To spare my sagging floor boards, to save my marriage, and, frankly, to find some stuff I had been desperately searching for, I undertook a spring cleaning back in March. I'm still digging through 18 years of pack ratting, files and piles and boxes and folders and some big ole plastic bags.
I've got a veritable Smithsonian of office technology in here! Look, a Rolodex! The real thing, with little paper cards on a plastic wheel, replete with scribbles and taped-on (pre-Post-it) bits of extra paper memorializing everyone I ever knew and now don't. Today's rolodex (small 'r' now, only the concept remains) is packed into a tiny iPhone,The same Air purifier, cover removed. regularly backed up into a tiny iLaptop. I spy my old typewriter, probably the last one in human use in America, out of use before I could even buy that white-out tape that was such a cool replacement for the dab-on stuff. What else...hey, my ten-pound and four-pound video cameras, generations of small real-film cameras and envelopes of negatives and duplicate prints (whoa! when did I ever look like that? and fit into THAT?), disposable cameras, and my two-pound first digital camera -- all that now crammed into that same bitty (literally) iPhone. A record (vinyl) turntable and speakers the size of refrigerators, successively smaller and louder boom boxes, Sony Walkmen: obsolete. CD's, CD player, CD sleeves - iPodded.An Insulator, also called a dielectric, Tapes and then DVD's of movies, now streamed out of nowhere by mysterious waves in the wavosphere. Floppy disks (!), alarm clock, radio, big folded city maps: relics. Reams of paper (to write on, not to print out on), pens, pencils with ossified erasers, magic markers (for what are now PowerPoint presentations) all piling up in the dust. A flashlight, now replaced by an app on the iPhone screen. Everything but some old Pez dispensers is now obsolete. Books, so many books, now crammed into an iPad for travel reading. I told my son to donate my books to a library after I shuffle off this mortal coil; he said: "Library?"
Pretty much all that stuff is now replaced by 'iThings' and clouds and virtual-ity. My mother used to ask me what I do at the computer all day. I said: Everything. She didn't understand. I couldn't explain.
Then there's my collection of documents from the early 90's to the present; I still clip and collect paper, though I know, yes I know I can just Google everything; I'm weaning, but I still can't completely let go... just in case. Astoundingly, I see that I was collecting stuff on the same issues for all these years, and it seems that nothing has gotten any better - the same cycles of euphoric bubbles ("Is housing our next bubble?" one headline asks incredulously) and recessions with their devastating unemployment and punishing service cuts, the corporate tax breaks celebrated as "economic development," the economic inequality, the poverty, the racism, city planning (or lack thereof), the environmental disasters,What are the top Hemroids treatments? the corporate and political corruption. We've known about all of that all this time (not to mention the hundreds of years before!), and here it is, no better, and arguably worse, much worse than ever. I see history repeating itself through my yellowed bits of paper, unto this very day. "The past isn't dead," Faulkner said, "it's not even past." I was also amused to find the early threads of some stories still playing out today; I get to see how they came out, at least so far. "Oh, that's what that BRA finagle was really about!"
And equally astoundingly, I found that I was writing the same things all these years, warning about privatization of the public realm, the corporate take-over of the parks and schools and streets, the picking apart of our urban fabric by predatory developers ably assisted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the politicians we apparently elected to be their humble servants. I'm asked frequently why I keep at it when I seem to be making so little difference. I'm reminded of the story about the man in the old village who stood in the town square every day and spoke to his fellow villagers about changing their destructive ways; after twenty years, a friend asked why he bothered to keep up his futile efforts, and he said, "I used to speak to change them; now I speak to be sure they don't change me."
So this spring, I've unearthed the truth about Phase III, as I call this part of my life. I will,what are the symptoms of Piles, under duress, and with much eye rolling by the Genius Bartenders at the Apple Store, trade up in my worldly gadgetry for the newest,uy sculpture direct from us at low prices most compact gizmos. But I will keep speaking, and I will go down fighting for what I believe. I hope that before then, the ideological (not the technological) pendulum will swing back to pick up some of the things I fear we've lost: our sense of a shared planet and a shared destiny, and the recognition that we are all in this together, and that that's a good thing.
