I hate being late. Biggest pet peeve; people who don’t understand that two hours early is six hours too late. It has nothing to do with the early bird getting the worm and everything to do with being in the right place at the right time.
Oh I’ve been late…late getting into the compact disc market. I blame that 100% on radio station Program Directors and GM’s that wanted nothing to do with giving the on-air talent enough room to slip into the wrong song or a personal favorite that didn’t fit the format.
I was extremely late getting into MP3’s and Ipod market…Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are the technical Mozart’s of our time but they know too much about marketing and make me feel horrible about not owning the latest this and the hottest new that—I wasn’t interested in a musical money pits!
I might be too early though on The Kindle. Star Trek and George Jetson have become our literary reality. Along with The Nook and Apples IPad, Kindle introduces thinkers, mental travelers and escape artists to the DVR and Netflix of reading. Two clicks and the entire book’s delivered to a lightweight thinly designed chunk of something I’d have a hard time trying to explain to someone ten years ago.
It’s biggest and best feature? When I’m too tired to let these radio eyes float through another authors adventures, I go to menu and turn on the speakers—it reads to me!
No more cardboard boxes brimming with half read paperbacks! No more dirty looks wasted on the innocent clerk at the Barnes and Noble counter charging forty bucks for a fresh from the printer hardcover. No more standing in long lines at Christmas waiting for Aunt Agnes to decide what credit card to put her stack of reading material on.
I’m pinching the future of reading!
One problem…unlike a computer that compresses a billion old and hardly listened to CD’s onto a hard drive—my dust covered collection of thought provoking ink meeting a once living tree publications can’t be transferred. You’ve got to repurchase your favorites…if they’re available.
Slowly but surely we’re moving our way toward an extremely healthy Motel 6 way of living.
Life is a weekend stay…unfocused; we constantly try to redecorate our living space. Bedroom and hallway closets, storage sheds in the backyard, attics and basements are stuffed with items that seemed great at the time but have quickly become what every family member after your stay dreads…an unmade bed of junk.
You’d never hit the nearest Wal-Mart to purchase new paintings for a Motel 6 room.
99.9% of the time, we walk into any hotel USA and Canada; if we’re lucky the luggage is tossed into drawers or the itty bitty sliver of a closet with hangers that don’t detach then race to pick up a pace on a calendar of events planned by We Do Vacations Right dot com.
Family junk from the trunk is the leading cause of brother and sister divorces. The parental figures collected so much of the latest craze that by the time siblings reach it…the items of one time importance either become decorations at the nearest landfill or a reason to break out the gloves in the seconds that follow the funeral.
My biggest dream as a child wasn’t always connected to radio disc jockey fame but to catch a glimpse of the man, woman, snake or dog chosen to open the boxes I left behind. In one of them I wanted to place a pickle. Depending on how long my stay at the Motel 6 of life is determined the condition of the pickle.
My hero in life Dr. Ronald Mack’s office featured more books than sixty six libraries. He spent an entire life collecting medical research then combining it with murder mystery and World War II history. Those office walls stand twelve feet tall and every inch of breathing room features a book cover. Nobody touches the books today, the door to the room is locked and the lights are never turned on; in a room once blessed with a vivid always demanding to learn imagination, there now sits silence.
Through my eyes I see printed, documented and published zombie-isms. The doctor is gone but not the living thoughts that still smell like fresh ink melted into the thin skin commonly called paper. Every ounce of energy he placed into each page carries no meaning and or purpose to a modern traveler, which in reality…is the way we live.
No wonder we pick then flick boogers. Its true purpose of creation means nothing to the outside shell. What we collect in life is no different. I can’t tell you how many cell phones I have shoved in drawers, “One day I’ll put them on Ebay or donate them…”and so they sit and sit waiting for the human figure to do as he said only to learn he is now dead.
It’s extremely healthy to live a Motel 6 way of life. Nobody is dropped on this planet to last forever…unless you’re Bigfoot and look what’s happened to his hairy butt, he runs from everything! The moment we catch up we’ll bug and bug him until he’s forced to give out what he’s got hidden in his closet.
Ipod’s, Kindles and Memory sticks are the missing link. One day in the future brothers, sisters and family friends will impatiently gather in a tiny room to go through the items their parents left behind—for the first time in history large garbage sacks and dumpsters won’t be required…everything they owned will be completely stored on a computer chip the size of a dill seed that fell from a pickle put in a box 53 years earlier.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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