taking apart technology.

 I saw my first iPad through the lens of an old spyglass that dates back to 1896.  I don't actually know the year, I make things up sometimes... my dad lent it to me for a movie prop, not knowing he was going to lose it forever, but how could I ever give up an authentic pirate spyglass from 1896?

I knew exactly where he kept the old thing, but he doesn't know that.  The old trunk.  The one that in our old house he kept tucked away in the back corner of the crawl-in closet directly left from where he hid the Christmas presents every year.  I remember sneaking in on all fours, contorting my whole skeleton like a mouse to fit through the maze of closet junk to finally arrive at that elegant and out-of-bounds cedar chest.  The chest was full of.... guns... and guns were off limits.  Ask my Luke Skywalker toy whose blaster was ripped from his plastic grip by mother the day he was drafted into my armada of playthings.  In our new apartment, where his entire room is about the size of that closet, he keeps it underneath his bed.

Just as I did when I younger, I would sneak into his room, go through the cedar chest, disassemble the civil war era revolvers, the b.b. guns he used in the depression to kill his dinner (often of squirrels), or to just marvel at the gadgetry of it all.  And the sounds, the glorious metallic sounds of springs loading and gears falling into place...

When I asked for the telescope he said yes, but stalled as he remembered where he kept it.  I didn't chime in with the answer, and I let him figure it out.  Eventually, he pulled out an old dusty trunk from underneath his bed, blew off some dust, wiped away some cobwebs, and creaked it open.  Silently reveling in the joy of antiquities, he pulled out the dented and rusted bronze telescope from the bed of retired rifles, knives, and other wonky weaponry.  It was bent and warped and you couldn't even collapse or expand the shaft, and let's be honest, isn't that half the reason we all play with telescopes anyway?  The shook-scchhuck sound, the phallic implications...

The iPad: sleek, sexy, and simple(they say), cheap(they say), great to use as a cheese platter(they probably don't say).  I really wanted to run out of the house,  across the road, and into the yard where this family is hovering over their new toy, their new technological centerpiece, and steal it away!  I watch them marvel at how magic it is.  One embarrassing evening, I was patrolling the web with squinty eyes and got very excited about those damn mac ads promoting the thing; the fit brit guy actually compares it to wizardry.  It becomes magic, apparently, in my inability to understand how it works and my marvel at the fact that it does.  Suddenly using an iPad gets me THAT much closer to Hogwarts.

A friend recently illuminated Harry Potter to me in a way that I always knew, but like so much that I know was not able to eloquate.  "We all love Harry because we are that different and we are that alone."  And much like Harry, at home over the summer, I've been feeling pretty estranged.  In my sister's [finished] attic, no job or money, a time where when I'm not reading or drawing or kayaking, I am spying on the more-than-fortunate neighbors with big boats and kids with toy hummers they drive around the boulevard.  No one really to spend the time with, except my lovely and spoiled niece, my less abrasive Dudley.  Things blend together at the seams, and suddenly it is a week later.  I need to get out of this town, this mugglian suburbia.  And I need to bring my telescope and pretend it is my wand.  Don't need no fuckin' iPad.

On the train to New York (after buying some Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans off the food trolley) I tinkered with the broken down trinket.  There is a lot of time in summer, a lot of pet projects.  Such as fixing a telescope, starting a blog, cooking my own batches of jam, taxidermy...  Anyway, the thing collapses and retracts again, whoopee!  Shook-schuuk.  Also, wonderful living images somewhere between 75 and 100 yards jiggle in immaculate focus.  Do that, iPad.  although in some distant future, when iPads are attached to our heartstrings at birth like teletubbies in the United States of Apple, I am sure that the little camera will not only have an incredible zoom, but also shoot home movies in 3D.  I like having the spy glass with me.  It keeps me connected with some form of rustic and adventurous history that I have no real connection to, but try to emulate in every day life.  So pissed, by the way, that modern trains don't have a caboose with a back patio thing like in all the movies.  Western movies.  With train robbers and stuff.  Maybe they got rid of the caboose patios because that is where all the robbers were getting in.  Maybe I shouldn't continue to write my stream of consciousness.

I feel somewhat like a pilgrim.  I feel somewhat maudlin.

New York City and no where to go.  Two legs and not a single place for them to take me.  It'd be nice if the subletter would let me stay a night early in my summer apartment.  Or if my friends would answer their phones so i could stay in their summer apartments.  But that ceased to matter after my phone died.  Even further from communication, further from what I know.  More like a pilgrim.

I know, I'll go to Ellis Island.

Or at least look at it through the lens of an ancient old pirate telescope.  The ferry costs money.  There is a person on the ferry with an iPad.  Fucker.  Suddenly, I feel very much in the same place that I was a few weeks ago, with less money, fewer friends, and nothing knowable.  But as I learned from the fit bit guy, things unknowable are that much more magical.

Cause even though I can't get that green statue in full focus, I am feeling a lot more magic.