Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

It started that August week when it was in the mid-90s and your thoughts were filled with ice cream and sprinkler-jumping and parades and alpenglow at 10 pm.  Then a glistening in the corner of the eye, and a sudden facefull of filament when you turn a corner.  You swear you heard it snapsnapsnap as your bumbling offhandedly destroyed one of nature’s most remarkable edifices, a moment of guilt followed by the notion that you’ve helped evolution favor arachnids with a better sense of urban design and seasonal decency.

Those early August web adopters have outlasted your first offended sense of denial, and they and their silk-spinning brethren have burgeoned into a dewy morning gauntlet to run between the front door and the car.  Fall is now implacably here, in the chill underlying every warm zephyr, in the startling darkness if you dawdle too long after work before heading for the gym, in the fact that bowl matchups are already 80% set.

There’s a vigorous fall schedule of rehearsals and concerts and work projects, and your tribal back-to-school urgency reluctantly craves this renewed bustle of activity just as the weather moderates enough to encourage it. However, the memory of summer still lingers, like that girl at the pool who said, “Hi” and asked your name and you were sure she’d be there tomorrow so you played it cool.  And now the pool is closed, the lifeguard chairs of whistled admonition are empty and silent and the inviting chlorinated depths have given way to canyons of yawning stuccoed dessication.

One more weekend with the Keens, then it’s time to remember how to layer your polypro tops.

(Click on image to enlarge)

I had a little automotive adventure in June that went something like this: I was driving home from a client’s on Aurora Avenue when someone came to a dead stop in front of me.  I stopped a couple of feet behind them, then tick…tick…tick…tick…BANG!  Someone plowed into me from behind, jamming me into the car in front of me (and involving two more cars ahead of us).

I’m pretty sure I didn’t lose consciousness; the first thing I remember after the impact is the acrid smell of the airbags and my reflection in the rear-view mirror with blood oozing out of my nose.  I was hyperventilating a little and chanting holyfuckholyfuckholyfuck.  This confirmed my long-held suspicion that I would die with a bolus of filthy language dripping off my tongue.  Unless you count what I was saying as prayer.  I’ve heard, and uttered, worse.

In the ensuing moments, the car would settle a bit, startling me with a feeling that I’d been hit again.  I tried my door, thinking perhaps I should get out of the car in case it caught fire, but the door wouldn’t budge.  I found my phone and thought about 911, but figured that would have already been massively covered, so I dialed Mrs. Perils:

“Well, I just got rear-ended on Aurora, so I think I’ll be a little late.”  It was a Tuesday, and we had band practice.
“So where are you?”
“Somewhere between the Battery Street tunnel and the Aurora Bridge.”
Then sirens started in the background and got louder and louder.  “I have to go now, the ambulance is here,” and I hung up.  In hindsight, I probably could have handled that better.

A first responder entered the car through the passenger door and started asking me about my injuries (my shins hurt a lot, my nose was tender and bleeding fitfully and my left side, where the shoulder strap dug in, hurt quite a bit).  He also asked a bunch of “who’s your daddy” questions to ascertain if I’d had a concussion.  Meanwhile, someone had managed to pry my driver’s-side door open with a screech and a clunk, and they proceeded to move me gingerly onto a gurney and strapped my limbs onto it, saying they were taking me to Harborview, the go-to trauma hospital in Washington.  I insisted that they grab my backpack from the car that contained my laptop and, within it, my entire terrestrial essence.  The first responder handed me off to the ambulance EMT, and thus began my VIP ride to Harborview.

As the ambulance started to roll, I received perhaps my most traumatic unpleasantness: they stuck an IV into my arm.  I hate needles, and I fucking hate IVs, but I wasn’t arguing.  They asked me again to recount my injuries (shins, abdominal pain, nose obviously malfunctioning), and posed more riddles designed to detect concussion: “How old are you?”  “63.  No, 62″ and, chagrined by my error, especially the rounding-up part, I recited my birthdate just to prove I had a tenuous grip on the facts.  “Oh, wow!”, he said, and I decided to take that as a compliment instead of a negative commentary on my condition.  Later, I learned that my accident had made the TV newsreels, with photos of my car that some of my co-workers were shocked to recognize, accompanied by something like the hospitalization of “a man in his 60s”.  Ouch, dude, that (sounds) harsh.

