Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Xmas Wrapup

'Twas the night after Christmas and all through the day
There were signs that the children had done more than play.
Of the living room rug we had long since lost sight
As its burden of paper grew, morning till night.
And the ribbons and bows that had graced every gift
Lay scattered and splattered, too many to lift,
And to tell who gave what we were no longer certain
Except when a label popped out from a curtain.
To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall
There was plastic and paper and boxes and all.

With his motions impeded by oceans of plastic
The Grinch who lives with us might do something drastic,
Absent some effort to clean up the place,
To pick up the boxes, to clear out some space.

He no sooner had vowed not to do it himself,
When someone stepped forward: a right jolly elf,
And smiling and waving, she came on the scene
With a sack she held tight that was plastic and green,
Then she spoke not a word but went straight to the floor
And she picked up the papers, the ribbons and more
And she stuffed the sack with them and giving a nod,
Handed them off to her deer partner, T__d.

It was good while it lasted, but far from complete,
For the plastic still catches the old Grinch's feet
There are pieces of toys that belong in a box
That somehow get caught in the toes of his socks,
And sharp things that pierce through the sole or the heel
That none but the Grinch who lives with us can feel,
And things that are larger and easy to trip
And fracture a thigh or a hip or a lip.
Though no one else sees them the Grinch knows they're there,
So he's painting a sign, "Let the traveler beware".
And he's staying confined to his dark, tiny room,
For no matter how dank or how musty the gloom,
He prefers to be thought somewhat iconoclastic
To ending his days as the victim of plastic.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Bah, humbug

Well, here we are again, the last three days before December 25th. During the run-up to this festive occasion, every member of the tribe has been sick with a flu variation that seizes hold of the stomach and lower digestive tract with ramifications that are unpleasant both to experience and to relate.

It does take the edge off one's desire to celebrate a season notorious for egregious menus and involuntary gluttony. And that's a good thing. But the whole notion that somehow the meal must go on, despite the fact that the preparer herself is a walking virus farm is perhaps worthy of re-examination.

Far better, it seems to me, to celebrate the fact that this season offers the gift of about four days in a row off work. This is time that can be spent, sick or not, in allowing the body to relax from the daily grind of getting up at an unnatural hour to satisfy the demands of the workplace. Modest reason though it may be, the gift of time is the one that universally returns the most benefits.

Two-day weekends are only a partial luxury, given that the first day is barely long enough to spin down from the weekly trance, and the second is over too soon. Sunday night is not the best night for sleep, because the mind ramps up to deal with the upcoming fresh and/or unfinished business of the week at hand. Saturday, for those of us who are fortunate enough not to have to work it, is ideal because it begins without the tyranny of the alarm clock, and ends with the promise of yet another day devoid of the same.

Thus, a gift of four mornings without a rude awakening is a rare treasure. Why spoil it by eating egregiously and indulging in seasonal gluttony? Why mess it up by slaving for the better part of a day over a massive menu that will end up in overconsumption and discomfort, with the attenuated aftermath of same-tasting leftover food that must be dealt with in the ensuing days?

Back in the day, consumption meant one thing: tuberculosis. Now it means consumerism. Which disease is more destructive?

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Press Delete

Is writing one of those "riding a bicycle" skills: Painful to learn, but once you get the hang of it you never forget how to do it even if you seldom do it?

Or is writing one of those "setting your digital watch" skills: You did it once by accident but that was last year and this is this year and damned if you know how to do it this year?

Writing indeed could be like a whole variety of other things we learn how to do, but some of us don't, as Eeyore said sadly, simply because there is a whole variety of other things we like to do. "Priorities", Eeyore might have muttered, had he known the word, which probably he did but was too depressed to think of it.

Back in the day when paper and writing instruments were all we had, writing in the sense of literary endeavor as opposed to penmanship was not for Everyman. It was, for the most part, one of the delights of the leisure class, who happened to have much of the education and most of the leisure. When Gutenberg developed moveable type, as everyone knows, the promulgation of literature to the masses became possible. And so it continued, with every new development of technology tending to lower the common denominator of who could be published and/or popularized.

As "recycled electrons" becomes the medium of choice, the blog and the wiki and all their variations are supplanting the book as the medium for delivery. The language is changing more rapidly; shrinking through the elision of vowels and by the return to phonetic spelling. Sink your Bluetooth into your Blackberry and you have instant earphonic communication. hu nedz vwlz?

So what is the future of writing? Who can say? If laws are written and promulgated in text message format, they will be impossible for the older generation to understand, but if they are not, they will be too archaic for the young. Will a work of literature have to be translated to l33t in order to be appreciated?

Another associated and equally disturbing trend is that which decrees that everything written, photographed, said or thought must be archived and preserved for future generations unknown. What distinguishes the archivist from the librarian in this regard is the subtle thought that the archivist strives to preserve everything because it is not possible for us in the present to know what will be important in the future. The librarian seeks to arrange everything currently available for the best possible retrieval, and recognizing that space is limited, seeks to keep the best of what is current at the expense of discarding the deadwood. I would hope that writers generally take the latter view.

Amazing strides are being made in the field of storage and retrieval of information. The next big thing is probably holographic storage although nanostorage solutions (manipulating storage at the subatomic level) are also field of intense interest. So perhaps storage capacity won't lag behind need as much as it does now.

In the technologically advanced countries we are largely unable to erase any trace of our personal histories because we have no idea where it is stored and in what format and who has access to it. And since mistakes are inevitable and all systems break down at some point, the record we leave behind may not even be wholly ours or may be only partially true, or could be altered to serve some undesired purpose.

So the question remains: how badly do we need to record everything about everything? If the population of the world in just forty years from now is 9 billion and climbing, will there be answers to the problems of supply that our progeny would otherwise not be aware of had we not kept all the archives of all the agricultural enterprises of our own day?

There certainly will be problems if we don't preserve the seeds from today and plant them tomorrow, since engineering of crops diminishes the diversity and thus disease resistance of our plants. Is the same true of our culture? Will the generations to come somehow be unable to cope because we failed to record everything we did? Smhw i dnt thk so.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

There's snow way around it...

Today's snowfall put new meaning into the second syllable.

It was one of those heavy, wet snows that come when it's not terribly cold. The stuff clumped and layered over the tarp on the car shelter that I had constructed this summer and reinforced with chicken wire this fall in anticipation of one of those heavy, wet snows that come...

When I came home tonight, I saw that the center peak of the car shelter I made out of those thin metal tubes of a former dining tent had collapsed down onto J's car. I got out a stepladder and a rake and removed as much of the snow as I possibly could. By the time I finished, the general roofline was flat, but at least not sagging onto the car.

This, of course, means that any further snows will simply repeat the process. And on the 50 degree days that are forecast to follow later this week, the water will pool in the tarp, and flow down through the slits that I had to put in it this summer when it rained and remained undrained.

A real, honest-to-gosh car shelter would have cost upwards of $800, which is money that only the government has at this point. So I'm forced to consider how I am going to cope with having a saggy, baggy tarp that has to be harder to shovel off than the car would be if I just took the whole thing down. But such is the problem with designing for assisted living.

There may yet be hope. This weekend, weather permitting, I shall betake me to the local domicile improvement emporium in the hope of finding structural reinforcements. A couple of two-by-fours artfully fastened by plywood braces should do it, wouldn't you say?