By Ronald N. Guy Jr.
Imagine
the innocent hockey puck. It’s held
firmly in a warm hand, unsuspecting of the future it was designed to
endure. The calm ends with an abrupt
slam to a hard, cold surface, followed milliseconds later by a violent beating
from competing weapons. The subsequent
60 minutes are a demolition derby, as the poor little puck is slapped, kicked,
slammed against boards and deflected off metal posts. Some die heroes (souvenirs for fans). Others find the briefest of reprieves – a
soft landing in a comfy net – but even this well-earned rest can prompt a
chorus of displeased boos (an opponent’s goal).
Pondering
the life of a hockey puck of course led to a memory from the 1980s. Remember that anti-drug commercial with the
egg and the frying pan? A blazing hot pan
is shown on the screen while a disembodied voice proclaims, “This is
drugs”. A cracked egg then lands in the
pan and immediately begins to sizzle while the chilling voice from the beyond
declares, “This is your brain on drugs…any questions?”
Forty
years later, I have one. Actually, it’s
a statement. Conferring recently with a dear
friend of similar vintage and trusted source of wisdom, we concluded that our
brains are frying on the daily in a new, well-oiled pan: The consistent
onslaught of information-age stimuli.
First it was email. Then social
media. Then smart phones brought 24/7
connectivity to all things and produced crispy-fried brains – i.e. agitated,
over-stimulated and wounded - worldwide.
Now 30 years in to what is clearly a never-ending adaptation cycle, we
both acknowledged fatigue - our original curiosity and determination to keep
pace with technology being replaced with a palpable dose of “I just don’t give
a damn anymore.”
It is two
days later and I’m typing this piece while watching games in a quad box and
monitoring text messages from other sports degenerates. Glorious?
In some over-indulgent fantastic way, yes. In others this method of modern sports
consumption, which is metaphorical for our daily lives, is in a dimension all
its own. In an effort to be everywhere,
are we really present anywhere? It is a
question best pondered in a dimly lit room and with proper mental lubricants in
play: classic jazz playing, incense wafting though the air and a decent amount
of whisky having been consumed by the conversationalist.
In that
aforementioned discussion with my dear friend and fellow member of Gen-X, we
had none of those ingredients, but we made due with salads, iced tea and the
multi-decade poporri of pop music that was playing in the background. We talked about our unique place in history,
as the last generation that will remember life before the internet and the
first to encounter and wrestle with its impact and evolution – in the
workplace, as parents and across all aspects of society. We cherished our ability to escape it all as
needed; after a tough day at school there were no text messages to fear or
address, there was only the therapeutic solitude of the basketball court in the
backyard. We reminisced about how we
used to consume music – hunting for the latest album, scoring it at a record
shop, listening to it front to back (no skipping), finding the hits and
exploring the deep cuts, learning all the words – and our sympathy for kids today
who are robbed of that magic by the instantaneous, superficial world of digital
downloads. Road trips were another
topic. Truth be told, I wouldn’t trade
the power of GPS, but navigating with a road atlas and a little bit of
directional chaos sure created some epic adventures. Sports were very different too. We felt closer to our teams and our favorite
athletes, even though they were far less accessible; the suggestion being that
a child’s imagination is a better gap-filler than a website, YouTube or a
social media follow.
At the
conclusion of our discussion, we parted ways with a hearty bro-hug, an
appreciation for the emergent circumstances that brought us together, gratitude
for genuine, focused human contact and this definitive conclusion: We grew up
in the best of times.
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