What I call the Rules of the Salmon are a set of guidelines from an unfinished yet still published work by arguably one of the greatest authors of all times. He also happened to write many of the greatest episodes of the greatest science fiction show of all time, but don’t hold either against him they are still poignant rules.
There are five authors to whom I credit (blame) a huge influence on my thinking and writing style. In no particular order: C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, James Michener, Clive Cussler, and Douglas Adams. Clearly the first two are iso listed so you understand that my path in life has been partially blazed by Lewis and Clarke. Chief among the writing style influence category has to be Douglas Adams.
In The Salmon of Dobut he poses a set of three rules that govern the situation in the world:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
This makes a lot of sense when I consider the world in general and the United States in particular. One could easily see how the younger folks take the niceties of life for granted since they were born with reliable cars, computers that while crashing often because they ran Windows still made it so they never had to worry about how to center a title or make footnotes in a term paper, the internet, multiple 24 hour a day news channels, more than 4 television channels they could watch on multiple televisions without ever knowing the pain of either black and white screens or “being” the remote control, never had to scrounge for a quarter (or worse a dime) while scouring the streets to find a working pay telephone, and never had to use a map thanks to the GPS or map app on their smartphone. I could easily turn this into a political post explaining that never having to fight for or earn these improvements is a reason they might believe in something more closely resembling the socialism we grew up hating, but I don’t want to go there.
The real reason these rules seem to hit home so hard on a day like today is because of rule number three. Anything invented after the age of 35 is against the natural order. And this is why I remain one of the only people over the age of 40 who has adapted to use only one space after a period..