The only thing I thought about Apple today was that I don't think much about Apple. I don't actively participate in the Apple fanatic's world. I just drove up to Raleigh one day, and shopped at the Apple store, but i can't exactly plead innocent to being an Apple fan. I'm not a boy for one thing. I don't own the gear required to call myself a fanboi. I have a Mac Mini and a 20" Cinema Display monitor, and that's about it. No Ipod or iPhone. How can anyone be an Apple fanboi without constantly buying Apple's latest gadgets?
It's not gadgets I don't like, it's telephones and recorded music in general. I've never owned a cell phone of any kind. It's not cell phones per se, I just don't like communicating that way. the only music CD I own, and it's not on my computer, is Barber's Adagio For Strings. It was a gift. I keep it in my car, and play it in honor of the person who gave it to me once a year or so. Listening to music to alleviate the histrionics of commuting ruined recorded music for me. I associated the music I played to distract myself with the tension of the traffic. I can't listen to Beethoven anymore without it jacking me up like being caught in an unending traffic jam, honking horns and all. Sorry, iTunes, other people's music just ain't my ticket to ride.
I play music. I spend hours every day playing or practicing on a digital keyboard that imitates a grand piano real good, and it never needs tuning (That's how I like my computers. They just work.). To me, it's just a matter of time. I only got so much of it to spend with music. i got other fish to fry. I can either listen to recordings of other people play music when I'm not there in first person, or play my own music when I am inside myself in first person.
Being online all the time is more about DSL than me constantly participating online. The MacIntosh writing instrument I'm using is connected to the internet by design, and it's connected to the internet whether I'm sitting at my new aluminum keyboard or no. My outrageously expensive internet account with my ISP is what keeps me connected 24/7, even if I'm not logged on. If I boot up my computer, I'm online, but all I'm really doing is using an instrument that's connected to the internet all the time whether I use it or not. It's just there. Sorta like my stove or microwave oven. When I wanna use them to cook something, they're plugged in, and ready to go.
My Mac Mini is not waiting for me to get through typing and hit the Publish button. Nothing's written in stone about exactly when I might do that. I actually enjoy editing my own compositions, although I probably do a piss poor job of it. Sometime it takes hours to get it just so. I don't realize it as it happens. Time flies. I dreamed of this coming true. As Sartre establishes in Being And Nothingness, waiting requires a fixed event to occur or your inactivity is called something else besides waiting.
My approach to participating online is a haphazardous affair. Back in the pre-digital days I sat at a type writer for hours just like i sit at my computer now. It's the computer that's online, and I'm using it in the same way I would if it were a typewriter. I use TextEdit straight outta the box. I'm addicted to writing, not to being to online. I have been using some composition tool or the other to capture drifting thoughts for sixty years. The biggest difference between when I used a typewriter to compose words and now, is having a choice of search engines to get the information I need to write without going to the Public Libraries and playing nice.
The Mac Classic was the first computer I owned, but it wasn't the first computer I used. My brother forced me to use a Radio Shack TS-80 he brought over and demanded that I realize the superiority of using a computer as a writing instrument. I'm not kidding. The only reason I bought a computer was to replace an electric typewriter. I hadn't had the typewriter long when my brother tricked me into finding out about computers. I bought a typewriter to replace my leaky fountain pens, and fountain pens to replace No.2 pencils. I capture drifting thoughts by using words to write them down. That way, my abstract ideations can't disappear like vaporware.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
