😳 WEIRD-ASS OLD TAPE THINGIE (obsolete technology) 😶

I'm on summer vacation, so will continue to post some of the stranger videos I've made for my YouTube channel (which claims most of my creative energy these days). This one features inexplicably weird, obviously deeply obsolete equipment, the function of which is a mystery to me. Probably made sense at the time.

Retro Commercial - Radio Shack Cell Phones - 1990

My husband is now saying, "You need a new phone."  "Why?" "Because I need a new phone." We have gone by the pass-it-down rule for a very long time now, as I am a dinosaur and don't care two figs for phones, never use them except to MAKE A PHONE CALL. So when Bill craves a new toy which he doesn't need (he claims he "needs a better camera" when he never takes pictures, and when asked about it says, "I WILL take pictures if I have a better camera" - this man is a scientist, can you believe it?), I end up getting his leftovers, which is fine with me. I will receive a slightly older phone from him which runs out of charge even when it is almost never used. That's "new" enough for me.
 

I note from my grandkids that old technology is coming back in a very big way: little cameras that spit out tiny printed photos which are then plastered all over the bedroom wall (shades of the 1950s!), and even record players requiring the vinyl recordings that immediately warp, crack, and develop scratches, skips and indelible dirt and grit that can't be removed, not even by the bizarre "white glue" method I've seen online. 

Records are those "things" we got rid of in the '80s. Bulky, dirt-attracting, the only really good thing about them were the covers. CD art suddenly shrank, and now it's just gone forever and everything is "streaming". But all this has happened at light speed, and it's interesting to see how far we've come in a few short decades, from the technological miracle of a suitcase you lugged around with you to an advanced computer you can hold in the palm of your hand. 

On the other hand. . . some people now collect obsolete technology just as zealously as I collect dolls and trolls. One must have an absorbing hobby in these frightening times, and as with the gadgets, old ideas like the drive-in movie and restaurant car-hop service are coming back into their own.

Though this has never been proven, there are rumours the nerdy high-tech boy at the end of this ad is actually Bill Gates. If not, he should have been. No one dreamed in those innocent times that things were about to get dangerously out of control, and that technology would swallow us all and put the entire world population under constant surveillance. George Orwell would have felt vindicated.

One advantage of the old technology was that it couldn't be hacked, because no one even knew what that term meant back then. Computers were these big slabs of quivering cardboard with multicolored flashing lights on them, sometimes talking to us in a robotic female voice ("working. . . " - always dubbed by Majel Barrett, Gene Roddenberry's wife and Nurse Chapell on the original series. You know the one I mean.) 

 

But the price! I could not find a cost for this particular "phone", but some early computers ran in the thousands, and people cheerfully paid it, if for no other reason than as a sort of status symbol. I even heard of a dummy called a "cellular phony" which people slung around and "answered" to show how important they were, like the pagers of old. People don't change, even if the technology accelerates past their ability to understand or cope with it. 

AND NOW, (just for fun). . . some artsy-fartsy takes on my screen grabs from the Radio Shack ad!

 

 

 

"God is dead". . . and so is Blogger?

One of the stranger gifs I've ever found (provenance unknown). So now I get an alarming message from Blogger, which I was afraid would soon be discontinued outright as obsolete technology, telling me that there will be a "new interface" on Blogger as of "late June". 

YouTube has threatened all sorts of dire things over the years, including disabling comments on videos featuring "minors" (in my case, dolls!), and then threatening to shut down channels altogether if they did not designate whether or not the videos are "made for children". All sorts of penalties were waved about for even taking one step in that direction, i. e. featuring a puppy for a few seconds (FOR CHILDREN!), OR, a puppy and a nude woman in THE SAME video (mass confusion and more penalties).

In my case, completely confused and panicked, I agreed to designate one video at a time as "made for children" or "NOT made for children", literally ticking a box for each one, but with an archive of about 2000 videos, I had no idea what to do with all the old ones and was seeing vague threats about having my account terminated forever. I sweated this for a couple of weeks while people posted videos with titles like "IS THIS THE END OF YOUTUBE???!!!" and worse, until the dread moment came, and. . . nothing happened. I mean, NOTHING. 

