I was over at the computer stuff store looking for something they turned out not to have in stock.  I was aimlessly wandering around the store looking at things (ooo...red computer case.  I wants!) when I came across the books/magazines area.  I got a good chuckle out of the eight (yes, eight) full slots of the SI 2012 swimsuit issue  when I ran across a rack full of books entitled something like "How to use your Kindle"   Yes, books.  On paper.  To tell you how to use your e-reader. 

At least Kindle For Dummies comes in a Kindle version...

WTF?

I think this poem is beautiful.

How to See Deer 

Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early;
next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.

You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to

new shapes in  your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting:

as if it were dusk
look into light falling:
in deep relief

things even out.  Be
careless of nothing.  See
what you see.

          ---Philip Booth

from here

I carry a little box in my pocket.  It is smaller than a pack of cigarettes.  It holds (currently) 5,232 songs.  It also holds nearly a thousand photographs, half a dozen full sized novels, a handful of games, an address book, a camera, a clock, an appointment calendar, a personal assistant, a telephone, email, a messaging system, and basically the entire internet. 

I have another smallish box, this one a bit bigger, about the size of a standard hardcover book (and not one of those thick intellectual doorstoppers either).  It slips comfortably into a satchel or my messenger bag but it's also not hard to carry in my hands.  It is not heavy or unwieldy.  It can hold, if I choose it to, more than 5,000 books and/or magazines.  It also has the internet and a handful of games and email. 

I have a third box, bigger than the first two, but still not very large.  It doesn't hold anything.  What it does is even better.  It streams movies from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, the internet.  British TV shows, Japanese sword flicks, French romances, cartoons, musicals, James Bond, Dr. Who, American remakes of Swedish mystery movies, Pixar movies and Pixar wannabe movies, superheros and geeky college kids, web shows, anime.  What I can't stream I can rent on DVD.  I don't even pay for TV anymore; why bother?  Everything on TV comes out on DVD in a few months as do all movies. 

The biggest box is not a box at all.  It is, I guess, a cloud.  It's where I keep the almost 30,000 photographs and videos I've taken in the last few years.  It also backs up all the music and movies I've bought.  It is essentially limitless.

The upshot of all this is that I buy a lot more music now that I can download it.  This doesn't mean I don't buy CDs any more.  But most of what I buy is downloaded and even when I do buy CDs I usually just put them right onto the iPhone and then toss the CD in a cabinet or put it in the car.  Because I can sample songs first, or watch videos on YouTube, or buy just one song from an album, I try out different kinds of music more often.   I buy fewer paper books but I read more and I try different genres and different authors.  Since the Nook holds them all equally and forever and always weighs the same I don't have to decide what I might like to read before I travel anywhere and I don't have to carry heavy books.  I just pack the Nook and if I'm off in the world and decide I want to read something that is not already on it I can buy it and download it right then and there.  I watch a lot more TV now that I ever did when I actually had cable/satellite.  Most of it is British and Japanese but there is also a healthy smattering of old shows from my misspent youth and the occasional HBO literary smutfest.  I don't buy many DVDs but I watch movies all the time, all sorts of things (Last night was Dororo and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and the easy and inexpensive access to digital versions of just about anything I can think of means I can watch pretty much anything, at any time, anywhere. 

I'm beginning more and more to realize that buying a hard copy of anything is pointless.  It's not that I don't love books or records or actual film; it's that I no longer see much use for them outside of small niches.  I guess back in the day when digital music and video and photography did not have the same quality as their hard-copy counterparts it made some sense to hold out for the real deal but that's not true anymore.  And it's not that I don't like record stores and book stores.  I love them actually, especially the second-hand ones.  Not everything is digital or will be and some things just work better in hard copy (coffee table books spring to mind).  And yes, I do have some books I will never part with unless some disaster rips them from my hands and I have boxes of photos from years ago that I will probably never get around to scanning so I keep the paper and I have some DVDs I watch over and over and over and that I actually replace if they get damaged.  But for the most part I don't miss the physical media.  In fact I am glad that my house is not continuing to endlessly fill up with stuff and all the associated plastic, dead trees, and dust. 

