June 2019 Our final Africa safari stop was Little Kulala Desert Lodge, in Sossusvlei, the Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia. We took another small charter flight, from Hoanib Valley Camp – or, rather the nearest airstrip from that camp, which was about two hours’s drive away from the camp itself. Sossusvlei Geluk Airstrip is the usual empty airstrip, just a cleared length of land with one or two sheds. As at our other camps, one of the staff picked us up in a Toyota truck converted for passengers, enclosed but not air conditioned.
In the early 1980s cable movie channels didn’t have much inventory and they’d play the same movie over and over, multiple times a day. And if you had the TV on for digital wallpaper, you’d sometimes end up watching the same movie a few times over the course of a few weeks.
One of those movies, for me, was called “Dance of the Dwarfs," and I quite liked it. It was a ripoff of “The African Queen,” about an uptight, beautiful woman anthropologist who hires a drunk, down-on-his-luck helicopter pilot for an expedition into the jungle to find a mythical race of monster dwarves.
I’m about halfway through reading the very first Perry Mason novel, “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” published 1932. Perry has virtually no inner life. The same for his supporting characters. Supposedly it’s this way throughout the series. We never learn Perry’s backstory, his hopes and dreams, his anxieties and fears. He just solves crimes and protects clients.
Perry Mason seems similar to Nero Wolfe. You get more backstory from Nero Wolfe. But as with Perry Mason, neither Nero, nor his little created family of employees and allies, suffers the kinds of doubts, fears and neuroses the rest of us do. They’re singularly focused on their work.
Today we’d consider that a terrible writing flaw. I’m enjoying it. If I want neurosis and anxiety my own brain keeps me in good supply.
In the Perry Mason novel, we’ve already had a scene where Perry’s femme fatale client throws herself at him. That’s mandatory in any noir novel. She’s gorgeous and sexy and lets it be known that she is fully available to him. I’ve seen that scene a few times in the Spenser novels, where Spenser was always tempted but able to muster the strength of will to resist. Perry isn’t tempted the least little bit. (Maybe he has a thing with Paul Drake. Heh.)
Perry Mason in the novels has little relationship with the recent HBO TV series and I’m OK with that.
A colleague on a Zoom meeting this morning shared his Mac screen with red numbers in the dock for App Store and operating system updates, and now I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.
We are enjoying “Endeavour.” It gives me an idea for a Star Trek series: “Ensign Kirk.”
This is the story of a young Starfleet Ensign, fresh from the Academy, on his first assignment. He’s a rising star of Starfleet but that doesn’t mean he’s given special treatment; it just means expectations are higher for him. He’s just another junior officer, considered expendable, sent on dangerous missions to spare more valuable officers.
The first episode finds him on his first day of duty out of Starfleet Academy graduation, assigned to a new ship, where he meets and befriends an older doctor named Leonard McCoy.
Younger versions of other characters from the original series will put in occasional appearances, but mainly this is Kirk’s show, with support from McCoy.
This is not the Kirk of the 80s and 90s movies, who broke the law and disobeyed orders. And this is especially not the Kirk of the J.J. Abrams movies, who was a spoiled-rotten privileged fratboy.
This is the Kirk of the original series, where Starfleet is an egalitarian institution and you get ahead on merit, not connections. Jim Kirk is just a plain old farmboy from Iowa who got into Starfleet on talent and hard work, and who respects and obeys regulations and the chain of command (but doesn’t have to like it). He’s a model officer, able to act independently, improvise or obey orders when appropriate.
Like the young Endeavour Morse, Jim Kirk is hungry and ambitious. He yearns to become the youngest person to command a Constitution-class starship and hustles and throws himself into danger to fulfill that dream.
I got this idea from Endeavour and also from a novel I read when I was in my teens, “Ensign Flandry,” by Poul Anderson. Anderson was a prolific, popular and highly respected midcentury science fiction and fantasy writer. He wrote a series of novels in the 50s or so about an interstellar secret agent named Dominick Flandry – like James Bond, a thousand years in the future. This novel was about Flandry on his first assignment. Great fun!
In the 90s, Justin Hall was a rich kid with distant parents and a need for attention. He fell in love with the Internet and started sharing intimate details of his life on his website, links.net. He was, maybe, the very first personal blogger, and paved the way for legions of people to share their own intimate details on Facebook on YouTube. He produced an autobiographical documentary in 2015.
Today, he is apparently in a committed relationship, with young kids, and he’s a cannabis entrepreneur because of course he is.
Hall’s philosophy of radical personal exhibitionism was commonplace in the 90s and early 2000s. I admired it but never participated myself, and now I’m glad I stayed away. These days, I try to be extremely active online in ways that don’t compromise my, and other people’s privacy.
I never participated in the radical transparency internet culture when that idea was popular, and now I’m far more careful about privacy than I used to be.
For example, a few weeks ago, a cousin shared a photo of my mother as a young woman, dressed up and looking pretty for a wedding. My Mom was older when she started a family, so this is really a view into another life for her.
I thought for a moment about sharing the photo online, but then decided, no, that one’s just for me and friends and family.
I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic and spent some time this weekend nerding out about it. Here is the result – the beginning of my digital garden: mitchwagner.com.
A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,
June 23, 2019 — Yesterday, we left the camp for our next stop. Festus drove us two hours over those rough desert roads to the same airstrip we’d flown in to. We arrived 40 minutes early so we had time to spend with our new friend. We sat in the same shelter where we’d had our first lunch together three days earlier, and talked.
Festus told us how he found his way when guiding people through through the bush.
In “Man of Steel” there’s a scene at the end where Superman and the big villain are having a fight flying around midtown Manhatttan, and they’re ripping apart skyscrapers and you see these shots of Superman and the villain getting thrown through a floor of cubicles and sending partitions and desks and office furniture flying.
And I kept thinking that there’s probably some poor bastard who finally got his cubicle JUST RIGHT — just the right desk chair, keyboard tray at the perfect height, little potted cactus, couple of inspirational posters, tiny corkboard in the perfect spot, two-cup USB-powered teakettle. And now it’s all smashed up. 🍿
“Digital gardens” are personal spaces on the Internet that avoid the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media. They’re not ephemeral and stream-of-consciousness, like blogs or social media. They’re curated (to use an overused word) websites about the creator’s interests and passions: Museums, books, philosophy, politics, etc. More permanent than either blogs or social media.
Like I said about 10 hours ago, I thought I had insomnia licked because I got a good night’s sleep five nights in a row, but last night it was back and I got about three hours of sleep total.
I was pleased, however, because I got myself set up so I can work on my iPad in the living room until I’m tired.
Insomnia is no longer an occasional thing for me. It’s a lifestyle.
I’ve learned that my resting face when I’m a zoom call looks like I’m drunk. Once I have my colleagues trained that I’m not drunk, I can start day-drinking.