It was just like the "videos featuring minors" thing - they haphazardly "applied" it to random videos for a few weeks, then dropped the whole thing. In this case, the FTC was after YouTube for allowing companies to access personal information about children, which was ENTIRELY YouTube's fault, but passed along to creators to terrorize them and make sure they knew Who Was In Charge.

This Blogger thing is quite different, or at least I hope it is, an update of sorts, but I want to be able to keep my massive archive, access it easily, and post new things equally easily. The new version of anything is always infinitely harder to use and less effective (as I found out when I was forced to adopt YouTube's new editing program). I can try out the new one, and they do say there will be an option to keep the old "interface", whatever the hell THAT is. 

If the new one is easy to use, updates the look of it a bit (it DOES look very dated, and there seem to be hardly any Bloggers left), then fine. But I dread losing stuff I have lovingly toiled over since about 2011 (!). I just don't want to lose any of it. I DO look for things in my archives several times a week, so if I can't do that without turning it upside-down and shaking it, then I will have to try to stick to the old one. I don't know. But at least there are no dire threats that are never carried out. Yet, anyway.

Meantime, now YouTube is saying "this version of YouTube is going away soon. Try the NEW YouTube!" This is a way to phase out desktop applications entirely, so I will be hanging by a thread once again as some sort of dusty museum piece. 

But for now. . . 

The camera weighs only six pounds!

He's taping that thrilling number, "Serenade in Peep Major" with the new portable, battery-operated Sony Videocorder.

It records both picture and sound. (The camera weighs only 6 pounds. The recorder pack just 12.) Needs only you to operate it. And costs only $1250.* Yet it can do just about everything one of those gargantuan mobile video units can do. Maybe even more.

It doesn't have yards of power cable to tie it down. (One thin cable connects the Camera and Recorder. That's all.) So it can go up in a plane and tape aerial views of potential factory sites. Tag along on an archaeological expedition. Or on a trip to the zoo with a bunch of first graders. Or it can even wiggle into tight places and crawl beneath machinery to record damage. (So only one person has to get his clothes dirty.)

Anyone can operate this Sony Videocorder. All its level controls are fully automatic. And there's a TV monitor right inside the camera. So it's almost impossible to botch things up. (If you manage to do it anyway, no sweat. The tape is reusable.)

The nicest thing about the Videocorder: when you come back with everything behind you, it instantly lets you have it all in front of you.

SONY PORTABLE VIDEOCORDER

China girls: animation

China girls were professional models who appeared on the screen for only a split-second. They were meant as a comparison for adjusting flesh tones on film to the rest of the spectrum. I am not sure how they did this in one frame (though it could be as many as four).  I worked on some animations a while ago, fascinated by the whole thing, then put a few of them on YouTube. I do remember seeing them just for a blink, and often wondered if they were really there. They were. But it must have been frustrating for them to have so little exposure (so to speak). 

Though every article I found about them said they were invisible to the public, I saw them. I know I did. Do I have a quick eye, or can I slow down time, being as how I am a time-traveller (revealed here for the first time)?

Warning: this will scare the shit out of you

This is a nightmare on video, and I don't know why I have to keep going back and watching it over and over again, because it still SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME even though I know it's "nothing". It's really nothing, and a couple of decades ago it was something so familiar, you experienced it every day without thinking about it. Except now, it has been impossibly attenuated into an expression of doom so potent that it can make you lose all hope. So hey, why not watch this right now? Turn the volume WAY up.

Electrophone Girl

When I first saw this image of a winsome, euphoric young woman with what looked like earphones on her head, I thought, what the hell year was this taken? I immediately wondered if she was about to be therapeutically electrocuted, as was the fashion back then. Electricity was thought to be a panacea, a cure from everything from sexual desire to neurasthenia (whatever that is).

I was to learn - and thank Wikipedia for this! - that, in fact, she was listening to the radio. In 1895! There was a kind of radio in the 19th century, and people could listen to broadcasts of plays and concerts from the comfort of their own home. 

