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didn't just make my skin crawl
Friday, June 27 2003
Early this afternoon I had to rescue a twenty-inch long Garter Snake from Edna the Killer Cat. She was still trying to figure out what to do with it when I came along and scooped her up, allowing it to slither away and hide. Back when I was a kid growing up on the farm, cats were terrified of snakes - even small ones. And they weren't just afraid of live snakes, they were also afraid of their shed skins and things like garden hoses that resemble snakes. Edna, on the other hand, is utterly fearless. This probably reflects generations of successful employment at various Brooklyn bodegas.
Later I was driving down US 209 from Hurley to the Hudson Valley Mall to shop for laptop memory when I saw a smallish Painted Turtle attempting to cross the road. Traffic was heavy and it would have been suicide. So pulled over, backed up to the little guy, and kind of stuck the rear of the car into the road so cars would swerve out around me and give the turtle more room. By the time I caught up with the him, he'd thought better of venturing into the whooshing traffic and had turned around to head back into the bushes from whence he'd come. I figured it was best to escort him across, so I picked him up. He briefly ducked into his shell and became a flattened stone, but then he said fuck it and re-emerged to begin thrashing around with is sharp-clawed feet. When that didn't work, he kicked it up a notch and released a torrent of odorless bright yellow urine mixed with a trace of creamy-colored feces. This is what happens when you look out for the things that creepeth and slithereth in God's creation.
The Matrix is an excellent metaphor when you're feeling superior to (or perhaps bothered by) the robotic doings of ignorant, commercially-manipulated strangers in whose midst you find yourself elegantly (you think) walking. This was the case for me today at the Hudson Valley Mall. I was in Best Buy trying to find memory for Mary Purdy's laptop, so I went to the computer expert counter and began talking memory with the computer expert. I didn't know whether what I was seeking was EDO memory or whatever it is EDO replaced. Memory boards cry out to be misplaced, misattributed and lost - that's integral to the memory manufacturer business model. They never bother to tell you what sort of memory they are in any of the text printed on them - all you have to work with is whether or not the card-edge geometry is compatible with your particular machine, and then you have to boot it up and see what you get. So when the computer expert asked if the memory I sought was EDO I just said "sure." Then, when he claimed not to have what I was seeking, I asked to look at the memory boards myself. I could just tell from the look on his face that I was violating the relationship we'd just established between one other. In this relationship he was the expert and I was the know-nothing commercially-manipulated yahoo. By asking to see the board, I was questioning his role as fountain of wisdom and hacking, if you will, my way directly to the information I was seeking. This look was just momentary and the rules of this particular part of the Matrix did actually allow for rare instances of my sort. He allowed me to look at the memory. The card edge geometry was perfect, but the board geometry was too large for the space available.
My second instance of hacking through the artifice of the Matrix came in the Mall's CVS drug store when I stopped in to see what Hannaford's competition had to offer in terms of recreational dextromethorphan and pseudoephedrine. The labels on all their cold remedies are strictly inside-the-Matrix. Generic or name-brand, the only clue to their ingredients is words like "Severe Allergy", "Cough and Cold," "Nighttime," or "Flu." Most of the namebrands are made-up words designed to imply restorative powers. But all of them are basically just different mixes of four or five active ingredients: pseudoephedrine, guaifanessin, dextromethorphan, dextromethorphan, and (rarely) one allergy medication that begins with a "c." As I pored over these products, picking up one after the other to look at the tiny print detailing what exactly they are, I realized I was again hacking through (in a way that few other do) commercial bullshit to get to the underlying reality.
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