So what did the rest of you kids get…?

Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. And that gun is in no way collector’s grade. I played with my toys and it shows on the ones I kept for memories. The cylinder on the little cap gun (it’s about half the size of a real single action Colt) barely turns anymore.

I still have two of my two boyhood rifles. One is a boy’s sized Winchester lever action replica that took the old cap rolls and had a trigger catch on the lever you could flip out so that every time you worked the lever action the gun fired. Somewhat like Chuck Conner’s was tricked in The Rifleman. The other is a Daisy 660, which wasn’t a BB gun, (I might shoot my eye out) but made a loud pop whenever you pulled the trigger via a strong spring loaded mechanism inside the gun. You cocked the spring via the lever action, but the spring in that thing is so darn strong that to this day I cannot work the lever holding the gun in my arms. A kid had to put the gun muzzle down on the ground and push the lever forward with all his weight to get it cocked. Which was probably how I discovered dirt clods made entirely satisfactory projectiles.

That was a different world. A kid could arm himself to the teeth back then and nobody gave it a second thought. Wish I still had my Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun….

…and my James Bond Attache Case…

That thing had tons of nifty finger candy. The code book had an invisible ink pen. The wallet with the fake money and passport came with little business cards…Bond’s cover was he worked for Universal Import/Export…that had 007 printed on them in a yellow ink that you couldn’t see when they were tucked in the wallet (note the translucent red plastic card holder). Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it was fun. The case itself took the standard roll caps. That’s because it was booby trapped. If you opened it with the wrong combination a cap would bang. It was an open question among us kids whether that was cooler then the Secret Sam attache case, which could shoot plastic bullets and had a real camera concealed inside you could snap pictures of people with surreptitiously. Or as surreptitiously as a nine year old kid walking around with an attache case could be.

In retrospect, you have to wonder about selling kids James Bond toys considering that your typical kid couldn’t get in to see the Bond movies back then because of the scant (by today’s standards) nudity. Being on television, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. couldn’t do that. But I guess you could sell kids James Bond guns so long as you didn’t sell them the sex that usually went along with the guns in the movies.

And then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…

Dig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…

They all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns.

I was walking in it again last night.  I’ve spent so much time in it now that I can almost draw you a complete set of floor plans.  I haven’t a clue what it means, other then what I already know about my hyper imaginative brain.

It’s an oldish rowhouse style house.  Not located here in Baltimore, but on some residential street of a town somewhere, possibly the main street.  The street has two-lanes, is tree lined and has on street parking.  But the house has a small driveway of crumbly asphalt and pebbles.  And it’s not attached to the homes on either side: it’s a stand-alone.  There is one like it a few blocks from where I live in Baltimore: an odd looking house that looks like it was meant to be part of a row and only one of them was built. 

It is narrow like a rowhouse, made of red brick and a stone basement.  It is two floors and a basement, which is only half underground in the front and walk-out in the back.  There is a small front porch that goes the entire width of the house.  The door is in the middle, between two tall windows.  There are stairs leading up to the porch on the side, not the front of the house.  There is a small grassy front lawn between the front of the house and the sidewalk.  You can’t see it from the front, but there is an odd little room jutting off the side of the basement, almost like an add-on.  The back yard is overgrown, but not hopeless.  The house needs some TLC, especially on the second floor, which is mostly vacant.  There is another odd little add-on room jutting off the back of the second floor.  There is a wooden shed of some kind in the back yard, right up against the rear property line.  I haven’t been in it yet.  The grassy-gravelly driveway goes all the way back to the ally behind the house.  There are trees lining it and an dilapidated wooden plank fence that blocks your view of the alley, except where the driveway pokes through.  You can drive all the way from the street out front to the alley in back…a straight shot, but bumpy.

The front door is made of wood and painted a dark green.  It has three small windows across the top and a simple brass door knocker.  Walking in, you find yourself in a room that goes almost the entire length of the house.  There is a kitchen along the left hand wall (as you walk in).  And oldish stove and sink and cabinets.  A row of small wooden framed windows runs over them, just high enough that you cannot look outside while you are working at the sink or stove, but enough of them that there is plenty of light to see by.  The floors are bare wood without even a few area rugs covering it.  There is a staircase in the middle of the room leading upstairs.  A couple small rooms in the back are for storage, and a small bathroom.

