Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was an intensely private person. It’s how she managed to conceal, for almost a year, the condition that was finally diagnosed as late stage uterine cancer. It was a foolish choice, that modesty; but Kage did the best she could with the hand she was dealt. I never heard her blame anyone for the fact that her cancer won. The last year of her life was marked more than anything else by good humour, patience, fortitude and determination.

She left her stories to me to tell after she was gone, which I have been endeavouring to do. I’ve never intended this blog to be a soap box, or a diary, or a private stage. It’s not about me, except as I was -and am – part of Kage’s unique and still-evolving world. She’s still telling the tales she originally came up with through a lifetime of summer afternoons and long drives. She’s just telling them through the notes and fragments she left behind. And I just focus them through the  facets of our very odd shared life.

Occasionally, of course, my own life does interfere – I mean, power failures, illness, cats lairing somewhere in the computer system – these are things that happen in the present; they inevitably get wound into what I write here. Kage took her inspirations from  reality; a somewhat subjective one, I admit, but still – she wrote what she saw. And, trained by her, so do I.

Reality sometimes turns downright crappy, though, Dear Readers. Tomorrow I must get up early – which is bad enough on a Monday – for a doctor’s appointment. This is because, despite my advancing years and very definite post-menopausal condition, my body seems to have lost track of the time. It thinks I should be menstruating. Since I know I shouldn’t, and since I have no more modesty than a cat, and since I learned a dreadful lesson from Kage – I will be off to submit to a biopsy.

Dear Readers, you have been very patient with my foibles and occasional collapses as Kage’s amenuensis. I’m not asking for attention here, not even kind thoughts – just letting you know that I am feeling a bit stressed and may not have much to say for a few days.

On the other hand, I may babble my brains out. Who knows? I don’t. But I’ll return to this as soon as I can.

Talk to you all later –

Kage Baker: for her, the annual holiday season began on October 1st. Which is today. So, happy October 1st, Dear Readers, and welcome to three months of frenzied dancing in the dark!

As we slide (astronomically, culturally, spiritually. Grammatically.) into the night time of the year, the importance of lights and celebrations grows exponentially. The darker it gets, the brighter we need to be. That was Kage’s philosophy, which she implemented in every aspect of her life that she could manage.

Literally overnight, the light has changed. It’s older, colder, golder now – it thickens as the day ages, until by sunset it is pouring like syrup from the west. There was dew on the grass and roses this morning, distinct beads rolling; there were cat and raccoon prints on the wet windshields of the cars. The smell of barbecues is being overcome by the smell of fireplaces (it’s an old neighborhood; we still have fireplaces here.) Decorations are appearing, shy and secretive as crocus buds in spring snow.

My whole family is pretty much nuts about decorative lights – when we were little girls, we’d clap with delight when the white lights in the trees came on at Disneyland: we all liked those glowing trees even more than  Mickey, Donald and all 7 Dwarves. Since adulthood and our own varied households, the holiday displays have gone up at all our houses – Kage and I usually on lit up for this 3-month season, but Kimberly strings seasonally-appropriate lights on her windows for every month of the year. Then all restraint is thrown to the winds for Halloween …

So today and tomorrow, we shall deck the halls with orange and purple lights; glowing eyes in the trees; waterfalls of embers, red and orange and yellow, like curtains in a god’s smithy. Down come the Chinese lanterns and cocktail-coloured lights that have been marking summer; up go the darker colours of autumn and Halloween. We have strings of crystal skulls, glowing jack-o’lanterns, and a porch light that paints the entire front door area with a fevered green glow as thick as paint. I’ll build a Jack out of corn stalks and a craft pumpkin head with a light bulb in it, and mount it on Lars the Wicker Moose – for Halloween, we’ll cover his antlers with spider web and he goes disguised as a stag.

And in the meanwhile, the orange-flavoured marshmallow pumpkins are out from Russell Stover, and we’re all courting sugar toxicity. The Peeps have appeared, too. Black jelly beans. Chocolate scratch cats. M&Ms that don’t taste any different, but are all the colours of changing leaves that California never has enough of … and for the brief while they survive in an open bowl on my desk, they are a a delight to the eye.

(Harry always carefully takes a bright russet one, and holds it in his claw to eat it like a wheel of cheese. The Corgi, who is of course not allowed chocolate, watches disconsolate and broods over his Milk Bones.)

Kage loved this season. She loved this moment – it’s when the year is tired and needs our help; when it becomes our responsibility to see to it that the nights retain a little light. Someone has to keep the beacons lit, to remind the sun to come back eventually. Kage took that on herself, every year as the autumnal mists rose up to blur the changing trees … and so do I.