Meanwhile, I believe the EMTs were concerned that my legs might be broken, or at least need attention, and they broke out a pair of scissors and, without unstrapping me, cut off my jeans.  I was startled - it’s been a while since someone was that anxious to get my pants off.  Then, at some point, they were either making a CYA recording or talking to the Harborview ER people, and the guy said, “he’s mentating well.”  Mentating?  Did the collision somehow activate heretofore dormant ovaries?

We arrived at Harborview, and there was a flurry of activity as they attached monitors, asked more questions and determined where I was at on the live-or-die scale.  Then I spent long expanses of time just lying there.  Meanwhile, someone who identified herself as a “social worker” called Mrs. Perils and told her how and where I was.  In retrospect, this sounds like a great way to do things, rather than have a harried ER doc contact the either concerned or bereaved.  Mrs. Perils and our son then set out for Harborview.

Meanwhile, someone had come in and asked if I had health insurance, and I gave him my Group Health card and explained that auto insurance would most likely be paying the bill.  Not everyone must have gotten that memo, because a while later, a woman came by and said she was a “financial counselor”.  She understood that I did not have health insurance, and was there to discuss my options.  There I was, half-fucking-naked and bleeding from the shins and nose.  Wasn’t there a more appropriate time for this discussion?  I told her about the previous guy’s visit, and she moved on to more fruitful venues to apply her expertise.

A while later, I still was worried by my abdominal pain, more so than the stuff that was bleeding, and they decided to do a CT scan, and off I went to the Magic Donut.  They said it was a borderline call, but I was happy to know that I had no internal injuries, and I only evince a soft glow now when the lights are out.  About 5 1/2 hours after I arrived at the ER, they handed me a bottle of Ibuprofen and a tube of antibacterial ointment for my shins and sent me home.

I’m not sure why, but I just drove myself to a state of normalcy.  I missed a day and a half of work, and two days of trumpet practice (because I wasn’t sure how much pressure would start blood gushing out of my nose again).  But on the following Saturday I showed up and marched with Rainbow City Band in the Fremont Solstice Parade, we went to Ashland as scheduled, and my aches and pains have slowly dissipated.

Things are almost back to normal now. It turned out that my laptop got sorta-pretzeled while careening around my back seat.  It still booted, but the screen was toast.  I was able to extract my data and port it to a new Macbook.

(Click on image to enlarge)

I’ve missed a bunch of kayaking because my racks were sent with my 95 Accord to a junkyard 50 miles north of here that’s only open 8 - 5 M-F, and I haven’t been able to retrieve them.  After dithering for several weeks, I finally focused myself enough to find a car to buy on Craigslist, and so far I’m really happy with it.  For one thing, it’s the first car I’ve owned that has air conditioning that works.

So, did this experience involve any life-changing epiphanies?  Do I, as a result, cherish life, live every day as if it’s my last, post daily pictures of cute kittens to Facebook?  Sorta, but not really.  I find myself not following people as closely as I used to when I’m driving, and I simply will not answer my phone in the car.  But mostly, I’m the same driver and the same guy.  It is tempting to think that, now I’ve had my accident, I’m somehow innoculated and safe from harm for another 10 years or so, like a tetanus shot or a colonoscopy, but on a cerebral level I know the same thing could happen tomorrow.  Driving has become less of a virtual activity; I know now that I’m actually in the car, and not operating it from some remote location divorced from the physical consequences of mishaps.  Most of the time.

We spent a long weekend in Vancouver, BC, the main purpose of which was to play with Rainbow City Band in the Vancouver Pride Parade on Sunday.  I don’t know why it requires a road trip in order to give myself permission to read, but that’s how it seems to play out.  Anyway, I finished a book I’ve been pecking away at for about 3 weeks, only the third book I’ve finished all year.

It’s not the kind of book that I’d normally pick up and read, as I almost exclusively prefer modern fiction.  Last winter, however, I learned that the wife of someone I work with at one of my clients published a book about their honeymoon trip, a romantic little cruise in a snug little sailboat from, oh, Seattle, out into Puget Sound, meandering out the Strait of Juan de Fuca and along the Pacific Coast a ways.  Then a little farther: down to Mexico, Peru, and then across the Pacific to the South Seas, Asia, and wherever.  Just to get to know each other.

Curious, I read a few paragraphs at the Amazon site, and I found myself engaged in the tale as well as her lively writing style, and I downloaded it to my Kindle for Mac.

I’m a sea kayaker, and I’ve had to prepare for expeditions that required managing resources vs. time vs. cubic volume, so I was immediately intrigued by the magnitude of their undertaking.

