You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The sweeping wave of new technology.
It’s a festering swarm of digital bees stinging my brain. Just when I figure out the latest thing, I am assaulted by another wave of invisible apps and internet advances that renders me even more feckless than the week before.
In the eyes of my teenage son, I’m a technological dinosaur. I am Methusula limping across the digital finish line with an abacus and Jesus Sandals.
I learned this the other night at dinner while I was staring at my smart phone feeling pretty dumb. I was the monkey in 2001 a Space Odyssey. I was hopping around like a primate with too much muscle and not enough contemplative reach. I was scared, unsure as I put my dirty paw on the smooth metallic monolith before me.
I turn away from the iridescent glow of the little monolith in my hand. As in the movie, I too am afraid of the smooth rectangle attached to the magic ether that surrounds us. I look to my snarky ass son, my face filled with the signs of technological inadequacy.
“I thought I filled out my NCAA bracket and saved it to the league,” I said over the roar of 28 screens blasting March Madness in the restaurant. “Arizona is my champion. I want USC to go to the Sweet 16. Here’s the bracket I saved,” I say pointing to the image on the brightly lit screen. “But it says I have ZERO Percent!”
My son rolls his eyes. He is video taping me like I am an exhibit in a museum. He is preserving this moment in history to show generations to come what the monkeys looked like before they touched the monolith and evolved.
“What?” he says stalling for time as he hits send, pushing my fatuous lunacy to Snap Chat where my delusional technological insipidness can be absorbed by all his pimple faced friends for 7 hilarious seconds.
He looks up from his phone, the bright, unnatural light of this new generation filling his eyes. His face wants to break out into a full on laugh, but I can see the muscles in his jaw contracting, holding his smile to a weak smirk. “You filled out a bracket, dad. You didn’t save it to any league. It’s just in the internet.”
“Just in the internet!,” I bellow back. “What the hell is that?”
JUST IN THE INTERNET? Is that even possible? Do I need an Alka-Seltzer? A priest? Someone get me a vomit bucket?
Are my March Madness picks floating in cyber space, lost in the Black Web, trolled by Russians and sexual perverts looking to get their freak on?
“Remember the good old days when you filled out your NCAA bracket on paper?” I said to nobody listening. Pen and paper and scratch marks. It was tangible, something you could hold and hand to your friends. By week three it was crumpled and ripped and frayed, but you held onto it like a $20 dollar bill. A paper bracket? How nostalgic! Remember if you made a mistake and crossed something out and rewrote your pick above the crossed out pick, your bracket looked like a soiled Kleenex shared during cold and flu season.
My son looked at me like a peasant imbecile once looked at Leonardo Davinci with his drawings of flight and metallic fighting machines.
I see the bright unnatural light of the internet illuminating my son’s gaze. The light is incandescent, white, cold. This is the new filter of a new generation. His face says it all. “My father is older than dirt. I’m baby sitting a technological salamander. Darwin was right. Natural selection is inevitable. The weak minded and technologically retarded will die as they crawl out of the swamp.”
I know the look. I had that look once when my dad use to talk to me about reusable razors and instant coffee. What’s old is new again. He was 50 something and I was 18 and the king of the world. Nobody tells me nothing, I once wrongfully thought. I was the king of the world. I was Leonardo DiCaprio riding on the front of a majestic cruise ship sailing across a void of forever. And why not? After all, it was the new age, then. A time of 3 News Network and a fledgling network calling itself the Entertainment Sports Programming Network. 24 hours of badmitton? Will never last, I once mused.
My son stares at me with a reserved smile, and I know what he’s thinking. This old guy is kind of cute. He is feeble minded and doesn’t understand the most basic elements of a sports web site designed by children for children. God I hope I don’t have to wheel him out of here and hold his drool cup for him.
“Poor old man. Born before Google and Twitter and the evil that is Facebook.”
He is lost on a technological current of change like a one winged gnat slathered in butter sauce flying through a den of hungry bats. He surely will be consumed by the digital carnivores that are waiting in the black ether to steal my identity and mass produce 20 visa cards in China.
I hand the boy my cell phone. He is Jesus and I am a decipel. I am hungry for a meal, and I don’t want to learn to fish.
“Fix it!”
At this moment, the world has come full circle.
I once wiped this smug bastard’s little ass.
Now I need him to return the favor.
Fix my god damn bracket! I need more than ZERO god damn percent! I need USC in the Sweet 16, and Arizona to take it all!
He stares at me like the retarded beggar in a muddy Medieval market place. Nobody wants to interact with this disgusting, foul creature that has no purpose on Earth. But there I am all the same, standing on the new millennium off ramp of life, holding my invisible sign that says: HOMELESS NEED TECHNOLOGY.
He reluctantly takes my cell phone. His fingers are like a digital surgeon swiping and tapping and waiting for something called Chicago Pizza WIFI to bathe my cell phone in wonder, splendor and golden light.
In 30 seconds he hands me back the phone. “Here you go. You’re in.”
I look at him like he’s Nostradamus predicting MOM JEANS of the 90’s.
“I’m in?”
“You’re in,” he says like a card shark who has an ace up his sleeve.
“You are a dinosaur dad. You shouldn’t be allowed to carry one of those things,” he says, his tone rich like syrup strained at the wise ass factory.
Just then the waitress comes with the bill.
I smirk at the 50-something old woman.
“Give the bill to Mr. Technology,” I motion. “Let’s see how his phone handles that.”
The waitress lights up. I don’t know a thing about her, but we come from the same generation that predates dirt and downloadable viruses.
She slaps the tab down in front of him with pleasure. She smiles at me with a look of satisfaction that tells me she is the old waitress among a throng of 20 somethings who bathe in the technological light of their iphones every chance they can. Emails and texts and instant messaging and tinder and snap chat and ….
AHHHHHHHH. STOP THE INSANITY.
GET OFF MY LAWN. SOMEONE GET ME AN ABACUS!
I stare at baby Da Vinci. The sagacious calm that filled his face while he opened the secret door to the internet for his dad, suddenly opened under his feet like a trap door that dropped him into the sewage hole that is the bastille.
“Ahhhhhh, you want me to pay this?,” he stammers like a feeble retard in the town square, peasants lobbing rotten melons at his corpulent uselessness.
I laugh out loud grabbing the bill.
I suddenly feel the surge of need, the importance that a Google challenged man of my ilk deserves.
“No I got it.”
Now I’m the one forcing my smile to stay in my jaw, while a slight grin materializes on my bad ass dad face.
Go Zona!
Life’s Crazy™