The Evolution of Hoss

I have spent a lot of the last six months trying to determine what kind of blog this is. Am I stay at home dad blogger, a blogger that just tries to be funny, or a blogger that secretly thinks that I am the only rational man in the world.

I have come to the conclusion that although this blog may be all of those things to a certain extent, what this blog has really turned out to be is a chronicle of how I am growing old. How my hipness is gone and how I have become completely out of touch with the world in general.

One moment I am a young hip guy feeling very comfortable with technology. I could work any program and I would judge those who couldn’t, often wondering how they survived on this planet by only knowing how to rub sticks together for fire. Any piece of technology I would embrace believing that at any moment someone would invent a robot named Hal and in no time we would have robot hookers flying in hover cars.

What becoming a father has really done is to age me, terribly. I no longer keep up with any new gadgets other than any advancements in diaper stink technology, I would be all over that.

Not only do I not own an Iphone, I don’t even want one. I just don’t see the point. I don’t have a need to browse the web enough to own one. I have an Ipod but sometimes I think only because my old walkman will no longer work. I don’t text all that much, I have no desire to learn HTML or Java which my wife tells me could be useful and I didn’t want a MySpace or face book page.

But as I sit here with my hand hurting from an old football injury in the past century, don’t you know, I was thrust into the world of Face book but not because I really wanted one.

An old employee sent me an invite to visit her face book page so that I could see what she was up to and write her a letter of recommendation. She is 26. That’s only 7 years younger than me but the difference is startling, even to me.

So I called my wife over, who is up to date on all this new fangled stuff, and created my own page. Now I am terrified. I am terrified like an old gold prospector hermit living in the hills, only coming down to talk with people when I need to trade skins and get some fire water.

As soon as I built it, I was pretty sure I regretted it. All of a sudden, my isolation and anonymity seemed to disappear. Within a couple of days I was getting friend requests from half my high school class. And I will be completely honest with you, I had no idea who the freaking hell these people were. I got friend requests from people that I haven’t heard from in a good 20 years.

It started to freak me out. Why do these people want to talk to me? I miss being the digital hermit, just a little. I want to go back to my shack and write letters to no one in particular but I think it’s to late for that.

And I totally don’t get any of this. Reading my wife’s site and others, I just don’t get it. I see a bunch of posts such as “I need to remember next time to mix peppers with my enchiladas………..” There was a ton of stuff like that. Not to harp on people’s writing skills or lives, but dude, that’s pretty boring stuff. “Johnny is tired of studying…..” etc, etc, etc. Um, ok. Then stop studying, It’s not that hard.

I began to sound like my dad, which also shows my age a little. Put down the computer and go out and get some fresh air. Then get a haircut and a job.

My wife had to explain the concept of “Twittering” to me. I still don’t fucking get it. You mean people just randomly write stuff like this all day on their pages and people read this? Why is my blog not kicking the shit out of everything else published, I have no idea. I tell a story here. I have hero, he does stuff, stuff happens. I’m a god damn internet Charles Dickens compared to what I have read. I usually have a plot that ends with me learning some kind of lesson. Seriously, why am I not getting paid for this.

And what was my thought when Hossmom explained “Twittering” to me.

Twitter = Twit.

I’ll be honest, that’s what popped in my head.

How can I be only 33 and so out of touch with all this and so blissfully out of touch? Because I have turned into my dad. I watch a good hour of CNN every morning while I get the kids ready for our day. I watch Hardball for Christ sake. If I am in the car, it’s either sports radio or some political talk radio. I actually know who most of the people in the President’s cabinet are. I scare myself, but not as much as Facebook scares me.

The final deathblow that makes me want to return to my cave and career of hide tanning was that Hossmom saw that my old girlfriend was on Facebook and that we could all be “friends.”

No fucking way. If you have read my blog, you will know that I think that my old flame is as close to pure evil as is possible on our plane of existence and it concerns me that the administrators will let Evil move around their domain so easily without being checked. Come on, let’s at least have some holy water sprinkled and garlic strung around our keyboards. Constant viligence people, constant viligence.

What if she see’s my name and sends me a message? I have already started buying plywood to bolt over the windows, but I don’t that would be enough to keep the gang banging champion of 1995 out. I know that it’s a silly belief but one that I am having problems overcoming.

The Facebook page remains and perhaps one day I will understand it more. For the time being, it remains blank of twittering, whatever the hell that is, and I will continue to wait for the robots and hover cars, at which point I will emerge from my bomb shelter to determine if the world has improved at all.