The age of memories

The creeping fear of age has a way of creeping up on all of us. I just don't have the same sprightly step that I used to have years ago. I'm sure that could be expected. But I really don't know where my life is headed. And the problem is as time continues to disappear, there's less and less left to live.

Yesterday I purchased a lottery ticket for about $50 million. Well, the ticket cost the buck. No real expectation that I would win the thing. But they have that fantastic cliché, "you never know," so every once in a while I allow myself to indulge in my fantasies and I actually pay the dollar. Someplace in my be full thoughts, I consider that maybe there's something patriotic in supporting the lottery. The money goes to build bridges isn't that so?

For a dollar I indulge in a dollars worth of fantasy thought to approximately a minute or two. You know the spiel, what kind of house I would purchase, what country I would live in, what I would do with the remainder of the money. But of course at the end of the day my numbers were not picked and I did not win.

I wasn't upset. I couldn't expect otherwise. If I won $50 million somehow I don't think I'd know what to do with it. Yes, of course I'm ready to try.

We live in a certain dull circle of boredom and inertia, living our own dismal lives of quiet desperation, preparing, no, waiting for the big grand reaper to come and take us away.

I wish I could say that some grandiose events occurred in my life that made my life outstanding. Well, I did get to witness many grandiose events even though I was not really a cause of any of them. Perhaps one of the most significant was that I lived through the computer revolution. I had a brother-in-law that was a computer programmer on the old IBM of the 50s and 60s. The machine was as big as a room and all it would do was read numbers off a punch card.

In 1982 I purchased my first home computer -- a TI-99/4A Texas Instrument home computer. I'm not going to tell you how primitive it was, do a google on it and you'll see for yourself.

Today I sit by a computer that is powerful enough to run a nuclear power plant, and yet it sits on my desk with plenty of room to spare.

And I've seen the evolution of dictation software. Today I can speak and all of my words are transcribed. Or videotaped. Except we don't use tape anymore.