I went to the bakery to write. I did write. On my phone. It started with a text. It evolved into a spasm of thumbs where I served as the go-between for two others, my daughter, Cherry and our friend, Danny. The conversation involved a doctored Guardians of the Galaxy poster. Familiar animated faces were exchanged for even more familiar human faces. I’d love to copy and paste the visual, but doing so would violate at least a dozen copyright laws. Besides, without knowing the human familiars, the joke fails. The text messages, spliced below into a single thread, stand on their own.
To Cherry: (below the poster) “Check this out. Look at the faces.”
From Cherry: “Sweet” “Omg”
To Cherry: “Funny. Huh? D made it.”
From Cherry: “Why is Kristina the raccoon?” (Emoticon laughing with tears)
To Danny: “Loves the poster too, but wants to know why Kristina is the raccoon.”
waits 5 minutes
To Cherry: “He hasn’t txt’d back. Let you know when he does”
From Danny: “Because his partner is root the big tree guy and he bosses him to do all the heavy lifting like Kristina. Also she’s the smallest one and identifies with him :)”
To Danny: “Cute”
To Cherry: Here’s the answer (copy and past From D above)
From Cherry: “L0l”
To Cherry: (smiley emoticon)
To Danny: “Cherry says Lol.”
From Danny: “I’m glad y’all like it (smiley emoticon)
To Danny: “Gotta find a way to incorporate it into something.”
I did find a way to incorporate it. The something being this blog post. It would’ve been easier to start a group text, but serving as the middleman forced me to pay attention. I had to study one person’s reaction before I flipped the response to the other. Even without sound, I was listening.
I read Marshall McLuhan in college. He was a smart guy, who predicted the World Wide Web thirty years before it was invented. He was right when he said, “The medium is the message.” We txt-speak. We emoticon. We copy. We paste. We also still allude. We still rhapsodize. We still satirize. It’s more Marvel Comics than Charlotte Bronte, but the main ideas aren’t lost. We’re all still talking and listening.
CRISPLY SPOKEN 