Disconnections

Because of the invasion of our office network by this or something like it, we had Life Without Computing today at the office; which is pretty notable considering that the company's business involves, well, that Internet thingy. We arrived to printed notices announcing that we Should Not Be Alarmed to find various mysterious stickers adorning our monitors -- this had all the reasssuring power of a John Ashcroft "high alertness" press conference. All the bad things, we were told, had been stomped to death in the night, we were assured, and only those whose computers had been marked with a big red A needed to be shunned by the township. But be alert!

The more keen-eyed among us were alerted a few hours later by the fact that sending an email was a process that executed with a disturbing langour. This phenomenon spread to other applications -- windows closed and opened in an insolently leisurely fashion, like teenagers shuffling lethargically to class when an ineffictive hall monitor appears. And then it all stopped. The plugs had been pulled. No network for the kids, we were told, for the rest of the day. The normal humming quiet of a plugged-in workplace erupted in verbal back-and-forth. Programmers who hadn't been seen away from their desks in weeks began congregating in knots, leaning together for mutual support.

We mention this because it kept us from our promise to write something earlier, something about the way that running in the park in a cloud-shadowed Spring dusk is a transporting event that takes us to the landscape of our dreamlife. Something about how the newly restored boathouse, lit up with floodlights, is more ghostly and ominous than it was as a deserted semi-ruin. How the little black dog that darts in pursuit of an invisible stick, when seen out of the corner of peripheral vision, conjures the dream-dogs of our late childhood, murder-missiles that would suddenly appear in the midst of an otherwise low-level anxiety scenario, streaking toward us out of that place on the edge of vision, sudden wolf scattering the soul's sheep.

Something about how a pink dogwood plays a neon tune in the strange greening of the park at night, and its a head full of oxygen that lets you hear it. Something about how it doesn't make any sense at all, but some Belle and Sebastian songs actually work okay for when you're running, and who'd have guessed?

Posted by BT at May 02, 2002 11:55 PM