If I fart a song from my heart,
is it poetry or art?
Is there anything quite as uplifiting as recieving a package from Amazon? The knowledge of what's inside. The satisfaction of opening. The anticipation of new books. The marvel at modern shopping.
Some might prefer the rapture of recieving a package from more locally, say Dymocks or Angus and Robertson. Not I. I trace the long road my package must have travelled in my mind. The kind souls who sped it on its way. The gentle beings who lovingly wrapped MY package, just for me. The clever little computer program that converted my Aussie money into Yankee money. The guilty pleasure of not caring about exchange rates and bargains and being stingy.
Is there anything as uplifting? I think not.
2 comments:
Clearly I would look at this modern miracle from a different point of view, from the other bank of the river Cynicism. (Where the boatman accepts only crisp bills, not checks or cards -- and forget about those passe coins, inflation waits for no man.)
That package flopped onto your doorstep courtesy of the ass end of a big machine. It started with a bleary-eyed night-shifter who had to hunt around a vast warehouse, pushing a cart with a bum wheel and flipping your book into a gray bin. Next it was sent down a line to a distracted teenager who had been plopping books into boxes for the last three hours. He ripped your invoice off the printout and tossed the book in after, all the while wondering if the cute but several-years-older girl down the line shares the same appreciation he does for Dimmu Borgir, the death metal rocker.
The box banged around in the back of a delivery truck to be loaded onto a huge, cram-packed DC-10. The pilot sipped at his coffee, weary from the party he was at last night celebrating his brother-in-law's graduation from law school. He avoided the new graduate as best he could since Phillip never really approved of the marriage to his sister; then he got totally sloshed and didn't remember much. He hoped he didn't make a fool of himself and that his copilot wouldn't notice the bags under his eyes. Naturally since it was a 15-hour flight, the copilot did and wouldn't stop bothering him about it.
Next came the delivery worker. He got up at 4AM, grousing at the early hour and arriving at work 20 minutes late. He gets a call from his insurance company at 8, telling him the settlement for the accident his wife had last month was nearly worked out; he would have to find time to come into the office and sign some paperwork.
He pulls up to your house and finds the box with the right tracking number on the label; dropping it off without so much as a thought about its contents.
In fact, the better these people do their jobs the less time they will spend thinking about the contents of the package. Only if something goes wrong will any of them spend an extra moment worried about whether or not you've received what you ordered. Or whether you've enjoyed it.
And that, is what makes the human race so lovable. If you were to take your uplifting story of the struggle of a simple package to be noticed in the cynical world of humanity and replace it with a futuristic cautionary tale filled with machines and cybernetically enhanced proto monkeys, the magic would be lost.
Post a Comment