I heard back from the volunteer agency I wrote to on Day 20. Turns out they've shut their operation down for a few months due to "staff changes," whatever that means. They'll put me on the list and get back to me once they're up and running again. Doesn't bother me. This gives the weather time to get nicer.
Wipe that look off your faces, maggots. "Yes, I love winter, but I am not willing to take wounds for it, as I am for summer." John Holmes (slightly paraphrased).
Anyway, on to Day 23. Manual skills are something I am severely deficient in. I was always the type of boy who drew or scribbled instead of building things (with the exception of Lego sets, of course). I'm rubbish with cars. I've helped my pop replace oil, brakes, shocks, and even entire engines, but left to my own devices the most I can do is change tires and check fluid levels. And I know zilch about carpentry, metalwork, wiring, plastering, bricklaying, tiling, or anything else construction entails. I can disassemble and clean guns and paint eaves like the dickens, and that's about it. I'm a whiz with jigsaw puzzles, but that's of little practical value.
So I set out to rectify these shortcomings. I chose to familiarize myself with basic home wiring. I've never so much as touched a length of copper wire in my life. I hovered in the background while our one-armed electrician upgraded our electrical system in California (with his assistant giving him a hand). Even in my twenties, I have a tendency to view electricity as some kind of benevolent spirit that inhabits the walls and breathes life into table lamps and computer screens.
I sat down and went through the entire course on doityourself.com. It was full of helpful hints, useful tips and even a little glossary of terms. Some of it I was already marginally familiar with—you have to know what amperes, circuits, and circuit breakers are if you fly airplanes—but some of it was almost incomprehensible. (Roughing in? Knock out a tab? Pigtail the hot wires together?) I had to pause frequently to look up things like junction boxes and fuses, just to make sure I knew how they worked.
Regardless, I like to think that I know my home electrical system a little better now (even if the voltage levels are different in Korea). I know what the colors of the wires mean, at any rate. When I'm back in the States and my wife and three kids run to me and ask me to install a light switch or a ceiling fan, I feel as though I'll be able to do it (with judicious help from that website). I might even get brave and install track lighting along the driveway at some point. I feel like a better man already.
You deserve a full update, and you'll get it, but it's just past 7:30 a.m. and I'm still soaking wet from my shower and I have to be out the door by 8:00 or the subways become too crowded to deal with and I'll be late for class. So here you go, bullet time once again:
We got the third snow of the year yesterday, a heavy, wet, sopping sort of snow that fell awkwardly out of the sky and went splat on the ground. The weird thing was that it rained first and then started snowing—accompanied by thunder. "Thundersnow" I thought to myself as I put on my old boots and traipsed out into that soggy mess to get my computer fixed.
Yes, that's the second thing: my computer. The hard drive went belly up last Sunday night. I was just clicking around, minding my own business, adding a few thousand more words to my 35,000-word NaNoWriMo project, when BAM—shutdown. Blue Screen of Death. Fatal error. Crash dump. Restart. Lockup. Force shutdown. No bootable disk. Sigh. I took it to the only Toshiba service center I could find on Google Maps, located in the Gangnam Finance Center building near Yeoksam Station. Once again I felt the unique and exquisitely painful sense of guilt I always get when I'm soliciting some service in Korea without being able to speak Korean. In pidgin (and heartbreakingly apologetic) English, the man behind the counter told me that my hard drive was bad, that he would salvage as much data as he could, replace my hard drive with a new one (albeit a Korean one with an English language pack) and put Humpty-Dumpty all back together again...for 121,000 won. I didn't mind. I was willing to pay any price, as a lot of my notes and pictures—and Novel #4—are completely unsaved and non-backed-up. I guess I got away cheap. I might have lost everything.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Miss H and I are doing our usual thing: throwing a bunch of Thanksgiving-y ingredients into the Crock Pot and turning 'er on. We'll spend the evening nibbling on a delicious amalgam of Thanksgiving dinner, listening to music, sipping Russian champagne and plugging away at our newest jigsaw puzzle.
Good Lord, how did finals come so quickly? I was just coasting along, riding my way through a leisurely November with the students, doing various writing projects, quizzes, and fun activities. Now, suddenly, there's barely two weeks left until finals. Five class-days left, and one of them will be taken up by a standardized writing assessment and the other will need to be set aside for review. YIPE!!
The day after Thanksgiving, the boys (Messrs. JA and BP) are coming over to brew up some more beer. This is the first time we've ever done it at my apartment. I have all the equipment freshly bought and laid by, and am rather excited now that this SNAFU with my computer has been resolved. I'm just going to be running around like a chicken with my head cut off on Friday afternoon after class, picking up my coat from the tailor's (frayed cuffs repaired), my laptop from Gangnam, and a few last-minute supplies from the E-Mart in Cheonho, across the river.
