Speak

I am speaking these words. Talking into a microphone. Using a voice recognition software I bought several months ago.

I’m feeling claustrophobic today. All day long I have an overpowering desire to throw things away. Yet I just can’t seem to find enough to throw away to relieve the claustrophobia. There are piles of poetry magazines I will never read. Why can’t I bring myself to throw them away? I do not like throwing away gifts. But I might have to. Old Christmas gifts that missed their mark but which I keep anyway.

I moved this website last night to a cheap web hosting company. It’s the only site I maintain now that is not on one of my own dedicated servers. I did this for sanity’s sake. Don’t tell anybody but my web hosting company filed for bankruptcy last month. They will probably come out of it just fine, and a worst-case scenario where they just turn out the lights and say good night to their thousands of other customers does not seem very likely. I have been meaning to close down one of my Web servers anyway, so this is as good an impetus as any to get that done. A lot has changed in hosting in the last several years. That goes without saying to virtually anybody in the business. It’s become streamlined. Hosting used to be the most chaotic business where the last thing in the world any sane person wanted to be was somebody’s Internet service provider. But they got the services straightened out and buttoned up such that it’s not as hazardous or prone to disaster as it used to be.

That is unless your hosting company goes out of business.

I am stuck inside today, a prisoner to UPS once again. About a year ago I subscribed to their UPS My Choice, thinking it would make deliveries easier to manage and plan for. It was a total waste of money but more importantly a waste of time. They give you a time window during which you should expect deliveries, but in this whole year not once did the deliveries arrive within those time windows that they gave me. They were even early a couple times, and being early is worse than being late I think, since it’s easier to miss.

My next plan for the .MOBI charter is this. Talking. Partly at least. I’m talking into a wired microphone right now but I will pick up a wireless headset so I can just walk around and talk and dictate into this website and into other things. My aversion to buying a wireless headset stems from my disdain for people who walk around in public apparently talking into thin air but are in fact talking to somebody through the wireless headset which you can’t always see. They look like insane people to me, and I get nervous. I do not intend to become such a person as that. Because I would look like an asshole. I don’t mind doing it in the privacy of my home. I can be an asshole here.

The problem I have with throwing away poetry books and magazines is that a lot of them are really quite beautiful publications. And these things are not generally available digitally. Why I have such trouble throwing away old LP records though, I cannot say. I think I imagine that I might get a turntable and digitize them, but that will never happen.

Another .MOBI pursuit which I have been working on for a long time involves sending voice messages here, sent straight from telephones. I bought a software which claims to allow me to do that but I have never been able to get it to work. But I’ll try again. As I said to a friend of mine the other day, so many things in life just do not work.

The .MOBI charter, if you are just tuning in, is to fill this website entirely through means other than a normal computer. I cheat once in a while, because there is nothing sacred about the so-called charter. But mostly I stay true to my intention. The .MOBI TLD (top level domain) was originally intended for web sites delivering content formatted for mobile devices. That charter was a bust, but I like my .MOBI.

I got an email last week from someone who has followed my websites since the early days. I’m not aware that we ever corresponded before, but I was happy to hear from him and to know that somewhere in the world people are talking about me.

I also have compact discs stacked to the ceiling into of my closets. Got to get rid of them. And then there are those boxes of slides. Family slides. Very few of those are mine. I binged on buying slides through eBay and at second hand stores for a while. I still find it fascinating to sneak a peek into the lives of others, and to see the things that someone found interesting enough to take a picture of. But that’s one of those projects that I never fully recovered after the big server blowout. Sometimes I forget that nothing has ever been the same for me since that happened.

Something about this day does not feel right. I slept until 1 PM, trying hard to get back to sleep after waking up at about 9 AM. The dreams were insane. What felt like complex and intricate thoughts and imaginations all turned into nothing. As soon as a glimmer of consciousness returned to my mind the fabled extravagances were vanquished.