When I Was Younger…
When I was younger I would go into the garage, grab my dad’s hammer, and then split rocks.
Each rock was a potential treasure of patterns. I did not dream a potential discovery of fossils, jewels, or riches. I was just fascinated by sparklies. Of course, some rocks had a dull and static composition, but others had a makeup I couldn’t begin to fathom… mostly because my knowledge of rock types didn’t extend farther than ‘rock’.
They were simple and good times and I stopped my rock abusing hobbies when my parents no longer forced me out of the house when my hyper activity got too much for them.
Rocks don’t hold my attention anymore. I could break one and note the weird colours, but it doesn’t bring about the awe and fascination as it once did.
Neither do I have the easy access to hammers.
This isn’t because my wife hides them on me for fear of self-injury. It’s because I’m not one who has a tool inventory worth being envious about.
My dad did. He always had tools. If he comes to my house, he brings tools. I wonder if there is a bit of shame there as he asks me for some complicated tool, like a wrench, and I give him this pained expression as I try to recollect what one looks like.
When I was younger, dad had a room in the basement that was filled with electronic stuff. A makeshift wooden desk lined one wall and on it were a number of those containers with the mini plastic drawers. In each were wires, switches, resistors, transistors, suspenders, all sorts of things I didn’t understand. I wasn’t allowed to go in there, of course. Maybe they feared I would eat one of the smaller devices.
My dad could fix things. I had a small little pacman handheld video game device. It’s difficult to describe if all you are familiar with are Gameboys with their colour pixels and varied gameplay.
For those of you not blessed with a picture because of Facebook imports, it looked like this:
http://colecomuseum.com/collection/coleco-pacman-tabletop-1981.php
What dad did was drill a hole on the side and add a power adapter to it. Now it could work on batteries or it could be plugged in for me to play whenever I liked. I thought my dad could do anything.
When I was younger , batteries were the bane of my existence. As they are today. One of the most brilliant thing I can think of is having a battery inside of a clock so that when the power goes out, the clock doesn’t revert back to the blinking “12:00”.
I hate that blinking “12:00”. The brightness is never noticeable until it starts flashing. And you think to yourself, “I could take the time to decrypt the sequence needed to set the time properly, but it will just revert back to its chinese torture tactics on the next power surge.”
But someone out there must love that blinking 12:00. It’s still default on any device that sports a time. And furthermore, one web developer thought it would be brilliant as an HTML element. I could paste an example, but I don’t wish to risk your ire. Like how I feel towards that Evony ad.
When I was younger I didn’t like commercials. I didn’t like ads. I certainly didn’t like blinking ads. But I can still sing a lot of commercials from when I was younger. Either I have a very good memory, or I watched a lot of TV. And when I watch old commercials on youtube, I get nostalgic and misty eyed. I remember those young and innocent days when all I worried about was the heater vent being on during cold mornings… and easy access to hammers.
One day I’ll return to my hometown. I’ll find my street. I’ll find my house, now belonging to someone else and hopefully not converted into a parking lot.
And maybe I’ll find some rocks. But I won’t split them. Those days are long past. I no longer see the point in it now.
Something like this blog post. Sorry about that.
