#180

Nice round post number today. Half of three hundred and sixty. In the fifth grade I tried to learn to skateboard, which involves attempting a ten-eighty, or, 1080, or, (2)360. 

We are talking about circles, here. 

Most I got out of this affair was learning to spin entirely around mid-leap, skateboard at least ten feet away from me with the wheels in the air, which is how I set it down. I can jump from a high dive and execute without hesitation, walk along the edge of the roof of a tall building or the top of brick wall six inches wide, do that Prince of Persia thing where you swing from horizontal bar to horizontal bar and also run up walls and kick off them to climb buildings, jump twenty-plus feet straight down, tuck and roll onto concrete and go directly into a sprint, but I cannot stay on a skateboard in motion. Just won't happen. 

Someday I won't be able to do any of those things, and hopefully I will have learned from life not to really care about that at all. However, already do not care that I can't skateboard. Check that off the list.

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I wonder how many federal law enforcement agents know how to skateboard. Could this information be found and made public through a Freedom of Information Act Request?

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It also crossed my mind to wonder how many are orphans, but that is a very personal matter and a rude question to even think*. Very low of me. Curiosity is a tough thing to wrangle, just scurrying ahead of you like a greased weasel on a dark night, sinking its teeth into whatever. 

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My second lamp lives pretty close to my head. One should always have a light by one's bed if one can make that happen; if it has to be the only light in the room, well, I've lived that way and it's not optimal, but one can manage. The important thing is being able to shut the light off from your bed. 

Like its partner in illumination, it's more of a desk lamp than a room lamp. This lamp has been with my family since the early nineties, and indeed was once the "computer lamp", the one which lived next to the computer on the huge glass table in the office of the apartment, and later, the multilevel little pressboard desk from Sears we had in our University Housing unit next to the dinner table, and then back to the apartment. Since coming to the states for the second time, that is, since the advent of the aughts and the bold new century, it has lived in this room, above my head, as my reading lamp. It's been in the closet for some years, but it is back in service now and still going strong with a warm yellow glow. My dad put a real good bulb in there.

It's got a rectangular black plastic "tray" base, with little square compartments for oddments like erasers and tacks and rubber bands and anything else you might want, like spare change and superballs and baby teeth and relics from acid trips like particular pebbles or a hard dried length of reed, and extremely small toys, beads, business cards, shells, tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce, unused keychains, and lord knows what else. The very front is a long narrow scoop, for pens and pencils.

The switch is a turn knob, flat on the right corner of topmost level part of the tray, smooth and white and round, gentle clockwise tension action with a pleasant click release. It has that desk lamp stylized cone shape head in white lacquered metal, on a neck that's just flex wire covered in that round grooved black plastic sheathing for cables, which rises from a tall protrusion at the top center of the tray, and extends to the top left corner. This has a hollow compartment for pens and pencils which you wish to be vertically oriented, rather than horizontally at the bottom of the tray.

Good lamp. I like level differences like that, where the very front of something is its bottom, closest to the surface rests on, and the back is the top, the pinnacle of the object. I also like looking at graphs, and arrangements of extremely perfect shapes.

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That's all I got, folks. I'll describe other lamps in the future, but those are the two main lamps, I guess, for right now. But life is long, I've known many a lamp, and by and by I will do them some form of what can be thought of as justice.


--JL

*should note that due to the children's literature I have happened to consume over the course of my lifetime, I am almost painfully sympathetic to orphans. Almost all of my philanthropic power-fantasies involve easing the plight of orphans.

I got so high before and during today's post. I'm serious. Keeping completely silent but I feel my laughter physically filling my room like giant balloons.