The thing about behavioral conditioning is that when there's rough parity between the would-be conditioner and his subject, in terms of complexity and adaptiveness, it's always a two-way street. After weeks of disciplined boycotting of communications originating from her tArdphone, the frequency of her attempts to communicate with me through that device had declined sharply. Text messages had dropped to near-zero. I still occasionally answered telephone calls, which in retrospect was a fatal flaw in my paradigm inasmuch as it delivered reinforcement to her on that most powerful of schedules: random variable. Meanwhile, though the frequency of her attempts to communicate with me through the tArdphone declined, the attempts shed did make were not at random times or under ordinary circumstances. No, she'd increasingly resort to this under especially stressful circumstances, when the communication was associated with consequential outcomes. This delivered negative reinforcement to me which has had very rapid and powerful effects. The sight of her operating the tArdphone was at first disconcerting. Over time it gradually become off-putting, then ugly, then hideous, then repulsive. In parallel, the very idea of her operating the tArdphone, the mental image of it, followed the actual sight along that scale of negativity. Two days ago, the tArdphone rang at 5:30 AM. I urged her to take the call, as there were things going on that we knew might require her intervention. She didn't answer the phone, though. She let it ring out, then scopped it up and launched into a full-throttle, slack-jawed, mouth-open, near-drooling digital dildo session with it, complete with little moans and exclamations. I felt myself becoming physically ill! She finally put it down and settled back into bed. I lay on my side, eyes wide open, struggling with waves of nausea, which finally subsided after a couple of hours. Then the phone rang again! And again, rather than answer it, she let it ring out and then again morphed into the psycho-retard zombie, face bathed in the pale sickly glow of the tArdphone. This time the nausea that swept over me was even more intense. I had to leave! I rolled out of bed, threw on some clothes and head for the door. Still clutching the tArdphone she trailed bhind me. I told her I felt ill and needed some air. Still stroking her digital dildo, she asked if she could come with me. Somehow I managed to shake loose and get out of the flat, still putting my t-shirt on as I headed down the stairwell. I spent about an hour outside in the cool morning air, circling the pool and counting to 100 over and over. It helped. I was able to return to the flat, and the rest of the weekend passed more or less uneventfully. The question is: will my conditioned response become any more extreme? It is, I think, at the limit of manageability. I must enforce my boycott of the device to 100% - I think it's the only hope.
DECEMBER 4 - COUNTERATTACK..
iT's back, of course. The problem with any disincentive schedule that doesn't cover 100% of cases is that it effectively trains the subject to identify and exploit the remaining reward opportunities. That's simply what committed adapters do. It is testimony to the sophistication of the organism, yes, but also to the depth of the committment. iDiophony, as a religion, as an addiction, and as a fetish is not easily expunged. The tArdphone appeared at the breakfast table yesterday, for a quick fondling. I rose and walked away, returning after a while and maintaining a neutral demeanor until it was time to go. She whipped iT out of her purse again just before stepping into her car. The day before, she had a full-on iWank session with iT while I drove and she rode in the passenger seat....the full-blown trance, complete with slack jaw, near-drooling, little moans and sighs, the big wide eyes. And, of course, the trainer is himself trained: I now have a quite visceral reaction to the sight or mention of a tArdphone. I want to puke. This is getting too interesting.
DECEMBER 1
Miracle or monstrosity? I've enough experience with addicts, cultists, and pre-adolescents to know that what seems to be her near-complete rehabilitation may only be a cocoon behind which the disease rages in secret. My iron discipline certainly appears to have saved her. My total nonresponsiveness to all communications originating from her tArdphone, other than a tiny handful of essential telephone calls, has virtually removed the device and the pathological behavior associated with it from our lives together. No more text messages arriving, no more email. The thing has only spent the night by her bedside once since November 20: ten days! Nor does she get up in the morning and slink to wherever it's been stashed, for a quick fix. She fondled once, while riding as a passneger in my car, and the iTard did emerge: the slack face, the near-drooling expression, the little moans and sighs... we know that addicts/cultists/preadolescents are master strategists, and so this may have been a move aimed at suggesting (by not concealing it) that this was the ONLY iDildo session she'd indulged in. Only time will tell. The addict/cultist/preadolescent left unchastised gradually becomes bolder, slacker, less wary, and the pathological behavior more open. We shall see...
