Day 17 |
January 3, 1998 | Return |
1,766 Miles Today: 106 Miles |
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Roamer's
Rest RV Park Tualatin OR |
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| Schlepped up to Portland today; didn’t like the look of the place in Canby (Plan A), so kept going. This is a new park with concrete slab pull-through, by a river and close to shops; "suburban setting." Best of all: $1/day phone line hook-ups. Civilization at last! | |||
| Why I'm burnt out | Insight during the drive up here: Yes, I’m burned out. Until now, I’ve dismissed this as merely a consequence of "working too hard." But this is wrong-headed for two reasons: (1) I’m not working that hard, it isn’t as if I’ve been on a death march or anything; (2) even if I were working insanely hard, just taking a holiday and going back to burn out again is dumb. Conclusion: my battery is flat not simply because work is sucking all my energy, but because it isn’t putting anything back. I need to rethink the way I work so that it becomes energizing, not draining. For example: do more creating and thinking. If you believe Personnel Actualization Theory doing new stuff will be a net gain: I’ll not only be doing work that puts back more than it takes out, but I’ll also have more capacity to do all the stuff I have been doing so far, better. | ||
| The missing home comfort | I’d thought I had every (material) thing I needed in the rig, until it suddenly struck me towards the end of this long cold gray afternoon that there is a home comfort I miss: I want a long, hot bath! | ||
| Two blue-collar fantasies | Driving over the last three days resurfaced an old fantasy: being a long-distance truck driver. See the continent, spend time alone, die in a fiery roll-over crash in North Dakota… It’s not unlike my dream of being a great waiter in a fancy French restaurant: a well-defined blue-collar task where I live by my wits and where doing a good job is well-defined. | ||
| Truck spotting factoid | I’ve seen endless Wal-Mart trucks on I-5, and none from any of the other retail stores, or representing any other major consumer brands whatever. And all the Wal-Mart Wagons seem to be going South, the oncoming direction – or they’re observing the speed limit even more pedantically than I am, and not overtaking me. I’m never passed by one, even though other trucks sweep by endlessly. Seems Wal-Mart is the only one that does its own haulage. | ||
| Computer companies as Greek city states | Reading the Greek history books stimulates thoughts of analogies to the IT industry. Athens = Apple, Sparta = Microsoft? Lots of flaws in the analogy, but still… These city-states were in a constantly warring and trading with each other in the 6th to 4th Centuries BCE, and constantly bickered among themselves even in the face of major threats like the Persians. This is still a half-baked idea since I don’t have any interesting predictions that would follow from this model, other than the thought: who would play the role of the Persians? The government, perhaps, or Hollywood? And what about Alexander the Great? | "The whole structure of their society is directed to securing one part only of virtue, military prowess, as being valuable in the acquisition of power. Hence the Spartans prospered while at war, but began to decline once they reached a position of supremacy; they did not understand what being at peace meant and never attached any importance to any other kind of training than training for war." Aristotle, The Politics, Book II | |
| Intimate Information | "Intimate Information" – will data become close to us, as sound did in the late Thirties, when advances in microphone and radio technologies projected sound into living rooms, cars and even bedrooms? | This is the premise of the Ambient Information stuff I've been thinking about. "Intimate" isn't much better as a descriptor, but illustrates the meshing of information with lifestyle. | |
| This thought came to me listening to a fragment of a Sinatra documentary on the radio. Apparently his "thin skin" had both good and bad consequences: it made him a great interpreter of lyrics, but also lead to mafioso associations. I don’t have his ability to emote; I’m more analytical. So? Does this mean I can never be An Artiste? Maybe I should try to put art on a scientific footing? That’s a sufficiently crazy goal… | Now have decent radio reception, so I’m listening to Oregon Public Broadcast Radio occasionally. OPB Radio isn’t nearly as good as KUOW: not enough news and information, too much local debate. | ||
| My big literary discovery of the trip was Esquire magazine. I’d always thought it was a soft-porn magazine (maybe the South African one was, way back when I was growing up). I bought the "Special 36th Anniversary Collector's Edition," the one with the "Dubious Achievement Awards of 1997." Hilarious satire and irony. The prose is witty and readable, and For Guys. Made me realize that maybe I am A Guy, after all. Had always wondered what women saw in Cosmo and all the other "women’s magazines." And I’d thought that "men’s magazines" were about clothes, like GQ. But this is IT: funny, insightful and admits to being pissed off that women don’t want sex more often. | |||