The Day It All Changed
In theory, Mercury is no longer Retrograde, and that entry is more than two decades old. Re-reading it, cleaning it up for posterity? The bit about pulling out a phone cord from the wall, brought a great pause in my thinking. I checked the date, a February show in Corpus Christi, 2001, along the Texas Gulf Coast, the Devil’s Elbow.
I have fond coastal memories, decades spent up and down the highway, and from that, time spent fishing, working, playing, and beaches. Lots of beaches. Funny stories, too.
However, the span of less than 25 years, I’ve gone from a laptop with a set of cords, power, phone jack, and wired internet access to a phone that handles more than that old laptop ever could.
The Day It All Changed
There’s a compounding piece, as well, and it was an answer to a trivia question when I asked about something slightly arcane, and the first response was an immediate, “Yeah, I just popped the question into a search engine, and there you have it.”1
I quit the trivia questions after that, the impossible to translate with a computer Latin2 sig file is about all I’ve got left.
“Google doesn’t know everything.”3
Rising cynicism, interconnected worlds, and the more you know? Doesn’t make us any smarter. It was back, then though, that was when the world changed.
I did run trivia questions, more as a way to entertain myself, and that’s long since been supplanted by other outlets.
That does mark, around the time, changes on the horizon, as foretold by the oracle.
I used to carry phone wires to connect through dial-up.
These days? Even AOL doesn’t have dial-up.
