GateHouse — Oh my God you guys the best thing just happened: my Mac finally broke! For good! It’s totally useless! THIS IS AMAZING!
Wow, this, I don’t need to tell you, is fantastic news if you are 1. a dippy Mac nerd and 2. a Vrabel, because the regular replacement of even sleek sexy Apple objects, whose very existence demands expensive upgrades at regular intervals, does not come easy to Vrabels.
Which is not to say that we eschew technology. My 80-year-old Uncle Jim, for instance, last year brought home a forehead-slappingly monstrous new iMac, one whose screen was easily large enough to humiliate most of the movie theaters in my hometown. It was terrifying, not just because my family wouldn’t have been more surprised if he came home and announced he had just purchased a previously undiscovered Jackson Pollock from an auction in Amsterdam, but whatever, it was way cooler than anything we had.
And what did he do with this glorious piece of sleek gorgeousness? He literally set it up on a desk that has been around since before I was, next to a computer called a Commodore Amiga that he literally purchased in 1989, on which we literally spent spent visits there playing hours of “Zac McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders” and which is literally STILL SITTING WHERE IT SAT IN 1989. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it functions or even turns on or has been totally gutted and is housing a family of vagabond gerbils, but it is there, this wonderful metaphor or progress, of the inexorable march of technological improvement, of my family’s still-lively inability to even remotely begin considering to throw things out if there is any chance it can serve some vague purpose down the road, or, failing that, if they can sell them to people for Bears-ticket money.
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