Invisible Monsters Remix

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his is how old I am: I loved the Sears catalogue. It kills me that I now need to explain what that was. It was an inventory of everything you ever dreamed of owning. Imagine the entire Internet printed on paper and bound along one edge—a stack of glossy paper as thick as a telephone book. Please don’t ask me to explain what a telephone book was. By now you imagine I’m wearing a bowler hat and a celluloid collar, driving my horseless carriage, lickety-split, to a torrid three-way with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Abraham Lincoln.

As opposed to you, you who’ll always stay so young and hip.

Be that as it may. This modern world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Nowadays, whatever purchase you moon over, whatever person you lust after, most likely it’s presented on a smooth glass or plastic screen. On a laptop or a television. And no matter what the technology, you’ll catch sight of your own reflection. In that electric mirror, there hovers your faint image. You’ll be superimposed over every email. Or, lurking in the glassy surface of online porn, there you are. Fewer people shut down their computers anymore, and who can blame them? The moment that monitor goes black, you’re looking at yourself, not smiling, not anything. Here’s your worst-ever passport photo enlarged to life size. Swimming behind the eBook words of Jane Austen, that slack, dead-eyed zombie face, that’s yours. That’s you.

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