More Blackouts

On Saturday, February 25, I posted a few impressions from the middle of a blackout which affected hundreds of thousands of people in Michigan, maybe over a a million. Two days later, on Monday, February 27, the power came back on. 

And it stayed on for four whole days, until Friday, March 3. There had been a big snowstorm overnight, and when I opened my eyes in the morning, the red LED clock that sits close to my face as I sleep was out.

This time it was much warmer than the previous blackout. Once again it seemed our whole block was affected. As late morning came on, my major problem personally was caffeine withdrawal. There was no way to heat water in my place. I headed off to a steakhouse, the nearest place that would have coffee. Google maps says it was a 4/10 of a mile walk. It didn't feel that long. The biggest problem was finding dry sidewalk or street to walk on amid huge piles of melting snow. 

On the way to the steakhouse I could see kids sledding down two hills in the public park nearby. On the smaller of the two hills, smaller kids were not moving very fast. Bigger kids were really zooming down the bigger hill. Near the steakhouse, people said there they had had no interruption in power.

The steakhouse was sort of like a return to my childhood: rural Midwest, 50 years ago. The coffee was nothing fancy. It was what people used to call "Joe." But it was strong, the waitress was very nice and she kept it coming, and after I while I decided to have some eggs Benedict. They make a big serving of eggs Benedict. I walked home in a much better mood than I had been in walking out, with the caffeine energy competing with sleepiness from a huge meal in a very pleasant way.

It wasn't nearly as cold as the previous blackout, but that night it was plenty cold enough. The next day, most of the snow blocking my car in had melted. I dug out the rest and headed to the library, and to the coffee shop adjacent to the library, or, actually, IN the library, which makes a great almond-milk mocha latte. 

This library is where people come to warm up and charge up their phones and laptops during blackouts. And that's exactly what I was doing when I got an email telling me that Amazon had made a delivery back at my place. I looked around for a photo of the delivery on the Amazon website, and sure enough: the package was outside, right next to the door of the enclosed porch, instead of inside that door, as is my standing request, and as Amazon does most of the time. 

I've never had a package stolen when it was left outside like that. I've never heard of any such thefts anywhere near my home. But anyone who is obsessive-compulsive will understand that that doesn't matter. I had to return home immediately to get that package inside before someone stole it or an unexpected downpour got it wet, or some huge stray dog picked it up between his jaws and began to to carry it west toward Nebraska. 

I retrieved the package. I changed into clean clothes. I was ready to return to the library for more warmth and wifi and recharging when I noticed that the sun was shining very brightly into the living room. Then it occurred to me that it was strange for the living room to be all lit up at that time of day -- and THEN it occurred to me that I had left the living-room light on, and that my electricity was back.

And the electricity meant that I could get my laptop online from home -- except that now my Internet was out. My brother called to see how I was, I told him: fine, except for the Internet. He suggested calling tech support. Sure enough, just like that, after two calls to tech support, BAM, my Internet was back.

Some people who, like me, favor big changes in the local energy structure, such as massive adoption of rooftop solar, are hopeful that blackouts will win people to our cause. While I certainly agree that massive adoption of rooftop solar would both help prevent these blackouts, and keep more people warm during blackouts (besides things like cutting way down on pollution and greenhouse gasses from electricity generated from Koch Industries coal), I don't see a lot of local people saying the same things. Solar energy remains far from widespread in Michigan. I think we've got a lot of hard work to do in changing public opinion.

Why I Still Write With Ink on Paper

 

For one thing, I don't even know what a Remarkable or a Supernote is, to quote someone asking on Reddit why people still write in paper notebooks. I'm 61 years old, I'm a writer, and I resisted even using a typewriter until I saw the Internet in 1997. As with many other people, that changed things a bit for me, and I started using keyboards more than I had. But I still write a daily journal in ink in a paper notebook that fits in a pocket. Partly because I'm old, sure, but also for other reasons. 

I'm fascinated by other technologies besides pens on paper which are no longer generally considered cutting-edge. For example, mechanical watches: watches with no electricity, no batteries, powered by a spring. Revolvers as opposed to semiautomatics. Internal combustion engines, even though I'm a hair-on-fire climate activist. We should all be driving EV's or not driving at all. But I understand some of the resistance to change on this matter, the resistance which isn't built on ignorance, but on love for technologies which are being phased out. 

My brother, 59 years old, an automotive engineer and executive, tells me that offices often no longer have what we used to call office supply rooms: rooms full of paper and paper-related items such as pencils and pens and tape and staples.

So people our age are becoming odd, and started becoming odd long before we noticed it, I'm quite sure, writing in our paper pocket-sized notebooks with our fountain pens, which we clip in our waistcoat pockets alongside our pocket watches, sighting down the long barrels of our single-action revolvers while the barkeep fetches the ice-cream from the icebox for our sarsaparilla sodas, with our Model-T's idling outside besides the troughs, startling the horses. 

