MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Baltimore - 7 July, 1999 - Despite the advice of the cover, I must actually hope that you are sitting inside reading a Web magazine. I have to hope that after ten days with no new features, you'll be dying for an update of our continuing outrageousness here. Welcome back!
The Conventional Wisdom is that most people don't come here to the Web during the summer months --- because of vacations, the beach, the chance to being out of doors, the parties, what have you. Contrary to that trend, The World's Magazine has usually enjoyed continued patronage during the summer months. We have never experienced the "Dog Days" of the traditonal print publications. Fact is, lots of people find reasons to come back here even during the summer.
Our plan is to keep it that way.
Next week's edition is prime example. We've done two of the three taboo topics, Sex and Politics, so gird your loins because next week we take on Religion. From what I hear from our team of Unruly International Writers, you'll find our Religion edition as pithy, perhaps more so, than the usual fare you expect to get coming here. Among the many things I *could* hype is another G21 First: ROBIN MILLER will introduce a New Religion in AMERICAN DREAMS. Tell a friend!
It was good for me to hear Dragana talk of doing "normal" things again, like visiting family, being able to travel, being able to dream of a future again. We also shared e-mail about some of our childhood obsessions. It turns out that she is an ancient history buff like myself. She has photographs of the archaeological digs of the the ruins of Romuliana - the Roman Emperor Galerius's imperial palace. She was there when they found the part of the archivolt with the Latin inscription FELIX ROMULIANA which proved that this site in Yugoslavia was the place of birth and burial of the last Roman God, Galerius, glorified as the new Romulus and Alexander. She writes: "I would climb on the top of highest tower, trying to imagine how it was once upon a time, and almost could hear the sound of running horses and Roman legions passing by..."
I was just thinking the other day, in regard to my fiction writing, how I could best describe my own lonely childhood games, when I would pretend to be riding with Alexander as he crossed from Asia Minor into the Steppes. I was trying to formulate, from this great distance of age and jadedness, the magic of this phantastic world which I had by myself among the trees, the conversations with my imaginary playmates, how real it all was for me... It's much like trying to explain to a non-writer that you begin to sound like your characters because they are the people you spend the most time with.
OTHER ROD STUFF: Didn't go to the Hamptons for the 4th. Nope. Decided it wasn't prudent, especially after a Providential message which gave me pause.
I stayed in with my thoughts, planned out the next phase of the unpacking marathon, and got a little caught up on my writing assignments. (I now accept that there is No Way to ever get totally caught up. I am committed to far more copy, which "burns" every day demanding more copy, than I could ever possibly get "ahead" on.)
The Good News on the home front is that --- thanks and tip of the hat to my pal, Robin Miller, I am now down to having only ONE BOX left to unpack. Most of my books are now on shelves, all of my casette tapes, and I plan to catalogue the music CDs this week. THE AIR CONDITIONER IS IN! HOORAH! Instead of sitting here sweating rivulets, as I have most of the six weeks since moving here to the southland, I can actually breath and I am dry. THE DESK IS UP! Yes, I am no longer working on a borrowed folding table. I get to unpack my printer this week and move closer to 90s.
My nest should be completed by the end of the summer, at this rate.
Work like you don't need the money,
I HEARD from my friend, and our Balkans War correspondent in Belgrade, DRAGANA VICANOVIC this week that she found the time to visit her brother's family in the Yugoslav countryside. Her nieces and nephews "wouldn't let me go away," she writes. After the horrors of the NATO bombing, some things are going back to normal. Dragana is going to visit her parents next week. And, she writes, if they can push the paperwork through, she and her husband hope to immigrate from their battered homeland and seek a new life in some other country far away from all the bad memories and lost friends...
BUT still need to get to Aestiva's HTML/OS, still need to replace the sound system that was trashed during the cross-country move, still need to add pictures or posters or something to these Spartan walls, repot my plants, buy a new Memory Machine....
Thanks for coming back this week.
Love like you've never been hurt,
Dance like no one is watching,
Rod
Rod is a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he writes on web design and development issues every Thursday. He is principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviews technology issues five days a week. His opinions on the Info Age began appearing on MethodFive's HYPER technology newsletter in March.
When not busy with his publishing chores at this site, and answering sixty -to- one hundred e-mails a day, he likes to throw darts; seek female companionship; and listen to Tupac, Beethoven, Philip Glass, Joni Mitchell, James Carter, Eric Clapton, Snoop Dogg, Etta James, Miles Davis, Handel, Portishead, Toots & the Maytals, Bob Marley, Sinead O'Connor, techno, house, jazz....
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© 1999, GENERATOR 21.
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