Old School Arts and Letters

A Return to the Past

Part 4: Verse 5 of work in progress: Photo by Author

This week I had planned to stay off of social media and reduce messaging apps to a minimum. Almost 600 days of war and a constant barrage of information is just too much. Many things went wrong this week but the decision to pull back did not. This exercise has given me great insight for how I should pursue things going forward. Which is to say that by going backward to my pre-Internet roots was the best step I could take. My time coming up was before all this that exists now. I guess it was back in the mid-1990’s that I went online with the amber lettering, Gopher and the Boolean Searches while a student and employee at George Mason University. That was the time when the only information that existed was either academic or empirical in tone. Gopher was a very rich and exciting way to do research for college papers and the like. So, not only am I Old School Internet but also cling to this as primarily a research tool for the expansion of knowledge. The social part of it doesn’t fit well for me although I do use it for keeping in touch with a select few, some of it war-related and some of it not.

Those of you who follow and are really interested in the war experience here will be highly disappointed. There are plenty of good writers out there with actual “boots on the ground” who are telling their stories. Our stories are all lived through this…