When I Was a Kid

Having spent the last fifteen minutes screaming the most hateful slurs I can think of at my laptop for not saving properly, I can’t help think of that old Louis CK bit on how everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. And it’s true. Just 20 years ago people had to write on typewriters. They had to actually know what they were writing before they wrote it. They had to spell all their words correctly. They couldn’t cut and paste their sentences. Or delete a shitty metaphor. In fact, if a person made a mistake it meant starting all over, going out to the lumber yard to slice down wood and then applying the necessary chemicals for a new sheet of paper.

            I know all this, and yet as I’m typing now I feel no joy or gratitude toward this machine no matter how hard I will myself to. In fact, in bringing up all the reasons that I should be filled with wonder and gratitude at such a device, I only feel my resentment increasing. It’s like when you’re having a really shitty day, and, seeing your glum look, a person reminds you how lucky you really are, and that there are people starving right now in Africa. If you are like me, you stare at the person with a rage that is even more infuriating because it has been made impotent. For the rest of your day, you hold a grudge against the rudeness of both that person and the continent of Africa for making you feel bad.

            It is true that everything is amazing, but the fashionable luddites miss the greater truth by limiting the scope of their argument to the fraudulant ‘wonders’ of new technology. Quite literally, everything is amazing. To single out modern technology, or the spoiled, current generation is absurd.

            Take the most mundane, every day of things. Your locomotion. Objectively, it is a breathtaking wonder of Blakeian beauty. Your brain fires messages, which are then carried down neural passageways at hundreds of miles an hour, without the slightest bit of conscious effort, and as a result you are given total autonomy and freedom. And yet if you wake up, like me, screaming in shock at the Froggy Night Rintone of your phone alarm and gumbling into consciousness before cursing your aching blown-out knee and stumbling over to the kitchen for a cigarette and a cup of coffee, do you emotionally feel the wonder of the awesome gift that you employing? Of course not. Not even Pollyanna was able to truly feel the weight of locomotion’s gift. Well, until she was crippled, that is.

            The gift of locomotion is just one example of the surrounding wonders that can be broken down into objects of awe and beauty intellectually, but never truly grasped. Such gifts cannot be grasped because they lack context against which to be judged. After all no beauty exists but by contrast. Even the flower, the most poetic image of beauty imaginable, only drew our eye historically because it stood out amidst seas of mundane greenery. If the average field had been a sea of red roses with only a single outstanding leaf, the pages of our 19^th century poets would look very different indeed.

            Once something has been made part of the every day, once it has been relegated to the mundane, it can no longer be an object of our wonder. And from an evolutionary standpoint, why would it be any other way? Can you imagine a world in which people could find happiness and contentment in the majesty of the every-day? Such an idea is absurd. If our prehistoric ancestor’s had been able to find contentment in the every day wonders of the earth’s riches, there would have been never been any reason to evolve beyond a hunter-gatherer society. We would have never risen to dominance as a species. It is in a species’ evolutionary advantage to remain completely miserable, but not quite miserable enough to collectively begin committing suicide. And it is this very aspect of human nature—from the inability to find contentment in a hunter gatherer society, to our inability to stop bitching about airline travel and cellphones—that has forced us to advance as a species, always with the blind hope that if only we could become agricultural, if only we could get that new, better cell phone, then we would be happy.

            But it is not all so hopeless. As stated before, the wonder of the every day can be captured through contrast. Now, I am not advising paralyzing yourself so to finally understand the wonder of locomotion, or emasculating yourself so to feel the weight of urination’s majesty. That would be a bit extreme. All that I advise is that you wait. The contrast of time is the gift of aging. It is worth noting, that all of these diatribes about people not grasping how wonderful they have it, including C.K.’s, come from the vantage of middle age, and begin with “when I was a kid…”. In aging, the every-day of the past creates contrast to the every day of the present and illuminates its beauty just as greenery does for the rose. And I can already feel it setting in on me. Having consciously endured and survived the dark days of the 1990’s I look upon certain things and suddenly wonder sets in. DVDs? You mean you don’t need to rewind? The menu option on my TV? You mean I can cancel my subscription to TV Guide?

            I could use this new understanding and sense of awe at the world in which I live to become a more joyful and understanding person. But I will not do that. Not when there are so many ungrateful kids going around, with their Iphones and Xboxes.

            Those no-good fucking kids.