I went down early last night- the combination of the Saturday at the office, the birthday party for the 89-year-old former Clandestine Agent, who looks like butter would not melt in her mouth, and the subsequent hour-long swim in the cool blue waters left me drained.

I got up to the raucous Indy rock from the station out West I stream on the laptop. I discovered I could stream things on the iPad, too, which also mimics the Kindle I got only about eight months ago to be ready for the pool season that is now slipping away from us.

I must be slacking. A buddy out West was already up and at ‘em, working on his morning post that always challenges me. He sent a book review of a fantasy series he is reading at the moment. He is a voracious reader, now that he is retired, and I wish I could keep up with him.

The subject of his review was a novel by a guy named S.M. Stirling, a prolific Canadian author who is hanging his hat in New Mexico these days. I was immediately entranced- there was a long profile of artist Georgia O’Keefe on the radio yesterday, and I slipped into a reverie of mesas sculpted in the shapes of erotic flowers, and stark bleached cow skulls.

It would be nice to have a yurt out there at The Ghost Ranch- better, a little adobe house and a view of the sunset. But that is “Plan B,” or D or Z.

My pal told me he has pre-ordered the latest of Stirling’s “Change” series, which is predicated on a mystical event that renders modern technology unworkable. Against this plot device, the stories are generally conflict-driven and filled with bravura. From what I could discern from Wikipedia, he “describes societies with cultural values significantly different from modern western views.”

I can see why that would appeal to my buddy. Certainly, I am tired of writing about standing on a precipice of our own making, so I it must be liberating to imagine a profound change on society imposed from some external source, like the postulated Aliens I have been reading about who are going to wipe us out for polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

That is the appeal of the Rapture series, I imagine, the vastly popular series of novels I manage to ignore. I do credit it with a clever plot device, that harnesses the internal reinforcement of the fundamentalist Christian doctrine that permits the authors to explore the degradation of society while deploring the whole sorry mess.

The pool season is ending and I am awash in books. All the bookcases are full, and they continue to come in. I just got a copy of “Women and Desire,” by Polly Eisendreth, and a matched pair of tomes called “The Female Brain,” and “The Male Brain,” by Dr. Louann Brizendine that focus on neural development of the sexes.

“Gender,” of course, is not the proper word, though we appear to be stuck with it. Either term is now fraught with a political agenda, just like the shrill debate about the weather. I never paid much attention to that sort of stuff as a parent, and having two sons, I only had the one female to deal with.

Which is turns out was not well, but never mind. It has been a relatively tranquil decade on the home front, though the tumult of the larger world has been intense. There has been way too much work and way too little time to either create things or sit still long enough to enjoy a book right through.

I wonder, too, at the impact of technology on the fully developed brain. Male, in my case, responding to the rapid-fire cascade of information processing required by the way we do business and social networking. The way I work- and it is a curious sort of work- is swapping bits of information with defined and undefined networks, packaging and repackaging the bits; adding some, redacting others, building assemblies of information and shipping them off into the ether.

I sit most of the day in a large cluttered office with the walls ringed by workstations.

Originally, it was a team space, and is set up to accommodate a couple other workers in a team environment that was handy when we were in the early stages of producing proposals to the Task Orders issued for competition by the government. The brain development book, by the way, provided some excellent insight into the way the Virginia Contracting Authority is acting at the moment, but I digress. That was the reason for the Saturday spent at the office, which had that dreamy feeling of vague doom.

Anyway, the orientation of my workspace has me facing a computer screen placed against the window. I have a little clock radio tuned to National Public Radio when I am not on a conference call, since the corporate Network Nazis are infuriated by the use of company bandwidth to stream audio as I do at home. Accordingly, my attention is focused most of the time on the results of my flying fingers and glowing screen that people will appear suddenly at my side and startle the crap out of me.

I wonder about that sort of focus, and why I feel so tired at the end of the day.

We have been so long in this technical world- I remember well the Wang word-processors in my first early foray into the world of rapid information dissemination at the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Faciiy on Oahu in 1981. It seemed a little like science fiction.

At this long distance, I can’t tell if I always had a touch of Attention Deficit Disorder or not. It is interesting though to see what skills have atrophied; I write, physically write, very little and my cursive script has become wild and erratic. I rarely write a check anymore, preferring to process through the internet teller, setting up automatic distributions and recurring one-time payments to initially avoid the monthly labor of paper bills, rolls of stamps and balancing a physical checkbook.

Now, I pick up a pen to write checks for the miscellaneous bills that come in for the maintenance of the parents estate that I find myself rusty, my penmanship childish or reduced to sloppy Navy-style block letters.

With the summer so close to being gone, I have to sort out what to do with all the books. They are stacked on the end-table by my chair, loaded on my iPod in audio version, and a large wicker basket is full of paperbacks by the desk.

What the hell, I thought. I toggled over to Amazon and bought Stirling’s “Dies the Fire,” the start of the Change series. I had the option of having it shipped wireless to my Kindle device, and I took advantage of it, simply by clicking a button.

Amazon shipped it direct to the Kindle and the iPad, and with the rapid application of technology, I have taken the reader completely out of the process.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
WWW.vicsocotra.com