My dad was ranting1 about the tedious impracticality of cobbling stories together for the purpose of sharing --this, over email, about what he used to do, on various websites, back when his main distraction divertation dilletantism was short-term overland motorcycle adventuring. He was known in those circles, as those circles go, for reliably posting detailed, well-shot travelogues; say a day trip to New Idria where he'd capture the beige-and-blue desolation of desert roads and roam through condemned wooden miners' hostels in his candy pink gas mask, posing next to government posters warning about the hanta virus. Or a week spent meandering through some nearby nowhere, cataloguing the Venus of Nevada, the Cadillac Ranch, or the newest additions to old Leonard's methodical (or maniacal?) sand painting at Salvation Mountain.
Time has passed; bikes have been totaled or sold; age has petitioned for its inevitable toll and has been, in some measure not entirely clear to me for the distance between us, paid; but my dad still heeds the call of wanderlust (or abhors the antsy homogeneity of "just sitting around"), and the wind on his face still thrills him, so he's gotten himself an e-bike and I'm back to having the pleasure of the occasional ride report from him. In seeming pace with the change from an internal combustion engine to an electric hub motor, he's moved from crafting the reports himself to using a phone app. We disagree pretty strongly on the whole phone/app/content ownership/device access issue2, but the knowledge of this doesn't keep us from regular attempts at persuasion in either direction. And so following his latest two-wheeled buzz around the Willamette River came the bird-chirrups:
...[the app] is 1000x easier than the old way of stopping, getting camera out, take a few photos, then when a ride is over, download photos from camera to computer, fix them all up in some program, save those to a file, then open another program and make a map route of some sort, go to a website, upload the map and all the photos, then spend time adding text and locations for the photos, finally getting it to post on a website somewhere...phew! But I used to do that a lot!
The nice thing about this is all you need is phone, click start, take as many photos as you like, click finish, that's it! It then does it all and sends you a link to the finished product!
We are livin' in the future! AutoMagicalRobots Rule!
Which I've got to admit made my blood boil a little for the elision of the their in "finished product", but nevertheless I'm happy he's enjoying himself.
Meanwhile my uncle Dave, who shall receive no introduction, offered a rebuttal:
ain't got time for that! too busy mixing up a batch of Tang!
Meanwhile, fucking around online I was served the following ad:
Mae, un BYD Tang es lo contrario de lo que estoy buscando.
On the first pass it seemed inconsequential, but then my head demanded the lived experience, like when you're watching some film with a character that's making an underwater escape and you hold your breath with them to see if you could do it, too. One...two...three...four...littleextra...okay, you're at ten kilometers per hour now. Tennnn. Driveway speed for folks with arthritic ankles. Honestly, if this were the true state of affairs I'd no longer wonder what the fuck is with the local inability to merge etc. But it has to be a typo. It just has to be.
...doesn't it?
- In his cheerful, bird-like manner of ranting, which has more to do with excited emphasis than the anger or hostility typically associated with ranting. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen my dad angry. This might have some undesirable corollaries in the sense that you can't teach kids how to deal well with something that you have ~no experience with (or entirely subsumed/transferred experience, I guess). On the other hand though, I'm aware of the rare blessing of a childhood not having to be spent on reacting somehow to an angry father, and for that I'm very grateful. [↩]
- I could point out that for all his lengthy history of beautifully-done reports, for instance, the vast majority were on "community" forum sites, where someone else owns all that work --or he could point out that for all my stolid insistence on doing things myself he's the one with lots of travelogues posted, and I'm behind on the post count despite a much higher kilometrage. [↩]