First order of business today was to discard a mass of 1960s-era slides from a Wisconsin family. It might sound harsh but that is how we roll in the modern age of archiving (heh, I am such the Archivist). Much of today’s archiving is destructive of the original media.
But really, these slides just sucked. A shit ton of sunsets and Christmas trees, most of them washed out and not especially beautiful or rich in their color depth. Plus, I scanned every last one of them, with annotations. To me it seems dishonest to dump these onto eBay or even into a thrift shop, where the only likely buyer would be someone who wants to resell them online. I have already scanned and publicly shared every last one of these slides. So a buyer would be getting nothing unique. And in this case, they’d be getting nothing interesting.
The more cynical side of this act asks: Why should I not throw them out when that is exactly what the family did with them?
Oh and I forgot: they stink like hell. They obviously came from a smoking home. I had to open the windows and turn on the exhaust fan while handling them, so bad did they stink of concentrated butthole aroma. I would have to disclose this putrid stink were I to sell them on eBay, and that would reduce their resale value considerably. So doing anything but discarding them would have been a waste of my time, I think. And I repeat: they really sucked as images. Just bad.
A second order of business was to rearrange some furniture and make some space available. Now it feels like I can dance dance dance, and party party party, with that extra 7 or 8 square feet of space. I also purged a small number of books for resale at the Salvation Army.
…
I estimate I slept 7 hours last night, but that I needed 11 hours to accomplish that. It was an epic attempt, and I could probably have stood to take some kind of pill. But I was skeptical of taking a Unisom while the Lorazepam might still be in my system. So I took nothing, partly on account of the unknown interactions and also because the night before I got the pretty clear feeling that Lorazepam was doing nothing in helping me get to sleep. It takes care of the panic attacks but if I thought it was getting me to sleep before I think it might have been placebo. Unisom tonight, most likely.
My heart pounds really hard these days, though not as hard as in past periods of time. But it is, fundamentally, a healthy heart, like pretty much everything else in my body except, of course, my brain. As much as I know that to be the biggest and most influential muscle in my body I also know it to be the most troubled and frayed.
Poor, poor me. Poor, poor those who have any encounters with me.
…
I am trying this LIBARRY scene again, thinking that if I just stick with it long enough someone will tap me on the shoulder and ask me if I am writing a novel, or whatever else it is that I am doing. That happened to me once at a bar I frequented for a few months last year. The bartender, alluding to conversation she had had with another bartender, asked “Are you writing a book?” TYPE TYPE TYPE. She and her colleague had noticed that as soon as I sat down at the bar it just looked like I could not stop typing. My effluviousness was not lost on them. Comments about that have come at me in other contexts, perhaps raising that melancholic reminder from yesterday that I do not have a family-like environment of like-minded workers who know and respect what each other is doing without feeling it necessary or even appropriate to interrupt or barge in with something so gauche as encouragement.
I was thinking later last night of a time in Chicago, when mother and I visited my aunt (mother’s sister) and mu aunt’s kids at one the kid’s houses. That would be my cousin’s house, I guess.
After dinner we all retired to the living room and sat on our fat, stuffed asses, remembering how to breathe again after eating for an hour straight. The littlest kids wriggled around on the floor playing video games (what were they to me anyway, my cousin’s daughters? My nieces once removed? Maybe…). My aunt, who felt to me like the overseer of the whole situation, sat on the big easy chair reading the Chicago Tribune. Some started snoring, others read books, I think I was watching the video games being played on the television.
It might have been one of the happiest family moments of my entire life, save for one little wrinkle. My mother could not stand it. She fidgeted, looked visibly impatient, stood up and sat down as if adjusting the couch beneath her, left the room for no reason then quickly returned.
I would see this behavior in her other times when we were in the company of these same relatives, or else other members of her sister’s side of the family. Mother could not stand the comfort of not having to say or do anything when in the company of family. Well, I call it “comfort” but I guess that is not fair, since she obviously did not see the situation as comfortable. She would see everyone being reasonably cnotent like that and she just wanted no part of it.
A similar scenario played out, probably on that same visit, at the house of my other cousin who lived on a seriously remote stretch of unzoned land in rural Illinois. It was middle of the day on a weekend, as I recall, so all the kids were around, playing and roughhousing and whatever else they did.
Long story short, everyone seemed to be having a good time, but then I noticed that my mother was hiding, I mean literally playing a game of hide-and-seek (minus the -and-seek) behind half-opened doors and floor-to-ceiling beams. She didn’t want anyone to see her and I never knew why. Without knowing I could see her she would appear to tickle her face and frown hard, just unable to fit in with the gathered assembly of family.
If not for this it might have fit my fantasy of family life, where everyone is comfortable with what everyone else is doing, because that is what they do and we are proud of them for what they do. I was reading a book, I think. No one had a problem with that because they knew that once I finished reading for the day I would report back on what I had read. What are the little kids doing, watching Saturday morning cartoons? That’s cool, we will have something to talk about at lunch come noontime, when those shows end for the day. I don’t remember what my uncle was doing — I do not even remember his name — but he always made something of a presence of himself no matter what mundane action he performed. This was because he had had a major stroke years earlier, and could barely stand on his right leg nor could he speak through one side of his mouth. Yet he got around without stumbling to the floor, and found ways to make his words understood.
He might have been considered an inspiration, or at least a valued and strength-solidifying member of the fabric of the family’s strength. But I honestly think his clumsy appearances bothered my mother, who saw him not as just another member of the family despite his obvious awkwardnesses but as a depressing, discouraging reminder of the frailty of these human bags of water and bones.
