I just pried myself away from the Matrix and the Animatrix on TV. Watching the Animatrix, I just couldn't believe how realistic computer animation has become. I always think back to Tuber's Two-Step, one of those little animation-festival pieces, from the days before Pixar, with colored polygons bouncing weightlessly around the screen.

I remember when screen savers were actually necessary and After Dark's Satori module, with its rippling colors, was just the most engrossing thing ever. I would have that experience where you come away from the computer screen and look at the world and see the computer in it. For a while during that period I couldn't look at sunsets; they paled by comparison.

I came away from the movies today and couldn't believe in the world around me. Certainly the linoleum could be simulated -- tiling patterns, even in perspective is easy. The play of the lamplight, the water dripping from the tap; even the streaked and blobby paint on my apartment doorjamb, uneven though it is, could be unreal. For a second there my own hand seemed to stretch before me like a gun in first-person perspective. Maybe we're already in the Matrix.

Estrellita brought me back to my senses, her splotched back the only real thing in the world as she did a figure-eight around my ankles. There is no faking the movement of an animal broken in some unrecorded, unexplained moment of history. The wobble of her tits and her uncertain legs. No animator would bother with the awkward shift of her weight as she swivels to look me in the eye; it's not good acting. And that fur... they can animate down to individual hairs now, but not those ones. Her pattern changes daily.

I was able to recall most of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that a curmudgeonly high school teacher insisted we memorize in defiance of evidence that in short order none of us would ever need to rely on our own frail memories again:

Glory be to God for pied things,
For skies as couple-color as a brinded cow,
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls, finches' wings,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,
All things fickle, freckled...
...adazzle, dim,
He fathers forth whose...
Praise him.