The clock displayed an incorrect hour that morning. It might have been due to a momentary power interruption during the night. There had been some thunderstorms, but Scarecrow had slept through them. He was unaware. The familiar rhythms of analogue ticking had left long ago, leaving only silent, blinking counters in its place. No one really knows what time it is. The counters are just a guide.
He had protested when they insisted on hooking up the juice. He was, naturally, afraid of fire. There was little danger of that, he was assured. "You don't have a choice", they said, "everybody's on it now." So it happened.
Scarecrow dreaded leaving the house these days. More than ever he only wished not to be seen, a cruel irony for a creature whose vocation in life demanded visibility. It didn't used to be this way. The world had so many paths by which one might pass unseen to prying eyes. By one device or another, everything that moves upon the earth is recorded and regurgitated into some digitized facsimile. He didn't have any solid proof, yet he sensed that with each observation, each recording, the subject was slowly diminished in some way. He didn't want to be a subject. He only wanted to go and do his job, then return home and be left alone with his modest amusements.
The electricity was not all bad. Turntables, amps and speakers were, truth be told, "pretty fucking awesome", as some might say. For a long time there was some really great music to enjoy. He had whiled away countless hours spinning discs and singing along into the spinning blades of a rotary fan. Yeah. Rotary fans were pretty cool too. And television. Well, it was mostly shit, but not all bad.
Scarecrow ingests nothing. He is not given to any intoxicants of any kind. No drink, no smoke, no pills. It is only by television that he was able to come to any understanding of having a vice. In the beginning there was not television everywhere. And it wasn't on twenty-four hours per day. And then it was. When there were only three or four channels to choose from one might typically find maybe half a dozen programs worth watching. It might require two to four hours of your time in a week. Then there were thousands of channels, most of those being duplications multiple times over, and yet left with really nothing to watch. Everything became a soul-less paste. And Scarecrow then understood that amusements, like other more visceral intoxicants, may become vices. There was one day when he even declared "vices may only be enjoyed in moderation, or not at all". If he were more clever, he might have said it in Latin. Or perhaps known that someone else had already said it, albeit phrased somewhat differently.
There came a time when he could no longer find his music on vinyl. Or needles for the turntable. There were tapes for a time, not completely awful, but requiring a new player. Then compact discs, requiring yet another player and at least a partial, if not complete collection conversion to the new medium. As disheartening as these continuing changes were, at least it could be said that one had a player and some tangible medium in hand that could deliver the content. Once one had paid for these they were one's own to enjoy. Then this even changed.
They had made this thing they called the internet, he didn't really understand it, and it was somehow tied to telephone lines and personal computers. He didn't have a good understanding of those things either. The telephone, to a very limited extent, though he didn't have one of his own. Nor did he have a computer. He really had no use for either of these. In the midst of those developments there came a new medium for music, the MP3 (or similarly formatted digital audio file).
These digital audio files were the wave of the future, he was assured by many. The repetition of the script was growing quite tiresome, yet nevertheless Scarecrow was persuaded to purchase yet another device. One might well imagine his horror to discover that, of the lifetime collection of music acquired (across numerous mediums), none of these could be converted to this new player. More than any other change of vehicle, Scarecrow grew disgusted with this version most rapidly. First of all, he didn't always care to listen with earphones. Then there was the method of acquiring these files. There had to be an internet connection somewhere in the equation. There were no more record stores. So even if a download was free, one still had the expense of an internet connection. Oh, and the connection via phoneline was not viable for files of this size. There had to be broadband, or high speed internet, whatever the fuck that was.
It didn't end there. All of those advancements were supplanted by still further wonders. Everything went wireless. And then smart phones, which then replaced MP3 players as the primary means of playing audio files. Yet another device and another service, with a monthly fee.
It used to be that radio was worthwhile. One did not have their choice as to which tunes might be played, but it was a good way to get a sampling and for the most part it was free. In an hour of broadcast time there might be twelve to fifteen minutes of commercials as a means of funding the operation. In the midst of all these other developments over the years there were disturbing things that had happened to radio. There were fewer stations owned by fewer people, employing fewer people and playing less music. There was less variety of music and even less of that. In an hour of broadcast time one now found that there was twenty minutes of what passed for music (?) accompanied by forty minutes of commercials. Loud, obnoxious commercials for shit that Scarecrow was pretty sure no one was buying.
The general concept of broadcasting found a home amid all these new mediums. The "station" was replaced by the "platform". This idea was not all bad. The platform was essentially a curated library of music from which one might make their own program. One might enjoy this, but for the fact that it comes at a price of endless and insufferable commercials. Or pay a monthly fee for the commercial "free" experience. Well, it's got some commercials. True zero commercials will cost still more.
Scarecrow was a being of little brain, yet even he could learn and reason through repetition. The same script was repeated for time immemorial, thereby he came to know certain truths. Little by little, over time there was less and less that the common man could own, to hold as his own. The analogue age had physicality. Inasmuch as he cared about these sorts of things, Scarecrow understood that abstracts like art and culture were manifest in something tangible. With the arrival of the digital age he watched these things evaporate.
Everything was for sale. All the time, everywhere. Life was for rent. It seemed that in world with so much to offer people were left with surprisingly little to show for it. Somehow they were prevented from accumulating any real wealth for themselves, instead always having to pay others in order to enjoy even the most basic of things. Scarecrow found something familiar in this, somehow relatable to some other experience.
It was on his way to work that day that he had a great epiphany. It occurred to him that the world was much like a dead beast in the field. In the thousands of years that he'd been doing this he'd seen plenty of dead beasts in the field. It was always the same. First came the errant coyote or fox. They'd take a few cautious nibbles, sniff about the corpse and then hastily move on. Then would come the buzzards and, his nemesis, the crows. They would have a rather thorough go of it, rendering the body to mostly bone. At last would come the flies, worms and other insects. The lowest order of parasites would finish the job.
He found that the world of the digital age was the same, but for one distinct difference. This dead beast was taken by the lower parasites from day one. They infested every cell and started devouring slowly and steadily. It passed almost unnoticed until it would simply vanish. The buzzards, crows and other feral scavengers would be left to cannibalism.
The realization was sudden, yet oddly anti-climactic in it's arrival. Scarecrow began to question his very purpose. "What the hell am I defending anyway? Is this the day that the crows will finally overtake me? Will that day not come?" He was given over to the inevitability of his fate.
He came upon the final gate to his field. He paused there to lean on the fence for several minutes, scanning the rows of corn gently rustling in the morning breeze. Here was the material world, lush and green, vibrant with life. This was the real world, not some digitized replica. He thought, "surely they can not take this away?", but then ruefully admitted to himself that even if they couldn't, that would not stop them trying. In a winner take all world the parasites ultimately take all.
After a time Scarecrow stalked off to his cross. He stood at the base of it and stared up into the morning sun. He raised his arms to match the shadow cast from the cross. Today was to be the day then. He hoisted himself up to his post and slouched against it with his arms draped over either side. Beneath him in that sea of corn he saw the shadow cross cast long across the field. Life had become rather boring for quite some time really. For this reason he had, like the hardcore SS officer with a cyanide capsule sewn into his collar, stowed away in his shirt pocket a book of matches.
He was pretty certain that he was not going to mind no longer existing. Just as Scarecrow ingests nothing, so does he likewise feel nothing. The only pain that Scarecrow was able to experience was in what little mind he had. And that pain would soon be brought to an end. Or so he hoped.
Now to return to our original concern, the correct time was 8:48 AM EDT, as calibrated by the moment when Scarecrow declared "Fuck it!" and set himself ablaze.
