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!