[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]
[Below, click Play button to begin The Happy Wanderer. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:17 long.]
The Missus and I have a favorite, half-kidding/half-serious theory about the modern world: that it’s set up to drive its denizens (especially us) crazy. Just in case you haven’t noticed: the pace of life never slows down, and there’s more and more stuff to fill every minute, and every bit of it is urgent and ever more resistant to prioritization. Music is louder and faster, TV commercials more obstreporous, money tighter, our friends and families both frailer and more distant, food and drink more dangerous, streets more crowded and more polluted (despite new regulations every year pretending to fight both traffic volume and air pollution), “communication” trivially easy and also easily trivial, civic discourse threatening to run off the rails at every nerve-jangling second…
Furthermore, of course, no one we know is getting any younger — a situation thorned with a thousand frustrations all its own. Speaking for myself, I am certain that gravity is much stronger than when I was a kid, and air resistance much weaker, and objects theoretically meant to be held in the hands seem aerodynamically designed these days to leap away and down to the floor almost as soon as I touch them.
And knowledge? Pfft! When it comes to knowledge, the situation really gets dire. Computers and networks grow ever more stubborn, refusing not only to play with one another but to play with me, dammit. I can download books tens of thousands of times faster than I can read their first chapters. Facts once gluey slither around in my head like greased marbles…
Note the peculiarly Baby-Boomer view of the world: if something hasn’t been set up to make life easier, it’s because we must be beset by enemies, entire wicked cabals of them, bent on keeping us from whatever we want at the moment. Because, you know, it’s all about us.
This crazy-makingness, I am convinced, is tied in somehow with the laws of thermodynamics. You know: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, at best just turned into other forms of matter and energy. The total amount of matter (or energy) in the universe is a constant. All that. Because, see — so my theory goes — the total amount of information in the universe is a constant, too. When you move 150 pounds of information from a blog to Twitter, let’s say, it remains at 150 pounds total — just diffused and vaporous and spread out so no one can see the whole anymore, just the individual molecules…
For those of you keeping score, here are a couple things preoccupying my mind and time (what’s left of both) these days:
First, here at the ol’ blawg (as Jules says), I’ve been working on an entry in my What’s in a Song? series. This task always preoccupies me — intensely — until it’s done. They’re fun and satisfying to assemble, otherwise I wouldn’t do them: who needs yet another dull and/or unsatisfying distraction in a world already full of them? But, you know, there’s a reason why somebody chose “absorption” as a metaphor for getting lost in a project.
I’ve also been working on Seems to Fit. (I’d like to add “of course,” but such things should not be taken for granted.) This probably requires a blog post of its own. For now I’ll just say that my objective of the last few weeks has been to ensure continuity: when a plot requires a half-dozen characters’ points of view, sometimes together in a scene and sometimes off on their own, it’s easy to lose track of the way they talk, what they’ve experienced and when, what they know and don’t know yet. It’s also possible — “easy” probably not the right word there — to simply lose track of an important character who almost never interacts with the others for reasons of geography and/or time. (See greasy-marbles analogy, above.)
So how’s everything in your neighborhood?
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Note: The image at the top of this post appears on a toddler T-shirt designed by “Tom,” of the Wire & Twine online store. (Here‘s the original.) I love thinking of those two mice as mouselets, overwhelmed by how much they’ve experienced in a given day.
Further note: Why “The Happy Wanderer” tootling on the soundtrack and referenced in the post title? Hard to say, exactly. I was thinking about simpler times, and suddenly remembered that song from elementary-school music class. And, really, despite the crazy-makingness, I am happy. It’s just more fun to bitch.
Sherri says
I enjoyed listening to the song while wandering through your thoughts with you. As the song finished, I found I also had just finished absorbing your post and had begun to type this comment. :)
moonrat says
equally frenetic, thanks for asking :)
btw my mom used to sing me The Happy Wanderer when i was little. i never realized anyone else in the world knew that song.
DarcKnyt says
I think I agree. The world seems set up for newer, younger models of people as well as gadgetry. And who doesn’t love gadgetry?
Ah, but does the gadgetry love US? Well, that’s something else again, isn’t it?
Thought-food; satisfying AND non-fattening. Nicely done, JES.
marta says
Like the bit about the world must be wrong if it isn’t suited to us. I got into a snit once when someone I know complained about crying children in public as if the nerve of some people to have children that cried in public. And while I don’t like listening to crying children anymore than anyone else, I wondered where this idea came from that when we set out our door we should expect the world to please us in every regard and then get all righteous if it doesn’t.
The world is filled with noise. So it goes. Who exactly is the world supposed to please anyway?
John says
Sherri: I’d like to say that I wrote the post, then edited and re-edited and re-re-edited it, neurotically and obsessively, so all those activities you listed would take EXACTLY as long as it took for the song to play.