NOVEMBER 20
I have seen the Mother Ship, and I see the Future. It is Hell. We made rendezvous in a town outside one of the major eastern Seaboard cities, one famous for the centers of higher learning concentrated there. We were guests of friends of hers. These were a couple in their late thirties. She'd warned me that the house, on a rural lane, would be very difficult to find. She'd emailed several messages I suppose had to to with finding it, but my tArdphone screener filtered them out. She began sending text messages to me the instant her plane's wheels touched the runway and continued throughout the last 30 minutes of our respective car trips to the house. I don't read or respond to her tArdphone text messages, yet they keep coming. Sending them, you see, is its own reward. Our hosts seemed a bit strange from the get-go. He: emotionally flat, marginally present. She: coiled tight like a steel spring. It took about 7 minutes for the conversation between the three of them to migrate to the domain at the center of their lives. The hostess produced a MacLaptop and they passed it around like a spliff, cooing and giggling. The hostess marvelled at my observation that it had been very easy to find her house: "Ooooh, you have an iPhone?". G turned to me, and with an expression and manner I'd seen before in born-again Christians, intoned: " These are the people who led me to the Mac, the iPhone, and All Things Apple." Amen, I ought to have responded. Jobs, peace be upon him, be praised. From there it was straight downhill. From then until bedtime these three nominal adults played with and talked about their infantile video games. I saw the center of the world my friend has chosen to live in. I was sickened, did not sleep well that night, and counted the minutes until I could leave that house and those people. But not before I'd had tArdphones shoved in my face several times. There is now only one step short of an explicit ultimatum that might salvage this relationship: a total shut-out of all communications from her tArdphone. Including telephone calls. I'll call her on a land line when I think she's around one. The tArdphone-conditioned changes in her behavior are accelerating, systematizing and becoming of the more-or-less permanent nature that warrants calling them personality changes. I don't like this new person, not at all.
NOVEMBER 14
Second day of a trip out of town, and the wiser for distance. I've filtered inbound email originating from tArdphones, and don't read or respond to text messages coming from hers. I cannot, therefore, be providing any sort of reward or reinforcement for sending these messages to me. And yet, the messages keep coming. Plain evidence that her reward is from manipulating ( caressing) her digital dildo - the communication aspect of the act is inconsequential. It also confirms the sad hypothesis that there will be no simple remedy for her illness. The tArdphone conditioning paradigm is working - for Apple Corp - and her wierd little iTard world is closing around her. She's nonresponsive to feedback from the human beings she would (absent the illness) actually be interacting with. I am filled with regret - if only I'd not been embarrassed to give her a regular, plain old vibrating dildo before she bought that thing. She might still know me. The timing makes it nearly certain that fondling the tArdphone is the last thing this iTard does before falling asleep at night and the first thing she does upon awakening in the morning. Indeed, several text messages have come from her in the middle of the night - she wakes up and straightaway grabs the horrid little toy.
NOVEMBER 12
In a sense, last night was the worst yet. We came home from the gym after a nice workout, eager to get some dinner. Seconds after we came through the front door, she was groping in her handbag, asking (rhetorically, to be sure) whether I'd mind if she "checked" to see whether a friend of hers had received a gift she'd sent her. "Odd", I thought, "In the gym, she'd gushed on about how happy her friend was to receive that gift, and how the friend had immediately sent photos of the gift by email". She already knew the gift had been received. I realized then that this was an addict making excuse for taking a fix, and that the craving must be very strong indeed for her to act this out in my presence with such a lame excuse. "Check", for the iTard, means "grab a quick fix". I got to work making dinner. Next thing I knew, she was giggling and fondling her tArdphone, reading aloud the email message she'd obviously already read earlier in the day. I ignored her. It was then that she shoved the tArdphone in my face! "Look at the pictures!" she screeched. "Can't see them", I replied. She grabbed my shoulder, turning me to face the toy. She moved the tArdphone away from me. "How about now??" she demanded. She yanked the device to within inches of my eyes. "How about now?" That instant was the first time she was repulsive to me. "No, can't see a thing." I sighed. I was unable to shake the disgust her siezure had aroused in me, and the rest of the evening passed in near silence. In the morning, she bounced out of bed and brightly proposed to shower and then make breakfast for me. I was cheered, until I realized what the gambit was. While she showered, I tiptoed downstairs for a survey. Her tArdphone was lying atop her leather handbag, positioned so she could sneak glances at the screen. I went back to bed. When she called me down for breakfast, the tArdphone was gone and the handbag closed up. She'd run straight to it from the bedroom. "What's it like outside?", I asked, walking toward the back door. " Same temperature as inside!" she chirped. A datum gathered from her wake-up suck off her tArdphone. All I wanted then was for her to leave for work as soon as possible. Her last words before leaving were "My cell phone is dead, but I'll charge it at work." I could see that this speech had been carefully formulated and rehearsed. "Cell phone", indeed. The iTard ALWAYS refers to the thing by brand name, in compliance with their programming. What an effort it must have taken to use the phrase "cell phone"! But what does this effort reflect? A healthy struggle against the dopamine-driven conditioning protocol of a cheap toy, or another armor plate in the shield of secrecy an addict builds aorund her sickness?
