Mine is the generation that will say it saw the rise and fall of the Betamax and the rise and fall of the VCR and the rise and fall of the DVD and the imminent rise and probable fall of instant digital on-demand full-stream video so you can order your European porn and your Adam Sandler in private, without all the humiliations and the petty jealousy from your fellow senators.

Mine is the generation that will say it endured the explosion of bloated monster SUVs, those gas-guzzling destructive hellbeasts o' fun that hog parking spaces and pollute the collective soul and endanger the planet and induce their drivers into raging frenzies of macho thuggish aggro driving wherein they somehow believe they're piloting a Porsche when they're really driving a two-ton brick, right up until all the oil ran dry and the air became clogged like a drain and Earth shuddered in pain and everyone scrambled for a Prius or a moped or, heaven forfend, a bike.

I have owned a Mac SE. And an LC. And a Mac clone. I am officially old enough to remember Mosaic 1.0. I remember some of the very first Web sites in existence -- raw, ugly little things from the bowels of the NCSA and Stanford and Satan himself.

I was there for the dawn of the Internet age, when AOL stock was two bucks a share and Amazon only sold books and Webvan was for a brief, shining moment a very cool idea and Microsoft Word fit on a single floppy disk with room to spare and whoa stop right there what the hell is a floppy disk anyway, your kids will surely ask.

Big deal, right? Point to any of these events and evolutions and tech spasms and most of Gen Y sorta stifles a yawn, says yeah, well, times are a-changin', Pops, and technology is racing faster than the Olsen Twins are spiraling toward rehab and it's pretty much all you can do to grab onto one gizmo and cling to its cute little bleeping capabilities for dear life before a month passes and the thing is obsolete radioactive landfill. Same old, same old.

But there's always a kicker. There's always one invention or movement or shocking world-changing must-have uber-gizmo that seems to rise above it all, to encapsulate the entire shift, one item that speaks to the whole shimmering dizzying cultural timbre and makes you go, well, this thing is something special.

Because now you -- yes, you -- can say you were there for the advent of the Apple iPod. The very first one. The red-hot must-have gizmo of Now. The smooth white plastic love lump of Yes. The Gadget That Changed Everything even though everything was pretty much already completely changed and everyone was pretty much already like, damn, can things even change much anymore? And then the iPod hit and the answer was a clear, delicious, hell yes.

The iPod is the It Girl of this generation. It is the gizmo equivalent of the printing press. The lightbulb. The steam train. The space shuttle. The Pocket Rocket vibrator. Et cetera.

Everyone who's anyone knows about this hot little number, or owns one, or wants one, or has had delicious fantasies about one, or at least thinks the sleek sexy little fetish object is pretty damn cool even if they say they don't because they're snooty culture geeks and don't think anything is cool if it doesn't run Linux or translate Latin.

Furthermore, everyone knows that, when combined with the iTunes Music Store, the iPod has almost single-handedly changed the way the mass culture buys and listens to music, all about custom play lists and finger-touch scroll-wheel menus and 10,000-song libraries and a shuffle-play ability to match your hyper kaleidoscopic all-American mood swings.

And sure sure yes yes, Napster and KaZaA and the file-swapping firestorm may have sparked the MP3 revolution, but it's the iPod that gave it shape and fetishy tactile bliss and mass-market accessibility, and it's the iPod that brought it all home to your sister and made her swoon.

The little white slab has it all. Cultural cache, hipness, style, sex appeal, superlative design, annoying ubiquity, shameless pretentiousness and a tangy and undeniably appealing hint of where we're headed and what's to come and, if we do it right, how seamlessly it can all slide into our social arsenal.

And, best of all, compared to most obnoxious, bug-addled, instantly disposable gadgets in the world today, the iPod actually works. Beautifully. Elegantly. Clearly. Like nothing that came before it and like a thousand things that will attempt to come after it because it's one of those trendsetting life-altering devices that everyone must emulate immediately or die trying. And for that we are all grateful, and annoyed, and impressed, our habits irrevocably changed, our cultural memory indelibly stamped.

Look, if BushCo and the desperately reductive, recidivist Right has proven anything, it's that we are no longer a society that measures its progress in humanitarian leaps or outstanding karmic shifts or in how we learn to revere the planet. These days, few are the positive political accomplishments and rare seem the groundbreaking artistic accomplishments and disregarded are the deeply spiritual progressions of the human soul. So, what do we have left?

Really, what can we look to in today's culture that's at once immediately accessible and also representative of the speed, dexterity, magic, annoyance and utter savage bliss that is modern life? Voilà: the iPod. What, you were gonna say "Nokia?" Or "Explorer?" Or "TiVo?" Please.

It can be the answer to just about anything. What was it like at the end of the millennium? iPod. How did you manage to endure the ongoing wargasmic ravages of BushCo and his corporate lizard spawn? Oh my God, iPod. What kept you from committing suicide with a USB cable and some printer toner after losing everything on that Qwest stock after the bubble burst? Oh man, iPod. Hey you kids get the hell outta my yard! Dude, chill out -- iPod.

And everyone will know exactly what you mean.

So then, let this not be a simple gee-whiz holy-crap gizmos-are-neat column, or a gul-dang whippersnappers today don't understand the world around them column, or oh my gosh I just so blindly love everything Apple does because they make the world a better place blah blah blah column.

No, let this be a column simply about noting the changes, marking the shifts, seeing the devices surrounding your life for what they mean and the time they define and the memories they will inspire, because indeed life races by so goddamn fast every once in a while you have to stop and smell the carefully organized MP3 files, you know?

After all, every generation has its iconic toys and every generation needs one particular development they can point to when the grandkids ask, via their infrared nanotech video-conferencing subepidermal microchip, so, Gramps, what was it like to live at the dawn of the 21st century in modern war-ravaged fear-drunk America?

And you'll stare wistfully at those classic white ear buds in their protective museum-quality glass case and go, well Timmy ZX-4, it was chaotic, and fretful, and anxious, and brilliant, and apocalyptic, and sad, and violent, and utterly beautiful on a million levels and truly heartbreaking on a million more.

But, you know, at least we had our music. Lots of it. All the time. All contained in little beautifully made translucent white plastic love pods that were gorgeous to the eye and pleasant to the touch and blissful to the ear and that were almost very close to something like perfect.

And somehow -- and I don't really know how -- that made all the difference.