Lileks: Hat Tip #479

Lileks -- again:

My grandmother's mashed potatoes always had lumps. I remember that, keenly. It was part of the drill when you went to the Farm for Sunday dinner: Tater-cysts. Nearly everything she served seemed like it was from another, older dimension, and I suppose it was; good hearty plain Farm Fare, designed to stoke your innards for a day breaking sod and reaping grain. The only concession to modernity was dessert. She always had Flav-R-Ice popsicle tubes. I was partial to the blue ones. Sitting in front of the color TV with my cousins, sucking on plastic sacks of colored sugar-water, watching Ed Sullivan while Grandpa sat in the big red-brown chair and smoked his aromatic Old Golds: Sunday night.

Then one day I didn't want to go to the Farm on Sundays. A year passed. Then one day they didn't make me go. Freedom! An afternoon by myself reading comics and listening to the AM radio. Hey, it's that Hurricane Smith song the girls like. Alright.

It's a good thing no one has invented time travel; many of us would journey back, find our young adolescent selves, and give them a stern and thorough lecture. No teen thinks their elders know the score, but I think we'd listen to our Future Self. Even if he said go to the Farm. Look, kid. In thirty years they'll be long dead and all these comics will be available in digital format for your home computer. Yes, your home computer. What? Yes, you'll have communicators. Here, look at this, it's what we use. See? Flips out like Kirk's, takes voice commands. The only different part is the absence of a warp-capable ship in hig orbit. Anyway, it's not all different; I mean, I come from 2007, and Jethro Tull put out a record two years ago, fer chrissakes. So go to the farm, okay? Poke around in the barn. Ask a lot of questions. Soak it up. You'd be surprised to learn what I remember, but you'd be horrified to learn what I've forgotten.