On Saturday, Miss B, our army doctor friend stationed up in Dongducheon, is coming down for a visit. Oh, and that's also the day that Miss H and I are heading over to Incheon to have our other Thanksgiving dinner at the Fog City Diner. I hope we can fit Miss B in there somewhere. It's hard for her to get weekend passes.
And then the weekend after all this, Miss H and I are heading down south to Busan on the KTX (for the first time since spring) to see the gang and have an early Christmas party. Eek.
And I still haven't resolved my V.D.Q., either. No reservations made yet and no concrete decisions in the offing. Argh!
How'd this happen? Everything was going so calmly for a while, and then BOOM. Chaos! Help! SOS! Mayday! Make it stop! I wanna get off!
It's been three weeks to the day since I went dark. "Dark" is something of a misnomer; I haven't quit the Internet entirely. Facebook accounted for, at best, 10-15% of my total time surfing the web. It's fair to say, however, that it was the main reason for my being on the web in the first place, if you know what I mean.
Some of my friends have only just discovered that I'm gone. I've received text messages and e-mails asking me what's up and when I might be coming back. I have no definite answer to give, because honestly, I'm not sure myself.
The answer is "When I'm ready."
But why did I quit in the first place? I've been wrestling with this question for nigh on a week. As of this morning, I was still at a loss.
Then, this afternoon, I went down to the Han River to read. I took a folding chair, my new Stanwell pipe, a plentiful supply of tobacco and matches, a bottle of Jim Beam and a copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The air was crisp. The sun was sinking behind feathery clouds. The trees were dripping with reds and yellows. The river was iron-grey and lay at rest like a freshly-tempered sword. I unfolded the chair, lit up my pipe, filled a glass with bourbon, opened the book, and read the final four chapters in one go.
Upon finishing, I felt that I'd reached new levels of clarity in my search for answers.
Civilization.
That's the problem.
Civilization.
I've been staring the matter in the face this whole time and never recognized it. The problem of civilization is a central theme in Brave New World, just as it is in my own novel series (the third installment of which I'm writing for NaNoWriMo).
What do I mean by "the problem of civilization"? Bread and circuses. Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe (and the closest thing to a villain that Brave New World has) explains it thus: you can't have a civilization full of intelligent, independent people, or it will dissolve into chaos. There'll be differences of opinion, boredom, ennui, insanity, or outright war. Hence the system of control which is so thoroughly explained in the beginning of the novel: the intelligence, physical beauty, and usefulness (or lack thereof) of any particular human being is determined at the embryonic stage, and a series of clinical processes are enacted to ensure that the resultant human being is molded and shaped to be a cog in the machinery of civilization. Menial tasks are performed by big, dumb, ugly people who've been chemically and genetically altered in their test tubes and then conditioned in childhood to accept their lot and perform their tasks with joy. Administrative duties are performed by handsomer, prettier, smarter, and wiser human beings, whose development and conditioning were likewise controlled from the get-go. To counter any malaise or dissatisfaction, humans are encouraged to imbibe soma, an ecstasy-inducing drug; have as many dalliances as they like, with no strings attached; watch "feelies," tactile versions of movies; and play ridiculous sports like Obstacle Golf. With their minds mired in pointless pursuits and carnal pleasures, and their days filled with the drudgery they've been preconditioned to enjoy, human beings have no need to ever worry about things like war or civil strife. Anyone who shows "subversive" or "devious" preferences for solitude, monogamy, or sobriety is sent to an island, severed from the main population to preserve the public's general state of contentment. Only in remote places such as Western America, on the so-called "Savage Reservations" (vast tracts of land surrounded by electrified fences) is humanity's inherent barbarity allowed to continue: religion, viviparous birth, marriage, love, and natural aging.
Fascinating book. You should read it. Mightily depressing, though.
Why? Because it's coming true. I look around now and I see the same thing that John the Savage sees when he leaves his Reservation and comes to London: thanks to drugs like the Internet, amusing diversions like video games and smartphones, and Facebook—that saccharine filter of friendship and raw experience—we have a civilization more blinded to the ebb and flow of reality than ever before. I see people more concerned with emoticons, abbreviations, Bubble Crush, Angry Birds, KakaoTalk, YouTube, Twitter, news feeds, discussion forums, and torrent downloads than they are with a lavender autumn sky.
That's the way I saw myself heading. And I didn't like it.
