Time Lowers all Bars

By the anticipatory vibratings of my youngest child, I can only assume that Halloween is nigh, a night promising sugary riches in exchange for minor scares and occasional suburban mirages. (One year: a horse dressed as Pegasus being walked on a lead.) Finishing touches on costumes are being applied, reworked, and revamped. Pumpkins have been agonizingly rejected and selected, sliced and scooped, carved and positioned. Careful attention is being paid to playlists: blood-curdling sound effects before or after the Disneyland Haunted Mansion music, and how much Danny Elfman is too much? It's more logistics than most military manuevers. As a parent, I'm obligated to carry bags and flashlights and hoods when they get itchy, and masks when they are too hard to see through, and (very likely) tote umbrellas, too. My rate is one Reese's cup or mini Baby Ruth per block walked, payable at the stop sign at the corner. I think this is being more than reasonable. And sometime after we've all walked about two blocks too far, and the kids are cranky, and the parents' arms are tired, and at least half of the group needs a bathroom stop and/or coffee, we call it a night, say farewell, and close our eyes on October.

And wake to November.

Of course I'm NaNoing again this year, marking a decade of dubious novel-writing (or the writing of dubious novels.) I "planned" my first year on Halloween night, set off into November with high hopes, and came thisclose to a full crash and burn before the end of the month. I had high hopes and grand plans and good intentions, which was all but inviting Disaster and Doubt onto my laptop for thirty days. I had not then had the experience I have now: the knowledge of just how "rough" a rough draft can be, of the power of free writing, of both the pain and the pride of a good edit. Our family grew by a child, faced all the usual things young growing families face in a ten-year span, plus the outliers. I've learned to be more flexible in my personal life, less self-critical, more outgoing. I've tried to get back in touch with my creative side, and take better care of my professional side, too. And I don't know if I can lay all of that at NaNo's feet, but I put a lot of it there, for certain.

Facing a Big Scary Thing once a year has been like a booster shot for life. My family and I have faced Big Scary Things together in these ten years, things that we anticipated and things that we did not. I'm reminded of these when we pull the big costume bin out of storage every year and remember the Octobers past, the people our kids have been, and look to who they've become. I think about all our annual rituals and how they anchor us even when we're being tossed around, and I can appreciate the importance of keeping those rituals alive even when we'd Rather Not This Year. And this year especially, we've recited our mantra of This Too Shall Pass to help us keep perspective on what matters, and what we need to do to get by. Rarely will we ever get anything right on the first try, and rarely do we need to. A best effort is better than no effort at all, and it's possible to get through even the most overwhelming task if you sit down a little every day.

I'm way off on my usual planning routine this year, a fact I've bemoaned in the NaNo forums. Ten years ago I didn't think I needed to plan. Ten years later I believe it. The bar to winning NaNo is set very, very low if you think about it. It's just words, one after the other. It's not life. It's not even a walk down the block in the rain. But you can bet there's going to be candy waiting at the end.

Because This Week

I think it might be tragedy fatigue, watching the UK reel from Brexit, and France from the tragedy in Nice, and the ramifications of chaos in Turkey, and America's increasingly violent live-streamed summer. I don't know if creating in the face of destruction is courage or denial, or an appreciation of the relative safety and calm of my own life.

I don't know. But it's been a hell of a week in a hell of a year, and we're only half through 2016. Our national elections are still months away, and the levels of toxicity and division are the highest I can ever remember. As a country, we've gone from memorializing the Civil Rights movement to reliving it. And I hug my kids, and try to breathe, and take the time every morning to be glad of the sun and the sky and even the mundane details of my neighborhood. And I'm still wrestling with a rewrite of a book, because I have few things I can do right now except to create.

Frog It

For reasons largely chemical -- having my pupils dilated for an eye exam -- I'm unable to tackle my nightly writing assignment, since I'm unable to handle any sort of related reading. So far, I have managed to be a nuisance around the house by badly loading the dishwasher and not being trusted to cook dinner for the kids, since I can't actually read the controls on the oven, and thus I've been banished to the far reaches of the house where I can sit in semi-darkness and not harm myself or others or pose a fire hazard to anyone.

So I'm going to ramble here, and talk about knitting.

