So many of these blogs online. And so few of them reflecting, even in part, the stuttering, word-shy shorthand of the compulsive textkid. Nearly everything that I've read is intelligent, measured, elegant even - taking a joy in language & not merely babbling on a street corner. Even the guy ripping into the war opponents manages complete sentences with multiple clauses (albeit breaking down from time to time when logic comes under strain & the white heat of his anger trips his tongue).
The passion to communicate. Why, I'm afflicted by it now, in spite of the fact that these entries will be read by a handful of passers-by who'll glance briefly & then move on, much as I do. It seems that those predicting the imminent death of language under a deluge of digital images & ikons will have to wait awhile yet: apparently there are too many people out there with a lot on their minds.
I wrote the following with different modes of communication in mind. In this instance, a pc versus an old-fashioned amateur radio transceiver. Pixels versus voice...
WAVELENGTHS
#1. Bonsai 1005 1 GHz Pentium III Processor
I paddle the keys and pixels break surface
like bubbles. The blue window shivers into a spray
of letters, uniform, a lingua franca. The world and his wife
are talking hard, a promiscuity of speech that melts
into the pool, unvoiced. This is language out of light,
words squeezed and shredded out of shape and form,
electronic runes and glyphs squirted into bits
and bytes down filaments. These digits, these encryptions,
they’re mouthless, lost in space. No tongues or lips
articulate the cries and whispers of the slave electrons
working the binary roads. Behind the brilliant lexicon,
just the insect voices and the hum of spinning disks.
#2. Icom 756 Pro Mk II HF transceiver
Still dark outside. 0500 zulu and a cold wind
rocks the antenna tower. I’m beaming west
on 20 meters, listening through the chuckle
of morse, the whooping heterodyne. I’m looking
for Australia on the long path, vaulting scraps
of landscape and the great bare, muscled back
of ocean; skidding in across the eastern shores,
magnet-voiced and listening hard. A VK3,
a loner by two hundred miles of fence-line;
a little wooden house, a splinter in the prairie skin.
Just him, his wife and daughters, fixing the broken wire
that separates the cowboys and the kangaroos
from dreamtime. Now the aerial image shimmers,
breaks. I lose his voice as the skywave shifts;
lose his tale of full moons, crowding stars
and voices in the wind. I drift with the tidal ebb
and flow of distant storms, spikes of wireless sound
and silence. But I’ve spoken; he has spoken.
Breath has shaped and joined our words.
We have thrown a line across the earth
and tugged it once or twice.
(VK3 is the callsign for Eastern Australia).
12:02:30 AM 
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