❧
It's almost nine o'clock in the morning and the temperature is forty eight degrees (8.889° C). It's the second really cool morning after the record-setting heat of last summer. In a month or so I'll wish it were as warm as forty eight degrees, but presently it's like the dead of winter to me. I put on long pants and imitation sheep's wool boots to stay warm.
Two or three nights ago I was preying for the temperature to drop below 70° and the humidity in the air to dry out enough for me to stop sweating and fall off to sleep comfortably. It reminds me of the group of Haitians that worked at the same job site as me. They showed up for work in sweaters and coats when the morning temperature was 72° in south Florida.
The ambient temperatures in Haiti don't rise and fall that much throughout the year. The Haitian's bodies don't have to adjust to big jumps or falls in the average temperature there. I don't know the actual figures in Haiti, but in the Amazon River basin in Brazil along the Equator, the temperature varies only +/- 2° around the 90° mark, 365 days a year. Thus, the temperature there doesn't get higher than 92° nor lower than 88°
It almost seems quaint now to remember how I loved taking Geography courses to claim the money I got to live on from the GI Bill. I had to be a full-time student to get the money, so I filled up my schedule with lots of courses that weren't required for a degree, but resonated with my innate curiosity.
The quaint aspect of it is that what I liked about the Geography courses is they showed a lot of films about exotic places they also lectured about. That was a sort of unique opportunity at the time. First to have the time to do it provided by the GI Bill, and to have the film technology around needed to see the film.
It was film on a reel. I'm trying to describe what might be called the "old days" to a younger crowd, but my point is that I'm not recalling the old days for nostalgic purposes, but to describe how I had to pay to go to an institution to view these types of images rather than Googling them up at my leisure on YouTube.
I have seen many more videos somewhere on the World Wide Web than I ever saw in a formal educational institute. With the near truth being that I've probably viewed more videos in the last six months via the internet than I ever saw in any of the schools I attended.
The big deal about that is that I saw them by indulging whimsy at full face value. Who hasn't spent hours following one link after the other to satisfy some inelegant urge operating under a pseudonym just as mysterious as their own fake handle?
Maybe a lot of people haven't. How would I know? I bought my first computer in 1988, and didn't get an internet account until around four years later. I was really ready to sign up when some local investors set up an ISP with a local telephone number. I've said all along that I was the thirtieth person to sign up, but I could have made all that up.
I do remember that what I bought into wasn't all worked out yet. The internet browser hadn't been invented yet, and the initial "stacks" we used to log on were primitive and the connections were totally unreliable. I don't recall the name of those "stacks", but it was a semi-standard protocol that thirteen year olds could delete a connection just for fun and games.
The one thing Microsoft did back then that still impresses me was to build a reliable stack of protocols for staying connected to the internet. Before Windows 95, staying connected was a crapshoot even if you were a natural born nerd who sorta knew what you were doing.
Windows is an okay operating system unless you log on to the internet. Being online with Windows, for me, caused me to feel as though I was spending more time trying to keep my rig secure than I was doing what I got on the internet for. I switched back to Mac, and haven't had to deal with that crap again. Ever. Not once since '03.
It gets real interesting to speculate on how ordinary people expressing their curiosity by following interesting links on the internet to some satisfactory conclusion.
I seem to have been a religious nut most of my life, and finding out why I've been a religious nut might have been impossible if I hadn't been able to view all the documents from all over the world from the same seat I'm seated presently.
Sorry I write such long sentences. It ain't like I'm writing the All American Novel. I'm tracing links in my own memory banks in pretty much the same way I go from web site to web site following the links the web sites I visit provide me with. That's another way of saying I try to capture drifting thoughts.
Following the links in my own private world as if it were literally the internet is something I've been training myself to do for forty years before the internet was invented. It's exactly the behavior required to do occult readings. That's what I had to learn to do to read palms, in the past.
I followed the anchors I've abstractly established by redundancy and repetition, and then say-id what I "saw" there to the person I held hands with. By following the anchors I previously created I produced a murky version of a Google Results page as my rap that considered magic and populism to make the trailer park queens as openly giddy as school girls.
I was a smelly bum back then. What kind of clients did ya expect me to have? The Queen of England? '-)
❦
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.
