The Bleat.

Tuesday, May 11

Monday was the damndest day; could not have been duller. Everything from the weather to the work to the meals to the general tenor of the ether itself was just – not – there, and I suppose I’m to blame. The days are what we make them. But Natalie was home today for Pointless No School Day, and I had lots of blogging to do. So. Couldn’t sit outside much; blustery, with spits of rain. Ran a ten-minute mile on the Wii, in addition to all the other activities; once you start building habits on this you’re loathe to do less, because the machine gives you positive feedback in the form of generic encouragement that mostly boils down to “Hello! Looks like you’ve pushed a button and stepped on a slab of plastic! Congratulations!”

But it was fun. It’s a pleasure to hang around the house with my daughter, who was alternately working on a story about a bird, drawing pictures, reading, and otherwise acting very self-possessed and self-occupied. She got her own breakfast this morning – at some point she got tall enough to reach the milk in the fridge. Sigh. Another thing I don’t do anymore. I remember when I’d make her lunch by putting her on the high chair, picking it up, walking it over to the microwave, and letting her push the buttons to nuke the Easy Mac. That’s parenting: a measure of your success is how you’re needed less and less.

You spend your life thinking you’ll fight this battle or that, picking your foes, but you never figure you’ll go twelve rounds with irrelevance.

Anyway, I’m tired of looking screens and pushing buttons. There will be a break from this on Thursday; the Cooking Channel is coming over to the house to do a brief segment on the Gallery of Regrettable Food. I will have to cook something. I will have to have props. How do I get myself into these things?

While scanning the Great Backlog I came across this illustration from True Magazine, 1959. It’s the shopping section at the back of the book. The female-head-mounted-like-a-trophy will be found later today on Tumblr – and by all means, do go there; every day, it’s like a miniature Institute of found peculiarities. The quantity of stuff on the internet is starting to overwhelm me, frankly; you wander off your paths, start clicking on tumblrs, and insane amounts of pictures march past in an endless cheerful mad parade, with no context, no reason, no purpose. Just images tossed into the great roiling pot of post-modern remix culture. I wonder if someone who’s, say, 20 and not particularly schooled on history and graphics can make sense of this without context, or if he even wants to; an 8-bit computer game is a 60s cigarette ad is a 40s propaganda poster is a 70s bikini picture is a 2010 photoshopped image. It’s like driving down a road at 60 miles an hour and trying to read words written on fence posts.

I wonder if we’re a decade away from a time when the landfill stratums fall silent, and there’s nothing to hold and examine, nothing to find in an antique store a half-century hence. Can’t even imagine such places would have bins of thumb drives – five for a New Dollar! Pot luck! This is why I like sites like this, which turn your page into gawdawful mid-90s sites.

As I was saying. This was in the back of the magazine: an illustration for a shopping section that showed the sort of things guys liked to get through the mail.

Well now. A gun, a purse, a pipe holder, a shirt, a drill, a radio, a fishing reel. Fella could do alright, shopping through the mail.

I’d like to say more, but I have four pieces to do in the next 48 hours, and I’m almost grateful for them; actual topics on which I can focus and unload. Nothing that usually piques my interest or provides some diversion is doing the trick, which gives you that horrible feeling you have exhausted the limits of your interests. There are times when I feel somewhat stupid for putting stuff up here at all. It’s another rule of the internet: whatever you are doing, 100,000 people are doing it too, and if ten percent are doing it better, that means there are 10,000 people eating your lunch every day. The numbers probably scale up.

Despite that, Comic Sins later today.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 12:46 am. It is filed under Domestic Life, Retro Delights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.