446. Mass Murderer Still at Large

BROWDERBOOKS


Here it is at last: the cover of New Yorkers, my new nonfiction title.  

It will soon be available in both print and e-book formats, once certain matters are settled with the two POD (print on demand) printers for self-published books, Amazon and IngramSpark.

Admittedly, it's a gamble, for the illustration is subtle.  Every time I look at it, I recognize a new detail that says New York.  As for  instance:

• taxis, buses, bikes, and subway trains
• hearts, as in I (heart) New York
• a sidewalk vendor's cart with an umbrella
• a man jogging
• an old lamppost that forms an inverted U at the top
• a TV screen
• apples (the Big Apple)
• high heels (fashion)
• arrows, suggesting movement (New Yorkers are always in motion)
• BE: people come here to be, or become, themselves
• DO: New Yorkers are great doers, always busy

And so on.  There are icons I have yet to decipher.  Some may be indecipherable.  But by all means have a go at it.  It's fun.

But will this register with prospective buyers surfing the Internet?  I doubt if subtlety sells books.  But the two alternatives that my design team offered me -- crowded streets and traffic squeezed in between soaring buildings, seen by day or night -- were the familiar vision of the city, whereas this is strikingly original.  I fell in love with it at first glance and have never regretted my choice.  

For my other books, go here.


                 MASS  MURDERER
                  STILL  AT  LARGE

                         Her Many Royal Victims

She strikes at many times in many places, and the list of her victims is impressive:

• Alexander the Great at Babylon in 323 BCE, ending his planned march into Arabia and North Africa, and setting off a bloody fight among his followers as they carved up the vast territories he had conquered.
• The Visigothic king Alaric in 410 CE, after sacking the city of Rome, but with Italy still to conquer.
• Oliver Cromwell in 1658, a good Puritan who refused to take quinine, which he associated with the Jesuits, thus making way (1) for the Stuart restoration in 1660, and (2) countless films and romance novels in the twentieth century idealizing the colorful (and morally slack) Cavaliers, while denigrating those strict, righteous, drab, and depressing Puritans.
• Lord Byron in Greece in 1824, thus making him a hero of the Greek fight for liberation from Turkish rule, and refurbishing his image as hopelessly depraved, an image that had driven him from Restoration England (itself a bit depraved) into exile.

        Had it not been for this ruthless female killer, it has been suggested, Greek might have become the lingua franca (lingua graeca?) of the Western world, Italy might be speaking German today, England might not be a monarchy, and Lord Byron might have become King George Gordon the First of Greece.  A bit far-fetched, perhaps, but not impossible.

          It should be obvious by now to readers that the murderer discussed here is not a human, but an ailment, a murderous disease. Bubonic plague?  Guess again.  Small pox?  Cholera?  The flu?  Wrong again.  The disease involved is malaria, carried by certain species of the mosquito genus Anopheles, whose bloodsucking females are carriers of various disease-causing parasites, one of those diseases being malaria.  And we know whose blood they are sucking, but one might ask, Why?  Because, in the insidious biological scheme of things, female mosquitos need blood for  protein and other nutrients necessary for developing eggs.  Without our blood, they could not reproduce.  So we humans are linked to them by nature -- or whoever you want to blame for your summer mosquito bites, and for the world killer malaria, plus yellow fever. The total number of deaths from mosquitos throughout human history?  An estimated 52 billion, almost half of all deaths in human history.

Female mosquito

           Interesting, in a depressing way, but what has it to do with New York, the subject of this blog?  Malaria does not plague us here, but in the early nineteenth century every summer brought an epidemic of yellow fever, caused by the mosquito Aedes aegypti.  So great a threat, in fact, that well-to-do merchants took their families north, out of the range of the disease, to a sparsely settled community known as Greenwich Village.  Then, finding that they could commute from there to their office or store in the city, they decided to buy property and build homes in this quiet, healthy neighborhood.  The result: the handsome Greek Revival residences, most of them built in the 1830s, found throughout the Village -- my neighborhood -- today.

Here she is, at work on human skin.
JJ Harrison

          Here I will add a personal note.  All my life I have noticed that, in picnics and other social gatherings that lingered into the early evening hours of summer, I was always the first one bitten.  I would feel an itching around my ankles, while everyone else was blithely unaware, at first, of the presence of these bloodsucking little predators.  I have long since vowed to never kill spiders, since they kill flies and mosquitos.  I have embraced that old saying,

                         If you wish to live and thrive,

                         Let a spider run alive.

