Saturday

June 23, 2001

great bottle tree and sculpture light

a dog too big for his car

I ask someone the other day if the Internet had changed his life. He looked shocked. I think it has changed mine. Personal computers didn't change things so much. It was when you could get all this stuff over the Internet that things really changed. It's being able to look up foods in the Epicurious dictionary while you write about food. It's being able to e-mail people. It's being able to see all this info and comparison price things, read about diseases you may have or imagine you have. Peak into other worlds. Normal media (radio, television, books, magazines, newspapers) are filtered and edited. But you may touch the truth (or fiction) of one individual online.

There was a recent hoax in the online journal world where someone pretended to be a young woman dying. There was outrage and sadness at the fiction, pretending to be fact. But what is true, anyway?

The online journal world, by the way, is not something I'm part of. I stay out of the conferences and publicity and don't join lists or rings or whatever else they call them. I do read people in these and welcome them. We've been occasionally linked but rarely enough that our page remains an bit of an outback. If you are reading this sentence, you are in an unusual little club on the Internet. Just so you know.

Oh, yeah, well cell phones have changed things, too, and computers you can carry around. Things are different now than they were, say, in 1970. They really are fundamentally changed. A lot of people protest but it's true.

And, if you had trouble concentrting before? Whoa. It's so hard now. That's why I have to take walks and force myself to keep an online journal every day. To have a rhythm. To escape all the choices. Wonderful, daunting choices.

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The whole gang (FFP, me, Chalow, SuRu, Zoey) went walking in Clarksville. Parts of it seem so secluded and out of the way, other parts bustling and downtown. Things had changed, here and there, since we'd walked it. A junk scultpure had been reduced to a pole with some paint and beads on it. (Somewhere I have a picture of it in all its discarded computer monitor, styrofoam heads and psycho paint wonder.) The gorilla didn't have a costume. Besides a jungle had grown around him.

There were some interesting dogs at Sweetish Hill and right at the beginning of our walk a woman almost lost control of the two dogs she had on long lines because they were interested in our two.

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I was really lazy after the walk. I played with the computer. We went for lunch at Marisco Grill and had Vuelve a al Vidas (raw oyters and other seafood in a spicy sauce). Would have cured a hangover if I'd had one. We bought FFP a tennis racket, checked on the parents' house, read for a while at Barnes and Noble (where I almost fell asleep reading in their overstuffed chairs). We stopped by Eckerd's and got a few necessities. By the time I need hair gel, everything about hair gel has changed. This time FFP got the pix we were picking up and came to check on me.

"I can't decide between this brand and its Mega Super Hold, Mega Mega Hold, Hard to Hold, Extra Volume Bounce and...." I said. Forrest looked unsympahtetically at the array and I picked the pink one.

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I think sometimes you have to do whatever pleases you. No deadlines or schedules. I sat out to do that today.

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As the day wound down, I was just sitting and reading in THE ROOM. FFP decided to go rent State and Main. I like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and that Macy guy and the acting was good but I thought the script kind of weak. It is The Player that got the Hollywood send up right, I thought. Then FFP went back and rented Wonder Boys. And that was our evening. We finally snacked on cheese and chips and such late in the evening. It started lightning and then raining. And we cut off the TV and went to bed so we could go to sleep to the rain.

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