There are staircases in my life that I frequently climb and among them there are specific steps that are off. Have you ever experienced this? The difference in rise could be (and probably is) millimeter or millimeterish, but your muscle memory still can’t compete with reality that doesn’t add up the same. Think about it… you don’t have to think when climbing the stairs, or you don’t have to think about the fact that you’re thinking about it. It isn’t quite like breathing, but it is pretty automatic. A task just above or below your heart beating and your lungs filling and exhaling.
And yet. Yet as many times as I’ve climbed these separate sets I still catch my toe on the same steps over and over and over. It always happens when I’m deep into thought about anything except the stairs and I’m in full auto-mode. Or I’m multi-tasking by reading something, carrying something or looking at my phone.
It is jarring and unexpected and unwelcomed because sometimes I fully trip and look stupid and sometimes I trip and look stupid and fall. Sure, all six feet, two inches of big ole me sprawled out on a staircase is a pretty funny sight. It’s also a shin-breaker and a humiliation blanket thrown over a normal task. And no, before some of you might think this is a purely physical issue, I don’t have a toe-drop or foot/nerve situation with my sciatic -- it happens with either foot and I’ve seen others do it too.
My point is this, that we get used to almost anything if it is frequent enough, if it becomes “automatic” in our lives, don’t we? The strongest computer ever imagined or even unimaginable in the 1970s and 1980s when we were all geeking on Atari 2600 and Commodore 64s or Radio Shack Tandy’s now resides at nearly every moment in our hand, in our pocket or purse or within mere steps. We’re used to knowing the weather in an instant and the exact time and television and movies and video games are available in your hand and on demand.
Remember when you’d pick up the phone and call a number to listen to the weather forecast and you could get the time as well? Remember when you needed quarters and had to ride your bike to the arcade or bowling alley to play Space Invaders, Frogger, Joust, Pac Man, or Pinball? Remember when if you didn’t know something, you’d have to go to the Library and look it up and in order to do that you’d have to know how to work the card catalog, the microfiche machine and understand the Dewey Decimal system? Now, you don’t even have to move your fingers, you just ask Siri to tell you, to play it, to find it, to pay it.
We’re so used to skipping all the steps we used to have to take that we’re missing some. We’re running everywhere on automatic without knowing that we’re out of step because in many cases that steps are being taken for us. There’s a whole generation or two or three that don’t even understand what a rotary phone is when they see one in an old movie. They’ve never seen a payphone in the wild. I suppose, “So what, who cares, we don’t need to know that anymore,” is a fair response.
This isn’t a rant, it is just an observation. We’re all missing steps. Maybe it’s okay. Perhaps I’m the only one with egg on my face when it happens. I wonder? It’s hard to be a nostalgist in my personal life whose working trade involves the height of technology. I’m constantly present within two worlds and more, because of my imaginary worlds in which my novels and poems reside. When I stumble there, I backtrack and retrace and check my hand-drawn maps. I could just ask Siri, but she’s never been where I’m talking about and those places don’t have GPS coordinates.
Q-Bert is a game that ate plenty of my quarters along with Dig Dug and the game, Tapper, where you slide full beers down the length of the wooden bars and catch them all until you don’t and they begin to pile up faster than you can remember to breathe. Missteps mean loss, there’s consequences, not the least of which is another quarter, but when everything is automatic and riding the invisible, magical waves of wi-fi, it no longer matters if your jeans pocket finds itself empty. Maybe, just maybe, though, we should think about keeping our pockets empty every now and then, and leave the phone at home?