If I find a spider in my apartment, I gently deposit it outside a window, so it can find a nearby garden to settle in, spin its web, and kill mosquitos and other pests.

          The name "malaria" suggests "bad air," but bad air did not cause or facilitate the spread of malaria; water did, since it helps mosquitos breed.  And today, with our greater knowledge of mosquitos and the diseases they spread, are these tiny creatures less of a threat?  No way.  In 2018 they killed an estimated 830,000 humans.  How come?  Because of population density: we live in far more congested circumstances than in the past, therefore are more vulnerable.  And the poorest and most deprived among us are the most vulnerable to mosquito-borne illnesses.  When I traveled years ago in the tropical regions of Mexico, everywhere I saw signs warning of paludismo, meaning "malaria."  Today malaria is chiefly confined to rural areas of Mexico not visited by tourists.  But in many parts of the world it's definitely a problem.  Anopheles is still winning the war.

          The villain of the story is the female.  So what are male mosquitos doing all this time?  Sucking nectar and other juices from plants.  But we can't let him off the hook entirely, since he breeds with the female and therefore facilitates her depredations.  But when you hear that familiar high-pitched zzzzzzz at night, you can be sure it's a female after your blood.

Source note:  This post was inspired by "Suckers," David Quammen's review of "The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator," by Timothy C. Winegard, in The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2019.  Many of the facts I cite are taken by Quammen from Winegard's work.

Coming soon:  Monsters: Legend, Fact, and Horror

©   2020   Clifford Browder

445. Thank God for Hate

BROWDERBOOKS

Work on the new book creeps along with renewed problems, because of continued frustrations with the new Mac.  I was tempted to suspend this blog until further notice, then decided I could manage to do the post below instead.  But I may yet have to suspend it, until the worst problems are resolved.  

"Don't know what'll come tomorry and don't care one God damn, sir." -- Union soldiers, 1864.

For a clue as to why this so bothers me, see my poem "Neatnik," published online in Blue Lake Review, December 2019.

                      Thank God for Hate

My endless ordeal adjusting to a new computer has made me think a lot about hate, the kinds of hate, and what it can do to you.  As followers of this blog well know, for many reasons I once loved Apple, Inc., but now, with the installation of my new iMac, I have come to hate it.  I have succeeded in transferring files from the old iMac to the new one, but the files are frozen, pending my buying Microsoft Word and installing it in the new iMac.  This I’ve never had to do before, but I’ve tried repeatedly, and Microsoft has always refused the payment, though no one knows why.  Then, with help, I managed to purchase it, but my files are frozen, until I purchase Word, which I have already done.  The latest twist: I must uninstall Word and then reinstall it.  All this has worn me out.  Result: I hate both Apple and Microsoft.

We use the word “hate” rather loosely.  I admit to saying, and quite often, “I hate liver” or “I hate pop-up ads,” but this isn’t real hate, just a strong dislike.  For  me, real hate is visceral, goes deep.  It isn’t the feeling of a moment; it lasts.  It may subside for a while, but it is still there, waiting for a chance to resurface.  And it hardens you, blunts your better feelings, even kills them.  So there you have it.  Real hate is

• Visceral
• Perennial
• Destructive

Does my antipathy to Apple and Word go this far?  Maybe, maybe not.  We’ll see. 

Have I ever felt real hate?  In my childhood I hated bullies, for I was a bookworm who wore glasses, an easy mark for some aggressive kid eager to play tough and show his manhood.  But this never achieved the level of true hate.  

There was one teacher, Miss Kiess, whom I feared and came to hate.  She was my seventh- and eighth-grade music teacher, a hard little gray-haired woman with a wry, often ironic sense of humor, who delighted in humiliating the weaker kids — the ones deficient in musical ability —  in front of the whole class.  I feared her, therefore came to hate her.  Which shows how hate develops.  What we fear, we come to hate.  But my hate of her had limits; I didn’t wish her physical harm, I just wanted to be free of her, and finally, after two horrid years, I escaped.  My hate of her wasn’t visceral, perennial, or destructive; it didn’t warp my psyche.

          Have I ever seen real hate?  Once, years ago, while dining in a student restaurant in Lyon, France, I heard a great crash at another table.  Everyone, myself included, rushed over to see what was happening.  There, confronting one another amid a clutter of smashed dishes, were two male students.  One had a look of rage such as I have never seen since; it warped his reddened features.  The other, distraught, kept yelling, “Il ne comprend pas la plaisanterie!” (“He doesn't understand a joke!”).  An older restaurant employee, a burly male, separated the two, and order was restored, but I have never forgotten the look of rage on that one student’s face.  He was on the verge of violence.  But was that hate?Visceral and destructive it was, but maybe not perennial.  Maybe just the hate of the moment, in which case, by my definition, it isn’t true hate.  

