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Pre-Millennium Meditations

by Richard G. Beyer - December, 2000

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(In Which He Strives To Emulate An Intellectual

Posture & Comes Off Sounding Like Andy Rooney)

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So I'm sitting here at this addictive little screen, realizing that I am 59+, 100 pounds overweight, not getting ANY smarter, never getting any exercise, thrilled because my wife has found me some red pantyhose at the store today as I've agreed to play MRS. Santa Claus for the office Christmas Party, and now I'm downloading Aphrodisiac Fish Food from a web site to feed to a virtual goldfish that I’ve adopted online so it will react warmly and blow little fishy kisses to me... and I think to myself… "Is this a life?"

Someday when it's all over, do Web Potatoes actually die, or do we just go into a state of "numlock," sitting at the computer waiting for someone to eventually notice that we have gone "off-line?"

I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the eventual outcome of life in Cyberville. (It was Collierville when we moved here; I think if we researched it a little deeper we might find it used to be... Stepford?)

Total escapism may have its place, but I'm not sure I want to live there. Or, as my old friend Carl Morton used to say, "It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to die there." And is email really communication? Well there’s a topic to start a millennium.

Back to Carl Morton… he had a poet’s soul and the writing talent to go with it. His illuminations in two memorable volumes were deep and meaningful. Yet he spent his working life in a hard hat, pushing progress on construction sites and standing toe to toe with union leaders to hammer out contracts with sheet metal workers.

Carl had more questions than answers, but they were all our questions and that made his poetry universal. He wrote about desire and regret, about the confounding wonders of modern existence and about his role as a hard-nosed businessman who spent too much of his life penning “memos to oblivion.” I can only guess what he would have had to say about email.

I always thought that by the time I was 60 I would finally have a few answers, but lately, like Carl Morton, all I seem to have is more questions. Of course all the ultimate answers may be found somewhere out there in Cyberspace, but I'm not really sure that the end will justify the means. And yet here I sit mouse in hand, at the beginning of the last year of the Millennium, sending and receiving, surfing and emailing and wondering if downloading can somehow make us upstanding.

And I’m really worried about those red pantyhose and keeping the fish happy and what it all means, so I guess I’ll just email someone and take my mind off all of life’s burdens. Maybe it is a life after all, but it is not exactly the one that I had expected… or maybe I’ve been spammed by the Cosmos and I just haven’t downloaded the message yet.

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(Comments on these perturbations will be accepted and assimilated with gratitude and constructive suspicion.) Have a correct day - RGB

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Richard & Carolyn Beyer's East Africa Homepage

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