I sit in the Cafe of the Dead with a friend. There are no Mexican sugar skulls or Frida Kahlo paintings or bunches of marigolds in the little coffee shop. My friend and I write. We’ve agreed to meet once a week for our writing. I don’t know I’m in the Cafe of the Dead until after I’ve written for a while and take a piss break. I walk toward the bathroom and suddenly realize that the cafe is deathly quiet. No one talks. Only the faint sound of music drifts through the air. I look around. Every person of the perhaps thirty customers – some in groups, some alone – stares into a computer screen, an I-pad, a smartphone. People silently hand their phones to one another. Someone looks, laughs quietly and turns back to their own screen.
I go into the bathroom, pee and come out into the same unbroken silence. I sit down with my notebook and pen. I think of the 10-12 hours a day I spend on the internet. I’ve come to feel it is a death in life and that I am possessed by alluring cyber-succubi and incubi. I write that sentence and make a note to Google succubus and incubus. I almost laugh. But, each day I find it harder and harder to remove myself from the seductive grip of that which I allow to possess me. 
I write more – about being in the silent multi-dimensional reality of the Cafe of the Dead, of realizing that only multi-dimensional reality feeds my writing, of wondering whether I have sat in the cafes of the dead for a while and not noticed the silence. And, I suspect that it is precisely being in multi-dimensional reality that allowed the knowledge to enter my mind.
Do you find yourself giving your life to the internet? Do you wonder who you would be without it? Those of you who know me and my work, know that I have been an addict since I was a little girl. Perhaps I am wired to be addicted to the internet. I drove home from the Cafe of the Dead, went on-line to answer my question and found this: http://www.addictionrecov.org/Addictions/index.aspx?AID=43 As always, I invite you to write me and the readers of Breakthrough Writing. Knowing I am not alone is on of the most healing gifts.
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