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So this is Christmas?: Ideological smoke

Posted By Scott Warnock On In virtual children by Scott Warnock | 7 Comments

Christmas 2014, forever to be remembered by me as the year of complete dissolution of internal ideological opposition. A bunch of presents were purchased and exchanged in my house that I did not approve. Yet, it will be the year not that I gave in, but the year I realized I had been giving in for a long time.

When I first contemplated having kids, which was not long after the time I declared I would never have kids, I envisioned myself as being one of those parents when it came to TV. No TV in the house. A little odd maybe, but those TV-less kids always seem so delightfully bright and quirky. Granola. We would live bare bones, maybe move to a cabin.

Here we are. No TV? We may have no cable, but Santa arrived this year with a big ol’ TV. Now I have two big ol’ TVs. In rooms right next to each other. In my house, not cabin.

Of course, why did I need big ol’ TV #2? Let me tell you a one-sentence story to which you, shrewd reader you are, will be able to predict the ending. Once upon I time, I thought my kids would never have video games. Well, Santa, next to the TV was a juicy Xbox One. This goes with or probably supplants that other xBox (uh, I don’t know, 1/2?) and a Wii. If I read my own articles [1]– and why would I? – I would know that video games might even be good for my boys, but I’m still aggravated at my weakness.

My daughter — who, bless her heart, if there is an opposite to the “nice” list is definitely on that other list — got yet another cell phone this year too. A good one. She spent Christmas morning not in a state of wonderment but in an addict-like frenzy on the phone and computer with Apple to get the thing working. Which she did. The next day she declared Christmas 2015 a bust and demanded that some humanoid take her shopping.

So she got an iPhone, but her dad, me, has long declared that Apple is a cult that creates the most overhyped products since the Dallas Cowboys. As I type this, I can hear my iPhone 6 jingling away over there. It might sense the acrimony with some app thing. People are showing me how to operate it.

I guess I am happy about the minus $600 present I got my wife. She hounded me to replace our new ventless fireplace with a new $700 one, even though the one we have wasn’t officially deemed worthless. Two days before Christmas, I got a tech service guy to charge me $90 to validate the old one and reposition the logs. After 14 years with a cold fireplace, she was happy to have it going. This was tempered by the annoyance of the 14 years.

I sat before my new fireplace. The boxes of the digital tools shared the pleasant glow. Staring into the natural gas blaze, did I glimpse a frenzied wisp of fume, but then see it disappear, hear a disembodied screech? Could that have been my ideologies, flammable and acrid, fizzling away? Was it an illusion? I sought confirmation of my vision. The tree towered beside me, but my housemates were all scattered about, looking at their own phantoms on screens. A different kind of ephemerality. Jingle all the way.

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Scott Warnock [5]

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.