Storm Surge

October 29, 2012
9:24 pm

Watching Sandy hit New York is a strange experience, a combination of nostalgia, worry, and relief. We used to live on the waterfront in Queens; now we live a mile high in the mountains of Utah.

I’m left thinking about the people that we used to know; people that disappeared from our lives as silently and easily as they entered. I’m sure that New York will be okay. There is a special collective dimension to that place that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. They’ll pull together.

But I hope the damage, and the suffering, are minimal.

— § —

It has been a strange, but productive day here.

After last night’s wildness and total lack of sleep, I expected today to go badly. It hasn’t. Instead, I have been intensely cogent and productive, despite being nervy and surrounded by a household of family members that are also just a bit on-edge.

But the day has a surreal edge to it. The times are all off. The routine is gone. And the week is not scheduled to be a normal one, given holiday festivities.

These, too, are strange. Last year they were still foreign territory. This year, with a two year old sophisticated enough to understand breaks in the normal order of things and to verbalize about them, Hallowe’en is on the radar.

And I don’t know that I was prepared to have Hallowe’ens in my life again; they’re like a forgotten note, scribbled to oneself decades ago as a child, that has suddenly resurfaced and changed the foundations of things.

— § —

I was also strangely productive the last time we had a day on which I was sure I would get nothing done due to lack of sleep.

It would seem that, unlike my wife, I thrive when:

There is no routine and/or the routine is disrupted
I am running on empty and/or am full of stress
Order cannot be maintained and/or is absent in general

Why suddenly now, with no sleep and a house full of crying kids, is everything crystal-clear to me? Why only now do I find myself typing productively like a madman?

The human psyche is unfathomable and strange indeed.

— § —

I wish the iPad battery charged more quickly.

These days I feel as though I am perpetually low on power.

— § —

Once again in life I find myself missing parts of the environment. When I lived in Southern California, I wanted nothing more than to see a season (any season) once again in my life. Life there was an endless stream of identical days. The temperature was always the same. The sky was always an open blue. There was never wind, never rain. For a year I lived the same day over and over again, ultimately feeling as though I’d go crazy if I didn’t see an overcast sky.

Now, in Utah, we’ve already had snow in October…but I find myself longing for rain. In New York we had rain often, not to mention wind. The river was a block away from us as well, so the scent of the air changed from day to day depending on the direction of the wind and the temperature of the air.

And when walking or driving with the windows town, the ambient sounds were variable. Here, traffic. A block later, the subway. A block after that, leaves and a breeze. One more block, flowing water.

It’s strange, but there is a part of me that envies the people of New York right now, who are experiencing massive wind gusts and the sounds of water ripping across rooves, windows, and pavement.

We don’t get much rain here.

— § —

At least we get snow.

— § —

I desperately want to return to the state of affairs that used to obtain in my life. In it, the subtle sound—the one that keys make on a keyboard on which someone is typing—was soothing and comfortable, a sound that I found to be reassuring when I heard it and that I missed when I didn’t.

These days, I hardly notice the sound, and (depending on the day) may not hear it at all.

There is a kind of catharsis to be had in the text and in its emergence before your eyes. Or at least there used to be.

I want to feel it again.

I need to write more.

Fried Cat

October 29, 2012
4:23 am

It is something of a truism that all of the best blog posts are lost before they can be posted.

For the first time in a very long time I had written a post that felt right, that felt honest, that recalled the me that used to write.

And of course as I went to save it on my Dana, a system error occurred requiring a reset, and all was lost.

— § —

Serves me right for relying on any device manufactured years ago in today’s technological reality.

Serves me right for relying on anything based on PalmOS in 2012.

Serves me right for failing to save more often.

— § —

And yet, despite all of this, I can’t help but continue to feel attached to these “older” devices. The sheer simplicity and directness with which they operate is something that has been lost to us.

I have the old Newton 2100 out on the desk again over the last few days. Nothing like it will likely come again—and it’s our loss. I’ve even toyed with the idea of trying to assemble a stash of them again (once upon a time, anticipating using one of these for as long as I possibly could, I owned three of them; later, in a fit of pragmatism, I sold two, keeping just one as a keepsake).

These days I do most of my writing of any kind on a Dana, despite the limitations and instability. And there are times—more than one of them—at which I’ve felt the urge to return to an old Nokia candy bar for phone service.

— § —

This is too speculative to go onto that “other” site, but I often feel as though there is a distinct way in which technology was more “intimate” earlier on in the life of the network society, as though we’re sliding backward—we had the game licked once, we were teetering on the brink of cyborgism, and instead we took a hard left and ended up back in the land of the consumer media device. The iPad is the new DVD player. The Newton and my first Linux machines were parts of my soul, the Palm Treo less so, and the iPhone and iPad now, despite their gloss, almost not at all.

The Unix filesystem, the Newon soups, and the sparse grey screens with only letters to adorn them—these were abstract and open spaces, unencumbered by metaphor and conventional, consumer-product objectivations. They were like the interior of the mind, like its process and potential. There was a deep synergy there.

Devices now are overloaded with metaphor—with windows and buttons and movies an notepads and so on, all of them rendered photorealistically.

It is plausible to incorporate a calm, abstract space of potential and reason into one’s consciousness; less so a highly elaborated jungle of consumer products and behaviors.

The barriers to entry of the former were much higher, but the self-articulating power of the latter much lower.

— § —

Perhaps this does belong on the other blog. Hard to say.

I remain unclear, as someone that has routinely been accused of “non-academic writing” over the years, about what makes a chunk of writing specifically and particularly “academic,” beyond the notion that it ought to be shot through with regular citations to others that have said what you are just now trying to say—first.

Fine, if they did, in fact, say it first.

But I often think that as a result we end up losing sight of the reason for citations in the first place and enmeshing ourselves instead in a game in which it is illegal to say that which has not already been explicitly said.

And we are the poorer for it.

— § —

This entry will have to be cut short. It’s not nearly as reflective or maudlin as the other one was, but that’s okay. I have to go now because our daughter has been awakened, deep in the bowels of the night, by our infernal cat, second only to our infernal dog in its ability to create frustration and difficulty in life.

The dog, however, is at least cute.

There is the slightest chance we’ll be having fried cat for breakfast tomorrow.