My little scribbling this week comes to you from a 20-year-old, pristinely restored Northgate OmniKey keyboard. Back when the crust of the Earth was cooling and computing was young, the Northgate company was one of many upstarts that made very good personal computers. What set them apart, though, were their keyboards. They had a pleasant, clicky feel that many users loved. Northgate sold their keyboards separately, but apparently few people then bought their computers, too, so they went out of business. This made having a Northgate keyboard even cooler.
It was the first gray, windy, wintry day, a day that could be in November or February. Such days can chill one to the bone, physically but spiritually, too.
Out here in the woods, if you’re going to watch television chances are you’ll get it via a satellite dish.
This has its annoyances — the “local” stations the satellite company chooses are in West Virginia, for instance. I wonder what television news covered there before they had meth lab explosions to lead the newscasts, but never mind. There’s no television at all when it is raining.
Sitting on a back porch in upstate New York, having coffee and enjoying a beautiful morning, it is as if I’m on a different planet.
The story has it that Townes Van Zandt, the folksinger, was asked how many kinds of music there are. “Two,” was his reply.
Asked to name them, he said, “The blues and Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”
Pity the poor person who doesn’t live in or near a college town. Autumn arrives and all that changes is the weather. In a college town, there is an air of excitement. The energy level increases. It’s exactly the opposite of the normal order of things, where spring is the time of rebirth. For a college town, it is the fall when everything, yes, springs back to life.
As a public service, I would like to let everyone know that the source of all dust in the universe is apparently somewhere near me.
The shape was tiny but unmistakable to anyone who has spent years watching for turtles while driving.
Somewhere, deep in a box someplace, I have an original, unused ticket for all three days of the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair,” held 40 years ago this coming weekend. I think I still have it, though I haven’t seen it for years. I hope I do, because I paid for it.
Every so often it seems as if the universe is sending a little message. You never know when it will happen, nor is it easy at first to recognize. In my case, it all began last week when the car started malfunctioning.