But, no. Ha.
moonie: Your mom is probably about my age. And children’s and folk songs disappear from our cultural consciousness with each passing year — a source of ongoing regret.
You seem to have had a very sweet childhood.
Darc: I know YOU know this — how this feels — but it’s very weird that my livelihood depends on the sort of stubborn gadgetry you mention… the sort that drives me crazy. It requires almost a sort of judo to work with it (the harder you push, the more it digs its feet in and pushes back), but you can finesse it. Sometimes. Until it realizes what you’re up to, haha.
marta: Right around this time of year, there’s almost always somebody who justifies his or her lunatic course of action by reminding us about Columbus, and where would we be if he hadn’t Done His Thing Despite All The Doubters, and so on. (Einstein is another favorite, year-round.) Strictly speaking, they’re right. The catch is that they’re talking about Columbus. Because he pulled it off doesn’t mean that everyone with an inflated opinion of his/her opinions, needs, and so on, is smarter, more sincere, or whatever, than the rest of the world.
That’s my opinion anyway. And I’m right, damn it. Despite The Doubters. Ha!
I think “The world is full of noise” is a lovely way to summarize all this. T-shirt-worthy!
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
Well, after the frustrating weekend of “non-camping” both the subject matter AND the “knapsack on my back” portion of The Happy Wanderer dovetailed a little too well.
John says
brudder: Certainly I don’t find those frustrations amusing, but I’ve gotta confess that your comment about them made me laugh.
marta says
@John – I understand the point some people try to make with the Columbus/Einstein-didn’t-listen to the doubters, and that is all well and good as far as it goes, but, you know, if Hitler had listened to some doubters…
Which is to say–ignoring the doubters is not always better than letting the doubters take over your life.
John says
marta: Ingenious little bit of argument-judo there, bringing in Hitler that way. I like it. Naturally, no one should be too easily discouraged to pursue a dream… But eventually, “Everybody is WRONG… except ME!” starts to sound less like someone bucking up their spirits, more like someone in the grip of a tropical fever-dream.
Nance says
“… I am certain that gravity is much stronger than when I was a kid, and air resistance much weaker…”
Exactly. You covered many of the same indicators of conspiracy that I’ve noticed, which just proves, naturally, that there is one. I fear that it’s larger, still:
ENTROPY IS INCREASING!!!!
And (I love this part) the toddler brain only knows this state as “normal.”
Time for you and me to begin to move off, stage left.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
Hey, Nance and JES, don’t go anywhere without ME!!
I do not understand why there are more calories in the foods I eat these days nor how the print in my old books has gotten smaller. Thank you so very very much for alerting me to the conspiracy which is out to get us. The nerve!
I’m also really liking this “songs my parents sang to me” meme we’ve got going.
a/b
John says
Nance: I think about entropy a lot. (Which is a very strange sort of public confession to make, I realize.) Presumably you’ve heard about the risks, despite the supposed advantages, associated with developing self-sustaining, -repairing, and -reproducing colonies of microscopic nanobots — that the entire world may end up under several feet of gray nanosludge. (So-called “grey goo.”) A sort of technologically institutionalized entropy. By the time everything gets through the political blender, the moral blender, and everything other blender, I think we’ll have pretty much accomplished it without even trying!
a/b: We’re not going anywhere. The nanosludge is already thigh-deep and rising — very hard to move around under the circumstances. We will of course continue to wave in your general direction until going down for the third time.
jules says
Well, whaddya know? I’m reading your blog, getting caught up, enjoying this post, and then I see my name!
Someone said, “The world seems set up for newer, younger models of people as well as gadgetry.” I’m almost 40, and I feel lost, too. (Not sure if that constitutes a “younger” model of a person.) I want to pick up a piece of neglected trash from the side of the road and give it my full-on attention for about a month and write an essay about the details of it. Strange thought, I know, but it goes through my mind when I think about how we rush around and multi-task so often.
John says
jules: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the BBC TV series Torchwood (which I’m finally getting into). Much of the storyline — the general arc as well as some of the specifics — has to do with the nature of time, and what the side effects might be if people could by intention or otherwise travel forward and back in time.
In the episode I saw most recently one character had to explain to the others why everything would quickly fall to pieces if these transits could happen freely. He said to imagine you begin with a clean sheet of paper, and you wad it up, and someone tells you to draw a straight line on the paper without smoothing it out: that (he said) resembled the difficulty of straightening out an uncontrolled temporal rift.
I thought it was a striking image and idea, one I’d never heard used before in all the science fiction and non-fiction I’ve read which focus on time travel. But I also thought of all those events potentially in all those straight lines, and of all of them butting up against one another, and thought: Wow. Sounds like real life!