The Slough of Coachean Despond

Things get progressively less pleasant with Juan and Kwan and the stoners. Last night, for no apparent reason, I lost my internet connection, but the cable was still working, and after a climb over boxes of displaced books that would have exhausted Sir Edmund Hillary to perform the usual unplug/replug ritual, with no effect, I pulled out the cable, went upstairs and contemplated reading Derrida to lift my spirits. You forget how important the internet is until you’re trying to load up your iPod with new songs and you don’t get an automatic fill-in listing for all the tracks and everything is Track 01, Track 02, Track 03.

My life, obviously, is a nightmare.

But then again, I am a man of resource, so I grabbed a bunch of disks to take to the office, where I can rip ‘em (WITH info), copy to my flash, bring ‘em home (the locked iTunes on my office Mac is v4, which went out with the leisure suit) and drag ‘em over via transit through hookup with Little Elvis. And I did give a peek to the video feature; there’s a videocast of free p.d. cartoons, so I watched an old Bugs Bunny on my little screen and thought to myself, you know, this isn’t half bad, given the right situation. I’m going to seek out stuff at archives.org: they’ve got lots of things I like, like world’s fair videos and such, that seems to be perfect for the iPod screen. What I don’t have yet, of course, is a name for the new iPod. I’m sure I’ll come up with something. It will be like Tik (pronounced teek) evolving from T.K.: I’ll know it when I hear it.

Speaking of names, I will soon be forced, I hope, to remember a whole bunch of new novice names. As I’ve said before, remembering names is, I think, the hardest part of coaching. That’s one reason why, as often as not, I try to come up with nicknames. It’s a lot easier to remember Termite than it is Paul [Unspellable]. A lot easier to spell, too. And he was a legacy! Imagine what it’s like when one is fresh out of the can with no precursor. A sea of random races without names—a postmodern Eden, you might say. I would say, just more nightmare for the slough.

At least I did get a new Nostrum up (I think) before the cable flickered out. And I’m two thirds of the way through editing part one of part 5 of Caveman (if you can follow the math on that). My goal now is completed Caveman by the beginning of the school year, followed by a launch of The View from Tab podcast, into which I’ll incorporate both old and new material. And, of course, I’ve got to finalize Bump (I’ve been trimming the Legion material at this, the eleventh hour), and also prep up my Cur materials for the new season of team meetings. Usually I just start over from the beginning, but with the veterans, there’s a lot of good stuff we never got too, so I’ll need another bookmark in the Cur, one for the old, one for the new. Despond on a stick! Then again, thank goodness I am a man of resource.

I will survive!