-First Desk-
This weekend I set a laptop down on my childhood desk, a desk that predated the first computer my family ever had, 1984's Apple IIE. To procrastinate on a paper that isn’t gelling in the slightest, I began pulling open the shelves in search of old pictures, still usable stationary, or any other odds and ends triggering old memories. It was, in retrospect, a foolish exercise.
We’ll return to the pictures in a moment.
First we should note the magic of the cassette player and the two batteries. How often, after all, does one resurrect an old electronic device with older batteries? This walkman must be over ten years old, and I was fairly certain it has ceased to work sometime in the previous decade. I’d stopped using the earplug headphones for lack of a device in which to plug them. The tape is Morrison Hotel by The Doors. It was obviously stowed there by an older sibling, I could not have been cool enough to listen to that at the age when I last used this desk. And the batteries, loose batteries, only two, in the bottom of the drawer.
“Best if used before 1999”, suggests the manufacturers.
But it works. Not without some problems, I’ll admit. You can only move forward, not rewind, and pushing stop no longer flips the unit open the way it used to. Opening the deck to get at the tape requires a fingernail. When I do advance the tape in a speed faster then play, the motor moves in short, tired bursts, as if laboring under the weight of Jim Morrison’s handlers.
In play mode, Roadhouse Blues sounds as good as I’ve ever heard it.
Aside from some dry markers and leadless pencils (there’s quite a lot), I’m encountering uncapped hotel pens that probably predate the Apple IIE – and they still write. Lucky finds like this wouldn’t last; I found a disk which claimed to house materials from my senior year of high school. Sadly, the Performa it was written on – using Clarisworks – is long gone.
And then I found the pictures.
Some of them are just what I’d expected, and in fact, wanted, pictures of European tours; Greece, Turkey, Germany, the Czech Republic, and so on.
And some of them are just wrong, causing me to clutch my stomach in physical pain. They’re college pictures. Pretty, picturesque photos of the campus interspersed with photos of people I used to call friends. The sight of them (there’s quite a lot) all beam back at the camera as if they had no knowledge that we would eventually insult each other in some way, after which I would withdraw in simmering resentment, and they would poison my name in every circle in which they came back in contact. I’m positive they knew it all along, you can see it in the pictures.
End of tape.
This weekend I set a laptop down on my childhood desk, a desk that predated the first computer my family ever had, 1984's Apple IIE. To procrastinate on a paper that isn’t gelling in the slightest, I began pulling open the shelves in search of old pictures, still usable stationary, or any other odds and ends triggering old memories. It was, in retrospect, a foolish exercise.
We’ll return to the pictures in a moment.
First we should note the magic of the cassette player and the two batteries. How often, after all, does one resurrect an old electronic device with older batteries? This walkman must be over ten years old, and I was fairly certain it has ceased to work sometime in the previous decade. I’d stopped using the earplug headphones for lack of a device in which to plug them. The tape is Morrison Hotel by The Doors. It was obviously stowed there by an older sibling, I could not have been cool enough to listen to that at the age when I last used this desk. And the batteries, loose batteries, only two, in the bottom of the drawer.
“Best if used before 1999”, suggests the manufacturers.
But it works. Not without some problems, I’ll admit. You can only move forward, not rewind, and pushing stop no longer flips the unit open the way it used to. Opening the deck to get at the tape requires a fingernail. When I do advance the tape in a speed faster then play, the motor moves in short, tired bursts, as if laboring under the weight of Jim Morrison’s handlers.
In play mode, Roadhouse Blues sounds as good as I’ve ever heard it.
Aside from some dry markers and leadless pencils (there’s quite a lot), I’m encountering uncapped hotel pens that probably predate the Apple IIE – and they still write. Lucky finds like this wouldn’t last; I found a disk which claimed to house materials from my senior year of high school. Sadly, the Performa it was written on – using Clarisworks – is long gone.
And then I found the pictures.
Some of them are just what I’d expected, and in fact, wanted, pictures of European tours; Greece, Turkey, Germany, the Czech Republic, and so on.
And some of them are just wrong, causing me to clutch my stomach in physical pain. They’re college pictures. Pretty, picturesque photos of the campus interspersed with photos of people I used to call friends. The sight of them (there’s quite a lot) all beam back at the camera as if they had no knowledge that we would eventually insult each other in some way, after which I would withdraw in simmering resentment, and they would poison my name in every circle in which they came back in contact. I’m positive they knew it all along, you can see it in the pictures.
End of tape.
posted by Benedict | 9:55 PM
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