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Thank you, may I have another
Saturday, January 12 2002
Ernie the upstairs neighbor is one of those neighbors who, upon receiving a favor, says "Thank you, may I have another." Today his favor was one I'd suggested back before I knew what sort of neighbor he was: plugging into my local network to get free high-speed access to the internet. This involved dangling a long ethernet cable down the back wall of the brownstone from the fourth to first floor and plugging into my hub. Gretchen asked if he'd been effusively thankful, as he should have been. "No, not really," I said.
In other news, the cats are getting used to wearing new collars bearing their names and phone numbers. Edna's neck was so small we had to punch a hole inside the triangular-shaped part of the four in EDNA 718-X2X-X4X1. Noah accepted his instantly, but Edna tried for a time to wriggle out of hers, somehow managing to get her lower jaw underneath it on at least two occasions.
I forgot to mention this back when I should have, but did you know that in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, all the public mailboxes have been removed? I'm talking here about unbolted from the sidewalk and a hauled off somewhere for storage, possibly to reappear again in some less troubling time.
While visiting her parents, Gretchen went to mail a letter and couldn't find a mailbox anywhere.
Evidently the anthrax scare is still going strong in Washington and people are terrified by the risk of anonymous mail. For them, it doesn't matter that all the tainted letters came from New Jersey, or that other places hit by anthrax (such as New York) still have their public mailboxes. This just goes to show what happens when people we pay to think globally start obsessing about the most local thing of all, themselves.
There's a new AOL commercial on the television and instead of gushing on and on about the latest version and how it's all there as never before: "easy to use," music, instant messenger, "You've got mail," and parental controls ("...and that's a good thing"), it suggests that we look on our desktop, that the AOL icon is probably already there and all we have to do is [double] click on it to open up a world of...
First they infect our computers with a virus, and then they spend money bragging about it! It's rare that I'm so directly presented with the opportunity to make a statement against a loathsome advertisement. I immediately got up and examined my computer to make sure there was no such icon, and I did the same with Gretchen's computer. When you see that ad, I urge you to do likewise (unless you actually use AOL; during the Summer of 1998 and Fall of 2000 circumstances forced me to). Then you can celebrate every time that commercial appears by smirking and saying to yourself, "Not on my computer, it isn't." Ah, what passes for joy in 2002.
At midnight I was walking Sally the Dog in the north end of Prospect Park's Long Meadow. From where I stood, I was surrounded by at least ten acres of prime Brooklyn real estate, yet I was the only person to be seen. At that moment perhaps no one else in the entire city was as isolated in space as I.
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