With my current hand below
Bonus! On the same walk, thinking about what I should focus on for the rest of my leave, I found a page of book for a bit of street bibliomancy. The first passage I saw was
Vronsky stood still and asked directly: “How so? Do you mean he made your belle-sœur an offer yesterday?“
from Anna Karenina.
A lot to think about.
Thinking about the new year and what binds me and what I am bound to
For a long while I was posting gutter study, the meaningful trash I find, to Instagram, but my hate for the interface was the last straw on a very weak back.
So I thought I’d use this old space.
I was thinking how to get that back in my life. I installed the WordPress app on my phone, hooked it up to my old blog, pulled out a recent photo, and did a test post. I was thinking about how I might integrate it into Instagram and Twitter and whatever while I was walking. Time was when I fed my family on building social media integrations so I bet I could something useful.
I saw this on the sidewalk and I don’t expect anyone to believe me. One of the foundations of my gutter study is photography of cast-off gloves. I’ll do a post about that sometime.
Anyway expect more. I’ll find a way so you don’t have to follow this blog directly.
This was a glove, as far as I could tell from a casual glance at five paces. It snapped into its reality at about two. When I read the backwards “Get In Touch’ and realized the fingers were tear-offs I started to feel like I was in a bad script.
Anyway, I will just likely post a picture and a title, and maybe a thought, but mostly not the latter. I think. And I hope to find a way so nobody has to follow this blog. It’ll be the propagation node to phenomenally mundane photos of garbage.
I went to the highway like I used to go to the library in the pre-Internet days. I would walk the couple of miles reviewing my headful of questions, and go over my notebook so by the time I got there, I would be ready to research answers for the weeks’ questions.
I got to the highway thinking about what I needed to change to help ease the mid-life-crisis feelings that had been growing over the years. Â I could have looked for symbols and oddities in the wooded roads to the highway, but I don’t spend a lot of time in the woods. I spend a lot of time looking at trash on the side of the road. So I was going to the highway.
When I got there I looked South and looked North. Â When I looked North, right near what used to be a cafe where years ago I registered nshrine.com in a fit of vacation inspiration. Â I saw a white lump in the grass. “That’d be it.”
As I got closer I got disappointed. Â It looked to be directory, maybe even a phonebook. Â Those can be inspirational, but nothing that could really get me going, nothing right for something like this. Â I decided to go with the bibliomancy method. Â I would think of the question in very precise terms, pick a random section, and pretend the contents were some confused person’s answer.
The paragraph I chose was a definition of “conflate”. Â Now the challenge is to wedge this into the problem space. Shouldn’t be too hard.
I was listening to the audio book The Greatest Show on Earth on my walk. Dawkins mentions the somewhat familiar fact that Darwin had a copy of Mendel’s theories in his library, but it’s pages remained uncut. If Darwin had read those pages, Dawkins speculates, the history of biology would have changed greatly.
The opposite theme is so much more common. What if some artist hadn’t met another in a cafe? What if he had been on that plane that crashed? What if I hadn’t gone that way on my walk? It’s almost refreshing to know that Darwin was a knife stroke and an idle afternoon away from great progress. The world missed a profound innovation that day he troubled over a letter to a cousin and napped.
I hear these things and see a torn up ad under a bush. I don’t have free time, but I’m in a period of far less structure and pressure, and a whole world of opportunity. I will miss the greatest opportunities, and the least. I just hope that I cut that damned page.