Some Day This Will Be How It Was Then

Last night I booted up my computer to show my brother something. In my mind, I was doing this because I wanted to show him something on my computer, but the truth is I wanted to show him something on the Internet. I'm not too young to remember life before the World Wide Web, yet now when my computer can't get online, I feel like it's broken. Subconsciously, I'm losing the distinction between my computer and the Internet. You may resent the distinction in this case (since we had no other immediate means of accessing the Internet), and I'll admit it's not a particularly strong example of the phenomenon, but I still think it serves as a good starting point for the journey we're on. "What journey," you ask? Why, don't you feel the rocking of the boat beneath you? Didn't you know that the moment you began reading this post, you became swept up in an adventure already taking place—an adventure with me, showered, yet back in my nighttime clothes lazing about on a Tuesday afternoon, in a recliner, on a boat?

But wait, I think we might have left something behind. There on the docks—I can barely make it out. It's the term "booted." Booted is a fine example of just how far the form of a word can dissociate from the idea of a word until it attaches to another idea altogether. The term actually originated in the days when computers were gas powered and had to be kick started. How we ever got from boot to trunk to torso to chest to booty to bottom to foot to kick is beyond me, unless of course that's how precisely. This would have likely also happened on a boat, or a series of boats, requiring at least one transatlantic voyage and an encounter with one or more pirates or pirate enthusiasts/reenactors. Such a shame that you left it there. I'm starting to wonder why I brought you along.

But I guess I can't fault you for failing to recognize the significance of the word for the journey we're on. The process is, after all, so gradual that we rarely notice it happening. I can tell that you want another example—that you aren't going to be comfortable unless you have three examples. Well as it happens I got a sneak peak at the earliest stage of this process last night at my parents' house, less than 30 seconds after the beginning of this story, which now seems so long ago. En route to showing my brother something on the Internet via my computer, I opened Firefox, but the page wouldn't load. I closed Firefox and tried again. Then I tried Safari. When neither worked I reset the wireless router and restarted my computer. Still, neither program would finish loading the homepage, so I gave up on the idea and figured there must be some problem with the Internet service provider. However, after a few hours it still wasn't working, and I needed to email a job application by morning, so I drove to my friend Sam's house to get online.

Both of Sam's parents were online when I got there, but they were having bandwidth problems, so they logged off to let me send my email. They set me up with the network key and my computer showed that it had full signal, but I still couldn't get online. To troubleshoot, Sam's mom tried going back online, but her homepage wouldn't load either.

"Maybe it's Explorer," she said. But no, I didn't even have Explorer, because I'm too mac for PC. By now it was too late to go to a Starbucks or some other Internet "hot spot," and I was starting to think I'd have to drive all the way home just to send one lousy email for some lousy job I probably won't get anyway, when Sam tried the wireless network with his phone.

"My phone isn't having any trouble," he said. "I can get to Facebook, and my email... what page are you trying to load? Oh hang on. Google isn't working. Yeah, it's just Google that isn't working right now."

Oh, right. I forgot. Google is not the Internet. And that sound—that's the sound of our boat scraping against the rocky shore. You were supposed to be paying attention. But anyway we're here. "Where," you ask? That's where.