preparing for the apocalypse, the revelation, the vaticination of the
rapture.

just felt like saying that.

new sunglasses today. $500 and about an hour after entering the
Lenscrafters on 5th Avenue i finally ordered what appears to be a set of
sunglasses, the frames of which fold up into a small pile.

the folding frames remind me of one of the ways i made my mother laugh. i
could always make her laugh like she’d be sick, and i have stories of her
fits of laughter (in response to my clownish behaviour) which still make
me laugh hard. in fact i laughed myself to sleep a few weeks ago whilst
remembering another incident, but for now i’ll focus on the foldable
glasses and the story of which they reminded me.

i was 17 or 18, driving around Tampa on a street which ran parallel to a
traintrack. i needed to turn left, which meant crossing the traintrack,
but as i prepared to make the left turn i saw a train coming. bells rang
and some red lights blinked, a pair of barricades might have been
lowered. all in all it was a common enough site. i prepared to wait for
the train to pass when i noticed that a “NO LEFT TURN” sign had slowly
unfolded, appearing as if from nowhere next to the traffic light.

i am finding it hard at this moment to describe the humorousness of the
situation, but as i described it to my mother she just steadily and
genuinely got lost in an episode of laughter, laughing at the corniness of
the little sign unfolding as if by magic, and appearing as if from the
air.

a week or o later she volunteered that she, too, saw the funny little
sign, and that she, like i, just sat there in the car laughing while
waiting for the train to pass. her laughter was with mine. we didn’t know,
now do i know now, how common these little foldout signs are, but we had
never seen one before, and this one seemed clever and cute, if a bit hokey
and small-town.

another incident which made my mother laugh so hard hard i thought she’d
get sick (this story is also hard to tell without a visual demonstration
of what i did, but i’ll try anyway) involved me taking out the trash. one
night, after dark, i carried an extra bag of garbage out to the curb, to
stuff it into the already nearly-full garbage can. my mother stood in the
garage as i did this, waiting for me to return so she could close the
garage door and lock the house.

i tried to stuff the garbage bag into the can but it wouldn’t fit. the bag
was full of, well, garbage, but it was also filled with an abnormal amount
of air. my mother noticed this and told me to “punch a hole in the bag, to
let the air out. use the scissors.” i withdrew a pair of scissors from my
pocket and wielded it like a murderer with a knife. i raised the scissors
over my head and plunged them into the garbage bag, repeatedly stabbing
the trash like a homicidal maniac, all in the interest of following
mother’s orders and letting the air out of the bag so it would fit into
the can.

i stabbed the garbage bag several times like this, then looked up, toward
the garage, to see my mother convulsing with laughter. her head kicked
back, she clasped her hands, she could hardly stand and so she retreated
back to the house, where i ran in, laughing, to find her sitting on the
couch laughing. “i told you to poke a hole in the bag, i didn’t say to
murder it!”

god, the laughter was like a crazed flock of seagulls. i laughed, but it
was mother’s laugh that crackled with the sated anxieties of the moment.
in the weeks to come when i would take out the trash she would ask me to
do so, “just don’t murder it this time.”

yes yes, i could make her laugh, and as i sat at the Lenscrafters today
waiting for them to take my money i remembered all that, stream of
consciousness-like, from the foldable sunglass frames i bought.

i was a bit chagrinned to be buying these sunglasses this week. some
months ago i threw some drunken dollars at a kickstarter project which is
developing eyeglass frame with built-in video cameras. i am doing this
only for fun, and because i need a pair of sunglasses, but i guess i
should have read the project plan closelier because i failed to notice
that the frames (containing the cameras) are not to be delivered until
november or december. i was happy to pony up $150 for what seemed like an
interesting product developed by a qualified team, and the frames
themselves seem like a reasonably fair value… but i may not be able to
use them for some months after i get them. oh well. so today i bought
regular sunglasses with other frames that contain no hidden cameras.
goddamit.

i was lugging a heavy box full of old magazines, the full year of 1924,
a year which once represented a vacuum in my collection but which now
abounds with multiple copies of every single issue. i consider some of
these copies “sacs”, which has nothing to do with testicles but everything
to do with “sacrifices”, meaning that when i have enough copies of a
single issue i can afford to destructively scan one of them, tearing the
content pages out and saving only the front and back covers and the music
pages for later use, discarding the scanned pages. as long as i ahve at
least one solid copy i can do the scans this way, and i prefer to do it
this way because it is much much easier and the quality is generally much
much better than doing it via the various scanner platen jujitsu methods
which aspire (usually futilely, depending on the vintage) to keep the
magazine copies fully intact.

…..

i have been cracking at the poetry this week, sicne getting this netbook.
i had a sour episode last night, with a few new lines in mind i turned on
the netbook and typed with the wind, trying to sieze those moments of
articulation from the clutches of oblivion. i have been using a freeware
text editor that boasts of being barebones, no-nonsense, a simple piece of
software that lets you write and gets out of the way. this, of course, i
another take-a-dump on Microsoft, though i would throw Open Office into
the mix of bloatware word processing products as well.

at any rate, i don’t know what i did to offend the righteous freeware app
that claims to let you write and get out of the way, but i lost a huge
chunk of text to that piece of shit freeware, with nothing more than a
perfunctory suggestion to “contact the developer” so they can improve
their product. fuck that. i gave up on being a beta guinea pig back in the
Eudora days, when that fabled piece of e-mail software greatness entered
a beta phase with something like 12 decimal points after its new version
number, and at some point Eudora ate months and months worth of my email,
irrecoverably deleted, sorry. i wrote to the team, but the best they could
offer was that beta software is beta software. you read the NDA, right?
sorry.

ever since then i’ve just held a consistent “fuck you” attitude toward
buggy, piece of shit software.

oh, i read today about an interesting problem lurking on the Interweaves.
speaking of buggy POS software released for public use with inadequate or
incoherent quality control, i was not surprised to see that osCommerce has
been found to have security holes wider than the entrance to the Holland
Tunnel. these security plagues allow botnets and digital mobsters to set
up malware distribution points on the most unassuming web sites. look it
up, if you care. i read it on USA Today, i think.

it reminded me of Matt’s Scripts, those seemingly innocent CGI scripts
which allowed web site owners to have cookies, message boards, guestbooks,
and other glamorous technologies henceforth reserved for the
pathfinder.coms and wireds of the day.

today it appears that most of these scripts have not been updated since
the 20th century, and one can only assume that they are not prepared for
modern times.

i remembered Matt’s Scripts in the context of osCommerce and it’s botnet
vulnerabilities because of an article I read somewhere in passing about
how the seemingly well-meaning Matt could eventually find himself on the
hook for knowingly distributing POS software that fails to meet even the
most generously liberal modicum of modern security standards.