I learned around fifteen years ago or so, when my then-only child was in preschool: I vaguely remember one of my very first projects was a slightly lumpen and uneven toy bear for one of his classmates who was about to become a big brother. My wife taught me to knit, and I love her dearly, but she and I are of very different mindsets to life, and knitting is one of those things that, if you must be taught by someone, should be taught by someone who thinks like you do, or who you have the proper amount of respect/fear for (a dear old grandmother is perfect.) My wife's lessons, no matter how often she repeated them, did not take, leaving me to my own devices in the pre YouTube days to puzzle it through from diagrams and books, and to finally wind up getting it right in the "Continental" style. Did you know there's more than one style? I didn't, but I learned it the opposite way that I was taught. She knits "English," which basically means that she uses one hand to manage the loose yarn and I use the opposite hand. Luckily, we're both right-handed, or chances are I'd still be learning. Continental is, from personal experience, unusual among the few knitters I've met in my area, and a male knitting is even rarer still, though I did strike up a very pleasant conversation with a gentleman about how he and his siblings had all learned as children, and were put to work by their mother making socks for themselves during the winter months. Having children of my own who tend to come undone during winter, I see this as exceptionally good parenting. Anyhow, those first few attempts at making anything other than odd lumpen animals, or slightly crooked socks (I tried) or overlarge hats were not wild successes. And although it's not really any more difficult than tying a shoe -- it's practically the same motion, in fact -- you're still doing it with a pair of sharp pointy tools and about a million times in a row.

There's three aspects of knitting that make it pleasant, though, and more pleasant than tying endless shoes. First is setting the expectations appropriately. I have little desire to make myself a nice complicated anything, and certainly less desire to impose such a project on another person. Sweaters are involved. Even proper socks are a hassle -- turning the heel, ugh ugh ugh -- but scarves are super easy, and baby blankets are just scarves without boundaries. I do a pretty brisk business in churning out baby shower gifts for my coworkers thanks to the innate simplicity of the rectangular form.

Second, it's very soothing. Once you get past the agony of actually learning the motions and the silly mnemonic rhymes to do them in the right order ("through the fence, catch the sheep, back we go, off you leap") and you learn your knits from your purls, it's possible to become a veritable fibre-slinging machine. When I had a longer commute, I'd work on the train, and provided that someone in my office is expecting, I can be seen hauling a black bag (manly) of fuzzy pink yarn (less manly) to my kids' soccer games, or pulling it out in front of our nightly murder-mystery TV, or whenever. It's easy, almost enough that you don't need to look at your work after a while. You can feel it -- you learn to know when you've placed the needle wrong and can fix it nearly automatically. I doubt I would have believed this all those years ago when my wife was patiently and fruitlessly trying to teach me how to Catch The Sheep. It's meditative, clicking the needles and handling the yarn and feeling the piece grow beneath your fingers. I've heard it releases serotonin even, one of the brain's built in "happy chemicals." I can believe it. The temptation to stay up late to knit just One More Row... well, it's kind of a buzz, actually. A socially-acceptable grandmotherly buzz, but a buzz nonetheless.

Third and finally, though, is overcoming one's fear of frogs. Or of "frogging" one's work by ripping it out when it's beyond repair or just not working. Frogging a piece can be traumatic, especially if you're really invested in it -- like a sweater or some infernally complex sock, and you may be tempted to just forge on ahead, or bargain with yourself to rip back just a little bit, just a few rows. Since I'm in the realm of rectangles, ripping out is not such a big deal. When you take as much pleasure in the pulling-apart of bad piece as you do in the putting-together of a good one -- well, that's supposedly when you've Leveled Up at knitting. That you can embrace the creation and destruction as integral parts of the piece... or something. It can be an infernal pain (pro tip: never attempt to rip out boucle) but it is a literal unwinding and remaking, too. A fresh start, with lessons learned from the last attempt. Taking a new approach to the summit. Insert your own metaphor here -- it's a do-over, and with the added benefit of wallowing in more happybrain chemistry.

So I'm in the middle of a piece now, a pen wrap for myself, and I just ripped it out for the fifth time in a row. I'm working without a pattern, without a plan, just a picture in my head of what the end product should look like and feel like, and I'm far too lazy to make a small sample swatch and do all the math and figure out how it should count out. I'm leaping in, something sharp and poky in both hands. It's taking shape again, and I think it might be right this time. And like the other creative endeavors I've worked on over the last fifteen plus years, it's teaching me more about making mistakes, and trusting instincts, and being brutal about editing (and starting over) and working through process along the way to a finished product.

I'm a computer programmer by hobby originally and by trade later, and there's very much an immediacy and a correctness to that sort of creation -- errors are reported quickly, and results are true/false without a lot of unpleasant nebulousness in the middle. Knitting -- and writing, and typing, and music, and carpentry -- is not like that, thank goodness, and although I'm not sure I'm good at it, I'm not terrible, either. And when I am, I'm happy to haul it off to the frog pond and rip it, rip it, rip it.