           Though not usually given to outbursts of rage toward others, as opposed to rage toward God, nature, gravity, destiny, Karma, and myself, I have occasionally felt a surge of anger.  Once, when talking on the phone to a male insurance rep about some complicated matter, in exasperation I muttered to myself, “Jesus Christ…!” (I get very religious when angry).  The rep immediately announced, “Profanity is not necessary.”  His comment enraged me.  To my regret, gentility prevailed, for I didn’t shout at him the thought that surged in my mind:  “Sir, that remark was not intended for your ears, but since you choose to comment, I will tell you that, if I want to use that kind of language, I fucking well will!”  Later, I was surprised by the intensity of my anger.  So we are all capable of rage.

          But rage is not hate, unless it expresses some deep, persistent feeling.  So my righteously proclaimed hate of Apple and Microsoft, though provoked by constant frustration and resentment, is really a momentary outburst of rage.  I can’t imagine it lasting forever, nor would I want it to.  With ample cause, I’m ventilating, expressing my frustration at the endless complexities of adjusting to a new computer, despite the well-meant attempts of many to help.  

*                  *                  *                  *                  *                  *                

         The text above is the post I originally intended to publish.  But since writing it, I have experienced more troubles with the new Mac, which I have christened the Shitbox.  In this post I wanted to include several amusing photos of myself, some showing me smiling goofily and endearingly at my old Mac, while in others I threaten the new Mac with a hammer.  The post would have humor, and a light tone at the end.  But after further frustrations, being totally unable to insert the photos properly and caption them, I have rejected that conclusion as too feel-goody, too optimistic, too bland, too naive.  My anger won’t permit it.

          Now I feel my moments of rage hardening into a steady, settled resentment that indeed approximates hate.  Not that I’m going to start smashing computers or picketing an Apple store — not my style at all.  Instead, I can imagine a quiet, passive, but enduring hate, rekindled at intervals by the memory of previous woes, or worse still, by a repeat of them.  Hate doesn’t have to rage and bluster.  It can sleep in you and be wakened — perhaps to your astonishment — at intervals.  It may warp and harden you, but you can learn to welcome the warp and the hardness, to respect them, even love them.  Hate has energy; it makes you feel more alive.  It can become an essential part of you, a cherished part, even the core of your being.  It can tell you who you are, and in doing so, give you intense satisfaction.  So thank God for hate: it gives us energy and joy.

©   Clifford Browder  2020

444. Mystery Man

BROWDERBOOKS

This is the first post using my new Mac desktop computer.  Some of you know the horrors I've been going through, horrors of transition, which I've recounted on Facebook.  But also, here's a

                                  FRAUD  ALERT

In the course of installing my new printer and computer, I've encountered them three times.  

1.  Having trouble with my old printer, I googled for help, found myself on the website of some outfit called adv soft LLC that I'd never heard of.  A male Asian, fluent in English but with a noticeable accent, worked with me for two hours trying to fix the printer, finally gave up and said I needed a new one -- advice that, even now, I think justified.  He then offered me various pricey plans for support, once I got a new one, and I settled for the 6-month plan, subject to my review.  I then, in a moment of sanity, googled adv soft LLC and learned that its services were unreliable, and that many complaints had been lodged with the Better Business Bureau.  Contacting the outfit, I got a smooth-talking woman and told her I didn't want or need their services.  She canceled my plan, but said I would be billed for a one-time session.  Though I anticipated a big bite of a charge, I was never billed, probably because I knew too much about them, might cause trouble.

2.  While trying to install my new computer, I asked for help, got a phone number online, and got the same male Asian with the same outfit.  Once again, I had been lured onto the adv soft LLC website.  "I don't know you!" I told him (though I really did) and hung up.

3.  The following day, when I tried to sign in to my new computer, I got a dramatic big-screen message that Mac OS X had been invaded by a virus; serious damage would be done, unless you phoned this phone number for help.  It sounded a bit like a scam, but when I was blocked again and again from signing in, I tried the phone number, but got no answer because it was early -- before 9 a.m.  Then, remembering another phone number given me by Apple Support, I tried it, got an immediate answer, explained the situation, and was told, "Don't phone them. This is a scam!"  Up until now, I thought adv soft LLC guilty only of overcharging -- legal and all too common in the capitalist world.  But now, with their phone number associated with a scam, questions of legality came up.  The Apple Support specialist I was dealing with spent a whole hour trying to remove the malware from my computer, and finally succeeded.  Day 2 on my new Mac, and it had been invaded by malware -- what a downer!

