Monday, January 8, 2001

 

2:24 a.m. I have to wonder, sometimes, why I stay up so late ... just to write this piece. What in the world am I thinking? What am I doing it for? Sometimes I wonder, and sometimes I get the answer.

Tonight, for instance. No topics were presenting themselves in any sane manner. So, I continued on about the business, kept on with the task at hand. I had taken all the floppy disks that I own out of their various containers and I had counted them up. There are 648 of them.

The drawer where I want to store them will only hold, wouldn't you know it -- 587. I measured and counted, just to make sure. So, a conundrum.

Whenever I have a conundrum (or an obstacle, or a bump in the road to glory) I like to step away from the problem and ponder it while I do something else. So, I baked a loaf of craison-cinnamon bread and thought about the disks and the evening progressed as per.

These are the reasons that I often don't have a topic. I'm usually doing things that are so amazingly low-level that they hardly tickle the meter on any known scale of importance. But, these are the things that I do. Tonight I'm organizing my floppy disks because I have to find some old material and see if I can save it.

I already have three collections of media that are obsolete: five-and-a-half-inch floppies, optical disks, and Syquest cartridges. They are all in a bottom drawer now and they might as well be ancient scrolls in a forgotten language of primitive hieroglyphs for all the help they are to me.

Anyway, the hours are ticking by and I'm stacking my colorful floppies into neat piles, based on a variety of criteria. Still no topic, but I did take a break and smeared a slice of fresh bread with cherry butter about an hour ago. I've also been listening to the radio because I'm still mechanically scanning, in case I don't find the files I'm looking for on the floppies.

And wouldn't you know it -- the radio show is talking about (Western, Christian) people who suddenly take up (Eastern, Hindi) yoga. I'm only half-listening because I'm doing many things at once ... and then the next program comes on and the lady is talking about ... Holy Communion and how it relates to the chakras ... and I realize that I've got just the right photo in my collection that I haven't used yet, so there you are -- I'm partway closer to a bona fide topic.

And one of the commentators suggested that we should -- right this moment -- think about the hidden meaning behind our actions. What are you *really* doing right now? Hmmmm. Deep thoughts. Momentary pause in the clacking and stacking of plastic disks.

Which is one of the main things I absolutely love about floppy disks. The sound they make when you stack them up. That, plus the wonderful colors they come in. And I also like to move that window back and forth and look at the actual disk itself and I think: how in the world did they ever figure that my words and my photos could be reduced to ones and zeros and then vibrated into electrical impulses right onto that shiny surface?

And that's when I realized that what I'm really doing here, at nearly three o'clock in the morning, is waiting for a certain kind of electric communion ... when thoughts take solid form and travel from body to body.

Stretching it, you say?

Maybe -- but if you saw the sorry little stack of photos I've got to choose from, you'll be glad I chose this one. She's a pretty little girl on her First Communion day and she's the soul of innocence and sweetness and pride. She represents something I haven't been able to articulate until now. She let me take her picture, even though I was just walking by.

That is what is meant by grace.