Table of
Contents
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In Search of Lost Time
Sipping a Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha
and eating a Greek Yogurt Parfait @ Starbucks
Tammy tweets me at the same time Chandler texts
Mariah Carey has strolled by me on the sidewalk
where everyone is taking selfies, checking email on
their cellphones, blogging and podcasting Adele’s
latest hit that does not include the fact that Freetown
is the capital of Sierra Leone, which I learned from
Frank on Facebook who suggested I link-surf Wikipedia,
stream the most recent episode of Downton Abbey,
share images on Instagram of last night’s imbroglio
that I snapped using my Galaxy S6, a smartphone
with a gazillion uses that are held together by gravity,
dark matter and a belief that boredom and stagnation
can be beaten by Google and PlayStation while doing
the
New York Times crossword puzzle on my MacBook
Air where I am desperately seeking to answer the
question how did people before the digital age exist
without YouTube.
© Martin H. Levinson
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Meditations in an Emergency
Chanting om takes too long when the universe is
expanding faster than a spaceship full of monkeys
on a trip to see the magic kingdom, which is New York
City baby, full of hustle and muscle to jump on the
E train at rush hour, visit Ground Zero and think
about the fifties looking for reds under the beds,
erecting fallout shelters in apartment buildings,
hoping Khrushchev won’t nuke the Big Apple
till we graduate high school, go to college, get a
job and a girl we can have fun with to take our
minds off Castro’s threats to fire Russian rockets at
Los Estados Unidos which JFK called his bluff on
and LBJ raised the ante through the Vietnam War that
Ayatollah Khomeini didn’t give a bleep about as he had
hostage fish to fry and Ronald Reagan asked why keep
US marines in a Beirut barracks blown-up by a suicide
bomber with no concern for the common man whose pain
was felt by Bill when he shelled a pharmaceutical factory
in Sudan trying to get Al-Qaeda so we wouldn’t be
bushwhacked into searching for WMDs and the war on
terror, a conflict we’ve been waging one way or another
since the founding of the republic.
© Martin H. Levinson
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The History of Where It’s @
No one really knows how it first started out,
that thing called the snail by Italians,
little monkey tail by the Dutch, the sine qua
non of Internet communication whose obscurity
ended in ‘71 when a techie teleyped a
message to himself in Cambridge Mass using
the graceful curlicue on top of the two. With
that message @ became where it’s at
for electronically connecting to humans or
facsimiles thereof and hallelujah, no more phone
conversations or getting together with
mundane mortals which means breakups can be
done via Facebook and Twitter, your pain can be
posted on Instagram, anguish can be
blogged, you and your ex can be alone together
with righteous illusions of who was to blame,
how things should have been.
© Martin H. Levinson
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