Txt luv and other black holes

Have you ever stared into the abyss for so long, but the only glance the abyss throws back at you is a sardonic scoff with smirking eyes? This is not a descent into madness, particularly, but the infuriating experience of waiting, waiting for that stupid text to make its way through the wireless and beepily bump its way to the top of your inbox list. You stare at the cell phone screen for so long, willing, pleading with all the forces of the universe to conspire in your favor, to nudge nudge and tap tap out those little letters when once received, could alter the course of your entire day and realign your skewered sanity.

You’ve all done it before – sent out some carefully constructed message to a meaningful Someone, something witty and cute, yet enigmatic enough to demand a response (if your own words fail you, a Guns N Roses lyric usually does the job – pulled off with the right ironic finesse). You press send and while your tummy churns with enough acid to kill a hippie, you wait. From the moment your thumb lifts off the nanoseconds count down like a leisurely backstroke through tar. The farther they go, the bigger the space gets for doubt to wrap its creepy tendrils around. Is she/he deliberately ignoring me? Did I text something profoundly uncool, like do my haikus totally suck? Maybe I sent it to the wrong person?

Life and death seem to hang on that virtual thread when you assess your Options, fill the empty screen with the sound of rhythmic thumb drumming, and backlit with pixelated bits of your soul, realize there’s no going Back. Answered soon enough, all is cool and nerves melt away in silly embarrassment, perhaps indicating the thrilling start of a casual text relationship! Unanswered, the blank stares and mute beeps turn into tyrannical despots, not letting you sleep, enjoy badly dubbed anime or the latest gossip about the dethroned Ms. Earth.

You hear your messages echoing in a far away continent, ignored, abandoned and left to wander in a digital Purgatory of Unrequited Texts. Usually, a day later, the reason turns out to be a simple case of no load on their part and overactive imagination on yours. Silly you, so much expended energy over nothing. The abyss spits you out and snaps shut its mandibles. But if time can be measured out in silence, an entire life was lived in that void – something approximating birth, disillusionment and rebirth – all in between the empty spaces of two texts.

* * *

In my room, a portrait of Lenin sits in psychedelic defiance beneath a hung on the cross-stitch of Jesus (that one my mom placed). I’m no flaming commu-nist, but I’m beginning to suspect my colleague the writer/musician/tortured soul who recently painted it is. Lenin’s glowing and disembodied head hovers above a woolly purple sweater that could’ve come from the Gap but I’m quite sure hasn’t. His eyes shine a jaundiced yellow and drips blood, teeth bared like an evil grinning Doberman. I doubt this was meant to send me off to sleep with warm and fuzzy thoughts like the benign and loving countenance of Christ, but it does make me wonder what the hell is going on here.

The cryptic title "Lenin Contemplates the Void" has confounded me greatly in trying to suss out the picture’s meanings and messages, but that’s probably because in its acid expressionism I almost mistook it for Lennon, that other rebel leader. It does however make me think about the Void (there it is again), which we have discovered to reside in all of us, taking one form or another but usually remaining hole-shaped. People rely on all kinds of fillers to plug them up, like religion, love, family, friends, fiction, substances, solitude, Internet porn, shopping, and one of my favorites, food. Another friend of mine sometimes resorts to the Kierkegaardian sickness of sleeping all day, which is not a terribly unhealthy void-avoidance strategy, since at least in dreams there is creation, and self-directed fantasies of Marc Nelson (for her, that is).

Maybe I haven’t been contemplating deep enough but lately it seems I may have lost the void for now. I’ve patted around my pockets like searching for misplaced car keys, but nope, no void, at least nothing gaping. Aside from the occasional waiting-for-that-text void, I seem to have struck a precarious balance between work and play, love and life – but just having said that, Void will surely strike back with smug vengeance, mighty smiter that it is. The only other void I do encounter is not a black hole but a white one – the tabula rasa white of this screen (yet again, a screen!) as I’m tapping away on MS Word on my old-school toilet seat "Book" trying to up my word count so I’m able to submit an article on time so that my editors don’t get pissed.

As my friends who write will all agree, writing is a strange and lonely profession. It’s an intensely private act exposed, akin to whacking off in public. It’s staring down the void/abyss/hole in its faceless face, and pulling crap out of its ass. But I do believe we have inherited the artist gene from God himself, who after all made us in his own image right out of thin air, indicating he must have had some grasp of symbolism and representation. "Tap into nothingness, out of which all is created," a German guru once said, another dude who would go well on my wall beside the other anti-heroes, perhaps in a striped pastel scarf from the Banana Republic.