brainsnorkel.com

I walked into an Apple Store to buy an AV cable for my iPod. The place was rocking. It was packed with people at 4 on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

I found a cheap Belkin AV cable and approached the counter at the back of the store. I wrangled approximately the right cash out of my wallet and was suddenly approached by two sales staff with concern in their faces.

“Err, our systems are down. We can’t take your cash.”

“Oh?” I said.

“If you have a credit card we can help you, but our cash drawer is out of action until the network comes up.”

The whole transaction from then on consisted of scanning the bar code with a PalmPilot-sized wireless POS terminal, swiping my credit card (again with the hand-held POS terminal), and typing in the unique portion of my Gmail address (for my receipt).”

Pesky cash.

You know you are a genius. The whole world needs to read your writing. There are so many words waiting inside you to get out that they tumble over each other and melt into your keyboard to decorate the screen. You don’t know why you bother writing because nobody seems to understand you — but write you must! You know that if only someone, anyone, would make it all the way to the end of your writing they would achieve enlightenment. Then you would have a soul-mate! A co-conspirator! A light in the darkness! A reason for writing more stuff! Oh boy, what a world it would be if only someone would read your words and think (just think!) about what you have to say. Maybe if you used MORE CAPS it would sink in?!?! And your previous writing? To recap is weakness, to revise is surrender, yet to refer to your previous work is divine. They must try harder to keep up! Don’t they understand the power of narrative? Fools! You’ve watched them before, reading your sentences, face turning blue as they search for a full-stop. You see them yearning for a comma. They panic as they hunt for the end of a paragraph. They flinch when you redefine a term. They can’t handle your intellect. They don’t deserve punctuation. Weaklings.