Nostalgia

Nostalgia.  When I was younger I  often thought  about how pathetic  old  people were,  being nostalgic about Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, when we had the  Beatles  and Frank Zappa.

Gone, forgotten, and good riddance

Of course, I was aware that life is cyclical, that  everybody gets to that age and that  some day I would be just  as lame as they  were.

I don’t think  I’m quite  there yet, but I look at facebook and  I can  see that a lot of the people  my age sure  the hell are.  I see so many  posts saying “Share if you remember what  this is” along with  some device that you don’t see any more because we don’t need it any more.

Since a lot of my facebook friends are writers, I see a lot of people who are actually nostalgic about typewriters.  Fuck that.

As much as I curse my computer, I’d never want to go back to that.  It’s not just the mess of having to change the  ribbon, the  awkwardness of slipping paper, the having  to use whiteout to correct each  error separately, the lack of spell check meaning if you had doubts about a word you had to  look it up  in a dictionary – which was a book – or the necessity of hitting the  keys with enough  pressure to smack the paper, although all of those things were pains in the ass which I’m happy to see swallowed up by the oblivion of the past.

No, the main drawback was, after you finished writing, what  you were left with were words on paper; your brilliant poem, article, or short story – and to get anybody else to see it, you actually  had to show it to  them physically.  Getting one other person to look at  something was difficult.  Getting hundreds to look at something was damned near impossible.

What we have now is so much better I didn’t even  imagine it at the time.  It is a significant , quantum improvement in my life; not just a collection of physical conveniences but a whole new level of communication.

I feel as if it would  be ungrateful to the  present to be nostalgic about such  a pathetic past.  If people in  the future feel the same about what we have now, my mind boggles at how brilliant that future will have to be.