BLOGORAHMAH

Thanks for visiting. I’m quitting posting to this WordPress blog and switching back over to the blogger.com blog that I’ve had forever. The URL is:

http://blogorahmah.blogspot.com

I apologize if in pulling up this WordPress blog you are shown some obnoxious, disgusting or otherwise disagreeable ad. The blogger.com blog doesn’t have them.

I recently got a notice from WordPress that my domain, blogorahmah.com, was about to come up for renewal payment, as is the payment for my upgraded plan.

I note here that the upgraded plan was pretty useless as all it did was remove ads and supposedly give me additional power in editing my site. All I know is, every time I tried to do something extra, I was directed to upgrade yet again to a higher status plan. As Marcel Marseau said: [shakes head from side to side.]

I cancelled the domain as well as the upgrade plan. As it stands, you may not even be able to see this, as the old URL does not seem to be redirecting to sierracourt.wordpress.com. No matter. Maybe you still got here. Well, if you’re reading this . . .

My theory is that the ads WordPress allows on these “un-upgraded” plans are deliberately obnoxious and sort of sickening, and in bad taste to boot, to encourage serious bloggers to upgrade in order to get rid of them. I had another thought.

Don’t read my blog.

I’m returning to blogorahmah.blogspot.com.

I’ve waffled before. It’s the cut of my jib. This time my switch back to blogger.com is probably permanent. If Google starts trying to tap into my revenue via subscription model marketing, as WordPress did, I’ll drop them, too. I’m tired of all these greedy, parasitic, money-sucking tendrils draining my resources like a leaky faucet.

So, anyway, have a nice day. If you’re not here, and you’re not reading this, I’m silently hoping you have a nice day despite your betrayal.

Last week we took a train trip to Chicago. A first for me–not the train, but Chicago. I once rode AmTrak from Chico CA to Seattle. Let’s not talk about that. This was much nicer anyway.

It’s difficult, at this stage, to write much about the city. It was overwhelming. I’m sure I looked exactly like what I was–a tourist–as I walked along the downtown sidewalks, pirouetting in a somewhat ungainly fashion as I gaped upward at the tall buildings. And a river of cars, and a river of people, since the train arrived right at the evening rush hour when a million or so people walked against us as they headed toward Union Station. What I great place.

I wrote about my new interest in film photography, but I didn’t take the old camera with me. In fact I didn’t even take a digital camera. I wanted to just enjoy the scenery, not try to document it. However, I took a whole bunch of cell phone pictures anyway. Here is just a tiny fraction of what I produced. Some of the pictures were taken out the train window, either coming or going. Getting a well composed shot was a matter of pure luck. And the windows were pretty dirty.

Here is a sample of my film photography. It’s kind of weird. To me, I think these pictures are cool in part because I know they were made using an old vintage camera and some black and white film, instead of a bed of electronic pixels and some tricky software. But to the viewer, this probably doesn’t compute.

At any rate, just for the hell of it, here:

The sun has returned. The demon projected from our combined shadow-selves was scared away by all the attention along with what must have been a cacophonous rushing noise of millions of shutter clicks, oohs, ahhhs, and cries of burning retinas in a swath cutting across North America.

I’ve said this before. Even though I am an amateur photographer, I didn’t take pictures of the eclipse last week because of the Internet. Thousands and thousands of photographers like me did, all of them more resolute and equipped with better, more expensive equipment than I have, along with robust Internet access.  I got to look at their pictures.

Meanwhile, all is well here where I am just a scant day-trip away from the geographical center of the contiguous 48. Summer arrived and the humidity is slowly building up, and when I look out my window, there is green, here and there, especially along both banks of the Missouri River where it lazily bends around from left to right below my horizon. I take lots of pictures of it, because it is mine. The moon belongs to the Internet.

 

The pharmacologically induced epiphany for which I perpetually hankered failed to materialize, let alone appear in a blog post.

But here we go.

There having been some discussion via comments about WordPress themes, I thought about my one time search for a theme that featured the entire posts, one after the other, instead of smaller paragraphs or partial snippets followed by a link reading “continue reading.” I find that annoying, especially when after I click on it, in order to continue reading, I first have to find where I left off—because the link just puts one right at the top of the post as if you just landed there. I realize I should probably stop complaining about WordPress’s glitches, and this is not just them, but almost standard procedure everywhere, anymore, but, still . . .

But there may be a silver lining here. I never think about it in regards to blog posts, but the opening sentence or opening lines to anything can be pretty important. I should start massaging opening lines in blog posts to encourage the reader to “continue reading.”  It might be my only chance.

