When my 18 year old comes home and offers to walk the dog, something is amiss. That never happens. Is he on drugs? No. It is Pokemon Go. After work I stroll along the Riverwalk and usually meet an average of four people and two dogs. Today I saw fifty people, (two dogs and one baby). They have a screen glow in their eyes. Oh course, it is not the first time technology has blown my mind. There was that time in 1991 when I sent a fax. Like, this thing on this piece of paper will arrive at my friend’s house instantaneously. Without a stamp!
Later in the very early 2000’s I moved to a house with a persimmon tree. I was new to persimmons. Yuk, what gross mushy fruit. What to do with it all? I had the world wide web at work and so I surfed. I found a persimmon jam recipe. If this internet thing has a recipe for persimmon jam it must have everything! I made my persimmon jam and then I dug that bloody tree up and replaced it with a lime tree.
Back in the day when the fax machine was king, I was literally cutting and pasting paper together to make a monthly community newsletter. I needed liquid paper because typewriters do not have a delete key and I skipped too many of Miss Chicken’s typing classes to ever get accurate at touch typing.
When I left school, I had to write letters to my friends. When we moved house, we lost each other.
Which is the real reason Pokemon Go blows my mind. It has brought people together. In the same way Facebook helped me rediscover my old school friends. In the same way that I have 10 year old writing and critiquing relationships with a women from all over the world. I never thought when I sent that fax in 1991 that relationships could happen because of funny little non real creatures at the gym (aka the local post office).