This screen is a sorry substitute for living human skin.

It’s hard and unyielding.

My phone, despite living in closer proximity to me than any living soul, has never dried a single of my many tears.

I’ve taken comfort in the words of distanced loved ones and kind-hearted strangers through its capacity, but my laptop has never comforted me in its nonexistent arms.

Technology’s glow is dark, and it cannot receive or return Love or Desire.

However, the pandemic has created some strange bedfellows. We’re satisfied by Sorry Substitutes, but far be it from me to suggest we all hold out for more!

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young (&Young?) once said: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

If your screen is the best you have to give yourself, knock yourself out. You won’t be knocking anyone else out, so imagine on. Keep loving with lazy counterfeit, purchased in advance with your unquenchable need for Ease and Rightness.

You aren’t sexually stimulated by effort, challenge, opposition, or adrenaline, so you therefore won’t reap their satisfying, fulfilling, life-enhancing payoffs.

You’re lulled into complacency with the cheapest of store brands, at the lowest prices, delivered to your door in brown, unceremonious re-used bags.

You’re not paying with currencies like Time, Cash, or Emotional Iinvestment, but you aren’t engaging in Firsts, experiencing Highs, and making Memories. Instead, you’re passing Time, consuming Air, and wasting Opportunities.

All while getting older. Not younger, as so many are lulled into thinking.

Connections can be made in the universe of Cyberspace, but life cannot be lived there. The atmosphere is not conducive to human life.

Considering its unaliveness, you shouldn’t purchase your heroes there, find your leaders there, or find your lovers there. Items of WEIGHT, TEXTURE, or MAGNITUDE cannot survive in the negative ethereal vacuum of Cyberspace.

However, should you willingly conspire with Ease, affairs can be constructed in the blankness, bearing surprisingly significant weight.

That’s when you realize that your lightheaded and -hearted entanglements with dark bitches Ease and Technology are more ruthless than anticipated. They are deceptively fatal. Be careful.

Oops, I’ve got to go. My groceries are being delivered.