Soon after I had this thought I Googled “opening lines in novels” and had a great time looking at the results. I won’t bother you with examples—you should Google it you’ll see what I mean, and probably be inspired, as I was, to begin page 1 of that novel that’s been spiraling around inside your head.

I shot another roll of film, this time with a type of film called Tri-X, a black and white negative film made by Kodak. I was told it is better than the type of film I used for my first experimentation, and it does indeed seem to be. The grain is smaller. Grain is very loosely kind of sorta like pixels. At any rate, the results are a little smoother looking. Here are two pictures from the roll, then I’m going to bed.

I photograph the negatives with a digital camera and then invert the resulting pictures to make a positive. Then I unashamedly tweak the pictures a little here and there to make them look like I expect. Ordinarily one would use the negatives to project a positive image onto a sheet of film, and make a print. I don’t have that kind of equipment and don’t want to turn my apartment into a dark room.

Have a good night.

Fifty years ago I drove an old yellow Chevy wagon from Palo Alto, California, to Independence, Missouri.

I had just graduated from High School and worked at a gas station on El Camino Real.  El Camino was sort of the main drag for all the cities strung up and down along the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay.

In Spanish, El Camino Real means “The King’s Highway,” and, where a few hundred years ago Spanish monks traveled on foot from mission to mission, kids in hot rods later cruised up and down between drive-ins.  Where once monks sowed wildflower seeds as they walked along, kids sped up and down, splitting the air with the sounds of hot rod engines pushing spent, polluted gasses through glass-pack mufflers.  I write this to characterize the decade I came from, but, really, nothing has changed.

It took me three days to drive all that way from California to Missouri. At the time, the construction of the Interstate Highway system had just begun, so most but not all of the drive along U.S. Route 66 was on two-lane blacktop interrupted by every little town and their gas stations and restaurants and flashing stop lights along the way. To me, it was exciting. It felt like an adventure, and I was happy enough to run away from the entire context of my life so far.

Then, in what felt like a second life-time, it took me 12 years and dozens of jobs and half-baked alliances with others of my generation for me to settle down while my pre-frontal cortex fully developed.  It was a process that occurred in fits and starts, and in its own sweet time.

Eventually I got a job at the local phone company (in an era where there was only one) and shortly afterwards got married and raised a kid. In what felt like a third life-time, I spent about 40 years playing that role to its conclusion.

Now everything has changed and things over which I have no control have finally asserted themselves. I find, strangely, that I am an old man.  I don’t feel like an old man.  I feel like the same person I always was, only with more aches, less hair, and an attitude informed by decades of trying unsuccessfully to impose order on a random universe. All that means is as you connect the dots, there is no picture to be formed, which is scary, so you leave out some dots and connect others–it means you get to make your own picture. Sometimes you get it right, and sometimes you don’t. The “informed attitude” I mentioned is wisdom,. If you’re lucky, you get some.  It tells you that most things don’t matter as much as you think they did, and the rest you barely noticed.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine used to say this thing whenever he was about to do something stupid. He asked the question, “What’ll it all mean a hundred years from now?” Of course it was hypothetical, and being young and immortal, we could afford to laugh at it. No one at the time had the presence of mind to ask what it might mean in three days. That would have been helpful.

Just recently, I ran across a similar sentiment: “Remember, a hundred years from now–all new people” which I’m taking a little more seriously.  In fact, it’s kind of been haunting me. All new people . . . a simple, irrefutable fact that sums up all of existence, finally answering the question, what will it all mean a hundred years from now?

It means whatever you think it means. The future exists only in our minds, and only right now.

This post is an experiment. After having read an article about enhanced cognitive ability associated with writing by hand, as opposed to typing on a keyboard, I decided to write out my next blog post in a “ruled” notebook and see if it makes me sound smarter.

It won’t do my self-esteem any good if it turns out that while typing it out into the WordPress “classic editor” (that’s right) I can’t read my own writing. The probability of this happening is more than zero.

So far, during this experiment I have learned that my handwriting is remarkably sloppy and getting worse by the minute. Also inconsistent, as the slant seems to be morphing from straight up-and-down to slanted toward the right. I couldn’t tell you how many months–or years–it’s been since I hand wrote this much at one sitting. That I won’t be able to read it well enough to type it out is a very real fear. Perhaps I should quit now before the first sentences fade in memory and force me to unscramble what I’ve done.

I’ll say this much–it feels different to hand write a blog post. The thinking process seems to have been slowed down and become more deliberate. (So it seems to me, anyway.) It’s possible this will help cure me of my penchant for run-on sentences.

Of course, either way, I don’t have much to say. That’s it.