Thursday, August 6, 2009

Easy Rider

As I write this I'm in a car, cruising along 495, a banged-up bit of pavement that will bring me (traffic willing) to Long Beach. I'm in the passenger seat, typing, surfing the Internet and doing it all without wires. The words, they just cannot be held back!

That I'm utilizing such technological wizardry is the real wonder here, considering that up until a couple of years ago I still had a VCR, a walkman (yes, with cassette tapes), a TV the size of a Kia and home phone with an actual cord. When I first moved to New York back in '94, I lived too close to the Empire State Building and my cordless phone picked up the top-40 station whenever I used it. Conversations had their own built-in background music. I talked with friends and family to Counting Crows, argued with my landlord to Ace of Base and called for pizza to Sheryl Crow. Two weeks after I moved into that apartment I couldn't take it and gave up on wireless telephony entirely. For more than a decade.

Then I married an early adopter--a term for tech-savvy folks who gobble up the latest and greatest technological whiz-bangs like M&Ms. Shortly thereafter, I had all manner of iPods, televisions and wireless gadgets everywhere: phones, computers stereo systems, books. If Captain James T. Kirk were to walk out of my kitchen, touch his communicator and request to be beamed somewhere, I wouldn't even bat an eye, because when you live on the Starship Enterprise, see, these things happen.

There is one thing that all this technology can't do: prevent car sickness...gotta post this thing before I ralph.

1 comment:

  1. I was wondering how you posted this while in a car...I loved the ending! Hope all is well in long beach - xoxo

    ReplyDelete