Mixed Media on wood, ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

1985; Enter the Bessa brick. Only seen in movies ie; American Psycho scene with Christian Bale in the back of the limo. Rarely seen in real life outside of the Tele, if ever.
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1995; Enter the cellular. Only seen on the Tele ie; Heartbreak High with Con taking a call in class. Everyone laughs at the novelty factor. Only the teacher is unimpressed. A glimpse of things to come post-millennium. Big as a brick with a pull-out antenna. Watch you don’t poke your eye out. Patch sales start to rise. Prohibitively expensive. The phones, not the patch. Only rich folks, which we weren’t, have them. The phone, not the patch. I had a patch, from the pirate show bag at the Ekka.
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2000; The mobile is now accessible and cheaper. Popular, it takes ground like the Red Army marching on a Leningrad Wursthaus. Green glow screen with chime ringtones are everywhere, turning classrooms, lecture halls and dining rooms everywhere into digital glow-worm caves. Birth rates plummet owing to incessant interruptions during lovemaking sessions all over the western world. And ain’t no action when Donny goes alone to bed tears in eyes with blue-balls in tow because his beloved missus, Charlotte the Harlot, is up til 4am back-and-forthing via texts all night, every night with BFF Rootin’ Ruth about her nights out ‘clubbin’. Most nights are spent debating which of the 67 guys she slept with in the past month from dating websites could be the daddy of the growing bumpy in her belly. All she has to go by is a pile of used frangers scattered across her pig-sty of a room, a marathon of a job sorting which ones are busted and which ones are not, a job she needs Charlotte the Harlot’s help. To do this they take turns blowing them up like balloons. Populations in no-phone zones such as central, sub-Saharan Africa and North Korea continue to skyrocket like the Challenger Shuttle. Incidence of brain tumors rise steeply. Newspapers are full of deals. Buy that blue 2G Motorola on a 2year contract for only $19 a month. Bargain Bargain Bargain! Got to get one with an Eminem ringtone. Sitting on the train to Brisbane you hear the digital jingle to his latest song 184 times. … in a 45 minutes trip as young and old addicts everywhere dial their own number just to make it look to others that they have friends.
Texting charged per character. Students hourly wage: $8 an hour. Daily text charges: $26 give or take. People going broke for the sake of a chat. Even formerly respectable folks begin selling their bodies on Fortitude Valley street corners to pay for enormous phone bills racked up. Suddenly everything on the Tele or radio has a .com.au attached to the end. Phone rage makes its debut, threatening to overtake good old ‘road rage’ in prevalence. It is not uncommon to witness folks in the grip of stroke-inducing plum-faced psychosis, screaming into their little glitter pink Nokia’s before smashing them into the sidewalk, or, as frequently seen, flying out the driver’s side car window frisbee-style while parked at a green light in rush hour. Proof that unlike the boomerang, they don’t come back. Mobile phone repair shops specialising in smashed screens begin popping up in shopping malls and low-rent alley ways.
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2005; Things are worsening. The wretched things now come with superglue; users everywhere seem unable to put the blasted things down. Hip ringtones of the top ten. Flip phones are the new trendy got-to-have thing. Some have internet. People are so bored with themselves having abandoned what old-timers used to call ‘hobbies’ that they nowadays spend 3500 of the 3600 minutes in a day snapping that phone open and shut, open and shut, just in case they misread the ‘YOU HAVE 0 NEW MESSAGES AND 0 MISSED CALLS’ message. It’s cool though, because by checking the phone every 3 and a half seconds, everyone around mistakenly think you must have a social life. Literacy rates among young people plummet like a burning Stuka. Books become the number one allergy amongst under twenty-fives. Even adults are forgetting how to spell basic words. ‘Their, there and they’re are just a big letter-jumble that the young reason, spelling and punctuation, just like algebra, have no application in ‘reel life’. Scientists estimate the desperately desperate phone maniacs are checking their phones on average 290+ times a day. This inability to take their eyes off the little screen comes at a cost; many, now choosing life on autopilot. Perpetually distracted like a pilot getting a lap dance from the stewardess, some mistakenly relieve themselves while perched on the kitchen sink instead of the throne.
Touchscreens are rolled out. Now mobiles have a dual function; pretending to talk or text as a way to avoid talking to a real person ie; the nice lonely old man at the bus stop that wants to tell you about the good old days, like the time he took out eight Japanese in Okinawa…. in 1981. Well, that and his bout of incurable crotch rot.
