Yesterday, a salesman knocked on our door while I was napping upstairs. When the knock came, Danna was downstairs, reading D-Listed updates, etcetera, summer etcetera. Kinder than I am toward people who cold-knock door-to-door, she locked our temperamental Boston Terrier T.S. Eliot in the bathroom and stepped out to greet him. After the security system salesman explained that there have been two break-ins on our street in the past month, she invited him to sit on the patio chairs and give his spiel. Two hours later, we had a free system installed in exchange for giving his company a square foot of advertising space on the front lawn. One of the best things about having the summers off is this sort of disruption of the routine. I have mixed feelings about routine.
Today, Eliot's morning routine is disrupted, apparently, by the sudden presence of a motion sensor perched above the living room curtains (he just noticed it fifteen minutes ago). Which means our routine is disrupted, too, because we are puzzled away from our morning reading and talking about our reading, summer etcetera. I'm fascinated. As I type this upstairs in my little study, Eliot sits on the couch goggle-eyed, taking in the sensor and the area around the sensor, and it's as if he can see the waves of light invisible to us. Can dogs see light on this end of the spectrum? I imagine they can but don't know for sure. Curious, I'm going to do a search later to find out. Herein lies my love-hate relationship with the internet. Before this epoch, wouldn't a guy have simply dialed up his most science-minded friends, say, his college friend with a degree in engineering or his other college friend with a degree in physics? From such an inquiry, a conversation would have happened, no doubt--two human voices registering wonder at the world. Would you nominate me King Luddite for a Day if I tell you tomorrow I called these friends first?
About Me
- Marcus
- Enjoying irony in his aesthetics as much as the next guy but usually preferring the earnest view. A reader. A fashioner of poems. A displaced Southerner raised by Yankees and living in the Mid-West. A brother. A friend. A husband. An ex-hopeless-romantic; a former Arkansan pining away for the Clinton days. My writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Bruiser Review, CutBank, Main Street Rag, Matter, Mid-American Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Tar River Poetry.
2 comments:
Or perhaps somebody woulda gone to the library, thumbed through a musty card catalog, and half-recalling middle-school's Dewey Decimal system found the book and plausibly an answer. With a cool-looking screenprinted diagram of a dog's retina. That coulda happened too.
Luddites were militant dudes, btw. Oh yeah, this is Joe, I just don't wanna register just right now.
I know, right? I love those illustrations. And I miss card catalogs. Which reminds me: I Read fairly recently about these folks who keep a library that's more like the internet than most libraries. Yet subjects are categorized more like thinking than either the Dewy decimal system or the internet.
Thanks for stopping by, Joe Hammers!
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