FRAUD  ALERT:  Beware of an outfit called adv soft LLC.      They are suspect, have many BBB complaints.

Why is this outfit still in operation?  I have no idea.  But now, on to another mystery, a man of mystery to many of us.

                                  Mystery Man  

                      He knew Goethe and Jefferson, inspired 

                      Darwin, and was celebrated worldwide, 

                       yet we don't even remember his name.

Until recently the name “Humboldt” meant only one thing to me: a river in Nevada that in the nineteenth century surged up mysteriously from a spring, then flowed sluggishly in a somewhat westerly direction, and finally sank down into the ground and disappeared.  It was a rule among the explorers of that time that if you got lost in a desolate hinterland, the only thing to do was follow a stream until it flowed into a river, and then follow that river, and any larger one it flowed into, until you reached the coast.  Rivers were supposed to always flow downstream toward a coast.  And what is now the states of Nevada and Utah then constituted the Great Basin, a desolate region where rivers like the Humboldt rose up out of nowhere, flowed on for a while, and then sank back into the earth.  God help any lost wanderer who followed them in hopes of reaching the coast.

Settlers camping by the Humboldt River, 1859 (retouched).

         When the westward covered wagons of the emigrants reached this region, hoping to make it over the Sierras into California before the first snow, their trail followed the Humboldt.  The native peoples of the Great Basin were not formidable mounted warriors like the Sioux or Cheyenne or Apache, but weaker tribes supposedly pushed by stronger ones into this desolate area, where they survived by eating roots and grasses. The coming of the wagon trails was a blessing for them, since here was food waiting to be snatched.  No need to attack the settlers; just send a few arrows into their livestock and wait.  The settlers might then carved out some choice meat for themselves, but they would have to lave the carcasses behind.  Then, as the wagon trains plodded dustily into the distance, the native peoples would help themselves to a banquet of carcasses.  They’d never had it so good.  And that was all I knew of the Humboldt River and   history, without a clue as to where the name came from, and why, or what the river’s condition is today.  

(Note: The above account of the native peoples of the Great Basin along the Humboldt River are my recollection of accounts by the early settlers of that time, who had little interest in studying the aborigines.  I doubt if it does justice to the inhabitants of that desolate area, who were probably Paiutes.)

         The first traders and pathfinders to discover the Humboldt gave it a series of names, none of which stuck.  Then, in 1845, the pathmarker and future presidential candidate John C. Fremont made a map of the region and gave the river its name.  So Wikipedia informs us, without bothering to explain who or what Humboldt was.  But Fremont knew.  Humboldt was Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the son of a Prussian noble, a much-traveled scientist and explorer famous in his time, but for many of us, forgotten today.

         And how do I connect Humboldt to New York City?  It’s a strain, I’ll admit, but in 1869, the centennial of his birth, there were worldwide celebrations, and 25,000 people marched along Manhattan’s flag- and bunting-adorned streets in honor of him.  Today I have to wonder what scientist’s name could inspire such festivities in this busy metropolis.

Humboldt in old age, 1857.

         Here I won’t give a detailed account of Humboldt’s lifelong pursuit of scientific knowledge, but only a few highlights.

·      Though his widowed mother thought him dull-witted and therefore destined for a career in the Prussian public administration, where she could keep an eye on him, his early contact with the botanist on one of Captain James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific inspired in him a longing to become a world traveler and explorer himself, and so escape maternal domination.

·      Even though his passport from King Carlos IV of Spain allowed him to visit Spain’s vast holdings in the Americas from 1799 to 1804, he described objectively what he saw there, and denounced Spain’s monopoly of the booming silver mining in Mexico, and the abject poverty of the people in Mexico City.

·      In 1804, when on his way back to Europe, he was invited to the United States, so President Jefferson could get advice from him about exploring his recent purchase from Napoleon of a huge territory, the so-called Louisiana Purchase, that almost doubled the nation’s size. Jefferson then corresponded with him for years.

·      In that same year he was introduced to Napoleon, whose subsequent coronation he attended.

·      He was a friend of Goethe, who shared many of his interests and delighted in his conversation.

