Now, I have a lot of friends on these here internets. We jostle and poke fun, and chat and so forth about a lot of things. Some how or another, like a fool, I mentioned that Jackie Kennedy was a hot babe way back when. Twice as foolishly, I also mentioned that she couldn’t hold a candle to my own mother. And they tempted me to prove it.
Now, pictures of my family from forty years ago are in short supply, and I don’t have many. This one is a scan of a scan, I think. She might be graduating from high school here, or egad! junior high. Anyway, you see what I was talking about now, don’t you my friends?
The really funny part is, she pretty much looks the same right now. Hi mom!
OK yesterday we defamed the elderly. It don’t matter; they’ve barely learned to use the telephone, and I doubt any of them are ever going to be reading teh intarnets, no matter how big they make teh intarnet pipes. So let’s get back to where we started. If you’re not a stick in the mud, technology can improve your life immensely.
As I am the foremost authority on myself, I can assure you in my case that’s absolutely true. That might seem odd at first blush.
I make reproduction antique furniture. Talk about a stick in the mud. Well, go to IKEA if you want to buy Jetsons furniture made out of wooden shredded wheat and formaldehyde glue, swathed in woodgrained wrapping paper. I’m not interested. And I’m not interested because “modern” furniture is an old idea. It’s just as dated as any Shaker table is. It’s the method of making it and selling it that’s new, and I put IKEA in the shade on that score. So I’m a thoroughly modern mill- man, trust me. So what exactly makes my day so modern, in the true sense of the word, and how is it different than it was just twenty-five years ago? I’m glad you asked:
1. I can get really good coffee anywhere, including in my house. This is totally overlooked. Good coffee was really hard to find 25 years ago. Home brewed was boiled, generally -a terrible way to make coffee. And your average diner had coffee from the tenth century in that pot. I’ve got a German coffemaker that cost $16.99 and makes sublime java, or I can drive four miles in any direction and get really good joe. I do. 2. I can live where I want. Everybody told me I was crazy to move where I live now. They said I was too far away from everything. My house has appreciated 539% since I built it 13 years ago. Yeah, I’m a dope. You don’t have to live in a crummy apartment next to your job in a big factory chugging smoke if you don’t want to anymore. 3. My house is comfortable Hot water always comes out of the shower head. It ‘s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It’s dry in the basement.The furniture’s not bad in here either. I ride when I mow the lawn. My children have their own rooms. These were magical dreams when I was a kid. 4. I’m alive. I’ve been brought back from near dead a couple of times. Twenty five years ago, they would have given me aspirin and last rites. 5. I don’t have to drive anywhere. Look, I’m sympathetic if you’re a road warrior. I’ve been there myself. But I never drive anywhere now. It’s possible now. Even bank robbers can stay home and steal on the internet. 6. I make money at home by writing. This one kills me. I tap out some text, which is visible in a little window on a screen, and occasionally get an attaboy or WTF from an editor that I have never met, and money is deposited directly into my bank account. This is the equivalent of alchemy circa 1975. 7. People find me even though I simply exist. I invented guerilla marketing. I was the king of “copier art” word of mouth, free publicity, you name it. Now I simply exist on the internet, and people looking for what I have to sell find me and buy things. I think I’ve spent about $125.00 on advertising in the last three years. The internet is making willing buyer/willing seller come true in spades. 8. I have really good equipment from all over the world. I’ve bought really good equipment and materials from all over the world and had it delivered to me here and never met the people I bought it from. I remember how hard it was just to get a 1×12 piece of pine after four in the afternoon on a weekday, and forget weekends. Now I can buy a 600 pound cast iron table saw made in Taiwan and sold through a company in Washington state, 2500 miles from me, at 2 AM on Sunday and have it delivered in less a week. I know this is the case, because I did exactly that. And Home Depot is open on Christmas. 9. I have access to really good information Of all kinds too. Maps, directions, weather, pricing, comparative shopping, the internet is an astounding treasure trove of information. 10.You’re reading this, ain’t you? I really can’t say enough about this mode of expression. They didn’t even teach men to type when I went to high school. 11.My packages get where they’re going. I was a shipping clerk for a little while 25 years ago. Shipping used to be as reliable as lottery scratch tickets. Now everything gets there right away, and you can track it all the way there. 12.I know how much things cost. How does a saleman get paid? It used to be that salesman got money by knowing what a customer didn’t, and taking advantage of that situation. Good luck trying that now, with this screen and Firefox in front of me. A saleman is in customer service now, or he’s fired. Unless you’re a car salesman. Then you’re still evil. 13.I can be contacted at all times. When I entered the construction trades, the idea of a phone on the job was science fiction. We all met before the sun came up in a dingy construction office and tried to predict everything that would happen all day to everybody and fix it before it happened. Yeah, that’ll work. My life has been immeasurably ennobled by the cellular phone and e-mail. I f your job is miserable because of those two marvels you’ve got a bad job. Quit now. 14.I can make financial transactions on the web. I go to banks to sign mortgages. I go to the Post Office…Never mind, I never go to the Post Office. 