Well, OK. I fully admit it, I often feel like I’m on a different planet from the people about me. Graham excepted, of course, but then everything I say that isn’t directly about Graham tends to be a long way apart from Graham.
When the feeling gets to be too strong I just sit here, blank of mind and still of hand, and there’s nothing in me that I can coax onto paper. Then it’s time to stand still for a while, see without seeing, hear without hearing, and let the rest of the world catch up with me.
Or, put another way, sometimes I need a day off.
Actually, I’ve not missed much. Two-and-a-half world events seem to have bounced up, and that’s not so much really.
Firstly, Steve Jobs bounced on to the stage to announce the much-anticipated igadget of the decade, to be known henceforth as iPad. Looks like nothing so much as an iPhone that’s been sat on by an exceedingly heavy large animal of the hippopotamus kind. And of about as much use.
Next, and it’ll be a matter of sadness to some, the death of J.D. Salinger at the age of 91 has been announced. To me, and this’ll come as no surprise to those who know me, it’s news of only passing sadness. Ninety-one is a good age; shame he didn’t do more with it since Catcher. It’d have made little difference to literary history if that self-same iPhone-destroying hippopotamus had sat on him just after publication in 1951.
Finally, and I can’t bring myself to grant it more than a half-point in my list, I caught most of the US president’s State of the Union address. Sad. Nothing else to say about it. Just sad.
And so, on the day when Graham put the final coat of varnish on the living room floor–nothing should be allowed to look that shiny–and the fumes dissipate into the damp Welsh January air, I lift my head to look about me.
Ye gods and little fishes but what a mess we are making of our poor old world.
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Well now since I’m not even in to Kindle I guess I could care less what ipod does or doesn’t do. lol
The older I get, the more I seem to look the other way when it comes to more “new and improved” gadgets.
Sometimes, oftentimes, I crave quiet. Just wanting to go about my day, without all the keeping up,.
It’s so darn depressing listening to all the ways we’ve screwed things up in this day and age. I think I would be quite content living on top of a Welsh mountain, and just peering down.
Ho hum, I like my own little world, everybody knows me in here…..
Ah, John, but after the hippo sat on it, the screen was large enough for some of us to have a change of seeing it without fumbling for our glasses, or so I’m led to believe.
I suspect the iPad does what it does very well. My problem is that I don’t have much use for what it does.
Well, we’re good at making messes. I’m not sure if that should count.
Giggled at the Hitler video!!! Yep, Jobs’ crew could have done better, for sure. I agree on the speech; he’s a good talker, but there doesn’t seem to be much will in the U.S. to change the status quo. “The rich get richer…” Salinger made enough to be self-indulgent. Sad.
Yes, we are. And, after a day of fighting Vista, I too am taking a day off.