Cruising Down Memory Lane
It’s disheartening sometimes to see yourself becoming what I used to call ‘an old fogie’, a poor clod so behind the times he doesn’t know what the newest fad is or what Kim Kardashian said yesterday, someone shuffling along life’s autobahn in slippers befuddled by the traffic whizzing by. Obviously the technology gets a little ahead of us fogies. That’s just something we accept. If we got grandkids around, we let them handle things like downloading music for us. Me, I don’t have grandkids laying around so I’m stuck in my timewarp.
Trends, fashion, innovations — it would be a full time job to keep abreast. The world is accelerating just when I’m slowing down. I got friends who can tell you the name of every actor in every movie that came out in the last six months, what HBO series was cancelled, who John Stewart skewered last night and what gangsta rapper was involved in what ruckus where…. If the Information Age is all this, I’m thinking maybe we should go back to, if not the Dark Ages, maybe the Age of Partially Drawn Shades.
Today I read an article in the Sunday newspaper — and yeah, I read it on newsprint, not on a ‘feed’ (sad, I know) — about museums contemplating a ban on selfie sticks. Now, a few days ago, practically a lifetime in today’s fast paced universe, I came across the nomenclature and found it incomprehensible so I just moved on to another article. Today I saw a picture of one. A stick holding a camera to take a picture of the person holding the stick. I got it. I mean, I got the picture, not the stick. And the point, I’m guessing because I really don’t know, is so the photographer can shoot hisorherself to post on Facebook, which, fogied up again, I’m not on.
What can I say that won’t sound hopelessly geezered? If folks want to walk around snapping pictures of themselves, is it worth my snide commentary? Is it an indictment of society at large or just a normal need to see ourselves on the internet alongside Kim? Us fogies, we’re disappearing, that’s for sure. And I doubt if snapping a selfie off a stick is going to make it happen any less fast. So I’m thinking maybe me and the old lady are going to take a bike ride down the road today instead. Just a sunny two wheel cruise down memory lane where we seem to spend most of our time now.
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