The Spirograph Generation

[hot_pastrami]

I am part of the Spirograph generation. That means I have highly developed skills in drawing complex, purposeless patterns. As a child I owned an Atari 2600, with cornea-burning pixels the size of pencil erasers, and control paddles that eventually curled the fingers into rigid claw-like appendages (which made playing Spirograph very difficult). But Space Invaders gave me awe-inspiring claw-eye coordination. I also had a Big Loader playset which taught me how to efficiently exhaust a supply D-size batteries with no useful or entertaining purpose.

Nothing ever happened to my generation to make us bitter, and that is why we are bitter. So we cling to our Pez, our synthesized rock music, and the original unadulterated Star Wars trilogy with a superior aire, and fling proverbial rocks into the traffic of society. I have seen my share of horrors... I was there for Crystal Pepsi. I WAS THERE for the Chevy Chase show. I owned a rotary phone, and for a time it was beautiful.

I even remember when the Internet was fresh and new, like an unused fabric softener sheet. Chat rooms were an amusing curiosity before they became minefields full of pedophiles and cybersex junkies. People online really were interesting rather than just being skilled at pretending to be. I remember having an engaging online conversation with a fellow in Brussels about computer technology, and NOT ONCE was the conversation polluted with a colon-dash-panenthase combination to communicate our mood... we used WORDS, damnit! Mysterious acronyms such as "LOL" were beginning to appear, but it was unfashionable to ask what they meant, so untangling an acronym-slinger's rantings was a bit like groping for cheetos in a bucket of pancake syrup until you got a handle on what most of them meant.

Then came e-commerce, and with it the endless tacking of "e-" or "i-" to the beginning of every word that had anything to do with the online world. The Internet became a huge obnoxious shopping mall whose abundance of unnecessary, poorly compressed images laughed in the face of the poor dial-up user. All the while, pornography websites quietly fueled the growth of the world wide web from the dark recesses, while online businesses grew fat from the gravy of blind invenstment dollars.

Now the once-great Internet is wounded from the shrapnel of the infamous dot-com burst. Website owners, still unable to grasp that the web doesn't play well with conventional advertising, fill their sites to the bursting point with animated banners, popup ads, and Flash annoyances. Our inboxes succumb to their wounds as SPAM beats them like an old man beaten with a bicycle chain. The once plentiful sea of free information has become a shallow, murky swamp where most of what one finds is worth it's weight in dead slugs, with the list of exceptions shrinking daily.

My point? I haven't got one. This post is worth it's weight in dead slugs.