For some reason, the second floor spooks me.  Whenever I go up there I become very apprehensive.  Like the first floor, it is vacant.  There are two rooms in the front which I have yet to enter though the doors are open and they seem just as empty as the rest of the floor.  There is a large open area around the staircase.  In the back, is that odd little add-on room.  It is way more rickety then the rest of the house, and seems to have been slapped on by some previous owner who had little to no carpentry skills.  But it is the only room on that floor with anything going on inside of it.  You walk into it and find yourself in a room packed with tools.  Hand tools of all kinds are hanging from every available space on the walls.  There is a large table saw that seems ancient.  Likewise a band saw and both wood and metal lathes.  The floor is dark with soot and decades of grime.  There are only a couple of small windows letting light inside.  This was somebody’s workspace.  You can see parts of things that have been left uncompleted.  There is a doorway on the right, leading outside to what looks like a fire escape.  Next to the door, an ancient powerbox with switches and old style screw in fuses.  Old, cloth covered electrical wires run from the box, to various power tools, and bare overhead lights.

The basement is interesting.  Like the add-on room, it is full of tools.  But it seems more a storage area then a workshop.  There are old cardboard boxes full of parts for god knows what, and wooden shelves packed with…stuff…more small cardboard boxes full of hardware and small parts.  Metal poles go from the cement floor to the beams above to give the floor above support.  The sides of the basement are stone.  There is a doorway in the back leading out into the backyard.  But there is also a doorway in the right hand wall.  That door is always open.

Here’s were it gets really odd…at least so it seems to me.  That door should lead outside, since it’s against the right wall of the basement…but it doesn’t.  It leads instead to another room.  At first I didn’t know it was even there.  When I found it on one of my journeys through the house I was amazed.  Unlike the rest of the house, it seemed as if it was still being lived in.  Except it isn’t.  This is a house that I have bought in some strange recurring dreamscape I keep having.  That much I know.  The house is mine.  The previous owners are gone.  I’m not sure if I ever even met them but I think I didn’t.  I bought it from a real estate agent somewhere.  For some reason, this one room was never moved out of.  It was left as it was, almost as if the people who sold the house, whoever they were, didn’t even themselves know it was there.  I get the sense they never looked in the basement at all…or in that second floor workshop.

You walk through that door and find yourself in what looks like a middle aged man’s den.  It’s got a threadbare carpet, wooden paneling, and what looks like a small kitchenette in the back.  There is a fishtank on a stand against one wall, an old TV set sitting in a corner with a pair of rabbit ears on top.  There are a couple small book cases built into the walls with a few paperbacks and some magazines.  In the middle of the room is an old over-stuffed recliner chair, well broken in, that looks like it’s been there for decades, and, oddly, a small ottoman in front of it.  Next to the recliner is a small wire metal stand with a phone, an ashtray, an empty glass and a magazine.  There is a large window on the side opposite the door from the basement, and another door in the back leading out into the backyard.  Something that looks like an old space heater is under the window.  Next to it is a small table with a lamp on it.  Behind the TV set is a bookcase that has mostly a jumble of old knick-knacks on it, and a few books here and there that look as if they’ve never actually been read.

The room feels cozy, yet…weird.  Weird because it looks like its previous owner just got up and left and never came back and now I have acquired it just as it was.  The basement storage area and the second floor workshop have that same feeling too.  This room was somebody’s retreat from a hard days work, or maybe someplace they spent all their days in retirement.  Watching TV, reading the papers, fixing the random snack from the kitchenette and having the occasional smoke.  The phone is handy so either they had friends to talk to or just didn’t want to be bothered getting up to answer the phone.  I haven’t noticed if there is a remote.

I started having this recurring dreamhouse when I bought my little real-life rowhouse here in Baltimore’s Medfield neighborhood.  It couldn’t be more different.  For one thing, the dream house is a lot bigger.  For another, it’s way older.  My little rowhouse was built in 1953 and it’s only 1500 square feet.  At a guess, the recurring dream house is a 1920s artifact. 