I've got a veritable Smithsonian of office technology in here! Look, a Rolodex! The real thing, with little paper cards on a plastic wheel, replete with scribbles and taped-on (pre-Post-it) bits of extra paper memorializing everyone I ever knew and now don't. Today's rolodex (small 'r' now, only the concept remains) is packed into a tiny iPhone,The same Air purifier, cover removed. regularly backed up into a tiny iLaptop. I spy my old typewriter, probably the last one in human use in America, out of use before I could even buy that white-out tape that was such a cool replacement for the dab-on stuff. What else...hey, my ten-pound and four-pound video cameras, generations of small real-film cameras and envelopes of negatives and duplicate prints (whoa! when did I ever look like that? and fit into THAT?), disposable cameras, and my two-pound first digital camera -- all that now crammed into that same bitty (literally) iPhone. A record (vinyl) turntable and speakers the size of refrigerators, successively smaller and louder boom boxes, Sony Walkmen: obsolete. CD's, CD player, CD sleeves - iPodded.An Insulator, also called a dielectric, Tapes and then DVD's of movies, now streamed out of nowhere by mysterious waves in the wavosphere. Floppy disks (!), alarm clock, radio, big folded city maps: relics. Reams of paper (to write on, not to print out on), pens, pencils with ossified erasers, magic markers (for what are now PowerPoint presentations) all piling up in the dust. A flashlight, now replaced by an app on the iPhone screen. Everything but some old Pez dispensers is now obsolete. Books, so many books, now crammed into an iPad for travel reading. I told my son to donate my books to a library after I shuffle off this mortal coil; he said: "Library?"
Pretty much all that stuff is now replaced by 'iThings' and clouds and virtual-ity. My mother used to ask me what I do at the computer all day. I said: Everything. She didn't understand. I couldn't explain.
Then there's my collection of documents from the early 90's to the present; I still clip and collect paper, though I know, yes I know I can just Google everything; I'm weaning, but I still can't completely let go... just in case. Astoundingly, I see that I was collecting stuff on the same issues for all these years, and it seems that nothing has gotten any better - the same cycles of euphoric bubbles ("Is housing our next bubble?" one headline asks incredulously) and recessions with their devastating unemployment and punishing service cuts, the corporate tax breaks celebrated as "economic development," the economic inequality, the poverty, the racism, city planning (or lack thereof), the environmental disasters,What are the top Hemroids treatments? the corporate and political corruption. We've known about all of that all this time (not to mention the hundreds of years before!), and here it is, no better, and arguably worse, much worse than ever. I see history repeating itself through my yellowed bits of paper, unto this very day. "The past isn't dead," Faulkner said, "it's not even past." I was also amused to find the early threads of some stories still playing out today; I get to see how they came out, at least so far. "Oh, that's what that BRA finagle was really about!"
And equally astoundingly, I found that I was writing the same things all these years, warning about privatization of the public realm, the corporate take-over of the parks and schools and streets, the picking apart of our urban fabric by predatory developers ably assisted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the politicians we apparently elected to be their humble servants. I'm asked frequently why I keep at it when I seem to be making so little difference. I'm reminded of the story about the man in the old village who stood in the town square every day and spoke to his fellow villagers about changing their destructive ways; after twenty years, a friend asked why he bothered to keep up his futile efforts, and he said, "I used to speak to change them; now I speak to be sure they don't change me."
So this spring, I've unearthed the truth about Phase III, as I call this part of my life. I will,what are the symptoms of Piles, under duress, and with much eye rolling by the Genius Bartenders at the Apple Store, trade up in my worldly gadgetry for the newest,uy sculpture direct from us at low prices most compact gizmos. But I will keep speaking, and I will go down fighting for what I believe. I hope that before then, the ideological (not the technological) pendulum will swing back to pick up some of the things I fear we've lost: our sense of a shared planet and a shared destiny, and the recognition that we are all in this together, and that that's a good thing.
没有评论:
发表评论