Left behind again

As another mere mediocre male mired in the morass of middle-age, the world is rapidly leaving me behind, and I can only wave sadly as it leaves me in the fucking dust. Holding back the years and the trauma of aging is like trying to hold a handful of wet sand in a thunderstorm, so just enjoy the sand you've got.

I try to keep up with all the fun stuff to read, watch and listen to, but am slowly slipping behind. But it's not just the media that I'm falling behind on, it's the way I consume it.

Enjoyable pursuits, things that I have spent vast portions of my life indulging in, just don't exist anymore. No more browsing in the video stores, no more driving across town to get in as many second hand bookstores as possible on a Saturday afternoon. All these things are fading away, replaced by vape shacks and nail salons and shops that just sell tasteful metal gates for your garden.

Technology still fucks me up, and I've been falling way behind on new technologies since the start of the century. We don't even have any streaming, because A) our internet can beshit and buffering fucks up my blood pressure and B) the streaming companies are mostly trash organisations and the one interesting show they all offer isn't worth the constant money suck.

As noted to tedious lengths yesterday ,I'm so wary of the cloud that I have to have the physical object. And I'm still happy with the terrible hardships of using DVDs and CDs to watch and listen to my faves.

But eve that is getting away from me now, because I went browsing for a new desktop computer for our flat, something a bit more settled and substantial than a razor-thin laptop. ButI also wanted one that has a disc drive for my old school needs, and was shit out of luck. None of the stores even offered them as an option. They could sell me 600 different kinds of headphone, but nothing that would play the Pulp CDs I bought in 1996 ,which still work wonderfully.

(I don't want to hear about some easy tech solution, I don't understand any of it and it will just make me angry figuring it out. I look like a nerd but can barely grasp the concept of the most basic technologies, so don't scoff at me with your 'oh, you just need a gapsucker to germinate your hard drive', because you lost me at 'oh'.).

I'm not going to get angry about it and fight it, I'll just get carried away by the world anyway, so it's always better to try and swim with the current as much as possible. But I can still miss something as basic as browsing in a shop, or the easy ability to play a CD. Things I took for granted for so many years, all long gone now.