Kage Baker liked coffee … no, I tell a lie. What Kage liked was caffeine.

To this end, she drank many pints of Coca Cola every day, because she also preferred her beverages sweet and cold. She’d tried warming up Coke but the results were not good. And before you make too much of a gagging face, Dear Readers, I must point out that she got the idea from ancient Dr. Pepper commercials, which used to actively recommend heating that for a winter-time drink.

It’s horrid, by the way. So is hot Coke, although it’s actually marginally less horrid than hot Dr. Pepper. But faced with the lack of warmed potability in her favourite beverages, Kage was forced to resort to coffee in the mornings. It gave her brain the initial needed kick-start; as soon as the neurons resumed their little do-si-do across her synapses, she would switch gratefully to Coke.

Even long days at Dickens Fair – I, desperate for caffeine and determined to be true to the ambiance, live then on Earl Grey tea brewed strong enough to use as ink. Kage drank Coke in her tea mug. And, often, with a healthy dollop of rum in it … it’s amazing how her role as a housekeeper/cook let her indulge in that with no guilt, whereas mine as lady of the house prevents me from clandestine tippling. Two old ladies at the mercy of their costuming, I fear … though Kage figured out how to outwit it. I’ve always been too susceptible to my corsetry.

Yestreday was National Coffee Day. Yeah, I failed to notice or celebrate it. I didn’t drink nearly my normal quota of the sacred drink, either, which explains a lot – why I staggered through the day in a daze, why I fell asleep before midnight, why a headache plagued me so much of the day. Maybe even why my computer didn’t want to turn on this morning; I am willing to believe in a semi-cyborgian symbiosis there, wherein the electronics I am closest to absorb caffeine through my fingertips.

But I forgot! Oh, shame upon my head and nervous system. I am making up for it today, though, and can feel the bright sparks in my mind moving more freely as my cerebro-spinal fluid is diluted and replaced with coffee …

If you, too, Dear Readers, rely upon caffeine for part of your electromagnetic energy and forgot to celebrate it yestreday – join me today and drink even more in penance and adulation. I recall Kage at one point declared Lord Ermenwyr the patron … something … of coffee, late one night as we careered through the San Joaquin valley in desperate search of the mermaid sign of ease. He’s certainly the embodiment of elegant nerves and twitchiness.

Me, I’m going to go pour myself another cup from my daily carafe, and keep waiting for the UPS truck to get here. It’s got the next 4 pounds of my monthly allotment of Mullah Coffee on it; not even the Bay Blend beans from Trader Joe’s can quite compare.

I really need another cup …

Kage Baker was wont to occasionally throw her hands in the air, whirl around in her swivelly desk chair and exclaim: “The computer won’t work!”

This could mean anything: a power failure. A virus attack. A corrupted file. The sudden engagement of the screen saver. Kage, although she never learned about macros or hot keys or keystroke commands, had an unparalleled ability to accidentally reproduce some order she didn’t know existed, and change an entire document to Cyrillic. Or disappear it entirely. Her margin and spacing choices were especially prone to this derangement, and it was always rather challenging to figure out what coherent but inappropriate command she had spontaneously generated this time.

On the other hand, there is no denying that computers will, in their fast-as-lightning, idiot savant, GIGO-emperiled way, do weird things. There is always a reason, but unless you can figure it out postmortum (as it were) the entire sequence can present like black magic. There honestly seems to be no reason sometimes for the things the Interwebs do … like, eat transmissions.

I know there must be rational reasons; physics, while it gets weirder every day, is not so arbitrary. But emails do vanish into thin air, and postings, too. Hitting send doesn’t always have any more effect than prompting a little sign to light up saying Shared With Your Friends, or some such kindergarten-level reassurance. But, you know what? All that really means is that the program has noted you hit the Send key, and has thus acknowledged that stroke. It doesn’t mean what you sent got there.

Unless the problem is wide-spread and prevents you from using your system, most folks don’t bother to find out what caused it. It’s chance, or gremlins, or a peevish Loa (Kage kept a sigil for Papa Legba written on her computer, trusting him in his role of human/spirit intermediary to keep her Interwebs working). For Kage, it was an especial mystery: even when I could show her how she’d done it, she wouldn’t remember the exact method next time and so would do it again …

I’m carrying on like this because yestreday’s post seems to have vanished utterly. Where and how and when? I do not know. If it showed up in anyone’s mailbox – since I know some of you Dear Readers get my ramblings sent to you – please let me know, eh? It apparently evaporated from its placement on here on WordPress, as well as Facebook and Google+.

