Lauren Scharhag writes

eDreams

My finger is sore from clicking the refresh button.

So far, I’ve gotten zero page views. I’m shouting my dreams

in a crowded room, but I forgot to include an eye-catching image

such as leaked tit-shots of a famous actress or a three-toed sloth

that can play the guitar, and my number of downloads

is also sitting at zero. Blue light waves permeate and convey

my dreams across airports, hotel lobbies, museums, coffee shops,

where they will slip unnoticed as the sign politely requesting

no cell phone usage in the area. The world

has become a glass house we all throw stones in. The world has donned

a tight-laced girdle of glimmering fiber optics, determined to be small enough

to span with your hands. The squeeze

has permanently altered the placement of its organs, and our

desires have been altered with it, scrambled and shrunk

to the minimalism of thumbs-upping and smileys,

starring and hearting, pinning infinite wish lists, praying for free shipping.

This is the place where we come to hawk our dreams

like old-timey hucksters on street corners,

touting their authenticity, since they are, after all,

locally-owned. Because this is the Internet and the Internet

is the world. So that makes everything you manufacture,

by definition, local. My finger is bloody and raw

from hitting the refresh button. So far, I’ve counted no followers,

elicited no comments. It wouldn’t matter if it was someone I’ve never met,

or someone I have met and haven’t seen in fifteen years. When the world gets small enough

we can dispense with the temporal. You can tell because yesterday

I took tea with Carl Jung and discussed the significance

of the steampunker archetype and our OKCupid results.

We invited Caligula to ogle Rockabilly girls in June Cleaver pearls with us,

then we all got drunk and went to get matching tats with Tesla.

That never happened though, because

pics or it didn’t happen, and I left my camera in the car.

Is it any wonder that my number of hits is still zero,

that all my digits are zero, even though these dreams are artisanal,

these dreams are organic, these dreams are non-GMO. These dreams are

whatever the buzzword of the moment is, and they’re filled with words and buzzings,

like this phone, where no messages await me, but I’ve stored

over five hundred pictures of my broken and abused fingers on it, because

it’s impossible to exhaust these devices. I might pass out

from the pain of it and hallucinate myself

into a photo, perfectly composed, touched-up and filtered,

in a city tableau at dawn, so my virtual friends can see

how perfect my life is. I can convince them of it. Apparently,

my dreams aren’t worth pirating though, because

they’re the same as everyone else’s. And yet,

this is the place where we vie, hiding behind screen names

and avatars, snug and smug in our anonymity.

We elbow each other out of the way to lean over a pool of pixels

and fall in love with our selfies, except there are no

passionate nymphs to mourn our single-mindedness, no daffodils

to mythologize our ardor. And yes,

we can buy this original Lalique fish fountain

for nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or autographed memorabilia

from our favorite dead people, like Joe DiMaggio and John Lennon

and Princess Di. We can have a vendor in Japan overnight us

this rare case of Crystal Pepsi, or purchase a genuine Rolex replica.

I’m sure your shopping account will have better suggestions

based on your browsing history, or else

you can just click the random button. Meanwhile,

my newsfeed tells me there are 800 million people who belong

to the nation of the unfed, that melting death

is creeping out of West Africa, and I think, for stories like that,

it’s worth hitting the share button, don’t you?

And if it were possible to have a lower number than zero,

that’s how many page views I’d have at this point,

a record of the world’s supreme indifference. My voice sounds

just like a million others, confiding everything to our dauntless confessor,

making inquiries of the Oracle whose name means a hundred zeroes,

rolling our messages into little cyber bottles

to chuck into the cyber sea. Our raised voices are

a blank check the universe has no interest in cashing,

since not every life is worth the world-wide witnessing

and it’s the spam filter for your dreams,

and mine.

 -- zsooofija