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2010; Beginning to think babies are popping out with the darned things already in hand. Are they growing in utero? Looks like it. Even the kids spend their days dribbling on the screen along with mum and dad as the sign up for Facebook, for nothing more than to share the cross-eyed bubble lips selfie next to the main course at that most fashionable apex of social dining venues, McDonalds. Proving just how hip little Jimmy is at age 2 he gets into mums ebay account she forgot to log out of while she’s on the loo and buys her a 40foot yacht from the south of France.
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2015; Questions to family and coworkers often go unanswered. Either they can’t hear due to chronic AED ‘attention elsewhere disorder’ or you smell. Deciding it the former, you look around to find you are eating alone. Your other family members, like vampires, only rise from their digital coffins to eat after you have gone to bed. The post-midnight banging of cups and clatter of dishes tossed in the sink for you to wash in the morning make sleep all but impossible. But back to dinner alone. Everyone else is in their rooms and on the toilet. Not because they need to go, but it’s the one room in the house one isn’t interrupted unless the door is unlocked.
A sound pervades your desolate dining room. At first you think your house has been invaded by either crickets or a plague of mice. Alas, you discover it is much worse; the fingers of fury strike relentlessly, swiping and tapping photoshopped selfies like there’s no tomorrow.
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For those texting while crossing the road often there is no tomorrow.
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Sick of eating alone and talking to oneself one discovers a genius way to hold impromptu house meetings; you switch off the router. Arguments instantly ensue followed by repeated questioning as to why you are so mean. At least that’s what you make out what they say since the whole family has reverted to ape-like grunting. Yes, they probably would answer, but it’s been so long since anyone held an intelligent conversation that they have all forgotten how to speak in sentences beyond three words. You receive a text from the next room stating ‘WTF! GTFOOMF! LEEV ME ALOAN!’ Point proven.
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2020; The greatest hoax ever enforced upon the coerced useless eater peasant classes of the world (that coincidentally created the most billionaires in history) is unleashed followed by the greatest crime against humanity in scale ie coerced gene-editing via jabby-jab, an open violation of our Constitution section 51.23a, but hey, when you’re a big untouchable snot-stain in grubberment, you can do what you want. Time to grift the saplings. Or, is it graft? I’d say grift covers the past 3 years. With a captive population that has been raised by the screen at both school and home there really isn’t a whole lot of imagination required to work out what happens next. Depression, suicide rates, hopelessness, aimlessness and understandably, drunkenness explode like a bomb in Beirut amongst all age groups. Students can not only skip school, but they can spend the day yes, staring at a screen of teachers face with the forehead cropped off. So after a year of wasted time in the bedroom, with nothing learnt other than they want to off themselves to escape the mass-murdering virus that hasn’t killed anyone, on top of the eight hours a day Johnny and Janie spend watching cute puppy videos and hot bikini babe workouts on tiktok, they can now add an additional 25 hours to the weekly tally of online ‘school time’. Even mums and dads are locked at home, being forced to ‘work from home’ since they are ‘not essential’ workers, which is fine with many folks since now they can down shots of Ouzo, watch porn online and not have to worry about failing the breathalyser test while technically being ‘at work’. Low-rent love-dead mummies try to supplement their income by becoming what the young people call, an influencer. Hip-gyrating over-50’s see-through leotard workouts with lots of eye-blinding bends and limb-stretches swamp social media. Cellulite-induced blindness becomes the number one reason for under thirties visiting the doctor who also harangues his eye-sore patients into getting the clot-shot. Another ten jabbies in the arms of the pro-jab Karen’s and Soy Boys out in the waiting room and his Big-Pharma Sugar-Daddies will award him the ‘Big Con Top Doc’ award. The prize? An all-expenses paid family vacation…. to Switzerland. His second for the year. But back to workout mummy. She thinks, why not? I got dreams too, though hubby ain’t happy the wifey now has over 5 million daily views with a comment section that keeps him awake longer than he’d like. For many though, it is secretly a dream come true. But still, appearances must be maintained in this new stay-at-home-to-work-while-having-a-few-shots-of-the-old-glug-glug-before-ten world. Tipsy off-balance mums tripping over shit all day and dad spending a lot of time in the shed spraying Glen-20 whenever someone walks in becomes the ‘New Normal’. Although anything but, to appear normal mums and dads still ask their morbidly depressed digitised children questions as though interested in their lives, like what they want to be when they grow up. The answers they give are as clear as mud, many truly believing what the school indoctrinators fed them, that they want to ‘change the world’, ‘solve global poverty’ or ‘make the world a more equitable and diverse place’ which you think is a bit strange since they can’t even at their age make their own bed. It terrifies you that on their next birthday they will be classed as an adult. A generation ago eighteen year olds were taking out enemy machine gun bunkers. Today they can’t even take out the garbage. Mistakenly you nearly ask how they plan to monetise these dreams. You decide it better to say nothing than open that can of worms. Last time you did you were called a Boomer and told that you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be young. After remembering that yes, you were once young with hopes for a bright future, you explain to your angry, mumbling teen still staring at the phone, that Boomers were born in the ten or so post World War 2 years. Looking at you for the first time this week your darling asks you just what was World War 2? About to answer, Janie interrupts, asking if that was when Captain Cook attacked the World Trade Center in Mongolia. Nowadays you figure it better to just smile and say ‘good luck with that’.
