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I was enjoying some James Time Saturday night, reading online manuals and various goo on my laptop (in bed) when I was taken back in time while listening to my cable digital music service.
For some reason, whenever I've had digital music services like those on satellite and cable, I've always gravitated towards the Seventies channel. I think it might be something about hearing seventies songs in relative high quality for the first time was a novelty. Plus there are a lot great songs from that era that I hadn't heard much until I heard them in movies later on in life.
I can't remember the song that jolted me back in time that night, but it was from around the time of Hotel California. The songs I listened to on AM radio over and over again in grade seven. For some reason, grade seven was spent listening to music (and imagining great movies I would one day make with my Super 8 camera.) Puberty had just taken hold and when I wasn't perusing the ladies' underwear section of the Sears catalogue, I was busy listening to music on CJME with Ed "the Rocker" Walker.
Some song on the seventies channel Saturday nigh had me back there in my bedroom in grade seven for a short moment. When I came back to 2006, I realized how long ago 1979 was and how much the world has changed since then.
I don't realize how old I am. And here's the thing: I feel pretty young, like I've just graduated from high school. Here is why: Like everyone else, but perhaps more than many, I've been discovering and learning a lot about new things in this great technical/information age revolution we're going through now. It's hard to feel old when you're learning new things every day and acquiring new powers. In a small way, it's like leaving home for the first time over and over again as I participate in a some new phase of the revolution.
That might seem a stretch but it really does slow the aging process to be a part of new things. The older people are, the less they embrace and use the new technology available to us now, that which seems to evolve on a daily basis. But some elderly people are a part of it: there's that Ask a Geriatric who's famous on YouTube, for example. I often wonder if I'd be able to keep up if I lived until that age. I haven't kept up with web design since I started making web pages ten years ago. I barely know what CSS is.
Maybe I'll fall off the technology gold rush bandwagon one day. Maybe I'll just give up and go live in the woods, away from sitting on a chair, staring at a flickering computer screen all day. Maybe I'll decide that relationships with my friends should be in person, and I'll not care to share my innermost demons with the world. And maybe I'll stop trying to make strangers laugh. I predict, I'll go one way or the other. I'm a man of all or nothing. More 'nothing' than 'all,' but you know what I'm saying.
In grade seven, I was learning how to make films. In high school I learned about computers (then there was a lapse in that area for over ten years as I tried fiercely to avoid spending the rest of my life doing exactly what I'm doing now: sitting on my ass all day), then I learned a little about television production at the cable station in high school, then I went to film school, then came my professional life (always learning new things), and finally there was my leap into the computer age in 1996. I haven't got off my chair since, but it's been a interesting ride.
The world sure has changed since grade seven, it's hard to compare life now to life in 1970s Regina. The commutes are about the same, thank God. And I've changed too. Sears catalogues do nothing for me these days. I suppose they would if I lived in a monastery.
Twenty years ago today, my dad died of cancer. He was buried three days before Christmas. The images of that night in the hospital are vivid. It seems both like a million years ago and pretty much 'last month' recent. The night before, at midnight, I and several of my coworkers were fired from our jobs. The list of atrocities we committed at the Shell Food Store literally consumed a stack of paper the size of a notebook. They had to document everything because we tried to form a union previously and it was still before the Labour Board.
Thursday saw us plotting our revenge and hitting the unemployment offices. When I got to the hospital, I hadn't seen my dad in about three days because of the turmoil. But no one knew he was going to die so soon, he had only been diagnosed with terminal cancer two weeks earlier. Our Anglican minister, now the RCMP Chaplin, gave my father Communion at his bedside and he was in good spirits, even telling the minister that I was in the "oil business" and he spoke of how proud he was of me going to university on my own free will.
In a couple of hours the pain set in and the nurses (my mother worked at the hospital as a nurse and knew them), increased the morphine dose repeatedly. At one point, I was left alone with my father to hold him up, with my arms around him in a bear hug because sitting up eased the pain but he was too drugged to hold himself up. My mother was off talking to nurses, searching for doctors. When they finally drugged him into unconsciousness it became clear he was going to die. I tried to reach my brothers by phone. Bill was going to pick up John and Barb. They were a ball of dysfunction and didn't arrive until an hour or more after Fred died. Some things certainly haven't changed in those 20 years.
The year that followed was very sad but it marked a turning point in my life. I got my act together academically and vowed to finish university in spite of my perpetual D grades.
It strikes me as odd that my 81 year old mother feels young too. I mean for crying out loud, there were dinosaurs roaming the earth when she was born in 1925, weren't there?
I suppose a kid in grade seven today would look at me as a dinosaur. When I was his age, punk music was going mainstream, rap hadn't been invented, and there were about twelve channels on television. Saturday Night Live was a new show, telephones used dials instead of buttons, no one had a computer, there were roller discos in Regina and tiny little busses would pick you up at the end of your bus route and take you right to your front door for an extra dime.
Today, I'm typing my innermost thoughts and hundreds of millions of people have the opportunity to read them at the touch of a button. I have a ten million dollar television production studio that I purchased from somewhere in California and downloaded to my house in Regina in a data stream that lasted about twenty minutes. I can do things with it that owners of ten million dollar TV studios couldn't dream of in 1979. And I can put my own television channel online, with a potential audience of hundreds millions of people from all parts of the world.
On Sunday morning, one of the reporters on This Week was lambasting the editor of Time (sitting across the table from him) for picking "You." as the person of the year. That aging reporter just doesn't get the revolution that is just starting to come of age.
Then again, my mother never "got" rock music. She told me the other night that my 16 year old nephew, her grandson, is in a 'choir' before she corrected herself. It's actually a thrash metal band.
My mom should be on This Week.
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