Not proud, but it happened.

Over lunch yesterday, I took my digital camera into Walmart to download all my pictures from the last year using a kiosk in their Camera Dept. I couldn't get the machine to work, so I asked the dept. manager to help me.

He couldn't get the machine to work right either, so together we had to manually select a few hundred pictures, about a third of which were photos I took for my Walmart movie last year of the inside of the same Walmart near the same dept.

As the dept. manager's expression became progressively more quizzical as we looked at more and more pictures of the inside of his own store, I slowly let out a mini-series of obnoxious rotten egg farts I had been holding in at work all morning. It felt good.

S’pose I should start blogging again.

Eh. I don’t know.

It’s becoming apparent to me that roughly 95% of my interaction with the world outside of myself is channeled via the internet, including the 50 hours I spend each week at work staring at a computer screen and corresponding with my colleagues primarily via email. When I get home, I write even more emails and interact with other human beings via MySpace, blogs, YouTube, etc., etc., when I’m not surfing the web for information on anything one can think about that might perchance pop into my head.

Is this a good thing?

A few months ago, I started seeing a blue spot through my left eye from looking at a computer monitor 16 hours a day. Since then, the spot has become less prominent as my brain has adjusted to it and essentially started ignoring it (no shit, I looked it up and this is what happens over time). In other words, my body was trying to tell me to maybe not focus all my available attention on a computer screen during all waking hours, but my brain said, “Fuck it—keep the funny video clips coming, bitch”.

Outside of the inevitable degradation of our eyesight, it seems the internet-age has wrought a somewhat more profound seismic change in the way we interact with the world: The systemic phasing out of the unmitigated experience.

I could drone on at this point about this concept, but I think you know what I’m talking about. Suffice it to say that, in retrospect, the Unibomber was quite prescient twelve years ago when he sequestered himself in a cabin in the woods and penned his rambling, alarmist manifesto about the impending emergence of an inhumane, technocratic society. He just happened to underscore his point in an unfortunate manner by bombing people he didn’t like.

If the internet was more prevalent back in 1995, he could have simply bombarded his adversaries with unsolicited porn spam, like a friend of mine does, and he’d still be enjoying the desolate Montana wilderness and continuing to expound upon perhaps the truest truth with regard to our collective culture in 2007: We as physical beings have been conditioned through evolution to achieve emotional well-being through directly interacting with nature and with each other; thus, our further devolution into a world of interaction increasingly mitigated by technological conduits will continue to sap our starving souls of sustenance.

But … the genie has already left the bottle hasn’t it?

Our bodies know this way of life is wrong, but our brains will continue to block out any foreboding blue spots, proverbial or literal.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s long-anticipated “iPhone”, which allows human beings to--at any time, anywhere--call someone, email them, text message them, create and send them photos, video, and music, and coming soon, sexually stimulate them, transmit feelings of love, and assuage their existential fears.

I’m sure, if you hit the right buttons, it will also let you read Thoreau’s On Walden Pond.