This essay is going to be about how tech advances can allow for art and literature to be inspired, created, and distributed. The seeds for this essay were planted in an article I read a few days ago that stated that NASA has plans to send humans back to the moon on the Artimes 3 mission in 2027.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I heard stories about the space race between the USA and USSR back in the 1950s and 1960s from my elders and popular culture. While I was fortunate to see the space shuttle, the Hubble Telescope, and the International Space Station go up, it just didn’t quicken the pulse and ignite the imagination quite like the idea of putting humans on the Moon. In some ways it felt like we were barely moving ahead for decades.

Even though I didn’t come of age with my parents’ space race, I was privileged to come of age during an era of just as great advances. My best friend and I were the among the first families in our little farming village in Nebraska to get dial up internet. Back then, we were so remote, and internet was so new, it was actually a long-distance phone call (remember that b.s.), to get online.

I remember the dial up, the ‘you got mail’, getting emails from the various girls I met at speech meets all over the state as a speech geek in the late 90s, etc. My best friend tried to talk me into getting a Napster account. She also taught me how to find free porn online without picking up a computer virus. I still remember the old Yahoo chatrooms. I had a few false personalities online, because the whole ‘don’t use your real name online’ kind of thing. I still adhere to the whole ‘don’t feed the trolls’ mantra from back then. Pity that one that didn’t go viral once internet went mainstream.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, I remember hearing about the Human Genome Project. I had just enough of a biology background in my college classes to know that this was a big deal. Several years later, my psych doctor had me take a DNA screen to see what psych meds would work best for me. I’m still on the same psych meds ever since that test and haven’t been to a psych ward since 2013.

Same tech allowed me to take an Ancestry.org test, the one where you spit in a few vials and mailed them off to a lab and your ancestry report came back a few weeks later. Found out I’m mostly German, Irish, and British. Have some Spanish, Swedish, and Russian Jewish mixed in for good measure. So glad I got those results and was able to share them with my Grandma Foster shortly before she died in 2015.

Still remember the old Myspace account from the mid 2000s. Kept up with a few old friends, heard some obscure bands, shared some of my early poetry, and tried my hand at some early online games. Like many people of that era, I migrated over to Facebook around 2008 or so. This was before Facebook became social media for senior citizens. Oh, what am I saying? I’m probably a senior citizen now as far as anyone born after 9/11/01 is concerned.

I have a passion for writing and even that was influenced heavily by the tech advances of my era. Originally, I tried to get my writings published with traditional publishers and university presses. Of the first 100 snail mail submissions I did, I received exactly 3 approvals for publishing. To be sure, these weren’t paying publications. An old writer friend of mine told me that getting 3 approvals in the first 100 submissions was actually better than average. Granted this was 15 years ago.

So, I went with a print on demand service for my early poetry, mental illness essays, and my semi-autobiographical novel. The novel was a coming-of-age story loosely based on my college experiences in the late 90s and early 2000s. In short, it was kind of like Jack Kerouac except fewer drugs and less hitchhiking.

My poetry was mostly nature poetry and everyday working-class people type poetry, almost like a modern Carl Sandberg, Robert Frost, etc. Other poets who inspired me included Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson. I also like some of the Old-World poetry, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Dante’s Divine Comedy, some of Rudyard Kipling’s work, etc.

As much as I loved writing poetry in my twenties, I found out that poetry doesn’t pay well. But it was good training for essays and articles, especially the idea of catching a reader’s attention quickly and telling a compelling story.

In my late 20s, I attended a poetry writing workshop hosted by my hometown’s state university where one of the lecturers said, to the effect, that poetry was kind of a ‘protest of death.’ Until then I looked at it as a celebration of life and being human. But I guess celebration of life and protest of death could be seen as opposite sides of the same coin.

Fast forward 15 years to the year 2024. I’m still writing at least some every day. Made some money off my writings. Now that I’m on Medium, I actually make a few bucks every month off my writing. I’m glad that sites like Medium exist. I’d love to find more sites like this. Get the whole ‘multiple streams of income’ thing going with my writing, I guess.

I took this stroll down Memory Lane as a means to illustrate how tech, inspiration, hopes of youth, and art meet. Today I am getting paid every month for writing for an audience on Medium. It’s hardly a fortune, but it’s a lot better than what I was getting all those years of living in low-income housing pounding out blog entries, poems, and ideas for stories when I was in my late 20s and early 30s.

I’m currently in the process of finding some of my old writings. I decided I want to get back into every type of writing I used to do 15 to 20 years ago. I did poetry, novels, essays, blogs, wise quips, etc. I imagine some of my wise sayings might even make some halfway decent memes now.