Radio 30 years before radio. Who knew?

If you look more closely at this image, now doing the rounds of the internet, you will notice it has been defaced by "somebody" (not me!) to give the beautiful young lady crude-looking rings, a necklace, a nose ring and wristwatch (which I am sure she never had, wristwatches not having been invented yet). I don't know what the doodles signified, except that perhaps someone assumed she was a time traveller projecting herself decades into the future.

But no. She did it all through her telephone. People were using their phones for all sorts of inventive things back then, enjoying music and plays and comedies and opera, all manner of entertainment. It was Smartphone without pictures. Then, as is usual with the human race, we forgot all about it, the knowledge sank without a trace, and was resurrected 120 years later as a Brand New Thing.

Once more we are playing with our phones, sopping up music and entertainment and even wearing funny things on our heads that would make a Martian think we had gone insane.

Electrophone System

The Electrophone system was a distributed audio system which operated in the UK between 1895 and 1926. This system relayed live theatre and music hall shows and, on Sundays, live sermons from churches. This was a subscription service and users would firstly ask the operator, by using their normal phone line, to connect them to Electrophone. The Electrophone switchboard operator would ask them which theatre they wanted to connect to. 

A 1906 advertisement stated that they could choose from among fourteen theatres — the Aldwych, Alhambra, Apollo, Daly's, Drury Lane, Empire, Gaiety, Lyric, Palace, Pavilion, Prince of Wales's, Savoy, Shaftesbury and Tivoli — in addition to concerts from the Queen's and Royal Albert Halls, and, on Sundays, services from fifteen churches. For opera, they would be connected to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

To pick up the programs, multiple large carbon microphones were placed in the theater footlights to pick up the sounds of the performers. In churches, the microphones were disguised to look similar to bibles. Home subscribers were issued headphones connected to their standard telephone lines. The annual charge was £5, which limited its affordability to the well-to-do. Queen Victoria was included as one of the listeners. In 1897, it was noted that coin operated receivers had been installed in some hotels, which provided a few minutes of entertainment for a sixpenny. Additional lines were installed, for free, for use by convalescing hospital patients.

Although fairly long-lived, the Electrophone never advanced beyond a limited audience. In 1896 there were just 50 subscribers, although this increased to over 1000 by 1919, and just over 2000 at its peak in 1923. However, competition due to the introduction of radio broadcasting resulted in a rapid decline, falling to 1000 by November 1924. In early 1923, an Electrophone director was quoted as saying that "it would be a long time before broadcasting by wireless of entertainments and church services attained the degree of perfection now achieved by the electrophone." However, that proved to be overly optimistic, and as of June 30, 1925, the London Electrophone ceased operations.

A second, much smaller system, was established in Bournemouth in 1903, but the maximum number of subscribers only reached 62 as of 1924. This system was finally discontinued in 1938, after it was determined during the previous year that there were only two remaining subscribers.

Blogservations. Two subscribers! That beats my yearly sales of books by exactly two, so I'm impressed. But I'm even more impressed that back in the Victorian era, someone thought of broadcasting concerts and plays and church services to a home audience, using technology that already existed. Someone was most definitely thinking ahead.

I'm also intrigued by the image of the young woman with the tennis racket over her head. 

Did someone just brain her with it, or did she brain herself? Or is this how you listened to those magical broadcasts, clamping this weird-looking gizmo over your head?

''Horse'' for the Tandy MC-10

WARNING: damaged videotape!

Primestar Channel Surfing March 19, 1997 (Damaged Videotape)

Dear Blank: the death of the letter and the human soul

For thirty years of my life, I was a prodigious letter-writer, but not now. I just don't do it any more, nor do I know anyone who does. So what's the difference? Emailing is just the same, isn't it?

No, it isn't. It's not even close.

My letters would run to ten or twelves pages, handwritten in coloured ink on funky stationery so my personal "vibe" was thick on them, and went deep into my life and the lives of those around me. When my correspondent answered, the envelopes were always fat, and my heart beat a little faster when I opened them. They were a little bit of Christmas morning in a humdrum day.

