My first memory of a computer is that my backyard neighbor had one. Jason was my age, and his parents were both attorneys. They had both a sailboat and a computer, and in my mind those items were of the same status. Who has a COMPUTER? 
My second memory of a computer is getting an NES, a Nintendo Entertainment System. My dad was the one who hooked it up to the back of our tv, and he was really the one who understood how to play it. As a little boy, I had a little wallet in which I kept spare change I found. A little caricature of a surfer was painted on it. Sometimes, when I was by myself, I would stick the wallet in the NES and pretend there was a game where you surfed on coins. My memories of that game are as real as my memories of Duck Hunt or any other game that we really owned.
My third memory of a computer is going to a friend from school’s house. They had a computer room. I was in third grade, and his family moved into town from White Sands, New Mexico. His father had some sort of military job, and they had the internet. He had a whole room of beefy monitors and boxes and smoky translucent containers of floppy disks (the big kind, I think). We played Commander Keen on his rig, sometimes.
My fourth memory of a computer if when our family got a home computer of our, in 1995. It was a Power Macintosh Performa 6200CD. We got America Online and then the internet. I joined a chat group/role play group where we pretended to be professional wrestlers and we would “win” matches based on how good our promos (interviews/speeches) were before the match day. I was fantastic and often a champion. Any charisma or dialogue or attitude I had was saved up for the promos. In real life, I was content with plant myself firmly on the walls and go unnoticed. But not on my computer, not on the internet.
Leigh Alexander’s Breathing Machine contains similar stories of her own relationship with computers. I especially I identified with how her wonder and imagination with computers fit right in to her general wonder and curiosity about the “real” world when she was growing up. The line between fantasy and reality is so often blurred when you’re a child.
Alexander spends a little bit of time at the end of Breathing Machines exploring the downfall of the earnestness and, what would the word be, innocence? liberty? acommercialism? of 90s internet. Now everything is commercialized and gamified. We’re products being sold products.
Many of us are trying to recapture that old wonder, the mystery, the feeling of exploring and trying on identities. Is it possible anymore, or was that just being young? I can’t quite explain it, but I know that feeling, I know it was better than this.
4.25/5, rounded down.
Suggested Pairing: Lurking by JoAnne McNeil