Sometimes I don’t even have to visit the house for it to occupy my dreams.  Lately, my dreams about it are I’ve been in the middle of something and suddenly started worrying that I needed to go check on the house, because I hadn’t been there in a while.  In some of these dreams I’m still living in one of my old apartments and I’m doing this and that and suddenly I realize I haven’t checked on the house.  Sometimes the feeling rushes over me that if I don’t check on the house soon I might somehow loose possession of it.  Sometimes I find myself wondering what to do with the stuff in that odd basement room.  Actually, when that house enters a dream I’m having, I find myself wondering about what to do with that basement room frequently.  It’s very odd.

When I visit the house, I try to avoid going upstairs.  There is something about the upstairs part of that house, particularly in the front, not the back where the workshop is, that makes me very apprehensive.  I’m getting the creeps right now just recalling it.  The rest of the house doesn’t bother me so much, other then it clearly needs some TLC and I’m not sure I can fix it up all by myself.  But it seems like a cute house overall, with a lot of potential, and it has a nice yard around it with a really nice big old tree on the right hand side by the front near the street.  There’s a house something like it on Falls road a few blocks away.  One of these days I’ll post a picture of it so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about.

I’ve often heard of people having recurring dreams.  I have recurring dreamscapes.  This house is one of them that started happening recently.  I was there again last night…the first time in a while I’ve actually been in the house in one of my dreams about it.  I was checking the house over and wondering if I should get rid of any of the stuff in that basement room, or try to find its owner and see if he wants any of it.  Probably it was related to all the intensive house clearing I’m doing this week.  But when something keeps coming back in your dreams, you wonder what the significance of it is…if there isn’t something it’s trying to tell you.

Maybe I’m just a bit nuts.  You wonder sometimes about the line between creativity and craziness.  I have co-workers who insist they never dream.  I dream all the time, and most of it vividly. 

Andrew Sullivan ponders what Pope Ratzinger said…

You’ve read the press accounts in which the Pope allegedly spoke of protecting the rainforests from destruction in the same vein as protecting heterosexuals from homosexuality. The actual text, brought to us by Rocco, is more complex, but essentially argues that the forms of male and female as created by God can know of no complexity or variance.

Unlike…oh…rainforests.  One of the major reasons why the civilized world wants to protect them is that we don’t know and are no where near knowing the full extent of the bio-diversity there is in those things, let alone exactly how all the pieces all fit together to make a whole.  There is so much still waiting to be discovered, possibly so much those discoveries can provide to humanity in terms of curing sickness, feeding the hungry, and maintaining the environment of planet Earth.  The richness of the diversity of the rainforests is what people are calling on the world’s powers to preserve, and that is the categorical opposite of what authoritarian institutions like pope Ratzinger’s church want to do for the human race.  If the human race was the Amazon rainforest, Ratzinger would be bellyaching about the need to clear cut it, so he could put a Christmas tree farm in its place.

The book, Prayers For Bobby, has been made into a film starring Sigourney Weaver….

More Here…

I wonder how many folks who oppose doctor assisted suicide, also oppose letting doctors participate in executions…?

I may not loose much weight this holiday break but my little rowhouse sure is.  I haven’t tossed so much paper into the recycling bins in ages. 

I have this bad habit of saving magazines and periodicals.  Not everything I read, but stuff I think could be valuable later.  Like the software developer’s periodicals I read for example.  Journals from the few professional organizations I am a member of, such as The Association for Computer Machinery.  I tell myself there is reference material in these I may need later.  But the fact is it’s all time sensitive.  Most of the fifteen years of computer trade journals I have on my shelves I can safely toss away now, because it either references technology now that is completely out of date and orphaned, or is online where I can more easily get to what I’m looking for via the seach engines.

It’s not like I have stacks of magazines here at Casa del Garrett.  I hate clutter.  So they’re all tucked neatly into those cardboard periodical holders and labeled according to publication and date.  It’s amazing how much of that stuff you can throw out when you ask yourself if you’ve ever so much as touched it in the last ten years.  That came to about four-fifths of it. Then I ask myself how much of it is online anyway and that’s another four-fifths of what’s left.

