Hello friends,
Since this is kind of an email newsLETTER, I’m going to take a slightly different approach with this one. A few updates than I’ll share a short (like very short) story I wrote today that hopefully you’ll enjoy. I’ve been in the process this year of writing a novel (which is slowly turning into multiple volumes since it’s so long), I’ve been thinking of the power of short stuff to get a message across. So I wrote this shorter thing I’ll share in a second.
But first…
And I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving reminded me of this great Onion article (from 2013). It’s a classic.
I also came across this great quote from author James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter. It’s from filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin and comes from "Conversations with North American Indians” by Ted Poole in Who Is the Chairman of This Meeting?: A Collection of Essays:
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”
To me, this quote speaks to where all this technology is headed. As we blindly adopt technology, we are moving farther and farther away from the natural world. And this brings consequences. Consequences I do not personally think we as a society have really thought through. It’s just a great quote.
Now for the short story, titled “Show Me an Apple,” hot off the presses:
“Show me an apple.”
The paste hit his tongue from a plastic tube that was almost constantly running into the corner of his mouth. He even had a little crease that had formed on the right side of his mouth where the tube always sat. He noticed it the other day when he was shaving. Hair got in the way of it, so he shaved. The paste was lukewarm. Almost tasteless, but nutritious, supposedly. Had all the vitamins and supplements and probiotic elements his body needed to live. But it was not an apple. And the timing of the paste squeeze had nothing to do with his verbal request to see an apple; it was coincidental.
His computer immediately recognized the command and pulled up a red shiny apple in his view screen. The young man, early 20s, wore goggles. The apple was floating in his digital view, spinning. He could look at it in all angles, zoom in, zoom out, with facts about the apple on the bottom left off the screen. But he couldn’t bite.
“Show me a steak.”
A steak appeared, instantly. Rotating on a white plate, he could see it in 5K definition, ultra definition, could see the glistening beads of grease, the salt and pepper and coffee rub, the grill marks, a little pat of butter melting slowly on top of the cut, and he could almost hear the screams of the cow as it was butchered in a non-humane way when butchering animals for meat was still legal. His mouth begins to water as he stares at the 16-ounce Ribeye and another glob of paste hits his tongue. It is not steak. He has nothing to chew. He has in fact not chewed since he was a little boy and he has no memory of it. He only knows his father told him once when they spoke about the old food that, “You once chewed, you know? You had some food back then. Not much but some.” But the young man does not remember this.
Show me this. Show me that. He went on a for awhile through food history, the history he was allowed to see. He had broccoli pulled up, spun wild caught salmon around his screen, watched videos of how people once fished it out of bubbling streams, and he looked at digital potatoes, truffles, chocolate, bananas, bread … until he got tired.
Finally, he asked,
“Show me the natural world.”
The computer glitched, then began to render a vista of an orchard with fruit and bread on a long table and children running around in the grass, then it crashed.
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