Point, Counterpoint

Point

I built this computer for a very specific purpose. I want to make that clear. We won't be flitting away our time on video games, spray painting gore and bullets over our irises like some kind of digital age Viet Nam veteran. This machine is highly calibrated. This machine is our child, and you want to fill its head full of an ever-thickening paste. I want to bring it literature, film and art. Your idea of literature seems to be the text-based, pornographic adventures of a thirty-something carpenter on a lesbian cruise. You're guiding this carefully balanced machine to a life of mass graves and eardrum damage. You pump the speakers full of dying moans and engine noises, while I try to compile a melange of modern hits with a cornucopia of classical and world music. You're a deviant, a pervert and a dilatory genius. I can't believe we've remained this close this long. Your horrific cacophony, your trivial attention span, your unseemly twitching and ever rising gluttony for the extremes of violence and perversion... Were I able to split us in twain, I would do so in a moment. I would leave you grieving, broken and utterly without revenue, resource or alternative. My contempt for you rises with each shameful keystroke. The growing stockpile of distracting programs within the confines of this hard drive begins to stink with the fetid odor of dwindling accomplishments. The words I complete, the music I catalogue, the knowledge I can consume—they all shrink beneath the weight of your unquenchable banality. I could be everything without you, but my fate is twined with your own.

Counterpoint

I constructed this machine to enjoy myself. I find its form pleasing, its speed enchanting and its power intoxicating. This is my surrogate for so many things. Communication, knowledge, entertainment... the things I cannot obtain for lack of funds or lack of companions, I retrieve through the computational divinity of this wire and Plexiglas enclosure. This machine extends my reach and grasp. But you see it only as a tool, typewriter and tablet. You see speakers and deem it a stereo. You see a keyboard and imagine it a writer's foil. I cannot imagine having the energy for creation and appreciation you would attribute to us. You believe we have some bottomless well from which to draw countless ballads, poems, songs and epics. I wonder if you're struck by some kind of vocative curse, a querulous logorrhea with no outlets. I could not possibly be party to the unending string of infantile prose you thrash about our domicile, or clutter these folders with. You think that new is good, and more is better, but cannot sit down and enjoy the things you see. You have to change them, or create more, always complicating, never simply allowing things to be. You are pretentious, callow and castrating. A harpy in men's clothes. A stream of caffeine so thick runs through you that you would choose mindlessly copying poems onto grains of rice over even a minute's sleep. I want to choke you into unconsciousness, if only so I can be entertained ever so briefly without your infernal guilt trips leeching their way into my every pore. If only I could be free of your incessant droning, I might be content.