We set out last night at about 7, stomachs full and four-and-a-half hours of driving stretching out before us. I’d printed only the most general of directions, amounting to “Get on the highway and go this direction.” They were slightly more specific, but only just.
I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
We hit the exit from interstate to state highway at about midnight, and within minutes needed to stop for directions. What followed missing a single sign directing us west was a circuitous easterly meandering through the streets of Smalltown, OH, as if we were hunting prey. As if we were hunting very clever prey.
We laughed at my claims of mystic directional intuition after finding they’d led us in a 10-mile-circumference circle. We laughed at the Walking Guy who very likely, after our sixth pass, expected us to hop out and bag him for rendition. We laughed at the Cirque de Soleil-like contortions sleeping little boys can form without waking.
We laughed, and that’s why I hope we never plan our trips too much.
In Family, Foolishness on
14 August 2008 with no comments
You’ve got this friend, see, who gets car sick. But you don’t, and so lacking any grounding for empathy, you motor like you’re competing on So You Think You’re a Stunt Driver, and said friend gets tastes lunch again. Your friend remains your friend despite the fact that you’re an asshat, and this inspires you, finally, to commiserate, to understand. How can you achieve this, though?
Glad you asked. I’ve done a little research, and while my endolymphatic fluid resists sloshing most of the time, there is a way.
- Grab a book. You’ll want small print for greatest efficacy.
- Find a bus with what amounts to C4 or some other military-grade explosive instead of conventional shock absorbers. A long route over poorly maintained streets, and an obviously itchy driver, make this exercise much easier.
- Seat yourself inward-facing, so that as the bus speeds up or slows down, you sway to your side.
- Begin reading.
Approximately ten minutes into your ride, after the wheelwells have exploded in pyrotechnic thunder with each of several dips into potholes, your concentration will have deteriorated into a nauseous haze, and you will finally understand why your friend won’t ride shotgun with you anymore.
In Aldous, Foolishness on
13 August 2008 with no comments
When it’s a commodity like connectivity to the internet, which in itself is not demonstrably injurious, you’ll be hard pressed to achieve solidarity in your bid for personal discipline. That is, “I’m a slosh of a ‘net user, and I have a dream to write gratuitously violent children’s slasher stories, so I need to focus” somehow entails “Hey, here are several shiny web links to look at that involve mesmerization and a systematic destruction of your pre-frontal!”
In Aldous, Foolishness, Uncategorized on
12 August 2008 with no comments
The Other Time Bandits
I whore my attention out to any enterprise no matter how dull its flash or shallow its mapping to what I consider my core interests. I have considered this at excruciating and ironically protracted length, and hypothesized enough ways that I suck to fill, like, a big thing where you’d all, like, fill it with stuff about how you suck. Not much hyperbole, actually.
I’ve decided to try something else: work. I’m lost thumbing through this huge box of crazy interesting stuff called the internet. Truly lost, as in, I spend time I should spend elsewise, on producing a few things rather than consuming several. So I’m taking back the time and attention I’ve spread more thinly than a Bruckheimer “plot.” I’m going to, as Gail Armstrong said, “focus on endeavours of more delayed satisfaction, more careful crafting, more in line with where true passions lie.”
This amounts to an attempted budget. First: removing as many points of access from the work computer. Second: restricting any chance to cave to the impulse to “just look” at my screen at home. Third: make quick’n'dirty lists of things I want to do, and then do them; this hopefully removes the time sink of “developing” a system of doing stuff, i.e., trying any and every 2.0 flash-in-the-pants around. I have to strip habits and build new ones.
Oddly, this plan includes spending a little more time writing here. The stuff will be short, pointed, and occasionally, worth reading. Whatever can be done on a shoestring (time) budget.
And now, I tarry no longer.
In Aldous, Family, Muse, Technology, Uncategorized on
12 August 2008 with no comments
The Pathfinders
Of all the memes wriggling across The One True Web (that social network that includes and exceeds the digital), I suggest that the greatest compels some to describe helpful normative domains, and compels others to seek such out.
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In Aldous, Muse, Uncategorized on
17 July 2008 with 2 comments
As if we need more URL-shortening services, a la TinyURL or (the defunct) URL Tea, there is yet another: ZombieURL. I mention it because I have a soft spot for shambling flesh eaters…and zombies, too.
In Foolishness, Technology on
12 July 2008 with 3 comments
I’m afraid to write. I’m afraid to sketch. I’m afraid to math. Sometimes, I’m afraid to put on a shirt.
This isn’t a story about neurosis. This isn’t about *phobia. This is a story about how it’s wrong to want to be right. That I’m concerned about cliché is only stronger evidence.
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In Aldous, Muse, Uncategorized on
9 July 2008 with 4 comments
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