Life Before the Internet
I recall writing checks in my spidery crawl.
The TV then was a humming spaceship
with glowing innards that deep-scanned
all who glued their flickering, bug-eyed minds to it;
it abducted whole families at a time.
That same television
materialized microwaves as heavy as lead ingots
replacing bread bins
while ushering in decades of TV dinners.
“Radio Shack’ and “Block Busters’ were thriving
The short brutal war between Betamax and VHS
was long over.
Cars had not yet learned to speak.
Many men thought that learning to type
would be a waste of their valuable time.
We had to go out to get stuff.
Fish in fish tanks
were considered adult entertainment.
The long married kept their sex life
hid like a ‘sixteen millimeter’ movie
projected onto the back of their brains.
Camera film had to be sent away
to be often irretrievably lost.
The food pyramid was thought to be
the right way up – we were already fat-heads.
We trusted the nightly news.
Then the Net captured us,
we found we had many hidden talents,
some even discovered how to wriggle their ears
and both at the same time!
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2023
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