Blank Lines filled with characters.
I'm talking about the internet. The blank spaces of zeroes and ones, whatever magic lifts the screen up from static to streaming thoughts. Yes, our current culture of communication. How does it make me feel?
The internet is one large label, one that triggers endless reams of memory paper. It feels odd to think of labels as a sort of necessity to creation. Building the box before the object. Organizing the delivery before the meal has even been written on the menu, let alone submitted online absent-mindedly by a hungry person sitting on their couch alone, in socks and a shirt. But my generation was born into internet which led to - need it now, do it now and make it mean everything NOW. Our population is focused on manifesting the white light perched behind a white screen. Hatefully, it feels like the white screen has endless possibilities which we need to squeeze out, quick. Finding that allegedly commonplace "purpose" is a constant hunt for this time of our time. And that person sitting on their couch ordering take out alone in their socks? That's me and you and the world of consumption, a verb we have been trained to perform. Also a box.
In an age where VHS tapes feel like relics from another life, how can we stay in touch with our true selves 5 minutes ago let alone 5 years ago. Sadness always strikes my memory muscles when I think of the joy I had driving with mom and my younger brother to the blockbuster. We were allowed to get one movie each and when you got a new movie you were allowed to get one old movie. Those were the blockbuster rules if you had a card. My brother and I would run to the new movies and rhythmically go through each aisle. They were sliced into categories, one aisle for action, one for comedy, one for horror (I avoided this and trained my brother to do the same). We made sure to pick corresponding movies, maybe one comedy and one action, Ace Ventura and Die Hard. And then we had a wily kind of attitude with the two older movies. We mostly let each other pick what we wanted (this is code for me letting my brother pick what he wanted) but usually it would be old favoties – Clue, Trading Mom, Rookie of the Year. Now, as I think back, I cant remember which were the new movies and which were the old, the aisles shift together and become one long line of stories. A thin line that feels like someone has attempted to erase it but was stoped midway. Thank god.
Growing up in the 90s was a gift, I’ve been told. The money was rolling in according to history – my parents told me later they had to plan and save and work and plan, all I felt was pleasure and the word yes. But, that was the 90s – the word Yes and the word Pleasure. Both of these led to a housing bubble and the eventual crash of our financial system ramped with debt, embezzlement, trickery, and America’s never ending need for that dream wrapped in happiness and dipped in gold success sauce. Also the word “more” was a part of the vocabulary. America was winning on all front in the 90s and it was reaching new peaks of capitalism. Success is America spelled backwards. Or is America just backwards when it thinks of success? Either way, my childhood consisted of swim meets at the country club down the road and up the hill over the trimmed hedges and down some steps toward a gate with a flexible latch; trips to Oshkosh in the summer to shoot off fireworks and be reminded that family is complicated; dedication to school and it’s many horrible social games I lost and won and refereed.
School was a constant, a fixed stage where the play changed each year but the script was the same. Get all the A’s and make all the friends and be the prettiest and be the coolest and make every moment the absolute best it could possibly be. These themes lasted until (what is the date today?) it lasted and I continued to win awards for my performances in grades and, well, the deep seeded core of what all the other stuff sums up to: self-consciousness.
Possibly the core objective and almost the most defined super objective of my life is the self I am and the consciousness with which I am building. The “why am I here” is mirrored with “what am I doing with it” in a forever battle of moods. A battle of impulses to prove one better and more realized in accomplishing the answer than the other. The battles were fierce.
As a kid, I was a lot. I stayed up late into the night watching the wizard of oz while my parents went to sleep, motioning to them that I would turn off the TV when I was done. After surpassing the age of two successfully, I would have tantrums the size of my tears for cringe worthy nothings like my babysitter baking a box of jiffy muffins without my consent (she was not allowed back to the house, I made sure to tell my mother). Moving onto age 6, I remember thinking in pre school how difficult and confusing the word “the” is – is it said “the” with the “e” pronounced like the “ee” at the end of the word “tree” or is it pronounced “the” like the sound of a confused giant “uhh”??? no one explained this and so when I was called on in 5k I chose not to answer but instead said it “th -e” – I had trouble reading for many many years leading my mother to become an expert at hooked on phonics and for me to accept that some teachers don’t understand me.
As I happily made it into elementary school, I shifted from Aiken prep – an old preppy white painted school that had magnolia trees and parents with trust funds. My parents sent me there for the first two years to set me up for some good strong learning bones, you can see I lucked out with my parents. I think the thing I am most thankful for from my two years at Aiken prep – 4k and 5k – was the day at recess I was told I couldn’t beat this boy Skyler in a race. We were in the big kid playground area, this is second to the 4k recess area which was smaller and had little slides and more safe soft areas. We were in the playground surrounding my a chain link fence and full of big metal play areas for real kid playing. All the boys were racing from one side of the playground to the other and I wanted to play. They made fun of me. I said I bet I can beat Schyler, the fastest kid who played lots of soccer, you can picture him. We all started at one side of the chain link fence, our blue and green plaid uniforms dirtied from 25 mins of recess play time and the wood chip ground for which we had to keep testing out the limits of scratching against knee skin. We all lined up and had to start with our hands on the fence and then another kid called out go, I think his name was Russell. Me and Schuyler and chris rogers (my boyfriend at the time) took off. I was in pretty good shape from my swim team days and hours of runny round with dad, my skirt pleats were flying up to my elbows, my hair was down and in a dark green headband, pretty sure my tongue was out, my arms were moving up and down swish and swish, I remember starting out right next to him, his blond hair cut into the classic 1994 bowl cut style, his khaki pants taught from the wind. We were neck and neck and then I realized, I could go a little faster for this last stretch, I could kick it up notch for the last 10 yards maybe it was 3 feet or 1 mile, (we will never know) and then in that moment I dug into the wood chips, and I burst out in front of him and I beat him by a long shot. I stood and breathed 2 times before he touched the chain link fence and looked at me and walked away. He said nothing, no one did, no boy said anything to me. I watched them all walk away and stood alone by the chain link fence and I smiled and thought - now that’s success.
Key stroke back to American success, the box, the abrupt shift from the playground of 1994 to the American playground of the computer and the era of ask jeeves and soon to be AIM messenger. Oh if they knew then what we knew now. If they knew what was going to come from the boxes of 0s. My little 7 year old self knew success in recess and would feel unaltered stagnation sitting in front of a screened box at 32.
One detail of this angelic 90s childhood I always forget - forgetting trauma is another skill of my (every) generation - is when I was maybe 5 or 6 I climbed up on a wall in our drive way that held back dirt and held up a pathway to a closer shot at the basketball ring. I climbed it very confidently and aimed the basketball at the rim which perched perhaps 6 feet from me. I aimed and shot but because my effort to make it was so great, I launched myself into a lack of balance and fell off the wall. I landed on my head, cracked my skull and went into a coma for a day. I remember waking up in a brightly lit room with lots of barbie dolls around me. My parents and some friends from school and my brother and maybe my grandma. I was confused about why I had gotten all the barbie dolls, but happy to have them non the less. When I asked my mom about it recently, she said I was in a coma for a day and the crack just healed. I asked if anything else happened or if there was maybe something else the doctor said about lasting damage. My mom said nope, it just healed.
Healed is a nice word. It mutes the deafening injury to the darkness of our past and gives sound only to the lightness of the naïve present. I hope one day America can both listen with healthy ears to the past and the present, find a playground, pick an old movie instead of a new one, step back from boxes and white lights, and, most emphatically, forgive head injuries.
