Old Man Yells at Cloud

We're having a tech from Comcast (spit) come to install wi-fi at the Arone homestead this afternoon, and I'm old-man excited.  This is what officially puts me right there on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and ushers me fully into the world of commonplace sci-fi technology.  It's simply astounding to me that merely an eye-blink of 25 years ago, I was 14, in my room playing games on my Commodore 64, which was hooked up to my shitty CRT TV, and had no access to BBSs because my mom wouldn't buy me the expensive 1200-baud modem, nor would she let me use the phone that much.  I used 5 1/4 inch disks to load comparatively tiny pieces of software slowly into memory.  There was a lot of switching disks, and even a cassette tape drive before mom sprung for the several-hundred-dollar, loaf-of-bred-sized disk drive.  And now I have more computing power in my front pocket than the entire Apollo Moon Landing's Mission Control room.

Excuse me, I need to adjust the onion on my belt.

Print is dead.  Oh, yes it is, it just doesn't know it yet.  I mourn the loss, but that's for some other time.  And if print is dead in general, then for porn, it's double-secret dead, the fine paste left over after being sucked into a jet turbine.  When I was 12, I had to steal Penthouses from the local drugstore, and watch scrambled cable porn, hoping for a glimpse of muff.  By the time I was of age, I could proudly (?) stride into the 7-11, and say, "One copy of Swank, please!  Why, yes, I am 18, here's my ID!"  Soon after, I found the porn stores.  Two entire stores - one near each end of town - filled with pornography.  Huge racks full of every standard newsstand-quality porn rag. Endless aisles of video tapes, those stupid gigantic boxes taking up a ridiculous amount of real estate. Porn newspapers like Screw, even.  And the lubes, condoms, cuffs, dildos, vibrators, fuck dolls, sex swings.  You name it, they had it.  There were even little booths in the back where you could watch a variety of porn in private, right there in the store, doled out in increments of four minutes for a quarter.  I made a few 75-cent transactions there myself.  It was porn heaven for a frustrated 18-year-old.

I imagine that for a kid of 18 or 20 today, it must be a feat of nearly-impossible mental gymnastics to understand just how different the landscape of pornography is now.  Once the wi-fi is installed, I'm done, finished, good-bye Cheech.  FROM MY BED, I will be able to, on a complete whim, turn on my detached, wireless computer, type into a search engine any possible combination of filthy words, and be immediately offered hundreds if not thousands of videos depicting people doing those filthy things.  FOR FREE.  No ID needed.  Just press this button promising that you're 18. And the filthiest stuff is no longer hidden - at the good ol' porn store, I never saw scat, or pissing, or any of the really heavy (legal) stuff.  But I can Google "midget transsexual horse fucking a blue whale" and be offered a choice of several different whales.  A stack of soggy, used-up Hustlers just can't compete in this day and age.