I’ve saved some newspapers, some of them whole, from certain historical event days.  Like the day the first humans walked on the moon.  The day Nixon resigned.  The day the supreme court overturned Hardwick v. Bowers.  I have the front pages of all the local Washington D.C. newspapers the day gay folk rioted in San Francisco after Dan White got off with Voluntary Manslaughter.  I’ll post the front page of the Washington Star that day later. 

I have lots of old Advocates and other gay periodicals, journals and underground ‘zines from the early to late 1970s, when the movement for respect and equality was getting up some steam.  The optimism of those days is almost painful to read again.  Everyone just assumed that the gains made in the sexual revolution, and for racial equality and women’s rights would naturally translate into a better world for gay people too and it didn’t.  But when you look at how the rest of the era’s equal rights movements played out that’s not so surprising. The straight, white, protestant majority took in the new freedoms that applied to themselves, and pretty much let everyone else keep on struggling.  Racism is still a curse on our country, women are freer to have sex with men now, but not so much to make the same money for the same work, climb the corporate latter, or rise in politics.  Yes, it’s all better now then it was back in 1972 when I graduated from high school.  But isn’t that what they tell gay people when we complain that we are still, after decades of struggle, second class citizens?   Oh cheer up…think of how better off you are now then you Were…!  I was flipping though some of the old gay community newspapers and magazines from the 70’s and marvelling and how anti-gay bullshit just hasn’t changed At All in decades, just the faces speaking it. 

Most of that stuff is going in a Rubbermaid storage container and I’ll have to find someplace in the house for it because that old newsprint degrades rapidly if it’s subjected to wide temperature and humidity swings.  By the time the recycling drop-off reopens I reckon I’ll have another few hundred pounds…yes, that’s right…of paper to deposit into it.  All the old computer journals.  The old libertarian movement journals, Inquiry and Reason.  The occasional lifestyle magazine issues I’ve saved because that particular month’s issue was really good…Cigar Affectionado…Vanity Fair…  The old Regardes from back when I was working as an architectural modelmaker…  The issues of Popular Photography and Camera 35 and Peterson’s Photo-Graphic from when I was trying to be a freelance photographer….  It’s fun to look back on the world as it was when those issues were published, but that world is gone now and if I want to go for a stroll in it again I can do it online.  I need the space more then I need the paper memories.

I’m holding onto my old Mad Magazines and Consumer Reports though.  And the issues of Model Car Science I bought and read thoroughly when I was a kid.

I stumbled across This really intriguing new animated take on the story of Peter and the Wolf…

…There’s a few clips from it out there on YouTube and I was looking them over, absolutely fascinated by what the artists were doing. Anyway, in the comments one person wrote that they almost cried when the Wolf ate the Duck. And someone else responded back a tad put off…

hey, just to let you know, sometimes people like to read the comments before watching to see what other people thought of the clip; and sometimes my computer scrolls down and i catch the comments before watching…so giving away the ending isn’t always prudent. thanks!

So have you watched Milk yet? He gets killed at the end. Whoops…sorry…

Via SLOG, via Twitter…

I’ll bet when we elect our first gay president, he doesn’t invite an avowed racist to deliver the invocation.

They say that gay folk, liberals and progressives are furious over Rick Warren being chosen to give the inagural invocation.  Well then our fury is some pretty pathetic stuff isn’t it?  Compare and contrast: suppose McCain had won, and then invited Gene Robinson to give the invocation.  Imagine the fury on the right.  The boycott by the right of the inaugural would be instantaneous and total.  Nobody…Nobody…on the right would show up.  Not to sit by McCain in the stands, not to march in the parade…they’d even walk away from cabinet positions.  The rage from the right wing media would be blistering, second only to the nuclear bombs being lobbed from the Mega-Church and Jesus Mall pulpits all over America.  Total war would be declared on the McCain presidency then and there. Four years into his presidency and he’d still be hearing it, the outrage not one iota less.  They’d never forgive him.  They’d be beating him over the head with it every second of every day of every year of his first term.  And make no mistake, he’d never get a second. 

