Tracks

Once upon a time I lived in a beautiful city full of bookshops. Whenever I could, I would take myself to readings and signings and such, and, whenever I did, the same fanciful idea would float around my dizzy head. I think it had to do with the fact that book-signings are just about the most intimate contact that plebs like me can ever reasonably expect to have with the famous and successful - at least the famous and successful that we have some respect for. It's not a terribly striking or original idea, but it's this: what if one could somehow leap into someone else's life, follow its course rather than one's own. Imagine two hugely long, perfectly straight railway tracks, one crossing a continent east to west, the other crossing north to south. No matter how big the continent, no matter how different the landscapes each might have traversed, at the point where the lines cross, they're in some meaningful way the same, for just a moment. Of course, physical proximity has nothing necessarily to do with the existence of alternative paths, or alternative choices. That's why a train analogy is better than, say, a car or bus analogy: our lives mostly run on tracks, which lack a system of points that might connect our tracks to the tracks of others. We can pass other lives, perhaps close enough to wave, close enough to wonder where their train has been, and where it's going to, but we then pass by, head off to our own horizon.

This is only really an idea that has any currency when we happen to have some idea about the landscapes that another train has seen, or might see, which is why it was at book-signings that I'd have such thoughts, rather than just walking down a busy street. These were people I knew something about, whose lives had some form of public domain. How strange to be crossing the tracks of other lives that had been to such magical, faraway places. Did the crossing somehow make those places accessible to me, if I just turned and jumped the tracks here, then followed to wherever? I couldn't help but see rails running off in many directions. I followed my own home, of course.

I think this has been on my mind because I've essentially just finished a little web-design project for an academic who, among other things, appears as a talking head on the documentary extras on the new Star Wars DVDs. His tracks have also crossed those of (to my knowledge) François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, and probably many more. My Famous Philosopher Friend's tracks have crossed those of Winston Churchill, E.M. Forster, Alan Turing, Kurt Vonnegut. It makes my head spin. Forgive a moment's gauche starriness, but those tracks are a very long way from my own, their landscapes full of great peaks and grand vistas.

The moral, I think, is both humbling and inspiring. We're never so far from each other, the trivial and the great. And, though we must follow our own tracks, we do have power over their path - perhaps if only like Gromit, frantically laying sections in front of the careering locomotive.

Perils of obsessional behaviour #65

So I was about to start getting dinner ready last night, when I decided that I'd just clear up the dirty dishes that were sitting around first. Okay, but the dishwasher was full of stuff that I'd cleaned the night before but which hadn't been put away yet, so I couldn't put the new dishes into the dishwasher until I'd cleaned out the old ones. Okay, so I set about putting the clean dishes away. I was almost done - was through to the cutlery container - when I started wondering why the dishes had been a little damp. Hmm. Thinks. Sometimes that happens when the drying cycle gets truncated; our dishwasher is a nifty portable thing that hooks up to the sink when you need it, and then unhooks afterwards and rolls back to its rightful place, so sometimes the drying gets stopped when we want the machine out of the way before it's finished. Okay, so I thought about it, and couldn't for the life of me remember having needed to disconnect the dishwasher before it had finished drying the night before. So, that meant. Um.

Ah, right. The dishes hadn't actually been through the dishwasher at all, and I'd just spent several minutes putting dirty dishes neatly back into the cupboards. So I then spent a delightful ten minutes in a kind of kitchen parlour memory game, which involved trying to remember which dirty dishes I'd just put where, retrieving them, and then putting them back into the dishwasher.

And this only happened at all, of course, because I don't trust dishwashers to get dishes clean without scrubbing them myself first. So they typically go into the machine clean to the eye. And slightly damp. And, it seems, have begun to sometimes come out that way too.

::If I could [bam] make it there, I'd make it [bam bam] anywhere, it's up to you, New York, New - ::

Hmm? What was that I was talking about?

The Law of Conservation of Apostrophes

Lunch at McDonald's today, and - stop me if this is obvious and I'm just being a dolt - I was caught by the realisation that there's something very metaphysical going on with apostrophes. It's not just that people don't have a clue any more how to use them - I mean, it's true that they don't have a clue, but it's not just that. There are clearly greater forces at work, galactic accountants whose tireless job it is to make sure that the balance of apostrophes is maintained. The only way to maintain that balance, you see, is by making sure that each apostrophe is paired with the absence of an apostrophe. That's their job. I imagine it's a little like the electron/positron pairing whose accounting is managed in the office next door. Perhaps there are "a-neg-trophes", such as were generated on a massive scale when the Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock movie "Two Weeks Notice" opened in 2002.

