I must admit something – I was one of those wackos who was trying everything I could to get a freakin’ HP TouchPad. I can’t buy an iPad right now, so a $99 TouchPad for a techie like me seemed absolutely perfect. Doesn’t matter that the operating system will probably be obsolete tomorrow or the thing wouldn’t even be made anymore. I had to have it.
So it’s actually poetic justice that my jonin’ for this hardware crack coincides with the closing of my favorite bookstore chain, Borders.
Borders. Its wide expanse of books, books, magazines, books, music, coffee and books called me each time I passed anywhere near, making me yearn to pass underneath those red letters into pages and pages of heaven. Real books. Aaaah….
Aaaah, crap.
Borders is a victim of the advancement of the human invention – computers that do everything for us. For example, instead of pliers turning a knob of five or six choices, a small computerized wonder box with buttons lets us sit on our fat asses and choose from hundreds. Phone rings? I don’t have to get up and answer it. I pull it off my belt or I stop watching streaming video and talk to someone who pretty much can be a voice from any further reach of the Earth.
The worst? The thin, rectangular, digital library that is an e-reader of some sort. Gone is that day as a child when I would walk my skinny, wobbly-kneed butt to the downtown public library, check out the maximum number of books (eight), pile them into my arms and then walk back home to digest them like a brand new steak for a big ole fat kid. The smell and yellowing of old pages and the seemingly hundreds-of-years-old ink was intoxicating, yet soothing in its promotion of a simple life that only required a light, a chair and some time to read. That exercise of enjoyment has been traded in for a piece of indestructible plastic, microchips and glass that I can stick in my back pocket.
Borders’ death – and that of the modern WalMart-styled, big box bookstore – was brought on by the human yearning for something easier and more convenient. It has allowed anyone under age 30 to live without the simplest of pleasures, the turning of a page. I really doubt that The Weary Blues or The Outsider were meant for a contraption that is fueled by space aged, invisible juice via a USB port.
We weren’t meant to become a society who can’t remember a phone number, won’t write a letter and has this weird idea that a smaller world means less actual human-to-human contact. However, that is who we have become. We are slaves to the idea of convenience, but to the detriment of the simplest pleasures of life.
And for $99, I have become what I have mocked.
