Shelf Life

Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you.

And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves.

My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves…

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Moving pictures took almost two years to turn from these… 

into this: (their corporeal forms now grace the shelves of charity stores)

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Then came the kindling of the pages, turning most of these…

…into things that could be in many places, but mostly in two.

Those that couldn’t make the journey, remain neither wholly binary or atomic.

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Along the way, I started foresaking these…

…and adopting their etheral brothers, though some still remain in limbo:

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The most precious, began as atoms, then light, before becoming embalmed in silver hallide… 

… and now existing as blocks of light, coarsing through slices of silcon, behind sheets of glass some livpure:

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My shelves will soon be emptied and no longer required. I don’t own those in distant clouds, but I do own those in the computers that belong to me. I have one, where I own none of the contents, nor the shelf itself… and it hurts when it’s altered without consent.

Is this Better Than Owning? Perhaps.

The absence of atoms isn’t problematic, but my senses can’t yet fully appreciate and comprehend all the bits in all those new places…