Wednesday 23 November 2011

Everything life widget...from irritant to obsession

I seem to be steadily accumulating an array of rechargeable battery-powered gadgets.  An ipod, a smartphone, a kindle, a laptop, and on and on.  And on.

This has created a whole new problem, since I suffer from depression and a borderline personality type, and its this:  batteries run down.

Sounds trivial, doesn't it?  But its gradually taking over my life.  As soon as any device comes off mains power, a little "charge-remaining" meter in my head starts cycling downward.  It's making me really quite unhappy.  Some of the other depressed people I know obsessively stockpile food, but I stockpile charge.  I can't stand to watch my family using the laptop on battery power.  I have to plug it in when they're not looking, its like a tic.  Don't they know that the bloody thing will run out of juice, maybe not right away, but eventually.  It's out there, like death, and I think that's the point.

Hoarding tins of beans or constantly charging or even collecting stamps, its just our attempt to hedge against mortality, to rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas put it, in my case quite literally.

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