We’d had a vicious fight, angry and tear-streaked and brutal and personal. She threw a vase; I upended a table. Snarling, she ripped a phone book in half; I karate-chopped through a plate glass window. She bit me, hard, on the elbow, causing blood to well up in carmine, tooth-shaped beads. So I yanked her ponytail.
I’ll tell you, it was a good ol’ rough and tumble brawl, ending only when she stormed out, the door crashing behind her in a hinge-quaking slam. Hours later, a message appeared on my phone, by way of a sheepish, grey-striped cat. It squinted and waved a green pennant.
“I want a divorce,” it said, the letters cartoony and puffy and jaunty, like multicoloured bubblegum bubbles.
I responded with a leering, amorphous, cyclopean blob, with buckteeth. It had this look in its eye like, “Right back at’cha, doll face".
She then sent a digital thumbs-up, which I winked at.
I’ll have to Line-sticker my lawyer soon, because I suppose I need his help. I’m torn between the disgruntled bunny with a wilting broken heart hovering above its head and the red-faced fury of Stella Supernova, who, as far as I can tell, is a spacewoman who does lots of science experiments, at least when she is not flying her way-cool rocket ship or playing goofy games with her pet alien, which suspiciously resembles a regular octopus.
If he doesn’t respond, I will (in this order) Facebook message, WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, Tweet at, regular text message and email him. I hope I hear back soon. We really need to shovel a bit of coal into this divorce’s engine, him and I, really get her chugging along to Splitsville.
While I waited, I pulled up a website and read a bunch of knee-slapping memes, which are stock images — a cranky cat, a doleful bear, Patrick Stewart, etc. — we use to communicate without really communicating at all, via self-reflexive, pop cultural phraseology, which essentially leave us squawking into the void, simultaneously, like a flock of brain-damaged parrots.
And don’t you worry, either, because I made sure to share the ones I liked best on various social media platforms, hashtagging scatterbrained, half-cocked — often oddly specific — words and phrases (#anyonenamedtoddwhohasacleftpalatewillappreciatethis) which, if you ask me, are very complementary and by no means bring to mind a babbling mental patient from a 21st century version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
About halfway through all of this,
I realised that we are slowly devolving, back towards the Neanderthal days, when Og would fascinate Grug and Oob and Muk and the others with pictorial tales of the hunt, which, as history will tell you, were often painted inside caves using juice from squished berries.
Rock walls, of course, have thus given way to digital ones. And millennia from now, after the robots have taken over, they will sift through the binary-coded compu-rubble of what was our once-great civilisation, scanning and cataloguing our pictures and status updates, tirelessly organising, in chronological order, the reliquary wall posts of old, piecing us, individually and collectively, back together.
Then they’ll turn to one another and they’ll say, “Well, would you look at that, EG-95 — they were just like us!”
“Af-fir-ma-tive,” EG-95 will respond.
And we are. We are just like them. We are both cavemen and robots, our eyes glazed and unfocused, bleary and blank, as we type and click and drag and drop and Ctrl-X and Ctrl-Y until the Farmville cows come home, using pictures and sounds and icons as crude stand-ins for critical thoughts and feelings and opinions. I guess they don’t call it Android for nothing.
We Line and WhatsApp and Facebook and WeChat, splurting out emojis and emoticons (which are the same, but also kind of different — the mestizos and mulattoes of meta-communication) and stickers with slapdash abandon. We communicate, in real time, across oceans and mountain ranges, through war zones and time zones. We are more closely linked than ever before. We are inextricable. We are, in essence, one.
But we’ve never been further apart.
We hide, safe and sound, behind pixel grins and eight-bit grimaces. Oh sure, we express ourselves, show happiness, excitement, sadness, disappointment, anger, grief — but usually from behind a computer’s screen, awash in the Vicodin comfort of its poltergeist glow.
Why risk exposure to the Ginsu-sharp blades of genuine emotion, of home-grown socialisation? They’ll cut right through us, you’re damn right they will, through all the meat and bone and viscera and nerve endings, right down to the heart, which, as everyone knows, is quite sensitive for a hollow organ.
It’s just plain awkward, you see, speaking voice-to-voice — or worse, face-to-face. It initiates discourse that puts into play vocal inflections and facial expressions and gestures and physical and non-physical cues. And that, sports fans, can get tricky, especially considering there’s not an app to track it all.
Our lives are getting easier, no question about that. But our souls? Well now. Our souls are dimming, becoming blanched and discoloured, shrivelling into antiquity, where they will rest beside cargo shorts and Halle Berry.
It’s sadface; it’s really, really sadface.
Adam Kohut is a sub-editor for the Life section of the Bangkok Post.