the metafictional blues

Is there anything as comforting, reassuring or satisfying as the delete key? Oh sure, maybe a blankie, or your main squeeze or a Snickers bar, but other than that, there’s not much left in this cold, dark world that makes you feel like you have a fighting chance against the pain of idiocy, overload and pointlessness. In these uncertain times, it’s hard to feel like you have any power over your environment or the scourge of reply-all vermin that seem to never die. The delete key gives you a small dose of control each day that, in my opinion, is many times the only thing that keeps you from slipping into a scene from Falling Down. Incrementally, this may not be readily noticeable, but when your deleteodometer rolls over the 10K mark, you can feel like you’ve really accomplished something… you can feel that you are in charge of your daily destiny; that you are, in fact, da man. This becomes even more exciting (and by exciting I mean oddly amusing and mildly disturbing) when you put this number into context … in that this is only one portion of one of my many active email accounts. Adding them all up, the amount of delete power I have amassed is … staggering. The mere idea that I have so easily expunged this enormous amount of other people’s words (not to mention auto-vaporizing massive amounts of spam each day) elevates me to demigod strength … and I feel giddy. In fact, I feel like singing … to paraphrase everyone’s favorite band, The Proclaimers:

I would delete ten thousand emails,
and I would delete ten thousand more
Just to be the girl who deletes a million emails
For someone else to store …

Here’s to the next ten K … thanks for the memories, deleted emails.