A (Today) Thought (Not for Tomorrow)

I am here at the Barnes and Noble, drinking a tall coffee at their café.  The women at the counter knows my order before I even tell her, and she doesn’t tell me how much it is.  She has a face that someone has worn before, long, drawn out into poles.  In north pole is covered by black straw-like hair hidden under a bland khaki baseball cap, the Barnes and Noble logo sewn onto the part right above the lid.

I suspect she assumes I remember the cost of the coffee, $1.89, even though today I have forgotten.  I have assumed the practice that so many of the young, and perhaps old, have adopted, turning over a check card, a kind of identity card itself, revealing the only true measure of a man, his wealth. 

It sickens me to think that technology has final created a life underneath a life that we live.  It is a life where money transfers hands, where imaginary entities talk and discuss what kind of movies, music, or cell phone apps one might want to try or buy, what books might interest me.  While we all sleep, these imaginary beings talk like the servants that live downstairs, who use the servant’s entrance. 

Not so long ago, Apple recognized the existence of these imaginary folk, create an app which it made more human-like, an eerie echo of the servants of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, named it Siri, allowed us to talk to it, not like your average apps, not by pressing a few buttons or typing out commands, or search words, but actually talking to it, with the language we use with each other.

“Play the Ramones,” we would command it, and it will play the Ramones.  “What is the weather like?” we would ask, and it will respond in female voice, human, though flat, that it is a beautiful day outside, a temperature of 85 degrees.  You might have with it a conversation you might have with anyone.  It is as if we have delegated even the banal conversations that everyday life requires to the pockets machines we carry with us.

Walking to the bookstore tonight, I recall that I had a feeling of being lost, and, with the feeling of loss, I also felt a kind of sadness take me. 

I had spent the day at the beach with Valerie.  We had gone to mass yesterday so that we could leave in the morning.  I had plans to run before we left this morning.  I had set the alarm clock to 6 o’clock.  But the snooze bar, a technological invention, permitted one more hour of sleep, and then one more hour of sleep, until, at 8 o’clock, we were required to start loading to reach the beach at a decent time when the heat of the day was not unbearable and when the crowds of people wanting to celebrate mother’s day littered the beach.  Needless to say, I missed an opportunity to run and felt bad about it.

The beach itself was blanketed in a cover of sea weed, so much so that it had created a sort of breaker between the beach and the sea water.  Valerie had made it a point to tell me that the sea weed was not dangerous, that it wouldn’t hurt me, had said it in a way that she might have said it to a child who having been surprised by the sight might shy away from approaching it. 

I recall wondering to myself where did she hear about the non-lethal nature of the sea weed.  Had she read a sign when we entered the beach entrance?  Did she ask the attendant at the gate about the sea weed when I wasn’t listening?  It was one of those moments when I was called to put my faith in her knowledge, or in the information of another person. 

Valerie feeds me information all the time, bits and pieces of news.  I attempt to place the information in the context of the web of information I have already collected in my brain, categorize into the vast network of data stored in my brain.  If I have some recollection of hearing the information before, I feel comfortable in taking the information, filing it away, taking it at its face value. 

But when I am unable to connect the information to any other piece of data in my brain, I suddenly get nervous, questioning the veracity of the information as if it wasn’t contained within the network of knowledge that I have already acquired, it cannot be possibly true.  This irritates Valerie to no end.  Not that the information she feeds is always wrong or even right. 

The truth of the information is not important, is irrelevant. It is the acceptance of the information, an acknowledgement of the validity of the statement which is important.  For Valerie, somewhere at sometime the information was true.  My unwillingness to accept the information without questioning it, without looking for confirmation, hurts her.

I usually end up search for the information on Google.  Often times, Google refers me to Wikipedia.  There is a semblance of truth in Valerie’s assertions there though it requires some clarifying, a kind of game of horseshoes, where close is enough.

