accumulating
digital material
stress, anxiety

Based on the article, I save all my texts and photos. But do I really need them? by Adrian Horton, who writes:

I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical realm, where I regularly purge outdated, irrelevant items with little thought. But I am sentimental, and identify with what experts call “digital hoarding” – accumulating excess digital material to the point of causing stress and anxiety.

I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical realm, where I regularly purge outdated, irrelevant items with little thought.

But I AM sentimental, and identify with what experts call “digital hoarding” – accumulating excess digital material to the point of causing stress and anxiety.

I checked my cloud and I can count 11 zip folders of images downloaded over the years from different phones I have owned.

If I un zip them, I have huge folders of images, images that I want to keep … I think.

My solution is to create free gmail addresses to get free 15GB Gdrives to store these files … which take time to upload.

Then I have to remember the email addresses and which files are where and the password and when everything is uploaded do I still dare delete these files from my laptop .. which is dieing anyway.

Doing all of this has me to the point of causing stress and anxiety.

I can vouch for the
few intelligent people …
as for stupid ones

In case y’all are worried, today’s haiku is based on a quote from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and this essay is not about politics.

Yesterday I read about private individuals listening loud to private conversations or music choices in public places.

The writer wrote, “Somewhere along the line this became normal – almost certainly during the pandemic, when we collectively decided that every conscious moment had to be filled with visual and audio content, before we were told to return to society.”

Too many ways to choose along with the compulsive need to listen to everything and not take a chance at missing anything.

Today I read in the New York Times article, Here’s Why You Hate Watching TV Right Now By Priyanka Mattoo who writes, “I try to watch TV, I swear. But every time I sit down to find a new show, I brace myself to run an exhausting digital gantlet. The viewing experience, which used to be relatively straightforward and, dare I say, fun now feels as overwhelming and unpleasant as walking into a dimly lit, warehouse-size dollar store in search of one decent spatula.“

Too many ways to choose along with the compulsive need to watch to everything and not take a chance at missing anything.

Then I read about the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center’s Symphony of Choice in the article Lincoln Center’s Audiences Deserve Music Worthy of Them By Zachary Woolfe who writes, “The orchestra played snippets of two symphonic movements without announcing the piece or composer, and the audience voted by cellphone. The winning movement was then played in its entirety.”

This continued over three rounds, to form a kind of Frankensymphony, with the finale of Schumann’s Second at the end as an encore. The first round went to, well, Mozart, whose beloved “Haffner” Symphony’s Presto beat out my choice, a sprightly Allegro con spirito from the Symphony in C by Marianna Martines, Mozart’s Viennese contemporary.

Mr. Woolfe closes with “Symphony of Choice gave me a glimmer of hope that audiences want to be challenged, not just pandered to.”

Why am I holding my head in my hands.

Just one more brick in the wall.

Lets start with how to make choices.

I DON’T HAVE TO DO ANY OF THESE THINGS.

I don’t have to program every moment of my life.

And yes there is a lot to watch on TV, millions of hours of programming but as Henry Kissinger said of the 10,000 hours of Nixon tapes, it will take millions of hours to watch.

Mostly, I do not have to go to a concert like the Symphony of Choice.

I have been there.

I have been there and done that FORTY years ago.

This was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up.

A place that suffered a form of a schizoid personality where it wanted to be the biggest small town or the smallest big city but wasn’t sure which way was which.

I was at a performance of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Catherine Comet.

The first piece on the program was Mozart’s 31st or Paris Symphony written in 1778 at the request of the director of the public concerts series for Paris, known as the Concert Spirituel, one Mr. Joseph Legros.

Before the concert started, I noticed there were two microphones set up in front of the Directors Podium.

The musicians filed in to applause and took their seats and then in came Catherine Comet and the Associate Director John Varineau.

They walked to the front of the orchestra and stood in front of microphones.

Through my family and church connections I had an acquaintance with Varineau, enough to say hello as we both tried to remember how we knew each other.

Maestro Comet took her microphone and addressed the audience.

There had been, said The Maestro, an artistic discussion that week during rehearsal because the Andante or first part of the Paris Symphony existed in two versions.

Back in 1788, after hearing Mr. Mozart’s symphony, this Mr. Legros complained that the first movement had too many ideas in it, it was too much for a Paris audience, it wasn’t what a Paris audience wanted.

So Mr. Mozart re wrote the first movement.

