Wednesday, May 30, 2012

collapsed

Frequent moves, small shared apartments, the pursuit of simplicity: there were reasons, but.

The process through which my music player, news sources, mail, and writing instrument all came to reside in a single device/interface has been nothing short of a personal disaster.

I really believe this.

Once, as They say, it was a boombox, electric typewriter, handwritten letters, printed newspapers. (And He rested on the seventh day.)

Stereos of varying sophistication and power came and went, but they were always Their Own Thing. The old typewriter was swapped for an unwieldy 386; later I acquired a b/w laptop incapable of connecting to the Net – a glorified typewriter, then. Along the way, indeed, the Internet "arrived," and correspondence shifted to email mostly; but I always had to access the Net from school or work, i.e. not from the hinky little laptop on my main desk at home.

On the eve of September 11, I received a used freebie, an old beige Power Mac G3, and in a single stroke, music, the Net (meaning news and correspondence, mainly, but plenty else as well), and "word processing" were collapsed into this one satanic Ding with/in which I have lived for more than a decade.

Now I endlessly flit from activity to activity – choosing music, checking for new mail, tapping a sentence here, or there, social network sites, oh, God, checking for new mail – never able to hover sufficiently over a single project to produce anything except exhaustion and a sense of Lost Time.



In point of fact, the production of this post comes at the cost of continuing work on an important, paid piece of writing.

Also, my writing habits and compositional energy have not recovered fully, and probably never will, from my quitting smoking: three years ago, nearly to the day.

9 comments:

  1. G3, G4, iMac, Mini / die Dinge, die Dinge / they're trying to kill me

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  2. which is weird because i usually suffer from REVERSE fundamental attribution error, blaming my intrinsic flaws for my failures and, with reference to situational causes, forgiving others for their failures

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  3. it looks like i may have to take up smoking again in order to crowd out my internet addiction

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  4. what would you do with a thousand bookmarks? i recently merged all of my browser's "read later" bookmark folders together with the contents of my instapaper account (which i subsequently closed).

    the sum is a folder of ~1,100 bookmarked webpages that i "saved for later" at some point between ~2002 and ~2011.

    there are four subfolders that make a couple hundred of the bookmarks useful insofar as i know what they are (mainly Amazon pages of books that have been recommended to me). but bracketing those "useful" folders out still leaves about 850 unread pages.

    delete them all in one giddy flush, and freedom? or what?

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  5. (and today i discovered a folder containing a few hundred pdfs marked "to read." now what?)

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  6. and of course there are plenty of people to profit from this state of affairs

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  7. The chicken and the egg are addicted to each other, and we are addicted to the puzzle of which came first.

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  8. Procrastination is an effect of fear not indolence.

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  9. LOL: "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." —Douglas Adams

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