Current mood:

satisfied

Well... I'm back from SoCal.

LA can bite my ass. I really can't see any redeeming value in that city. The smog is utterly disgusting. To get anywhere, you've got to take a half-dozen turnpikes and interchanges to a half-dozen different freeways and inter-states.

Fuck that shit.

However, now that I've driven in LA traffic, I can truly say that I've got 1337 dr1v1ng sk1llz.

It was nice to actually meet the people in my department face-to-face, especially our new director. I'm happy to see that he's going to help make my job meaningful. This means that I'll actually be working harder, I'd rather that than knowing that I'm in a completely pointless position.

Over the trip I re-read Fahrenheit 451. Gawd what a great story that is.



"Listen," said Granger, taking his arm and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass.
"When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized that I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was a part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was an individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He *did* things to the world. The world bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on."

...

Granger stood looking back with Montag, "Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts the lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

...

"My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that someday our cities would open up more and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be. You see?" Granger turned to Montag. "Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor. 'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.' "

---Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451.