Last night while cooking up some tacos, my brain decided to run through old scenes of “Dawson’s Creek.” I have no idea exactly why, but I think it has to do with the fact that Christa has totally conned me into watching the entirety of “Friday Night Lights” simply by mentioning “there’s a real Dawsoneness to it.”
Shortly after I finished eating those delicious tacos (seriously, ever since discovering that I could make my own taco flavoring with cumin and cayenne and chili powder I’ve had a whole new appreciation for them) the news that Steve Jobs had died broke, and I cried.
I don’t know exactly why I cried, though I suspect it had something to do with the upcoming anniversary of Luke Bucklin’s death.
It’s weird. I can count on one hand the times I cried upon learning about the death of someone famous I did not know. Those are: Kurt Vonnegut and Tim Russert. Sure I cry reading tributes to and remembrances of famous people all the time, and there has been lots of tears this morning. I’m not made of stone. But it’s not often that the news of such deaths makes me spontaneously burst into tears.
As the leaky tears fell from my eyes, my brain made three very weird and random connections to Steve Jobs.
First it went to James Halliday and the Easter Egg. Just yesterday I wrote a review of Ernest Clines’ Ready Player One where a tech-titan ala Jobs dies and leaves his fortune to whoever finds an Easter Egg he’s hidden in his popular virtual reality game. A small part of me wanted there it be a Jobs’ Egg somewhere. Or news of something like that.
Second, I thought of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign. I adore this campaign. It came out in 1997 just as I was coming off my whole Beats obsession (specifically Allen Ginsberg). Also I just learned that the TextEdit icon features the text of the ads.
Anyway, I still have one of the print ads pinned above my desk. Why yes, I’m the type of person who keeps fourteen-year-old ads torn out of magazines. Thanks for asking.
Finally, because it was kind of already on my mind and my brain likes to bring together all the things I love in the world in ways that make me happy, I thought of this scene from “Dawson’s Creek” (also featured on the pin board above my desk) which I cannot find on YouTube in English.
It’s from the episode right before Dawson leaves for his pre-college internship in California. His dad, Mitch, has decided to get Dawson a computer before he leaves and they have this conversation in the computer store:
Mitch: This baby does it all, Dawson. 850 megahertz, P3 processor, 128 megabytes of ram, 32-gig hard drive, DVD, 56k modem. What more could you want?
Dawson: I don’t know. A Mac, maybe?
Mitch: What?
Dawson: It’s become obvious to me that in life you’re either a Mac person or a pc person, and the choice defines you. Let me put it to you this way: Beatles or Elvis?
Mitch: Beatles.
Dawson: See? Exactly. This is no different.