Why internet?(1)

To know the thoughts of others gives me the courage to know my own…

I knew an old man, many years ago. Of course, that was before he was old, before his face sagged, before his hair fell out. He smiled more often, as if the world were magical, and he were dipped in life’s wondrous mystery. It was before he had discovered coffee, and Cabernet, but after caramel apples.

He had a camera, a box that winked memories with a click, scrolled onto a spool with the turn of a knob by his index finger and his thumb. In those days, as sometimes happens, memories would overlap, leaving a collage of meaning. And as he got older, and more clever, he would not scroll at all, packing the memories, one on top of the other, in the hopes of creating something never seen before, a kind of virtual memory, in time lapse.

There were only 12 memories to each scroll. Each memory was frozen, did not move, a kind of inverse blink. All memories were grayscale, leaving colors to the imagination. Back then there was little confusion about reality. The box could not lie, or be made to lie, at least, for the little boy, except for the overlaps, which were obvious.

In those days, before the Lessons of Roblox, children wandered alone. Before the Fear of Trauma, before iVictim, the child was free to explore the wild.  “Don’t come home until dinner time.” And so he went forth, with his box, in search of blinks to immortalize.

He was not alone.

He would congregate with other children, left to wander alone in the wild. Here were the people in his neighborhood, clustered by age and sex and friendship.

“I have a box!”

And they were fascinated.

“Pick me! Pick me!”

And so he did.

“Let’s play Combat!”

And so they did.

And after 12 clicks, too soon, the scroll would turn no more. The box was put away, the scroll rewound, removed, and sent to be reworked, decoded, inverted.

Sixty years later, the click box long gone, the old man found the blinks. Slowly, gently, he let the memories thaw, soften, and return him to a time of wondrous mystery.

{include the pictures here when I get back} 

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(1) This was today's prompt from Collective Journaling led by Peter Limberg, which I was offered through the Internet Real Life sessions from The Dark Forest Collective on Metalabel.