Dimensions

For a short while, I, like so many other reckless young men, flirted with the idea of becoming a mathematician. Luckily I was pulled from the brink by a faculty advisor and an intervention by friends who weren't so fortunate. (Intro to Organic Chemistry was their downfall. I got out just in time.) Anyhow, one of the few things I took away from those fateful months -- other than the nagging sense that I used to know how to do things like find an integral, three times a week at 8:00am -- was the notion of dimension and projection. This is hopelessly mingled in my mind with the other classes I was taking at the time, including a few philosophy courses, so Professor Polt is likely to grade me on this. I'll try to get the essay done while he's still lagged from travel.

In essence, when you're losing a dimension, you're losing information. You're seeing, in essence, the shadow-of-a-thing, projected there on the cave wall, and not the Thing itself. This came up a bit in those forgotten math courses of mine, and tragically for me, in a later computer graphics course when we talked about representing three-dimensional figures on a two-dimensional screen. (This was tragic because it threw me back into linear algebra again, after I'd worked so hard to stay clean.) You lose something, of course, when you try to show a 3D ball on a 2D monitor: the "back" of the ball is gone, flattened out and masked by the "front" of the ball. After the projection, there's no going back. The information is lost.

This is a very long-winded and rambling way for me to rant about trying to copy and paste something off my tablet, which I'm actually typing this upon, with a fingertip, which was a disaster. Left on its own, a single finger is a poor substitute for all ten working together, and I genuinely do have empathy for my fellow comp-sci graduates (and math refugees) for trying to write software that can properly derive user intent from a wobbly fingertip. I certainly got to see this in action, as I watched the poor tablet sweep through menus and settings while I tried to highlight a small section of text to email to somebody. It was a UI disaster, no matter how I tried to sneak up on it.

And that's why I broke out the keyboard, and took a second to do what I wanted with minimal fuss -- each key mapped to the action it represents, not projected down into the pitiful low-res representation. It's no wonder I cling desperately to my keyboard-enabled phone, after comic text-attempts from my wife's keyless phone "Pick up egos, molt, and very from store" is her phone's shadowy projection of "eggs, milk, and bread." The ideas are flattened out by the process, and information is lost. And personally speaking, the fingertip-on-screen barrier is annoying enough that I won't try to do that again.

I wonder if this will turn us into flat-thinkers, too? I see it, to some extent, with my eldest child. He and his friends have marathon chat sessions, but they're largely photos and short bursts of video (a technology we would have loved, back in school, no matter how much information was lost.) Text and words are a dimension that single-fingers alone are poorly situated to navigate.

My Daughter is Kicking my Ass

...at games, that is. My youngest child (age seven) is on some kind of massive board game bender right now. We don't have anything Hallmark-y like an actual Family Game Night or anything, but we do have numerous bookshelves, and at least one of those shelves is jam-packed with games. As the kids have aged, the selection has improved. I will be a happy man indeed, for example, if I never have to sit through another round of Candyland ever, ever again, and my eldest's much-loved Toy Story Monopoly Junior is buried in the back of the closet where it will hopefully remain out-of-mind until the heat death of the sun.

Gradually, gradually, we have been able to replace these games of chance with more strategic and less luck-based fare. Mancala is a great one, because the rules are dead simple, and it contains a good mix of surprise and strategy (sometimes with directed help from dad. "I'm about to take these pieces unless you move them...") I know it gets disparaged for being the token "wacky" card game, but all my kids honed their ruthlessness to a fine edge playing endless two-player hands of Uno during sibling soccer games. We pulled Sharp Shooters out of storage recently, which is basically Yahtzee with more visual scoring and the pleasure of being responsible for sixteen dice. And we've even been playing Sorry! quite a bit, once I learned that it goes from a boring luck-of-the-draw game to a ruthless slapdown simply by dealing out a small hand of cards to every player. It was a revelation. Castle Keep is quick and easy, when the dog doesn't decide to lay down in the middle of the playing space. There's little want for unplugged entertainment at our house.

When any of the kids seem to be having trouble sleeping, my wife and I joke -- not untruthfully -- that they must be in the middle of learning something. We saw this when they were infants, discovering their hands, and rolling, and learning to crawl. We saw it when they were walking, and "talking" with us via baby signs (yes, we are those parents), and we see it now and then when they're mastering the bigger concepts: multiplication, vocabulary for their Spanish class, some new piano piece. You can practically hear the gears turning in their little heads.

