Ithaca Blog

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Welcome, Internet, Connecting Me To Limbo

The guy setting it up for me said that it "is very weird" that I do not have Internet connection in my house until now.

I never felt the need for it. I have Internet connection at work, to do things like check bank balances and Facebook. I also have it in a small office I have downtown. But now I'm giving up the office space, so I need the connection for protracted projects. (I write, for the local weekly, and other things.)

I always thought it was good, that if I want to go online, I have to go to work - one place or the other - and not have the temptation of sitting around in lounge pants doing it. I have to put on real pants. I have to walk or bike (or, occasionally, drive) half a mile. Good exercise (under those first two options).

So now I have the service here at home. It's good, in that I can write and post this, at my kitchen table, pretty late.

But it's bad, in this. Last night I was writing, and looked up something important. But now I don't remember what. All I remember is that, somehow, I saw something on Google that said, "Sly Stone on piano, Richard Pryor on drums Mike Douglas Show 1972."

Dear reader, you are on the Internet, so you know where this is going, don't you? From that slight submerge, I emerged two hours later, having subsequently perused the Rolling Stones on the Mike Douglas Show; the Wikipedia biography of Mike Douglas (he is from Chicago); an interview with a glassy-eyed Keith Richards from about 1972; Keith Richards trying to work out the lead-in to "Carol" with Chuck Berry in a movie, where they fight; a visit to the website of the session's bass player, Joey Spampinato; an excited look at a Youtube posting of NRBQ, Spampinato's old band, at the GrassRoots Festival in 1993, where I myself, a worker at the festival, am seen sitting on stage enjoying the performance behind the piano player, with pigmentation in my hair, which no longer exists, beneath a "Brooklyn Gum" bike-racing hat from Italy, that I'd forgotten I ever had; then, somehow - I guess it was just in my head - a version of "I Don't Know" by Sonny Boy Williamson, from 1960's French TV, in black-and-white video.

Then I shook my head, as if to clear it of cobwebs. What was I first looking for?

I couldn't remember. So I closed my notebook and went to bed. Sorry, whatever I wanted to write about.

Tonight, this is it - writing to you before bed. No monkey business, no Youtube, no footage of John Lennon playing ping-pong with Miles Davis, no that nice song by Magnetic Fields, no Senor Wences, no nothing. Just this, to you, then bed.

Well, maybe Senor Wences. One second. Or Fyvush Finkel. Fyvush Finkel!

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