Soon it became clear that this tale would be as much about the evolution of their relationship as it would about how you equip yourself to backpack across the Pacific, and I faced a dilemma that book clubs around the Pacific Northwest would not have to consider.  While the book clubs were deciding whom to root for in this relationship, I, who worked two doors down from the male protagonist, had to decide just how much “I” was “TMI”, and how much was necessary to abet a story that I by now really wanted to read.

At the outset, I felt a little skeeved out, like I was hanging around outside their bedroom window waiting for them to get naked, which might not be all that blameworthy if they were strangers.  But I ultimately found the tale of the journey so compelling that I plunged on.

The author said that at some point on the trip she was (re)reading Moby Dick, and that’s how I ended up approaching this book.  Melville alternated chapters between documentary descriptions of the technical aspects of whaling, and the epic story of Ahab and his mythic quest.  Most of us who have read Moby Dick only remember the essence of the mythic quest, and not how many gallons of oil can be rendered from a sperm whale.

And, whether she intended for me to or not, that’s how I approached this book.  It was interesting enough to read about how their relationship evolved in the salt-encrusted crucible of the Dragonfly.  But I often found myself in Moby Dick-mode, skimming over the Relationship stuff to learn just how the hell you cross the Pacific in a boat only a few orders of magnitude larger than the one I use to paddle around South Puget Sound for a few days.

That said, I enjoyed her depiction of the adventure of the voyage, how they related to fellow-travelers in other sailboats, the technical sailing concepts and her personal journey to mastering them, and what they did on land and the ways in which they connected with island inhabitants.

So now on the days I spend with this client, it’s interesting to try to parse how much I’m supposed to know about my co-worker from personal interaction with him, and how much I know from reading his wife’s book.  It would be an interesting exercise to read the tale from my coworker’s perspective.  Doubt that’s gonna happen.

The book is The Motion of the Ocean by Janna Cawrse Esarey.

A tsunami of subject matter since my last post has left me increasingly paralyzed, and I’ve stood on the beach pondering how to assimilate it all rather than the sensible thing, running like hell to higher ground.  For those who thought I died there on the beach, I survived, and as I stand here on higher ground, all those events that comprised the wave have receded with the tide of time.  And as I get back into practice, I hope not to use stuff like “tide of time”.

So, instead of trying to assimilate history, I’ll recap the current status quo, and attempt to plunge forward.

What’s not new:

• Still live at Chez Perils in Seattle, married to Mrs. Perils
• Still have the same jerk of a boss, working for my accounting/software consulting company, while having to supervise a lazy and mendacious employee.
•  Still playing my trumpet enthusiastically in the Rainbow City Band
• Still sea kayaking when I can

What’s new:

• I’m no longer trekking to Milwaukee once a month due to the effect of the economic downturn on my client.  That presented a certain amount of economic disruption and a large amount of psychological upheaval as the days stretched on uninterrupted by flying and hotels and bad dietary choices on the road.  I’d been operating on that schedule for 11 years.  After a couple months, however, the subliminal stress that I had so artfully sublimated slaked off, and I quit checking my frequent-flyer mileage account every day, quit logging in to Flyertalk every day, put my suitcase into the closet and began to relish the unbroken chain of weekends stretching into the future.
• I’ve become a Facebook maven, flinging bon mots and Liking and commenting inappropriately, and to an extent participation in that community has supplanted the desire to express myself that blogging used to fulfill.  I’m not unhappy that I participate, nor do I think that it fulfills all the dark predictions that its critics promulgate.  I enjoy the effortless contact across geography and my disparate constituency: kayaking people, band people, blogging people, Ohio State people, book club people, family (they’re people, too, but “family people” kinda clunks).  I find the immediate feedback to posts, comments and even Likes gratifying, and that was something that I always wished I could generate here at Perils.  But I also find that the Facebook model is not conducive to rolling out prose like I enjoy doing here.  And that’s a blessing to the 95% of my Facebook crowd that simply Likes me and only wants me to Like them.

Can’t think of much else that’s New, and I challenged myself to get a post off in under an hour, so that’s it for this post.  Watch this space.

Well, the rest of it, anyway, since my last post derived from our Ashland trip.  Most years, the Ashland trip in late June IS my summer vacation, because I’m forced to plan it in November; similarly ambitious ventures for the rest of the summer remain figments of my imagination due to lack of focus and total inability to plan, and Labor Day hits me like a wrong-way drunk on the interstate.

