Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Nesting

number twenty-six

Two days to catch my breath here south of the border before a huge orange truck pulls up in front of the house and starts unloading everything, everything in the whole world.. 503 words.

[NL]—The thing is, it took me a little while to get back to Monterrey. It is a good distance from my house, and I pretty much will have to take a cab if I go there alone. This is no bother, really. Monterrey is filled with things to do, sure, but so is San Pedro; so is this house, for that matter. When I arrived on Saturday, my action plan included only sitting around in the air conditioning and doing very little. I accomplished this with gusto: we filled two glasses with Stewart’s Ginger Beer and dark rum, and Sunshine and I clinked them together on our tiny front balcony while I re-lit and re-lit the candle we’d taken out with us. We clinked the next two glasses together on the patio in the back. And the next two. The candle worked better in the back yard where the privacy wall kept most of the wind away.

Sunday, I continued this wonderful streak of lazy disinterest in getting back into a car. I explored around the house, and I looked out all of the windows. Sunshine and I watched a lot of TV, and we clinked some glasses together some more.

By Monday, I think Sunshine was growing a little tired of my dedication to laziness. We were due to get her shipment of household items (which, in government acronymic jargon is called the HHE) in the morning, and I think that Sunshine was determined to get me out of the house in the afternoon. But, as it turned out, the HHE, which is really a giant Mack truck with thousands of forty-pound boxes of books on the back of it, didn’t arrive until almost four-thirty, and wasn’t unloaded until almost six.

By this time, there were sixty-seven smaller boxes, and nine more larger boxes, strewn about the house. Any gushing I might have done about the sizeable and airy minimalism of this place withered and died. A lot of Sunshine’s interest in dislodging me form my nesting also gave up the ghost. I made some food, and we knuckled into putting things away. There was a point when we did go out to the grocery store for some odds and ends. It is right between the Costco and the mall, and about a four minute walk, but we drove anyway. It is far larger than the average grocery in the States, but the extra room is given to extra things: cell phone stores, appliances, toys, tires, office furniture. We were there for some cereal and maybe some cheese, but we ended up spying an array of bookshelves that we thought might go in the house nicely, and we did have all those books with no home. We decided to sleep on it, maybe see what else is available here before we jump to any conclusions, right?

Back at home I noticed that the bigger boxes were just about exactly as tall as Sunshine.

I started looking for some glasses to clink.

this happened to Mr. Cavin before 11:12 AM



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.

Return to Previously

About Mr. Cavin