One of the lessons from the Great Experiment is that the nature and frequency of blog posting varies with and is directly attributable to two factors: what is going on in what passes for “real life” among the blog-afflicted, and access to our vice, i.e. a high speed connection to the internet.
Now that we are back in the brainstem of the global electronic colossus, on an Internet II backbone that moves like greased lightning, it is a pleasure doing even those mundane chores which were boring before and torture on the slow, feeble connections in South America.
But so far our on-line access is limited to the office, at a major American university which shall go nameless, where we are now sitting, at 8:08 on a Monday night. At nine we have to pick up the ever-enlightening Norma Yvonne when she finishes teaching her last class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. And then off to our temporary refuge, a condo in Watertown in a sprawling complex of octogenarians eerily named “The Village”.
Eerily mostly because we have just finished downloading and viewing the classic 13-part TV masterpiece “The Prisoner”, in which an enigmatic and acerbic British spy played by Patrick McGoohan tries to resign from Her Majesty’s Secret Service. On his way out of town he is gassed and kidnapped and wakes up in an inescapable futuristic Mediterranean resort, a sort of cross between Club Med and an electronic Gulag. Called “The Village.”
But the village in Watertown is not full of lapsed spies (although who really knows what those inscrutable oldsters are currently up to, or were up to 50 years ago. We know enough retired (and active) intelligence operatives to know that they look just like everyone else, in fact that is a PROFESSIONAL REQUIREMENT in their business. These villagers, however, seem more intent on grilling the perfect sirloin and sorting their garbage correctly than in escaping or forcing us to reveal our secrets.
How do we manage at home this long hot July, without cable TV or Internet access? Well, besides discovering the hidden thrills of Candid Camera and Sabrina the Teen Witch, we find that we actually have time to read books. Unfortunately, the first one we picked up, “Small Town” by Lawrence Block, a legal-crime drama set in post 9/11 New York, is literarily worthless and full of embarrassing and poorly scripted sexual fantasies, yet paints vivid characters and puts them in interesting enough situations that we are probably doomed to reading it through to the end.
Enough about us. Time to concoct a workable scheme for blogging the convention without getting thrown out, arrested, blacklisted or shanghaied. Two weeks and counting.