This summer, however, events contrived to afford me several additional adventures.  That’s owing in no small part to the fact that I’m not flying to Milwaukee a week a month any more, due to a persistent downturn in my client’s business.  I’d been making that trek for the last 11 or 12 years, and the rhythm and routine of travel, the Road Warrior’s mentality, has been a huge part of my life.  That monthly trip would pretty much take out two weekends, as I’d fly out on Sunday morning and land at SeaTac around midnight on Friday night.  I had become far too wrapped up in the Frequent Flyer mindset of whether I’d get upgraded, and scheming about how to squeeze in enough miles in a year (75k) to make Platinum, instead of lowly Gold (50k).  My last trip to Milwaukee was in December, and I haven’t checked into Flyertalk.com, where “elites” bitch endlessly about every little imagined indignity the airlines are visiting on them, in months.  If you’ve seen Up In The Air, you’ve gotten a whiff of that mindset.

I still work with my client remotely, and I can’t say I don’t miss that full week’s revenue, but so much stress has slaked off of my life this year since I don’t have to screw myself up to slog through TSA, and hole up in hotels furtively practicing my trumpet and making serially bad dietary decisions.  I’m Gold on Delta for the rest of the year, but I’m resigned to being mere Silver next year, and permanently consigned to steerage thereafter.

So, on to the rest of the summer.  One benefit of not traveling was that I got to participate fully in my band’s  marching season.  We played some really fun music, and played in parades in Seattle, Bellingham, Kirkland and Vancouver, BC.  The jewel in the marching season’s crown, however, was the wedding of two dear bandmates on a San Francisco-esque foggy August day in West Seattle.  We were commissioned to play the processional and recessional, but the wedding guests were digging it enough that we played a few more numbers, and I was grateful, as it was our last performance and I really didn’t want to let go of the summer’s music. The video begins with nieces of the brides waving rainbow streamers in lieu of carrying flowers. You might consider, in the future, why your wedding shouldn’t include a marching band. (password is “RCB” in caps):

(video here)

Check out the brides’ private moshpit as the Black-Eyed Peas recessional draws to a close.

I’m not a crier, generally, and I’ve probably attended fewer than 10 weddings.  My record is still clean, but it was very affecting to observe the joy of the brides, and their parents and families.  If possible, it was more moving to observe the couples in my band as the ceremony, so emblematic of their struggle - our struggle - progressed, sniffling, holding hands so tightly that their entwined arms evoked a metaphor of nothing so much as a wishbone.  Can you tell me with a straight face that marriage needs protection from people who yearn for it this fervently?

The brides still needed to drive to Iowa to become completely legal.  Fucking Iowa.

Well, what else did I do?  Oh, yeah, there was that 6-day, 5-night kayak-camping trip in Desolation Sound, BC.  I think it needs its own post. Watch this space (click to enlarge).

Mrs. Perils and I were sitting here imagining something we’re calling an “existential playlist” when we both thought of this song.  It’s a cover of a Led Zeppelin song, No Quarter, by a local band we used to stalk in the late 90s/early 2000s called Maktub.  It’s 8+ minutes.  Sit back, light something or pour something, and zone out:

I’m now at the age where “He lived a full life!” will roll glibly from the lips of my survivors, and as my shade ascends, descends or simply hangs in the viewing room like a bad smell, it won’t really have reason to protest.  Such high philosophy is noticeably absent when incidents occur on this side of the Great Divide such as the one on our hike on Friday.

We were walking a section of the Pacific Crest Trail in what is now the Soda Mountain Wilderness (thank you, Bill Clinton, for your 9th-inning National Monument designations) just southeast of Ashland that we’ve been on many times.  It winds through mature second-growth forest, breaking out into slide areas that afford gorgeous views, either west towards Ashland and Siskiyou Pass, or southeast to Mt. Shasta.

Due to heavy winter snows and below-normal temperatures throughout the spring (sound familiar?), nature is somewhat behind schedule, and we’ve been seeing wildflowers on our hikes that are usually burnt out and gone by the time we get here, and things everywhere are lush and green instead of the more accustomed brown and sere, and we were literally reveling in every step.

Until this one step.  The one with my right foot as I was leading us on the trail through moderate underbrush.  About a quarter-mile before, we’d flushed a pair of grouse, and been startled at the loud, low vibration of their wingbeat, so we were on alert as we proceeded the rest of the way through the meadow.

So when I heard a vibration and scuffle on that fateful footfall*, I wondered for a second if I’d disturbed a grousing grouse*.  Two more strides, and I heard Mrs. Perils’ maidenly exclamation…”holy fucking shit!“, I believe it was…as she leapt up onto a log well off the trail.  What she had seen was a western diamondback rattlesnake, about 1 1/2″ to 2″ in diameter and at least 4 feet long, just to the right of the trail where I had stepped.