When I originally quit Facebook, I told myself I was doing it because my right hand was moving of its own accord—creeping, crawling toward that Facebook tab, clicking on the bookmark unbidden. I also felt that my brain's natural tendency towards autodidactism had been superseded by a base craving for input: information of any stamp, no matter how sordid or simplistic. I perceived that I was logging onto Facebook every morning for two vile reasons, and those reasons alone:
(1) to peer at the winnowed grains of my friends' (and coworkers', and distant acquaintances', and too-distant relatives') lives and assess them subjectively; and (2) to make myself angry. I'd foolishly become involved with ("liked") a slew of conservative political Facebook groups, and my news feed teemed with their inflammatory rhetoric on a daily basis.
I was fed up. I felt like Facebook wasn't much good for communicating with or keeping track of loved ones anymore; now it was just a place for my friends to post insufferable political views, hackneyed jokes, fatuous memes, mushy musings on pets or spouses or babies, and pictures of cats. I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything to Facebook anymore; I realized that I was reposting quotations and news stories basically in order to annoy my liberal friends. I had degraded. I was no longer an intellectual, upstanding member of the online community. I was little more than a troll. Enough was enough. When I woke up and saw that Facebook was making me miserable, that my hand would relentlessly click on the link and prevent me from accomplishing anything worthwhile, and that I was spending nearly six hours of my day—all of my free time—just staring at screens, it became clear that I was a full-blown Facebook addict.
I didn't feel like I was really living.
You'll notice that "living" is one of the tags I use for posts. You'll find it in the tag cloud over on the right side of this blog's webpage. (Even using the term "tag cloud" makes me want to puke.) I did that intentionally. I want to highlight the posts that are actually about Life, life with a capital L, not life through a fiber-optic cable. I want to keep track of how much living I'm doing. I want to feel like the two hundred hours Steam so thoughtfully tells me I've spent playing RAGE have been counterbalanced by at least a thousand hours of pure-D experience.
Facebook wasn't letting me do that, and I knew it. I've known it from the beginning. I mentioned something in my original post about wanting to accomplish more during the hiatus, such as touring Gyeonggi-do, riding trains, visiting Hwaseong Fortress, exploring Ganghwa Island and so forth.
I don't know why I got so wrapped up in Facebook and the Internet at large. I can't explain why it's so easy for the human brain to fall prey to instant communication, electronic entertainment, and easy access to moving and static images. But that's what happened to me. Maybe it's a byproduct of civilization. We're social animals, and we've been conditioned to be even more social by our millennia-long habit of living in cities. We want to feel connected. Perhaps it also has something to do with the way our brains our wired. After an eternity of playing with things like marbles and Jacob's ladders, video games and streaming video are a quantum leap forward. (Whatever the reason, the effects are insidious.)
I just want to feel alive. I believe that civilization, and with it technology and all its insidious tendrils, is sapping the genuineness and joie de vivre from the existential equation. I was on Facebook for the sake of keeping my brain entertained during its downtime, like a kid with a Game Boy in a waiting room. And I wasn't even using my time on Facebook in a constructive way (as far as it's possible to use one's time on Facebook in a constructive way, anyway): I was just trolling. If it wasn't Facebook, it was something else: editing pages on TV Tropes, looking up trivia on the Internet Movie Database, watching Grand Theft Auto V videos on YouTube, researching firearms on Wikipedia, even browsing news sites with the same ulcerating anger with which I once patrolled my Facebook feed. Technology, man. The Internet. It's eating my life. I'm 13,000 words into my NaNoWriMo project, and I can ill afford to be wasting time wholesale—now or ever.
So I quit Facebook. And I might just quit the Internet, too, at least until November's over. We'll have to see. Something's gotta give. Civilization's making me sick, especially now that I've finished Brave New World. I read about soma, and feelies, and sex-hormone chewing gum, and Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy and Assistant Predestinators and bottles and television and I thought, Man.
No way. Not for me.
As the Savage defiantly tells Mustapha Mond, "I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want goodness. I want sin."
Living, in other words. Not virtual reality.
If you agree with me, then get off my blog and go eat an apple in the autumn air. You'll thank me later.
I hope you've liquored yourself up properly before clicking your way over here. This here post is yet another vitriolic op-ed. If the word 'philippic' in the title wasn't enough to scare you off, heed this final warning, go back to your pay-per-view and microwave some lasagna.
I like to think of myself as a principled man. I'll grant you that some of my principles probably aren't all that productive, or even healthy. I go out of my way to step on those extra-crunchy leaves, I write people parking citations whenever they miss the bloody white lines, and I try never to pay for my own drinks.
Diseased as my principles are, however, I stick by them. To betray them is to betray the very essence of my being.
Well, the very essence of my being is feeling a bit betrayed right now.
I read somewhere once that the philosopher Plato despised the invention of paper, alphabets, and written language. If he'd had his way, nobody would ever so much as scribble "bagels and cream cheese" on a Post-It note and tack it to the fridge.
