Drinking from a firehose. Ready?

‎Tuesday, June 21, 2011 23:05:48

Finally home from the day, just 55 mins left before I’ve only been one day at it then dropped the ball. So here it goes, for volume rather than pith. By the way, the lateness was due to a community board meeting, a board I sit on. Reports from elected officials, new redistricting lines being drawn, a new restaurant going into a well-designed mixed-use building, that sort of thing. Too damned long, every time, but (unfortunately for my exasperation) always time well-spent, and always some piece of accursed encouragement from an unexpected, outlying quarter to make me think my participation is worthwhile, just when I’m ready to never come back, sign off, resign, turn in the badge. As I occasionally remark, as I walk to the back of the hall for a coffee or a cookie, to members of the community who stay til the bitter end, waiting for their turn, for their item on the agenda, ‘Welcome to representative government.’

Anyway, after I posted that first missive last night, I was struck by the wallpaper I’d chosen that decorates the rest of the page behind my scribblings. Bookcases, filled with a variety of untitled books. Wide bookcases in my case, with this new 16X9 screen I’m using, and the higher res on in. Lots of books, piled wide and high. Me: paper magnet. I pay hundreds a year to keep a storage locker full of books. A wall in my home is a floor-to-ceiling monument to the bound word. I grew up around them, my family covets them, not a single relative I have doesn’t have a skittering, tumbling pile of books within arm’s reach of either a favorite chair or the bedside.

I picked that wallpaper blindly, the thumbnail that Blogger presented being so small, and my eyes not what they once were, especially with the small stuff. (Can’t say how disappointed I am that my eyesight is proving my mortality. Everything else still works well, but not being able to read something just frosts me.) And yet it ends up being indicative of one of my major issues.

I want to know stuff. All the stuff. I find it incredibly difficult to be disinterested, to come to the end of my desire for intake. It’s often what I’ve used as an excuse, more often unconcious than intention, to avoid producing something of my own. In fact, this blog, or at least the effort of it, is to produce something every day. Something tangible, at least as tangible as anything written on the internet ever is.

I still read two papers a day, while working for a third, and have more than a few friends, my age and younger, who wonder at why I still bother with papers. Because I actually mean paper papers. Granted, each subscription now affords me the on-line version for free, with the associated perks of cascades of spam mail, offset by the advantage of searching their archives for past stories.

It’s this last that led me to invent the term ‘eighty-foured,’ to describe a story that I’d cut out of the newspaper (yes, I do that. The storage unit doesn’t just hold books. Want to see the Clinton Impeachment, Florida 2000 or the 9-11 attack, in English, German, Italian and French? Maybe the Obama election. A big box for each. And within each, at least one story (in the Florida 2000 case, several) that have been eighty-foured. That is, they no longer exist on the net. They’ve been rewritten, reworked, re-headlined, or just…disappeared. The term comes form crossing two pieces of the culture. Every waitress knows that when the kitchen is out of something, it’s eight-sixed. ‘Eighty-six the lobster thermador aux cravettes in a Bernaise sauce and Spam,’ the chef might shout out, when he runs out of Spam. The other piece comes form george Orwell’s great description of the 21^st century’s Republican Party blueprint, ‘1984.’ Our hero? John Smith works correcting past editions of the official national./party newspaper (read ‘FOX News’), editing them so that they match or correctly predict the actual events that have occurred later, much as FOX, the LATimes, NYTimes and DCTimes are wont to do on occasion, and which the ephemera that is the written word in the net, combined with the behavioral vagaries that can be designed into search engines to make access intentionally vexing (try to fine editorial graphics on the NYTimes site. I gave up a year ago, and just clip the graphs now) can make disappear in moments. No need to claim that ‘we’re out of that issue’, and who’d have thought we’d dream of the permanence of microfiche?

So I underline, and fold over, and put aside to write about later, and never get to that subject, that rant that bit of perspective or analysis, because 1) the firehose is still on, blasting more stuff in the door at the front of my head, and 2) that door is open to all comers. Did you see the article on mapping the neural pathways of C. Elegans today in the Science Times, or listen the last week’s Fresh Air (NPR) on the history of, and forces behind the coming and going of the Prohibition in the United States? Those were this afternoon, from 2pm to 4pm, during lunch and work.

By the way, it’s easy for me to remember which two amendments to the Constitution those were. When I graduated from high school, Michigan had given all eighteen-yr-olds the right to vote and to drink, since they had the right to be drafted, sent to Viet Nam, and turned into a piece of dead burger. So we all learned about ordering gin and tonic and margaritas when you were just sneaking beers. When I went off to college in Indiana, it was a twenty-one state. Which didn’t stop any of us from drinking, just from getting caught drinking. So, in a unique reversal of history, 18, which tooketh away, gave to me, and the 21^st, which gave back (in one sense, anyway) was the number that took away legitimate drink for my college years.

More tomorrow.

1022 ~ Tuesday, June 21, 2011 23:43:59