15.I have access to money easily. People in the real world think easy credit is a snare to catch you. I’ve built empires on unsecured loans. All you have to do is always pay them back. People like me used to be trapped in laboring, or preyed upon by loan sharks, because regular banks wouldn’t touch us. Now they beg me to borrow money. I don’t need any today, because I could get my hands on it when opportunity knocked. 16.I have digital photography It’s hard to exaggerate its usefulness. I sent a picture of the exact item purchased to a customer, with a picture of it inside its crate with one side open, to show a customer what’s inside and how to unpack it. He purchased it because he saw a digital photo of the last one. 17.I have a big truck. I never go anywhere, but when I do, I can carry an enormous amount of stuff, safely and comfortably. The very idea of air-conditioning in a work truck boggles my mind still. Is that an FM radio?!! 18.I am not isolated from society. I reiterate: you’re reading this, ain’t you? I have friends I’ve never met, all over the world. A note in a bottle, or waiting for my Nobel Prize ceremony was my only hope of meeting such persons before. 19.I can fly. When I was a young teenager, my father took me to Boston’s Logan airport, who was running a sort of tour where the children of the great unwashed (that’s me) could get a chance to ride on an airplane. We took off, circled Boston twice, and landed. I thought at the time that was going to be my only chance to fly in my life. Thirty years later I was flying twice a week to a remote office for my last regular job. I used to get home in time for goodnight stories for my kids. My father worked in Boston when I was a kid, commuting only 35 miles from our house, and I almost never saw him at the dinner table. 20.This box makes me smarter than I am. That’s not that difficult, but the computer and the internet is the greatest cheat sheet in the history of mankind.
There you have it. It’s always “the future” right now, and it’s so bright… well, I told that joke already. I must be getting old, I’m repeating myself.
Look, I’m not young. I don’t know what young is, really; but I’m not it anymore, of that I’m sure.
Why is the average person in a nursing home so dull? Make eye contact, or if you’re really foolhardy, ask a question in a nursing home, and you’ll likely get a disquisition on everybody and everything that person has ever seen that they can still remember, going back to Roosevelt. The first Roosevelt. And it comes out in one, punctuationless sentence, along with a little spittle generally. And 99% of it isn’t interesting to anyone. Why is this? Why are old people so dull? One of the very first jobs I had was working in a nursing home, so maybe I can answer this.
The reason most old people are so dull, is that they’re people, and most people are dull. You just don’t notice is until it’s in a wrinkly package.
We’re all mostly dull. But time strips away sex appeal, and the likelihood that the other person might be able to help you move furniture someday, or introduce you to someone with sex appeal, and all that’s left is the run-on sentence we all have prepared to answer the simple query: How are you? That, and a peculiar odor.
It’s the people that are the same person, just been around longer, that I’m interested in. My father, who you met here a while ago, has interesting things to say, and if you get a minute, ask him an interesting question. And so we must all strive to be interesting and/or useful throughout our whole lives, or we’ll be the ones waiting to describe our bowel movements to strangers, whether they ask us about them or not.
Like I said, I’m old. Well, I’m not young. Don’t invite me to the Ween show; I won’t go. I’d sit in and play with Ween, though. Because I’m not out of the game until they screw the lid shut. Growing up is not necessarily growing old.
Time marches really quickly these days. Lots of stuff is offered, in a dizzying array daily, agitating for your attention. And some of that stuff is pretty useful. And it occurred to me yesterday, that my life has been made easier, immensely so, by the march of technology coupled to the mostly open market to get it to me.
So tomorrow, I’ll list all the ways my day yesterday was made easier, safer, more convenient, faster, — and in a few cases just plain possible — by the march of technology and my willingness to use it instead of saying: “That’s not how we did it when Kennedy was President, you whippersnapper.”
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. Douglas Adams
No, I don’t mean the rheotorical you; I mean you. And me. Anybody.
Well not anybody, of course, because not everybody is educable. But there are no entrance requirements, no interview, nothing; they just put the curriculum up on the internet and let you use it. As Lawrence of Arabia says to Ali, pointing across the trackless waste of the Nefu desert towards Aqaba: “It’s just a matter of going.” Simple, really.
Indeed. Now, you’re not going to get to ask anybody any questions, get help from your peers, go to any keg parties, or clap any erasers for brownie points or anything. The stuff is just laying around there. You’ve got to do something with it, no one’s going to show you the way.
Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.Ben Franklin
Now, if you know the vernacular of the 1700s, you’d know that “dear” means “expensive” or “difficult” in that aphorism. And Ben knew what he was talking about, because he was talking about himself, really. He’s one of a long list of people that taught themselves what they wanted or needed to know. Like most auto-didacts, he knew amazing and voluminous things, but there were large gaps in his learning. This is the danger in not having a curriculum set out for you.