NOVEMBER 11
This morning was nearly the end for me. She's now a full-blown iTard. No longer hiding, her disease is on the offensive. She lasted about 24 minutes after getting out of bed. She'd left the tArdphone downstairs, in a backpack, out of reach from the bed. It didn't help. Visibly agitated, she ripped open the backpack, drew the digital dildo out and, fondling it with that wide-eyed, slack-jawed expression, announced she was going to 'check to see...' whether a certain item of information had been sent to her. Interestingly, the item she mentioned was one she must have thought would be one I urgently craved. It wasn't - it wasn't in the least urgent, the need-to-know was at least 24 hours away.Her choice of this particular item, though, reveals her tactical aim: to link the tArdphone with reward in MY mind. Like all addicts, like all zombies, like all cultists, she's now actively recruiting. Unless I can form and execute an effective counter-strategy, one which not only insulates me from the sickness but also transforms her from iTard to human being, this morning marked the beginning of the short countdown to the end.
NOVEMBER 10
Continuing and reinforcing the basic iTard dEprogramming pRotocol. Non-responsiveness to any and all output from her tArdphone, excepting purposeful telephone calls. My email filter sends messages not in rich text format to the garbage bin, which catches all email sent from the tArdphone, for now at least. Non-responsiveness, rather than negative reinforcement should be the best schedule for deprogramming, as it ought to minimize a general aversion to the deprogrammer. She's groping for ways to counter, but only at the tactical level. Yesterday she tried a gambit of using the tArdphone to take perfectly pointless pictures of me. Response: flip the bird, no response to the photos emailed to me later. Deleted without viweing. There may be hope, but the dopamine factor exploited by the Apple Corp designers is very, very powerful. Her native intelligence is her - and my - only hope. We shall see. She essentially admitted to being taken down by the Apple Corp product formula, the catering to customers' longing for stupidity. Watching me shut down a Windows machine, she commented "You never see screens like that on a Mac." "Right," I replied. "They don't want you to know what's going on." "That's FINE with me!" she wailed. Ignorance is bliss.
NOVEMBER 7
- It's true. She hasn't come to her senses, she's taken her illness underground, into the closet. Sensing, perhaps, that she has an increasingly visible problem, she now keeps the tArdomatic inconspicuous. It's no longer on the nightstand when she sleeps, and she's back to using another alarm to wake her in the morning. When she does awaken, she slips out of the bedroom, and within minutes is fondling and stroking the tArdphone...that is, "checking the weather". The actual weather is plainly visible on the sunny living room balcony, steps away, but her illness makes her find out how warm it is by sucking the temperature from her tArdotron. She thinks I don't know. Can she be saved?
NOVEMBER 5 -
What seemed to be an encouraging sign has turned out to be the opposite. It seemed to me that she'd become self-aware, and had begun to realize she'd centered her waking life around a cheap toy, her tArdphone. I'd stopped timing the intervals between her touching it, looking at it, operating it, talking about it, etc., because she seemed to have gotten a grip on herself. Now, it looks like she's simply done what all addicts do: she's hiding it. When I greet her at the end of her work day, she's still in tArdphone-centric mode, grabbing it every few minutes, talking about using it during the day, and so on. Then, as if sensing my horror and despair, she suddenly disengages from the tArdphone...or pretends to. At home, in my presence, it's almost as if it didn't exist... but there are little hints that she grabs it the instant I leave the room, or step into the shower. Like an alcoholic with her hip flask. This means it's going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.NOVEMBER 2 -
Each day that passes makes it clearer she's lost, gone. Her tArdphone is the first thing she sees when she awakens, and the last thing she sees before she sleeps. She's unable to live for more than 30 minutes without holding her tArdphone, touching it, operating it, or talking about holding it, touching it or operating it. A considerable portion of her waking attention is dedicated to indentifying and contriving opportunities to touch it, use it or talk about touching it or using it. She is altering her mode of living to maximize usage of the tArdphone, thus moving it to the center of her existence and supporting her delusion that the tArdphone is a valuable and useful tool...she has stopped in the middle of the act of love to pick up her tArdphone and stroke its screen for nearly a full minute, the man still inside her. When she operates the tArdphone, her jaw goes slack, her eyes widen and she emits little moans and sighs. I know there is no getting her back now. She is lost. We think we are so very sophisticated, but a shiny toy with pretty colors and a variable reinforcement schedule for learning to use it are no less powerful than slot machines that dispense cocaine instead of money....snip...