With the exception of my 5am NaNoWriMo ritual of me + typewriter + dog + weaponized coffee, I have been sleeping soundly. Not a peep from the kids at all, which is why this sudden turn toward games and gaming has caught me off guard. We've been spending hours lately, moving tokens, dealing cards, or hoping for a six in Catan: Junior (because a six lets you move the ghost pirate, duh.) It's becoming something of a mania with the child, and of course we want to encourage this. It's harmless, is probably honing some skill or the other, and it's good for her to learn how to lose gracefully, because if there's one thing I do not do, it's coddle the kids. Once we've put Plumpy and Mister Mint and Gramma Nut and all the other horrors back in the box, the figurative gloves come off. I may point out weaknesses in the defense... for a little while. I do not play Daddy's Little Princess checkers. You want non-competitive? Do a jigsaw puzzle (though I get the last piece.)

So not only has the youngest been playing ever single game she can get her hands upon, and asking about those she can't (Monopoly, garrrrgh), but she is completely kicking my ass. Either the dice hate me, or she's skimming from the bank when I'm not looking, or she's genuinely, actually good. Is it possible to be a prodigy at Uno? Any scholarship opportunities in this? I'm asking for a friend.

I'm not even talking about video games, where my dwindling reflexes and Lack of Caring render me helpless to all three of my spawn. (Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you.) I'm being outclassed and outgunned by a person still waiting for her permanent molars to come in. She's learned a victory dance from her mother. It's brief, but it stings, oh, how it stings.

I couldn't be more proud.

Thirst

I woke up early this morning to something that's too rare right now in California: the sound of rain, draining down the downspout outside my bedroom window. This is our first serious rain of the season, one that's been anticipated for a week at least. I never had an appreciation for something as simple as rainfall until I moved here. The climate in the areas where I grew up were known for their general unpredictability (standard joke: "Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes.") Nearly two decades a Californian now, I've gotten complacent about weather in general, and tend not to have as much awareness of the passing of the seasons. This isn't meant as a brag, honestly! Despite the autumnal equinox arriving this past week, my days are the same as they were in April, or June, or August. Only the early darkness belies the fact that time is, in fact, advancing. Thanks to the ongoing drought, the hills and trees around me are in a permanent state of late summer: withered leaves and dried grass (we say "golden" to make ourselves feel better.)

The tempo of the rain just picked up, it's delightful. It's complacency-shaking, too. A reminder that change can and does happen, and that it happens whether or not we're ready for it. Now a rumble of thunder: this is a rare storm, indeed! Of course everyone along my morning commute route will also be shaken up. Californians are notoriously bad drivers, tops in many polls, and the rain brings out a special degree of incompetence. I'll need to be on my guard, as I take my future driver to school this morning. There's nothing like driving in the rain to summon Fatherly Judgment about everyone else on the road. ("You call that a turn signal?!" "Hey, headlights on! It's the law!" etc.)

Of course I'm also going to summon the spectre of NaNoWriMo in this post. We're under a month away from October, and whether it's due to new management at the Office of Letters and Light, or whether it's just blue-car syndrome because I'm unprepared, there seems to be a lot of discussion about planning and preparation this year. My initial reaction is one of the California driver, faced with the first precipitation of the season: lose all common sense, and veer wildly. "Write? Plan? I can't do it! My God, it cannot be October already."

My second reaction is that of the seasoned vet. This will be my seventh(?) foray, and all but one of those years in the Typewriter Brigade. I know I can generate 50K words in the allotted time, though let's not talk about the quality or editability or the future of those words. Like many vets, I'm not doing NaNoWriMo to prove that I can. The challenge isn't the thing any longer, and honestly hasn't been since year two.

Quite frankly, at this time of year, I'm just parched. Sapped creatively from a long development project at work, from the daily grind of drives to school, stops at the grocery, and kids' sports on weekends. I wear the same clothes every week, and do the same tasks, and attend the same meetings. It takes something like NaNoWriMo to break up the sameness. To water the mental grass, to mangle a metaphor. I have tried writing and editing on a daily basis, but the inertia of my daily life is strong, and it's hard for me to get motivated to change my habits.

When the improbability of November rolls around, though, the herald of the end of the year, and long nights, holiday plans, and other demands... somehow that's just right. I do subscribe to the philosophy of "when you have a million things on your plate, what's one more?" And NaNo is finite . By definition, it won't last forever, it makes no demands after the thirty days, there are no obligations or even expectations. A month of cutting loose, talking typewriters, photographing toy rhinos -- occasionally even writing. It's a welcome shower of weirdness on thirsty soil.

