Spastic Sarcasm of Television Youth

     It flickered. The screen changed again to the page he wanted to be at, which always happened to be the previous page incidentally. He couldn’t quite figure out yet that he would always want to be on the previous page. The deck’s bright screen flickered again and again, as he tapped rather roughly the ‘enter’ button incessantly. He watched a thousand pieces of random data flow pass by his eyes at ten times the speed of light. And yet he was completely oblivious to it all. He could care less about all the data. It meant nothing to him.
     Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the room in which he sat. It was a small room, vaguely the size of a lemon. The walls were painted egg white by an evil painter and all the furniture was pure white, including the sheets and covers that lay on the bed that was dirty and unkempt. Little stains of coke began to sprout insignificant forms of life on the sheets. The television, also white, was turned on, tuned to no particular channel. Lifeless but turned on at least. The announcer’s voice had been muted and the picture was obscure, blurred and distorted by continual use. And if you looked closely, you could see the remains of ten thousand hungry Ants scurrying to find a good staple of food whose tracks remain through seven years of caked dust. And to all this he was oblivious. He just sat there, in front of his console with a thousand empty coke bottles surrounding him, waiting for that random access to dial him up.
     He had already waited for a year now. He sat there in dirty, polka-dotted boxers that he hadn’t changed in over six months, a white with yellow beer stains V-necked under shirt, and a ratty looking, worn out Best Western bath robe. His hair was unkempt and a beard that was just as bad growing from his chin. And he stared at the flickering screen through coke bottle lenses on thin wiry frames, supported only by a toothpick and a bent paper clip. He cared not about his personal hygiene, hadn’t showered in over sixteen months, and his obscenely long fingernails clicked and clacked annoyingly against the keypad with each stoke of the ‘enter’ key.
     And still he paid no attention to the quiet of the old, dusty room and his nails clacking and the occasional fart. He paid no attention to life itself. He watched all that fade away. How it all blurred in with each other. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, the TV become one with the coke stained sheets of the bed. The flourishing civilizations of the coke stains began to dance amongst the tracks left by the Ants in the dust. Then the cloud came and the room went fuzzy. All that he could see was the flickering screen in front of him. The room had disappeared completely, gone beyond the fringes of reality.
     Soon, as he stared continually at the effervescent screen, his vision, too, began to blur. It began to blur the insanity of his mind, the entity of cyberspace, and the fiction of the reality around him in to one. His eyes grew heavy and his mind grew cloudy. It filled him with a haze he had not known before. He tried to place his finger on it, but he just couldn’t do it. The answer evaded him like a quick-witted fly about to be swatted. It was only then, for that split second, for that single minute instance, that he became aware of his surroundings. He realized that he had not showered, or cleaned the room, and that his fingernails were clicking annoyingly against the keypad. And then he became overwhelmed with joy, the absolute joy of living. He realized how much he loved life, and how he was missing it all by just sitting there, waiting. He wanted to get up and go run out into nature and scream at the top of his ill-used lungs, "I’m alive! I’m fucking alive!"
His eyes grew wide with excitement, and a smile etched its way through his stale and stiff beard. And he stopped tapping the ‘enter’ key, freezing the flow of data in front of him.      A cricket chirped and all grew quiet. His eyes grew hazy and clouded over. His smile faded beneath the beard that retained its shape of that once warm and unforgotten smile. He slumped in his chair and his chin came to rest on his chest as his head lolled forward. His fingers came to a rest near the keypad and the image on the console’s screen froze, forever. The image was of three brilliantly pink roses, cluttered together in perfect harmony. The one in the middle was dead and wilted, resting on its side, having given up completely on life. And the left rose was just wilting, almost as if it were trying to decide whether or not to give up like it’s companion. The only rose that was alive was the one on the right. But even that one wasn’t perfectly alive. It was growing out of the skull of a one-time human being. The death and decay of that man had given it life.      And now he sat, dead as can be, in front of his console. He had died of malnutrition. He had not gone out and lived enough, not seen enough of the world. He stayed in his hole and waited for something brilliant to come and get him. He wasted away his life to get a glimpse of the freedom that comes with isolation in the matrix. And that glimpse never came. He had just wasted it all away. When the moment of revelation came, it was already too late. He died the moment he turned on that life consuming box.