last night I could not stay awake.  8 o’clock and I am nodding off.  What’s a guy to do, but go with the feeling and head for bed.  Except that is what my brain wanted me to do…get to a place where it could then kick into overdrive and make sure that I didn’t sleep.

It all started off with a Journey song…”Open arms,” to be exact.  Now I don’t know when the last time was that I listened to a song by Journey.  I know that it hasn’t been in the recent past because Steve Perry and his skinny leg jeans with that tube sock bulge in the crotch skeeves me out more that I would care to admit.  But there I am lying in bed with this track going through my head….and I commented to myself that it was “like a broken record.”

Now, my children don’t have this cultural reference.  They didn’t grow up with record players.  They had walkmen, and ipods and the such.  They wouldn’t know what it was like if you had a scratchy record.  How it would skip, or keep repeating the same line due to the needle hitting a scratch in the record groove and bouncing back.  They wouldn’t understand where the saying, “in the groove” came from.  And that got me thinking.

Don’t be afraid.  It wasn’t a whole lot of thinking…..remember I was trying to get to sleep.

Looking at things simply, my family spans 3 generations….actually there are more, but I said looking at it simply.  My Grandparents, my parents, and I.  From the late 1800’s through today, 2014.  The changes that have happened in that time.  That amazing 124 years.

My Grandparents were all born around 1890.  They went from a mostly agrarian society to an industrialized one.  From oil/kerosene lamps to electric light.  From horses to motor cars.  My Paternal Grandfather fought in WWI.

Through the crash of the stock market, the Great Depression, Prohibition, leading up to WWII.  My parents met and married right after the war and moved to where my brothers and I were born.  Korea lead to Vietnam.  My parents and grandparents lived to see three Kennedy brothers assassinated.  From horse drawn wagons to men on the moon.

It all boggles my mind as to how quickly our lives change, and how quickly they still are changing.  Google glasses, chochlear implants, medical data implanted under your skin.  I know I sound like my predecessors when I think to myself where it is all going to end.  Wondering if this continual new age is doing us more harm than good.

Weird.  But no weirder then that tube sock lump of Steve Perry’s.