I do recall that I was going on about a couple of nice back-from-extinction stories. For instance, the Black-footed Ferret (a handsome little vermin) is regaining lost ground in preserve areas of the Great Plains. This is especially nice because they are the main check on the population explosion of prairie dogs … and it turns out we need prairie dogs (in reasonable numbers) to keep the native prairie grasses healthy. The floral ecosystem of the Great Plains maintains the local aquifers and ground moisture and helps prevent enormous range fires. Also, it supports buffalo. It’s all interconnected, of course, which someone has finally convinced the Bureau of Land Management is what the word “ecosystem” means …

Also, while the feral tiger population is decreasing with frightening speed in most of the world – as tigers are eaten by wealthy Chinese men – in one Indian preserve, they are thriving. Also thriving in this preserve are Indian Rhinoceri, who also suffer from the attentions of the Asian marital aid industry. Why is this one preserve different from all the rest? Because they have instituted a new policy: they shoot poachers on sight.

I am entertained by the thought of who, among Company operatives, got to breed and transport  herds of Black-footed Ferrets: the Great Cat Herding Project, it should be called.  Could have been hilarious.

Also, I am wondering if some of the Enforcers are having a nice sojourn in India at the moment, hunting poachers. Warm weather, nice scenery, and if you’ve got a jones for curry, it’s a dream assignment …

So anyway – if anyone sees that wandering blog o’mine, give a holler. I’ll fish it out of the rushing stream of the Interwebs and try again.

Kage Baker borrowed, as part of her personal philosophy, a line from William Wordsworth: “The world is too much with us …”

She said it was a battle cry, an excuse, a complaint, an explanation and a prayer. Saying it, she would lock the door and declare she wasn’t setting foot outside in the chaos that day. Or she’d pack a small case (complete with travel stickers for London, Cairo and Shanghai hotels) and request a lift Northwards. Or she’d break out the Monkey Island discs and submerge herself in the intricacies of Plunder Island and the zombie charms of the Pirate LeChuck.

As a last resort, she’d write. It was a last resort because Kage’s usual state of existence was to be engrossed in writing; where she didn’t notice most worlds anyway. Unless it was encompassed by her own skull, it was not in her line of sight. When she was forced by exigencies or running out of Coke to interact with a more broadly consensus world, it evoked Wordsworth’s cry of dismay from her.

Small wonder she preferred to spend her time with the Company operatives, or Lord Ermenwyr, or even Mendoza’s dreadful love life.

Maybe it’s because it’s an election year – when all the rotten nuts fall from the trees – but I am sharing Kage’s viewpoint today. I think my mistake was reading the news … I should have stuck to the funnies and private correspondence; the informational agora and the social networks are full of angst, poison and bad news. My defenses and immune system have left for a vacation somewhere. A sandstorm of insanity is blowing over me, and I’ve left my skin in my other pants. Or some such tortured and eighth-grade metaphor.

I’m going to migrate for a while to some other world, Dear Readers. Maybe one of Kage’s, if I can screw my courage to the sticking point of actual work; maybe one of Terry Pratchett’s or some other comforting English peer. Definitely, though, it will be via the written word – I can cast it myself that way, and not have to worry about what some promiscuous and skanky medium like television will trot out before my eyes.

I don’t want to see any more news today unless Atlantis rises, or the UFOs land, or the air parts like a sequined curtain in the West to let the Wild Hunt come in over the waves at Malibu to cleanse the San Fernando Valley.

The world is waaay too much with me …

          THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Kage Baker did not deal with repairmen. For all I know, she might have been good at it – but she just didn’t do that, so we never found out. It was just the way she was. She’d retire to her room and read – couldn’t even write, not with strangers wandering about the living room.

But there were rarely repair emergencies in her room, so it was safe to hide in there. And it gave us somewhere automatic to put the parrot – Harry would either get insanely territorial or insanely affectionate; either way, it was awkward having to pry the bird off the plumbers or the phone tech. I have confined him to his night-time cage right now; the baby gate that keeps the Corgi from licking the repairmen to death is no bar to someone with wings and a set of pliers for a mouth.

Today, we are hosting plumbers. They are good plumbers but as they have to work in both the kitchen and the bathroom, the entire house has been disrupted. Mind you, we now have a new bathroom vanity, complete with new plumbing and fixtures – and shortly we’ll have a new garbage disposal as well. I love garbage disposals, more than even dishwashers. Washing dishes can be sort of soothing, but a good garbage disposal will keep your kitchen pipes from clogging up.

