Pools & Dragging: The Life Cycle Trip

When I was last in California, I took a look through some of my parent's old stuff, like scrap books, photo albums, and boxes of slides. That set me off on this week-long existential crisis on aging, life and death, perspectivism, the mechanization of art, the digital takeover, and the dying out of physical-personal-artifacts. In my little black book I scribbled, "Now, kids have files. And with one crash of the hard drive (an event far more likely than the house fire) it's all gone." I worry that one day, not long from now, kids will look at the disposable camera with the same sense of nostalgia I have for the Polaroid Instamatic, or look at a CD the way I do a record. It's already going on, I guess.