Salute To Obsolescence.

I wanted to put together a little post yesterday morning, but only managed to walk around the house gibbering Yoda-like pronouncements before going off to work. Hard to write a cogent entry when the only words I could manage were “Flip the burgers I must.” After a few cups of coffee I was fine (relatively. Until experts declare me legally and clinically fine, that is). The past few mornings I’ve been looking at the end-of-decade lists posted by various news organizations. For the most part they’ve been pretty dour. What really was there to get excited about? In a decade permeated by listmania and obsessively compiled groupings of the best and worst of everything, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of excitement to list the greatest achievements of the ’00s. Understandable. For me, the decade really is marked by its extinctions. Not just wildlife or the structure of the earth itself. No, I mean the cultural extinctions. A lot of time-honored ideas went by the boards in the past ten years and will be relegated to existence only as entries on Wikipedia.

>>   Pay phones died this decade, but before you assume I’m going to go all Andy Rooney here, let me assure you that I hated them. The only way I’ll ever be able to explain the concept to my kid is that when you wanted to make a call and you weren’t home you drove somewhere to find a phone that you could rent for three minutes provided you were carrying enough money. Oh, and providing that the phone worked. Usually it didn’t. The line was nearly always cut and the coin box jammed. Sometimes you’d find a phone only to realize that you didn’t like the people near it and went to find another one, maybe several blocks away. The phone didn’t have apps, but it did have a voice to remind you to add more money. One slight benefit of the pay phone was that you could leave the number at your job in case they ever needed to find you. I gave one employer the digits for a bar pay phone several towns over.

>>The network movie of the week. Every Sunday night you could see a really bad movie after a day of church or starchy family dinner in the comfort of your own home. Patrick Swayze winning the Civil War, or Meredith Baxter-Birney throwing up in dumpsters. It didn’t matter.  They were the wallpaper of our lives.

>>Four Non Blondes. Any group that leaves the world with the most messed up, bowel loosening song ever (“Whats Going On?”) and doesn’t do a decent follow-up (or issue an apology for their one-time existence) should be tried before the World Court.

>>Saturday Morning Cartoons. When my child was a few months old we got ready to watch our first morning of sugar sponsored madness only to find that the shows had been replaced by Lester Summerall and some bimbastic colleagues. As a mortgage paying, hard-working, stand up citizen I don’t want to watch Sting play his new songs on Saturday morning, or view proper toothbrushing techniques. No, I want bad foreign cartoons on all 140 channels and a bowl of Honeycomb in each hand. Another wish gone with the decade, I suppose. Onward and Upward.