Joe Brainard's Pyjamas (The Sequel): Google the Dark

I was Googling a friend with whom I've lost touch. As I get older, I find myself doing these Google "wellness checks" on certain folks. And then I had the stomach pit spinning sensation because the "priority searches" came up with my friend's name followed by "death" and "obituary." And I thought, "This is sooo gonna fuckin ruin my day, my week, my year." But I'm happy to say I did a pretty exhaustive search and I never found an obituary or anything to indicate a death to me. So my day popped back up like a buoy dragged under. But it puzzled me. Does it mean people are hoping for my friend's death and doing searches? Or possibly worried like I was. Sometimes people are severely injured and hide. The way certain animals do when they're sick or dying. I think this is a case of that.? I wish I could say "I miss the days when I was young and had mostly young friends and middle age family, so people I loved rarely died." But even then death was omnipresent because of a young plague stomping out lives left and right like a three year old playing destructive juggernaut to his toys. Now the news is even more laden. If I named my telephone, I would call it "Fraught." You know the news reports will carry direness. You just hope it's less direness this time. I suppose many people are much? more realistic than I am, or hide a lot less from themselves. I imagine those people see everyone as divided into two categories: "dying fast" and "dying faster.'"

This post made me go looking for a certain poem and I was surprised to find Google referred me back to my own (older) blog to find it: This pretty much sums it up. But in poetry not prose.

Source: http://joebrainardspajamas.blogspot.com/2012/08/google-dark.html

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