Mad Elliptic of a Passionate Electron

Johanna Drucker

The threshold of potential had gone flat as a soup of daily laundry. Dullness flooded the plain of the cyber-netherworld like dishwater suffering from a terminal lack of imagination. Indolent inattention stretched without any oppositional poles to define it. The glum monochrome scape was too inert to even acknowledge its latent state. The pixels in the flatline scene rolled collective eyes and groaned out loud at their colossal boredom. A monologue as toneless as a dialogue from a Beckett play produced a low boring noise. One unfocused scan swept by aimlessly after another. Bad attitudes, notes from an untuned violin, dropped like acid rain into the receptive puddle of self-pity the pixels wallowed in all afternoon. Rough life the little darlings led, aligned with the whims and whimsy of any passing jpeg.

A tiny atom, random force of nature, flickered her appearance into being as a miniscule-you-can-barely-see-it blip on the field of measurable phenomena. Innocuous as milk, at first, the streak traversed the visual coordinates with an irregular excess energy. Erratic and quick, the bright spot ambulated in a pattern that stopped just short of intention. Then came burst, pin-hole bright, onto the indifferent scene. Light streamed through the dynamic particle, a glittering chain reaction of sparkler stars, tracing its sequined swath against the flat immaterial world.

Electron

This was the passionate electron, searching for a hot rush of engagement. Matter to matter, spirit to flesh, senses craving and intellect (such as it was, let's not exaggerate the virtues of the brazen brat) desiring, she careened, drunk on bad pop music and self-generated melodramas. She had swallowed whole strains of sentimentality, absorbing their polluting toxins into her porous soul. Her suction lacked a filter in its system, and, like subtlety, was absent from her modus of operating on the energies around her. Erratic as spit on a griddle, the molecular mass appeared to hover, pause, then tear off unaccountably with just enough energy to keep itself above the horizon line of classificatory rhetoric, but without enough charge to pull away from the gunmetal sick sheen of the lower level protocol. At her side, loyal, faithful, and ever-dogged, her companion, Mute. Solid canine in his configs, he got only three channels on his receptor lines, and even that was more than he really thought he needed. She rode him sometimes like a solid wave of energy, and other times spun off like a bareback avatar in fluid flights of electric fancy.

A tall dark stranger (!) came into the radar screen of her bright little scope. Ahhhhh... she put her head to one side, posing for all the world like some cliche of the lovesick heroine, her default trail curling coyly around the trace of her first trajectory with the flexible grace of a late adolescent female.

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