Please Kill Me Now

Simultaneously feeling quite the fool, I am considering the purchase of some kind of reading tablet, maybe one of the Kindles. The mere consideration of this gives me a somewhat otherworldly feeling, as though I were viewing the event from afar. These new technologies, if one can generalize, generally sicken me.

None of this new technology lives up to its hype. Take this blog post, for instance. Do I own the copyright? Will I be able to access the copy in the future? Who knows? I am typing this in real time, with no back-up, so if someday there's a "pay wall," or a "software not supported" problem, that'll be that. (In a cooler frame of mind I save them all as Word documents, with appropriate back-up. I'm old fashioned, but I'm not stupid.)

Or am I? I'm typing on an Apple IMac, and although I really do love the interface and the display I must admit that I am convinced that Apple's major corporate emphasis is keeping the user from completely enjoying his own property. I just tried to make a CD of my own pictures, and although I did find, at last, the instructions on how to do so, and copied them out, and followed them assiduously, it was finally impossible to accomplish. I own an IPod, and I would dearly love to load the contents onto this Apple, but alas, that would be impossible. Apple is desperately concerned about so-called piracy evidently, so much so that it is willing to inconvenience nearly all of its dupes, I mean customers.

Maybe you could have done all this, but so what? Is new technology just for you? I ask for help sometimes, and I don't get it.

I then tried to print a couple of pictures myself, rather than having the CD to take to the store. I wanted to avoid this, because my printer makes me even more furious than the rest of my technology. It was cheap, the better to make the money on the always running out four colors of ink. Amazingly, printing only text uses up vast quantities of magenta, cyan and blue as well as the black. "Paper jam!" is my printer's middle name, especially with anything heavier than an Aerogram.

My deep conviction that I must jettison the printer to preserve my happiness led me in the first place to wonder if a Kindle would better serve me. All I want to do is pull text off of the 'Net and read it at my leisure. I don't really need the great reams of paper that I've been accumulating.

Oh, why do we struggle so? It'll all be over soon. Everything will be digitized, and everything "real" will disappear from the world. Get used to it! Digital is the Antichrist, but that's another story I suppose.

So, should I get a Kindle?