Discord Dodges and Dogs

Discord loads with declarations of dapper memes and I wonder to myself, as I watch this spinning, hairy pac-man and my daughters Spotify fighting to force loads, if all it means to me is a slower reboot when I need to Google dog cough.

Shortly after steemit, I did join discord and once or twice attempted conversation in the dark and neonized chat rooms, but couldn’t figure out when the groups I might be interested in, such as writing met? Off I went, and next time, into times, Greenwich Mean or Western European, but then that meant computing conversions and coming home to the desktop, and is that early morning or late night? I really don’t want the so-and-so was mentioning you updates on my phone!

Am I too old to learn new tricks?

I checked in, very late, on a weekday night, Pacific Standard and found that put me in contact with L.A night owls, but I’ve got too many other things that tick-tock away at my time, I really ought to go to bed, I’ve got a photo shoot in the morning and a load of laundry to be switched, when will I pick up my son, what’s for dinner and can I squeeze in mowing the lawn? So much life outside of the screen!

I tell myself I’m lacking the discord skills I would have known if I’d been a gamer, born twenty years later, someone who speaks x-box who easily grasps a controller, double b and angle hit of something else and interprets the format, but Sean Cassidy was cool when I was in school, and the first computer I ever saw, besides a Texas Instruments calculator was in 5th grade! And another few years before I got to touch one, for this FIRST one was off limits besides the male teacher and the top math students, all boys, allowed to type computerized letters on spitting papers lined with holes.

Were they introduced to the language of MS DOS? My first mother-in-law spoke both Russian and could program and I fancy her the smartest I’ve ever known.

Today, I am scrawling my freewrite on a small pad as I wait two and a half hours at the vet, at the back of a very long walk-in line, because my little dog, Angel has been waking me up at night with a terrible cough. He is x-rayed and the young, blonde vet woman confirms he is old and has moderate heart failure! It was all I could do to hold back my tears and nobody knows if the three pills a day will help him live another week, another year or many? So, I’m quite sure in the next week, with all of this added noise, I won’t find the time to figure out how to employ bots, or build community through an application called discord. You know, old dogs.

Photo Credit: Federica Galli/unsplash