Why?
Writing degrades the memory, he said. If people could just write stuff down, nobody would ever have to remember anything, would they? They'd just let their bloody memories go to pot.
Plato practiced what he preached. He never touched paper. The man routinely memorized verbal treatises on rhetoric (thousands of words long). He remembered the trial of his mentor Socrates verbatim, and in so doing single-handedly set the principle of stenography back by a millennium.
(If Plato were alive today, I wonder what he'd think of things like datebooks, and gingko biloba, and all those memory puzzles on the supermarket racks. Apoplexy anyone?)
I'm kind of the same way. Technology bugs me. By nature of its omniscience and accessibility, technology, as a medium, degrades the quality and uniqueness of the works it so greedily subsumes and regurgitates.
Case in point...
MUSIC
People don't enjoy music anymore; they saturate themselves with it.
My grandfather had a tradition. One night every week he'd shut himself in his den, put a record on, and listen to it, beginning to end, without interruption. My cousins and I could hear him in there, whistling along with Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins. I could almost picture him sitting in his armchair, replete with sweater, penny loafers and black socks, tapping a toe in time to the beat, his eyes closed in concentration like a marquis at the opera.
Nowadays, sitting on the subway, I find it difficult to find anyone under 30 who doesn't have a pair of earphones stuck to their head.
People listen to music everywhere: at work, at the gym, at home, in their cars, on airplanes, even when they go out on an introspective walk in the country.
I'd love to know how you're supposed to commune with nature when Rage Against the Machine is raping your eardrums.
(I don't exempt myself from these habits; read on and you will see how I, likewise, have become a member of the digital generation. Hell, you're reading this very post on the screen of a computer or a smartphone, right?)
I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy music. I'm not even saying that there's a wrong way to do it. It just irks me that, thanks to technology, music has shifted from being an occasional, introspective, evocative, enlightening treat...and has become business as usual. Nothing special. Small potatoes. Et cetera, et cetera.
People used to look forward to live concerts for months, hoarding tickets like fragments of the Covenant. What with live-streaming video and camera phones and fiber-optics and Wi-Fi, they can push a button and tune into to U2 (Live at the Rose Bowl) from anywhere on the planet.
Whereas folks used to have a collection of ten or so prized vinyl LP records (you may want to Google the terms "record," "LP," and "vinyl"), nowadays they'll have something like tengigabytes of music. That's hundreds and sometimes thousands of songs, any one of them accessible in an instant. You don't need to put a needle into a groove anymore; just hit a button and spin the wheel.
You could almost argue that people have too much music. People (me included) find themselves slewing wildly through their music collections, skipping song after song until they find one they haven't heard 30,000 times over. Sometimes there's too much even to fit on a single device, and said music magnate must either retain multiple MP3 players or simply rotate their library out every six months or so. (I'm talking to you, Miss H.)
Think of the way it used to be, people. If you wanted music, you had to wait for a band of strolling players to waltz through your village—or make the music yourself. It's everywhere now, all at once, in your face and as loud as possible.
I'm not exempt. I (occasionally) have my ear-buds on when I go out on walks, and my headphones are almost always glued to my cranium when I'm working on my computer. (I'm a little obsessed with LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," okay? Sue me.) But I can still appreciate the specialty of a particular group, artist, song, or album. I still buy most of my music on CDs, so, when the mood takes me, I can pop one into my stereo set, crank it up, and enjoy an entire evening listening to only one band. Crazy, huh?
When you mass-market anything and make it available at the push of a button, it loses its specialness, its rarity, its unique nature. It's not a treat anymore. It's more like...coffee. Or gasoline. Or Pop-Tarts. Just another consumable resource to help get you through your day.
Technology cheapens art. That's the crux of my argument.
LITERATURE
My biggest beef with the techno-revolution. It's screwing with my beloved books.
(Yes, this is a pathetic argument, meaning that it stems from an appeal to human emotion, rather than a logical argument appealing to rationality and common sense. Bite me.)
The Kindle® is the bane of my existence. I know it's the wave of the future. I know e-book readers will replace printed works in a deplorably short time. I'll even acknowledge that they're a helluva lot more convenient for carrying around your reading material. But I don't like 'em. They can't replace a lovely, dog-eared, care-worn paperback with yellowing pages, coffee stains on the title page, a broken back from all those times you propped it up on its spine instead of using a bookmark, and which smells so deliciously of the wooden cases, gritty carpet, dusty counters, and sagging shelves of every used bookstore you've ever ventured into.