But there's more to it, and you don't have to be old to enjoy a good pen. I'm still very new to the pen and notebook subreddits, and so I still don't understand why everybody hates Cross pens. I still don't hate them. A two-piece Cross Bailey like the one in that picture, nice and heavy, with its rollerball and luxurious deep blue lacquer, nice and heavy, writing in a Zequenz signature notebook, is a sensual pleasure, a luxury many can afford, especially if they're no longer blowing money on gasoline. 

My Internet History

The thing is, I can't remember not knowing about the Internet. They say it was created on January 1, 1983, when various smaller networks around the world agreed upon protocols to communicate with each other. My brother was writing code before he graduated from high school in 1981, as valedictorian. A little later in 1981 he went to MIT. So he would've told me about the Internet in 1983, and it would've failed to greatly rouse my interest. 

 

Then comes a long, long dry spell, as far as I am concerned. I tended to say stupid anti-computer things. You know: the way people often disparage things they know little or nothing about. 

From 1994 to 1997 I lived in NYC. It was then that I saw people, who hadn't been interested in computers before, suddenly become obsessed with the Internet. A young woman I know very slightly suddenly was wearing a cap with a big "SPAM" label on it, and I understood without talking to her about it that she was not involved with the canned meat: she was involved with the Internet version of junk-mail advertising. 

She was much more well-off financially than I was even before this. And somehow, from my first glimpse of that "SPAM" hat to this day, I have always been pretty sure that her involvement with spam made her a lot richer. 

Someone else I knew in NYC, who was about as poor as I was, which meant he was far too poor to own a computer of his own, got onto the Internet at a branch of the New York Public Library, and he became one of those people who were obsessed with the Internet, always speaking about it in an agitated, speedy manner. In 1995 a desktop computer cost anywhere between a little under a thousand dollars, to many thousands of dollars. 

I had a very difficult time imagining the Internet experience, despite my friend's agitated attempts at description, and despite a lengthy 1996 cover story in the German news magazine the Spiegel which contained many thumbnails of screenshots of homepages. At the time I was not familiar with the IT terms "thumbnail," "screenshot" and "homepage." The Spiegel described the Internet like this: "Vor allem [...] Projektionsfläche für Ängste, Wünsche und Visionen." ("Above all a place to project fears, visions and wishes.") So some things haven't changed very much since 1996.

In 1997 I moved from Manhattan to Columbus, Ohio, and saw the Internet for the first time, in a branch of the Columbus Public Library. And I got it: visually, it was very much like newspapers and magazines. Indeed, many newspapers and magazines made some or all of their content available for free on the Internet. Except for pictures. Pictures took a long time to load, and typically a newspaper or magazine wouldn't even try to put as many picture online as were in the print edition. A smaller percentage put everything online than do today, and Internet-only content from a paper publication was rather rare. 

But the mind-blowing part was the range of choice of content. Up until then I had to have a paper version, which, depending on where I was and where the thing was published, might take days or weeks or months to get to me. I could fight over the few copies at the library, or I could pay for my own subscription. 

Now I just had to do a simple search, and boom, I had some, in most cases, and in many cases all of the words of a magazine or newspaper. I was limited primarily by the range of things I could think of to search for.

And I could read more than one language, which gave me a significant advantage over some people in being able to use the  World Wide Web in a truly worldwide manner. (Skipping ahead to 2021: yeah, I know there's a difference between the Internet and the WWW. But I still couldn't explain that difference to anyone.)

I went from WebTV to WebTV Plus to an actual desktop computer of my own, in addition to the library Internet.

Laptop computers, in the 1990's, were much more expensive still than desktops. Compared to laptops today they were thick, and heavy, and their screens were small. 

But by that time, everybody had gotten used to computers constantly getting better and cheaper. You could get a model which was six months old for half of what it cost six months before, or you could wait a while until a brand-new one was better and cheaper, but it would be much cheaper still in a few months, and so on and so forth. The better smaller faster cheaper process is still going on, but it was more dramatic in the 1990's because the sums of money per computer were much bigger. It had been going on for a long time before the 1990's, but to me, that's the kind of history I have to look up, not the kind I remember. Except for having read a mention of the faster better smaller cheaper principle sometime between 1978 and 1984 in some magazine, in a description of something I was not interested in having.

Around 2000 or 2001, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur I knew at the time whipped out a laptop which would look ordinary today, but which at the time was less than half as thick and about twice as wide as any I had ever seen. I expressed my astonishment and admiration at this device. This guy was always very polite to me, but his wide eyes seemed to say that he was thinking, "Wow, what a hick!" or "I bet this poor schlub doesn't earn in a year what this laptop costs." 

And without a doubt he would've been right twice, but of course there's been two decades of better faster smaller (or thinner) cheaper since then...

He was on high-speed wireless Internet back then. Most of us were still on dial-up. Remember "Get off the Internet, I have to make a phone call!"?

Dial-up modems and land-line phones. 

After seeing that laptop computer from the future back around 2000, somehow I got used to the pace of change. It astonishes me less.

Will She Still Feel Harassed If She's Ready For Clover?

"Will she still feel harassed if she's ready for clover?"

