up2in2

Blah, blah, blah, blog.

That's what's going on here. Blogging is all the rage. What did people do with all of this energy prior to blogging? I don't get it... I mean I get it, but I don't get it. I get that it's a vehicle for expressing various things that beings like us are want to express; and I get that it's easy and convenient. What I don't get is: what is it other than a vehicle. Is it somehow replacing the good old email... which, if memory serves, replaced the good old hand-written letter? And where does the old phone call or post card fit in?

I have old hand-written letters from past love-interests and family members saved in files and boxes. I have post cards sent from friends who had travelled to far away places (or not so far away). I don't have old phone calls saved.

I hope I'm not committing a 21st century digital faux paus here, but every few years I get a new computer, and I get rid of the old one. I might have ATTEMPTED to archive some data including some personal emails at one of these hardware crossroads, but truth be told, I'll be damned if I ever figured how to preserve anything in digital form for use later other than my address book. And I was pretty good at this when I gave up my little black book (actually big and brown with funky little odd-size loose-leaf pages organized into sections alphabetically) and moved all my friends and family into my Casio Digital Organizer. Sure I can format and save to disc just like any fourth grader can; but what fails to make an impression on my future is ACTUALLY getting this data back into my life when I get another machine. Maybe all my old emails exist amongst the quantum foam on some floppy disk somewhere in my office... What's a floppy, anyway. My last girlfriend was saying something about my floppy just before she broke up with me.

Anyway... post cards are cool. Just $.24 to send one. You can't even get a bad cup of coffee for $.24! And letters... just $.39. Ever get a break-up email? Thank God, I have yet to bask in the pleasure of this. I have gotten a few break-up voice-mails, but that's the subject of another post... maybe the kind one needs a post-hole driver to install. I just cut back on my cell-phone usage to the tune of $50 a month... saved almost as much as by not switching to Geico... so easy I was able to do it.

By the way... if you read this entire post, thanks. No... really, blogging reminds me a bit of what it was like to read Herb Caen in the Chronicle (decades?) years ago... yikes! It's not that I see anything that really compares to the wit one could find on the first page of the second or third section of the SF paper. It's that seems to be what many of us are shooting for... or let me just speak for myself.

Even John Carrol's recent journeys down Mondegreen Ln bring smiles and giggles to many I know. Maybe if you laugh at my blog, you should send me a quarter. If you don't laugh send me a quarter and a criticism. Might as well; it's a free country. But to be clear... no quarter, no criticism!

But I digress, once in Herb Caen's column he mentioned a report of a personalized license plate that read YUCK FOO. It just so happens that my father used that name to list our phone number in the white pages of the local phone company directory when I was a kid.

I suppose I'll need a larger mailbox to hold all those quarters.

as always,

love,

your not-so-ugly and definitely not-so-neighborhood FIVE MAN.

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"Life is too long to justify having a shitty time"

- Postscripts From the Razor's Edge #42