Vassilis, your fortuitous departure from these shores has left you with cultural memories that predate the invention of the Smartphone. You mean children once actually played games that were not electronic?
A poem with a sharp recoil to it, like a frontiersman's Winchester.
The hunters are everywhere now, and the thicket... a last haunted refuge of the apprehensive prey.
I think that's the 47%, or perhaps it's the 99.999%...
Either way, no place left for child's play in the fields of the Overlords.
Thanks, Tom.(Un)fortunately, we had no choice back then, as you well know but we also had no lack of imagination. I remember constructing a mini-golf course in the sandlot behind our house back in 1954--I used Bally canning jars for holes and packed in the sand around them for greens--the fairways were another story (couldn't get rid of all the pebbles) but it was the only mini nine-hole gold course in town and we'd actually hold tournaments. We fashioned putters out of old slats we found in the neighboring lumber yard. Sigh.
Yes, sigh, groan, yes. The inventiveness that was mothered by necessity definitely included what they might nowadays call "a creative component". Perhaps this is why the robot pseudopoets so distrust (and dread) imagination. But it's not only them. Caught up in the clutches of the medico-insurance-pharma-corp hydra, I find that saying anything at all can be dangerous, anything with an image or a metaphor in it, potentially fatal to one's interests (pain reduction, not dying).
In the alleys behind the tenements we played various forms of hide & seek, tag, loitering with intent, casual unkindness, furtive cigarette smoking, football (both touch and tackle variety -- of course no helmet), sexual indiscretion (of an unknowing nature, if the girls were willing, and the Catholic ones always were), basketball (with no net & sometimes no hoop, old balled up sock ball), stickball, marbles, snowfort building (a circled-wagons fort built of discarded christmas trees, the littlest kid[s] inside, the bigger kids outside pelting the fort with iceballs), slingshooting, hockey (in shoes on iced pavement), catch-a-car-on-ice-and-hold-onto-the-bumper toboganning (shudder at the thought, now), & c. & c.
I mean I know you know I know what you mean, here.
Vassilis, your fortuitous departure from these shores has left you with cultural memories that predate the invention of the Smartphone. You mean children once actually played games that were not electronic?
ReplyDeleteA poem with a sharp recoil to it, like a frontiersman's Winchester.
The hunters are everywhere now, and the thicket... a last haunted refuge of the apprehensive prey.
I think that's the 47%, or perhaps it's the 99.999%...
Either way, no place left for child's play in the fields of the Overlords.
Thanks, Tom.(Un)fortunately, we had no choice back then, as you well know but we also had no lack of imagination. I remember constructing a mini-golf course in the sandlot behind our house back in 1954--I used Bally canning jars for holes and packed in the sand around them for greens--the fairways were another story (couldn't get rid of all the pebbles) but it was the only mini nine-hole gold course in town and we'd actually hold tournaments. We fashioned putters out of old slats we found in the neighboring lumber yard. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteYes, sigh, groan, yes. The inventiveness that was mothered by necessity definitely included what they might nowadays call "a creative component". Perhaps this is why the robot pseudopoets so distrust (and dread) imagination. But it's not only them. Caught up in the clutches of the medico-insurance-pharma-corp hydra, I find that saying anything at all can be dangerous, anything with an image or a metaphor in it, potentially fatal to one's interests (pain reduction, not dying).
ReplyDeleteIn the alleys behind the tenements we played various forms of hide & seek, tag, loitering with intent, casual unkindness, furtive cigarette smoking, football (both touch and tackle variety -- of course no helmet), sexual indiscretion (of an unknowing nature, if the girls were willing, and the Catholic ones always were), basketball (with no net & sometimes no hoop, old balled up sock ball), stickball, marbles, snowfort building (a circled-wagons fort built of discarded christmas trees, the littlest kid[s] inside, the bigger kids outside pelting the fort with iceballs), slingshooting, hockey (in shoes on iced pavement), catch-a-car-on-ice-and-hold-onto-the-bumper toboganning (shudder at the thought, now), & c. & c.
I mean I know you know I know what you mean, here.