Some people will argue that "real" books are better.  They are not.  The book I read online or on my Nook is the exact same book I can read on paper. But it will never fade.  It will not burn or mold or tear or crumble to dust.  It takes up no shelf space and I can re-read it whenever I want.  If my battery dies or the Nook breaks I can just transfer my library to the next reader or my phone.  I can do almost everything I can do with a real book: carry it around, read it outside, bookmark it, make notes, lend it.  Someday I have no doubt they will make an e-reader I can take into the bathtub with me or out into the rain but then...when do I ever do that with a hard copy book?  Don't even get me started on photography.  My digital photos never fade. The red never leaches out of them.  They also do not wrinkle, tear, or crease.  They won't burn or rip when I try to move them from those crappy old photo albums.  There's no chemicals involved in creating them and no expense.  I can edit them however I please, print them if I want, mail them anywhere.  Music?  How many vinyl albums would 5000+ songs fill?   How many milk crates?  How many 8-tracks, how many cassettes, how many CDs?  How much shelf space?  They will never scratch, hiss, warp, melt, or disintegrate and they will sound exactly the same no matter when I play them.  And I can play them anywhere I go. 

I love the feel of books.  I like their weight and their smell and the hint of history and subversion that even the silly ones have.  I sometimes miss the sound a record makes when you drop the stylus onto it, that small tick as the needle finds the groove and the slight hiss before the music starts.  I remember opening the back of my camera, pulling out the film just so and fitting the holes over the film winder until I could feel them catch, snapping the camera closed and winding the film until the numbers appeared in the window, feeling the film move through the camera as I thumbed the lever to forward it.  But if all these things were gone forever would it mean the words, the music, the pictures are lost as well?  Those are what matter, not their physical substrate.  I think people miss these things and yearn for them because of nostalgia, because of the link to our pasts, to our community of pasts.  Those of us of a certain age no doubt remember fondly having to haul ourselves off the couch to turn the record over, remember having to go to the film kiosk to pick up our photos, remember walking into the local Crown and finding them sold out of the book we wanted to read, remember having to wait a whole week before the next episode of our TV show or years for the reruns to show up, remember having to go to the movie theater to see a movie and being out of luck if that strange foreign film we wanted to see didn't play in our town (or even in the country).  We are old and we say the old ways are best because they are our ways.  But they aren't better.  At most and charitably, they are just no worse.

I have more books and music and images now, I have more worlds, than ever before and some of them, most of them, are not real.  Sometimes the new way is better. 

Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is.  What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you.  And it does, actually; it does.  Go look outside.  You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

--Tycho, Penny Arcade

(Yes, yes, I know I don't write much anymore, that this shabby little scrap of ego gratification has collapsed into a collection of other people's words, random observations, and not very well told tales of domestic mishaps.  It is mundane.  In the world of the seriously messed up, mundane is a good thing.  And truthfully?  If someone says just exactly what I want to say just exactly how I would say it if I were just exactly as smart and funny why bother saying it any other way?  Props given where props deserved, I always say.  Besides, I actually am writing.  Every day.  Just not here.  Also, hours, HOURS, every day spent in photography related stuffs. I might be obsessed.  Creating.  Making the world.  You know.)

Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.

--Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

One of my maybe not so great habits, especially when I am out roaming about with the camera, is that I listen to other people's conversations.  I can't help it, I love watching people, especially people I don't know.   So, I'm down at the Mall, it's a lovely day.  (That would be the National Mall, for those of you who might mistakenly believe I go shopping on lovely spring days.)  I'm sitting on a bench near the Natural History Museum fiddling with settings on the camera when a family stops in front of me.  Mom, Dad, two kids, one pretty young, the other one old enough to maybe be in middle school.  The usual tourists.  Casually dressed, carrying all kinds of stuff, looking kind of flustered and a little dusty.  There is nothing about them, not their clothes, hair styles, accents, anything that would let me think they are anything other than American tourists enjoying their nation's fine capital city. 

Mom is looking at one of those nifty tourist maps they hand out at the kiosks.

"I dunno which one it is."

She turns the map another way and looks at the museums lining the mall.  Dad seems a little stressed.

"Doesn't the map say?"

Mom turns the map over, looks at the back, looks the other way down the Mall, sighs and hands the map to Dad.

"I can't figure it out.  Which one do YOU think is the Capitol?"

The high school most local to me has a yearly fund raiser where they sell bags of mulch at a reasonably good price and also deliver them to your yard free.  It's good quality mulch and the price is better than at the local nursery.  Thus it was that I had 50 bags of mulch delivered to my front yard early this morning.

I no longer remember when it was that I thought this would be a good idea. Perhaps it was when I pried the flyer some student had left from my screen door.  Perhaps it was when I was contemplating my garden in this year of the early spring and realized that I hadn't mulched anything, not the bee garden, not the flower beds, certainly not the paths, in years.  Whenever it was I decided it was time and I placed my order tout de suite for what seemed to me actually probably not enough mulch. 

