surrounded scantily clad women.
So, as my family dies out, I silently wish that just
one more glasses-clad learner will enter into the handler’s room desiring
one of my kind, rather than the ubiquitous droning screens.
And, I lie untouched in my two by three inch shelf.
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