Sure, the Kindle® and its ilk may do wonders for literacy. Most e-books are only about $2-$3, I hear. And my Kindle®-owning friends tell me that they can get most of the classics for free. That's all right by me. If a device brings the best literature in the world before the eyes of the proletariat, I'm all for it. Free books for the people, I say. But I dislike the idea of the e-book reader. The primal feeling and sensual joy of reading is no more. You can't smell the binding, feel the rough edges of the paper, read the author's signature on the inside cover. You can't hold the work in your hands and wonder how many other people before you have done the same thing. You can't ostentatiously flash the cover at passersby when you want the world to know that you're an intelligent and well-read human being for reading The Brothers Karamazov. Nor can you hold a Kindle®up in front of your face when you're sitting on the train next to somebody you really don't want to talk to. And worst of all, at the end of the day, you can't walk into your private library, sit down in a comfortable chair, and cast your eye over the familiar spines of your favorite books crowding the mahogany shelves.
Oh yeah, and books don't need batteries.
That is all. AVIATION
Technology is pervasive stuff, ain't it?
I feel the need to say a little something about airplanes. Aviation has customarily been on the forefront of the techno-tsunami. That's both good and bad, as it turns out.
I had the opportunity to fly a Cirrus SR20 recently.
What's a Cirrus SR20, you ask?
Cirrus Aircraft is a Duluth-based company which prides itself on its line of advanced, user-friendly, safety-focused aircraft. Right now that line consists of two airplanes, with a third in the works: the SR20, the SR22, and the SF50. The SR20 is the basic model; the SR22 is the same airframe with a better engine; and the SF50 "Vision" is a sleek-looking VLJ, or Very Light Jet, projected to hit the market in 2012.
The circumstances which allowed me to pilot a $750,000 airplane are not important. Suffice it to say, however, that though I found the SR20 pleasantly simple to fly, I did not approve of it. The thing is soaked, sopping, steeped in technology.
You remember how I said that Cirrus prides itself on designing safe, user-friendly aircraft?
Yeah, well, they do that by analyzing accident reports, determining what most commonly causes malfunctions, and then designing aircraft that even a knee-biting dumbass could fly.
To give you an example, Cirrus's experts decided that, no matter how safe or intelligent a pilot could be, he might still forget to put the landing gear down sometimes. So they made the SR20's landing gear fixed instead of retractable.
I don't like that. I don't like it when a company assumes I'm going to do something stupid. I don't like it when they try to think for me. I don't like it when they decide that I can't be trusted with retractable landing gear and give me fixed gear just to be on the safe side.
Tish and blather. Fiddlesticks, I say.
Cirrus airplanes have a boatload of built-in fail-safes and recovery devices which are ostensibly intended to help a pilot prevent and/or recover from a dangerous situation. The most notable of these is the SR20's built-in parachute. That's right. The airplane has its own parachute. It's controlled by a red handle on the ceiling of the cockpit, over the pilot's seat. Yank that handle and a solid-fuel rocket blasts out of the airplane's roof, just behind the rear window. Straps unfurl all along the airplane's sides, the canopy deploys, and the airplane floats gently to earth at 15 mph. The aforementioned landing gear is designed to collapse in just such a way as to cushion the impact and protect the fuselage (and its passengers) from damage.
That's not all. The Cirrus SR20 has a blue "LEVEL" button in the cockpit which, when pushed, automatically returns the plane to straight-and-level flight. Let's say you're flying in IFR conditions (when you can't see outside the airplane, and are using your instruments to fly), and you get spatially disoriented. Or let's say you were flying on a clear day and you had to dodge a bird. The plane starts to go out of whack. Push that blue button and the plane quiets down, straightens up, and levels out. Bang, there you are, flying along just as if nothing ever happened.
The SR20 has built-in sensors which know when the plane is about to stall. (Remember, a stall happens when the air is hitting the wing at too severe an angle to generate lift. The plane basically stops flying and begins to fall out of the sky. In the hands of an inexperienced pilot, a bad stall can lead to a spin, rapid descent, and a big smoky hole in the ground.) These sensors simultaneously alert the pilot of a stall and tell the plane to fix it. The plane levels itself back out and recovers from the stall automatically.
The Cirrus company was also the first aircraft manufacturer to put something called a "hypoxia awareness system" into their airplanes. This is a sensor that monitors the pilot's control of the airplane above 12,500 feet. Above that altitude, without supplemental oxygen, the human body won't be able to take in enough O2 to sustain consciousness. I've experienced this effect myself. There's lightheadedness, headache, decreased awareness, euphoria...and the blackout comes pretty soon after. So, if a Cirrus pilot flies up that high, and his oxygen system malfunctions, and he faints, and he doesn't touch the airplane controls for two minutes...then a computerized voice will ask him very loudly "Are you awake? Are you aware?"