This year has been particularly withering, and I've got a lot of low-level stress that's chipping away at me right now. I'm not anywhere as prepared as I like to be for this, attempting to craft a whole novel, with my little story point milestones all typed up on notecards. Frankly, I'm a mess this year. But I'm also not going to miss out on the chance to play in the rain.

Noises Off: Sounds in the Newsroom?

I contemplated posting this on Typosphere, but I try to keep the really grumpy/cynical stuff out of the way. I don't know if you've seen the piece, but it's bouncing around my "typewriter" newsfeed just about as fast as the Hanx Writer story did:

The Times' newsroom set to ring with the sounds of typewriters once more

And with a little digging, one finds a tweeted pic of one of the speakers in question.

Hmm.

On the one hand, I can actually see some benefit. My kids and I all find it easier to work with some kind of background noise going on. I got into the habit in college of packing my trusty Walkman, a couple of cassettes and some spare batteries and camping out in the library to recopy notes. (My wife is the lone dissenter in the house, and can't so much as read with the radio on.) Public typing aficionados in the 'sphere have reported favorable responses to the sound, too. ("I haven't heard one of those in years.") As a kind of productivity susurration, perhaps the recorded drone of a flotilla of typewriters will have the intended effect.

But what is the intended effect here? It feels more like cheap manipulation to me, like the old saw about piping in the scent of vanilla at amusement parks. It's like a sensory trick, isn't it? Wouldn't this get old after a while? Unless the sounds are truly randomized, I can see this being something of an aural assault. I hope that it's not just a single sound effect layered and looped upon itself, like an early Steve Reich tape composition. There is a point at which a wave of noise can be too much. Even I had to stop every now and then and flip the cassette over.

What nobody's pointing out, though, is that this is being played in a newspaper office. Not exactly the best place to work right now, given that the readership is almost certainly carrying around the latest news on a device in their pockets. A very, dark cynical part of me says: if they play it loud enough, they can't hear progress coming.

I will be the first to confess that there is certainly a lot of romance in the sounds of a typewriter, and as any type-in attendee can avow, a roomful is even more special. I don't know if piped-in sounds have the same impact, but if they do, I hope all the divisions at the Times get to choose their legacy-tech background music, otherwise the Times' web team will be stuck listening to the harmonies of a hundred screeching modems.

Metamorphic

I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm a little pinball-crazed. Crossing my newsfeed today is this item about a group working to recreate in the physical realm a popular pinball machine that formerly only existed in the digital. There are constraints to the project, not the least of which are budget and the laws of physics. The availability or practicality of parts, for example, are utterly unlimited in a digital realm, and I own some games that simply cannot exist in any physical form. And there are some that lie vaguely in-between the realms of "physically possible" and "batsh*t cukoo" (and get criticized for basically being tables that play themselves.)

The Timeshock! table, though -- and the other virtual tables produced by this studio -- all appear to have just enough grounding in reality to make them practical, and that, in my opinion, is a large part of their charm (I have two of the other titles they list in the article.) They're challenging and yet predictable: simulating reality in a convincing fashion is sufficiently difficult, and I'm sure that goes two ways. I like the idea, though, almost as if the idea of pinball retreated to a digital cocoon during the lean years of the 1990's, only to re-emerge reborn and metamorphosed.

Of course, I'm still rooting for the creation of digital simulations of some of my favorite tables, too. Farsight did a decent recreation of the classic Haunted House table for their Pinball Arcade app, and they're promising a Kickstarter campaign to bring over The Addams Family, the top-selling table of all time, and (not coincidentally) the one that appears to be requested the most. I'd love to have a playable version of this machine around, as it contributed in part to my delinquency in grad school and made me weigh the importance of truly having clean laundry vs. setting aside a few quarters for a game. (Hint: laundry did not win.) As I've pointed out before, pinball machines are in top form as they leave the factory, and then are devoted to a life of being bashed and battered around from the inside-out. Care and upkeep is much easier on a tablet than a table.

All the same, I'm pretty excited. I hope this digital-to-analog port happens, and I hope to give the game a try in person if it does. It's not too often something digital gets to insert itself into the analog realm, and I think it's noteworthy when it does.

Pen Review: Namiki Vanishing Point

Time again for some pen geekery...



Maybe not a full review, since I've only had it for about 18 hours now, but at least a first-impressions review. tl;dr: I'm very happy with the choice.



I have no great love for eBay and I can usually pass up some of Levenger's more esoteric or expensive options, but I am known to haunt their online outlet store. They have famously excellent customer service, so when the listing said "like new, appears to have never been used," they weren't joking. I'm not sure who received/bought this originally and returned it, but thank you. The blue is just sedate enough to look professional, and just happens to be my preferred color. Well done.