I’ve never been able to learn things properly. I always just wanted to be left alone in the library with the information that interested me. But you’ll notice that Ben Franklin didn’t espouse his method of learning, and neither will I. It’s a self-selecting cadre I inhabit, and if you join because you think it’s sexy, you’ll likely make a mess of your life. Try going into IBM and telling them you know the things an MIT education encompasses, but you have no credentials to prove it. The tests you didn’t take online aren’t in the Human Resources person’s desk, either. Grab a broom.
The only real way to learn anything in this world is to do it alongside someone that knows what they are talking about. But the person that knows what he’s talking about is a rare thing, and rarer still is that person that will help you. They’re busy. But sometimes they write it down. And you can learn it from them, even if they’re halfway across the planet, or dead as a Pharoah.
People drop out of college now, and say: “Bill Gates dropped out of college, and he’s rich. No problem.” Believe me, you’re not Bill Gates. If you were, you wouldn’t be looking around to see what other people were doing, and mimicking their approach. Being an auto-didact is a force-play. You run to second base on a ground ball or you’re out. There’s no deciding in it. You are or you ain’t. Bill Gates and his ilk stole second and third and home, and you’re still trying to bunt.
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, “You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.” Sir Arnold Bax
Regular people make the world go round. By definition, most people are regular people. But if it’s enough for you to have the stuff in your head, because you can use it, and know how to pan through the whole placer to find the glittering dust that’s there in the ore, it’s there now.
Hi all. I’m having a Monday squared, how about you? There seems to be some sort of dark matter on-line somewhere that eats my text whenever I’m trying to enter it into a text editor. Bad comedians used to make jokes about “where the socks disappear to” in the comedy clubs. I imagine it’s been updated now, and with your two drink minimum you get to hear about “where the pixels go” now.
Anyway, we get peevish when the little wonders we are increasingly relying upon let us down. It’s human nature. But I’ve missed a few meals in my youth, and knew people that grew up dirt poor, and I always try to remind myself that we’re worrying about the icing on our cake, and luckily rarely have to worry about the pastry itself anymore. You know, like Sinead O’Leary had to:
Her Uncles had found her alone, a little girl sitting quietly in her family home in the county of Mayo. For the Irish, the famine was just the last straw; they had a litany of Cromwell’s leftover reasons to leave anyway. And so they left in their thousands. Sinead O’Leary was no different; first to Liverpool, then to Canada, on to Boston. When she finally moved to New York City, now a grown woman and married, she rechristened it New Cork, and no-one she knew dared disagree. She made it so.
She simply refused to remember anything unpleasant, and seemed to forget nothing else. She regaled her children and grandchildren with stories of Cuchulain, and Medb, and faeries and wee people, a living encyclopedia of fun and fantasy.
She saved what little money came her way, and she bought and sold things. Her long lost relatives would send her this and that from the Auld Sod, and she’d sell them to Yankees who collected such as her family had, as if the Irish were as exotic as Babylonians, not right across the Irish Sea from their own forefathers.
One fine spring morning, she opened a bible box her uncle had sent her. Inside, sheepskin glowed with monastic filigree. She knew the Lord’s word was on those Latin pages. Oh yes, she knew. She was wise enough to know also: There was a devil of a ransom in it from a collector too. And when a trim woman appeared at her door, sent by her employer, the Colossus of Finance, to buy it for that mausoleum of manuscripts he was constantly stoking on Fifth Avenue, Sinead was ready. He wanted it like the damned wanted icewater. Sinead knew how long to hold out before acquiescing.
Into real estate the money went. Then her son invested it for her in the stock market. Soon the simple woman, who still retied her own lace when it frayed, was rich. She always was, if you asked her, even though her Uncles could have told you they had found her alone in that stone cottage, all those years ago, because her parents were dead and gone, outside the door, their mouths green from trying to eat grass when the potatoes failed.
She was very old when that awful day christened “Black Friday” took her fortune, just like the famine had taken her family those many years ago. Her son sat with her on the simple wooden settee she still favored. “It has St Patrick�s clover in it, and to put a cushion on it would be extravagance itself!”
He gently told her that he had lost her money, over a million dollars, in one afternoon.
“What a blessing!” she said.
Her son, now grown grey himself, and ruined along with his mother, couldn�t comprehend.
“How kind of the Lord to wait until I could afford to lose a million dollars. Imagine what a blow it would have been to lose such a sum when I was poor!”
Her son burst out laughing. And he knew then, that his beloved mother was placed on this earth for a reason. And they would rise again. Surely.
“Besides,” she said, “I have three more Bible Boxes”
Alway remember whence you came, people.
Month: September 2006
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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