I only titled this posting as such because that is what I was hearing through the radio as i started typing. there is no fire here, no snuggling, just overpriced coffee granted to me by payment to a surly cashier who I think does not like me, but whose general attitude seems to be of disdain for all.

I had forgotten about this 30th high school reunion e-mail chain, since there was no weekly Throwback Thursday e-mail last week as there has been for about a month. I was thinking that I do not know anybody on this list. Sure, I recognize a name here or there, and I may have conversed with a handful of them — THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AGO — but this conversation is being carried on by what feels like another class. And I don’t mean the Class of 1986. I mean a different class of alumni, class of people, maybe I could take it as far as saying it feels like a diffeerent class of privilige?

Scanning is one of these OCD habits I have that, once I start, I find it hard to stop. I am scanning the 1928 issues of “The Etude” magazine at 600dpi for maximum OCR accuracy. It is faster than any 600dpi scanning I’ve ever done but it does not lack for tedium. It’s a fancy Fujitsu duplex scanner which listed for thousands of dollars. Somehow i got it for significantly less than that. I don’t think I paid more than a few hundred for it, this because (as I discovered upon receipt) the device had no feeder chute, rendering the device essentially useless. In time I obtained a feeder chute for something like $80 but it took quite a bit of headbanging to get the Fujitsu to work with Vuescan, which is said to be about the most versatile scanning software out there. As it happens I checked to see if an update was avaiilable, and what do you know: among the handful of bug fixes was “improved suport for certain Fujistu duplex scanners”. I updated Vuescan and the fancy thousands-dollar scanner works with that software. I should be grateful but I am not feeling the joy over an expensive  piece of software that didn’t fucking work for about a year. This is one of many things that has repelled me from continuing to pursue a living in technology: So much shit just doesn’t fucking work.

I just wrote a too-long e-mail to a woman who wants to use one of my photos on a CD she is creating. She mentioned that she once played at the White House, which I find genuinely impressive. So I said that, followed by a brief account of my attempts to contact Richard Nixon. I read in a book called “Music at the White House” that Nixon had written a theme song for a club he was in in college, and I wanted to play that little song as a novelty on one of my recitals at Oberlin and New York. His answer: “NO!” I’ve always felt like an asshole for the correspondence, but if you’re Richard Nixon you must have dealt with a lot of backwash of society.