Bonanza

Blue Rock Station,
1190 Virginia Ridge Rd.
Philo Ohio 43771 USA
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I have come to realize that I am a product of the '60s. Not the seeking-a-higher-plain-of-consciousness-Haight-Ashbury '60s. Not the wild-abandon-of-Woodstock '60s. Not even the anguish-and-angst-Vietnam-war '60s. No, the building blocks of my psyche consist of far less self-reflective stuff.

No matter how clever we may think we are, we are still largely a product of our environment. I now realize that, as a kid, I drank Tang because the astronauts took it to the moon. I carried my lunch to school in a Beatles Yellow Submarine lunchbox. I knew all the words to that song on the Slinky commercial.

When my dad brought home a brand new color television...our family sat in awe as we watched that branding iron spread bright orange flames across the screen during the opening of Bonanza. The future seemed as bright and as scary as those flames. Nothing could be black and white again.

There were always new and really cool things being developed and sold. Things like the Etch-a-Sketch and skate boards, Polaroid cameras and transistor radios, and stereo record players. They told us these things were developed because of the space program (obviously they couldn't have made it to the moon without a skate board). And of course we believed them.

As a product of the '60s, I came to believe that every new technology and product with a little red blinking light was cool and an advancement for the benefit of humankind. So now I find that I am confronted with the realization that something profound within me has changed. When did all this new stuff cease to be exciting and become just a pain in the gluteus maximus?

Seemingly, every business magazine, management newsletter, or book written by the latest self-appointed expert during the past few years has been shouting from the literary rooftops that the Internet will fundamentally change the way we live. We now have voice mail and e-mail and faxes and cell phones and pagers and beepers and cars that talk to us, and (most importantly of all) toilets that automatically lower the seat if it has been left up by some troglodyte. Now, aside from the toilet seat thing (which I have to admit serves a much needed purpose... preserving marriages the world over), I could just as soon do without this stuff.

There was a time when men, and I'm talking real men here, would stand around the proverbial water cooler, hitch up their belts and brag, "Yeah, (wiping his nose on the back of his hand), I pulled the engine on my Chevy the other night, dropped in a 405 four-barrel. You should hear that puppy purr (mixing metaphors is not a problem for real men)."

"I know what you mean, Earl," the smaller guy would reply. "Last weekend I put a second floor on my house...by myself...in the rain."

Then someone would spit, punctuating the sheer manliness of it all.

Now, that same exchange has been replaced with, "Yeah, (dropping a pile of floppy disks on the table), I get about 350 e-mails a day, 375 if you count meeting notices."

"I know what you mean, Earl. Last weekend I interfaced my fax, voice, and data input functionality...directing them through my cell...to my Palm Pilot...in the rain." Then someone spits. And this is called "progress."

There are times when the vast amounts of sheer nonsense that bombard us can be overwhelming. Through the miracle of technology, we now have more ways to get more bits of useless information to people who really could care less, than ever before.

In a moment of weakness, I am sometimes tempted to marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind. I imagine how different the world would be if those intrepid astronauts from the '60s had had at their disposal the technology that we now take for granted. Then I open an e-mail from a friend that shows a picture of a woman in a bikini gain 300 pounds before my eyes.

What did we do with all our time before we had these technological marvels at our disposal? I miss Bonanza.

written by Jay Warmke - April, 2000

A Technological Bonanza?