I made a pretty, purplish-red splotch on the carpet in my office when I melted down today.

I was in mid-groove this afternoon as I slid out of my shirt and tie and eased into a battle-scarred pair of jeans and big, floppy sweatshirt, and then saddled up to my computer desk.

Everything was fine here at The Kughen Home for the Mentally Divergent…that is until I logged in and pulled down my email. Now, it is not unusual for me to receive in excess of 100 email messages a day during the week. I accept this as part of the obligatory ball and chain that goes with being a modern Internet user at home and at work.

But today, as I watched the happy little parade of email roll into my equally happy PC, I began to shudder. With hands trembling and my butt sinking deeply into my high-back chair, I rested my face on the keyboard and wondered just what had happened to my once serene, non-technical existence. As I drifted into a fitful sleep, face-down at my computer, I dreamt of those carefree days when I actually talked to folks on the telephone, occasionally visited in person and almost never got more than a few emails a week. Those were happy days.

With a snort, I flopped over into a bale of computer cables beside my desk and ebbed farther away into a deep sleep. Then, I dreamt of running through a flowery field in the sunshine, the birds singing and chirping in the distance as a fair maiden’s lithe voice drifted o’er my head. But as I ran through that utopic field, chasing maidens (all of whom, incidentally, were my wife) and butterflies, I began to notice the world around me begin to change. The change was subtle at first, but it grew more overt with each passing second.

The sun slipped behind menacing clouds, and flowers wilted and dropped their pedals into the yellowing grass. The skies opened and a black rain began to hose this once beautiful field. And as I lay there, cowering in the crabgrass, I heard the rodent-like scurries of an army of little feet tramping my way.

That’s when I saw them.

There were thousands of sickly grimacing little email notes that had sprouted knobby legs and were wielding pitchforks and hot pokers. They scampered my way, whining and chortling, and in general seeming as though they were up to no good.

I know trouble when I see it, so I stumbled to my feet and ran like the wind, the rain biting my face and the sick, dead grass squishing between my toes. I ran and ran and ran.

They ran faster.

And then I heard their battle cries. They screamed like berserkers as they bailed from miniature airplanes that darted overhead. The sky grew dark as millions of miniature emails blotted out the sun and drifted into the dead grass around me.

Panting like a dog, I stumbled once, twice, then careened into the grass landing on my schnoz with a dull thwack. I lay there for a few seconds with blades of grass stuck to my tongue—eyes hazy and wild—too tired to give additional flight.

They then surrounded me, shouting something about Custer and Little Big Horn, but by then I was curled into a ball, shielding my ashen face from their tiny little hot pokers. I saw one of them wing by my head with what appeared to be a rather large meat fork.

I opened my mouth to scream, but was silenced as they rushed to me, their tiny feet digging into my soft, lily-white beer belly and as I tried to bellow again, my mouth was filled with thousands of them and…

With a clatter, I careened away from my desk, knocking over a pile of blank CDs and launching my wireless mouse across the room. Spitting mouthfuls of paper out, I realized that I had swallowed a sizeable portion of a notebook on my desk.

Shaking the sick mass of paper that had formed a spitball the size of a small dog on my tongue, I glanced at my computer screen to see that my inbox of unsorted mail had grown to more than 1,600 individual pieces of mail in just the past month.

Kicking aside the CDs that had been dashed to the floor, I settled back into my chair and saw that some 100 or so email messages had invaded my machine just today and were now marauding about my inbox. I thought I heard one or two of them snicker, but I wasn’t sure.

So after my meltdown, I settled back into a posture that all too familiar these days: Me hunched over the keyboard, illuminated by the flicker of a computer monitor, hunting and pecking at breakneck speed, and answering the daily typhoon of email.

Sometimes I wonder just why it is necessary for any human to communicate that much. I try to remember a simpler time when folks had to use a crude device known as a telephone to talk to folks who weren’t standing in front of them.

I vaguely remember telephones. I believe they’re those funky looking things with buttons antennas. If you’re not sure, walk over to it, shake the dust bunnies away and lift it off the charger and place it to your ear. You should hear an irritating hum. That’s a telephone.

Now if we could just remember how to use the damn things.