Now open your eyes and take another look at the so-called fury on the left.  Pretty lame, isn’t it?  American liberals are so cute when they’re angry.

To the ersatz friend who couldn’t be bothered to introduce me to, or even give me a contact lead on the cute single gay guy who he told me sounded like a perfect match for me: In your next life may you be as lonely as I was in this one.  Then maybe you’ll appreciate the fantastic luck you’ve had in this one enough to understand why what you did hurt so much.

To the ersatz friend who told me I was too homely to get the kind of boyfriend I wanted: Swear to god I had no idea you were so shallow.

To my idiot neighbors who park multiple large vehicles on our street, and the occasional broken down boat trailer, without a shred of thought for the other people who live here: This isn’t the suburbs jackass, and Redfern Avenue isn’t your own private driveway.  Check your deed in case you are confused about that.  Need more parking space?  Put it in your back yard.

To the morons who drag shopping carts full to overflowing to the self checkout counters…oh…wait…I dealt with them in a previous post didn’t I…?

To the jackass neighbor across the alley from me with the bright motion activated spotlight: If you have that thing out there to light up your backyard then I have a suggestion…try pointing it at…you know…your back yard, not up in the sky where it can shine into my bedroom windows like a goddamned searchlight.  Or are you watching for incoming enemy bombers too?

To the careless nitwit at the Valley Motors body shop who didn’t bother checking my rear bumper for structural damage when I brought the car in after it was rear ended: I hope your car drops a connecting rod into your lap while you’re passing a slow tractor trailer up a steep hill on a narrow country road in the only passing zone for the next 20 miles.

More cheerful Festivus complaining can be found Here…

to the s/o:fark your xbox 360! i’m in the farkING ROOM with you. Talk to me!! Put down the goddarned controller and have a CONVERSATION with me! Look at me! Notice that i am in the ROOM with you, or cooking for you, or cleaning your house or doing your laundry! TELL ME ABOUT YOUR farkING DAY!!! Am i not WORTHY of your time because i’m not an RPG or a FPS or an RTS? How about when we do watch TV together, you turn of G4/TECHtv’s xbox360 video game review shows and watch something other than Adam Sessler????

The Nevada unemployment office, chase bank, the T.V. theme from Duck Tales, and Nevada drivers who text while they drive can all go straight to hell.

To my upstairs neighbors: Turn down your classic rock, if I hear Taking Care of Business one more time I will destroy your fuse box with an axe, giggling like a school girl the entire time.

To the middle aged harpies in the grocery store: If I’m pregnant, my stomach IS NOT there for you to touch at will. If you didn’t put it there, don’t touch it.

To my asshole boyfriend who lied to me this morning so he could get out of going to my OB appointment….so glad I spent hundreds of dollars and many hours shopping for your Christmas desires so you could could hide your balls and not be a part of the pregnancy YOU WANTED. The toilet was scrubbed with your toothbrush this morning, again…after I smooshed a fly with it. ASSHOLE.

To my sister: The thing that all your shiatty boyfriends have in common with each other is you.

To my mom: who forces me to attend church on Christmas Eve. I’ve told you a billion times, "I don’t believe that farking virgin birth story." Also, having a Starbucks & a Chick-fil-a inside your church is just WRONG and it’s sad that you can’t see that!!

To my brother: I swear to Ceiling Cat, if you don’t stop giving me a hard time about being a vegetarian, I will kick you in the nads.

To my roommate: I hate your boyfriend and I want him off my couch. Get rid of him and we can be friends again.
To my roommate’s boyfriend: STFU. No one cares what you have to say about EVERYTHING. And get off my couch. And for that matter, my rooommate.

…and so much more!  Festivus will officially end later tonight when Bruce is pinned to the ground during the Feats Of Strength by a trash bag full of old computer manuals he is taking to the recycling drop-off…

Okay…  I discover now that Brad DeLong’s Egregious Moderation is still up and running…just at a different address.  Serves me right for not visiting it more often.  So it’s re-linked…

One of the seductive things about cleaning out the household deadwood is stepping back and seeing all that space again on the closet and bookcase shelves.  I almost never throw away books, but I’ve found that computer manuals are something I have to make an exception to that rule for, or else I wouldn’t have any room to move here at Casa del Garrett.  I’m dragging tons of old manuals for software I haven’t so much as thought about in over a decade to the recycling drop-off, and the effect is I can suddenly see a lot of open space here in the front office. 

