I was up all night as usual. I did over an hour practice; octaves on the headjoint. I want to get good at that because it's harder than octaves on the whole flute.
I was just settling down for bed when there was a loud bang and the power was out. Of course.
I'd turned my laptop off and gone to sleep and woke up at a quarter to 5. Amazingly, it was connected to the internet when I turned it on again. I usually have to run the internet troubleshooter when it's powered off for any reason.
Unfortunately, I was limited in typing to about 1 character per second, or a bit less. Just like YouTube often is, because the internet itself is decaying so badly. But now this was for anything. I looked on Google for answers and got everything from it needing a BIOS update to some program running that ought to be turned off (it wasn't) to goofy keyboard settings being set and merely needing to re-set them.
None of these things worked. I finally fell back on my own go-to, which was to pull the battery and let the laptop sit, battery-less for a while, then applied contact lubricant to the connections and put it all back together. And I didn't even have to go through the troubleshooter to connect to the internet again.
It was nice to be able to assume I could just go to sleep for 8 hours and the electricity would be back on, as it was. As things get worse, this will not be the case.
It really makes me wonder why I write this thing, though. There's a general idea in our culture that it's good to write about things. It was a great thing to write about things well and to be the first, or one of the first, to write about whatever you were writing about. It's a sure hit in a growing economy. But it's all been written about now, there are no more jobs for writers, and we're in a shrinking economy, soon to be rapidly shrinking.
Something goes "plik" and the Internet's gone. Something goes "plik" and the electrical grid is down. Or things just get slowly worse, until it's electricity for a few or a couple hours a day, then a week. No one's going to have the time or interest to read a blog.
Years ago, there was interest in busking blogs. This was when downtown had several regulars and a lot of passers-through, playing all sorts of instruments. It was like this all over the world. I think a few places with lots of tourist traffic still have buskers, like NYC and San Francisco, Tokyo and Waikiki. San Jose is not a place tourists go, which is why we have none now. We will have one if I get back out there. But it's not enough to write about.
If the collapse is slow enough, I think we'll have time to regress to earlier, more dependable technologies. As an example, now, if you want a sign for your shop window you go to Kinko's or a sign shop where they use computers to make a rather soulless, "corporate" looking sign that they charge you $100 or more for. Someone handy with a brush could make a rather nice sign for 1/2 or 1/3 the money, in far less time. It's yet another example of "humans fast, computers slow".
(In all fairness I'm not sure how demand for signs is, now. With all the businesses downtown closing, I'm not sure if much of anyone needs signs these days.)
Getting back to the futility of this blog, people will never care if I wrote a single word. What they might care about is if I can play the flute well.
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