Jenny woke up with something new (to her) on the brain. She swung her legs gingerly out from under the duvet and spread her toes on the hardwoods. With a brief detour to press the coffeemaker’s “on” button, she settled at the computer. The Idea Copyright Database website was in her bookmarks, her search query submitted within seconds and with nary a touch of the mouse. The annoying “please wait” graphic a throwback to 2007, when the (then called) Apple computer popularized the hypnotic spinner. Government websites were always a solid decade behind the times. “This thing gets slower every damn day,” she mumbled under her breath, and stood to retrieve a cup of tasty caffeine.
1004 results matched your request… “Shit,” Jenny thought, “not specific enough yet,” and sipped her coffee faster in an attempt to facilitate the process. She only had 15 minutes before she had to start getting ready for work. She managed two more keywords and searched within the results. This brought the list to a manageable two pages’ worth. She scanned the abstracts and clicked through to a couple. Finally, towards the bottom of the second page she found what she was secretly hoping not to (having long ago stopped worrying about the ironic causality of the process). She mumbled some obscenities and clicked through to the Execution Permits. Already a three-year with two more years left on it, and three more in the queue.
“These,” more obscenities, “people,” Jenny said loud enough to elicit a groan and some rustling from her lover, still in the bed. “They need this shit like so many trophies on their shelf. What would they talk about at parties? How would they know how to feel about themselves, how to rate their self esteem against all the other similarly-but-not-too-similarly-now dressed people in their precious little peer groups? Oh, I’m sorry: communities. What ever would the world do without their precious little ideas, codified by Big Brother for all to see.”
“Oh, for the days when a freakin’ domain registration was as far as these nascent mental masturbations need freakin’ go, when there were actually TLDs to be had.”
---
originally published in 2007
---
originally published in 2007