Typing

An e-mail from a friend yesterday reminded me of a lingering memory of Leslie, who commit suicide last year.

I and several other web people of the time were invited to be a part of a project which seemed intriguing on the surface but in which I quickly lost interest. I was always skeptical of it but had nothing to lose in seeing what it was about. The organizer invited people who he described as the most original and artistic people on the web at the time, and Leslie was not one of them.

I remember how she winced when I told her I was in this project. When I heard that she had killed herself I started mining my memory for signals, for indications of her discontent, and there were many but that little incident came to mind first. She did not articulate any anger about the matter, but she didn’t have to. I recognized it. I think one must be a pretty unhappy individual to let nonsense like that eat away at you, and I would know because I know how it feels to let these petty poisons rot and how perposterous it looks to anyone not inside your head.

I walked to my 181 today to get “2666” by Roberto Balaño and a set of DVDs by a director whose name I forget right now but who was recommended by a friend. And I finally got a copy of “The Last Great Necessity,” a book about the transformation of cemeteries in America from places of memory to businesses and places to be avoided. The memory of humans is largely consigned to museums and libraries, but it was not always like this. Or so the book summaries say.

My vision has been playing games with me all day. I should give the retinal guy a call, but it’s only been a couple of months and I’m supposed to wait a year before seeing him again, and of course there is this pesky holiday coming on. He said to call if conditions seem to get worse quickly (because my type of macular degeneration is known to accelerate very quickly) but I can’t decide if conditions really are worse or if I’m just imagining it. Blindness would be bad but I could cope. I would go apeshit if I went deaf.

That e-mail correspondence which reminded me of Leslie further reminds me that I rarely respond to e-mail any more. It feels like labor to communicate with people via e-mail and typing, and it always has, but I seem to consign myself to a world in which substantive communication is most often left to typing.

I woke up screaming from a dream yesterday. In this dream I stepped into my living room and saw that my computer was gone. Stolen. To scream over something like that probably sounds neurotic or work-aholic (I am neither) but if that computer and external drives disappeared my livelihood would essentially vanish with it. I have some offsite backup but not enough, and rebuilding from a metaphorical lightning strike would take weeks and full restoration would be impossible.

But after I woke up and assured myself no burglary had happened I thought about that dream. The table, with the computer and monitors gone, looked nice. I liked it like that. I imagined what I might do if all this IV-level access to the Internet was yanked away, and the possibilities seemed tantalizing. It seems like I am trapped in this lifestyle, a self-sentenced prisoner.