Just like when I first moved here.

You let go of all the old stuff in your life and suddenly you have room for new stuff.  And you glance around your nest and it feels like you have a life in front of you again, instead of one that’s mostly behind you.  

Yeouch…  When I got up a few moments ago the thermostat was reading fifteen degrees outside.  And it’s very windy.  All night last night the wind was howling.  I could feel it shake my little Baltimore rowhouse, which is made of brick and concrete block.  It kicked one neighbor’s plastic trash can up and down the ally all night long like a child with a new found toy, making an irritating racket that kept waking me up.  I wanted to run out and put it back in the yard it belonged but I didn’t know whose it was.  Eventually I put in ear plugs. 

Figure the wind chill is in the single digits, the only question is are they positive ones or negative ones.  Ah…I see that wind chill here in Charm City is 6 degrees.  Swell.  I was going to make a trash run this morning but I think I’ll just keep on working inside the house today.  I got dressed and filled the bird feeders.  Before the day is over I’ll probably have to fill them again.  Feathers make better insulation then you might expect, but the little dickens need all the calories they can grab in weather like this.

Via Der Spiegel…

If you spend much time in Germany, it won’t take long before you notice that speaking the language really isn’t that difficult. Any time you’re at a loss for a German word, just throw in some English and move on. For one thing, it’s the height of coolness to sprinkle your German with English. And for another, even if your German friends don’t understand, they’ll smile and nod for fear of looking dumm.

Plus, they do it too. Words like "office" and "meeting" long ago entered the German vocabulary. "Babysitten" and "downloaden" have been adopted. Even the word "people" has been molded to suit the needs of the German language — the term has a negative connotation to indicate folks who are disagreeable and tiresome.

Well that’s how some native English speakers use it too.  But…anyway…

But when it comes to advertising slogans, the use of English is becoming passé. Some advertisers have realized that many Germans just don’t understand — or even worse, misunderstand — their hip slogans. Even such straightforward lines like "Come in and find out," for a chain of perfume stores, can be dodgy. It seems most Germans cycled the slogan through their spotty understanding of English and thought it meant, "Come in, but then go back out again."

…

…The Vodafone slogan "Make the Most of Now" has weird associations with fruit juice ("Most") for many Germans. "Welcome to the Beck’s Experience" didn’t work so well because many thought the last word meant "experiment." The grand prize for slipshod slogans, though, goes to German television station Sat1, which used the catchphrase "Powered by Emotion." This was taken by many to be a modern version of "Kraft durch Freude," the Nazi party’s leisure organization, often translated into English as "strength through joy."

I wonder what the person who did the test marketing on that one made of the startled looks they got.  Hey…this one’s really getting their attention…!  Way back before there was an Exxon…there was the Humble Oil and Refining Company, and its other trade names Esso and Enco.  Then the gods of the corporate boardroom decreed there should be one name for the company everywhere in the world.  At one point they figured to just rebrand all their existing gas stations as "Enco", which was Humble’s acronym for "ENergy COmpany", only to discover that "Enco" translated into "broken engine" in Japanese.

So they invented a word.  Exxon.  It means nothing, they took the family name of a sitting governor and added an extra ‘X’ to it and now it’s the company name.  A lot of corporations are doing that now.  Lexus.  Acura.  Genstar.  Allegis.  Enron.  They’re non-words…words that never were…words that mean precisely nothing.  But because they are empty meaningless words they are absolutely unique and can’t embarrass the company in some far away corner of the world.  As it turns out, the only universal language consists of words that don’t mean anything.

