ARTIFICIAL EMBRACES CAN STILL LIGHTEN THE GLOOM

Today I received an email that I thought was a legitimate email because the name sounded real, somewhat familiar, almost (but not quite) like a grade-school classmate I used to know, and the tagline was 'Regarding tomorrow', so I thought it might be about work, but it turned out to be spam, which pissed me off, but then I imagined the Internet in ten, fifteen years time, when our emails will all be video emails, and we'll be able to see the faces of people as they give us their messages, and I imagined myself, age forty, forty-five, alone in a room, rain streaking the window, opening my Inbox on a particularly gloomy morning, finding it empty, but seeing my Junkmail full, full of stranger's faces, salesmen's faces, smiling, saying hello, their grins broad, their hair permed and pressed, all of them wanting to talk to me and me alone, and for some reason I can't quite understand this made me feel good, accepted, embraced, if only in an artificial way.