(Footsteps at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert yesterday).

We do not know what they are doing up at AOL dot Com. We called them up and a woman with one of the smaller voices explained they are doing something else at their media hosting enterprise. It is shaking our production schedule to the core because things do not work.

There had been a minor disruption in July and we called them up on speaker phone to discover exactly why it was that pictures would not drop into the text to evoke charming and beguiling connections between images and words. We had hoped they would explain that it was pure mischance and everything would be correct again shortly.

We are here, still on speaker phone, to express our dismay. The America On Line full-service has dropped the ball. We regret saying it without Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan to express the intrinsic romance of the digital conversation of emotion to zero’s and one’s. We think they could probably afford more and better in their universality. In fact, we felt more than a little let down this morning when our distribution lists would not load to help us express our dismay. There are 93 names entered with precision on the one list and more than 90 on the other. They used to feature a snazzy picture selected with equal care as the address list to evoke the spirit of the day. It might contain some irony or provoke a guffaw, like this one.

For example, the Burning Man festival is in progress out at the Black Rock territory near the Paiute reservation in Nevada. There has been a spate a rain there in the desert and some attendees have expressed displeasure. This is what confronted the gathering this morning: three inches of rain and a crowd of 70,000 celebrants. All wet. Many hungry. Absent? The Eco-protestors who got rousted by Tribal cops.

Attendees were directed to “shelter in place” in the Black Rock Desert and conserve food, water and fuel. Officials have halted all traffic aside from emergency vehicles from entering or leaving the festival.

Authorities were investigating a death “that occurred during this rain event,” according to the sheriff’s office- tribal or local unspecified- though it was unclear if the death was homicide or person-slaughter. Either have happened in previous gatherings and not directly related to the storms.

The remote event site in northwest Nevada was hit with 2 to 3 months’ worth of rain in just 24 hours from Friday to Saturday morning. More is anticipated Sunday afternoon.

Officials have halted all traffic aside from emergency vehicles from entering or leaving the festival.

d not a single picture will be uploaded unless we transition from AOL to something else. We have downloaded an operating system called Proton, and it threatens to work.

Such an adaptation would have been unthinkable not long ago. You may recall the century before this one. The Internet had not yet been replaced by the futile attempts to harness “texting” on your personal phone. The flat screen doesn’t work that well since the grime and grease from our fingertips had not yet fouled our communications.

That was not the case in 1998. We were worried about the collapse of Western Civilization then just like today. The weight of the 20th Century is upon us. That is the one we shared with the weight of all those numbers was going to collapse in something we called Y2K. A movie- remember those things?- was a Romantic Comedy issued that year by Director Nora Ephron and featuring Tom and Meg as electron-crossed lovers. It gets more distant, since it was inspired by the 1937 Hungarian play “Parfumerie” by Miklós László.

Additional dialogue and improbable situations were contributed by Nora and Delia Ephron. Their part brought the dated situations almost into the 21st Century by telling the story of two people in an online anonymous romance who are unaware they are also business rivals. Mirth ensues. Or at least it did until this morning. The America On Line Engineers decided to enhance our communications experience by making it impossible to communicate.

Things gone today? Address lists were added to the list of the missing. Pictures are unavailable to contribute to the aura of levity.

Adding to the general spirit of frustration is a distinct inability to ensure there is some humor amid the swelling resentment. Meg realized that Tom was worth a chance, and although his performance was hampered by digital degradation, things were going to work out in a warm and uplifting spirit.

Despite the age of the film, the decline of the Actors and the other degradations, a quote may be appropriate here. In an email to cast member Joe Fox, actress Kathleen Kelly expressed actual emotion. The note was good enough that Nora Ephron decided to include it in the script like this: “The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.”

So, there you go. You do have mail this morning, including this note, from a source that can be trusted. Well, at least sort of. We can always text around the now obsolete ‘WORDS” and realize that for the first time in twenty years we DON’T GOT MAIL. We think Meg and Tom would appreciate the emotional response. But what we used to get ain’t this. We used to get digital notes that made sense. Have a great day!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicocotra.com