My emails are the usual hi, how are you doing, when should we meet for coffee? They are news bites and have nothing to do with how I feel.

The letters - they're gone, and, I think, gone forever. This is after they were humankind's main means of communication over distance for hundreds of years. When has anyone noticed, let alone grieved this loss? Doesn't anybody care? Does anyone pick through old emails, inhale the scent of them, notice how time has made them yellow, crackly and dry?

I've felt a sort of smothered, shameful sense of irrevocable loss about this, because after all, who misses letters, that dinosaur means of communication? It's embarrassing even to admit it. Who even writes them except Grandmas with Alzheimer's who don't know the first thing about computers? It's almost as bad as printing out your photographs and keeping them in a book.

Why don't I text? Why aren't I on Twitter? For God's sake, isn't it a better, quicker, more efficient form of communication than stodgy old email, which is now the dinosaur method of "keeping in touch"?

I feel a smothered shame because I feel left behind, but I am left behind because I don't want to go. Fuck it! It means nothing to me. The blog is important because it's my last means of self-expression, but I know my total of views is small (with a few bizarre exceptions that I still don't understand). I don't write for "likes" or hits or to be popular, but because if I don't write, I begin to die inside.

There follows a small excerpt from a book I intend to read, if I can step off the merry-go-round of my own life for long enough. I did not even think of it as a merry-go-round (sometimes, I admit, it is an ugly-go-round) until I began to think on the things Rebecca Solnit describes here.

Since the Amazon page for her book has a "Look Inside!" feature which gives away hundreds and hundreds of her words, I think I can justify quoting her here. They are but small excerpts from a chapter called We're Breaking Up, but all of them ring true for me. They express a vague uneasiness that never quite leaves me.

I too keep a blur going to partially erase or at least obscure my emotional pain. But until this moment, at least part of me assumed I was the only one who did this. Malignant uniqueness is the malady of the era. In a time when everyone is supposedly connected as never before, there is a profound sense of isolation.

Or at least, I think there is. Maybe I'm the only one.

https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Trouble-Spaciousness-Rebecca-Solnit/dp/1595347534?ie=UTF8&tag=braipick-20

On or around June 1995, human character changed again. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound — and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the Internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier. News came in three flavors — radio, television, print — and at appointed hours. Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning.

Those mail and newspaper deliveries punctuated the day like church bells. You read the paper over breakfast. If there were developments you heard about them on the evening news or in the next day’s paper. You listened to the news when it was broadcast, since there was no other way to hear it. A great many people relied on the same sources of news, so when they discussed current events they did it under the overarching sky of the same general reality. Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A few hours wasn’t such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people, or your trivia.

The bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common. I would read the paper while listening to the radio, but I wouldn’t check my mail while updating my status while checking the news sites while talking on the phone. Phones were wired to the wall, or if they were cordless, they were still housebound. The sound quality was usually good. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. The general assumption was that when you were on the phone, that’s all you were.

Letters morphed into emails, and for a long time emails had all the depth and complexity of letters. They were a beautiful new form that spliced together the intimacy of what you might write from the heart with the speed of telegraphs. Then emails deteriorated into something more like text messages… Text messages were bound by the limits of telegrams — the state-of-the-art technology of the 1840s — and were almost as awkward to punch out. Soon phone calls were made mostly on mobile phones, whose sound quality is mediocre and prone to failure altogether (“you’re breaking up” or “we’re breaking up” is the cry of our time) even when one or both speakers aren’t multitasking. Communication began to dwindle into peremptory practical phrases and fragments, while the niceties of spelling, grammar, and punctuation were put aside, along with the more lyrical and profound possibilities. Communication between two people often turned into group chatter: you told all your Facebook friends or Twitter followers how you felt, and followed the popularity of your post or tweet. Your life had ratings.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.


It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common.

A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It’s an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind.


I think it is for a quality of time we no longer have, and that is hard to name and harder to imagine reclaiming. My time does not come in large, focused blocks, but in fragments and shards. The fault is my own, arguably, but it’s yours too — it’s the fault of everyone I know who rarely finds herself or himself with uninterrupted hours. We’re shattered. We’re breaking up.