Receiving no answer (or control inputs) the computer is then programmed to automatically take the airplane down below 12,500 feet, all the time asking "Are you awake? Are you aware?" until it gets a response.
Seems cool, right?
No. It isn't.
Look back through those last few paragraphs and you'll notice something. I used the word "automatically" way too much.
My question is this: if you're such a raging dullard that you're up above 12,500 feet with no oxygen, or flinging the airplane all over the sky trying to dodge birds, or letting yourself get stalled out, then what business do you have flying an airplane in the first place?
Okay, sure, this technology saves lives. I read somewhere that the Cirrus parachute system has saved 121 people from almost certain death. The hypoxia awareness thing sounds like it could come in handy. But look, you should be able to do all this for yourself. This technology makes it too easy for you. A pilot could get spoiled, and his skills dulled, flying in a Cirrus. And when the real emergency comes along, when the electrical system fails and he loses all that technological whizbang, how is he going to know how to handle the situation?
Cirrus is barking up the wrong tree. If anything they should be trying to find out how to make people safer, not airplanes. Last I heard, the NTSB had concluded that eighty percent of all airplane crashes, accidents, and mishaps are caused by human error. There's no way to design human stupidity out of an airframe. Cirrus won't be able to accomplish that no matter how hard they try. But they're still trying. And what they're coming up with might ultimately cause more problems than it solves.
Do you see where I'm coming from? Technology is convenient, yes, but there are things far more preferable than convenience. Skill. Talent. Romance. Sensuousness. Appreciation. Peculiarity. All the qualities which make music a treat, books a joy, and airplanes a challenge are being ingested and diluted by the unstoppable march of technological progress. I find this deplorable.
Technology has its uses. Moreover, it is a paean to the scope of innovation and the indomitable human spirit.
But does it have to take my precious books away from me?
Couldn't some of us, withal, remain happy in the Stone Age?
And now, just to prove how inescapable the thing truly is, and how immersed I myself am in it, despite all appearances to the Neo-Luddite contrary, I leave you with a song. A song synthesized with electronic instruments, mixed with digital recording equipment, distributed via laser and fiber-optic cable and data port, brought to you by a video download from a website on the Internet, appearing to you on your computer or smartphone with its LCD screens and high-fidelity sound reproduction, and packaged for you by an online personal blogging tool.
...through which the author has chosen to disseminate his anti-technology rants.
Go figure.
Even the singers are wearing those damn ear-buds...
Tuesday and Wednesday we didn't fly at all. We were weather-canceled. The spring winds which blow so fiercely in the Mojave at this time of year kicked up in force. The powers-that-be don't like the UAV to fly in high winds; it makes landing kind of tricky. Any less chance that the $3,000,000 piece of equipment will get bent is taken up. I stayed home, but Spud, my second boss, still flew. That governor on the Mooney "Sierra Hotel" was still acting up. Pete, Spud and a few others worked on it for two days and got it fixed at last.
On Thursday, the winds were calm. Spud and I met at the hangar at 7:00, had some of Anna's excellent coffee, rolled Sierra Hotel out of the hangar, cranked up and took off. Spud is solid. He's tall and extremely lanky, with a Roman nose, big honest eyes, and a ready grin. He'll never hesitate to tell you a story or explain an obscure aerodynamic principle. He lets me fly quite a bit, too, whenever there's a quiet moment in the air.
There was a bit of an incident on Thursday, though. It felt oddly breezy in the cockpit as we climbed out of Apple Valley and headed west to Victorville. Neither of us could figure out why. Then I looked up. I saw blue sky peering at me through a crack over my head. The door was open. I hadn't closed it properly. I'd fastened the bottom latch, but the top latch, directly above my head, was loose. And now the 100 mile-an-hour slipstream was blowing the door ajar. Neither of us panicked, nor even lost our cool, but I tell you what—unexpectedly seeing blue sky from inside the airplane is somewhat disconcerting. Fortunately, the UAV wasn't ready to take off yet, and we had a few minutes to spare.
We tried various things. Spud slowed us down to an absurdly low speed to reduce the tearing force of the slipstream. No good. Even with that, I still couldn't pull the door to. Spud called up the tower and asked if we could do a touch-and-go. We were cleared, and while on the deck, Spud reached over and helped me latch the door. We had to throw in a fancy handle-jiggle to get the job done. We took off again, just as the UAV called up and said they were ready to go.
Lesson learned: next time, look up and make sure the door's latched. I didn't feel too bad about it. Spud was gracious and passed it off. I hadn't delayed the United States government in the testing of its new über-advanced reconnaisance and weapons platform, either. Whew...