Until it goes feral and turns on you, of course. Once it joins the Dark Side, there is nothing worse. It’ll even prevent the dishwasher from working, whether it’s a machine or human hands, because nothing will drain … one of the chief minions of evil, is a bad garbage disposal.

However, even with good things happening today, there are problems. The old, old, old plumbing has set a few ambushes – the end of the inflow pipe crumbled to rust when they took off the original faucet. Removing the old bathroom sink revealed a hitherto unsuspected old gas pipe (capped, thank goodness) that had to be accommodated …  you can’t just saw those things off like rose suckers, you know? Decisions have had to be made on half-a-dozen last minute spatial relationships: the sink had to be moved to one side of the gas pipe, which pushed a bookcase out of the way, which re-arranged the corner behind the toilet; and so on  ad infinitum, or at least what feels like it.

Removing the old garbage disposal revealed that the pipes in the kitchen were installed with 3 or 4 unnecessary u-bends and traps. No one can exactly tell why, but it sure explains why it drains so slowly … now weird noises are emanating from the kitchen, where I think they are removing a hyperspace portal from under the sink.  Man, it looked like an old Windows screen saver in there.

And did you know that the engines in garbage disposal are measured in horse power? That’s kind of scary. I okayed a half-horse power motor, which is more than the lawn mower has; and that’s on the low side. Apparently I could have installed something capable of getting rid of small branches and body parts.

It’s all these new experiences and snap decisions and sudden catastrophes attendant upon household repair that Kage simply would not handle. I think she would have preferred if plumbing were all plug and play, like DVD games – but even in modern houses, that’s not the case. And this house, despite the electrical outlets and hot water and heat-conserving insulation, despite the unit-per-person wireless computer network my nephew and I have proudly installed, is at heart a lathe-and-stucco California cottage almost a century  old.

You gotta be flexible to keep a house like this running. Kage could handle all the wildest vagaries of history with batting an eye – she could look a volcanic eruption in the eye, and raise it a plague of locusts on the side; she could sum up a civil disturbance on a scale from art riot to the siege of Kabul and take the appropriate measures. (Which was handy in some of our adventures …)

Plumbing’s tougher. But it will be soooo great when it’s done.

Kage Baker, as I have mentioned, was a fond and firm devotee of really good bathrooms.

On consideration, I think that maybe this is a X-linked trait, as it seems to crop up a lot more in us setter types than in our pointer brethren. Certainly, while growing up, the most that seemed to concern our brothers was whether or not the lock on the door worked – had they opened that door to see the wild California hillside out there instead of the mirrors and pink tiles of the upstairs bath, they’d have been not only unconcerned but enthusiastic.

At one point in our domestic journey through a series of odd and charming dwellings, Kage and I lived in a cottage by the sea. In the front room the ceilings were normal, but the roof sloped down drastically  from there. By the time you were in the bathroom at the back of the house, the room was not quite 6 feet high. (Kage, at 5’8″, claimed she could touch the ceiling with her tongue.) Our taller male guests could literally not use the toilet while standing. A couple of enterprising gentlemen tried kneeling, or concussed themselves mildly – but most  just stepped out the door conveniently located beside the toilet, and so into our wild back yard. They seemed much happier out there … some species just aren’t meant for domestication.

That was probably our weirdest bathroom, except for those times when we didn’t have one at all. Camping, Renaissance Faire weekends, breakdowns in dubious lands – everyone finds themselves from time to time out of range of clean porcelain and pretty hand towels. It all made Kage more determined with every year to have some haven somewhere where a lady of a certain age could relax in comfort, privacy and hygienic sophistication without climbing on a roof or walking half a mile with a glow stick for protection.

*****************************************DISCONTINUITY******************************************************

Just recovered from a power failure. Most of this post survived, thank goodness, but it is now very late. And I have spent the day working on the great day tomorrow, when the plumber comes to replace the bathroom vanity, sink and faucets. A new line for the hot water! Discernible water pressure! A white sink instead of the horrid 1950’s robin’s egg blue one that has been in there for years – that one clashes with the colour of the cats, and must go!

Books and magazines have been cleared, the shelves and room heater have been carefully re-distributed, and the piano stool we found under a stack of Scientific Americans has been moved and re-purposed for Dickens Fair.

First vital step in the new bathroom ready for tomorrow!

Kage Baker would have been amused at the news today. Especially on such a slow, cloudy, chilly, falling-asleep-where-you-sit day. Especially since looking it all up would have been preferable to doing any work. It’s the sort of day where you don’t know whether to gulp that extra cup of hot coffee, or pour it in your socks …

The UARS satellite that came down last night “probably” fell into the ocean and may never be found. That’s the last word from NASA, who had been tracking the thing 24/7 for 20 years, until they suddenly weren’t. Also from NORAD, who theoretically track everything potentially dangerous in near-Earth atmosphere. All that time, all those eyes, and we don’t know where it went once it was no longer where we expected it to be. Good thing it wasn’t a dinosaur-killer meteorite, though it doesn’t bode well for when one shows up.

A new kind of raptor has been found (well, its bones. Well, some of its bones) and named “Clever Girl”. If you understand why that is funny, you – like the paleontologists that named it – have watched Jurassic Park too often.

We still haven’t figured out how to re-supply the International Space Station, or get anyone off it. Does anyone still have a functioning spacecraft?

The Chinese have stopped a 600-year old carnival whose point and focus was eating dogs. In other news, deep-fried butter is now available at the Los Angeles County Fair. Sweet or savoury, your choice.

Olive pits can be used as fuel in pellet stoves. Winter is coming, lay in the Greek olives …

There might be a sub-atomic particle that travels faster than light. This could explosively re-arrange the landscape of physics. While the scientific community tries to explain and replicate the experimental results, ideas that have so far been proposed to explain the neutrino findings now include: lies, a supernova from last week, static electricity, the ever-popular “mistake”, and the phases of the moon. No one (but me) seems to find this recital of battling causes funny …

The internet service in the USA lags behind that of 25 other leading technological countries – including Romania.

Which is part of why this is a brief, silly, place-holding list today, Dear Readers. Aside from the fact that is a cold, overcast day and I’ve OD’d on carbs, my modem connection keeps flickering. Also, it’s Saturday! I have been industriously doing next to nothing all day! So should all of you be!

Get a good book and someone snuggly, and curl up for the first autumn evening. It’s coming over the western hills, with the fresh fog from the sea and a chilly wind. Time to contemplate a wood (or olive pit) fire, and some good, hot take-out Chinese food.

Time for the Kage Baker Memorial Mu Shoo Pork. With extra plum sauce. Oh, yeah.

Kage Baker observed the classical quarter days, the Solstices and Equinoxes. To be accurate, she also observed the lesser or minor or half-quarter days that fall between them: Imbolc, Beltaine, Lammas, Samhain.

This from a woman who  was seldom sure what day of the week it was, and had to actually recite the nursery rhyme to be sure of how many days were in a month. But she had a feel for the astronomical dates, I think; some supra-conscious awareness of the length of days and night, like plants that time their sleeping and breeding to the daylight. The other four just appealed to her artistically. As I have said, Kage approved of any reason for a celebration.

Today is the Autumnal Equinox – day and night are evenly divided on this date, and everyone in the Northern Hemisphere gets the same share. It’s got nothing to do with time lines, which are arbitrary divisions imposed so telephone companies could bill us all differently once, and so not all the prime time television shows happened at the same time. It means the 24 hours are divided 12 and 12 into dark and light, no matter where you are. A time-lapse view of the terminator line on the Northern Hemisphere over a year’s time shows it very nicely:

http://io9.com/5843103/%20http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/index.htm

See that point where the line is perfectly vertical? That’s us. That’s today.

It is a moment of balance, of equipoise.In the world’s long cyclical fall into light and darkness, this is one of the two annual moments that is not bent. There is no twist. There is no wobble. The Lost Chord sounds in the vast abyss, and echoes perfectly to every corner.

Kage loved that word, equipoise – she loved the concept, and tried to arrange her environment to reflect it. She wasn’t so much in favour of the All things in moderation schtick – she liked excess in its proper place – as that she wanted her environment to be … even. The ambiance should be one of ease and control and comfort. Then, if she felt like over-indulging in something, she’d have a quiet, clean, well-lighted place in which to do it.

But what she most cherished was the feeling of balance. On this evening, she liked to drive out to the quiet of the Giants’ Steps north of Pismo. The coast gets rocky there, ranging from a shingle of jade and jasper pebbles to a couple of house-sized islands just offshore – birds roost and breed there, and the waves of all seasons break and arch over them. Kage would stand at the edge of the land, stretch out her arms and slowly twirl – first deiseal, then tuathal, then deiseal again.

“All balanced,” she would say, satisfied. And we’d go off and get cheese and apples and bread and ale, and have a picnic as the sun went down into the Uttermost West.

Personally, I’ve been spinning on one foot in the dark for some time now. At first, I felt like one of those cheap tin trigger toys you get at Halloween – you pump the trigger and the little metal pumpkin spins and opens like a lotus and shoots sparks in all directions. Do it too long and the paint will blister, your thumb will get burnt, and eventually the springs will break. I’ve been waiting to fly off into the darkness in broken shards for months.

But it hasn’t happened. In fact, I seem to be stabilizing a bit. Maybe I’ve just picked up a wobble, like the earth in her frantic dance; I waver back and forth but I don’t fall over. I keep staring into the dark, and you know what? I think I am seeing some lights out there.

Happy Equinox, Dear Readers. Stay balanced.

Kage Baker disliked change. Intensely. She avoided it whenever she could, she ignored its implications and machinations whenever possible, and if it was extreme enough – she worked steadily afterwards to blot it out and put back what had been altered.

The efforts of the Company operatives are all slightly warped images of Kage’s determination that puffins should not be dead, that Scotch Broth should be available for dinner, that Glass Wax should not vanish from the face of the Earth. Any lost works of art, priceless jewelry, miraculous antibiotics and super grains that wanted to come along for the ride were welcome, too. But her main concern was that the world should, in some private room and garden, be the world of her childhood: just the way she had first comprehended it.

This obsession drives a lot of people into a kind of intellectual Amish-ness. Not Kage. She wanted things to be right, the way she remembered them – succeeding in that required research, skills, resources, esoteric supplies and power sources … so she readily embraced most modern technology, at least as a stepping stone to whatever antique food or environment she was presently trying to reproduce.

She was an enthusiastic and avid computer user – that’s where the really detailed Past lives these days, so that’s where she learned to hunt for it. Ebay, historical societies, the carefully scanned inventories of specialty museums: only electronically were these open to her, and she dove without hesitation into the electronic seas in her search for the pearls of her memories.

It was directly because she hated change that she learned how to deal with its leading edge: information technology. Learn your enemy and then recruit ’em, was her philosophy. So she infiltrated The System. She wasn’t interested in bringing it down, though – she had no concern, really, with what it did with itself. Kage just wanted The System’s resources so she could loot the past and carry it home with her.

The last couple of days, a sizable portion of the electronic world is in a tizzy over changes. I am sure everyone’s inbox, Stream, Walls, Newsfeeds, Magic Mirrors – or whatever you call the particular interface between yourself and the Interwebs – is choked with anguished cries, please for help, and outraged denouncements of both the old and the new. One friend has declared that Big Brother is looming over him, and retreated to some unplugged redoubt. Another has joyfully announced that she’s drunk the Kool-aid and loves it! Proponents of various social networks are squaring off and condemning one another like Cathars and the Inquisition.

Man, it’s nuts. Kage would be laughing her ass off, as yet once more the shadow of change shorts out everyone’s common sense and the Tower of Babel wins again. It’s just faster today. And electronic. And no one can interrupt you when you rant.

But she would, I think, do pretty much as I have done. Back off. Fort up. Wait it out. See what she liked best of all the glittery toys on offer, and go with that. If it helped her find an original, real Cootie Game, or a box of wax skulls full of sugar syrup – she would praise it. Kage was results-oriented.

She wasn’t one to embrace change. She didn’t believe it was good for one, or vital for keeping society going. Until her forties, Kage always maintained, all change had ever done was take away things she loved. The last 20 years of her life, technology finally got it together to begin restoring some of those missing treasures – but very late, and fairly little. She was not inclined to forgive it yet for all those things it had let slip into darkness.

And, of course, it eventually also dropped her. The party line in medicine these days is that it is constantly improving, saving more people every year; that the human race currently lives in a Golden Age of  ars medica unknown since Atlantis sank into the sea … except that when it was Kage’s turn in the barrel, all her doctors made faces like the scientists in a monster movie and cried out that they had never seen anything like it!

So, despite all the changes, not everything is solved. Not everyone is saved just because you have a new tool or toy. You need to wait and see, you need to try things out carefully and log some results. Then you can either make your choice, or realize you’re screwed. But until then, you’re wandering around in the dark making guesses about whether you’ve grabbed the horns of a dilemma or Death’s bony fingers.

But that’s the nature of change, right? Me, I’m gonna go see how much like my old network I can make my new network look. There’s only so much change I can take, too.