Love and Loved
I Love:
1. How the keys of the keyboard stand in ranks as soldiers at attention. If I strike them nothing good comes of it. But if I am thoughtful and deal gently with them I may gain access to a treasure of some value.
2. The grit of paper between my fingers and the smell of books.
3. The curve of the common lightbulb. These will be gone soon to be replaced by the new spirally efficient type.
4. Driving a car. The sooner we forfeit this privilege, the better because people are not quick and their judgment is flighty like the birds and the weather.
5. VHS Tapes, Cassette Tapes, CDs, DVDs. The idea of producing music by mechanical action is vulgar in the new order of media and will be shortlived. All art in the near future will be produced without physical action except at the necessary point, the speakers. Eventually, not there either.
6. The physicality of money. (Not money itself, regarding roots of evil and so on). Money will always persist, but soon the record of its possession will not be asserted by the existence of “crass” objects.
7. Newspapers and magazines. You have my point by now.
8. Looking at a computer screen. This will be replaced by special glasses that convey the same image, but do not restrict the viewer to one location. (This continues the motif of the termination of physicality).
9. Holding my hand open in front of my face. It is so obvious! A post with sticks radiating from it. This seems an obvious solution to the problem of how to manipulate the physical world. However, look deeper. How to supply it with nutrients? How to make it nervous and regenerate itself? How to move one part of it and not another? This simplicity is born of unequalled brilliance.
10. The time we live in now, the day before the most powerful technology we have breaks its wrath on our soil. It feels inevitable and nothing will be the same after.
11. Sitcoms from the 1980s and how little they joke about divorce and masturbation.
12. Sitcoms from the 2000s and how much they joke about divorce and masturbation.
13. Feeling smart because I know more about computers than my parents.
14. Knowing the importance and fragility of friendship.
15. Knowing the importance of boundaries: learning to assert them, and recognizing when other people are asserting them.
16. Not caring about the stuff that doesn’t matter, like tripping in front of a girl. That took some time to learn. Nevermind, I still haven’t learned that one. Rest assured ladies, I step as smoothly as ever.
I Loved:
17. Riding my bike up curbs and off curbs. Playing “follow the leader” on my bike.
18. Playing Nintendo till 10 and thinking I had been up late.
19. Later in life, playing Nintendo till 2 and thinking I went to bed early.
20. When I was little and my grandfather gave me a dollar every time he saw me. He said, “A young man has to have some spending money.”
I was four or five.
21. When toy stores used to sell toy guns.
22. Having sleepovers.
23. Being babysat by older women. They were powerful and mysterious and hot. Ah, forbidden love.
24. Feeling smart because I knew more about Nintendo than my parents (the poor fools).
25. Being part of a network of kids made kin because we knew more about video games than our parents,
26. Thinking I could do stuff that MacGyver could do (or I would be able to someday).
27. Believing in the magical notion of “cool”. Now I know that everyone farts, cries, and dies.
28. When adulthood was powerful and mysterious.
Forget that! I here drop my wistful tone and redefine adulthood as powerful and mysterious! Let the world be my neighborhood, and my motorcycle my bike. Let my fortune be my allowance and cookies and pizza be my dinner (as they are). Let my fond remembrances be my mother’s arms around me, and Shakespeare and Seinfeld provide my bedtime stories. Let my former babysitters take me to bed, hopefully demanding no pay.
