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loving the herd and hating its members
Monday, August 8 2005
setting: 5 miles south of Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia
I went driving around with my mother this afternoon because she was interested in buying a digital camera and copper soldering supplies, neither of which she knows how to use but which she would like me to teach her while I'm in town.
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To get to town I took Old Greenville Road, past "Spring Lakes," a horrendous Fairfax-style development of single family houses and a even townhouses in what had once been cow pasture. The development had languished for years for want of low interest rates. But now it has just the financial nutrients it needs to spread like an angry case of herpes. I decided to drive around through the development to see what it looks like. I have nothing much to report, since you've all seen these things before. I should mention, though, that many of the cheaper homes are entirely encased in vinyl siding, which absurdly marches even to the tops of the chimneys.
We ended up having to go to Walmart to buy a camera card reader when Staples didn't have the multi-reader I had in mind. I haven't been inside a Walmart in years and just the parking lot made me feel like I was drowning. Most of the cars parked there had goofy Support the Troops and God Bless America magnet stickers, as if by saying it often enough it somehow becomes true despite the reality. Cerebral thought in Redneckistan, such as it is, is all about retreating into symbols and letting them do the work normally given to reason. It's that way down to every detail. As religious as Shenandoah Valley residents claim to be, really all that their religion amounts to is the symbolic profession of membership, a mental ordeal best gotten through as quickly as possible to leave the mind sufficiently blank for the many forms of programming that can occur within today's modern ranch-style home.
Speaking of modern "homes," there's a fresh new tier of some sort of townhouse-style housing development further up the side of Mary Gray, proving yet again the prophetic wisdom of a letter to the editor I wrote in 1994.
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There are now three horses living on my parents' land. Two are relatively new additions to replace those who have died. There's also a single solitary goat who, owing to her white coloration, is named Snowflake. Horses and goats are herd animals, and, lacking a herd of her own species, Snowflake has come to consider herself a part of the horse herd. But goats and horses have very different habits, making Snowflake's position a difficult one. For starters (as my mother pointed out) horses and goats have completely different sleep schedules. Horses sleep two hours at a time, usually on their feet, whereas goats sleep at night for eight hours, much like humans. So in the morning it's not unusual for Snowflake to awaken from her preferred nest (under the crumbling ruins of the chicken house) to find her herd has disappeared. This sends her into a panic of baahing which, if the horses are feeling particularly charitable, is sometimes answered with a whinny.
The fact of the matter, though, is that everyone in the herd dislikes each and every other member. Being (obviously) the smallest, Snowflake suffers the most from this animosity. What's strange is the fact that despite their mutual hatred for one another as individuals, all of them seem to love "the herd." It's the opposite condition from that of, say, Gretchen, who hates "people" but loves individual human beings.
I stayed up late installing Service Pack 2 on the Windows machine in the Shaque. Because of some sort of idiocy, the first attempt ruined the existing operating system, forcing me to reinstall everything from scratch. It seems like it always ends up being this way whenever I altruistically attempt routine maintenance on my parents' computers. In the midst of all this, though, I was successful at setting up a wireless access point that can use the Shaque computer to dial out and connect to the internet using Microsoft's notoriously problematic "connection sharing" feature. I'd never managed to get connection sharing to work before, and part of what surprised me about it was that it was perfectly happy sharing the connection out to an iBook running Macintosh OSX via AirPort WiFi. Most of the convenience of WiFi has to do with the absence of wires, not the speed of the connection, and I was perfectly happy despite the slowness of dialup. (Wardrivers take note: the network's name is betstrom. It is named after a hen who lived from 1976 to 1981.)
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