·      The young Charles Darwin signed up for his famous 1835 voyage to the Galapagos Islands as a result of reading Humboldt’s seven-volume account of travels in Spanish America.

·      In 1827 he began giving lectures to European audiences, free and open to both sexes and all classes, about his earlier explorations in Spanish America.  He wanted to summarize all that was known to the natural science of his day, and how it was all interconnected.  As a result, he has been hailed by some as the father of environmentalism.  

·      Little of his personal life is known, but he seems to have fought off an attraction to young men in his early days, and later may have fathered three or more children with the wife of a servant whose family lived with him for years.

·      When, in 1859 at age 90, he died, he received a state funeral in Berlin.  Ten years later, in 1869, the centennial of his birth was celebrated worldwide, with festivities in New York, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Moscow, Alexandria, Egypt, and Melbourne and Adelaide, Australia.  His fame, a London newspaper reported, was “bound up with the universe itself.”

A statue of Humboldt at the Humboldt University in Berlin, 2015.
Christian Wolf

         Given his deserved renown, I am chagrinned at learning only now something about the career of a man whose name I formerly associated with a sluggish river in the desolate stretches of nineteenth-century Nevada.  Also bearing his name are the Humboldt Current, which flows along the western coast of South America, and the town of Humboldt, South Dakota, in the township of that name, in (I'm not making this up) Minnehaha County.  

          (Never heard of Minnehaha?  For shame!  You must never have read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, published in1855, where she figures prominently as the love interest of the protagonist, Hiawatha.  I'll say no more of Longfellow's masterpiece, except that it begins "on the shores of Gitche Gumee," a name that has lived in literary infamy ever since.  But I digress; forgive.)

Source note:  This post was inspired by “The Magnetic Polymath,” Miranda Seymour’s substantial review of two recent books on Humboldt in the New York Review of Books of December 5, 2019.  Which proves that I read more than the Sunday New York Times, though not, I confess, The Song of Hiawatha.  

Coming soon: The Killer of Alexander the Great.

©  2020  Clifford Browder.

443. Apple, Inc. -- I Hate It

BROWDERBOOKS

I have just acquired a domain name that is unique -- mine, and no one else's:
                        cliffbrowderbooks.com. 

What the point of it is, aside from denying it to anyone else, escapes me.  So far, it has proved utterly useless.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  But when some domain name registering outfit offered to register it for only $97, marked down from $300, I knew to immediately delete their e-mail.  

          If anyone wants to know about any of my books, forget the domain name and go here, to a post devoted to my books, their cover illustrations, summaries, and reviews, and nothing else.


                           Apple, Inc. -- I Hate It

Hate Apple, Inc., the company I love to love?  Until last Friday, such a thought was unthinkable.  I hate Big Tobacco, loathe Big Pharma, and harbor undying enmity for Big Oil and certain other conglomerations that pollute our lives, but for Apple, Inc., as longtime followers of this blog well know, I nurse a love that throbs to the very crux of my being.  And this when Big Tech -- such monsters as Apple, Amazon, and Google --  are being called to account worldwide.  Why this passion of mine?  Many reasons:

• It gave me my computer, an ancient Mac desktop that I have had for years, ancient but still gamely functioning, the best computer I have ever owned.
• The nearby Apple store on 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, spacious and flooded with light, has served me well.  Smiling young people in blue outfits greet me at the door, answer questions, and give directions, and on the top floor a Genius does wonders to repair or enhance my ancient desktop.
• Surging to new heights in the market, Apple stock is sexy.  It's "with it," it's "hot," it dazzles.
• As of 2018, Apple has the highest market value ($961 billion)  in the world, and is also, with net income of $59 billion, the most profitable.
• Years ago, on a modest scale, I made what's known as a "killing" in the stock.

          About that "killing": years ago, when Apple's cofounder and presiding genius, Steve Jobs, was rumored to be ill, the stock plunged.  Jobs was Apple's Wunderkind, the guy who again and again created gadgets that no one needed but everyone wanted, a master of invention and design.  Like Edison with the phonograph and the electric light, and like Bell with the telephone, he changed the way we live.  In photos he himself was West Coast casual.  In contrast to the more formal jacket-and-tie look of Wall Street, he had the California look: super informal, with either a sweater or a shirt with an open collar, and plain, old, ordinary jeans.  Which mattered not at all, for his gadgets flew off the shelves, and his computers were slender, sleek, and sexy.  But now the market was saying that, without him, Apple would lose its magic, its fantastic moneymaking ways.  