An old friend from grade school, who lives in Pennsylvania these days, has offered to take any of the computer hardware and software I don’t want anymore off my hands.  Techno geek children tend to befriend one another at an early age.  I am grateful.  I dislike the thought of tossing all this stuff away, even if it’s to a recycling bin.  With all the hazardous materials in electronics these days, I doubt much of it really gets recycled anyway, so much as disposed of.  He’s an ingenious tinkerer whose grade school accomplishments included building a pirate radio station and hacking the school sound system.  I’m sure he can put my boxes of old computer hardware to good, possibly even nefarious use.  "You have violated Robot’s Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future, immediately."

I have another friend in Kansas who I suspect would have loved to take all this stuff off my hands too, but I don’t see myself taking a drive to Kansas until after winter has left the plains, and this stuff is too heavy and bulky to just box up and ship.  He should remind me to look in the computer closet for anything I’m not using though, before I take my next road trip west.

One of my goals this Christmas holiday vacation time is to clear out some of the deadwood from the computer stuff closet in my front office.  It’s a daunting task because I have the pack rat gene…I have it bad…and the stuff in that closet is a deadly mix of old computer technology that I can fashion a zillion plausible scenarios for needing once again, and stuff that I’ll never need again but has sentimental value.  You know you’re dealing with a computer geek when he says that his old PC-XP motherboard manual has sentimental value.  But that was the first computer I ever built myself.

I have tons of old manuals, some from application software I’ll never use again, some for programming languages and development environments I’ll never use again, some for programming languages and development environments I never used to begin with, but thought I might.  The books for Visual J++ being a good example of the latter.  Oh…and Visual InterDev.  Anyone remember that?  I have my first Windows Technical Manual…for Windows 3.11.  I have my books for IBM PC DOS 3.1.  I have the manuals for my favorite word processor of all time, XyWrite for DOS.  Parting with that old friend when it got left behind in the trek to Windows, long file names, the Internet and modern printers was hard.  I have never liked GUI word processors.  But then I have never cared how my words look on paper, only how they scan and read.

I bought several more Rubbermaid storage containers for the task.  I’m going to divide the contents of the closet to stuff that I will likely need to get my hands on to do the work I do now, and maintain the computer network here at Casa del Garrett – stuff that I want to keep but can safely put into storage in the basement or under the backyard deck – and stuff that I can muster up the courage to throw into the Baltimore City paper and electronics recycling bins.  The thing that keeps my pack rat gene in check is I hate living in clutter.  I absolutely hate it.  So when the volume of…stuff…reaches a critical level I can work up enough ruthlessness to throw or give things away I figure I don’t need anymore, and just accept the fact that as soon as I’ve done it I’ll find a use for all of it after all.  Oh look…an article on how to hook a modem up to a shortwave radio and listen in on teletype traffic…Damn…I KNEW I shouldn’t have thrown away that 2400 baud modem!!!

I’ve already got two big contractor’s trash backs full of stuff to take to the city recycling/trash drop-off and I haven’t even gotten into the hardware shelves or the massive floppy disc/CD rom collection.  Some of that stuff may not even be readable anymore.  But I’ll go through it all, one at a time, and find stuff I can toss out.  The rest will go into storage bins and probably live under the basement staircase until I can convince myself that it really is worthless now.  I do all my computer tinkering now in Linux.  The old DOS stuff has sentimental value, but no practical value anymore.  As I was going through the old manuals I found myself remembering moments from the past, when the personal computer was still a new thing and nobody quite knew what to make of them, or what brave new world they would usher in.  I lived back then in a world before the Internet, where primitive amateur computer networks employed modems and batch scripts that called neighboring BBS systems at night, when the long distance charges were low.  I thought I knew what loneliness was back then, but those were happier times.  And I still had a future to look toward, and all the time in the world to find a boyfriend.

So I lay hands on this and that in the computer closet, and the pack rat gene says to me that all these things I am throwing away are me.  But they aren’t.  They are sea shells I have found on the beach and they delighted me for a time.  But there is too much of it to carry with me further on down the shore.  So some of it I’ll leave behind for some other kid to find and play with…perhaps…and the rest I’ll toss back into the sea.  The nice thing about recycling is that this stuff can get to have another go around at life even if I don’t.  Maybe that old DOS 6 manual will come back someday as a novel that will find a home on some other kid’s bookshelf, a treasured favorite.