Month: January 2018

Steps

He’s thinking about the day. He needs to dress, which means walking to the bedroom, fifty-eight steps. He’ll walk around downtown. It’s eight hundred steps from the plaza to the library.

Do you want to see a movie? she asks.

I don’t know, he answers. What’s playing?

She reads him a list with the playing times.

I don’t know, he says. Let me think about it.

Instead, he thinks walking to the movies, thirty-two hundred steps. He thinks about getting a drink of water in the kitchen, twenty-one steps.

Something is wrong, he thinks, getting up. Something has gone awry. Counting steps, he goes into the other room. He was supposed to do something there, but it fades away under the count. He walks around the room for a quarter mile, four hundred and fifty steps, and then returns to the other room.

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Floofthopomorphic

Floofthopomorphic (catfinition) – ascribing feline qualities to non-felines.

In use: “He was a floofthopomorphic athlete on the field, astounding all with his quickness, but dismaying them with his ability to be distracted and his unwillingness to listen to others.”

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I was walking this morning when this one streamed out of the ether.

“Mississippi Queen” by Mountain was one of our art class staples in high school in my senior year, 1974. Scott had a large rock vinyl collection, and brought in a huge number of albums. I don’t recall how other students reacted to it, but Scott and I really enjoyed it.

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Floofinjay

Floofinjay (catfinition) – a haughty, strutting cat.

In use: “While his rescued siblings retired to their mother’s side, the little tuxedo floofinjay went about the as though he was the new emperor.”

 

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A Time Pause

Walking around Ashland, especially in the commercial area downtown along Main Street and the Plaza, I encounter buildings constructed between one hundred and one hundred ten years ago. Their construction date is easily known because the year is on the building, which I like. But seeing such a proliferation of construction, I wonder what the town was then like, and the people’s vision of the future, and then consider what this town might look like one hundred years from now.

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Her Memory

She’d found herself forgetting everything. It was, she explained to friends and families (who didn’t seem interested), like a wall or chasm existed between the answer and the question. She knew the answer was on the other side, but she couldn’t reach it.

This infuriated her. She’d been a five-time champion on Jeopardy! Ask her anything about culture, politics, arts and literature, physics and chemistry, or geography and history, and she could give you a quick, correct answer. Or could. Now it was changing.

She would not accept this. She adapted, because that was her nature, first keeping copious notes on calendars and notebooks about everything that happened. Nothing was too mundane. Updating her calendars and notebooks took from fifteen minutes to an hour every day, and was done as part of her ritual of preparing to retire for the night. Memories of more personal matters were augmented via recordings. The first recordings were done with a small Sony tape recorder. She switched to digital as the technology matured and became cheaper and more reliable. Eventually, she started making digital video recordings and storing them on the cloud. Then she could see and hear herself, reassuring herself of who she was and who she’d been.

By then, she’d retired. By then, her hair was wispy and white, and she wore wigs, out of vanity. By then, she’d buried her third husband and second child, and her parents and siblings. By then, she’d gone through cancer in her cervix and successful treatment, and had a hip replaced after a fall, and was treated for glaucoma, and celebrated her ninetieth birthday. By then, many friends had died or moved away, or were in hospice, or couldn’t remember her. By then, new technology emerged for an augmented digital memory, something like Keanu Reeves’ character had in Johnny Mnemonic. She’d enjoyed the book (by William Gibson) (because she loved science fiction and fantasy), but didn’t like the movie. But then, she’d never been a huge Keanu Reeves fan, outside of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, although he wasn’t bad in the first Matrix film.

Technology improved. She gave her memory a name, George, after her first husband. George would chat with her about what she needed to know and do, and what had happened, who said what when.

A new product, “Your Best Friend,” emerged. Using smart technology embedded in phones, computers, cars, houses, and businesses, her memory could have a holographic presence and a voice outside her head, almost everywhere, almost all the time.

She loved this aspect. She named her new memory Jean, after a friend she’d lost in her past. She and Jean had shared many good times together, and she thought it would be better to have a dead girlfriend as a faux companion rather than a dead husband.

She and Jean went everywhere together. It was initially a little strange to others and she was self-conscious about it, because it was all new, and others didn’t have virtual holographic friends. Others thought it odd, or that she was weird, or demented, you know, delusional. She was on the cutting edge. If her husband(s) could see her now. Hah!

Technology improved and became cheaper and more prevalent. Soon, many people had such companions, nannies, guards, and mentors. Eventually, she forgot that this was her memory.

Her memory had become her best friend, which, if she thought about it, was how it should be.

 

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Saturday’s Theme Music

My wife and I were driving home when John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” played on the radio. We knew the song and sang along. It’s from his Uh-huh album. It came out in 1983, when he was John Cougar. We saw him perform a few years later, in Germany.

As the song wound toward its end, my wife said, “This song doesn’t have many words to it, does it?” No, but that’s how a lot of pop songs are, to me. I was thinking more about these lines:

“I said, “Growing up leads to growing old and then to dying
“And dying to me don’t sound like all that much fun.”

The idea that death is bad — or not fun — has been weaponized, something to use keep us in check. “You might get hurt if you do that. You might even die.” Yes, as if we’re all living forever on this world, in these bodies.

I thought, Heaven as a concept must have been invented to comfort people who are dying or has lost someone. I always liked that idea of Heaven, that another place is beyond death where we live on. Maybe it’s like living in this sense in that mythical next existence, but suppose it’s not? Yet, we’re coached and socialized to fear death because this is life.

Come on, we’re all going to die. Life might be a spectrum, and this slice of life is just another frequency band. Thank of how wonderful it could be in the next band.

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