And then, there was a bit of technical difficulty. We escorted the UAV out to the test site, but the controllers at Victorville couldn't seem to hand the darn thing off. Control couldn't be transferred to the training base. After 30 fruitless minutes, they gave up. Spud and I escorted the UAV back to Victorville. We tried again at noon. This time, everything went off as planned.
The mission went perfectly. We escorted 'er out; came back to Apple Valley; got some errands done, like returning Spud's rental car (a Prius...ha!); and then drove back to the airport and did some paperwork. I polished up a long article about mountain-climbing in Korea, and sent it off for publication. I also worked on my entry for the "Drunk At First Sight" Blogfest. (It's not too late to sign up for that, folks! Join the fun! Write up some romantic, comedic fiction involving St. Patty's Day, alcohol, or Ireland! Come the 17th, stroll around to everyone else's blogs and enjoy the read! Sign on today!)
Then Spud and I flew the afternoon mission. He let me fly out and fly back in. The thing that sticks in my mind about those two flights is just how beautiful the flying was. The weather was divine, and clear as a bell. You could see for miles. There wasn't a breath of wind, which almost made up for two days of tree-bending gales. We just sort of cruised along, behind and below the UAV, close enough to read some of the serial numbers on the tail, a vast sea of blue sky above us, a continent of sand and dust below. The snowy San Bernardinos glimmered in the distance through the thin blue haze. Rogers Dry Lake shimmered with a mirage the size of a battlefield. The Sierra Nevadas reared their hoary heads on the horizon. Our perspective was unlimited. We were masters of the world, and all that lay in it. Flying is joy, and as Melba Colgrove said, joy is the feeling of grinning inside. The neat thing about working with an instructor who also happens to be a retired Navy fighter pilot is: you get to hear the most incredible stories. And all sorts of exciting military jargon is thrown in with your lessons, too. We sat up there on Friday afternoon, six thousand feet over the ground, the panorama of the desert spread out beneath us under the fiery western sun, the ground controllers updating us regularly on the position of the incoming UAV. A bubble of excitement bounced irrepressibly around my chest. There's a strange sort of deliciousness to waiting. Waiting for somebody's vehicle—even just the vehicle itself—is one of the sweetest kinds of anticipation. It doesn't matter what manner of conveyance it is: a train, a plane, a car coming around the bend. Whenever I'm waiting at the station for a bus or a train, excitement simmers in the pit of my stomach. Every time I see a film where people stand around and wait for something (or somebody), I am bodily thrilled. The opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time...and I don't even like the movie all that much.
Things were no different as we slowly orbited the rendezvous point that Friday afternoon. Oh boy...where's he going to appear, and who's going to spot him first?And, as we waited, Spud taught me how to intercept. That's right, an old fighter pilot taught me how to intercept another airplane. Picture me, my hands on the thin yoke of the temperamental Mooney, Spud sitting in the left seat, his flattened hands held up in front of him, pantomiming two aircraft in flight, as he discourses excitedly about how to spot the enemy first and get on his tail. Tell me that's not awesome. Just try.
After I made a pretty decent mess of putting the Mooney into the traffic pattern for runway 26 back at Apple Valley (the wind was blowing out of the west, strangely), we landed, refueled, tucked the plane into its hangar, and prepared to depart for Ontario Airport, about 60 miles away. I had a moment's scare when I realized that my computer bag was not in my Jeep. And what's worse, it had my computer in it. Somewhat frantically, I drove down to the airport lobby, with Spud sitting in the passenger seat and calmly reassuring me. "You ever read Nancy Drew stories?" he asked, as my heart jumped and pounded in my chest, cold sweat on my forehead, hands tight on the wheel. I was thinking about the USB drive with all my private data on it...in the hands of a stranger. "Uh...no...what?" I stammered. "Nancy's father gave her some good advice once," Spud said. His voice was strangely soothing. I felt like I was in a two-seat fighter jet, roaring over the ground at hundreds of miles an hour: a hapless trainee, sweating about what button to push next. Spud, my instructor, was at ease in the backseat, speaking to me in that same tone...an aural salve. "Don't borrow trouble," Spud intoned, quoting Nancy's father. "You've got plenty enough of your own." After I took a turn about 30 miles faster than I should've, he added "If it's there, it's there. If it's not, it's not. Nothing's going to change in five minutes." That ready grin never left his face. Feeling marginally better, I dashed into the airport building and found my bag. It was sitting right where I'd left it, on a chair in the lobby. Nobody had even touched it. Everything was still there. Computer, USB drive, lock, stock, and barrel. Man, I love small airports in small towns. I ran Spud down to Ontario Airport, battled my way back through rush-hour traffic on I-15, and got back to the house about 7:30. I could now look forward to Dad's spaghetti, Mom's garlic bread, some Billy Squier, and InuYasha. I'd just put a twelve-and-a-half-hour workday under my belt. It felt good.