Because - and this is the key point - only misused apostrophes seem to count in the credit column, and only absent apostrophes seem to count in the debit column. Apostrophes that quietly and precisely do their job are somehow inert, chargeless. But when McDonald's decides to launch a "Fruit 'n Walnut Salad", uh-oh, suddenly there's a massive apostrophe deficit, because all the apostrophes missing from the right-hand-side of each contracted "and" have to go somewhere. Just hafta. But where? Well, as in many situations of purely physical imbalance, things much prefer to right themselves as simply and as closely as possible.

So, you've been wondering why suddenly everyone who so much as glances in the direction of McDonald's is "lovin' it"? Sure, it might look like a pathetic attempt to buy some hip, but it's really just nature balancing the books. Squish out an apostrophe here, it'll find somewhere to squish back there. My concern now is that, since the cup I drank from presented a phone number and exhorted me to call and express my full and frank opinions of today's meal, under the heading of "How are we doin'?", this has either caused, or was caused by, a sudden WHOMP into existence elsewhere of a huge number of a-neg-trophies. And I realise that it's just the law of conservation of apostrophes taking effect, but I watch with trepidation to see where they've appeared. Do let me know if you find them, won't you?

(Oh, and while we're in McDonald's, just what the hell does it mean to say that "I'm lovin' it", anyhow? Someone needs to look a little closer at how the present progressive tense works. Personally, I'm hating it. I haven't been hating something so much for a while.)

Birds and dragons and the afternoon haze

Cartoony birds sitting in dit-dit-dah-dah irregular spacing on telephone wires, some in communally neat rows, like old women on a day trip to the seaside, others wanting a bit more space, dammit. The whole looking like a complex piece of music on a stave, or perhaps a coded message - though what is music if not a coded message.

Students in the quad outside the USC medical school learning the correct procedure for operating the Chinese New Year dragon, to bells and drums and lots of happy smiles. The dragon's as yet undecorated mesh body making it look naked, unprepared, as if it was rehearsing too.

A Sanyo blimp climbing steeply into the hazy LA afternoon sky like a submarine blowing the ballast tanks and making for the surface.

Fun at the Halfway House

So I'm spending a lot of time at Santa Monica's main public library these days, and it's completely fascinating. It's actually the temporary main library, because they're building a shiny new one a few blocks from here that won't be finished until next year. But that's by the by. This is my sole experience of the public library system in the US, and if it's anything to go by - which I admit it might not be, since Santa Monica is hardly yer average American burg - then they're great places to go if you want reassurance that, however marginal you might feel in society sometimes, you're pretty damn mainstream in comparison to some. I joke that it's a bit like a halfway house for the clinically weird, but I'm only half joking. Sure, one of the lenses in my glasses has been held in place with blue tape for quite a few months now, but that scarcely figures on the oddball scale that the Santa Monica library has quite helpfully recalibrated for me.

I've been here enough to notice the regulars: the ones who come to be, rather than to do, and perhaps to snooze away a quiet afternoon. A hint of camouflage in their wardrobe sometimes, a shake in the hands, often lung complaints that have the delicate tinkle of emphysema, and some healthily invigorating conversations with themselves. And goodness knows my personal hygiene isn't always one of my five-starred reviews, but there are smells here sometimes that ought to be captured for the benefit of medical science.

And then noise. This isn't weird; it's just me. The man sitting opposite me (delicate tinkle of emphysema: check) has a packet of cookies under the table that he's reaching for every now and then. He's not supposed to have them in here, and he knows that, because the act of taking out a cookie, eating it, and then putting back the packet is a careful ballet of pretending to be doing nothing at all. It's like he's a kid at school scoffing from a bag of sweets under his desk. But - and it's a huge fucking great big but - the process of taking out and eating each cookie is currently driving me crazy. Confession: people-noise sometimes makes me nuts, particularly in places where I ought to be able to expect quiet: idiots talking in cinemas, gaggles of bright shiny undergraduates who go to university libraries specifically in order to map out their social engagements for the next two years.

