every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
the internet
once upon a time not so long ago, I sorta knew about the internet. it was 1994, I think. Lindy and I had had computers since the week before we got married in 1982. my friends who were in on this new craze had had computers since 1976 or thereabouts. I was kinda embarrassed to be getting into personal computers so late. wasn't I a computer professional? oops! I've tangled three years, 1976, 1982, and 1994! so let's get back to the simple story. it's 1994, the year of the Northridge earthquake, but we didn't know that yet. oh man! I remember the trepidation with which I connected everything up, logged in to an internet provider service for the first time, logged onto the internet, and waited. well? wasn't it going to do anything? Lindy had apparently read a little more than I had, she does that, and she'd unlimbered her browser, whatever the hell that was, and found a website, whatever the hell that was, and she was off beginning her new adventure while I still waited for the internet to do something. I hate to admit it, but it's been like that most of the time since then. before very long I'd about half-mastered email and knew a dozen or so URLs that worked reliably and Lindy was building her first website of her own. one year she did our taxes on the internet and the next year, PC Magazine did a survey on six different services that let you do your taxes on the internet. it was a bracing new world! if I typed an URL in wrong, I could find myself lost in the internet space and maybe watching human beings do things I hadn't known were possible. for a few years, it was crazy. but just like what happened to the Old West, pretty soon the timid townsfolk moved out and preachers and bankers came with them, and the internet became the tame, asphalted and sidewalked place we know today. but even the tame internet is a pretty wonderful place. I can read a Brasilian newspaper, listen to music I'd've never heard of before I began exploring, find information on topics I didn't ever know I was interested in, find poems by almost any poet I hear about. people I know work crossword puzzles on the internet, or play interactive games on the internet, trade stocks and bonds on the internet, use internet money. I still plod along, emailing and now texting or Skyping or reading a newspaper written in some place I'll never visit, or reading reading reading poems and about poets, getting gobsmacked by women I hadn't heard of yesterday but will be in big new movies tomorrow, reading about some new kind of math I can't understand, or a game teenagers are playing that I can't see the attraction of or understand the rules for, and listening to music old and new. and every few days Lindy tells me "you really have to learn about ampersandzipanorama" or some other new feature of this magnificent invention, the internet.
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