People often tell me I'm a lucky man. And when I say "people," I'm obviously talking about my mother. She watches me as I bumble my way through life, dodging this, ducking that, running headlong into the other, always somehow finding my way out of a jam. (Or, as happens more often, having the way out dropped into my lap.) She always shakes her head and says, "Well, Andrew, you certainly inherited your father's luck."
Apparently, Dad does the same thing. He and I just roll through life, sanguine as you please, and when disaster strikes, we have to scramble to rebuild the dike. But we manage it somehow, either by hook or by crook. Pop even jokes to Ma that his middle name is "Damage Control." Looking at some of the tight spots I've been in, I can't help but think Dad's passed something on to me resembling chronic good fortune.
But there's no use denying it any longer. I'm broke. Not quite flat broke, to be sure; I have enough money for maybe two months' rent, if I was living in an apartment. Possibly three, if I was in a cardboard box by the reservoir.
So when I finally decided two nights ago that, yes, my computer had picked up a virus, my motherly caring side naturally wasn't the first on the scene.
Nice going, bozo, my inner accountant groused. How you gonna pay for this? You might have to hawk those Monty Python DVDs after all. And ya thought you were out of the woods...
I gave it my best shot. I deleted all my temporary Internet files. I ran Ad-Aware and AVG, my anti-spyware and anti-virus programs respectively. Nothing doing. The virus was still in there somewhere.
My folks happened to have a copy of Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 lying around, so I installed that and gave it a go. It detected the virus, but it couldn't delete it: it kept freezing up.
Well, shoot. I heaved a sigh, got up the next morning, and took my poor abused Toshiba into town to be fixed. Repairs would have cost me $200, which, as I've already pointed out, I don't have.
It was right about then that a small dose of my genetically-enhanced luck kicked in.
As I am standing in front of the repair counter, filling out the paperwork to have my laptop diagnosed and cleaned, my brand-new cell phone starts ringing. I put down the pen and answer it. It's my best buddy John, whose house I am going to for a barbecue later in the evening. He actually works at the same computer repair shop where I've taken my laptop. He's not there, though; he's home. He has strep throat, but he hasn't called off the party. He just wants to remind me that I don't have to bring any side dishes; he's got it covered. Bring a bottle if I so desire; he's got Scotch and beer out the wazoo. I say okay, thank him, hang up, and keep filling out paperwork.
I finish the forms and hand them to the repair person. Just as she's beginning to fill in fields on her computer screen, my cell phone rings again. It's Dad. He wants to know what's wrong with my computer. I tell him that I've only just finished the paperwork, and diagnostics haven't commenced yet. I'll call him back when I hear anything. Dad says okay, and we hang up.
The repair woman is almost finished filling in those fields, and is about to lay hands on my laptop and start plugging in wires, when my phone rings again.
It's John. It's loud in the store and I can barely make out what he's saying, but I do catch a few revolutionary words: "...bring your computer over to my house and I'll fix it."
I don't remember exactly what I said in reply. My mind had gone somewhat blank. Accepting $200 of repair fees and then finding out you're reprieved five minutes later...that pulls the rug out from under your brain, so to speak. I stammered a thank you, thought up some feeble excuse for the repair lady ("Uh, can we hold on for a moment? I've just thought of something else I might try"), and boogied.
The expression "weight lifted from one's shoulders" gets tossed around a tad excessively these days. It's lost its power as a result. As I stepped out of the shop into the bright winter sun, I realized how powerful it truly was. I felt, quite literally, as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. There was a little extra spring to my step, a noticeable lightness in my innards. I wouldn't have to spend $200. That wasn't as good as being in love, true. But whew anyway.
Shopping for a bottle for John's party was all the sweeter. In the end, I settled on some tequila and margarita mix. Who says you can't have margaritas in January, anyway? I ask ya, who?
I went home and dumped some stuff off (including that long sought-after library copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh). Then I drove back to John's house with my diseased computer. He popped in a repair CD, ran some programs, isolated the virus, and killed it. Then (over the course of the party) we ran some more scans and tests. Both of us pronounced the machine cured at a quarter to two, after a spotty all-night vigil.
Maybe Dad's karma rubbed off on me when he called right before John did? Who knows?
Thanks to the help of a friend, I was able to get the dang virus off the computer for free.
John, you're a lifesaver. I take back what I said about you being a square because you won't go to Australia with me.
And I got to party in between the scans we ran, too.
Beat that for luck.
I heard back from the volunteer agency I wrote to on Day 20. Turns out they've shut their operation down for a few months due to "staff changes," whatever that means. They'll put me on the list and get back to me once they're up and running again. Doesn't bother me. This gives the weather time to get nicer.
