Snail Mail
Snail Mail
Back in the Paleolithic Age I used to write a lot of letters. Mostly to friends. Hard as it is to believe now, I used a pen and notebook, wrote by hand, put a page or two into an envelope, attached a stamp and sent it through the U.S. Mail. A couple of days later and voila, it would arrive at its destination. Later I might even receive a letter in return.
A couple of decades ago my friends stopped writing back, but being a stubborn Anachronist, I persisted. After a few years of sending epistles into a Black Hole, I guess I wearied of being the last yahoo on the planet trying to prop up the U.S. Postal Service with first class mail when everyone else had moved on to e-mail, so I got myself an e-mail account and wrote my letters on a keyboard, hit SEND and voila, instant delivery.
Course my friends had moved on by then to text messaging on their cellphones. Since I didn’t own a cellphone, I just continued my communications on a computer, figuring they could handle both technologies. What I didn’t anticipate was how using two thumbs on a small phone pad would morph communication to truncated misspelled messages the length of their new attention spans. Now, in response to my salutations, I received a garbled often incoherent pecking that apparently has become the Lingua Nueva of the Twitter Age.
I was idling at a fast food joint recently and the kid who brought me my tray of dollar specials said, “Hey man, that’s too cool.” I asked what he was talking about and he pointed at this notebook I’m writing on now and said you don’t see that anymore, you know, people writing stuff down. “Good for you,” he grinned.
Well, I resisted the urge to ask him for his address so I could write him a letter maybe. And anyway, you and I both know he’d never, not in a bazillion nano-seconds, write back. Nevertheless, I hope he moves on from burger flipping, maybe develop an app to organize Tweets into full blown novels. Okay, graphic novels.
Hits: 85
Skeeter, it’s worse than you think. I just read an article on the internet, which explained how writing in cursive is not only dead or nearly dead, but printing letters of the alphabet will soon go the way of the quill and inkpot as well. Voice recognition will make them obsolete, I believe the writer prognosticated. I tried to search for the story to send you a link, but the website must have took their own advice a step further and got rid of the words too, since I can’t find it anywhere.
Just think, soon we will truly live in one world, together, all of us equal, when everyone signs their name “X”.
Aw man, I was hoping you’d send a letter…. Course, by the time I got it from Hawaii by carrier albatross, it definitely woulda been too late. X