A Battery For My Soul

My dad wrote this poem a while back and when I read it, I thought it was pretty cool! So I wanted to share it with you guys. Here it is:

So it seems these days I need a battery for my soul.
Because our art, our passions are no longer fueled by feeling,
but rather a 1.5 volt DC cord and a rechargeable battery cell.

The electronification of the whole damn nation.

It was really the books
that got me started on this thread.
The books, my old friends,
with their spines removed,
with their guts torn out,
the words replaced by wires.

But it really all started with music.
Or at least that’s where we first noticed.

I have a friend who owns a record store,
and he’s endlessly bemoaning
the reduction of music to computer code.
In a way, I can see where he’s coming from.
Something’s been lost.

When I was a kid, I remember records and radios,
going into the music store,
flipping through the album covers
just to look at the art.

I remember taking the albums out of the paper sleeve,
holding them with both hands like they were gold,
not because they might break,
or because a fingerprint or speck of dust might damage them,
but because of what they contained.
There was a respect for the art.

Now I hold my whole music collection in one hand.
And in some ways this is definitely better,
But still, something’s lost when music is reduced to single serving songs
and album covers are minimized to a pixilated 2 inch square computer image
that most people don’t even bother to look at anymore.

So if you’ve been around long enough,
we should’ve seen it coming with music.
But I guess we should’ve seen it coming with books, too.

I blame the internet.
For so many things really.

But it’s bringing about the death of my old friends,
where burning and banning couldn’t succeed.
Even where the damage wrought by my two-year old toddler
could be fixed with a little tape.
Those days are slipping away.

Encyclopedias were the first to go.
When I was a kid, there were these books called encyclopedias,
vast collections of books from A to Z,
filled with pages of wonder that made the world seem endless.

Then along came the internet,
and suddenly the world got smaller,
and for those of you who remember what it was like before,
you might agree that some of the magic
and the mystery
and the wonder
went the way of those volumes of books,
and I wonder if someday people will forget where the “pedia”
in Wikipedia came from.

But it didn’t stop there.
After they took the records from our hands,
and the books from our shelves,
they took the “friend” from the word “friendship.”
Stuck a plug in it. And a rechargeable battery.
Revolutionized it.
Digitized it.
Simplified it.

And perhaps that’s really where we went wrong.

As of this morning, I have 396 friends from around the world who I barely even like,
Yet I see them more often than I do my real friends 10 miles away.

I have 516 followers, and they listen to everything I say.
As long as I don’t go over 140 characters.

While I respect succinctness and brevity,
some things just can’t be said in 140 characters,
and some things just shouldn’t be said on Facebook.

But sometimes people don’t think.
And we can thank technology for that one, too.

Our technology has made us stupider.
We don’t have to know how to spell anymore.
A computer does it for us.
We don’t have to remember phone numbers
or birthdays
or children’s names.
Just plug it into the cell phone.

And again, are there advantages?
Some might say we’ve freed up our minds
from all this minutiae.
Certainly that extra space can be used to contemplate higher matters.
But do we use it to consider quantum physics?
Or the nature of the Universe?
Or the existence of God?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve filled my empty spaces
with pictures of kitties doing the most adorable things.
And a million quotes of inspiration
that I read from a computer screen
while I sit
and do nothing
inspirational.

Not that long ago in California
they had these things called rolling blackouts.
Whole sections of cities
just powered down into darkness.

(you can look it up.
it’s on the internet)

Even then,
back when books were books,
and the only computer you owned
required a desktop to hold it,
I wondered,
how much we rely on
this power that originally only
intended to bring us to the light.

These days I wonder how far we’ve gone the other way.
And when the power goes out for good,
I wonder if we’ll go out with it?

Once upon a time, we had phonographs,
and when we wanted music,
you just turned a crank.

Once upon a time we had books,
and when we wanted to be transported,
you just turned a page.

And when I think about the light and the dark,
the past and the present,
I fear that in the future,
someone… or something
will say that once upon a time we had people.
But their batteries just ran out.

2 years ago 49 views 2 frames 1 Like

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