Apple faithful: Namaste. Much love. It is five in the morning here in California as I write this. Outside my windows, in the predawn darkness, birds are starting to sing in the garden. The sky is turning gray. I have been up all night, energy coursing through my body. I’m totally electric. I’m vibrating at the frequency of the highest astral plane, thinking about what we are going to unleash upon the world on this day, September 5, 2007 — a date that will live in history. Yes, it is big. It is huge. It is profound. But the words big and huge and profound are not sufficient to describe this event. No words, in fact, can contain the magnitude of today. Seismic? Still not big enough.

It’s not just a video iPod. It’s not just a stumpy Nano. It’s not just the greatest band in the history of the world declaring fealty to King Jobs like Vercingetorix casting himself down before Caesar. (What, you think it’s just a coincidence that Paul McCartney is making a special announcement on BBC 1 at the same time our show begins? Please.) No. It’s more than that. It’s the day, today, when the future of the media industry is revealed, when scales fall from the eyes of the movie companies and TV networks and they realize the trap into which they’ve been led and from which, now, it is too late for them to escape. Alea iacta est, as they say in French. Today is the day when the entire world realizes that the true lord and ruler of the planet resides not in Redmond but in Cupertino. iPhone? A mere distraction. A sideshow meant to appease the movie and TV companies — it’s just a phone, innit? — and draw attention from the truly devastating product that was to come.

Today, history is made. Fifty years from now people will look back and mark this date as the turning point when the shackles of 20th-century media and telephony and film and TV and print were thrown off, shrugged away like so much heavy useless armor. And you, Apple faithful, will tell your grandchildren that you were there to see it. You lined up at the Apple store on Day One, your hands trembling, and purchased this magnificent device and recognized, even then, that what you were touching was the future. You will tell how you were there on the day when freedom — yes! glorious freedom! — burst into the world like sunlight into a darkened cave. Freedom. Say it out loud. Freedom. What a word. What a concept. A new kind of freedom, the kind where you lock yourself into the world of an enlightened despot, the greatest figure of our age, the Walt Disney of the 21st century, and bask in the glory of what I give you. My freedom. My world. My greatness. Multitouch coupled to disk drive coupled to WiFi coupled to Safari coupled to OS X. Imagine it! Dream it! Then dare to do it!

Oops. Gotta go. Breezeann, our house manager, says the smoothies are ready, and the colonic tech is here for my final flush. See you at Moscone. Namaste. Much love. Peace out.

(Photo by Incontinentia Buttox, Vatican News Service.)