Saturday, February 17, 2001

 

12:17 a.m. I've been working, on and off, on a whole new system set-up on my old machine. It's a slight upgrade, from 8.1 to 8.6, but it wall allow me to use the newer Photoshop with the nifty sub-program of Imageready, and eventually ... you'll know all about it here because once I figure it out (with the help of my own private computer guru) there will be some kind of nifty rollover or other accomplished popup or blur here and there on these pages.

Meanwhile, I wanted to show you my new desktop. Isn't it just the cutest? It's got a sort of "Where's Waldo?" feel about it, with my ten desktop files cleverly folded into the photo.

Some are well-nigh invisible, if I may say so myself. I did experiment a while ago with a little bit of shareware that promised to remove the labels entirely, but that didn't work out. For now, my files are named: "., .., ..., ...., etc., except for the trash and a file named docs.

Ah, yes. Some days there' s a lot of heavy lifting around here, I tell you that.

I don't know how long I'm going to keep a photo up on my desktop, however. It's sort of strange to me. Makes my screen feel less solid. Plus, whatever photo I choose eventually becomes sort of an emotional sucking hole after a while.

It starts out ok, and I love seeing a photo spread all the way across the screen ... and the first few times I look at it I like it the way I liked it the first time I photographed it ... but then ... the deeper, secondary emotions that actually saturate everything begin to seep to the surface and I start to get deeper and stronger feelings ...

... in the matter of this photo, I begin to think of the coldness of the water and how foreign it would feel to fall into it ... how much I notice that the sun isn't shining .... how expensive the houses on the canals are ... and how could the neighborhood be friendly when everyone there is in more than a million dollars' worth of debt ... and on and on.

Earlier I had a photo of one of the walls of my living room and after a day with it, I began to feel unbelievably claustrophobic and trapped. I conclude, therefore, that photos are made to be glanced at, not lived with.

And computer monitors should maybe be flat, one-dimensional surfaces upon which files are scattered. I've had a lined, yellow-legal-pad design for a long time and that was nice and restful. Ditto the pale bulletin board. Flat is the key.

Actually, the strangest scene I've ever had for a desktop was one of the old gray and white landscapes of Mars. The one with the "face" on it. Talk about cold. Talk about forlorn. Talk about lonely in the middle of the night ...

Another one I want to try is to photograph the scene I would see right behind the monitor if the monitor wasn't there. Get it? That would be kind of cool, actually, because if you can get the size right, you can pretty much hang your icons in thin air, so to speak.

Virtual thin air. Thin air once removed, reality mocked and repackaged, thus giving you a po-mo-nitor, if you want to be that way about it.

And so goes another Saturday night from the desktop of another citizen of the imaginary world we call here and now.