Okay. It’s Happened To Me.

This one goes out to the kids.

In another month or so, I’ll be 39 years old. Every so often I have to keep reminding myself that this is 2010 – as in, TWO THOUSAND TEN, as in, monolith-blows-up-Jupiter 2010, as in, well holy hell. You just wake up one day and realize that you haven’t been keeping up with things. And that, quite frankly, there’s just too much shit to be keeping up with, ON TOP of all the normal day-to-day shit that the average adult has to remember, comprehend, think about, intentionally ignore, fret over and just generally gnaw on.

As that wise sage Grandpa Simpson once said: “I used to be with it. But then, they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s ‘it’ seems scary and weird. IT’LL HAPPEN TO YOU!”

When I was a kid, microcomputers were just hitting the market. They called them “microcomputers” because “computers” were big clunky things that lived in refrigerated rooms and cost about the same as ten Ivy League educations. “Microcomputers” (or “home computers”) were basically big programmable calculators. But they were cool. I was an Atari kid, but back then everyone you knew was an Atari or a Commodore or an Apple.

And tie this one on, kids: there was no Internet. These computers could talk to each other – you could transfer files back and forth, talk to each other, etc. – but you were doing it over the phone line with a 300bps modem that, compared to today, was about as fast as doing it via carrier pigeon. The difference was, the carrier pigeon didn’t up and die every time someone else called the house and you forgot to turn off call waiting. A 300bps modem connection did.

Many of our parents were flummoxed by the whole modern computing concept, and a great many of them just refused to have anything to do with it. And us kids, I must say, were generally patronizing about it. Learning BASIC wasn’t that hard for goodness sake. I had a typing speed of around 80wpm by the time I was sixteen.. these computer things were cool and weren’t that difficult to learn, so why the hate? Embrace your technological future, Mom and Dad. It won’t bite.

Like I said, patronizing. Snotty even. That’s just how a teenager is, and I sure was no exception.

So fast forward twenty-five years. Wife and I are in a local Sprint store in January and we’re buying husband a Palm Pre smartphone. She’d been playing with hers for about a month and I’d just fallen in love with it. See, I was basically a Nokia man – I just want a phone, I’d say, not an MP3 player and a video player and book reader and a web browser and a camera and all that other crap but an actual working phone. And as fiercely as my mother used to fight the incursion of home computers, I insisted that I’d keep my little candybar cell phone until it was pried from my cold dead fingers.

Unfortunately, a good friend of ours was heavily involved with designing the Pre, and we’d been talking about buying one for a while, and the opportunity came around Christmas to buy one for Kristi. And you know what? Pretty freakin’ cool. Touchscreens. Full color, high resolution web browser. And God help me, right away I found myself digging on the MP3 player. And that’s okay! Keeping up with the tech curve! Still with it!

And then one day I’m surfing around and I see this photo:

It’s from Asus, their Eee Keyboard. The whole computer is housed in that keyboard. Whole thing. That thing on the right? Touchscreen control. Built in Wifi, Flash-based solid state storage, designed to work with HDTVs as a display. It’ll hit the market this summer at $600.

Then there’s the iPad, and the half dozen of other touch tablets ready to hit the market. And the new generations of smartphones. And motion-based gesture controllers. In another two years, mobile computing will be an entirely new world, as different and as powerful as that first leap into home computing in the 1980s. And you know what? I’m not with it anymore, and that’s a damned sobering thought.

Don’t get me wrong. I like cool toys.. and the toys, they are indeed about to be way cool. But I don’t have time to keep track of it all, and I’m accepting that soon now I’ll be forever behind the expanding curve. And all you kids will be like, hey old man, you’re still typing? Get with it: everyone’s neuronetworked with gesture-based bioaugmentation now. Stop bitching, you old fart – technology is easy and you need to get with it and stop holding the rest of us back.

Sigh. Look. When I was a kid, phones had cords and touchscreens were something on TV that would only come along in 400 years, on board fictional Federation flagships. You kids don’t know nothin’. Give it twenty years and it’ll happen to you. It will. Just watch.

Now get the hell off my lawn, and no, you’re not getting your ball back.