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Moanin' & groanin''
That's me, absolutely. Serves me right for getting all wound up one way or the other, but there it is. And you wouldn't believe how many times I've started this week's column only to realize I'd just written 500 words worth of beating up on myself or some other poor goof. This is cause for serious self-examination, which I had planned to give up until the next millennium, so ... Wait a minute, I know! I'll tell you about a scene from a dream I had last night. Everybody likes weird dreams, right?

I was at the back corner of a piece of rural property, standing just inside the fence. My wife was somewhere out of sight but in the dream. All at once along came three deer in a line, heading for the back fence, which was very tall and made up of what some people call hog-wire (a heavy grid of the sort that a rabbit could climb through but a pig couldn't). The funny thing was, a large fox was ambling along behind the last deer, making it three deer and a fox in a little procession. Funnier still, when the deer got to the impassable fence, they sorta wriggled their noses somehow and then miraculously passed through! Whoa, I thought. I never saw the fox go through but I'm sure he did. A little later in the dream I was trying unsuccessfully to loosen a large screw on the bottom of a plumbing fixture in a basement somewhere. Shades of our old house, I thought when I woke up.

The plumbing in that 72-year-old home was a mysterious rat's nest of rotting iron and copper pipes of assorted pedigrees, all of which was slowly dissolving in the soft (acidic) water from the well. Hanging from the joists on rusty bits of strapping, it was the sort of arrangement that jerked and shuddered whenever a faucet was shut quickly somewhere in the house. I remember watching the pipes sway in the cobwebs and threaten to clatter down onto the basement floor, and how I could hear the ringing and rattling after shutting off the water in the bathtub, way up on the second floor. There were any number of valves and junctions that just couldn't be touched for fear they would crumble under the wrench, and I kept a few old mason jars propped under the various drips. Usually the rate of evaporation paced the leaks, so that I rarely had to empty the jars. Oh, the joys of an old house.

Rollin' & tumblin'
I know what the deer dream means, by the way. Makes perfect sense to me. For that matter, I understand about the screw that wouldn't turn, but I'm trying to steer this in the direction of something related to computers. (We'll see a little farther down the page if any of this comes together.) You see, I had occasion yesterday to attend an actual Apple "presentation" at the Taos Talking Pictures Festival. A guy named Tom Pisano gave a really fine iLife demo that actually taught me a thing or two. What's more, it made me want to be something I'm not.

I WANNA MAKE MOVIES! And other stuff. That's what the stupid demo did to me. But it wasn't "stupid," of course, it was irresistible. It was exciting. You could even say, in the best Apple tradition, that it was empowering, at least potentially. No kidding.

Obviously I've never played with digital video, never edited a sound track, never done any of the things millions of you have already worked with. There are only so many things you can do at one time in this world and that's how it's worked out for me, so far. So far ... just to show you how much all those cool digital tricks twisted me off my pins, earlier today I found myself reading Mac hardware technical data to see what I would need to do what I've never even tried. That would be just like me, you see. If the book isn't selling quickly enough, it must be time to make a flippin' movie, geez! I can use a five-year-old Power Mac or my tangerine clamshell to write, obviously, but I need lots more than that to crank out killer DVDs -- besides talent and know-how, I mean. In this respect it must be said that the marketing works. I'm the biggest skeptic in the world, and Pisano's presentation made me want to steal a new Power Mac and Cinema Display from the adjacent media room on my way out. (Wouldn't fit in my briefcase, though.)

Stallin' & stumblin'
I'm the greatest procrastinator in the world. I put off growing up as long as I could, making a decent living even longer than that, and have almost succeeded in postponing doing what I really love until after I'm dead. See that you do better than that, because my understanding is that not having enough fun in one lifetime means that we have to repeat a grade. That's why I hung my old faded prayer flags up over the garbage can [above]: even the trash needs a good blessing now and then.

Taos is the kind of place where you can walk into a downtown store and come home with a pocketful of prayers. Tibetan prayer flags are everywhere around here. I even have a string of 'em hanging inside my pickup truck. Last year my wife and I hung all our old Western bandanas up and called them our "cowboy prayer flags." I don't know if they worked or not, but nobody got sick or died and I haven't lost my big black hat. See?

So what does this have to do with big brown dream deer walking straight through eight-foot high hogwire fences, and why was a big red fox bringing up the rear? Can you say "magical totem animals"? (I thought you could.) And what about the fence? WHAT ABOUT THAT FENCE, eh? Oh, and the big screw that wouldn't turn, hohoho. Bad old screw. See Johnny grunt and strain. See the driver strip the slot. Better put a mason jar under that one, yup, or else follow that fox.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your comments.

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