Old Dog and New Tricks

I absolutely have no opinion about the TikTok ban. I've read about it, and I see both sides of the debate, but the ones begging not to ban it were doing so for emotional reasons, not logical, business, or ethical reasons; at least, that I saw. Did it need to be banned?  I could opine on that if I'd ever used it. But I never did. I never once even thought about it.  Was it like a video platform? Like Instagram, that moves? We all know all you would have gotten out of me are videos of the two Pittsburgh Zoo tigers, Steelers, and Penguins games. Maybe some dogs running around the backyard action. I'd have hardly gone "Influencer" on it.

I know people claimed it helped enhance lives. I know people said it was responsible for some lives lost. I know people said China was gathering information about users. Meta does, too, which is how it builds the algorithm that feeds me endless dog stories. Is that better because it's an American-based company? I'm no longer sure I believe my information is safer in American hands than anyone else's. And it's scary how information about us is out there.  Case in point, I was researching skin tags on this laptop the other day because Carly has one.  Two days later, I got an unsolicited text advertising ways to eliminate skin tags.  Yeah, Big Brother is real.  And he doesn't just speak Chinese. This tiny blog is probably not a good thing to publish if I want to be private.  I don't care about TikTok, Snapchat, or anything else I don't know about. At some point, post-60, pop culture, and social media are just too hard to keep up with. I am the out-of-touch fuddy-duddies. I always complained that my parents were back in the MTV days (when it actually played music videos).

I do my fair share of social media. For someone isolated due to work and caretaking, it's a way to get some contact. I loved Twitter. Loved it. It was built for sports fans. When you have the jitters during a tight game, you could get on Twitter and just zing away. And you were sure to find a familiar crowd because everyone else was doing the same thing. The vast array of .gifs made it possible to illustrate exactly how you feel amusingly.  Like this...

When the Pens blow a lead

When the Pens hang on to win

I met some great people through Twitter. I've even physically met some of them. Sports fans, dog lovers, and Rush fans. I got political occasionally, but I dialed it back after the 2012 election, realizing I didn't like the heavy-handed feel of the Republicans spouting on the platform, so the same was true for Democrats. Let's keep it light. Until this election cycle and the gloves came off again, that is. But that's not the point, really. The fact is, I was comfortable there. Until I wasn't. So I went fishing for a new home to spout about sports and opened a Mastodon account.

That didn't last long. It was appropriately named because it's a beast. It allows up to 500 characters per message; you can have photos but no GIFs.  And it was hard to get set up.  Creating a profile was oddly not intuitive. And no one really is on it. Well, the sports teams are all on it. I doubt there's a trick that they miss, but the only follower I got was a right-wing creeper. Long story short, I spent about a week on it.

Then, I moved to Threads. I have found a new home there, which initially appeared to have a more positive vibe overall. As the Inauguration approached, that changed a little. That will be true for a few weeks, no doubt, and then taper back off. Of course, if things go off the rails, it might never calm back down. But while I'm pretty active on it, I don't fully understand it. For example, can I use more than one hashtag - which isn't really a thing there - it doesn't "show" the hashtags? Seemingly, it limits you to one.  I know there's a character limit, but not sure what it is. Then, I don't get the Follower thing there - I got a notification the other day that my niece had accepted my invitation to follow me. I didn't ask her to follow me. We follow one another on Instagram, so did it automatically solicit her to follow me on Threads?  A couple of days later, I apparently "followed" someone. I didn't remember following that account, so I looked at it. That person hadn't made any "threads," so why would I have? I unfollowed them. Sorry person I don't know...maybe you're a nice guy, but...

So, in short, it's leading me around by the nose, not vice versa. I understand why older people are victims of fraud so much more than our younger counterparts. But when I need a diversion, I can find it there—there are lots and lots of dog-lover accounts, so I've stuck with it for now.

All of this might be quaintly amusing, but it also might be dangerous. If we aren't in complete control of the technology we use, how can we be sure it is not releasing information we don't want? You'd think I'd be particularly cautious, having had my identity stolen a couple of years back. Yet here I am, blogging away, and I will undoubtedly post the link on Threads. 

I don't know that our generation will ever be as vulnerable as my parents were. Mother wanted a computer, so I set her up with a used laptop and created an email account. I showed her how to use it and sent her a test email. She replied, and I quote, "I got your email." I believe that was the first and last email she ever sent. Thank God. I look back and shudder to think how badly she could've been scammed by "Nigerian princes" looking for money. We know not to click on suspicious links. We are more suspicious of texts telling us the IRS is coming to arrest us for tax evasion. But technology moves so fast, and I, for one, am not moving fast enough to keep pace. The thing I learned when my identity was stolen is that scammers are savvy. Very. The amazing things they could do if they weren't bad people. So, how vulnerable are we out there in the fast-moving cyber world? The fact that I'm asking the question without an honest answer makes me think it's "very."

