boohoo, sony dslr camera broke today. i have to send it back. i don‘t think i can fix it. the shutter release button popped out, exposing but a toothpick-wide hole into which the button should fit. i plopped the button back in and it worked for a few minutes but then it failed. pressing the button produced nothing. turning the camera over, the button fell out again. something inside must have broke. the button don‘t work, and one can‘t be a photog without a properly tuned and functioning button. there is no way i broke it. i already initialized the return to sony for fixing, but need to find a box and bubble wrap. i need a new point and shoot anyway, and between that (which i should get tomorrow) and the film SLR which i was using last week i should have no lack of camera-ege on hand, but the dslr is a pretty slick creature what with its zoooooom lens and rapid fire paparazzo shooting.
i wandered north toward upper astoria. i have been up there many a time, but i began thinking of it differently after getting a copy of Mannahatta, the book about the project which used computer imaging to re-create what the island of Manhattan looked like 400+ years ago. that book, though i‘ll never read every page, made such an impact on me, changing how i think about some streets that i walk on all the time, knowing how they cleave to the hills and valleys that used to ramble up the “island of many hills“. now i walk along the Queens streets and feel that the natural ground over which the streets paved has been less flattened and less obliterated than manhattan. i wandered Glendale yesterday. what a beautiful part of new york. it felt like something from A Wrinkle In Time. the rising sidewalks and rolling streets feel more natural than manhattan, though it is hard to feel like a sidewalk is natural. it is virtually natural to humans accustomed to urban planning grids and evenly spaced streets and byways, but its substance feels like a steel plate on a person‘s brain. a suit of armor on a naked body. a zipper on the pants of life. it feels strange, like surfing on cement, knowing that the real planet on which we live is clamped beneath inches of concrete strips (tapeworms) and beneath waves of pavement.
i have such bottomless quantities of work to get through. good things. all self-appointed, self-assigned projects. to-do lists! i remember a college prof who made the task of writing a novel seem amazingly easy, when one simply starts with a few bullet points, fleshes them out with sub-points, indentations, I/2/ii/a/ subtleties of infinite substrates to the outline path. it made sense then and it makes sense now. anti-sprawl.
what would i outline, should i be summonsed to do so? what would be my thesis? my point? my focus and directionality? what would be my I. ?
(that‘s a Roman # one, not a me).
seriously, what would be my I.? it could start anywhere. pondering the finality of the I. seems counterproductive. stalemate. when the I. could start from what lies right in front of me. the space bar on this keyboard. i took a computer class in grade school and was handed a diagram of the computer keyboard. across the bottom was a large key called the “Space Bar.“ i thought, since this was a computer class, that the “Space Bar“ was something for the 21st century, a NASA relic, something that one tapped to lift himself from the classroom and into the stratosphere.
i imagine my I. could start there. but i don‘t like writers talking about writing, or newspeople talking about being new people. or poets writing poems about themselves writing poetry. would you like to listen to a bus driver harangue you about the idiosyncracies and torments of being a bus driver? every day? every time you step onto a bus? i would not. i would like the bus driver to drive the bus, answer my questions about connections, announce the stops, possibly be friendly or outgoing per the individual‘s personality, but i do not want to hear this individual talk about driving a bus. i do not want to hear a reader of books talk about the details of turning pages, reading words, adjusting their eyeglasses. i do not want to hear litanies of a poet expostulating on the vagaries of writing poetry. no, i want to read poetry, substance of observation raised from the person‘s life and perspective, but no more talk of poetry. no more talk from CNN correspondents about the lofty goals of their chosen profession. no shop talk from a web site person about the nuts and bolts of software and ssh and ftp and curl and cron.
aha, this screen is too small and this keyboard too clumsy to scroll back up into the invisible swarm of text that has floated off this screen and into outer space, too small for me to glance up and see what the hell i was talking about that sent me off on that tiny tirade.
tiiiiiiny tirades…. so common a squall, the tiny tirade.