Steve Jobs, displaying a Mac laptop in San Francisco, 2008.
Matthew Yohe

          I disagreed.  Even without him, I figured, Apple would keep its pizzazz, continue to innovate and dazzle. And so, following the old rule, buy when everyone else is selling, I bought.  Not a huge amount, just what I could manage, but I bought.  And soon enough, it happened: the stock bottomed out and soared, soared, soared, and with a few slumps along the way, has been soaring ever since.  Oh glory!  A modest commitment, but the best investment I have ever made.  I still get a warm, oozy feeling in my innards knowing that, just this once, I was right when everyone else was wrong. And so, through thick and thin, Apple and its stock are precious to me: my one and only corporate inamorato, my sine qua non, my Big Rock Candy Mountain.  Maybe Ayn Rand was right: greed is good.  (Of course.  But for whom?)

          When Jobs, who was indeed ill, left the company, I held on to my stock.  Likewise when, in 2011 at age 56, he died of pancreatic cancer, for I had faith in the company and in Jobs's successor, Tim Cook.  Though born and raised in Alabama, Cook was another tall, lean, spectacled Californian who favored unpretentious jeans (except when admitted to the Oval Office).  And gay, too, as he announced in 2014, the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to do so.  He did it, he said, after getting letters from young kids struggling with their sexual orientation.   

          One more reason to hang on to my stock: in 2012 Cook declared the first dividend since 1995.  It was modest, as dividends go, but a dividend.  What else could he do, being under stockholder pressure, with the company sitting on $100 billions in cash?  And those billions took him to the White House, whose occupant respects fortunes and success, and to meetings with foreign heads of state as well.  Such is our democratic aristocracy.  Movie and TV stars have money, fame, and glamour, but CEOs have power and respect, and it takes them far.  

 bi

The gray-haired Cook on the right.  We know who's on the left.
The subject of their talk: trade.  April 25, 2018.

          Even if Apple could no longer trot out amazing new gadgets, I was sure that just updating the old ones would keep the cash flowing in.  And if it opened stores in China, where a new middle class was yearning for Western paraphernalia, and especially for the magic of Apple's products, the inflow of cash could only increase and accelerate.  (A concern that took him to the White House for a talk on trade and tariffs.)  So I, who dislike gadgets and keep them to a minimum in my life, have continued to love Apple, Inc., and its products.  All corporations have their faults, and Apple is no exception, but the very thought of the company still warms me to the cockles of my heart.  Until now, at least.

          So why this change of heart?  Last Friday I made a momentous and long-delayed decision: I would get a new computer.  My old one still worked well, but for many reasons it needed to be upgraded, and soon.  So I ordered one from Apple -- a desktop like my old one -- and paid an extra $9 for expedited delivery: it would come by 12 noon that very day.  Soon I got an e-mail telling me that it had left the warehouse and was on its way.  I was thrilled.  New vistas opened to me, things my old Mac couldn't do.  A new Mac at last: it was really happening!  

          Tracking it, I learned that it would arrive at 10:59 -- in ten minutes!  I got everything ready, knew exactly where I would lodge it, pending installation.  But 10:59 came and went: no computer.  I tracked it again: it would arrive at 11:30.  Hoping they would bring it up the four flights, I planned a generous tip, counted the minutes, paced the floor, waited.

          But 11:30 came and went: still no computer.  But they were pledged to deliver it by 12 noon; that's what I had paid for.  And at 12 noon, predictably now, no computer.  Yet tracking said it had been delivered -- an error or a flat-out lie -- for downstairs there was nothing, just an empty vestibule yearning to be filled.

          With difficulty I contacted Apple Support by phone, got profuse apologies, was told that they would refund my payment -- not just the $9 but the entire cost of the computer.  So my wasted morning ended with the letdown of letdowns:  I would have to buy the damn thing all over again!  

          Like a dank fog, disillusion crept in, dampening my affection for Apple.  It had betrayed me in the worst way, raising high hopes only to deflate them.  Will I order another Mac?  Of course; I've already done so, and it should come next Tuesday.  Will I continue to see in Apple, Inc., the object of my dreams, my sine qua, my Big Rock Candy Mountain?  Tuesday will tell.  Meanwhile, that mountain is beginning to look a bit worn, a bit barren, and maybe more rock than candy.  Alas.

Coming soon:  As promised before, either a scientist once hailed worldwide but now forgotten by us, or a killer of 52 billion people. Unless, of course, some personal crisis barges in and plants itself in my psyche.

©   2020   Clifford Browder