Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [close-up of wrecked car after crash] (c. 1950)

"It could well have been worse."

Aging amounts to remorse wrestling with inevitable loss, for none of us get to choose our demise and nobody warmly welcomes theirs. It does not help that we crash and burn at our own hands. We gain weight one mouthful at a time. Even when we limit our intake, our nibbles eventually do us in. Not even the lifestyles of the rich and famous amount to any real insurance against these crashes. We lease our youths. Not one of us ever owned theirs outright.

I overwhelmed my hard drive with the same process, one innocuous keystroke at a time. I subscribed to some infinite newsletter, then didn't notice its issues eventually obscuring access to my front porch. However satisfying creation might have been, scrubbing away the resulting accumulations proves the least satisfying assignment. I mostly avoid cleaning up after myself, assuming I acquired enough memory and storage to allow me to not pay close attention, or any genuine attention at all. I've been steadfastly paddling the incoming toward the back of the tub without fully acknowledging that I was sitting in an essentially fluid medium. There never was a way to isolate myself from the effects of my own behaviors.

I admit that I began ignorant, but only because, as near as I could determine in my ignorance then, ignorance was the only starting point on offer. I might get smart—too late, of course—but I could only begin in relative stupidity, barely imagining the forces with which I would one day be wrestling. I thought my idea of using fine art illustrations brilliant, and I sincerely appreciated their ready availability. So appreciative was I that I failed to fully appreciate the effect of accumulating multiple hundreds of megabytes each when less than a single one would have sufficed. Many museum sites share their masterpieces at the highest possible resolution, which would produce the finest quality print. My screen needs less than a fraction of that detail to satisfactorily display any image. Iterated three thousand times, I produced a 2.57 gigabyte master by insignificant-seeming increments.

Launching this monster stresses out my machine. With Safari and Chrome also running, I end up swapping memory to perform ordinary operations. Saving takes forever. The machine crashes and restarts itself, exhausted if I leave it open overnight. My blog application's so overwhelmed that I can only Force Quit the damned thing. It's working wounded. I need to reduce the size of all those illustrations. This involves finding where they're stored inside the application—they do not appear on any file list—then running each through another app that shrinks the file size and reloading the result. If I were diligent, this effort might require months and months. I lack the discipline to even start.

I will eventually trade up into a machine with significantly more than eight gigs of memory. This will enable me to continue paddling the accumulating liquid to the back end of the bathtub, probably into perpetuity. Eventually, as the aging economist once said, we're all just as well as dead. We're way too late smart, and inevitably unable to successfully undo the damage we've already innocently done. I am the butler holding the smoking gun. "Forgive him, for he knew not what he was doing" seems the appropriate epitaph. Not one of us ever knew before we were more than halfway through, and it's rare that any of us willingly ever attempt to clean up the mess we made of it, once so innocent and so filled with promise. Forgiveness might be the only utterly necessary coda. It could well have been worse.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: iAlogue, #PureSchmaltz