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2024; it’s hard to blame the youth in this mess. After all, they have been groomed from the cradle by the big tech corporations that that’s what it’s all about; having ‘it’, whatever new gadget ‘it’ may be. On top of that, little Johnnie and Janie have been told by friends that their mum and dad have a fans only site, some of whose parents are subscribers. Even the education system has let them down, that beacon of light that once taught their charges trade skills having metastasised into a digitised high-tech indoctrination camp that reinforces the unquestionable need to consume, conform and most importantly, never, ever, EVER ,think for yourself. Repetition works Donny. Repetition works Donny. Repetition works Donny. And after 12 years of repeating that daily dose of watching screens, at school what is the one skill little Johnny and Janie graduate with? Watching a screen Donny. Repetition works Donny.
The PC. The Pentium. The dial-up to the broadband to the web-cam to the wi-fi to the X-Box to the cellular to the mobile to the touchscreen to the two grand fingerprint-access smartphone. Let’s not forget the Air. From the Walkman to the iPod to the Apple Air and now ladies and gents………………………prolonged drumroll……….
…Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you, our newest state of the art must have high-res must-have must-have,…..we present to you, the Virtual Reality 2000, your very own microwave oven on your head, just in case you thought the kids didn’t have enough dysfunctional disconnect. Here, have the kitchen sink.
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Now Mum and Dad can relax. Finally, after eighteen long years of getting them off to school to look at screens and to Saturday morning sports (that they don’t want to do because it cuts into prime gaming time) on time they can rest. For they know now Johnny and Janie are ready to take on the world by isolating themselves with their best friend, their phone, and will in the digital diaspora never have to talk to anyone again. All aboard to La-la land in a permafrost state of screen-induced catatonia. Like a dedicated Scientologist reaching clear status the much-pampered offspring that have had nothing but time, money and resources poured over them have to reached the New World Order architects goal; they have achieved ‘brain-dead consumer’ status.
You feel nauseated just looking at your post-modern, post-functional offspring, realising the only offspring you really like anymore are the music group. To clear your head you go for a walk. Even then things obviously aren’t right. There is something very wrong with the people you pass. Now you know society has in fact gone mad with the walking masses all around talking to themselves
. Then you see the little white plug devices dangling out their ears. You dare to politely ask a young lady staring into her phone at the pedestrian crossing just what is that thing in her ear? Her eyes widen in panic and she steps back as if you are Ted Bundy reanimated. Straight away you know it was a mistake. Yes, even as a grown-up, talking to strangers, particularly chronically-connected narcissists, can spell danger. She appears to speak into ‘the ear thing’ saying ‘what the fuck Maddy, I got a sicko pervo creepo stalking me’. You flee, not because she’s terrified of you, but because you’re utterly terrified of her.
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. You realise that talking to dogs and the pretty birds in the trees from now on in may be the most sensible option to stay sane in 2024 and beyond. At least they appreciates your company.
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But back to the youth.
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Confined for prolonged durations during the day in their bedrooms, or, when leaving the hermit hole after waking up at lunchtime, they will pick up their phones and, like good millennials and yes, frequently Gen Z’ers as well, pick up where they left off on last night’s saved game of Hay Day, while missing the cup completely and pouring orange juice out all over the counter. But cleaning up entails…doing work. Cramps set in at the very thought of it. Don’t worry, beat a hasty retreat to the room, for those dedicated hard-working enigmas called mum and dad will clean it up just when they get home from a hard days work. And when they start telling little Johnny and Janie what rotten little parasites they are they can do what has always worked; just pop on the VR headset that will no doubt become a staple of ‘learning’ at schools in the near future and jet off further into the dark star-studded recesses of the fantasy reality the corporate tech groomers have seduced them into.
As for mum and dad?
Switch off the real ones and get back to the sim ones.
They’re so much cooler and…….stop, or else this could go on forever.
Welcome to the Bungle.