sorta forgot about this thing
Sometimes when I’m driving I let my knee take the wheel and pretend I’m Magneto with my arms folded making humming noises that represent the magnetic force moving the hunk of metal I’m inside. I haven’t gotten complete turns down yet but I make major breakthroughs everyday.
It seems that age discrimination is the only pure and last uncorrected prejudice among me you and anyone else willing to not deny human nature. No matter how much you are able to keep that “inner-child” mumbo jumbo alive, when you are old you will not have much in common with your younger counterpart. Go ahead, time-travel. You’ll hate yourself, and yourself will hate you for trying.
Before you argue trust me I know, and have already processed, what you are thinking. “But Will, Grandma Shirley is so ALIVE and filled with purpose.” Yes my son, she is, and if Grandma Shirley could control her bowels well enough and had the back for it she’d shit in the neighbor’s kid’s sand box. It’s in her bones, and it’s in my bones to shovel the shit up, cover it in sugar, and tell her it’s malt-o-meal in sheer spiteful revenge.
No, of course that’s never happened. Mostly because I’ve never owned a sand-box. All of that is entirely beyond the point. The real pinnacle of this discussion doesn’t lie in the inexorable fact that subtle characteristic differences and unexplainable underlying animosity exist between the young and the old, but that society changes at much too quick a rate now-a-days. How can my Grandma Shirley, the portal of life to my portal, be so absurdly different from me that she can hardly relate to a single aspect of my life? The answer is simple, my friends: this, the age of technology. Yeah I didn’t see that coming either.
Cotton gin, Steam engine, interchangeable parts, invention of the factory, invention of the child to work in the factory, choo choo train, light bulb, auto mobile, sliced bread, nuclear bomb, telegram, telephone, television, teletubbies, space ships, satellites, computers, cell phones, THE INTERNET!
Take a breath, and make it a couple of lungs full. Relative to the progression of the human race, all of that really did happen that quickly. Really.
Grasp the past ten years only if the preceding is too much to handle, I know it is for me. The internet, computers and cell phones rule your life. It’s not necessarily a bad thing either. Sure, ring tones on cell phones have a funny way of killing us softly with their song. Those badly adapted versions of Beethoven’s fifth conceived by musically illiterate programmers are sold a buck a pop to, well anyone, which I suppose is exactly the problem. But set aside the nuisances, it’s an amazingly convenient time to live in. And by live in I mean be young in. Dylan said it, “The times they are a’changin.” And now he’s a computer screen smacking, printer kicking, cell phone crushing frustrated old man along with the rest of the new race of technology fearing bastards whom I can never fully understand.
It’s moving, it’s moving very quickly. T.V. shows now talk about past decades like they were different universes. Not to worry geezers, I know I certainly will get mine. All anything needs is time and at this stage in the game, as the future is whizzing by, all I can hope for is a faulty bowl of malt-o-meal instead of a cold nuclear winter none of us have the sweater for.