We were both pretty shaken, and as we proceeded each ensuing step was as fearful as they had been euphoric before. We froze at every rustle in the undergrowth.  As I had on countless other hikes, I turned to Mrs. Perils and assured her, “It is only the wind, Gretel!”

We tried to remember what the current procedures were for dealing with a snake bite.  Back in the 70s, we’d been sold snakebite kits that had razor blades and suction devices for draining venom; we knew that this treatment had been discredited, but were fuzzy about current best practices.  We got to a clearing with a sumptuous view of Mt. Shasta, but our enjoyment was muted.  We had a cell phone signal, so we made our one Lifeline call to a client of mine whom I knew liked to search the internet, and he pretty much confirmed what we thought we had remembered: immobilize the limb, keep the bite below your heart, no tourniquet, etc.  Oh, and call 911.

Our hike was not on a loop trail, it was an out-and-back, so we would have to walk past that spot again on the way back to the car, which was 3 - 4 miles beyond it.  Rescue would have been a major undertaking.  (did I really say “undertaking”?).  We walked on about another mile or so, hoping that, given time, our reptilian interlocutor would decide to move to a different snack bar.  Ultimately, though, we had to turn around and head back. We found a couple of sticks to brandish, and walked warily.  We didn’t know exactly where the encounter had taken place, but knew the general vicinity, and tapped our sticks ahead like blind people as we walked through.

Once we knew for certain we were past the spot, we built up an absurd sense of euphoria the rest of the way, as if we had a map that showed for certain we’d passed the lair of the only dragon in the forest.

Here are some photos to show why a person would undertake (there it is again) a stroll into the forest (click image to enlarge):

More photos in a gallery here.

* I know I can write stuff like this because I’ve read some Barth recently

(Entrance to the Bowmer Theater)

We’re in Ashland, OR for our annual haj to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Once again, my mom has flown in from Toledo to attend with us, and once again, the weather is so far hot & sunny, such a change from the cool & overcast spring we’ve had in Seattle.

One big glitch: On the day before our departure, I received an email from the Festival that they’d discovered structural damage to a central beam in the large indoor Bowmer Theater, and that it would be closed indefinitely.  This was a pretty large deal, since 4 of our 8 plays were scheduled to be performed there:

• To Kill A Mockingbird
• Measure for Measure
• Imaginary Invalid (a Moliere)
• August: Osage County (a contemporary play by Tracy Letts set in small-town Oklahoma)

We were left with:

• Pirates of Penzance
• Love’s Labors Lost
• Henry IV, Part 2

all in the outdoor Elizabethan Theater, and:

• Julius Caesar

in the small indoor New Theater.

Since my mom was already in town, and we already had our airfare to and lodging in Ashland paid for, there was no thought of canceling.

As events progressed, the Festival devised a way to stage the canceled plays in the cavernous old Armory building just up Oak Street from our lodging, so we lined up in the street Tuesday afternoon to see if we could get a seat for To Kill A Mockingbird.  As it happened, there were plenty of seats inside, all on folding chairs in neat rows in a huge auditorium.  There was a certain sense of disenfranchisement, since I had bought front-row tickets for all of our plays last November in the members’ presale, and our seats in the Armory were more than halfway back.  Still, kudos to the Festival for going outside the box to deliver the product.  And, the Armory performances are free to anyone who held tickets to the original performances; we got our choice of cash refunds or vouchers for future performances of any play, this year or next.  I selected vouchers, since I have a glimmer in my eye about another trip down here later in the year, after they (hopefully) have re-opened the Bowmer.

To Kill A Mockingbird

I had never read the book, nor seen the movie, so this was my first introduction to the story.  The production in the Armory was done without costumes, props or stage sets.  It opened with the full cast on stage, sitting on folding chairs in a semicircle, with an adult incarnation of Scout narrating.  As she was reminiscing about that fateful summer, actors would rise from their chairs and create a flashback tableau of dramatic action, and the voice would pass from the adult narrator to a pre-adolescent Scout.

As the production progressed, the actors involved in dialogue used an area about 10′ by 10′ to represent their interactions, and their strength of delivery did a lot to overcome the lack of visual context.