Yesterday it was 82 degrees outside and sunny.  Rather hot, actually.  Perfect garden weather.  Perfect sipping margaritas on the patio with a friend weather.  Perhaps not the best weather for shagging mulch.  No worries though; today turned out to be much cooler.  Mid 60s, overcast.  The truck with the mulch was at my curb by 9:30 am and I directed the eager and polite high schoolers delivering it to just pile it by the sidewalk, which they did cheerfully, efficiently, and quickly. 

Those of you who know my yard know there is a most inconvenient hill between the sidewalk and my house.  It is short but steep and makes most yard-related chores more difficult than they have to be.  But I was not worried.  50 bags of mulch is not so bad.  I figure at the worse it is 50 trips to the back yard and back and at the best 25, since i can often carry two bags of mulch at the same time.  I got this, piece of cake.

I picked up the first bag.  It weighed about a ton.  I could barely lift it.  I realized that the bags are bigger, probably by a half, than the bags I usually pick up at the Home Depot.  I managed to carry three of them to the back yard and realized that this approach was doomed to failure.  So I tried dragging them.  That was even worse.  Then a flash of brilliance struck me and I remembered that I do in fact own a wheel barrow.  I got the keys, opened the shed, realized the wheel barrow was all the way in the back underneath a stack of Dennis' crap that he asked me to store "temporarily" (fucker), moved all the crap, and started maneuvering the wheel barrow out of the shed.  Then I thought to test the tire.  Completely flat.  Goddammit.  After a few minutes thought I remembered that I have really nice, friendly, generous neighbors so I walked a couple houses up the road and borrowed a wheel barrow. 

Once I had the wheel barrow I decided to toss the bags down from the sidewalk to the bottom of the hill.  I ended up just pushing them down with my feet because that was easier.  I got 10 or so bags down the hill and then started loading up the wheel barrow.  Just lifting the bags into the wheelbarrow was incredibly hard but I managed and, by loading two bags at a time was able to get ten or so bags into the back yard and near where I need to spread them.  I decided the best approach would be to move some bags and then spread some mulch, kind of to break up the really hard stuff with stuff that was not so hard.  This was working pretty well even though the giant bags of mulch weren't as easy to cut open and empty as I thought they'd be.  I laid down some landscape cloth on the path I was mulching and dragged the bags over and cut them open and emptied them and then raked the mulch around.  This, I thought, was a pretty damned good plan. 

Then it started to rain.  Well, hell.  It didn't rain hard enough that I absolutely could not work outdoors but it did rain hard enough that I panicked at the thought that the remaining 40 incredibly heavy bags of mulch in the front yard would get soaked through and then I wouldn't be able to move them at all.  So, change of plan. I decided to move all the rest of the mulch to the back yard to approximately where it needed to go and worry about it later.  This took two hours.  By the time I'd managed to get all 40 bags down to the bottom of the hill and then into the wheel barrow (two at a time) and then into the back yard I was soaked.  The mulch was still fairly dry although the bags were slick from the rain and my slate sidewalk and maple root covered back yard were quite treacherous.  Still I managed to get it all moved without throwing out my back or twisting my ankle or falling down.  I did, however, break every single nail on both hands.  Sigh.

After all is said and done I figure I moved ...  well, if the internet does not lie and a 3 cubic foot bag of hardwood mulch weighs between 50 and 60 pounds..I moved a ton and a half of mulch today.  In the rain.  In terms that some of you that don't have gardens might understand, that is the equivalent of disposing of 14 adult male American bodies.  Yikes!

Anyways, lesson learned.  Next year, I pay the kids to move the bags to the back yard while I sit inside and drink mint juleps or something.  It's what high school students are for.

March 15.  A portentous day in some respects...

What concerns us now is that here in the northern hemisphere on the middle day of the month dedicated to Mars it is still technically winter.  The vernal equinox is nearly a week away.  It should at the very least be chilly.  One should need a sweater to go out of doors.  Yet the sun shines, the sky is blue, the flowers push up from the ground, the trees blossom forth, the birds sing joyously. 

And it is 82 freakin' degrees outside.

Seriously, WTF?

Today I received in my mail the weirdest Groupon ever



Now...I am not sure what is oddest.  Is it that I can afford to do this?  Is it that it normally costs sixty thousand dollars?  Is it that the company that does this apparently can't fill the slots on a prime summer time date?  Is it that Titanic tourism actually exists as a thing?  Is it that I ever so briefly considered clicking that button?  (Once in a lifetime thing, amiright?)  Is it that this offer was tucked way at the bottom of a long list of more mundane destinations (take that, Poconos!)?

Or is it that for your $12,500 (regularly $60k, remember) the best they can give you is a Leonardo DiCaprio impersonator to sign your DVD?

Really, WTF?  If Leo would sign that DVD, I'd be so there.