Then Mr. Varineau took his mic.

He said the discussion was that he preferred the original piece while Maestro Comet liked the 2nd one.

Mr. Varineau then said, “This is what Mozart wrote his father … ” and he read from a letter Mozart had written where said of the new version, and the Paris audience, “I too am very pleased with it. But whether other people will like it I do not know … I can vouch for the few intelligent French people who may be there; as for the stupid ones – I see no great harm if they don’t like it. But I hope that even these idiots will find something in it to like; and I’ve taken care not to overlook the premier coup d’archet [A fancy term that simply means all the instruments playing together at the start of a symphony, one of the contemporary fashions of the Concert Spirituel.] … What a fuss these boors make of this! What the devil! – I can’t see any difference – they all begin together – just as they do elsewhere. It’s a joke.”

Then Maestro Comet said that they decided to play BOTH versions and judge the winner by the audience response.

Mr. Varineau took over and directed the GRSO in a performance of the original 1st movement of Mozart’s Paris Symphony.

Then Maestro Comet took over and directed the GRSO in a performance of the 2nd version of the 1st movement of Mozart’s Paris Symphony.

Then they both returned to center stage and took turns asking for audience reaction to the two pieces.

Remember this was after Mr. Varineau read the letter from Mr. Mozart that said things like “I hope that even these idiots will find something in it to like … What a fuss these boors make of this! …. It’s a joke.”

As you have already guessed that audience of Grand Rapidians found something to like in the 2nd version and even though its composer thought it was a joke, those boors weren’t going to make a fuss and they overwhelming applauded the 2nd version.

Maestro Comet and Mr. Varineau looked at each other.

Comet smiled in a I-told-you-so kind of way and Mr. Varineau shrugged in that someone-gonna-do-something-stupid-whatcha-going-do look.

I had applauded for the 1st version and I glanced around the hall and caught the eye of one or two patrons who had caught on to what had just happened and we shrugged as well.

A Symphony of Choice.

A Frankensymphony.

Boy, Howdy!

An absolutely appropriate term for music for today.

have one of those days?
those weeks? those months? then I said …
what else could happen?

I could ask if you ever had on of those …

But I am sure you have.

I mean, why else would we use the term, those days, if there wasn’t universal understanding of that meant.

It has been on those … for me.

If I will keep my feet on the ground and say it has been one of those weeks, and it started with the fun of traveling by plane even though I wasn’t the one traveling and you plan to be some where in 4 or 5 hours and you to get to that some where some 32 hours later.

Start there and build on that.

Or start on that and go down hill.

As the feller said in Yes Minister, “When things are going down hill fast, you need someone to jump in the drivers seat and step on the gas.”

Debit cards reported being used in Australia.

Credit cards declined.

If we didn’t have exploding thunderstorms and sky high humidity for weather we wouldn’t have any weather at all.

I threw gasoline on a fires.

I closed barn doors long after the horses were long gone.

I stepped on the gas going down hill.

What can you say?

As I remember it, and I am not going to bother to do The Google and try to find it, but there is a saying in Yiddish that translates to English as “May God do this to me and more.”

Nothing specific is mentioned.

Because there is no reason to give God any ideas, you see.

Still, when I felt I was coming out of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, I made a mistake and I said out loud, “What else could happen?”

I got home from work, went to my home office and started to connect my laptop to my work station … and my desk imploded.

It went splat, flat before my eyes.

It happened so fast I doubted what had just happened.

It happened so slowly that I felt I could have stopped time and wound it backwards and started the moment over.

I stood there and looked my desk and computers and monitors and cables all now just a pile on the floor and all I could say was, “really?“

Okay, I said some other things as well.

But really – who has a desk collapse?

I mean geeeeeeee whiz!!!

There was a time, back in the day, when I could enjoy a cigar and with some creative visualization, pack all my troubles into that cigar and feel them blow away with the smoke.

It was a bit of a stretch, but it worked or at least it worked for a while.

I could sit and smoke and read and my troubles drifted off.

Cigars burn blue smoke from one end and burned gray smoke from the other.

Different problems, I would say.

I still enjoy my cigar but somehow the ability to pack my troubles into the tobacco eludes me.

The visualization doesn’t work.

It’s been one of those day … those weeks … those months and I bet it would be just as bad, even in Australia.

how … how bad is your
regular life, that you think …
know what would be fun?

