Here
we go again. A countdown of sorts to the end of summer, although if one sticks
his or her respective head outside it’s liable to get charcoaled. Or parboiled.
Or fricasseed. Or all three.
OK,
that’s an exaggeration, but for some reason the thermometer still seems to be
stuck in the mid-nineties and I’m getting the urge to take a trip to Point
Barrow for vacation.
Actually,
what I mean by the end of summer...is the end of summer vacation.
We’re
approaching one my two favorite days related to school when I was young: the
first day back (the other, of course, being the last day). Accordingly, the
back-to-school sales are upon us.
It hit me last week that we were past the
middle of July when I went to the store and couldn’t help but trip over stuff for back-to-school blocking the aisles and people
scrambling to buy the aforesaid stuff
It makes me think of when
the weatherman is saying a big storm is on the way, so everybody runs to the
store to stock up on milk and bread (including yours truly, even though in the
end the bread gets moldy and the milk goes bad before we use it all).
At
any rate, the shelves are packed with vast quantities of notebooks, binders and
related implements of academia. Funny though, I haven’t found an abacus on sale
at Walmart yet.
As if it hasn’t been bandied about
enough, I keep reading discourses and little factoids about new and modern ways
of doing things and technological advances that has given us an abundance of
labor saving devices and short cuts.
There
was once a time when all you needed was a Big Chief pad and a big fat pencil,
but that was the days of black-and-white television and longhand penmanship.
I was going to
insert here my customary prattling on about e-tablets and smart devices. This
year I’m giving in and accepting the future. There’s no stopping high tech, but
it doesn’t seem all that long ago – you know, back when the Counting Crows were
a thing – that a tablet was something you wrote on with lined paper that you
could tear out and hand in. I’ve said this before, but today when you say
“tablet” you might mean something entirely different; as in I-pad, Android,
Kindle, Google-something and so forth.
All
that’s well and good, but isn’t it amazing that we entered the nuclear age with
not much more than a slide rule?
Anyway, all this high-tech stuff can be
hard to keep up with, and every now and then I hear people say things should
just slow down a bit. Kind of, but not really, like the rabble rouser in H.G.
Wells’ 1936 movie Things to Come who preaches to the masses (on an enormous
1936 version of a flat screen TV, mind you), “What is the good of all this
progress? The object of life is happy living.”
He says, “Progress is not living, it’s
only the preparation for living.”
Then, he and a throng of other Luddites
march out to storm the launching site of a rocket that will take men into outer
space. So they fight and shoot guns and what-not but in the end the rocket is
zooming off to the moon.
By the way, in the future everyone will
be wearing huge metallic shoulder pads. And capes.
I f you think about it, based on the
brisk business of the Apples and Androids and flat screen TVs, I’d say we love
progress in the real world.
While
you’re out shopping take note of the coolest back-to-school items this year: an
anti-theft sandwich bag (zip-lock imprinted with fake green mold), a word-combination
lock where you have to spell a word to unlock it, a tape dispenser that looks
like a cassette tape , a thumb drive that looks like a human thumb and a design
it yourself calculator.
For
the college bound there are back-to-school smart phones, back-to-school ear
buds, back-to-school Bluetooth speakers, back-to-school game consoles and on
and on. All those things to distract the proverbial little Johnny from studying.
Can
I interject “in my day” here? Back in school, too many decades ago, the only
things I had to distract me were...let's see...a record player, a transistor
radio, board games, a dial telephone and, oh yes, a black and white television.
OK,
I guess it's kind of the same. When you're a teen and want to be distracted,
nature finds a way. So when you're doing the back-to-school shopping thing,
remember that times have changed but kids have not.
Same
with the weather.
I’m
trying to remember last January when I was saying, “I can’t wait for hot
weather.”
I
think I’ve learned my lesson, so don’t expect me to start saying, “I can’t wait
for cold weather.”
