Polaroid.

Ever since I was a child I've wanted a polaroid camera.
Since on Scooby-Doo (the classic episodes of course) Shaggy employed the use of one and I, with my small six-year-old eyes and small-yet-larger-than-average six-year-old brain, was flabbergasted at how a photo could develop right in front of your teeny (six-year-old) eyes. I actually asked my mother if those thingamajigs existed, because seeing as Scooby Doo was a cartoon -and anything can happen in cartoons- I found it highly likely that Hannah-Barbara were capable conjure this contraption from their deepest, darkest thoughts; a mere figment of the imaginations of two animation geniuses.
I believe the polaroid also had something to do with solving the mystery.

Or Shaggy ate it.
Or something.

(It can happen!)
(Remember, anything is possible in cartoons.)

Anyways, it seems likely that my childhood dream of posessing a polaroid will never come true. Polaroid has decided that it will no longer be producing their classic polaroid cameras and film, but will now dedicate itself exclusively to digital models.
I do not know why this is, well, scratch that, its most likely because of the money.
But what about the fabrication of cameras for the sake of the fabrication of cameras itself? Camera fabrication is an art, and the classic polaroid a contemporary legend that is soon to be extinguished. It has marked the iniciation into the world of photography for many children before me, and probably brings back memories to more than a few. It has marked the lives of more than one generation.
I can hardly believe that the 6-year-old inside me - a six year old who later grew to become a 10-year-old who was slightly dissappointed when at his first communion he got a very good camera instead of a polaroid- may never be able to grasp one in his now-not-so-tiny hands, to just get the honour of taking one picture, admiring at how, from a slit in the camera, a piece of paper comes out, and slowly, as I blow upon the recently ejected material, from the darkness of the film a whole story is revealed, a memory conserved... forever.

My inner child is crushed.