Harold Bloom once told me that the squirrels outside his house were taunting him. He was old and wise, and therefore I believed him — even if it seemed crazy at the time.
Or did I believe him? I certainly remembered that he said that. And 15 years later, I learned why he was right.
Do you have any Bluetooth-enabled devices? Have you ever noticed that sometimes these devices don’t work when you most want them to? Or that they seem to fritz out at the most inconvenient possible times?
Is this really a tech problem … or is this a you problem?
Do you know exactly how Bluetooth works?
Of course you don’t — you just know when it doesn’t.
Maybe it causes cancer. Maybe it causes autism. Science couldn’t tell you.
You probably know it’s, like, a frequency issue. There are little wavelengths of something — electric, fundamentally. These wavelengths can connect your ear device to your handphone device. But sometimes it doesn’t work.
Sometimes it’s where you are, maybe. Sometimes the battery might be low. Sometimes there’s a wiring issue. You never really know.
You also never really know with the squirrels. Has a squirrel ever yelled at you?
You and the squirrel are also connected by some form of wavelength transmission communication. This is partly physical. Auditory. Visual. Probably electrical, somehow. But also you don’t know how a squirrel processes the world. Just like you can’t really imagine how a bat echo-locates or how a bee can look at another bee dancing and then fly to the exact flower patch.
Therefore, you and the squirrel are connected by organic Bluetooth.
If you really disturb it, it might yell at you. Or if it’s already yelling about something, and you get frustrated by it, it might continue to yell about something. Maybe it was originally yelling about something else. But if you tune in and get frustrated, the squirrel might get louder. Maybe it is yelling at you. Maybe it is kindly asking you to chill out. To touch grass. Maybe it’s requesting that you return to attending to whatever nut you were trying to bury or unearth.
Once I went not to the sacred store, but to a sacred lake. The squirrels there … they seemed to know. If you were at peace, then they were at peace. If you were not respecting their environment, they would kind of yell at you.
This is a Bluetooth connection. So to speak.
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Photo by Richard Baker/Getty Images
Of course, you are not — exactly — a Bluetooth-enabled device. But both you and the squirrel are alive, and if you are near it, maybe you are communicating with it along a frequency that you don’t even understand.
These things are obvious. But also unsettling. Because you don’t know what Bluetooth is doing to you. It’s not a “gamma ray” … or maybe it is. Maybe it causes cancer. Maybe it causes autism. Science couldn’t tell you. The other week, the Lancet denied that there is a sex binary.
Social desirability bias is a hell of a drug. Give it to a Harvard professor and to scientists who publish in academic journals, and they’ll promote the mass sterilization of children because that’s the latest thing that the academics have bought in to.
That makes a lot less sense than trying to peacefully communicate with a squirrel.
Therefore, Harvard professors are far less functionally sensible than little boys with BB guns. At least a little boy with a BB gun might use it to defend the screen window against a squirrel that has realized there is food to be had in his mother’s home.
This is a far more natural thing to do for a man than to use many words to try to push a false doctrine that defies all biology and common sense in order to join an enterprise dedicated to mutilating the children of men.
Harold Bloom was a Yale professor. He had read many books. He loved the books he read. Deeply. His mind was probably in the clouds when he went outside in the morning for a walk or for a newspaper.
Perhaps the squirrels sensed it. Maybe it gave them a headache. Maybe they complained. Or maybe they were trying to be as gentle as they could without speech to try to tell him to chill, go back inside, have his coffee, and read more.
I do not know.
But have you ever controlled someone else’s Bluetooth device with your mind? Maybe your mind disrupted the Bluetooth frequency, and that’s why it stopped working when you wanted it to and why it worked even less well when you got frustrated.
You would never know. Squirrels make more sense than Bluetooth, which may be carcinogenic. Squirrels may make annoying noises, but at least they don’t give you cancer.
Digital superstitions, Tech