And rustling. Paper bags. Sweet papers. Rustle rustle rustle. It makes me tense and occasionally homicidal. So what Mr. Emphysema is doing right now isn't helping, because the long drawn out process of trying to extract each cookie as quietly as possible means that the rustling is maddeningly quiet - it's a bit like a whisper in a quiet audience; its very quietness makes it louder - and also maddeningly extended. Just take the bloody cookie out quickly, stick it in your mouth and have done with it already. Jeez. And then there are the people who eat a chocolate bar (cf. burgers wrapped in paper) by painstakingly turning over a millimetre of the wrapping, nibbling away at the partially-revealed treat, and only then venturing to reveal another millimetre. Just take the bloody thing out of the wrapper and eat it already. Jeez. Yes, I know you'll get chocolate on your pretty fingers. That's life, I guess.

Okay, that's enough for today. I'm starting to worry that Mr. Emphysema is currently blogging about all the weirdos in the Santa Monica public library, and especially this dork opposite with the blue tape on his glasses.

God rays and white walls

It might seem strange that my favourite photograph from the day is of signs on a wall, but not if you know me. It's not just that we were snapping a bit randomly, and both posing a bit reluctantly, for the photographs of ourselves to have much more than a feel of familial contractual obligation about them. The favourite photograph isn't that way by default. It earns it, by capturing, more than any of the others, the light that Wednesday, the shafts of SoCal sun that were all the more precious for having needed to push photons through special-effect storm clouds. Film-makers call them 'God rays', I believe, and I'll harumph a bit at the allusion, while admitting that it does capture something that's exactly right.

Maybe I've been spending way too long recently watching Lord of the Rings extended DVD extras and Kong production diaries, but looking back I can't help thinking that the day owed something to the filmic cliché of hours of frantic rushing and complexity so that a single moment can seem so simple. A. has eloquently documented elsewhere the mad rush which began the day. The dress having been secured, things calmed a little, though the drive along the weathered coastline was a study in shades of wet grey. Off to the left, dolphins roamed happily, not needing to say so long to anyone, or thank anyone else for the fish. We drove past the Knopflerish but slightly too literal 'Telephone Road', and the intriguing 'Santa Claus Lane'. What is it with American street names, anyhow? They often seem like the product of some undergraduate project in random generation of referring expressions. And why is Euclid so richly remembered in thoroughfares? Why not Eratosthenes Avenue, or Pythagoras Square (on the hypotenuse is, etc. etc.)?

And then the light broke through above the gentle streets of Santa Barbara and on the white stone walls of the courthouse, beaming on one last errand: the completion of a marriage licence, the holding up of a palm in sincere affirmation of the truths of statements made in writing. Then some final preparations in the pleasingly, pomp-punctuatingly informal setting of the courthouse bathrooms (To UK readers: You know it's a euphemism, so feel free to substitute the real word here), and suddenly lights, cameras, and action. All was in place, as if by the simple matter of a week of crazy-making planning and running around. Rings on fingers, thanks to the ex-Mayor of the town, and suddenly we were alone, married, the afternoon barely begun, the prospect of an unhurried drive back to the big city along the coast road and a night of shutting out the world suddenly seeming very appealing indeed.

But first, some photographs: of the flowers so cunningly sent by my family; of each other, by the steps, and up in the Vertigo tower; of the courthouse, the white walls punctuated by ornately scripted signs with splashes of illuminating colour, the light flashing its last across the stone seat. The odd peace of shooting beyond the end of a flurry of rushing and having it all work out.

And a beginning.

Fun with Ambiguity

Honestly, on the day that Apple announces their biggest collection of new and supercool stuff in years, it seems that poor old lumbering behemoth Microsoft might as well be trying to appear like incompetent hacks. It took the kids over at /. about a minute to realise that perhaps, just perhaps, 'Malicious Software Removal Tool' might not be the most prudent name for the thing. Does no-one at MS have the remotest clue? Their product naming is becoming like a feed line in an old Laugh-In episode.

But then, after using the Windows XP 'Add/Remove Programs' panel to delete an old version of Firefox, only have it make a new version I'd installed separately also unusable, I know all about the malicious removal of software.