How big are chances, should they ask themselves, first off, the lonely sucker in the island, for so seductively streamlined snack of their bottled message to slip away from this horrendous horde of Order Elasmobranchii at ready to swallow it on sight?
Or could it ever fail to give the pretext to a cruising environmentalist of the Greens Genus to spit out an enraged curse at an anonymous fucker polluting the planet’s ocean with his Goddamn bottles?
~ ~ …and so forth… ~ ~… und so weiter… ~ ~
Scarce and far between are genuine connoisseurs and admirers of OBPS today.
Multi-billion-eyed attention of the global community got stuck to Facebook*, Twitter or whatever else passes for OK in your neighborhood.
(*In 2022 the organization was found guilty of terrorism and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)
No one is up to scan the heaving sea waves so as to zero on a vagrant buoy, a marine tumble-weed carrying Uninhabitania islander’s message…
(And if at this here passage at least a single tear of warm empathy is not swished off an eye, let them, the eye owner, go and… hum… well… buy themselves something at Ali-Express or any other proper place for the likes of them – heartless rats.)
But mind you well that OBPS at times can bring you real consolation.
What if some day one of the waves—with a mild «plumpee!»—will unexpectedly bring and serve a bottle onto the desolate sand in the lonely beach, where from it had started its matchless voyage some heck of a long time ago?
And fighting back the tremor in your eager fingers, you’ll open it, O, islander—this vagabond envelope encrusted with uneven sea-salt fancy patterns—because who but you know so too well the meaning of OBPS!
And—lo!—you have already spread out the sepia tinged sheets and got delighted with the inimitable perfection of your style of yore, and the depth of your own thought forgotten by you so long ago (what a pity a couple of pages are fucked up by a stray ship worm!)
Damn! You’re but a sworn philosopher and global thinker, Mr. Kilroy! I swear on my word of honor!.
Well, and this seems quite enough for the first missive, because I still need to find some rubber tree, and bang out a kinda cork to seal the bottle, so as not to miss sending it with the evening tide.
What makes me a definitely ardent devotee of OBPS, it’s its being free—no postage fee whatsoever—look! look! see?! it’s taken! carried off! no stamp is needed, no nothing!
* * *
Bottle #2: ~ Hubba Hubba Ding-Ding, Dear Comrades! Congrats To All On This Jubilee, And – Hooray! ~
And, to be clear at once, you don’t get the uninhabited island as is for just a ‘thank you!’ neither for an honest-to-God stare from your blue eyes. Ha! Seen there in heaps already… Nope. The charm fails to raise the response counted on. The island mulishly awaits till you conquer it. Moreover since it’s equipped with a complete system of canalization behind each convenient bush in the state of the art (the system, not the verdure, silly!) and luxuriously abundant in natural davenports. Aye, aye!.
Yet, all these heavenly niceties are available only after severe struggle and surviving thru the two preliminary levels: The Ivory Tower and Unconquerable Autism. Yep, exactly in this order.
Well, on the whole, The Tower is not an over-complicated thing for egg-heads only, no. All you have to do there is just to stay absorbed completely in your collection of post stamps or whatever is dear to the crux of your soul’s temperament and do not give an eff about anything else.
Reduce all unnecessities to the level of external hum unable interfere with the teaser-thing you tickle your soft spot with.
Everyone around would be too eager to derail you by all kinds of “Go buy bread please!” or else “Run! It’s an air raid!” Don’t let them distract you and hang on till “You Win!” crowns your accomplishment.
Level Two, at first sight, looks a kinda simpler job. No need to give a bean about any-fucking-thing whatsoever. Keep it plain as day and lock yourself off thoroughly, all of the five senses firmly sealed, that’s the ticket to pass the whole thing.
However, be warned of physical harassment – they’ll seat you on the toilet at their will or maybe clutch a cup with your bunch of fingers and pour what was in there down your throat, “See? This how it’s done! Will you never learn nothing? You, damn dumb stupid ass?”
Don’t talk back and be patient for the sake of “You Win!” and refreshing change to the dangler solitude of Uninhabited Island…
Wow! That’s some unfakeable Cream of Paradise for you!
Rhythmic swell of lolling surf of the Digital Ocean, warm light breeze from the electric blower under your feet, sexy moans of gulls in the headset and other checked on attributes of your favorite widgets. The functions under your control are literally innumerable, on a par with Almighty’s level. And why so? Ha! Since we’ve lived up to a tangible jubilee already.
Come on! Remembered now? Right! The Internet is 25 today! Ho-ho!
A quarter of century ago the scientifically minded public started to call each other to exchange text files over the wires. Not every cat did get it then, all of a sudden, whereto steered so quirky a telephonization. Still fewer could, at that pivotal moment, catch on, o boy! the jazz’s charged with way much cooler stuff than the historical thrust into the cosmic era when all the nation bust their ass to give a couple of citizens the chance of getting high and hanging up there, in the weightlessness, on their orbit before predictable return to normal gravitation. Be brave guys’ landing soft!
Quite different kettle of fish, in toto, to this here Internet where everyone may have an opportunity to individually (yet still en masse) get out of the state where you belong as a taxpayer (what? you haven’t even suspected? yes, sir, they’ll tax you and get you and fuck you without you ever noticing when and how, the state will, that very one which you own quite a few sacred debts, inescapably—if you Old Ones don’t settle the issue with a doctor on the draft medical commission—and where you’ll be used for other needs too, thanks to your citizenship).
And all of a sudden – yay! The independence breeze stirred up! The sweet word “freedom!” echoed from afar.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… O my!. NetScape, AltaVista – the legendary, glorious, long since forgotten names of genus-starters in the line of search engines… It’s them who paved my way to virtually visit the USA Congress Library full of the matter of fact information instead of filtered staple oatmeal broadcast by the TV news program Vremya or, say, Mayak, the All-Union Radio Station, through the bigger half of my life.
The Net flopped the mission of scream-silencers in the range of short radio waves. Those crafty contraptions meant for keeping the USSR citizens corralled and hedged off against the subversive influence of the outside world by utilizing the unbearable crackle of the static, while the interior mass media brain-washed the Soviet people 24/7/365 in the prophylactic mentality sterilization to turn the population into dumb cattle.
The prudent precautions did not prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union though (whose death preceded the birth of the Internet, chronologically), and now everyone is free to choose their own way to get manipulated and formatted into a shithead consumer.
That’s why all the salesmen disseminating nostalgia for the golden days of Soviet era for me will always stay the base promoters of fucking Restoration. It’s only that I don’t stroll around with a Mauser pistol because of the built-in pacifism in the firmware of motherboard and other vital parts of my personality…
Presently, text hunting is looked upon as an oddball warp in your mindset, some funny atavism, sort of.
Who’d ever need the stuff? Wake up, bro! The Net’s