Technolust, technophobia…

Ever buy a machine so cool you thought your whole world would change? Just got a MacBook Pro (no; you CAN’T follow me around till I’m sleepy and take it home with you), transferring the best of my files from a humungous PC to a 17” silver envelope weighing just 6lbs and leaving behind the rest of my files/mind-flakes like yesterday’s newspapers… The new Machine makes me feel like I can climb veritable mountains with my mind! I remind myself daily its just me using it…But I promised myself so very much…the novel, the short stories, the proposals that would change history…This baby was made just for dreaming schemers like me…So much to accomplish; so many directions to go in - all at once… Communications is my game and I love it still. Had an auspicious beginning in pr years ago. My First Ever (witness the pr-speak!) release told the tale of a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud painted with a history of San Francisco by my then-boyfriend, Ken Jennings. Owned by famed promoters, Peter Marino and Davy Rosenberg, their whole scene was unbelievable! These guys lived in a house with a Sisteen Chapel-like ceiling over their round bed, had one of the 3 replicas of King Tut’s Throne in the universe in their drawing room and a piano from their dear friend, Liberace. An Evening Magazine camera crew followed the Rolls around one entire day with me in the back! Whew! What an auspicious pr beginning…But Marino and Rosenberg only got in Herb Caen’s column when they crashed the Rolls on Doyle Drive, What a waste of a Rolls, lamented Caen… So based on working with these colorful characters, I slid into a job with Art Blum Public Relations and Advertising and started my own infamous career in pr…exhilarated; sleep deprived, I suffered many panic attacks, felt many surges of pure power... But I digress from, where was I? The Power of the pseudo power of Technology…We believe we are taller, more beautiful, wiser by the Power of the Product…The neurotic Brenda in Six Feet Under has bought a laptop in order to write a novel but finds herself allowing sexual encounters she might not otherwise as “research” for her book…Well, THAT sort of research is definitely in my PAST…So what kind do I seek? Wikipedia and Google are beginners tricks… The novel I intend – sigh; what a lot of work on spec! Read recently that writers shouldn’t expect their novel or play to be read by publishers. Just isn’t done for way the bulk of submittals… Mostly I attempt to leverage my way in – shoot for doable stuff like local theater, local music concerts, local artwork, a press release for the occasional conference. Well, that works! Even global projects like United Nations conferences have not been beyond my reach, at least when I cultivated people (who for some reason believed in me) who could help me find the work that I then did for – free! They never have a pr budget, I’ve learned. And I have talent, actually. Keep having to remind myself still, after 30 some odd years. Very challenging years these were. From my first poems at age 18 and the Quill and Scroll I got for interviewing fellow high school students – trying to see into their souls, I was. And they often formed brief attachments – to their own reflection in my writing I suppose… I use communications in the hope of having an effect on the world; to actually clean up some of the mess or create a corner for beauty. Sometimes I get a chance – when I make my own way, my own path like I always have done. You can do it, too! Even from the library computers, but that’s WAY harder… So here I am with my new technology: my new great light, silver friend and terrifying enemy. I always seem to find that scary part to a thing. Like my Mom as she lost ability to talk telling us with fearful eyes that the inventors of the atom bomb “thought they were doing a good thing.” (Inferring we should do something to stop the impending evil accompanying the BOMB!) So today I notice two girls at the store I visit multi-times a day (Jungle Vibes), are carrying iPods and my friend, Strange de Petaluma, was telling me of 3 teens walking home from school down railroad tracks in Oakland listening to their iPods - and they got killed by a train! Couldn’t hear the damn train! Without the iPods, likely wouldn’t have been nary a scratch on ‘em… So what dangers lie ahead for me with this new café/workhorse MAC? I’m thinking I’ll write proposals for a hiring hall here, for another Farmers Market, for a documentary on Guaxchi, creating relations with Chinese folks in order to do business…I’ll let you know what works! (what succeeds or how I do) And then the blasted thing wouldn’t turn on! And the Home Theater had no picture and, possibly worse, my big old clunky PC no longer had DSL…woe was me until my partner unhinged the backside of this “Powerbook” looking quite helpless as it lay there, took out the battery and replaced it. “It went to sleep and didn’t wake up,” he said. That’s what we’re all afraid of, I guess…