It’s hard, now, to be with someone else wholly, uninterruptedly, and it’s hard to be truly alone. The fine art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or musing, or introspection, or simply moments of being, was part of what happened when you walked from here to there, alone, or stared out the train window, or contemplated the road, but the new technologies have flooded those open spaces. Space for free thought is routinely regarded as a void and filled up with sounds and distractions.


I watched in horror a promotional video for these glasses (Google Glass) that showed how your whole field of vision of the real world could become a screen on which reminder messages spring up. The video portrayed the lifestyle of a hip female Brooklynite whose Google glasses toss Hello Kitty-style pastel data bubbles at her from the moment she gets up. None of the information the glasses thrust into her field of vision is crucial. It’s all optional, based on the assumptions that our lives require lots of management and that being managerial is our highest goal. Is it?

I forget practical stuff all the time, but I also forget to look at the distance and contemplate the essential mysteries of the universe and the oneness of all things. A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone’s trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.


It is a slow-everything movement in need of a manifesto that would explain what vinyl records and homemade bread have in common. We won’t overthrow corporations by knitting — but understanding the pleasures of knitting or weeding or making pickles might articulate the value of that world outside electronic chatter and distraction, and inside a more stately sense of time.

Getting out of [the rabbit hole of total immersion in the networked world] is about slowness and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labor practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farmworkers. It’s an attempt to put the world back together again, in its materials but also its time and labor. It’s both laughably small and heroically ambitious.


POSTSCRIPT. (Is that one word or two?). There may be quite a few postscripts here. Let me tell you about a longstanding friendship that broke up  - not easily, but extremely painfully. And it had to do with the issues raised by this piece of writing: in particular, modes of communication and how they can dramatically affect its content.

There were a lot of problems in this friendship, though for years I had thought of her as my best friend. No doubt some of them had to do with the uneasy transfer from written letter to email. She lived far away, though our connection first began when she lived here. Letters were our preferred method of contact for at least ten years, but like everyone else, at some point we made the switch. What happened was a gradual shift: there were fewer and fewer emails from her, though I continued to send her long, personal ones while hers became increasingly mundane. I felt as if I was running back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net, a pattern I loathe, and which she used to heavily criticize in others.

It wasn't just impoverished content. I couldn't see her handwriting any more. Her handwriting clued me in as to how she was really feeling. (By the way, many schools are no longer teaching cursive writing to children. Why, when they won't be using it for anything?) Pasting on a link to an interesting article just isn't the same as tearing pages out of a magazine and scribbling all over them, marking them up with circles and arrows, comments, criticisms, and exclamation marks. Sending these chunks of paper was fun, but receiving them was a delight.

Then her emails became so spaced-apart that communication had virtually ceased. Occasionally she phoned to try to catch up, and her conversation took the form of, "And how is - " (Bill, my kids, the grandkids, the cat, even my psychiatrist!). Though asking after people is seen as the hallmark of politeness and a splendid way to get people talking about their favorite subject (themselves), it isn't. That's a crock. It's what we used to call in the '60s a "copout", a way of ducking out of any sort of self-revelation, not revealing anything that could create a dangerous vulnerability.

Was she playing it safe? Had she given up? How should I know? She was only my best friend, and she wasn't giving me any clues.

Meantime, her increasingly infrequent but sometimes breathtakingly long emails went from mundane to ranty. These came as huge blocks of tiny flyspeck print with no paragraph breaks (and most people seem to have forgotten paragraph breaks exist). I had to literally copy and paste them and enlarge them in another program so I could make them out.

She lived in a small town in the Bible Belt of Alberta, and increasingly felt hemmed in by what I like to call "small town small minds". But a kind of paranoia was entering the one-sided discourse (for I could not reply in kind - there was a sort of abyss between us now, and I was growing tired of trying to reach across it). Some of them were downright shocking in their sense of persecution, and her sour attitude towards her husband made me wince. She was treating him like a burden she carried with martyrish glory. Surely if she stayed with him, when she really didn't want to, it made her a good person?

