A Day in the Life of Chaos

There are moments when society colludes to make you feel old.   It happens in an amalgamation of statements, occurrences and overt acts.   Those that commit the injustice really don’t even know that they are doing it, it just happens.   I am sure when I was younger I did the same.   The Atlantic magazine recently published a story about a couple attempting to live without WiFi, internet and cellular telephones.  They permitted the use of a land line.   The New York Times published an article about the anomaly of a quiet zone in West Virginia where because of proximity to a radio telescope, there is no cellular service and the consequential impact this has on life. I seem to recall some TV show where people had to live as they did in the 1800s.  Honestly I don’t understand this concept, if they wanted that they should have just gone and filmed the Amish.  Incidentally I don’t think the show lasted that long.  I suppose it was just not that exciting. The point is that from the perspec

As you grow older it seems like events increasingly mark age.   They are like a highlighter illuminating a moment of our existence.   Today I opened an article that explained to me that on this day in 1967 the Beatles released Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.   I would have been 20 days old.   If you tried to explain this album to young people today it would be as mythical as the Iliad and the Odyssey.   Hell even people of my generation are often disconnected, post Beatle remnants.   Technology is the most vulnerable to rapid change and a lack of understanding from one generation to the next.  Often words can become meaningless or non-sensical in just twenty years time.  I often make a joke when I hear a phone ringing that increasingly no one understands.  The ring sounds and I yell “I’ll get it.”  In the era of cellular telephones attached to everyone of this who understands.  When I was young we had a single telephone in the house we all shared.  When a phone call came in some

Every day I seem to discover that I am falling further and further behind.  The thing is I wasn't always this way.  I used to be the guy that was always on the cutting edge.  People came to me for tech advice.  Patrick, what should I buy?  How do I fix this, what do I do about that?  Somewhere along the wandering path our existence the modern world passed me by.  It is difficult to put my finger on the exact moment but I suspect it occurred somewhere around the advent of cell phones.  I was okay when they were simple bricks but as the networks and functions became more complex my mind started to let go.  It is hard to understand why.  I mean function has actually become more simple.  I was the guy who sat with my DOS PC trying to reconfigure the RAM to allow me to play some game that had unique requirements.  I confronted the scary  DOS prompt and at times won and mostly failed.  People still come to me from time to time to solve a computer issue but I usually try to feign ign

Well today we enter the blogging world. No, there are no followers, it is simply an attempt to be. Isn't that what we all want anyway? Just to be. There is something beautiful about the written word that is often lost in the text based communication of this age. We have been on a slippery slope traveling downward at an ever increasing rate. Sometimes from a distance I look at the life of my 93 year old grandmother. I think of the change she has seen in America and the world. The changes seem so dramatic, so historic. She has witnessed world wars and amazing developments in technology. Her living memory touches the memory of those who knew the nation when it was still young. When I compare her life to my own I feel as if I am standing still. While this may be the result of my myopic vision perhaps one of the biggest changes of my life, a little less than half of hers, is the written word itself. When I was young we wrote letters. We waited for a response to come. I re