The mechanism on the vanishing point is pretty clever: this little chromed tailpipe has a tiny flap inside that the nib pushes open when the pen is engaged. The barrel of the pen is serving more like a sheath. The downside is that you're limited in refilling options, since the whole writing mechanism is being moved around in there, so there's no practical way to also add a piston or snorkel.

Levenger helpfully included a cartridge, squeeze converter, and a piston converter. I already have other Pilot/Namiki pens about, too, so care and feeding is covered.



I've heard that new nibs can sometimes squeak a bit when they're first used. I haven't encountered that. I'm not sure if it happens every time or if I lucked out, or if my pre-inking ritual of flushing out the works with water did the trick.

You can see the slightly indented sides on the clip where your fingers are supposed to rest. I don't find this obtrusive at all when I'm writing. It's a subtle tactile guide to holding the pen properly with a triangle grip. Supposedly the tinier nibs can run a bit toward the dry side, so I've read about VP owners choosing a fine enough nib to conserve ink vs. picking a nib that's smooth and not scratchy. I'd personally recommend the Medium, and you can see that it's shading nicely on my scratch pad of sugarcane (bagasse) paper. Just don't wander too far from a bottle of ink or supply of cartridges. There's no window for checking ink levels.

Why go capless? Both because of the sheer coolness of the thing and the convenience. I don't post my pens when I write, that is, I don't stick the cap on the back of the pen. Partially this is out of a desire to keep it looking nice and not scratch up the barrel or crack the cap. Also, it's a good way to ensure that your pen comes back home to you when you let someone borrow it: keep the cap in your other hand. :-) For meetings, or quick notes, or one-handed writing situations (e.g., standing up), a click pen is convenience itself. I will say, though, that the argument that a VP keeps the nib pointed upright ("No leaks!") is just silly. Regular capped fountain pens should be stowed nib-up in your pocket or a case. It's nothing special or unique to a capless pen. Most fountain pen owners who value their wardrobe learn quickly to keep them upright when not in use, and not shove them into a pocket nib-end down. Gravity: it's the law.

Walk, man

And just like that, a month goes by between updates. Somehow it never feels like it's that long away... and then it is.

So, I'm back, in some capacity anyway, and hoping to put the newly-freed time to better use than what I've been doing lately, which is loafing and playing way too much pinball. The weekly library walk is a good sanity-maintainer, as it's something to look forward to in the work week and good exercise for the largely sedentary lifestyle of someone who makes his living behind a keyboard. Our library system has a number of branches and a particularly excellent online system for reserving books and having them ready for pickup at any branch. I don't know if this is the norm now, but it's incredibly convenient.

That cassette collection (of questionable taste) lived in one of those huge zippered nylon cases under the bed in my dorm room, and was fed at first thanks to the largess of the back catalog of the BMG Music Club (12 albums for a penny!), by careful duplication of friend's cassettes, and then in years later, by legging it to the library to riffle through their CDs. Some of those old albums are permanently embedded in my brain with the place, so (for example) the tape I made that backed Naked Lunch with Different Trains automatically takes me back to a late-night drive across central Indiana to pick up a friend from the airport. Some of the more regrettable 80's pop songs are instant time-travel back to college years, walking around the pond near campus just as autumn was turning and all the sugar maples dropping continual showers of orange and yellow leaves. (This ink color is close, but nowhere as vivid.)

Scent is a powerful memory-trigger, but I think music is an actual time machine for your brain.

Silent Running

Scribbled with a Pilot Knight fountain pen, kitted out with an Italic nib liberated from the squiddy Pilot Plumix. This took a grouchier turn than I intended, but it is true that I spend about 20-25 hours per week making my wife a track widow, the poor thing.

Our meets are pretty low tech, doing all our registration on paper, starting with black-powder blanks, and recording times with paper tape and numbered popsicle sticks. At the high school level, they are far fancier (and bigger-budget) with electronic shoe tags, video cameras to record finishes and the like. There's certainly a place for higher technology, and maybe some day we'll sign in children all marked with QR codes and hand scanners. They're all facilitating technologies, though -- there's a need they are filling. I'm still unclear on the need for the second screen strapped to my wrist, determining if I'm dancing or not, and offering to look up the song for me online.

Holiday Musings on Time, and Tunnel Vision, and Typing

I'm on vacation, technically. It began Friday evening at 5:30 local time, when I closed down the windows, lowered my standing desk to normal height -- because I live in earthquake country and am paranoid -- did a last scan around the office for any thing I'd need over break, turned off the phone and lights, scanned the office again (see paranoia, above) and left. The last two weeks have a been a blur. The American Thanksgiving holiday in November is not pinned down to any specific date, but rather falls on the fourth Thursday of the month, and this year the placement of days put it as late as it can possibly come.

