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August 26, 2003
Volume 31: Is not the Clothes She Wears
I love machines. I love what they do to me. I have been in a good mood for eight solid days now, despite my monthly desktop publishing experience in the middle of it, which I hate and which normally costs me at least a bottle of vodka, but not this time. I have to attribute my unreasonable serenity in part to a company that I will not curse by naming in this technophilic context, but who sent me two large and beautiful air filters to evaluate which I will do in due course in a more suitable venue. I'll say this much: they make me sleep. I love to sleep. I love machines that make me sleep. Love me, love my machines.
I love my Nikon Coolpix 5700, which has eight zoom and a big fat lens, which means it, when I, well I, sometimes I just look at it, fully extended, and I wonder, well, just how sturdy that thing is, because it's so light and sleek and warm in my hands that it, well I, I, I. I showed the thing to Uncle Demon, and he's blind, that's how much I'm into it, but it's not that, it, just look at it, it flips and swivels and folds and extends and right in the palm it, now turn, now like that, press that, yes, I can't possibly stand it. It does exactly what I tell it to, which is wonderful in a machine, if depressing in a man.
My computer, far more complicated, more erratic, hot and cold, what do you want, what am I supposed to do, how much investment can I justify in perpetuating this bondage, you always want more from me! I spend far more time with my computer than my camera, but our relationship is more detached. My computer is a nexus. It's hard to become really intimate with something that effectively exists in more dimensions than you do. If you switch into a given dimension set fully -- the one where you can send instant approval of the Pixies to the guy from Jerkcity, say, or listen to the Pixies yourself -- then you can love the computer in its specific incarnation as purveyor of the Pixies and Pixies related information. As a discrete box it's like trying to love a hydroelectric dam for itself and not for its output to your blender.
During the recent blackout, however, I developed a new appreciation of the humbler machines: freezer, fridge and stove. I have a tremendous number of allergies, so it was actually extremely difficult to find things I could eat that required neither processing nor refridgeration. I ended up throwing up seven times without my air filters regardless, because THEY PAINTED THE HALLWAYS IN MY BUILDING IN FORTY DEGREE HEAT AND NINETY FIVE PERCENT HUMIDITY AND THEN THE POWER WENT OUT. Excuse me. I know enough now to love the fridge, stove and freezer, but it's cousinly and definitely platonic. I do not want to straddle the freezer door handle.
There was no sex during the blackout. There is no sex at all. There is only machinery, that surrounds and lifts and separates. Sex? Take me somewhere calm and blue, with dry air that moves a little, and the ocean, and the mountains, and the forest. The very idea makes me want to take my flat wide-angled screen in my arms and lick all the dust off. But most of it I would leave behind. Then what? Books? Books. Yes, I'm the last machine of all, operated by books, my levers twisted and sunk and jammed in and rotated until my blood turns into ideas and back into words to turn into books. I am only a pen for more books.
Posted by cd at August 26, 2003 11:15 PM
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