To My Youngers,
I was riding my bike home from work the other day and I saw the strangest sight, that shouldn't have been a strange sight, that I have seen in quite a long while: someone using a telephone booth.
This got me thinking about the steady march of technology and the price of being left behind (which has apparently gone from 10 to 50 cents over the course of the past twenty years...), about who decides what things get to become nostalgic and cool (LPs, cassette tapes, typewriters) and what don't (8-tracks, phone booths, tapered pants), and about what that says about us as a society (does it even say anything at all?).
Looking back it seems pretty senseless, pretty arbitrary, pretty haphazard... so perhaps what it does comment on is our propensity for randomness, for making 'choices' with seemingly little, if any, reason behind them, for discarding things simply because they no longer hold our collective fancy.... but also for holding on to things that should be gone, for attaching worth to inanimate objects and for wanting to hold on to a piece of the past, no matter how impractical, nonsensical or random it may be...
Lead on pay-phone user, lead on.
-E
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