You may find a lifetime has passed you by

I'm going to Philadelphia for a three-show Fruvous run. That's cheesy, but I can, so I'm going to. Frankly, I can think of places I'd prefer to spend three days, but I think I can find enough to do in Philadelphia that it won't be so bad.

The great thing about leaving town is that I leave the 'net at home. I do not travel with a laptop, I do not hunt down computers to log on and check on things. The electronic world will go on without me. I like that.

Breaks remind me what life used to be like, before. Remember before? You had to call people on the phone when you wanted to get in touch with them. If you didn't like the phone, you wrote letters. If you wanted to know something about a company, you went to the library. If you wanted to shop, you went to a store or used a catalog and that crazy phone thing again.

The computer wasn't an appliance, it was a fancy typewriter. Most households had only one phone line. You got your news from TV or from newspaper; or you could listen to the radio, but only the stations in your town.

It's not that the world was smaller, really, but it didn't work at this lightning speed. It used to be that you had to look to find crackpots, now you can't get away from them. How did the world function before Usenet? Now Usenet is an outmoded technology. It's all about web sites.

Remember Gopher, Archie, Veronica? Remember IRC? This stuff was five or six years ago. It's still out there, but almost nobody uses it.

Anyway, we live in The Future now, and I'm taking a vacation.

before - after