What do I have in common with Kansas City?

We have both gone as fer as we can go. Will Parker was amazed by bell telephones, radiators, gas buggies and indoor privees. I am appalled by technology’s onward march.

 I have been gone for a while. My absence began with a computer malfunction. Not as if I didn’t foresee it. But instead of safeguarding the contents of the computer—I took a photograph of it for another blog I was working on.

I lost all the entries in my address book—though of course I had a photograph of the computer containing them! We bought not one but two new computers and moved on to other problems. My good and effective scanner wouldn’t work with the Mac version 10.6.8 nor apparently would our Dymo labeler. The scanner that came with the new ink jet printer is nasty. Then the laser jet had a problem. Then we got WiFi . . . I could have written several essays about the whole business, but then I realized Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had already documented the progression of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Finally I was reading an essay by Nora Ephron, a much better writer than I could dream of being. In her essay, I Remember Nothing, she writes,

I was curious about technology. I became a champion of e-mails and blogs—I found them romantic; I even made movies about them. But now I believe that almost anything new has been put on earth in order to make me feel bad about my dwindling memory, and I’ve erected a wall to protect myself from most of it.

She goes on to state that she has “resigned myself to my computer dealing with its aches and pains of old age, much as I am resigning myself to my own.”

I too am resigned and as I resume this blog I repeat what I wrote on July 28, 2005, “hold on to something, it's going to be a bumpy ride!”