Childhood Tastes Like a 9-Volt Battery

I used a found Collective Soul CD to scrape dried cat vomit off my dresser. When’s the last time you bought a CD? I don’t miss them. There isn’t much romance to them. They don’t crackle and warm like vinyl. What about laserdiscs, movies on mirrored plates.

And the floppy disk. I had the urge to plug in my parents’ old ACER computer I found boxed in the basement to flip through forgotten documents and photos stored on beige floppies. I don’t have the patience to let these things load.

I miss the sound of dialup connecting to the World Wide Web. My friend’s parakeet used to mimic the gurgle and warble of electronic coding, static. It used to say Bitch tits. We’d spend an hour trying to get online to log into chats. We’d trade pix and lie about our a/s/l. His mom would pick up the phone and the monitor screen would freeze blue.

The Sony Walkman was recently retired. My 2002 Mercury Sable has a cassette player. I plug my iPod Touch into a cassette tape adapter, which converts the digital signal to a magnetic signal. It mocks the function of reeled tape. Technology tricks its host like a virus. Technology employs acronyms.

LCD. LED. HQ. HD. 3D. MP3. DVDs giving way to Blu-rays. I never knew the videotape was a VHS until it died. R.I.P. Plasma gives electronics a human element. We can’t get post-apocalyptic without robots. We personify things to feel less alone. Teddy Ruxpin read to me more than my mother did. I told him secrets. I gave him baths. We will create waterproof robots. Popstars will become plastic.