My
second generation kindle is showing its naked age at eighteen. The not quite
French vanilla top cover is stained, its first hairline crack appearing early.
Many years later it took a urine spill from my urinal, and the laminate on the
five-way cursor split; it has to be coaxed. The screen is scratched, the
battery isn’t taking a charge, the ink beads want to return to Israel for
vacation, and yet, somewhat remarkably, I am still able to get it to function.
By
necessity, I now depend on the marginally younger Paperwhite, but will miss the
device, this particular device, when I can extradite myself to trade it in. I
know Amazon has manufactured many kindles, and the $600 I spent for both of
mine may seem steep compared to current prices, but I admit to attachment, and
treat the outmoded model just as families treat coma patients, loving it more
than the newer touch interface versions, since I am, unabashed, a proponent of
keyboards. Guilt trails my soul, weeping a dirge at the organ. The Paperwhite has a protective case, O ye
miserly dowager, if you are as devout as you claim, the older reader deserved
the same consideration. Every actor in the industry has the art of
portraying the coma nailed to the wall, in those reconstructed hospital episodes.
The knack is in interpretation of the locked in individual. For Benjamin
Walker, Teresa Palmer’s down time in The Choice, due to a car accident,
represents coming to terms with loss. It permeates the dialogue of the movie skillfully
for an otherwise light romance where the canines know everything ahead of their
owners. In The Descendants, the comatose wife is a trigger, pain and discovery
leading to a lesson in forthrightness. In House, the coma is the butt of a
joke, and in the original Coma, the condition was weaponized to reveal medical
conspiracy we all fear in physicians, surgeons especially, and in the canceled
Hand of God, PJ the whining wimp is Ron Perlman’s moral guilt, divine mystery,
or both. Wondering how many takes go into these efforts to illustrate the dilemma
of how technology is used to force the living dead on our conscience, early on
in this stupid crisis, I nearly choked to death aspirating a steak sandwich,
and suppose this terror will be revisited, hardware in its ICU stages.
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