Moving toward emptiness.

Sitting here at my desk, trying to come up with something to post, I start to look around my room for inspiration. My room is a time capsule of me from middle school and early high school. It's almost as if the room has been vacuum sealed since Y2K;a paean to the po-mo,pre-9/11 teen on the verge of the digital revolution, preserved for whoever the beneficiaries of our fucked up world will be. I glance over at my CDs--Green Day, Matchbox Twenty, New Found Glory--all pop giants of a bygone era of physical media, when packaging and track order still meant something. In fact, I don't think I've paid for a single CD since my first year in college, when I, like the rest of my peers, discovered the joys of pirated media. While napster may have risen and fallen in a day, its wildly successful (and highly illegal) model ripped down the wall for its successors and phlebotomized the coffers of the big music machines. It's only a matter of time until all physical media disappears, and then what will litter the rooms of teens? Digital frames and posters? Laptop screens and Kindle readers? Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS? Iphones and Ipods? Teen rooms will lose the dust and clutter that scream life and personality and presence.

My room is the blueprint to my current incarnation and eventual, final form. It's weighty, tactile and odoriferous. It's a symphony of color and pattern. It sings the opus Julia. Without all the scraps of paper, the CD cases, the piles and piles of dusty books and games and dolls and figurines and doohickeys, the room becomes nothing but a room in the linguistic sense, lacking all the nostalgic weight that differs it from any other room dating from the time that rooms were rooms. When the day comes that techonology has completed its lobotomy of the physical history of humanity (and I'm becoming more bitterly convinced it will), I hope I'll have been buried deep in the dirtiest dirt in the most cedar of cedar coffins, keeping company with the earthworms and slugs and beetles whose little lives stretch longer than the span of human memory.