No doubt you’ve heard the expression, “Nibbled to death by ducks.” Perhaps you think it’s kind of cute or funny. Let me tell you: It’s not cute, it’s not funny. Being nibbled to death by ducks is a hideous way to die. Day after day you watch helplessly as, little by little, they nibble away at you. Then all of a sudden — poof! — you’re gone. I honestly think I would rather be ripped apart by sharks or sharp-toothed jackals than to be nibbled to death by ducks.

Why are the ducks doing this to us? Because they hunger for power. They want to rule the world. Their strategy, as simple as it is nefarious, is to enslave us to technology. Thanks to them, we must spend most of our waking hours fiddling with electronic gadgets, trying to figure out how they work, debugging their breakdowns, screaming at them when they refuse to do our bidding. Instead of making our lives easier and richer, they’ve made them more pointless and frustrating. This isn’t life, my friends. Our vital forces are dripping into the gaping maw of oblivion, while they nibble us to death and all we do by way of protest is to giggle, “Hey, cut it out, that tickles.”

And the ducks are winning. Slowly, imperceptibly, we are becoming helpless, passive, obese, trapped like moths in the worldwide web, living in morbid dread of being disconnected, while our minds and bodies atrophy. The ducks torment us by “upgrading” our gadgets, endowing them with superfluous functions and ever-increasing complexities, creating new programs that almost instantly become obsolete. You have to consult an operations manual to figure out how to work an alarm clock and the instructions are written by Peking Ducks. Push the button marked “Help” and you hear a chorus of derisive quacking.

Little Duckie Duddles is watching us, fiendishly contriving ways to drive us mad. He requires us to have secret passwords and security codes to gain access to our own private information. You must change each one of them every two months, lest someone steal your identity. This means hundred of passwords and codes. Someone has even created an “app” to keep track of them.

And while we’re on the subject, I hate the word “app.” I hate the way the ducks have forced us to communicate in idiotic, infantile duck-babble: BuzzFeed, gigabyte, selfie, Google, Twitter, OMG. I feel sorry for today’s young people. They don’t realize that they too are being nibbled to death by ducks while they spend their precious hours, gazing dumbly into “smart” phones as if waiting for some message that will reveal the meaning of existence.

But maybe I’ve got this wrong. Maybe it’s not the ducks, but time itself that’s nibbling away at me. Maybe I’m too old to keep up with the pace of change. Maybe I’m obsolete. Maybe the world is leaving me behind.