Infernal Kernel

Not really feeling any urge to write at the moment but I figure why not sit here and stare at my laptop for awhile and see what comes… 

My first thought is that I don’t have very positive feelings about my laptop. Look at it, sitting there perfectly calmly after all the rage I’ve directed at it over the years. How infuriating…Sitting there all smug, processing things, thinking up new errors for the next time I really need to get something done. It’s not a laptop, it’s a flat time-gobbling bastard. 

Who came up with ‘laptop’ anyway? If anything it’s more of a lapflap. A flap for my claptrap. Claptrapflap. Get off that lapflap for once will ya? 

If I was here at an old candle-lit writing desk, dipping a feather in my think-well to give me a chance to reflect every now and then, I’m sure I’d be going on about something far more interesting. Writing some kind of manifesto maybe. Or even if I was just blathering randomly as I do, I’m sure it’d be about something more unusual. Like Napoleon’s haemorrhoids or the various different kinds of mud and what they’re good for. 

But no, I’m sitting here entranced by this glowing panel. My window to hell, that I gaze into intently for hours every day. That’s what Bill Gates should call the next incarnation of Windows, Windows Hell.  It was once a Vista of hell but now we’ve arrived. With a little devil jumping around the screen suggesting things instead of that paper-clip guy. And errors within errors within errors. 

‘Windows Hell has encountered an error with this error. Do you wish to send an error-error report?’ 

and your only choices are ‘pain’ or ‘tickling’…. 

I’d pick pain I reckon. You can be philosophical about pain, but it’s hard to be philosophical about tickling. Laughter is terrifying when you think about how involuntary and hysterical it is. It ceases your mind like a madman. That’s why villains always like a good laugh, because although they aspire to total control, at bottom they are unstable, and so secretly long for and resonate with chaos. Muah hah hah hah! They revel in it. 

Even normal good-natured laughs are strange when you isolate them. Like when people sit at their computers with earphones, sporadically bursting into caniptions and shaking like maniacs in their chairs. What’s so funny? You can’t know. They may have just sponosored a Malaysian to shoot themselves on webcam. Nothing is impossible online these days. 

So actually it’s not the laptop that’s to blame. It’s just the gatekeeper. The internet is the real monster. Pulsating, slimey data-spewing demon of distraction. Forget Windows Hell, Mozilla Hell would be more like it. Or no – Google Hell. If any corporation was to turn out to be a power-play by The Lord of the Underworld it’d have to be Google. Gathering all the data on what everybody’s searching for while slowly making them completely dependent on it to cater to those needs. Just waiting to twist them in its big red grotesque veiny hands. Poor little doe-eyed 18 year old just out of school, typing in ‘volunteer help poor’ and being brought to povertyporn.com, tinkerstinkers.com, charityhurtsthepoor.com etc… 

Although in fairness that’s not what happens…yet. For now it’s more just a general wasteland – like Mad Max(macs?) with slightly less pigshit. I’m sure if there were a heaven and hell they’d both make good use of it. A place for heaven to sell their worn out ear-plugs and browse for sunglasses(for all the sunshine and laughing) and hell to post pictures of the funniest tortured faces and blog about branding irons and electrified rubik’s cubes and whatnot. 

But anyway, that’s enough time gobbled for now methinks. Just do me a favour, next time you see someone having a good old laugh, imagine that they’ve just killed a kitten and see how it tranforms that bubbly happy sound into something sinister and frightening. Or imagine that you’re an alien and your witnessing some kind of disturbing fit that you must report back to your superiors. 

Do this, brethren, and the kingdom of Hellven will be yours…