Technology is melting my brain.

When I was a kid- oh snap! This already sounds bad, the way we entertained ourselves was largely dependent on the type of weather we were having. If the weather complied and the sun was out and doing its job the sky was the limit. Fishing, hiking, bike riding, crawdad hunting, or perhaps a rousing game of army- or cowboys and Indians. Oh to be a child! But if it was raining, we were basically screwed. Soon after mum got wind of our antics she’d decided that cowboys and Indians, or playing army was making us way too violent so she would instruct us to find other ways to amuse ourselves. Well there was only so much entertainment that the technology of the time would afford a ten year old kid with the attention span of a rock. Listen to the transistor radio, or watch television that only had three channels that had decent reception.




Somehow, somewhere, I must have been not paying attention, or maybe its something else entirely that is the problem. See the older I get, the easier that it seems it is for shit to sneak up on me. The first time that I saw someone walking down the street yakking on the phone I was like; “Whoa! What in the heck is that?” I would always get that same look, like I had some sort of ugly growth protruding from my forehead.
“It’s a cellular phone man! I can’t talk now, I only have a half an hour of battery life!”
so basically there were these strange looking people walking around talking into these things that looked like bricks, that cost (In 1984) around $2500 to $3000 and in some cases even more. And I’ll never forget the advent of video games. It seemed like I was just getting used to playing Pong on the television, and the next thing I know people are raving about this thing called; “The NES” the Nintendo Entertainment System.




The first computer that I ever saw was something that someone told me was a Commodore 64, with 64 kilobytes of random access memory and standard with micro soft basic, it was top of the line. It wasn’t until somewhere around the time that the compact disc was being force fed to the masses, that I firmly slammed both feet on the brakes. Wait-a-minute! What happened to the cassette tape? Where are my LP’s? what ever happened to 8 track tapes? What? record players are for old folks? I drug my feet, for the longest time, slowly as all of my friends one at a time moved like zombies towards the warm glow of the computer screens, video games and the compact disc players. I resisted. I resisted that is until it became harder to find the most important thing in the world to me on the medium of my choosing, a lot of the music that I was listening to wasn’t available on cassette or LP’s. the bastards had me painted into a corner. If I wanted the tunes, it was time to pay the dealer, which meant I had to man up and buy a compact disc player.


From that point on, I held up rather well. I held out for the tried and true in every aspect of my life, like a desperate man Jockeying for position around the last life boat aboard the Titanic just before it kissed the ocean floor, I clung whole hog to the comfortable and the familiar. and then something quite unexpected happened, I started to watch a cable network called: “Tech TV.” I quickly became hooked on it, and in late 2004 I bought the computer that I still own. And in the short time span between then and now, I have watched many times in horror as technology continues to move and progress at astonishing speeds.What was state of the art yesterday has become a dinosaur practically overnight. It changes so fast- in fact, that all of the slick little techno gadgets that we buy today are practically obsolete by the time that we get the frackin box open. It makes one wonder what computer designers will come up with next. Voice activated computers? Thought activated computers? I swear the technology is changing so fast, any day now I expect to find myself standing on the sidewalk behind some nitwit that is bent over trying to receive a fax through his butt. Sometimes Technology makes me want to pull my hair out.




Anthony Timmons- 2011