…’s Eggs
I really want this weblog to be full of self-indulgent shit. In fact, dispense with names like “weblog” and “journal”. The Eponym shall be considered my personal canvas of puffery and pretension and every entry shall inspire in all persons the desire to heave. My foremost intention is to mock the traits of others from a comfortable distance while ignoring in myself those very traits. Artistic reasons drive this choice—and you shall understand, before continuing, that what you’re seeing is an artist plying his craft before an audience of thousands—and what shall be revealed at the end of this non-weblog’s life, probably in 2012 AD or thereafter, is nothing less than the very capsule containing our generation, which can then be swallowed and chased by a gulp of water, its nutrients dissipating and calming your extremities and hardening your resolve and making you snap out of your trance and start writing that book or inventing that profound gadget you always dreamed about. It’s already started, so let’s get underway.
First order of business: I got a Moleskine notebook when I was in an art museum in Oslo, Norway. It cost 85 Norwegian Kronors and I had my choice of several pocket-sized models. After examining them all I chose the graph-ruled one because then I could use it to do just about anything. Hell, watch me plot a pie chart of my monthly laundry bill in this bitch. Productivity, up; sexability, way up; commitment to big enterprise, DOWN. I put a sticker of a Norwegian flag on the cover, and slipped it into my pocket.
I wrote in the thing religiously throughout my trip. The fear driving my incessant scribbling was actually a deep distrust. Upon returning home, I knew I would drop the notebook in a drawer and hop back on the computer and never pry myself away. Writing as much as possible, nonsense, notes, addresses, whatever, was an attempt to stave off my maternal attraction to the glowing screen. The book fit comfortably in my pants pocket so long as I took out the other gewgaws: cellphone, keys, pile of mixed Scandinavian coinage. This arrangement worked well for a while. I wrote about the King of Oslo on one page, and about a book I was reading on another. Between the blank spaces I put addresses and random words. All in all, I filled proabably fifty pages of the book over the next two weeks. I even scribbled down the basic form of an inspirational shirt we saw on a Chinese tourist, a lady of about forty, outside the Viking Ship Museum. The shirt was in broken English and said the following (everything here is [sic]):
RESULTS
However difficult it may be/it is, FINISH THE TASK
_Put all … ‘s eggs
in one basket_BE COMING UP ROSES
meet withsuccess
meet withsuccess
GET THE SHOW ON THE ROAD
Yes, that’s “… ‘s” used as a word. Below this I sketched a mountain, which I called Meetwithsuccess Mountain, and a rose growing from its side. Be coming up roses, you know. Kevin and I looked this drawing over all day, because I know I missed a few lines from the shirt—the lady was moving quickly in trying to control her pack of bewildered tourists—but thought hit me that the preshrunk hipster T-shirt business over here has a long way to go before it is capable of the inspiro-Dadaist sublimity of a shirt like this. Pop-junkies like us could not invent “meet withsuccess” in a million years. We’re still at “Atari’s really cool and bleep bleep blip” and “My [thing] is [thingier] than your [thing]” across a set of pert e-commerce breasts. This is thinking small. Let’s try harder, T-shirt people…wait for it…no matter how difficult it may be/it is!
The Moleskine became my plan. I would write unceasingly in it whenever I was away from a computer. Unfortunately, the plan dissolved when I realized I was never away from a computer except when I’m walking home, or cavorting around the town. So now, I’m weblogging again, or should I say, not-weblogging. I’m Moleskining, in digital format, and indulging myself wonderfully, I might add.
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(4 comments)
hey nick, i’m newish to blogging (been at it since, ah, december 8-missed my own 1 month party, shit) and tickled when someone links to me, especially someone I don’t know. well, I had a girlfriend when I was 16 who went away to ashbury and promptly dumped me (I was crushed for over a year…got over it by falling for a girl with the same given name; she’s–the girl who dumped me–now a lesbian, by the way)…where was i? yeah, i’ll put you in the “blogroll.” cheers.
Falling for an Ashbury girl is always a bad idea, Hugh. Anyway your blog is interesting and talks about things dear to my heart, like RMS. That man cracks me up. I saw a talk he gave at Waterloo where he ended by singing a song about Emacs while wearing a priestly robe and wearing an ancient hard drive platter on his head. A guru indeed.
i actually had the “pleasure” of meeting rms once, he was giving a speech at UQAM, then going to present in the enviro department on patents, a talk organized by a friend of mine who does research into the nefarious dealings of the biotech industry; somehow I was roped into guiding him the 3 blocks to the other building. we had a somewhat bizarre conversation about nothing in particular. when we got to the new building I had to equire how to find room ZQ56HHg6 (or something) and when I came back, a minute later, rms was sitting on the floor by the stairs with his laptop open, presumeably coding printer drivers. he gave his speech on “brevets” in french. he told me i should try to install gnu/linux on a computer I didn’t use much so I wouldn’t fuck everything up. I thought having a mac was enough of a fuck-you to the Man, but rms didn’t seem to agree.
RMS always struck me as a guy that just really thought computers and programming and hacking should remain the province of hobbyists and enthusiasts. I haven’t got a problem with that, though he is a bit dogmatic about what software ought and ought not to be. He also struck me as profoundly sweaty, and in need of a trim. I certainly like the guy more than his ol’ buddy ESR.