This Thanksgiving morning I woked at the central house of my extended family glad to be excluded from the economic engine I once served with slavish devotion.

Megan, Emma's grandmother, is working at the supermarket until 6 PM.

Even as Thanksgiving is under siege as a blasphemy against multiculturalism, everyone in straight retail is heading to work for the real American holiday preparations, Black Friday, aptly proclaiming the materialistic bent of our society as the worship of the God of Things kicks into high gear, the priests and acolytes ready their reduced margin sacrifice to the self-worshipping masses...and I, the feral apostate, slunk heretically towards my donated laptop to write against the grain...

Then came the attack on my brain, the opening salvo, which I quickly parried, as Microsoft recommended that I select Bing for a search engine and MSN for a home page. I denied this suggestion and choose to stick with my current settings.

The Zombie Occupation Government then overrode my assertion of cognitive autonomy and changed my settings, splashing news of whores, bimbos, jocks, the Orange Man and his boundless evil across the face of this window of interactive thought.

Such shite upon the screen actually drains my brain. If a kind soul had not been present to show me how to restore my settings I would have abandoned the attempt to retrieve research links, say hello to friends and family via email and make the morning post. Something about the women's magazine cover graphics and incessant advertising actually strip-mines my mind and draws down my energy.

The sportsballers in the other room do not understand, cannot comprehend that Modern Media constitutes an assault on the human mind, a seduction of the logical guardian of our emotive souls in order to enslave our deeper being. On the other hand, one might stop to consider that none of these folk—made of the same material as I, sprung from the same familial root, all of them with more education, numbering even teachers of the language I write in among their fold—have ever expressed themselves in our ancient media, the media that has been with us for ages. Is my dysfunction simply the engine that has pushed me away from modern media and into obsolete media? Or, might it be that I only express in obsolete media because my dysfunction has kept me out of the clutches of modern media?

I'll settle for being an alienated accident—so long as I remain free of the clutches of the Beast my fellow travelers in time worship with such abject submission.

For those of you who have supported this odd pursuit, thank you and thanksgiving to you.