But it is interesting to think that I might rely on the internet before I rely on my wife for information, that this immaterial conglomeration of ideas existing without anyway of being vetted and tested has become the crucible by the way I test the truth of the assertions of my wife in whom I should place my absolute truth and faith in. 

It is like the internet has attached itself to me, to my brain, a kind of external server for my mind which I might access when the information cannot be found on the local hard drive that is my mind.  The experience has made me less human, more like a consumer.  Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that this might be my loss.

I am avid reader, or so I think of myself.  When Barnes and Noble offered its Nook, I was foaming at the mouth.  I convinced Valerie I should get one, and she relented.  And now I own three.  I don’t regret buying them.  I have enjoyed them thoroughly, have used them thoroughly, even as the readers that they were meant to be.  They have replaced entirely my need to buy a paper and ink book. 

On the side of my bed is a kind of cemetery of books, lined up, there spines showing their titles like the inscriptions on tombstones.  I have noticed that layer of other things have fallen on top of the books, various papers and other items, burying the cemetery, making it a layer so that it is slowly transforming into the site of future unearthing of a civilization long dead.  I am saddened by it all because I know between the pages of those books, there is information waiting to be read.  But there is effort in actually pulling the book from the pile, opening it up and holding it in my hands, in carrying it around, as bulky as it is. 

I have the urge of perhaps giving the books away, selling them so that I don’t have to stare at them anymore.  If I get the urge to read them, I can always just by the electronic versions of them, keep them in “the Cloud,” this imaginary world where we can make things insubstantial, substantial.

It is a suggestive word, “the cloud,” as hinting at a kind of heaven, an ideal.  Surely, there are those who might suggest that things that exist purely in an electronic form are so much better than what came before.  No more cutting down trees.  Now we can have libraries of information contained in such small area.  Less to put in a land fill.

Valerie is an old fashioned girl.  For her, things were not the same since Ford mass produced the automobile.  I have tried to get her to take one of more older Nooks.  She has resisted me the whole way.

First, the Nook is not adapted to the type of reader Valerie is.  I suspect most readers are cover-to-cover readers, opening the book, starting at page one and proceeding numerically until they finish the last page.  I am this kind of reader.  For this kind of reader, the Nook is ideal because, on the Nook, the pages are arranged numerically, and so, like most visual media, you explore the pages as they appear on the screen, one after the next. 

But Valerie likes to wander.  When she reads a book, she does so in a kind of fourth dimension kind of way, jumping into a future chapter, then jumping back to a past chapter, flipping back and forth until an image of the whole appears to her.  She reads like she walks, wandering her and there, picking up little treasures along the way and storing them away.  For such a reader, the Nook must be frustrating because the reader limits the ability to move about. 

Second, Valerie has a fondness for the rustic means of living.  She would prefer sending and receiving letters and cards than receiving emails, even though it might mean waiting longer periods to receive greetings.  She was reluctant to get a cell phone when I got one and then once she did get one, she did not want to trade in her old phone for a new version.  Some of her funnier moments are when she gets frustrated by her new phone, pressing down on the touch screen as if mashing it would make it any harder or more accurately.

I suppose it stems from her need to collect everything around her.  Where I rely upon Google and Wikipedia, she relies on the things that she finds, bits of paper, crystals, little abandoned toys.  For Valerie, life is about collecting. 

In our bedroom, Valerie has placed a statue of Mary, Jesus’s mother.  It stands about two and a half feet tall.  About her feet Valerie has placed all kinds of found objects, little tributes of her wanderings.  It is a mysterious side of Valerie I just don’t understand.  But it is her firm grasp into a material world, a way of placing herself in this world. 

It is a world without technology.  It is slow paced and without direction, meandering and full of little surprises.  I envy this world, and, at the same time, grow frustrated with it, for all my recognition of how oddly the way technology fits in our modern world, making us beings that we were never meant to be, making us rely on relationships which are not human and are inherently untrustworthy and unsubstantial, I find that I am a creature of the modern world, caught in the rapids of its progress.