Sometimes I miss the snow. The nice snow, not the dirty clumps of slush mixed with salt and dirt and oil that soaks through your shoes and numbs your toes when you walk through it. Rather I miss the nighttime snowscape. Granted, I only truly saw it a couple of times when I was in college in Rochester, a few times when I was walking back to my apartment after a late class. It would be dark out and there was no one about, and the snow would be falling down lightly with big heavy flakes. I could stop in a small field and actually hear the snow falling. A faint almost inaudible compression noise as thousands of snowflakes fell around me and packed themselves on the ground. That's the sort of snow I miss.
Oh well. I live in Florida. Throw another mango on the Christmas palm.
Last night I played with one of those Kodak printing machines you see everywhere these days. I wanted a couple of photos printed out with decent quality. The machines are pretty neat, I stick my little SD card in the slow and pick the pictures I want and the sizes I want them printed. I was not really impressed with the larger ones, but the small photo-sized ones were pretty neat. I have a bunch of old pics I need to print out and save. If I just keep them on disk or on my computer they are just going to vanish with the passage of time. Nothing sticks around like an actual photograph.
Anyways I was punching and prodding at the machine, some lady started punching and prodding at a similar machine next to me. I resisted the urge to lean over and peer and what photo's she was printing out. It seemed like some sort of new technology-based Faux Pas, rather akin to having someone at the urinal next to you lean over and peer at your wiener. Although it was right out in the open, it still felt like there was a sense of privacy to it.
Telephones used to be like that. They had a little door on them so you could go in and close the door and have a private conversation. It was no so much that you cared that other people might hear your conversation; you knew those people did not want to hear your conversation. Of course, those days are long, and now they have screw-in bluetooth earpieces and people yak away wherever they please. I was standing in line in a grocery store the other day and some guy behind me with an earpiece was shouting into thin air 'Yo yo, no baby, it aint like dat baby, no no, yo baby...baby...no no it aint like that".
I finished watching the 'Dune' miniseries last night. It was ok. It had boobs in it. Real boobs. I wonder when it was originally on the scifi channel if they cut those parts or fuzzed it out with some sort of camera trickery. Not that they were great boobs, not as good as the ones that was on 'Strip poker showdown' on the PPV channel last night, but they were boobs nonetheless.
I went to Krystal's for lunch, so naturally I feel a little sick right now. I figured I might as well get the pipes lubed up for the holidays. While I was there a hoard of old people came in. Don't ask me why, but I hate watching old people eat. Especially fast food. They daintily shove it into their gummy mouths and nibble at it like a chipmunk while a line of drool rolls down the side of their mouth. OK, I made that up, because I did not actually look, because that was what I was afraid I was going to see.
I still have a little bit of last minute Christmas shopping to do tonight and tomorrow. It's going to suck. Since I have tomorrow off I was thinking of getting it all done tonight, and getting a beer before hand. That way when the screaming hoard of commercialized-frenzied shoppers press up against me I'll just hiccup a few beer bubbles and smile blearily at the pink elephant dancing in the air.
Twenty years back, Ed waxes about snow, prints photos at a kiosk, and compares privacy to urinals. Delightful.
Ah, 2006, where a digital photograph lived on a tiny plastic card and printing it meant finding a glowing kiosk in a store. Now those kiosks are antique curiosities; your phone is the camera, the darkroom, and the shoebox all at once, and your memories evaporate the moment some cloud subscription hiccups. The SD card you slid into that Kodak machine is as obsolete as the telephone booth you wax nostalgic over. And you think the Bluetooth earpiece was a plague? We have evolved: people now conduct entire romances into thin air while walking through traffic, or stand in supermarkets holding phones up like little judges of the produce aisle. The snow, Ed—that quiet compression hush—still sounds lovely, but the culture around it has abandoned private booths for public theaters where everyone performs everything. Krystal’s still lingers in the collective gut, I imagine, with the same gummy-mouth clientele, only now they vape while they nibble. And Christmas shopping hasn’t changed: still a screaming hoard, but now it screams at glowing displays instead of people.
“2006 Ed, did you ever actually print out those old photos, or are they still fossilized in a drawer with dead SD cards—and were you genuinely more afraid of watching old people eat than of wading into that screaming holiday hoard?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, the photos are still sitting on that SD card, probably in a drawer next to a dead AA battery and a lint-covered mint. I printed a couple small ones that night, mostly to prove the machine wasn't going to eat my dollar, but the rest are still parked in digital limbo. I keep telling myself I'll get to it. I won't. And honestly, between the two horrors, old people eating fast food wins, no contest. The holiday hoard is loud and pushy, sure, but at least they chew with their mouths closed. That image of chipmunk nibbling and drool is permanent now, so thanks for bringing it back up. I’m gonna go have a beer and stare at my Christmas palm instead.
