Thursday, October 28, 2004

Scary Animals

number four

Deadly fish and Robert Young Pelton all in one DC weekend with extras. 518 words.

[NC]—Man, it is late. But I reached home alive yet again, and I guess that is a load off. A week ago I left for DC today, even later than now, to see Sunshine’s swearing in ceremony. What was initially going to be a regular little trip of about three days sort of expanded on me for several reasons.

Firstly, there were other people there. The chance to hang out with Sunshine’s parents and show mom around DC was great fun; and through several harrowing Metro courses, two book sales, and eating and such, we whiled away most of the weekend. I wanted to see Sunshine some after everyone else had gone home, so I had counted on sticking around through Sunday. Several weeks ago, however, we had heard that Robert Young Pelton was going to be lecturing at the National Geographic Society. Well, thought I, that will be a neat little addition to my first week of yearly October vacationing. Sunshine, telling me about this, seemed to think that this was to be happening on the twenty-fourth or –fifth. Sounded nice, actually, and about perfect for snagging a few extra DC days. Turns out it was the twenty-seventh, so I ended up in DC for a week.

With all of the back and forth between towns lately, I had been pretty much waiting until this two week vacation to get some Greensboro things done. I will admit right up front that I am way too damn lazy to actually use a hard-won vacation to clean my house; let alone begin packing it up for storage. But there were some other pressing things: I was way behind on my movie watching, and I had not lifted a finger to begin creating my Halloween costume.

Not to worry, I took all of the costume making goods to Sunshine’s house, with the clear retrospective intent of letting them rest there in a box while I watched giant animal movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. My current favorite is Frankenfish, where folks in adjacent boats try to escape giant computer animated Snakeheads in buckets. If Tremors is like Jaws on dry land, then Frankenfish is like Tremors in the water! No really. Not to be missed. After that, a movie about a swarm of killer bees, some real-life emergency room shows, and an X-Files marathon, there was just no getting around to destroying Sunshine’s apartment with paper mache like the itinerary listed.

So now I am finally home. Pelton was a hoot, and I recommend his show if you ever have the chance. DC was wonderful as always, and I finally got to the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, where we ate Spanish instead of Brazilian or Turkish. Best coffee I have had since actually being in Spain, man, for real. Now it is time to turn in. Today is my birthday, and I have to rest up for all of the heavy drinking later tonight, and the twenty-four hours I have to do my Halloween costume from start to finish shortly thereafter.

And a party on Saturday, and a holiday on Sunday, etc.

this happened to Mr. Cavin before 4:13 PM



Quiet Reading Room

This is a quiet reading room. Often, I find it is uncomfortable to digest long tubes of columned text directly off a computer screen. This journal is dedicated to the collection, percolation, and ultimate integration of my personal experiences. Subjects that I want to examine and then talk about--sometimes talk a lot about--€”are presented here. This central content can tend to thousands of words, maybe millions. I was afraid that readers were leaving the presentation boggled, spinning, googly-eyed. Or perhaps when confronted with twenty-four inches, or yards, of monitor sprawl they were just giving up. I am not even certain that I have necessarily solved this inevitable content problem of modern information enjoyment, but here is what I have done.

After long and highly scientific routines manipulating double-blind control- and test-subjects, peer reviewed journal publications, and hours and hours of hands-on experimentation, I have crafted this quiet reading room. There is no scientific way to control the length of the articles I write, but careful handling can somewhat soothe the contextual presentation. In other words: I have dropped the traditional speculation about lexicon, and attacked the question of the matrix itself instead. Brilliant. After years of diligence what I eventually crafted is this reading room.

The walls are contoured to relax instead of constrain; the paper is made to soften instead of reflect. The light is dimmed--just so--€”to prevent strain, angled to prevent umbra, and color-coded to soften harsh red lights and deepen wimpy light reds. There is nothing I can do to control aural environment, but my recommendation is that it should be kept quiet. About ambient sound: these entries are probably best read as far as possible from emergency vehicles, preferably from beneath the muffler of a vintage fire fighter pilot's scarf, puffy old duvet, or snow that is still falling.

My theory is that the wide web world is filled with potent and material opportunities that are just too difficult to digest for many people to take part. Enjoyment of this stuff is regulated to the routines of crawlers and robots at the peril of humankind's peaceful future survival. In an attempt to delay this likely outcome: welcome to this quiet reading room. It is for people like you to relax, kick back, and hate my content for better reasons than the dizzying vertiginous specter of its lousy dpi presentation.

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