Downsizing

 

A funny thing happened to the world while I was growing old in it. Over the years, everything got smaller.

A lot of it has to do with advancing technologies and the diminishing availability (and affordability) of space. The housing sector is a prime example. When I were a lad, everybody wanted a massive house on a quarter acre block with a huge garden. This was seen as a great status symbol in the post war era up until around the 1980s. At some point around then, city planners, or whoever thinks about these things, realised that the statistical population growth in conjunction with the diminishing lack of space meant we had to have a re-think. Ergo communal living, multi-storey housing, smaller blocks and the gradual decline of the expansive back and front garden. Houses are spreading vertically instead of horizontally.

Bloody good thing too, cos I’ve got an old style 1980s house with huge gardens and they are a bastard to maintain as you get older, especially with the endless heat we endure in Western Australia. No wonder everyone is selling off their backyards to stick another house on.

Stereo systems also grew inexorably smaller, and oddly enough, cheaper as well. When I got my first job, I rushed down to Alberts Hi Fi (RIP) and got myself a bloody huge fuck off Kenwood sound system. Cost me about two grand and took up the entire lounge room. Had to chuck out the sofa and the telly, no room for them as well. The speakers alone were bloody enormous. Talk about embarrassing.

Then when that monster finally packed in around 2010, I went down to the local discount hardware store and bought myself a complete stereo system with twin speakers, and carried it home under my arm on the bus. Cost me $200 and I’ve got it in the study sitting on a piece of A4 paper. It’s so small I sometimes forget it’s even there until I tread on it and it lets out a tinny squawk like a radio shock jock.

Cars are getting smaller and more efficient, and fuel efficient too – oh except for four wheel drives which are becoming increasingly massive, about the size of rocket launchers. But they don’t count because you have to be an arsehole to drive one in the first place. My love of four wheel drivers hovers down around my level of respect for wankers who drive V8 utes – Excuse me, I’d like to buy a V8 ute please, preferably in an obnoxious shade of green or baby shit yellow.

Well, are you a violent racist homophobic misogynist pig ignorant bogan bastard with an IQ that doesn’t hit double figures?

Errr… no.

Well you can’t fucking have one then, can you? Cos we only sell them to cunts.

Computers got inexorably smaller. From the warehouse sized jobs we had in the 1970s to the tiny almost invisible jobbies you get today. I still remember when one of the teachers at my high school proudly showed us the school’s first computer. He threw open the door to a big room and -the computer WAS the room. It took up the entire room and looked like a set from an early episode of Doctor Who.

Intellectually we are downsizing as a species as well. We spend years and years hoarding and collecting all this ephemera, all this stuff, all this shit that interests us, and we look at it once, if that, and just stick it away somewhere in the house. Until eventually, all this stuff starts to leak out and spread all over the house, and before you know it, you’ve got a house for your stuff to live in and no room for you.

Then you get old, and you suddenly realise, hell, I can’t take all this shit with me where I’m going, I better get rid of it. So you have a garage sale, at which a crowd of other people who have already got too much shit of their own flock around to gawk at your shit, but it cheap, and take it home to cram into their own space.

Oh, and music itself got smaller too, from the big LP disk through the cassette tape, the CD, to the MP3 or selfie stick or whatever it is you young punks use to store 15 million songs on these days and it’s all about the size of a thumbnail.

Think you’re so bloody clever, go on, go and queue up and sleep outside the Apple store overnight for your new iPhone. The one they only updated 2 weeks ago. By the time you reach the front of the queue it will be time to start queuing for the next one, and then you’ll be thirty and out of touch anyway.

Back in the olden days, product placements themselves used to be huge. I don’t know if it was because people read more or had broader attention spans, but even on 33 LP record covers and sleeves you got a whole spiel, usually penned by some middle aged square in faux hip youth Austin Powers type slang, which was quite amusing. I recall an old Rolling Stones LP I bought in a second hand shop was full of such voluminous piffle:

Get down my droogs, cos you’ve just plucked the new Stones platter. Don’t be a square, daddyo, don’t Bogart that joint, secrete it in yon sleevie before heading to the homester pad for bit of the old in and out… okay I’m channelling A Clockwork Orange now, but you get the picture.

Anyway, I’m quite happy that stuff got smaller over the years, cos now I can cram more of it into my house.

I tell you what else shrinks as it gets older too – people. My parents seems so huge and full of life when I was growing up, and now they’ve shrunk and faded away, almost gone. Their minds are gone, and their bodies are following them out of this world. Just lately I’ve noticed the first hint of that change in myself as well. The long inevitable decline and the shrinking away toward nothingness.

See the clouds gathering on the horizon, hear the bell toll, it tolls for thee – but you can’t bring all that stuff with you.