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The miracle of the feathers
There it was on a Sunday [note ye well] morning atop a certain terra-cotta Mexican birdbath, a most unusual creature: mostly white, with yellow shading and the beak of a seed-eater. Whoa! This can't be a coincidence, I told myself. For such a thing to show up now, in this place, was a MIRACLE, all right.

The thing is, I had just seen a white evening grosbeak! For those of you who don't know, the males of the species usually have very distinctive colors: olive, black, white, and yellow. Quite a sight, especially when you're host to a whole flock of them. It being only a couple of weeks before Easter, I tend to pay more attention than usual to anything that might be considered a "sign," which I immediately took this to be.

"A WHITE GROSBEAK!" I shouted to my wife. "No, a HOLY grosbeak! Wait, I know, it's a holy GHOSTBEAK!", I yelped as the Answer came to me in a rush. The Lord was sending me a signal, for sure. I'd been sitting there whomping up on myself as usual, wondering how many different kinds of a fool I'd been over the years -- more on that anon -- when all of a sudden, a freaking natural phenomenon dropped right out of the sky and into our yard! Our little patch of Southwestern gravel, to be precise. Our rented patch [whomp! whomp!]...

The miracle of the rich idiots
The whole thing started back in the early halcyon days of the Internet business, when men were men and content was king. There I was, looking for a way to escape living embalmment in an otherwise lovely setting dedicated to growing fat and playing golf, when the INTERNET plopped down out of the sky and into our LC II (not terra-cotta, though it might as well have been). Well hell, that's good enough cause to just chuck everything, isn't it? And so I did.

I put my trust in modemly salvation, flying on faith while inventing a whole new digital genre. Life was scary but potentially good. While still working for Applelinks, I hired on to column-monger for MacAddict.com [you can still read the original WebFaust essays here]. There was every reason to expect Big Things, because at the time a certain other major Mac site was paying a brace of insufferable morons somewhere in the neighborhood of a dollar per word for twice-monthly columns! (Do the arithmetic, I was almost home free.) I forged faithfully onward, counting hinted-at chickens before they were hatched, vowing to write about computers and other things I knew nothing about until I had enough cash to buy us a ranch in the clouds.

What happened next was that the idiots got their due. Almost everyone in the entire world was fired in wave after wave of dot-com implosions, including me. [Thank God for Applelinks!] MacAddict's nefarious bean-counting corporate prevaricators had in the meantime broken every promise they'd pretended to make, so getting canned there made little difference. I've been here ever since, spending the money we got from selling our house, bumping up the credit cards, and trying to figure out why all these rocks are bouncing off my head. The other day I got an email from a now homeless & jobless former editor at Imaginetheworst Media who had to go to Kinko's to send the damn thing! I figure the kind of heartless crap suggested by these shenanigans will be a part of the business until God shows someone how to send napalm in an email attachment, and when that happens this box is going into storage while I learn to use a pen again. (Paper, by the way, can last for thousands of years under the right conditions, unlike your favorite digital medium.)

The miracle of life
This Web site, my marriage, Apple Computer, the 'murrican people, and a whole raft of other things have shown they can take a licking and keep on ticking. Well, so can I. So can you, for that matter . [Hang in there, Rich!] And I'm feeling pretty good right now, mainly because I've been granted the opportunity to learn from past mistakes. There's something big about to happen, I just know it. My actually doing something creative and constructive with my newly-acquired wisdom would be big, I can tell you that. [whomp!] Oops.

As for Apple, the reason folks there can add to the total of cool things in the world instead of making life miserable for all of us is because they don't own the whole world, you dig? Jobs knows that. I mean, if everyone used Apple computers, there would be too many demands to satisfy. All the company's efforts would be directed toward maintaining a dominance of mediocrity, resisting change, and so forth. (This is supposed to remind you of someone, naturally.) Well, I'm not rich. I don't have all the money in the world. I do have the good sense to buy a new leather jacket on credit so I don't look like a jerk, and since I don't already have six closets full, one jacket makes a big difference.* Besides, a person who can start off writing about an albino bird, weave that into a personal mini-history of the Mac Web, and close with an Apple metaphor in less than 1,200 words rates better treatment from the prosperity gods, so why worry? In fact, tonight I'm going to put on that cool leather jacket, walk three blocks from this rented patch of Southwestern gravel ,and enjoy a front-row seat at a Leo Kottke concert. No, I can't afford any of this, but that's the creative part, see? What, you do?

That being the case, I urge you to (1) buy Macs, (2) make love, not war; and (3) pay attention to those who care about you. (Sounds simple, often isn't.) There, I've done my bit.

Now you do yours!

("Grack!")

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr is very happy to be alive and hopes the condition is chronic. Both his Macs are doing fine. The cat has hairballs,but his Web sites don't:. Check out the Zoozone, Fotofeed, and JHFarr.com. (Won't cost you a thing!)

* My wife likes it, too, which both explains a lot and begs the question of just whose sense we're really talking about.

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Mar. 11: "Lord of the Turkeys" Mar. 4: "The Heart of the Matter" Feb. 25: "New Stuff: Browsers, Servers, etc." Feb. 18: "Mascot Lore & More" Feb. 11: "Killer Email & Wiccan PotLuck" Feb. 4: "Meanies, Guerillas, & Subscription Copycats" Jan. 28: "Full Moon Frenzy, w/ PowerMacs" Jan. 21: "iMacs & Webmaster Schadenfreude" Jan. 14: "Was It Only a Week Ago?" Jan. 7: "Useless Column" Dec. 31, '01: "I Want a Refund"

AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

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