Calling Me Back

I start every morning by turning on the computer and checking email, reading the news, sometimes doing a little bit of research regarding something that came up while I was writing. Occasionally, I will rent a movie and watch it at night. But I’ve come to despise computers and the Internet. I’m convinced that staring at a computer is bad for me. I know that my vision is more shallow since I started using them (not eyesight, but vision). This morning I was giving myself a little talking-to about how I need to stop using the damn thing. Stop reading the news for starters. I don’t need to know the details of how ugly the world is getting. It’s never harmed me in the past to get away from the daily assault of news stories.  I wasn’t thinking “every now and then,”  ”a day or two,” or even a week. I was thinking months. I need months away from it to get healed.

Immediately after my little talking-to, and just prior to getting down to work on Street Song, I checked email. Only one came through, a blast from Tammy Baldwin, the new senator from Wisconsin, whose campaign I’d given money to. The subject line read “Hibernation=not an option.” I’m not sure I agree, but it was a pretty strong coincidence. Sometimes I steer by them; sometimes I don’t.

Nearing the end of the road

I have a habit of taking up a new interest and devoting myself to it so completely that I do little else—for years. I’ve done it with music, the Italian language, bicycles, the study of history. Invariably, I reach a point where I can’t go any farther with a particular study. I begin to feel that it isn’t essential to my life and so gradually I let go of it. I feel this happening with computers now. I started out with Windows around 1996, and switched to the Mac in around 2000. My first Mac had OS X, and I’ve upgraded to each new version as soon as it came out. Right now the Mac world is all excited about Lion, the new upgrade coming out in July. I’m not. I find that I don’t care at all. I doubt that I’ll bother with it. I’ve gotten deeply irritated with the belief that Apple is constantly pushing: that tech must be at the center of our lives. I would rather sit down and play my guitar than download a song from iTunes or stitch together a fake song from pre-recorded loops in Garage Band.

When I look out my window, I don’t see anybody. Everybody’s indoors. I keep thinking I should go outside, sit down, wait for some people to show up, and get into a conversation. Yesterday I went over the hill to the annual North Beach Street Fair where I sat down in a doorway and studied people as they walked by. After a while I realized that I was actually making some people nervous, which reminded me of the famous line from the Gregory Corso poem, “Power”:

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is Power

A-Bloggin’ and A-Rantin’

I’ve been somewhat hostile toward blogs and blogging. It has seemed faddish to me, I guess. I tend not to like made-up words, like blog and vegan. I’m doing this for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that I don’t hear many people saying what I want to hear said. So I have to say it myself. As I begin this, I don’t feel that I’ve found the right voice. I feel stiff. Although I’ve never been enthusiastic about the Internet, due to my work as a writer, I use it every day. I’m currently learning HTML and CSS, and I use Photoshop and Word. But I tend to believe that, overall, the Internet and computers have done more harm than good. More and more people are abandoning the real world and real community for a vicarious life of sitting in front of a monitor. How can that be good? I can’t imagine anyone writing poetry on a computer. One of my goals for the future is to be in a position where I have no computer and no telephone—just a regular old mailbox. I read an article in the New York Times about a writer in Maine, Carolyn Chute, who lives at the end of an unpaved road with no phone, no fax, and no computer. I admire her. Technological development is not the purpose of life. I don’t have a cell phone, and I never will. I think they’re intrusive, and nobody has ever convinced me that they aren’t a danger to your health. I wish they would go away.

End of rant.