How do you protect yourselves online yet still enjoy some of the social interaction it offers?

The Professor's Last Lesson

"The arrow flies when you dream

The hours tick away, the cells tick away

The Watchmaker keeps to his schemes

The hours tick away, they tick away."

- Neil Peart, The Garden

We all have celebrity deaths that hit us hard. As a matter of fact, many of us are now mourning former President Jimmy Carter, who lived a long, fruitful life, but we feel his loss nonetheless because he was such a beacon of good for so long, and we mourn that light lost in a darkening world. And I imagine everyone reading this will remember precisely where they were when they heard the news about John Lennon. But, for me, the celebrity death that hit me like a gut punch was five years ago, and that was the death of the incomparable Rush drummer Neil Peart.

I was curled up in my the wingback chair in my bedroom on a Friday night reading and, because our phones have ruined our ability to concentrate, I put the book down for a moment and picked up said phone and was scrolling around on what was then Twitter and started seeing what looked like tributes, so I dared to Google it: he had died earlier in the week, but the family was just releasing the news. I think I forgot how to breathe for a minute. I had the same sort of surreal moment I had when the trooper woke me to tell me I needed to call home the night my daughter died.  It's like a part of you separates, floating above, whispering in your ear, saying, "Don't worry, this isn't really happening. It can't be real." But it is real, and when that little denial piece comes crashing back down, it's like a physical blow. I began to cry. And I could not stop. Somehow, I ended up in bed, curled in a fetal position, sobbing. My husband came in to ask what was wrong and actually was irritated with me for a while (looking back, I get it - having lost a child, mourning a person one's never met seems almost like a betrayal to that more significant loss, and he couldn't accept it). When I couldn't get it under control, even into the next few days, just breaking into shoulder-shaking sobs at the drop of a hat, he might not have fully ever understood it, but he accepted my sincerity, and I think he has always felt a tad guilty for his early derision.

Why was I sad? Rush was a massive part of our lives, including my daughters'. They felt like a part of us. Both girls knew the band's work. If they were on the radio when we came home from something, we sat in the driveway and listened until it ended. Rush was the soundtrack of my life. Love or hate them, one has to admit their lyrics, penned by Neil, are thoughtful and well-crafted. And who can argue (I dare you to try) with the genius of his drumming? He was the beating heart of all those songs.

To illustrate how much and for how long I had worshipped at the altar of their music when I was in Bozeman in January of 1992 as my father was dying, I managed to find the Power Windows CD, which I'd had a hard time locating, and even though I didn't have a way to play it, I remember just holding it as we waited for the ambulance to come to take him back to the hospital the final time (shit, I'm crying now actually) like it was a talisman. A year later, I sat in the airport waiting area in Austin listening to Counterparts on a Discman, waiting for Mom to fly in so we could drive to San Antonio for a reunion of Dad's Air Force group, where he would be memorialized in the courtyard of the Alamo.

But they were the background to happy times, too: I have marvelous memories of traveling with Marissa to see them in concert. I always got a new outfit for a Rush tour, and I remember both kids taking me one year to pick it out for me. 

Whatever I was doing, happy, sad, small or large, Rush was a part of it. I trusted in them. I trusted that even though Clockwork Angels was clearly their last (and, in my opinion, finest) album, the "fact" of the three of them was still there. They existed, and I felt anchored in that knowledge. And I assumed they would probably come out of retirement from time to time for this or that, and I definitely assumed Neil Peart would continue to write. When those possibilities were gone, I was shattered.

But it was more than that. Neil Peart was 67, not that much older than I was. He had lived the life he had wanted to (despite surviving his own horrific tragedy) and was the master of his craft. But what had I done? And what time would I have left to do it? I was thrown into a crisis, contemplating it.

Those questions that haunted me five years ago have remained. And I feel the clock ticking ever more loudly. 

Just hazarding a guess: Neil Peart would eschew the thought of trying to be the inspiration for anybody to do anything. He would tell us to be our own inspiration. I'm curious if Jimmy Carter wouldn't tell all of us, on the other hand, that if we miss the light we believe he was in the world, we should be our own small beacon of light, and he would encourage us to follow a path that we find inspirational.

So today, as I think about those two very different men, I plan to do that in whatever time I have left. But, I'm sorry, Neil, you'll have to accept some responsibility if I follow my true path for teaching me to question my life and pushing me to move in that direction.

Thank you to both men for making the world a better place. That won't change because you're no longer in it. You live on in all of us.