The first computer machine I met at 40, when “Internet” word was yet unheard-of. The lunch break was it, I remember like today, at some office, which name I cannot call back to mind. The staff went out forgetting to turn the machine off, which oversight gave me about an hour for sitting before it and clicking the mouse on the “open file” Button that hovered in the monitor, smack-bang in its center.
On every click the monitor would wink and hop, slightly, as if in doubt: to open or not to open? Yet, eventually, kept to where it was. One whole hour and it never got tired, faith!
Then the office employees came back waking me up from the spell of my first intercourse with the wonder of technology.
On leaving the office or, to be more precise, at the first crossing after leaving it, I met Sam, the most advanced cat in town on such matters, and asked him how that frigging file could, by the bye, be opened with the mouse. Well, he looked at me the way as if I asked about how to put your right foot before the left when walking, however, patiently enough explained that, before to click the button, the file you wanna open should be highlighted in the list.
O yeah! Windows 95 was a mighty cool operational system! The present Windows 10 sucks at every point when compared to that…
So, on the grounds of the current status quo allowing for texts availability, there crops up an uneasy suspicion: what if books—following the example of the vinyl disks by the band Flow, Song, Flow!—will also disappear in the bottomless bin of Past to the common heap atop the mentioned garbage because of the rise of laser disks and pirate sites all over the globe, where you are welcome to download any hit, be it the Lemeshev’s aria What If A Stray Arrow Will Hit And Take My Life?. and all the way up to Hit Me, Baby, One More Time performed by Britney Spears?
To which with all befitting soberness I declare – fuck, no!
Were they even to convert each and every printed volume into an audio book or turn it into a movie, just what they did to poor Harry Potter, and The Steel Was Hardened That Way, or steep it in all kinds of widgets to reproduce of the prairie in bloom aroma or the stench off your dorm buddy drunk blind (to follow the storyline), and send the X-rated impulses of tactile impressions in passages with the sex orgies served by the whores at The Red Mill (as depicted by the seasoned author), or even letting you feel, virtually, taste of any delicacy, up to Zhigulevsky beer when snacked with a briquette of molten cheese for 13 kopecks a piece, still and yet – fuck, no!
Because there is some (what would I call it?) magic (yes!) in books which is beyond imitation by any 3D (or be it +696D if they choose it)!
Got it what I’m about? Quite so! The words! Those black ant-like-critter-signs in the white field without smell-taste-color, like the distilled water, but making you tighter than all them sweet wines… But then again, if only you know the trick of getting the adequate intoxication from them those ants, sure thing.
Good news, that skills could be developed when you need it, which lately brought about my getting high from classical music, at least on certain pieces. Take The Hairless Heights by Mussorgsky, if you please, where witches fly to, to land under the soundtrack cooler than the chopper’s Ride Of The Valkyries over Nam…
Yet, Alfred Schnitke still remains as remorseless guts ripper as he always was…
No doubt, freedom captivates anyone but since that villain Hegel had shackled the world with his unbreakable chain of unity-of-opposites, it (freedom) got turned into prison as well.