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Wirelessly Wrought
It is near nine-o'clock. Wednesday night, I think. And I spent the last three hours attempting to set up my computer wirelessly. The wifi unit was sent West from East coast storage, packed diligently between long-sleeve t-shirts and pajama pants. The smoking jacket, Hugh Hefner donned on me, just won't cut the cold after Sonoma sunsets. The weather here causes the mercury in your thermometer to rollercoaster. Somewhere, somehow Napa and Sonoma can reach ninety degrees without a sweat, but when the sun goes down the temperature drops thirty to forty degrees like a fat kid through thin ice. The night chill brings a colder morning mist. The geniuses who make the grape juice tell me that this is a perfect climate for the vines. The cold nights and morning dew keeps the grapes fresh with acidity and the bright, orange sun during afternoon hours dries out the clusters and ripens them - harvest, press, ferment, age, wine (or for the parents out there; give birth, feed, change diapers, teach your children how to shit on their own, watch them grow through their formative years, and 'whine' about bad grades, the loss of a scholarship and the high cost of college tuition - an exercise wine will help one overcome.) And tonight, I whined about the hours spent setting up my internet connection so I can bounce wirelessly from my couch to the floor to the kitchen countertops. I had no expectation of such an evening of distress. But now as I look around the cluttered mass of material in front of me, the battle has been won - for now. It's time to clean up and my brain is trying to mathematically figure out where to start. I am translating IP addresses, three digit dot three digit dot three digit dot one. 255.255.255.1. Routers and SubNet Masks mask crumpled ATM receipts, charcoal covered with ash overflowing from a Salvation Army purchased Cinzano ashtray. Tweezers have punctured my Comcast contract. Empty bottles and glasses sitting in puddles of circled water. Grape shears sticky with Monday's sugary fruit cut from the vine were used to dislodge a piece of cardboard from a wine case to run wires inside so to avoid tripping on the serpentine swirl of cables and electrical cords embedded in the living room carpet. Money and credit cards sit too close to burning candles that are used to compensate for the lack of overhead lighting and a Martha Stewart Everyday lamp purchased at Kmart. Baseball hats and headphones. A digital camera with an empty battery sits atop books on Wine Science. And a glass of Rose from a bottle without a label, a capsule or a name. Only a cork that says Saisons des vins. The season of the wines, or so the French-English dictionary on About.com tells me. The wine is good, and was needed, as I swirled it in my mouth with cigarette smoke and decanted it into my stomach. Another bottle of wine (Trader Joe's famous Two Buck Chuck, $23.88 + tax per case) is angled from the floor to the electricity outlet as a prop to keep the massive black box afloat so to run PG&E's finest into my modem that allows me to broadcast this nonsense to no one in particular, but everyone in between. The furniture is sparse, and the addition of the cardboard wine case doesn't fit my fancy, although it ranks as the fourth piece of furniture in the apartment I call home. Atop the box is the little black object, a bit bigger than an Altoids container, flashing green lights letting me know I am connected. With that box, I am sucked into the encyclopedic world. No more salesmen coming into the house and displaying faux-leather bound dictionaries of culture and countries, history and happenstance - that's the word the sweaty salesman said to me when I was a child. I didn't know it then, but when I was researching the American Revolution in sixth grade, was it 'happenstance' that the French Revolution was a byproduct (a coincidence) of American Independence? Or better, today why are the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons bombing in Turkey or why did the ETA blow up commuter trains in Spain in 2004 - were the events enacted happenstancially (I don't know if that is a word, but dictionary.com might be able to tell me) because of September 11th and the War in Iraq? Are all events coincidental or cause and effect? Maybe this is a question for Jack Ryan, season 5 of '24' is recently available to download on iTunes, but if I don't want to pay the $39.00 (coincidentally the cost of my monthly internet connection) I could visit the Comedy Central store without leaving my house and download clips from last night's episode of the Daily Show to see what John Stewart had to say, he appears on top of the game, at least when Anderson Cooper isn't crying on the streets of Louisiana or the couch next to Barbara Walters. (Only $1.99 for the transcript of those interviews to be e-mailed to me. Will the transcripts arrive wet with salty ocular excretions, or do I have to buy some of those vials of singular Coop teardrops on eBay?) The world is my encyclopedia thanks to that little box on top the wine box in my boxy living room in a box of a building, set aside other buildings of like stature in a complex not too different than what was envisioned by that guy, you know that guy who is credited with urban sprawl in American post-WW2.... what's his name? I'll have to google him. But I was reading on the internet the other day, before I engaged wirelessly (wires, they seem so internet boom circa 1998), that Google wants us Americans to stop using 'google' as a verb. I always thought a 'google' was a noun - a googleplex is a 1 followed by a 'googol' zeros, whereas a googol is 100 zeros. Another question for those world-wide encyclopedia thumbing boys at Google, which, I assume, will display an unfathomable amount of search query responses, or wait, 495,000 to be exact. Just checked it out. God bless the internet. Maybe I can log on to Craig's List to find a house keeper in Santa Rosa who will not charge me a googleplex to clean my 500 square foot apartment, patio not included. Or perhaps I can find some cheap furniture there, or at Ikea.com.
Post - September'06 Back to home...
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