Happy Birthday, Invention.

In about 12 hours I will have been breathing on the planet for exactly sixty years. No mean feat to make it to the Digital Age from the Age of Aquarius - 6 groovy and happening decades of invention and constant adaptation to technologies that dissolved the gaps between time and space, past and future, and communities and individuals.

Bell Telephone (the precursor of AT&T) had an advertising campaign in 1979 with a jingle that went, “Reach out! Reach out and touch someone !” Ok, of course I see it now.

Yuck. But it sounded totally different back then.

Back then, the bridging of distance to counter loneliness was so powerful a societal and emotional priority that it could be used as the primary marketing focus for the nation’s largest communications company. Isolation could be cured through technology!

Just think - we can gab with Auntie Neuneu for an hour and hear her crazy stories, not just at Thanksgiving, but any time we want! She is so hilarious.

And it did work , that connection - but a tacit invasion of privacy (which is CLEARLY IMPLIED in a modern reading of the slogan) happened along with it. Today, communication is more powerful than ever before, but somewhat out of our control.

They kept their promise though; my phone makes me feel plenty touched, every single day. But I just wouldn’t feel right complaining about it: America is not afraid of innovation.

Of course, now conversations and images share the same device, so we can reach out and touch someone ( yuck ), and if folks are right in front of us we can capture them and put them in our pocket, which sounds just as incredibly creepy. One thing about being an only child of a single parent - you don’t have all that many photos of you together, since one of you has to take the picture.

As a child of the 1960s, image capture was clearly dominated by Kodak™, who produced a dazzling assortment of film cameras but none that had yet been engineered for operation held backward and at extreme arm’s length. Yet and still, there are a few photos of my mother and I - one of her bathing me at one month old, one where she is giving me a bottle, and a cool one where we were flying a little red whirly airplane toy that I ABSOLUTELY LOVED and was EXTREMELY DANGEROUS called the Electromic (sic) Super Flash.

I would GLADLY explain in great detail the magnificence of engineering that this toy represented, but suffice it to say that I loved it and played with it for years and years until it hit something and broke and then I still played with the rather ingenious mechanism that had made it work, though it didn’t fly anymore as much as manically flap about. Anyway, there’s a photo of my mom and I playing with this in a park, which is amazing for a lot of reasons: I almost never played outside as a kid (mostly I was an indoor book nerd, which is why a flying plane toy was so dangerous), there wasn’t really a park near our apartment, and even today, neither of us has any idea who was holding the camera.

But the photo is pretty good - besides our sight-obvious urban charm , it could have been on the front of the box that the little plane came in. The computer, the microwave oven, electric locks on car doors, Velcro™, the ATM, the MRI and cotton candy grapes .

More than half a century of science making life more interesting. I have shared this magnificent time with these miracles, though don’t think I’ve accomplished enough to stand toe to toe with sugar floss fruit .

I believed, as a child, that I would grow up in the world I was born into. But the world grew too, and tv’s got wider and they tore all the malls down and my car, lights, and watch all speak to me now.

I didn’t realize there’d be this much talking to inanimate objects in the future, even though I saw people doing it on Star Trek . New is great.

Improved is fine. I am no Luddite; far from it, I enjoy technology in the form of ever more clever tools.

But I don’t think that everything needs to be improved, or even evolve - say, for instance, the chocolate chip cookie. It’s fine.

I think we’ve got that one. The very first iPod is still a miracle.

It’s the only thing I own that is also in the Museum of Modern Art, and it was announced October 23, 2001 - 25 years ago. It’s an icon of both design and engineering which is now, literally, a museum piece.

Time did not change the object - the object just wasn’t as important as the idea of the object, which did keep evolving and was re-rendered and re-rendered into my current smartphone. I suppose that’s fair.

I mean, I was there too, 25 years ago, but I had the quiet decency to grow and adapt - working really hard to cultivate just the right amount of creases in my face and grey in my beard and loss in my range of motion. That iPod stayed exactly the same.

Ultimately I don’t feel right complaining about technology because my engagement with it is somewhat up to me. I don’t have to call Auntie Neuneu, I still have a film camera to take photos, I can listen to an album on vinyl if I want to, and I can purchase and consume regular grape-flavored grapes.

I’m not scared of more options if I’m free to make a choice. But I am glad that I can take photos with my family, all of us together, with no one left out of the picture.

I’ll do that tomorrow, to commemorate the day, and even dial in my mom on FaceTime to be a part of the moment, and then I will capture the warmth and the happiness of that moment, and put it in my pocket. How touching. the friends one the mom one the (wait for it…) clown and nun one Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe