You are receiving this message in defiance of all probability. Is communication even possible? You track your eyes across the screen,; your brain, through long training, converts the dead black pixels into symbols, words, ideas. And yet you remain obstinately locked inside your own soul. The words, as mere symbols, have no meaning except what you choose to give them. But what guarantee is there that your interpretation is correct? It seems that you receive a barrage of such messages every day; your inbox is a swamp of information about comedy and theater events happening in your community, offers to cure you of erectile dysfunction or tinnitus, endless invocations of the “one weird trick” that a mom in Iowa used to cure her restless leg syndrome. If only there was a cure for restless language syndrome, you ponder, suddenly nauseated by the sheer mass of words you must deal with everyday. Why are you so obstinately attached to the machine in front of you? You are horrified to realize that it has been an eternity since you worked with anything real — you have become a symbiote with a piece of office equipment. At work, your sole function is to translate a stream of ones and zeros into TPS reports; at home, your sole recreation is to translate the same stream of ones and zeros into pictures of cats, happy creatures not cursed with the parasite of language. You could go to the theater and listen to a comedian talk, talk endlessly, a hot stream of gases expelled from a fat man’s body that claims to have meaning. You could stay home and watch television, and let a false image made of electricity and light persuade you to concern yourself with the fate of purely imaginary beings. You could click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the window, and send another stream of ones and zeros out into the cosmos of information, in the hopes that some machine, a thing that isn’t even alive, might somehow correctly interpret your anguish and make all the language stop. But is that even enough? You might be able to stop receiving email about theater shows where more people will talk at you. But you can’t escape of the sea of symbols that you’re drowning in. You look in disgust at the machine in front of you that has sucked the joy from your life. You feel a deep shame at the similar machine in your pocket. You realize that your life consists in squirting symbols and letting symbols splatter upon you and you feel unclean. You wish there were some truth in this monstrous world. You wish you could live unconsciously, with no space between your desires and your deeds. If only there were some way of killing rational thought.