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| Original Placemat Commission for a friend- by Robert Perrotti, 1993 |
What Makes The Ocean Smell Funny?
Repost from January 24, 2007
That was the title of an art installation by the most talented artist I ever knew. The answer seemed obvious at the time. Fish, of course, make the ocean smell funny.
I was barely out of high school and life was simple, representative, even straightforward. Balance was more than a protein shake.
We were unspoiled, direct, wealthier. We visited libraries, watched network TV, and had ethnic food once a week---pizza. We kept diaries, not blogs. Everything added up. The code we shared had to do with a guy named Morse and never went viral on us.
We wrote letters, and magically the message was delivered to the right place a day or two later. Our newspapers were dropped off, not linked. Our cars operated sans sensors. And with only a hunch that the metric system was going to take us places we didn't really want to go, we just said no. We embraced the anomaly of a Dunkin Donuts baker's dozen.
This is not to say there weren't mysteries within the mundane. For example, on Bonanza, no one really knew where (Ben's stepson) "Clay" went or, for that matter, why Adam moved to Australia. Why did Ben have three wives? Was he just unlucky or a full-on serial killer?
And why did all the wives and lovers die within one episode? Didn't word get around? Silver City was kind of a small place. You'd think it would spread like hoof and mouth in the quilting circles: fall in love with a Cartwright at breakfast, nailed into a pine box by evening. And what happened to Candy? Some claim there are answers in the theme song, but I've never met anyone who knows the words.
The Ponderosa aside, answers were absolute back then, and better yet, the questions made perfect, predictable sense. Unlike the current question at hand, the one I don't even know how to ask. Why isn't my damned cable working?
Seems a rather simple concept. Long signal carrying wire runs into my house, something like a phone, which, by the way, has been working without conflict and through hurricanes and floods since Bell invented it, and then this long, sturdy-looking wire is grafted into the back of my computer via a fancy little screw.
A marvel, an electronic In Box of sorts, nothing too complicated.
Signal in equals signal out: a personal assistant that keeps me in music, pays my bills, reminds me of birthdays, snags my movie tickets, turns my alarm on and off and stores all the complicated thoughts in the universe so I can concentrate on more tangible ponderings like grocery lists, 1960's westerns and getting to work on time.
Connected, I am much more efficient. I am a profile of my former self. Password protected. User friendly.
But since Christmas morning, inequalities have occurred. Packets have been lost. Nodes have failed. Men in Black have come and gone but still, signal in does not equal signal out. I have threatened to go back to DSL. I have threatened to go to city hall. I have threatened to get up on my roof, by God, and nail a satellite dish up with my bare hands.
That was in the beginning. Now I just beg. My web pages languish in last month's thoughts, colors and links. My blogs no longer represent my ever in-the-moment self.
My Yahoo friends have made other friends and moved on. My profiles have been deleted, my passwords have expired. My cookies are stale. I have stopped receiving spam, canned or otherwise. My iPod is gathering dust. (Can you tell me why it isn't called an EAR Pod?)
I have become a modern cautionary tale, an urban legend.
So they are saying my connection will be restored tomorrow. But I fear my faith has been lost forever.
It occurs to me that life was never simple. Everything I thought I knew, I didn't. Life is hard, complicated and has no Google Image feature. Sometimes, when the ocean smells funny, you just have to look beyond the fish.
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