The story itself has two major plotlines: the first, the depiction of the Finch family and the development of Atticus Finch’s character as a father and citizen; the second, the civic and legal developments leading to the trial and its outcome.  To begin to appreciate either, it’s necessary to be able to place yourself in Depression-era, small-town Alabama.  This is where the lack of scenery and the first-rate production values of the Festival is quite apparent.  The surfeit of family sagas and courtroom drama in the cinema and on the screen in the ensuing decades overwhelms this work taken in its components; it would make an ordinary episode of Law & Order.  It really needs to be viewed through its temporal and geographical context.

What gives the story its spark is the collision of these two plotlines: the precipitous ripping of the Finch family from its comfortable niche near the top of the town’s social foodchain and making them the embodiment of all its resentments, armed only with a nascent moral carapace; and the journey of Jem and Scout from a mostly passive and credulous acceptance of the world as viewed through Atticus’ lens, to the crescendo of lurid and unvarnished images that are thrust upon them.

This last thread, the passage of the kids from Atticus’ protection and control, is almost lost in the hurly-burly of the trial.  It begins with their unbidden, perhaps forbidden, foray to the jailhouse to stand with Atticus, and extends as they assert themselves (as invited guests) to view the trial from the black folks’ gallery.

I’m curious now to read the book and join the majority of the civilized world.  I’d like to see how Lee’s prose stands up to the expectations of its myth.  I’d also like to learn the elements of backstory necessarily excised from the play.

Here’s a podcast with all of our RCB 2011 marching music, recorded at band camp a couple of weeks ago.  The recording was made in a cavernous room with no acoustics, during our last session on Sunday, so lips are a bit tattered and the sound is what it is.  Still, I think you can tell how much fun we’re having with this.

The theme is Dance Party, and our music director tried to make selections from the last 4 decades:

Gonna Make You Sweat
Ladies’ Night
Holiday
I Gotta Feeling
Land of a Thousand Dances
Copacabana
Four Minutes
Soul Bossa Nova
YMCA
You Dropped A Bomb On Me
Hey, Baby

More about band camp later.

It took me a while to make the connection.  After several instances of being irritated because I couldn’t find a rubber band anywhere, I realized that it was the most significant effect of our cancelling home delivery of the Seattle Times last fall.  We would always carefully remove them from the rolled-up paper and deposit them in the junk drawer in our kitchen.  This particular act of frugality began in the 70s when we took the Seattle P-I, and continued when we reluctantly switched to the Times with the demise of the P-I.  I don’t believe I’ve ever bought rubber bands, and now I’m confronted starkly with the necessity.

I’ve been reading the Times and P-I online exclusively for several years, a circumstance which was probably abetted by my periodic business travels, and seldom handled the dead-tree version even when I was home.

We continued with the Times even after it forced the P-I out of their JOA agreement primarily because my MIL, who was living with us at the time, spent a lot of her morning reading it.  Also, Mrs. Perils preferred the paper version.  And I admit that reading a newspaper online is not the same experience.  It has its advantages: compact, available anywhere, searchable, RSS feeds, free; the major disadvantage is that its visual geography seems more limited.  The “paper” paper has things in the same places every day, available at a glance rather than a click-and-wait.  Two examples that come immediately to mind are sports statistics and comics.  Even though the paper comics have shrunk as my eyes need them bigger, you could still rake your eyes over the page and snag on your favorites fairly quickly; online, you have to click a drop-down menu, select, wait, expand, read, rinse, repeat for every individual comic.  I just don’t bother any more.  And, I have no idea what the baseball standings are, or who is still left in the NBA playoffs.

There are moments when I’m reading online when I feel a little guilty about hastening the unemployment of the earnest ink-stained wretches still toiling away within print journalism’s august perimeter.  I had a pang as well one day when some carriers were going door-to-door pretty much pleading with me to re-subscribe.  I’m not sure what economic model could successfully replace home delivery.  I’ve paid for online subscriptions before (WSJ), and would be open to paying a single fee to read newspapers online, sort of how AOL experimented with corralling content under a single portal in the 90s.  I’d be disappointed in, and would probably resist, having to subscribe to every paper I lit on in pursuit of news.

I also perceive a danger in the dismantling of the journalistic institution.  While we are flooded with a euphoric torrent of information, we as its wary consumer now need to do our own fact-checking, without the professional training to get it right.  On the other hand, we aren’t, as in prior times, being spoon-fed information by what is essentially an embedded member of the local oligarchy reluctant to step on the toes of its advertisers.  And then I’ll read one of the Times’ tortured anti-tax, anti-union editorials and I’ll think, nah, I can buy my own rubber bands.