I’m on the way back from LWE on the Limoliner luxury executive bus, listening to the people behind me talk about nearest-neighbor compression algorithms and realtime processing in embedded devices. I think they were at the show too. The bus is fabulous: clean, spacious, comfortable, and of course it has net access. Highly recommended: NYC to Boston for less than the train and in roughly equivalent style, although not quite as fast. And of course, network.
In a few weeks I’ll be going to Vegas and I’m thinking about the last time I was there, at another conference, in November 2000. I was so lonely and for such good reasons: I kept burning my bridges. I guess I still burn them, or at least let them burn and watch them fall. Nonetheless, I’m quite attached to those ashes and charred embers of my past.
For example, I used to keep a set of Wired Magazine issues from 1999 to 2001. They got fatter and fatter, then they shrank abruptly with the crash. I eventually tossed them– what was I doing with back issues of a magazine I don’t even read? I still have a Kozmo.com receipt and an Eazel t-shirt. I have fewer physical mementoes of people from my past, but I think of them more often, turning moments over and over in my mind. And there’s music and weather and places and tones of light that remind me of people and times. I used to be more susceptible to this sort of thing, really. Now I sort of slip into a reverie, but I used to feel gutwrenching nostalgia or pain or anxiety seeing a picture of an ex or driving past the house of a friend I’d lost.
They say nostalgia is corrosive; I think it may have been Sartre who talked of it as politically dangerous. I certainly agree that it’s as destructive as unspoken resentment.
Nonetheless, I’m listening to Tom Wait songs: “Picture in a Frame” which is about promises and the pain of fulfilling them, and “Black Market Baby,” which is about temptation, and the pain of giving in to it despite knowing it’s the worst possible choice:
Liars say their prayers to her
and sailors ring her bell
the way a moth mistakes a lightbulb
for the moon and goes to hell
There’s no prayer like desire,
there’s amnesia in her kiss,
she’s a swan and a pistol
and she will follow you like this…
Secretly Ironic 