An Expensive Cup of Coffee

The sun is coming up. There is a white band on the eastern horizon visible through the bare branches. There is no crimson, orange or yellow this morning. I just dumped a cup of coffee on my computer – and ohhhhh! NOOO! It has shut off. It was an expensive cup of coffee. It fried the logic board and wrecked the battery. With a PC it’s not cheap but no big deal but with a Mac they want you to buy another computer. I was finally able to find a referbished board with a six month quarentee. And now two weeks later I’m up and running again. It cost almost as much as a new computer but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give that money to Apple and their corporate strategy of eliminating my options. Screw You, Apple! I love my MacBook Air but not that much. I'm willing to go back to my PC if you make to many demands on me. That was an expensive cup of coffee. God it’s hard to get used to living without a computer. For Internet access I still had the library. God I’d rather have gone cold turkey on cocaine. And I can't go home again, never again.

It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes – W G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn, 1998  p31

In 1986 only 0.8% of the worlds data was stored digitally. Today more that 95% of it is.

All great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one – Walter Benjamin

Saabs. Broken down and worn out. Three of them. At least one is always in the shop. Three young men looking at them. Opening their bonnets and slamming them shut again. They are the sons of the woman who I am going out with. Going out with so you can stay in with. They are trying to determine if the cars can be fixed. One of them comes and tells me, “Man, ain’t nothing that can be done. Haul em off”. The magenta one had weeds growing up around it. The silver one’s odometer had just turned 200,000 today and then it went clunk. Blue smoke had trailed me all the way home. The blue one, at least, I had hoped would still be salvageable. The smell of oil hung in the air. I guess I’ll be staying in.

One of them is talking about the ‘M’ word. Motherhood, I ask? No, marriage, he says. I had already broken off three good relationships because the ‘M’ word had come up. My kids had thought that I should have married Joan. Some people are just not cut out for marriage. I’m one, I think. Maybe once. Thanks for looking them over, I say. I’ll refill the tank if you let me use your truck. I have an old doublewide refrigerator that needed hauling away too. Everyone has an opinion of how I should live my life but me. Everyone is willing to share. I too once had a dream. It’s hard to recall now. It’s hazy now. Sometimes at night it comes back to me and I wake up with tears in my eyes. Staying out. Staying in.  And now I can’t even keep my beer cold.

Life is no dream / Beware and beware and beware / We tumble downstairs to eat the damp of the earth / or else climb to the snowy divide with the choir  / of dead dahlias – Fedrico Garcia Lorca –Poet in New York, 1955  p53

By 1850 humans had already been responsible for pumping 350 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere

Praised… with the ferocity of a theatre audience that applauds far beyond the limits of its real opinion the commonplaces that are designed to arouse its need to applaud – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p851

AFTER READING PINSKY’S “TO TELEVEISION”

I watch live

            Supposedly

Before a live

            Audience

How can you tell

The laughter is not

            As monotonous

            Or monotone

Anyway I was alive

            I thought

Or maybe not

It’s common

Or so said Mcluhan

            One village

            One globe

            One life

Thought can be given only were there is thinking – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p53

Video game consoles are now performing a fourth of all the world’s computing

Multiplicity of meanings is the element in which thought must move in order to be strict thought – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p71

An edge city

City on it’s edge

            Edgy

            On a ledge

Legendary – peripheral

            Lateral

Nondescript – fast cars

            Fast food fasting wives

Surgical sociobiology

            Odorless and credit

            Card thin

The academic jargon

            Practiced out back

            Grilling steak

Disintegrating relationships

            Of lateral distinction

The strolling figures

            Of architectural watercolors

Factory campuses ripe

            For condo conversion

An ego city

City on the go

            Get in and go

            Get on with it

                        And go

Machines were not so much to save time as to save dignity that fears the animate touch – William Carlos Williams – In The American Grain, 1956 p177

Just because there are more men to kill does not necessary make the number dead the measure of how violent we are – its not the total number of murders as it is their per capita rate of occurrence and the argument is that the later is on the decrease. This is certainly one way to look at it. Mankind is becoming less and less violent as the numbers who die as a result of their violence goes up and up. Man is a killing machine or maybe not.

Our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pens with all the gestures of a Napoleon – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p805

20% of the world’s major civil conflicts since 1950 have been linked to climate extremes associated with El Ninos

Rising  world temperatures in the last thirty years have resulted in reduced production of grain food crops, 3.8% more corn and 5.5% more corn could have been produced had the temperatures not increased.

What is what is what. / That’s what. I’m no wiser for all that, for being wise – Laura Riding – The Poems of, 1980 p117