Thanksgiving marks the beginning of The Holiday Season, when all the retailers kick into overdrive with sales to entice you in to the stores while you're still digesting your holiday meal or, in an alarming trend this year, in lieu of it. I suspect that many of the Typosphere are cut from similar cloth: if not purely anti-retail, then at least I would expect a lot of us are anti-retail-hype, and would sooner drop a typewriter on our feet repeatedly than sacrifice our minds, bodies, and sanity for the promise of a cheap(er) TV or tablet. All you needed to do was camp out in a parking lot for a few days in advance. Happy holidays!

Well, not me, of course. First because I don't buy into the hype. Second, because I can't understand the mindset of people who do buy into the hype and they scare me. Third, because I'm usually up to my earlobes in work and projects, which was the case again this year. 2013 was a success for us at work, I'd say, assembling something of a working process or pipeline of software out of fairly disparate staff and skills, and producing finished projects with release schedules and test plans and impressive-sounding buzzwords. Sitting, as I do, near the starting end of the pipeline, though, I need to get enough things set up for my peers to be able to do their jobs while I'm out. I've been wearing a face that hopefully conveys something along the lines of "I'm very very busy right now and I'd love to talk to you/blog for you/type on you/stop and eat a meal but ask me again in mid-December." Everyone and everything in my orbit has seen The Face. But as of Friday evening, I packed up The Face and headed home.

As a child, I can remember the amorphous stretch of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas as being interminably slow, making paper chains to count down the days (one link per day) and begging for the tree and the trimmings and the lights to somehow will the holiday into arriving faster. As a parent of children, the karmic wheel has turned, and my own kids are wondering why I still haven't hung the stockings up this year, or when all the bins are leaving the middle of the family room so we can start stacking presents up. (The answer is: I haven't found the bin containing the stockings yet.) Being sapped with projects certainly made the time pass, and maybe now that I'm away from work I can again experience the luxury of waiting, of having nothing better to do than to look forward to something.

I don't believe that for a moment, of course. I have plenty to do, not the least of which is locating that damn bin. I want to pull my 2013 NaNo draft out of hibernation and see how good or bad it went, when looked at as a whole. I admit to a certain level of tunnel vision or selective memory with the draft: the ending was odd, and I recall the last quarter or so, but it will be like a fresh, raw text when I sit down to it. I think making The Face offed a few brain cells. We'll see what that looks like. There's shopping to be done and cookies to be made, and my kids are still finishing up school this week, too. Everyone else gets to stop making their Faces by next Saturday, and then our calendar is blissfully blank and tranquil.

Ah, except for a week after this coming Friday, which Richard "The Mad Professor" Polt has declared a San Francisco Bay Area type-in. I'm excited to attend, since I'm sure I'll need some time away from my darling children and their post-holiday hysteria, and I get to meet what looks like a sizeable chunk of the Typosphere. I've got a typewriter to polish up for sure, maybe something photogenic? We'll put our best faces forward.

BABAROP: Look Out, Baby!

The missus ordered a roll of butcher paper to cover our dining room table when it's school time for my daughters. It's 30 inches wide by 900 feet long. It's a BABAROP*

I'm not sure how many NaNoWriMo drafts that works out to be. Included in the photo above is a Hermes Baby, for scale. I'm genuinely scared for the Baby's future. A piano suspended overhead would be less menacing.

This might be just the thing for anyone with one of those super-long-carriaged accounting machines. How many lines per day would meet your quota? "I typed two and a half yards today."

More to the point: do you think I can convince her to order another?

* Big-Ass Big-Ass Roll Of Paper

Balancing Act

I took a day off yesterday to cash in a birthday present from my son. The two of us took a two-hour Segway tour through Oakland, and if you think this sounds incredibly geeky or dorky, then you haven't even begun to imagine me in a bright-yellow safety vest and bike helmet, trying to look in control of a $6700 hunk of technology with grace and poise, though I possess neither. I'd hoped to snap a picture or two, but the tour didn't afford us much chance to stop.

