Feel Sorry For Us. Go Ahead.
After a day of wrestling with downloading, registering accounts requiring acres of confirmation, phone calls to young'uns to talk me off the ledge.... Accepting the new digital reality and trying to work with it.... Google asking me if I want to send that email because I used 'attachment' without attaching anything......
I reach for the wine that I swore I wouldn't drink until we were in a "Break Glass in Case of Emergency" situation. The glass is breaking.
And then, on cue, Amazon Prime suggests I might want to listen to Elton John on this Friday with my wine and crankiness.
I click the link because Elton has got me through many a bad time since 1974. And what do I find? Demands for my ENGAGEMENT because God forbid I just listen to the tunes and don't GIVE a bloody thing but my ears and appreciation. Since I own his records and I've paid to attend his concerts, Elton has got what he needs out of me to pursue his craft.
So go ahead. You have my permission to feel sorry for us as I used to feel sorry for my mom who thought ATMs were the spawn of Satan. Because we feel sorry for you. We feel sorry that you are commodities instead of recipients of bliss. We feel sorry that you aren't poring over liner notes in the privacy of your home instead of being prodded online for your "opinion" before you've had time to form one.
I'm terrified to log in in this day and age. Bombarded with demands to know what I thought about certain artistic product. Did you know there was an era when artists put out their art and if it sold, it sold and if it didn't, they created something else? Elton got rich without my online input and his music will survive just fine without it now.
I'm not a luddite. I know new performers depend on online reviews. So I would advise youngsters to reserve their review energy for their generation. We oldsters did that by buying records. No online reviews. We just bought in extraordinary numbers and that's why you have U2 and Elton and Alanis now.
Elton is singing "Candle in the Wind" right now. We were kids when he recorded this. He made us feel something for celebrities, to care about them as much as we cared about our social justice issues. We had hearts then, not Twitter. So go ahead and feel sorry for us for not knowing we have to download our whole fucking lives. Or upload to a Cloud. We had hearts.
One day, I promise you, you will be saying the same thing to the generation after you.
Alvina Moon knows what I'm talking about:
