total.pardo

i decided i have to take more notes.

i decided i need less static.

ARO (amateur radio operators) call it QRN (troubled by static)

i just do.

went back over the “ideas” i had in a chap book called “34 observations” - and from the drain of forgotten epiphanies. the same drain that captures the deaths of great ideas that burst forth in hot, wet flashes of intuition and anger - ideas lost like sentries on the picket line guarding against the next attack from continuous partial attention.

i almost lost a great idea for a piece. Henri Cartier-Bresson would not have had his decisive moment. no sir.

if i lose 2-4 great ideas a week - could it be the “greats” lose several score more in the same period? probably.

jean shepherd got on that radio almost every night in the fifties and sixties - invariably without notes. did he pull the stories out of his bottom? or was he just that good. the latter evokes. the dude abides.

perhaps pardo’s mind has become like a compost pile? i certainly put almost every insignificant grass clipping of information i find in there. doyle’s holmes would most likely demand the immediate burning of my attic mind indeed. to wit:

My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled around the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

‘You appear to be astonished,’ he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. ‘Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.’

i decided its not so good to have shallow knowledge, the mile wide, one inch deep retention basin absorbing the wiki blurbs, rss snippets, and other informational rat holes - only to dry up in after the deluge passes.

drinking from the content fire hose is getting cumbersome.

and keeping notes from it doubly so.