i hate the modern world

by anonymous

i hate the modern world. i remember the old days, when folks were folks, and things were things, and everything was what it was. the mailman was the mailman. that was what he was. he delivered the mail every day. pop jones ran the general store. it was his store. he owned it and ran it. that was what he did. mrs willett’s dog was mrs willett’s dog. when you walked past mrs willett’s house he barked at you, but he was a good dog and didn’t mean no harm. that was what he was. there were no smart phones. there were no computers. before that, there was no television. and before that, not even any phones at all. and when the first phones came in, there were party lines, so folks could listen in on you. you couldn’t pretend to be somebody you were not. so you just waked past mrs willett’s dog and he barked at you because that was what he did, and you went down to pop jones’s store and you sat on the porch in the summer and beside the stove in the winter and you shot the breeze and what you said was what you said. you were either for mr roosevelt or mr william jennings bryant and that was that, you did not have ten different twitter accounts where you could say ten different things. there was no fifteen minutes of fame. there were kings and queens and presidents and the pope and a few famous writers like mr mark twain or inventors like mr thomas edison or bankers like mr j p morgan and that was it. everybody else was just who they were. they were butchers or bakers or newsboys or cub reporters or organ grinders or organ grinder’s monkeys. and there you had it. and you can go back even further than that and there were just peasants and knights in shining armor and you were one or the other. king richard the lion hearted and joan of arc didn’t have podcasts or twitter accounts. and back even further than that, when people lived in caves. people lived in caves together and listened to the wind howl and the sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths roar, and nobody had any secrets or secret identities then, that was for damn sure. and if a sabre toothed tiger caught you and carried you off, that was that, you did not have a smart phone to dial 911 with. sometimes i think we are all still living n a cave, and the modern world is the tiger carrying the human race off helpless in its mouth. i can say i hate the modern world, but how do i say i hate it? sitting in front of a computer, tapping on a keyboard, with a cup of coffee from starbucks or dunkin donuts beside me, in a centrally heated/air-conditioned room, twelve feet from an elevator that will take me down to a sidewalk where i can take a cab to a pizza parlor where i can get a pizza with anchovies from sweden or pineapple from hawaii or pepperoni from austin texas… of course i do not even have to go out, i can have it delivered … and be watched the whole way by security cameras made in japan, and tracked by a network of electrons covering the earth… and beyond… like a swarm of flies feasting on the body of a dinosaur… i hate the modern world. how about you?