She began to obsessively write about her search for an apartment in Vancouver or, perhaps, Saskatoon. An apartment? Yes, she was going on Kajiji every day to hunt for a place to live (which amazed me, because her husband was chronically ill with Parkinson's and she had vowed in an act of total selflessness never to leave him). She was prone to saying things like, "We'll be here another fifteen or twenty years. Or maybe less," in a manner which evoked making marks on stone walls to measure time until her release.

When I figured out what she really meant, it shocked me. Her "release", the thing she was counting down for, was obviously widowhood, something which springs the trap for many unhappily married women.

Finally, I had had enough. I started an email asking her if she and her husband would witness our passport applications, but then it all came flooding out of me: what is going ON here? Are you leaving Sam, or what? Why are you spending hours going on Kajiji every day?  Are you going off on your own, and where are you moving to? Why do you keep saying you'd never even think of leaving him if you're making such definite plans? Does he even know you're thinking of leaving him? 

Then, at the last second, realizing I couldn't send all this stuff and that I'd regret it later, I deleted it and stuck to the request for witnessing our passports.  Shortly thereafter, I received a reply: "Hi, Margaret! I decided I'd expedite things by answering this. Sure, we'd be happy to do that. Sam."

I had come within a hair's breadth of blowing their marriage apart. Or had I? Perhaps he alreadyknew that she was thinking of leaving him - but I didn't think so. It would be the worst kind of news, and I would be the inadvertent messenger, reviled by both of them. But then I was hit with another shock. I didn't know if this was an isolated event, or if he was reading all her emails. Just mine? Or everyone's? For how long? Monitoring email generally doesn't happen unless a spouse is "checking up", suspicious about something. It is not a natural state of affairs.

At any rate, I was furious. Livid! I never wanted to be in that position again, risking having sensitive and highly confidential information disclosed to the wrong person. In fact, I decided I would never use email with her again. Obviously, it wasn't safe.

But she didn't get it, at all, and had absolutely no idea why I was so upset. "He was just trying to expedite things," she said in her very short paper letter, meaning (I assume) she was OK with what he was doing. Or just wanted to stay out of trouble? When I told her what nearly happened, about how I had nearly blown her secret, she had a sort of bland non-reaction. I didn't understand this at all. Did our friendship not mean anything to her now? And what about her marriage? I didn't even want to go there.

I just had the thought right now, as I contemplate the shift between letter-writing and emailing, that never by the farthest stretch of the imagination would Sam have seen one of her letters from me sitting on the table, ripped it open, read it, then answered it "to expedite things".  It just wouldn't happen. Why? It would be seen as a grave violation of privacy, at best unthinkably rude and at worst, creepy and disgusting.

It's like someone rifling through my purse, or upending its contents on the floor and pawing through it, pocketing this and that.

What has happened to privacy in 2016? Do boundaries exist? We casually speak for each other, as if we are doing the other person a "favour". Do we think about the violation of ripping open another person's thoughts and feelings? In my paper letter (which I assumed Sam would not read ), I told  her I felt too frustrated by the longstanding deterioration of meaningful communication between us to carry on with the friendship.

There was a stony silence, and I am sure she withdrew and felt deeply hurt. I had been horribly, monstrously cruel to her, for no reason! She likely believed she had played no part in this at all.

I don't know to what degree the dramatic change in our mode of communication (from letters to email) led to the drying up of our friendship. I don't even know exactly when the change happened. But it can't change back. I don't know what I learned from it, either. Time can't be turned back, we can't start writing with quill pens again. I don't even want to. A few years ago I began keeping my journal on the computer, and it is heaven - no dusty binders, ink blobs, pens running out.

But I understand Rebecca Solnit when she writes about the yearning to return to something real. She mentions knitting in particular. An ephemeral thing, and yet it produces a result, something useful or fun. I have never been more attached to my writing, or less restricted. Something is there, some sense of something growing almost organically. I can't say what it is or why it is there, but it is one of the reasons I sit up in bed, pull out my earplugs and peel off my eye mask, and start my day.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!