There is this man sitting on a camel colored leather couch in front of a giant flatscreen TV that hangs on a white wall. He has a computer in his lap and a cell phone next to him and an iPad sits on the round wooden coffee table. It looks as if someone has been carving into the coffee table, and there is really only one potential suspect for this, but another possibility is that this is the way the table has always looked.

Sometimes we look around a familiar room or even a neighborhood and see things we swear we’ve never seen before. Entire houses seem to have appeared overnight. We search for children who exist only in picture frames. Children who turned into something different and moved away.

But back to the man. He has information coming at him from at least six different directions. He looks down at the woven rug beneath his feet and remembers trying to return it because it was just a little more pink than he had anticipated. But then he got used to it, and the sun from the tall window faded all the colors anyway. The rug is worn down, fraying at the edges, and this is a little bit like the way the man feels. The hair on his temples has gone gray and he feels frayed at the edges. In fact, he feels like throwing any number of devices at the window or the wall or the TV. Read More>