CD music and obsolete media

Yesterday I did a 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. media retreat. I didn't text, or go on my laptop to scroll the e-mail news, or write in my blog or watch a streaming video series. It was a remarkable experience. I am 80 years old and I am from the land of long ago. My little media retreat yesterday took me right back to the period when we people didn't fill every minute with social media, internet or cell phone stuff. I will call that the "Wide Open Spaces." Now, don't get me wrong, I am no Luddite and I am not off the internet forever - I was an early adopter: I had my first apple powerbook laptop in the 1980's and bought my daughter a MacIntosh Performa when she was about 8. I loved that world.

I think my main disenchantment began to gray the vista about early 2000's with facebook. When my e-mail was distributed to all my old high school classmates due to our 40th reunion 2003, I got assailed by a tsumani of ignorant right wing crap from my old palls living in the Florida Villages and the Southwest with their much younger second wives. They were becming Trumpers. I really didn't want to know and I didn't want my day poisoned with their facebook crap, also, I had a lot of ill will towareds the facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. There was no reason to think his soul had improved from the impulse that founded his brand.

My next big disillusionment came with the replacement of cassettes by cd's. I had read about this trend from a book on Planned Obsolescence Kathleen Fitzpatrick, although the concept dates to the 1930's. The sheer waste of time and materials was appalling to me, yet, I dove right in. When the cd wallets were popular, I put all my cd's into the wallets and created another pile of plastic trash with the former plastic boxes.

Yesterday I chilled out in the "media retreat" suggested by a Woodbury Friends acquaintance. I had one phone call from my sister to give her a ride from the bus to the farm after her work shift.

Instead of spending two hours reading my e-mail news feed and another two hours or so writing my blog, I played my dusty ukelele. Also I got down my old almost forgotten boombox and played a Joni Mitchell cd in celebration of the 50th anniversary of her album BLUE. i set aside a chore for this morning - to gather whatever cd's I still had lying around and see what was there and maybe play some.

This morning I gathered and dusted off about 10 cd wallets, Classic rock, Country and Western, Folk and Bluegrass, Contemporary (Madelyn Peyreux and Corinne Bailey Rae, BonIver and such) and I was struck anew by the waste of it all. Lately I had been wanting to hear various old favorites and I felt trapped in the new world where I don't know how to load up my phone with music so I can plug it into the dash of my car which has no cd player, and my regular radio station 88.5 has been playing a lot of really modern stuff to attract a younger crowd. And I don't mind listening to new rap and pop, but sometimes I feel alienated because I am not driven by youthful lustful longing or angry dissatisfaction and it doesnt' speak to me. I would like to hear my old friends Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Carol King, Etta James. But I can't because I don't know how to load my phone, more work. Speaking of which, my former cell phone, I hesitate to call it 'old' as it was four, stopped taking a charge. The apple people told me the batteries only last 2 to 4 years, so I had to get a new one before I get my hearing aids which connect to the phone.

I looked on amazaon to see if there was a small battery operated cd player I could buy to use in the car, something like the saucer shaped one I used to use in the car on long drives to West Virginia to listen to books, but they don't make them anymore. I found on the shelf with the old boombox, but it doesnt't seem willing to do its job. It reminded me of the scene in The Time Machine, when the adventurere finds the silver discs of the Eloys' civilization but no one knows how to make them talk. but the pretty Eloys wouldn't want to listen anyhow because they live only in the moment probably due to the trauma of realizing on some level that they are going into the meat machine of the Morlocks and it doesn't' matter what they know.

This music experiences rides in on the back of my having divested myself of my vast library of thousands of books collected over a lifetime of avid reading. Box after box after box was hauled to the Free Books Project to be re-distributed to the world at large in the free little libraries and book arks all over Camden. All I have left are a few dozen refugees that got left behind, and one third of my art book collection. In truth I don't really look at books much anymore. First of all, I am losing my vision due to old age and both a cornea disease and cataracts, but still, I don't take them down from the shelf and page them the way I used to. The landscape of my intellectual life has changed so vastly that it is unrecognizable. I used to subscribe to a dozen magazines from Mother Joones to Science Digest. I could drop a hundred bucks every couple of weeksan at Borders Book STore (now also gone) I read books to soothe my imprisoned soul during my working and parenting years. I vacationed in books and traveled in books and solved my emotional problems with books I understood the world through books. That communication is gone.

I moved on too. I paint now and I write this blog. I listen to an audio book at night since I can't see and I prepare myself for the end. But it makes me sad and disgruntled to think of the swindle and the waste engendered by this constantly shifting media storage - all those computer discs with my writinggs -eventually thrown away - all those little video cassettes of my family life thrown away because they were on a camera format that needed a caddy to play on a vcr capable tv screen which of course, no longer existed. Mountains of plastic and monumental amounts of time and effort just lost. Well, I have vented and now I need to re-direct. We all know that if you look back, you run the risk of turning into a pillar of salt. As my brother often said "It is what it is." As I often say "Things turn out for the best if you make the best of the way things turned out." Both of those statements are problematic in logic terms but I don't care. They are life philosophies that fit. By the way, speaking of e-mail news feeds, remember the newspaper? REmember the plethora of cartoons depicting dad at the kitchen table reading the morning paper? Now I am reminded of The Book Loft in Mullica Hill, my all time favorite second hand book stoe in a big two story barn on the main street of Mullica Hill. I loved that place adn I can still summon up the fragrance of the old dusty books. The periodicals room was a treasure trove of ordinary living captured in Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, House and Gardens and a hundred other magazine titles thate wnt back nearly a hundred years. Gone. I have no idea what they did with the magazines and the books.

If I have made you sad too, I apologize. It's time for lunch - a tomato sandwich with a New Jersey tomato, a gift from my sister from Platt's farm where she lives. We still have a few farms in the Garden State though our crops now are housing developments.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com