43 years long, that's what the first line of the song sounded like to me. As the decades passed, I began to doubt more and more that what it sounded like to me was actually the first line of the song, "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers:



But still, up until a couple of minutes ago, that was what it still sounded like to me. It took me about 5 seconds on the Inter Tubes (it's a vast network of tubes) to find out that the first line of the song actually is:

"Well, I built me a raft and she's ready for floatin'"

That makes much more sense and is much less disturbing than what it had sounded like to me for 43 years. The dude's not harassing women, he's building rafts.

It was so easy for me to correct my error there. But it's so hard to talk sense with people who are taken in by fake news. They've got exactly the same Internet at their disposal as I, but they believe that Obama supports ISIS, that political correctness supports something they call "Muslim rape culture," and that Hillary Clinton... has done some horrible things. I've never encountered any other beliefs which were both so widespread and so vague as whatever it is that all of those people who think Hillary is so horrible think she did.

Mistaken beliefs which ought to be as easy to dispel as my former impression that the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers hoped that some woman would no longer feel harassed, now that she was ready for clover -- whatever it meant to be ready for clover.

I don't like it when mainstream journalists maintain that we -- by "we" I mean intelligent people -- should have more understanding for all of those tens of millions of white folks who voted for Trump. I understand them perfectly well: they're stupid. Very stupid. As stupid as it would have been for me to insist all day long, day after day, forever, until the end of my incredibly stupid life, that the Doobie Brothers' song "Black Water" refers to a woman who may or may not now still feel harassed, now that she is ready for clover, instead of going to the trouble of learning what the first line of the song really is. "Will she still feel harassed if she's ready for clover?" -- that's how stupid those tens of millions of people are, and us pretending they're not stupid is not going to make them more intelligent, and it's certainly not going to help us out of our current political predicament. Nobody had any intelligent reason to vote for Trump, that's the truth, and the truth might set us free if we say it openly and honestly enough.

Writing

I've been writing a lot of stuff since the age of 11, if not longer. I believe that was when I wrote my first short stories. I turned 11 in 1972. Not much more than a decade ago, I was still writing mostly with a pen on paper. Then, in 1997, I started to become curious about this Internet thingy, and everything changed... In January 1st of this year, I started writing with pen on paper again, in Moleskinenotebooks with a PilotGS-2 Pro, on pretty much a daily basis. I enjoyed that. I found out that it was Bruce Chatwinwho had given Moleskines their name; I browsed through one of his books and didn't think it was for me, although that remains a very cursory first impression from which no-one should draw conclusions. Anyway, in May of this year I pretty much stopped with the Pilot and the Moleskines, because I had started with this blog, and I'm doing here very much the same thing that I was doing in the Moleskines, except that I'm trying to be more careful here, more polished in my prose style and more reserved with my judgements, and more discreet, because this is going public right away and that wasn't. Some of what I've written here I've copied from the Moleskines. I miss writing in the Moleskines, they and the GS-2 Pro have aesthetic qualities which this keyboard and monitor completely lack, but this blog has pretty much replaced them, whaddya gonna do. After this blog makes me a multimillionaire, I will have the option of writing in nice notebooks with nice pens again, I will be able to pay someone well for typing and data entry, right? Right. Since starting the blog, I've written a page and a half in the Moleskine. A page and a half in a month and a half, noting when I started using a new disposable razor, when I set a new personal best in the number of reps of the Upward Dog I could do in a set, and not a whole lot more than that. [PS, 15 March 2022: I thought they were called Upward Dogs, but what I was doing was going from laying flat on my back, going to a fully extended bridge, then all the way back down. That was one rep.] A page and a half. I was averaging more than that in a day. I used to be downright hostile toward computers, in a way which seems to me, in retrospect, quite neo-Luddite. I used to say that I wanted to chisel my writing into granite, rather than enter it into a database via a keyboard. (I never have learned to chisel granite, despite those repeated blustering pronouncements.) It is clear, in retrospect, that my hostility was based in ignorance, and in the frustration of having tried a few times to use computers, and failed, a frustration familiar to many of us not that IT has spread so wide. I eventually learned to do a few things with computers and with the Inner Tubes, as have so many of us. I can't be objective about the quality of my own writing, I never have been able to do that. It's very often painful to look at things I've written. Kurt Vonnegut'scomment about how he felt lousy about all the books he'd written, and Samuel Beckett'scomment about how to write is to fail, both resonate strongly with me. So I just get through each piece of writing as best I can, hope that it's not too much of an affront to my readers' taste and intelligence, and then get on to the next one. I can say of myself with some confidence that I'm a good reader, and I think there's often a connection between that and writing well, and so that gives me hope that it may not have been fully futile, all the time I've spent writing so many different things, two unpublished novels, large chunks of several more which I may or may not ever finished, who knows how many short stories, essays, letters, journal essays, emails, Internet forum posts, blog posts. Queries... Reflections on the pleasures of well-made notebooks and pens, on the frustrations and ironies and trade-offs of life.