"There's a piece of me in that machine; and a piece of it in me" - that crazy guy from Tobe Hooper's The Mangler.I've read how many authors of the 40s-60s were deadset against technology. Words like "dehumanizing" and such often were used to describe it. I think some of that was just a bittersweet nostalgia - bitter about the present and sweet on the past. But I wonder sometimes if they were truly onto something. The Buggles THE AGE OF PLASTIC, according to an Amazon customer review, contained a song about how technology stifles creativity. I don't really know if that's true, since even preppy schoolboy rockers Genesis were largely appreciated by people who chose to use illegal drugs. It's hard to say if rock as we knew it from 1965-1979 would have even happened had the young folk not succumbed to every bad habit their parents tried to protect them from. So, yeah, Taking Back Sunday and Nickelback aren't re-inventing the wheel. Nobody except people who are stuck in a relatively small area of music history are demanding they even try to re-invent the wheel. People don't want spacey headtrips being played on the radio. Stuff like that causes one to ignore everything around them, which is counterproductive if one is trying to shop and is downright hazerdous when one is driving. Emotional powerpunches like "Livin' On A Prayer" by Bon Jovi or "Someday" by Nickelback are about as creative as music needs to be for most people. You can shop to the beat of the song once you've heard it a couple times and are familiar with its rhythm and enough of the lyrics to sing along with (part of/most of) the chorus...and driving, that just depends on how sucky of a driver you are. I don't have a driver's license bc I'd have to have the radio OFF to keep from ramming into somebody and even then I might get lost in my thoughts and do that anyway.
And I concur with my Grandma Della and her dearly departed sister my Great Aunt Marie that the days of yore were no walk in the park. Labor was indeed more difficult. But, as they say, you reap what you sew. What benefits does one reap just sitting at a chair all day under fake light? Working the fields you easily see the benefits of your labor, even if it indeed becomes nearly impossible to continue as one gets in their typical old age. That's where the idea of retirement came from, I'd imagine. Sitting at a desk all day, what's the point of retirement? Does one get too old to sit on their ass and push buttons? Of course, everyone has family or at the very least (as would be in my case, if I had a job to retire from at any point...) hobbies to enjoy a larger qty of. But the truth is if you have kids or a wife, they need you now AND later. If they can survive you out of the picture 8-12 hrs daily these days, they can probably get along just fine later. Kids grow up and the less they see of their parent(s), the more they don't care. Making up for lost time doesn't happen with children; despite whatever stigma they've earned in your eyes, they're not children by the time you retire. Unless you pave your own way to retirement and get out of the workforce by the age of 35 or something...and if you had your kids when you were early-mid 20s, they're already drifting away from you by the time you're 35-40. Kids at the age of 14 are just starting to "get real" in respect to life and what it's "all about". They're developing and discovering aptitude and trying to figure out their role in the world. It's a confusing time for them and you bugging them demanding to make up for time you didn't spend with them when they were a baby and/or toddler is a distraction they don't need. I was 17 when my Mom converted to Christianity and it took over 10 years for me to get over the sudden change in rhetoric I was hearing in her. The ideas of individuality and personal freedom of expression and supposedly sharp observations of hypocrisy being the Christian way, etc. etc., was suddenly replaced by Bible quotes, talk of forgiveness and how freedom of personal expression had limits and suddenly those limits were not the point in which logic fell short but rather the point in which it became sinful. And then the household in which just about nobody ever visited became almost a zoo of people. Visitors were stopping by left and right it seemed. I was very uncomfortable with all the change that was going on and one of the worst things about it all was that it wasn't bad change and it actually made perfect sense. However, I couldn't stand the idea that I was being led into it. I always thought of myself as being rather bright, albeit staggeringly uneducated because of how behind I got in school by not sitting down and listening like a good little boy. My sister was doing long division in 4th grade. I didn't know what division was until at least 5th grade and the formula for triple digit division I could not wrap my head around well enough to execute until 8th grade and in 9th grade I had to re-learn it because I had forgotten over the summer break. Even in high school despite my ability to remember a great deal of what the teacher had lectured without writing and/or going over any notes, I still got Cs and Ds on tests in history class because they insisted I needed to learn geography as if I needed to know how to navigate the Earth in order to understand the events and conditions that led to those events...seems like since aviation practice/skill is not high school, i.e.: general knowledge, material, but they thought it would be very important to have the globe memorized just in case aviation became an interest to 4 or 5 of the 400 students at my high school, they could sneak that into Earth Science. Because I admit it's a valid theory that what happens in different parts of the world at various points in time is effected by the climate. But one needs to understand how the climate effects the people within it, and that I did not learn in any of the three science classes I took once I got out of baby school aka Seriously Emotionally Disturbed (SED) class(es), which I had to ride on a bus for over an hour to get to because the school was located in the boonies and the students that went to it lived wherever they damn well felt like, which is all good and well since the citizens of the town that held the school were all farmers and the landlords didn't want crazy kids' parents living there just for convenience..."this isn't the WalMart drive thru serving Burger King anywayUwantit, ya know. This is a land of hard working people and this community takes pride in what we do! Your petty problems are just that - PETTY! Go away and quit bugging me and my colleagues!" Uh...got way off topic trying to explain why I'd seem like an idiot even though I' m really not, I promise... yeah... Anyway,
But yeah, I would chew on the ideas that my mom would present to me and ultimately I would convince myself that it's "just" a book and it could very well be fiction for all anyone really knows. The more information I was given, the more hard that was to really put stock in and eventually I was torn between pride and stupidity. The hard part was answering anything my mom might ask if she found out I was no longer anti-Christian. She might ask "Have you decided to quit pouting and join us?" or, "Are you a Christian now?" Neither of those I would feel comfortable answering, especially a year ago before I really started reading The Bible. Now I'm doing a Bible Study of this thing called THE STORY, which is a condensed version of The Bible that reads less like a textbook and more like a novel. It's also supposedly easier to read, even though much of it is the NIV slightly re-worded. I still don't know if I'm a Christian. My pastor and my mother talk as if I need to go on a missions trip or volunteer at the Salvation Army. My pastor said "He IS calling you to do something". The part about something isn't so troublesome except for the "is" part, which implies every waking moment of every living day I'm being told by God to do something. And since I spend most of my days and nights either asleep, watching TV, listening to music, or (window)shopping, it would seem to me like I'm not getting the message. And if I were to get the message and act upon it, it would never be over. I'd be spending my entire life on it. So Mission trip or Salvation Army soldier is the only two options I can think of. I'm too thickskinned as some might say to even consider trying my hand at pastor.. Even the Baptist and Church of Christ churches can probably do better than me. If God ever forces my mouth open and pushes words out of it, I might change my mind. And then there's my constant struggle with lust, which I often give into, in my awkward nobody wants me/DIY sort of way...ugh...hopefully Google doesn't censor this...darrg...
But anyway. Just kinda thought it was interesting, the thought that by typing this and shopping on Amazon like I was 1/4(?) of the day that just ended 1 hr 17 mins ago (and counting....) that I am being "eaten", so to speak, by the actions I am choosing. Like the sands of the hourglass...
