A Magical Wonderland
When I was 27 I bought my first computer. That was the year 2000. It was the era of the Apple relaunch and I can remember the first time I walked into our local CompUSA and discovered an array of stunning, colorful computers in the back corner of the store. A wonderland of screens and cases and keyboards all glowing and calling my name from some otherworldly realm. The iMac was a magical mushroom no one had ever seen before and it offered a new experience: an art exhibit in the middle of a boring, techbox store.
I’d never seen anything like it. No one had. I can’t remember now how many visits to that store I made but I found myself walking through the enchanted wonderland of Steve Job’s creations and pining away. A set of Harman Kardon speakers encased in clear plastic sci-fi bubbles came with the package. Works of art and I thought, ‘I’ll have those one day.’ (Fast forward twelve full years, and I did.)
These plastic and metal artworks presented a conundrum for me, one that I couldn’t overcome in the end. See, I’m practical, always weighing the benefits of a thing with its aesthetic. I’d ask the tech guys at work about how compatible iMacs were with PC’s and they’d always shake their head and instruct me to ‘do the right thing‘ and buy the PC. They were right because at that time hardly any external software came with the iMac. Nothing was compatible and there was no such thing as Microsoft Word for iMac computers. Even email formats were wonky when sent from iMac users.
Practicality When a Mushroom Beckons
I barely had the money to buy any computer at all, much less two. So one had to go. You can guess which one since I’m still here, 25 years in the future reminiscing about a visionary’s creation that was so stunning it captured the imagination of the individual, and then the world. There has been nothing like it since and even if there was, it would never satisfy within me that first encounter with a glowing mushroom called iMac that I’d never seen or experienced before. It was magical.
I read my credit card off to the Dell salesman over the phone and within a couple of weeks, I had a brand new flat screen Dell PC sitting in my living room. It weighed five tons, was black and gray plastic and came with a full surround sound system including a subwoofer. Nothing about it glowed. The speakers weren’t transparent, artsy or aesthetically pleasing, none of it was, but it worked and its utilitarian features helped me to create plenty of interesting music and writings. I remember the day, some six years later, my friend agreed to help me drag that flatscreen monitor to the curb for the garbage pickup, complaining the task broke his back. I giggled, apologized and thanked him, well aware it weighed five tons.
Regret Doesn’t Always Mean Mistake
To this day, if I ask myself seriously, would I go back and buy the Mac instead, my decision would be the same. Some things simply aren’t usable to everyone, and to me I was not tech savvy enough to navigate different operating systems. The only way I would have also procured the iMac is if I’d had the means to acquire both. Then I would have taken my chances on the Mac knowing I could buy the PC if I found beauty to be less utilitarian than I’d hoped.
I’m practical. And I’m not upset about it. In fact, it’s one of the few strengths I have that has kept me balanced in life. There’s nothing quite like being raised by an artistic, mad, bohemian mother. A beautiful but broken genius whom my father balanced to a great degree. I have enough of his pragmatism to navigate through life steadily and enough of God’s love to just skirt the edges of catastrophe.
The Practical and The Unknown
There will never be another moment like those few months in the year 2000 when I teetered on the fence of aesthetics verses practicality – that regretful memory, the colors, the awe of artistic vision suspended forever perhaps in my mind like a beautiful wonderland that was just out of reach. Even if the exact same computer relaunched today, and even if I bought one I doubt it would satiate the void which was the result of a decision to walk the path of convention as opposed to novelty.
Sounds silly, but memory isn’t always the best of navigation devices. Nostalgia is deadly.
To look back now those iMac computers look dated, out of touch and I laugh at myself silently about it. How could something that seems so insignificant now still be part of my memory bank?
Who knows to this day how much my practical decision cost me. Or how much it saved me. Perhaps it’s trivial enough that it really doesn’t even matter. Balance, I suppose, matters most. There’s nothing like conventional to kill the spirit of creation; and there’s nothing like the unconventional to exact change in the world.
An Eternal Flame is a Controlled Burn
The world and the individual then needs both the chaos of creation and the practicality of convention – a controlled burn – in order to balance the curiosities of life and the utility of daily living. This balance plays out over the longest length of time. I might venture to say that the most unconventional decisions could actually be the best direction to take if balanced with reason.
Maybe all of this is the meaning that wraps itself into and throughout our lifetime here on earth, where the most important decisions are sometimes the quietest; the ones least understood because their results are laid up in heavenly treasures which are yet unseen from this side of eternity.
