wiffle ball and the point of contact

We played wiffle ball over on West Hill Place, just off of Charles Street, by the T-station. Drivers would use it as a shortcut to get to Storrow Drive, even though they weren't supposed to. It interrupted the game. We'd have to move the traffic cones or undo the chain to let them through. There'd be dirty looks shot and much huffing and puffing, but the drivers didn't care. We were just kids playing wiffle ball. West Hill Place was essentially a circle. Car bumpers played the role of bases and a convenient manhole served as the pitcher's mound. You got a homer if you hit it fair over a second floor window. We weren't exactly power hitters - we had more luck scoring runs by grounding the ball under parked cars. On the rare days there were no cars, there weren't a lot of runs scored.

There were usually only three or four of us playing and so we had to adapt the rules a tad. You could throw the runner out by hitting him with the ball. It was a dangerous strategy as a miss would almost always result in a run scoring. We also always underestimated just how much that little white plastic ball stung when it slapped against the flesh. Shrieks of pain resulted in derision, so you had to grimace, bear it, and take your place out in the 'field', fiercely rubbing the point of impact and wincing.

Contact was sublime. It always is, whether it's a proper ball against a wooden bat or plastic on plastic, there are few better feelings than the shudder of a bat when it hits the ball, that split second of unity and ultimate harmony that comes when the ball's trajectory reverses and it becomes part of the bat's motion, exploding forward with a crack that staggers the forearms. The hitter becomes a motor; an engine generating propulsion. The balls sails and as it does an incredible sense of forward motion flows through you. There's no time to appreciate it; you have to run and maybe, if you reach base safely, you smile and clap your hands together hoping to feel again the moment of contact.

I'm writing a new book. I can't really say much about it yet, but it's not fiction. It's not about baseball or wiffle ball either. But it's new. Instead of sifting through countless pages in the big purple binder, buried in words I've already written, I've got blank sheets staring back at me, waiting to be filled. Some writers fear blank pages, but not me. For me it's a thousand points of contact, hit after hit, as each page fills so goes the forward motion and as I type I feel the shudder in my forearms and so it flows.

Hopefully.

 

 

remembrance

Santa brought my family its first computer on Christmas Day 1984. I was 8, though for some reason it feels like I should have been 7. It was a Macintosh 512, affectionately referred to as the 'Fat Mac'. We got a subscription to Macworld and a bunch of programs as well. My mom spearheaded the integration of this strange new machine into the household while my dad stood back and embraced the ways of the luddite, as he still does to this day. I looked on in wonder and excitement, using the new machine at every opportunity, curious as to why my MacPaint creations never looked as awesome as the sample art. Swapping floppies became habit. Boston Mac User Group (BMUG) discs littered the desk. I begged for a LaserWriter but instead we got an ImageWriter II.

At school I used Apple II's and Basic to make shapes with a turtle.

At home I designed posters and wrote screenplays based on me being Indiana Jones. And I played Lode Runner. A huge amount of Lode Runner.

After an upgrade to 1Mb of RAM could only take us so far and so we used my cousin's educational discount and bought a Macintosh SE. That had an internal hard drive, which blew my mind. Swapping floppies was relegated to installs only. My mother wrote a cookbook on that machine. It was that machine that came with us to London when we moved in 1989.

My first Mac was a Classic II. I got it my junior year of High School. By then Tetris had replaced Lode Runner as my gaming addiction. That was followed by an LCIII, a Centris 610 (hand-me-down), a PowerMac 7100/66 (also hand-me-down), a PowerBook G3 250, a PowerBook G3 Pismo, a PowerBook G4, an iBook G4, a black MacBook and now the 15" MacBook Pro that I'm writing this on. I had the first iPod and quite a few subsequent iPods - Shuffles, Nanos and a Classic, but never a Mini. I'm on my third iPhone and I use an iPad regularly. I've never owned a PC.

In the summer of 1997, my mother and I drove from Key West to Washington DC. We listened to a lot of NPR and tried to identify road kill along the way. I remember saying that she and dad should, if they had the money, invest in Apple. The stock was trading at about $12 a share at the time. This was before the iMac. Steve Jobs had only just returned to the company and the future was uncertain to say the least. My mom asked why and I said, 'They make the best computers. Someone's going to have to notice that eventually. And it looks like Steve Jobs is going to help people notice that.'

Every step of my education and subsequent professional life has been processed on Macs. Writing, web design, general design, photography, project management and wine merchanting have all been made a little more comprehensible, a little more pleasurable, a little more manageable because I have faith and confidence in the tools I use.

Last night I was drinking whisky with friends when one stopped mid sentence and handed me his iPad with the news splash of Steve Jobs' death. I took to Twitter and saw a steady stream of reactions to the news. We poured another dram and spoke in saddened awe. I couldn't sleep when I got home and so wandered online, reading testimonial after testimonial.

Steve Jobs built the company that makes the tools I use and trust. He did it remarkably. He built another company that makes movies I love. The tools that forged the World Wide Web were built by yet another company of his. The sheer scale of his accomplishments is daunting. He changed the world in not one but several fields. For the better, and without question better than the alternatives. A future without him driving forward innovation, shaping the advancements of technology so that it actually matters to people, seems a sad prospect.

It seems selfish, really, to mourn the loss of someone who has done so much because, in part, I wanted there to be more.

Rest in peace, Steve. And thank you.

sight

My left eye is my stronger eye, according to my optometrist and the prescription he gives me. It's been thus for quite a few years now, possibly since I first needed glasses. It's not stronger by much, a mere .25. .25 of what, I don't know, but I don't think that matters very much.

It was Hammersmith station, and I tried reading the Piccadilly and District Line Eastbound maps to work out how many stops we had before we got to Knightsbridge. I assume we were going to Knightsbridge - I was with my mother and she took me to Harrods quite a bit. I needed to squint to work out the station names. I was only 10 or 15 feet away from the maps. My mother sighed and told me we'd need to book an eye appointment. 

That was 18 years ago. My eyesight's about 3-4 times worse than it was for that first prescription. I don't mind being short-sighted, at least not literally. I like my glasses and I don't have any issue with contacts. Every couple of years or so I need to get a new 'script, usually just a fraction stronger. I keep an emergency pair of glasses in the glove box of my car. 

My old optician used to, in between aggrandising tales of his hugely successful sons, recommend laser correction. In the interest of full disclosure he confessed he'd make quite a bit of money if I took him up on it. Sometimes he struck me as more of a salesman than an optician - most of the time, actually. I declined. As I said, I like glasses, have no issues with contacts. 

And the thought of shooting a laser into my eye kind of freaked me out. It still does.

Last week my optician found something, or thought she did. Some sort of discolouring of my optic nerve, or lack of colour - it was too pale. She recommended a second opinion and I took her recommendation. Her colleague dilated my pupils to the size of planets - disconcerting though compelling mirror viewing - and looked at my eyes for a very long time. 

Retinal oedema on my left eye - the strong one. There's a risk of retinal detachment and the possibility that they're going to have to shoot a laser into my eye whether it freaks me out or not.