I am a king of skilled procrastination: a meditation on time and technology…

My final paper today, and of the semester, is a short observation journal. I have to write a page for every hour of observation and nine are required for this class. I have eight done and I just finished writing the last few up. This is for a class in disability awareness so I’ve arranged for the human resources director of a local services organization to give me a tour.

The tour is at 1:30 and the paper is due at 3 pm. That leaves a half hour travel and writing time. No problem. When I have to write under pressure then my perfectionism leaves me and I can just write. I know it’s hopelessly neurotic, but it’s not an uncommon neurosis in academia. My speed is way up; I wrote a fourteen page take home midterm yesterday in a little over two hours.

So here I sit in my favorite library as my printer at home is all out of ink and there is no point in buying sundries like ink at this stage in the term.

I’ve noticed that I am becoming an increasingly wired and cyborg-like with my “time saving” devices.

A few weeks ago Jes gave me an early Christmas present of a Palm Pilot. I’ve downloaded all kinds of useful functions and I’ve begun using it for navigating my crazy schedule and all the things one uses palms for. I have a check book program to help me manage the vapor, a few shareware games, I’ve put Word and Adobe Acrobat on for school downloads. It also has a digital camera and can play MP3s. That’s convergence baby, all your devices in one place and it’s the same blue as both my cell phone and the shirt I am wearing now; all things for synergy in this the most synergistic of worlds.

I like to do my work to Jazz, so I copied a bunch of Miles Davis onto the memory card. Playing the music files tends to burn through lots of juice so I have an adapter that I can plug into my car’s cigarette lighter and a different one I can plug into any USB port that siphons power off the computer. Computers in my school’s libraries consist of key boards and flat screen monitors mounted on a steel cradle. The computer hardware sits behind the flat screen and looks like a very small piece of Samsonite luggage no larger than a folded laptop.

There are two USB ports in the side into which I have my jump drive and the palm plugged. I, in turn, am plugged into the palm via head phones and the jump drive via the monitor. My eyes track the color in this electrochemical surface. It does its best to pretend the white page and the black ink, hypothetically hammered into place by a daisy wheel or some down strike armature, and those precursors are themselves shadows of the typesetter’s diligence. That’s time for you, my grandfather made his living as a photo engraver; a family trade of woodcarving adapted from the hobbies of shipwrights on the Great Lakes into chiseling metal to match photographic prints. He was a “typesetter” of images in the latter days of a Guttenberg world.

In my ears it’s May 1952, twenty one years before my birth, and Miles Davis is playing that Coltrane classic Dear Old Stockholm in one of only two sessions that he did for Capitol Records. He’s a little strung out on heroin and you can tell because of the “flat” passages and his occasional disappearance and resurfacing. Even still, his bad days are some of the best days and if you’re not up on that story line go read James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues or watch that Otto Preminger classic The Man with the Golden Arm.

Memory, time, media, manna: it’s a circular circuit of information transfer, a multimedia orgy, a radioactive bath of ones and zeros simmering me in a shimmering illusion of productive options for the manipulation of signs. It’s a decadent buffet for the Calvinist elect on the far side of the digital divide. It’s time for me to go to the next thing…and the next…