“As far as wanting to go places, I can’t believe people do it for fun. When I’m in airports, and I see people going on vacations, I think, ‘How horrible could your life be? How bad is your regular life, that you think, you know what would be fun? Let’s get the kids, go to the airport, with thousands of pieces of luggage, stand in these lines, be yelled at by a bunch of morons, leave late, be squished all together—and this is better than our actual life.”

Fran Lebowitz in Netflix’s ‘Pretend It’s a City’.

My wife wanted to fly from South Carolina to Michigan.

She booked a flight that left on Monday at 10am and she would arrive around 4pm.

Then there was a software glitch and her airline couldn’t schedule a flight crew and they cancelled all their flights on Monday.

She booked a new flight on a new airline for Tuesday.

She would take off again around 11am, layover in Charlotte, NC, for 90 minutes and take off and arrive at 4pm.

I dropped her off and wasn’t more than 5 minutes into my drive to work when she called that her flight was delayed by one hour due to crew scheduling.

This reduced her layover time in Charlotte to 30 minutes.

I checked the Airport map and her arrival gate was in a terminal that at least was next to the terminal where the departure gate was.

She talked to the Airline people and they were confident she would make the connection.

From my desk I watched airplane arrival and departure times.

When the plane did leave it looked like she would have a somewhat doable 35 minutes to make her next flight.

The next text I got, she had landed in Charlotte during a lightning storm and since no ground crews could be out on the tarmac, no one was allowed to get off the plane.

Not to worry said, the pilot, no planes could take off either.

From the map, my wife’s current plane and the connecting plane were butt to butt but stuck there with her waiting to get off and the other plane, full of people, waiting to take off.

The airport cleared the Ground Stop when the storm blew over and she raced to the next gate.

The gate was closed.

If that wasn’t bad enough, someone from the airline came along with two other passengers and let them board the flight.

Somehow they had been added to the manifest for the flight but my wife and another passenger where rejected as the flight plan had been filed with the existing passenger list.

Someone needs to explain to me how this works.

So my wife got another flight to Chicago that would connect with another flight.

She should arrive around 11pm with long waits in Charlotte and Chicago.

Finally getting on the plane to Chicago, another storm hits the windy city.

She lands there late.

No worries as O’Hare is also being delayed by the storm and who knows what else.

Her departure was set to 11:30pm.

Then we realized that was Central Time.

What ELSE could happen.

Then another passenger looks at my wife and says, ‘I hope this crew doesn’t time out …‘

But the crew didn’t time out and the last text I got was at 1:44am Wednesday Morning.

‘Landed‘ it said.

She should have been there around 4pm on Monday.

Just starting with her take off time on Tuesday, we could have driven there faster.

I am reminded of the time my Wife and I toured the Wright Brothers Cycle Factory in Greenfield Village in Detroit.

The docent gave us a sketch of the lives of the Wright’s and how they sold bikes during the day and worked on their airplane at night.

I asked, “Was it true that they custom designed their engine and that on the morning of that first flight, it took them a couple of hours to get the engine started and running correctly?“

The docent said that yes, that was true.

“So,” I said, “The Wright Brothers invented flight delay before they invented flight?“

We need that on a postage stamp.

we will be known for
feelings of the heart – small, hard,
and full of meanness

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Of the Empire by Mary Oliver.

My sister Lisa and I try to connect and talk about once a month.

I’ll get asked, what do you talk about and I say, ‘Oh just stuff.‘

The thing is as I pass through my days and weeks and I see things and I hear things and feel things and I taste things and I read things, I think, I have to remember to tell this to Lisa.

And when we can, we just talk.

Beyond my understanding, my sister often reads these things I write and lets me know when something makes a point.

It was Lisa who connected me with the poems of Mary Oliver.

I find it interesting that Ms. Oliver wrote this poem, Of the Empire, back in 2008.

Maybe she saw this coming back then.

Maybe we aren’t so different from where we were in 2008.

It’s just that there are those today who can read this poem and say ‘so what?’

Nevertheless, Of the Empire, reads as an indictment, a description of today in a way that is chilling.

Painting with words that tingles in your toes.

I have to also that those last two sentences bring my sister Lisa to mind.

Not because it describes her but just the opposite.

I have known my sister my entire life.

And let me tell you, her heart?

Her heart has never been small.

Her heart has never been hard.

Her heart has never been full of meanness.

Her heart is huge, open and soft and full of love.