August 8, 1997

Summer is dwindling… & the days float by like so many logs on a river, on their way to the sawmill of mind, to be made into the planks of memory… hm, don’t know that I would show that metaphor in public. Or is it a simile? What was the difference, anyway? So much for my liberal education.

Had a light brush with celebrity last Friday. A movie crew spent the whole day out in front of my office building, shooting something. It’s a good, very urban sort of location, and features a conveniently large traffic island to boot, so they weren’t the first ones I’ve seen there.

But it was no small effort, unlike a TV commercial or some music video. On hand were two huge cameras, a couple of cherry pickers outfitted with artificial shade that they could adjust as the sun crossed the sky, dozens of extras and a lot of technicians and crew waiting around for something to do. As I left for the day, I could see some active filming going on, and the star (as I’d heard) was indeed Bruce Willis, whom I got a short look at. Not my first choice among movie stars, but he was good in 12 Monkeys, anyway.

E-mail has proven itself quite interesting in the month or so I’ve had it. I’ve heard from people I almost never — in a couple of cases, flat-out never — get real mail from. I’ve also found out a number of things I might not have otherwise, not at least for months or years. Just this week an old VU friend e-mailed me to say he was moving to San Francisco after living 14 years on the East Coast. Not long before that, I found out that a Scotsman I knew in Japan had become a father this year.

Then there was the running series of E-Postcards (the sender’s phrase). One fellow I know took a laptop on vacation and has sent a daily report on his movements (mostly on the West Coast) to a large number of e-addresses, mine included.That’s something you won’t catch me doing, taking a laptop on vacation.

2016 Postscript: Since then, a child of mine then in utero has grown up, I often take laptops on the road, but not on vacations per se, and the most recent Bruce Willis movie I’ve seen is The Sixth Sense. I think Mercury Rising was the movie being made that day. It was one of the turkeys that earned Mr. Willis a Golden Raspberry that year.

As for email, I don’t use the hyphen any more, and the in pre-social media days, the regularity with which people corresponded on paper was a pretty good predictor of how much they used email. After the novelty was over, people who were lousy paper correspondents proved to be the same electronically.