It was incredibly fun. I've only experienced Oakland from inside a car while passing through, usually from the elevated highway that slices the waterfront district from the rest of the city. I don't have a lot of reason or opportunity to go into either of our cities these days. My job is close to home in the suburbs, and the kids have school and sports and activities that keep us within a 5-mile radius or so. My son is purely a product of the suburbs, too, and rode wide-eyed through the various highs and lows that any major urban center has to offer: the bustle of Chinatown and the riot of color for murals both official and "volunteer", "old" Oakland vs. "new" Oakland, the polish of Jack London Square contrasted with the obvious signs of human habitation under the highway, the sunny spectacle of Lake Merritt just two blocks away from homes with bars on all the windows, beauty shops offering permanent makeup, and an all-grillz jeweler. It was good to shake him up a little bit, and give him a taste of life outside the sycamore-lined streets of his hometown.

It was good for me, too. I don't take nearly enough time off from work, which is something I'm reminded off on those few times I arrange it, like yesterday. My own self-balancing mechanism is out of true.

The Segway pulls off a pretty complex technical act to stay upright, and there's a little training at the start of the tour for newbies and vets on basics like getting on and off, and moving and stopping and turning. As a first-timer, you need to overcome your awareness that the machine is standing, impossibly, on two parallel wheels without visible aid... and that it's going to react to your slightest movement in an undesirable way. Hesitation or staring down at the ground is a recipe for disaster. A tour-mate did this, and his body posture made the scooter edge away. I'm pretty sure they can smell fear.

The advice the tour guides gave for starting out was pretty good, and no-doubt applicable to those of us who need to work at maintaining our own balance:

1. Hang on with both hands
2. Look straight ahead, not at your feet
3. Step up with confidence
4. Find your center
5. Relax

Admittedly, there are are other device-centric instructions in there like "don't run into fire hydrants" and "stick out your butt to stop" but that doesn't translate as well to life advice for the chronic workaholic. I'll have to keep working at my own balancing act.

Touchless

Wow, abundant typos here. I can see how a swipe-n-slide lifestyle makes one's fingers flabby. Clearly I need more typing practice.

Typed on a noisy, oily, fingerprinted, wonderful Montgomery Ward Signature 513 (Brother), c. 1966

Nada

Typed on a 1956 Smith-Corona Silent-Super with excellent numerals

On Libraries

Why didn't I spend more time in the library?

That's my regret du jour. I certainly developed a love of reading as a child, and had paperbacks that I read enough to wear the words from the page. But I don't remember actually going to the local public library much as a child: trips were few and far between, and generally tied to school assignments for research papers. Admittedly, our town library was small, and not an easy distance from our home. I actually had to consult a map of my hometown to locate it, and I now realize that it was on the outskirts of town, out by the county high school. Well, no wonder.

Still, what a shame. I made regular trips to our library in grad school when I lived in the Midwest, mostly to rummage through their meager CD collection in the basement to put together mix tapes for myself for the walk between my apartment and campus, or to raid their twice-yearly massive used-book sale. I don't think I ever actually checked out a book from there, though, which is also inexplicable, considering the typical impoverished lifestyle of your average graduate student. I didn't have a lot of leisure time for reading, I remember, typically trying to squeeze in a chapter or two of something at night before I fell asleep.

I'm making up for lost time now, with a monthly trip or two out to the local branch that sits an easy mile from my office. Fifteen minutes to walk out, fifteen back, and that leaves half an hour of browsing time. Since our system is computerized and has many branches, I'm able to tap into the large virtual corpus and request materials to be shipped to my local branch, and am emailed when they arrive, to really maximize that half hour. Today I was back in my old habits, checking out CDs, although this time it's to use for seeding my "songs heard" in the online music streaming service I use at work, and not copy to a cassette tape.

So why didn't I spend more time in the library? Access, I suppose, and general ignorance, and laboring under the false conception that I needed to own something to enjoy it, I guess. I've become a lot more borrow-friendly as I've aged. I still have those old favorite books at home on the shelf -- new hardback editions, most of them -- but I'm kicking myself retroactively for not taking more advantage of the great facilities I've had access to over the years.

Decline and Fall?

Musings from an SM9 bought on the cheap in pre-boom times

Publish or Perish?

I'm not trying to imply that Mr. Speegle falls short of a "real writer" definition, by the way. I don't actually know what that definition includes.

• Why Libraries? at Writing Ball
• The ongoing saga of Pen and Platen at Just Write
• Me, musing on the future of books, getting hyped about the nook

 Typed on the Remington Monarch 

Attention Strippers

No, no, no, not that sort of stripper...

For those of you making Silver Surfers, I wonder: have any of you considered re-painting with appliance enamel? I'm sitting here staring at my stove, and thinking how nice a glossy white finish might look on some of these machines. Now, it's usually easier to get paint off a typewriter than it is to apply new paint on, but still... I wonder.