By Leatrice Spevack
Back in the ’70s guys had cars. Cars were a rite of passage through the mysteries of motorization, movement and plain old monkey business.
The ’90s have guys trading in dreams of sleek machines for computers: the no-risk, faster formula to hijinks on the highway.
Reality bytes. Indeed, it bites big.
It’s been sinking its twisted teeth into the soft grey matter of the young and cautious for close to a decade. And this temptation toward technology has taken a terrible toll on the simplest of social skills. Longhairs seek excitement on the Freenet instead of the freeway; desire data rather than dates; relinquish reclining seats for cyberspace.
Sex on the net is like going to a drive-in by yourself.
Cars are better.
Automobiles used to provide a forum for forging friendships and set the stage for many initiations into the midnight world of sexual adventure. Speed was the potent power and its danger delicious.
Of course, AIDS wasn’t the in-your-face nagging reminder of mortality (morality?) then. Death was a foreign concept as the loss of Led Zepplin. Yet, for the unfortunate few, what began as a capricious lark to Lover’s Lane resulted, all too literally, in a race up the Stairway to Heaven.
Crashes happened.
But today, this alien generation of terminal agoraphobics “experience” system crashes which result in meretricious mental angst and leave users emotional cripples down the binary boulevard.
Cars are better.
Alas, it seems that vehicles have lost their attraction as transportation or even as toys. Now one must see Paradise by the…Super VGA Light. Computers offer a sterile world of fleshless control. Can you really swap the scent of sex for pix of women in putrid acts with pointers?
Apparently, yes.
The icy Internet allows one to indulge in the vilest underpinnings of secret fetishism. Maybe they ought to sell access with a protective rubber cover for the power bar.
These days you can easily enter a not-so-brave world of distortion and cliche where wired technophiles spend the wee hours pushing always-responsive keys that can’t say “no.” Can you say auto-fellatio? Sure you can.
Beware gentlewomen! Empty promises of lots of RAM so often disintegrate into half-lit rooms filled with only floppy discs. Listen, I’d never trade 16 Megs of RAM for the memory of the backseat of a Ford Mustang on Manhattan’s West 21st Street at 4 a.m.
Cars have muscle.
Cars are better.
The modern operandi of every acne-ridden, kinky, puerile Lothario is to mimic Cyrano or Larry Flynt; every freckled, fat-assed Juliette, Anais Nin or “O.” The difference lies in that these people knew of what they wrote or published. The “net” is not experience. It is cyber-crap. It is unactualized, vicarious and absolutely artificial. It is sterile and faceless and odorless. It is safe sex gone mad.
Yeah. Yank this.
Cars are better.
OK, so apart from sex, what about conversation? Oh, oh, sorry—the Internet allows us to communicate with pretentious idiots all over the world. Gee, and I thought that only happened at gallery openings and the Left Bank.
Apparently not.
Those who once defied James Dean or even Bruce Springsteen now hail hackers as their heroes: guys whose culturally-eviscerated “handles” are inspired by breakfast cereals. Captain Crunch, indeed! This is just a Formula One fantasy for digitally dexterous phreaks. Fearless?
Right.
Finger this.
Cars get you somewhere other than your room. Where would Jack Kerouac have been without one—On the Net? Dylan on the information Highway alt.binary.61? Where is Hunter S. Thomas when you need him? Probably putting down Fear and Loathing…in the World Wide Web on CD ROM. Yikes!
OK, I know, I’m a techno-peasant, but it seems that guys these days have a lot more software than hard drive. So swap the Freener for some fishnet and remember who told you:
Cars are better.
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