Aha, there I go again, lurching into thoughts of all the things I will never have. They did seem to have a nice family life. My aunt loathed one of her daughter’s husbands, and she was never shy about saying so when he was not present. But there was never any screaming.
If anything my mother’s odd deflection of that atmosphere made me realize how strong her sister’s family was. I remember attempting to bring mother into the conversations, with no luck.
…
After typing all that I thought of calling my aunt. She would be well into her 80s by now. I thought of her just yesterday, with all the snowy streets and cars skidding around. I am usually careful to wait at a crosswalk until oncoming cars are completely stopped at the red light or stop sign. This is to avoid the risk that the cars will skid on the ice, crushing me or at least bumping me at the kneecaps and turning the next weeks of potential greatness and opportunity into time spent with 2 broken legs strung up in a fucking hospital bed.
What reminded me of my aunt was the story she told me in college about a time she was driving on a Chicago highway during or after a snowstorm. Something happened (she did not know what but she probably got lightly struck by another car) and her vehicle went spinning on the highway, like a marionette. With no control over the vehicle she said that all she could do was take her hands off the wheel and close her eyes. “I thought, ‘This is it.’”
Who knows how many seconds or moments passed until the car stopped spinning… She opened her eyes and found herself completely on the other side of the Interstate, facing straight into oncoming traffic as drivers swerved to avoid her. From there she was able to pull over onto the grassy median, where she sat and sat and sat for a very long time, waiting for the snow to stop.
One line from that story has always stayed with me: “This is it.” Suddenly and unexpectedly facing death, or perceived death, her experience illustrates that one is unlikely to respond with panic or screams but with silent acceptance, even resignation that circumstances can simply and unexpectedly blast out of your control at any moment, at any instant. But when that happens you might find that control of those same circumstances can just as randomly land right back in your hands.
So I’ve never been sure if she was right to close her eyes, or if I would follow her example in similar circumstances. I think I might want to see what happens to me in my final moment, if it comes to such circumstance of instant dramatics.
…
It is later. Back at the ghetto coffee shop. People out of doors seem to be in high spirits, now that it is easier to get around and I guess fewer of us feel the need to be homebound by the snow. And of course it is Friday.
Someone posted to a mailing list to which I subscribe complaining that some people, businesses in particular, do not shovel their snow quickly enough. I have never had to shovel snow but I do not envy those who do. I walk on the street itself as much as possible after big storms. The drivers of what few cars are out there are not going to run you down when they see you on the street. It seemed like a bit of a lame complaint, though they were talking specifically about Broadway, which might be a different scene than I am familiar with as far as walking in the street after a storm.
Listening to Alison Krauss, streaming from my sister’s Plex server in Tampa. So cool that we can do this, share our personal media libraries via SSL over the Internet in such a professional looking interface. I can connect to her server better than I can my own sometimes, when my server might be right across the street while hers is 1000 miles south of this spot. Of course this is not an over the air server, but one which is routed through the vagaries of packet switching and whatever miraculous protocols have come along since the 1990s to render efficient the movement of streaming data from hither to yon.
Wish I knew more people with Plex servers to share, or who would be interested in mine. But you gotta be careful sharing this stuff with strangers or potential enemies.
What of substance to say this day? Nothing, it seems. I check in at the Hour Children to see if my 7 years worth of old music magazines are still there. They are, though only 6 of the bound volumes are seen from the front door. They moved one volume over toward the cash register. I have one volume left at home that I might keep, since it is a rather handsome and somewhat older copy, from the 1920s. Oh and I also have one from 1880-something, forgot about that. I need a scanning binge to get some stacks of paper out of my way. Scanning binges are best kicked off by opening a beer and putting on the headphones. But I am not drinking for now, at least I don’t think I am (I cannot find Resin anywhere anyway), and I actually put the scanner away to prevent myself from giving into that bottomless desire I have to scan scan scan. Dance dance dance.
At present I have a small mountain of about 500-600 pages of music I have scanned. I cannot decide if I need to keep it around. It is of scarcely limited value (if that is not an oxymoron) and one could say its physical value is sliced and diced into smaller and smaller pellets of meaninglessness now that I have them all scanned. Except that some scans are not particularly excellent. But even there, I retain intact copies of virtually every magazine (music included, of course) should there be missing pages that I must acquire into my scanned collection.
A few weeks ago I was playing through a mass of scans I did the night before, looking for diamonds in the rough, or at least something that rose above the seemingly unimpeachable threshold of banal parlor music. I think I had scanned 323 pages. Playing through that stuff it at some point bogged me down to find that not only was I wasting my time digging through a bottomless sea of shit in search of some precious diamond piano piece, but I had also scanned 323 pages of this shit the night before. How many hours? This was no ADF machine that did things quickly, as I use for the receipts. It was a budget-priced A3, oversize flatbed that is not exactly the swiftest leopard in the scanning world. Also, I accidentally started scanning at 600dpi before switching back to 300dpi. Horrors!
I once crashed a company network at Time Inc. by scanning a dollar bill at something like 2400dpi, or whatever maximum scanner resolution was at that time (This was 1996, I think). It happened around 10pm, after most people had left, which is how I think I got away with it. Around that same time someone got fired for attempting to download the entire Usenet.
…
Meaning to post that recording of the music from the mausoleum, the place I don’t think I’ll be returning to any time soon. Want to use that as background for comments made from the chapel, comments to be made as if I am touring the mausoleum. I probably cannot do that, use the music, since it is likely a common commercial CD which the SoundCloud copyright police will recognize.
