Getting it Wrong

Getting things wrong is a bit of an ideé fix in my novel, but in a different way. After my self-induced crisis of theme, I came to realize that the impossibility of fidelity was really my central idea. Not just marital fidelity or obeying laws, religious duties, etc., but the one-zero-ness of the digital age.

I am not listening to Liz Phair. I mean, beyond the fact that I'm tuning her out on a level to write this post. But she's not in my den with her band singing this shit to me. I'm listening to a CD which converted this data to 1's and 0's and a Rotel CD player is converting that back to an analog signal with a pretty nice DAC.

A software engineer I know says all digital-to-analog converters are the same, but he's wrong. I've done enough A/B comparisons to know better. Because not only did I spend more money on my stereo than any car I've owned in the past decade, but I took comparison shopping to a ridiculous conclusion whiel I was saving to do so.

So the DAC/transport sends a signal to the preamp. Also Rotel. All my separates except my turntable are Rotel. My turntable is an old Fisher, and while I still believe in the superiority of vinyl, I have roughly four times as many CDs as records, and a lot of those CDs are duplicates of the LPs. I don't use the turntable a lot. It's not convenient enough.

Which gets me kicked out of most audiophile clubs...

Ever look at a newspaper photo up close? Those dots, they're a halftone, the analog equivalent of the digital lie. Offset printing will not support contone prints of photos, so the photo is shot through a screen (or rendered via 1's and 0's to imitate the screen) to a line screen. If it's newsprint it might be as low as 80 lines per inch; an art book might go as high as 300 lines, but generally people can't tell past 200 lpi. 150 to 175 is commercial printing standard.

The standard is a lie. It's an industry set on a standard that amounts to the number of people who can tell Pat Metheny's 'Bright Size Live' sounds better in it's 1976 vinyl pressing than it does in the CD reissue. Better if you have playback equipment that reveals that one sounds more like the band is in the room.

There's a trade-off. What I spent on my stereo is a pittance in audiophile-land. 'Entry Level' is what the best of my separates are defined as. There are people (with deeper pockets) who spent more on a CD transport or DAC than I spent on my whole system.

What did I buy for $3500? I got a stereo that is less inaccurate. The truly accurate is impossible without a concert ticket. Could I afford my stereo? No, but I paid for it in cash.

Which gets back to the whole 'fidelity' thing. I paid for it in cash, but I couldn't afford it. If money had been no object, I could have spent $300,000 on my den's stereo without effort. With effort, I could have pushed the $1 million mark (while testing David Wilson's ability to keep a straight face about such efforts being put into a den prone to flooding and smaller than some walk-in closets).

But even if you spend the million and up on a stereo, at best it will fool you into thinking the band's in the room. Or that an incompetent engineer with a tin ear has hijacked your house.

Which is a LONG way around from what I set out to with this post. Jay mentioned that he had refrained from joining the throng recommending 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' because he hasn't had the fist-hand experience to tell if it's 'Rainman' for people who can read.

There's some marked differences between the ficitonal Christopher and my younger daughter. Tactile defensiveness often leads to an aversion to hugs, but not always. Mo has tactile aversions, but Frau Lobster and I both count our lucky stars she likes a snuggle. At least, if the snuggle is on her terms.

The timetables in 'The Curious Incident' are true to the disorder, but picture schedules we've used with Mo can cut both ways. You can velcro up the order of the day for her to see and gain some much-needed stability; you can also look back to the calendar and find she has replaced your 'plan' with icons representing a different series of events. This is where logical and literal thinking becomes magical thinking. 'If I put Grandpa's house on the schedule, they have to take me there,' is what one switch might mean.

Another switch might be Mo's way of saying, 'you may think we're going to take a bath, but fuck off, I want to go shopping.'

As far as the book being geard to a juvenille audience, I'm not sure. Maybe a teen audience but by the time I got the notion that Chrisopher's Dad and employee found some relief in marijuana and that the Mom was maybe less than ideal in other ways, I quit wanting to have my nine-year-old read it next. Whimsically formed families disolve on little more than whimsey and when you have a kiddo with autism or any other developmental or learning problem, it's that much worse when you split. I find it appalling that people have sex with anyone they wouldn't want to have a baby with; I find it worse that people would marry someone they wouldn't want to have a baby with.

AMG noted that (and she's, as far as I can tell, 'pro-choice' in Americn parlance), and she finds this appalling, there are people filing 'wrongful birth' suits against people who failed to detect and warn them of birth defects they would have had aboritons to avoid.

It's your child, not a potential employee. If you think you can abort potential problems, watch out: schizophrenia often fails to manifest itself until the freshman year of college or similar trauma. My brother rolled an SUV at 35 while not taking his meds (again) for bipolar disorder, resulting in his being in a rest home on a feeding tube. His mother is retired, but he's still her son.

Don't lsiten to Jay, have as many kids as you want, but know this: no matter how old they are, they're still your kid. You will still want to look after their interests. They'll have to go to great lengths to avoid this. Change names, countries, etc., and they'll still be you're kid. If child or parent is determined, a divorce of sorts is possible past 18 years but dont' fucking count on it.

In the meantime if you get married and have kids, if your kid has some extra challenges to bring to the game, don't kid yourself. Maintaining two households is more expensive and more stressful for all concerned.

Which gets to the heart of 'The Curious Incident,' because as flawed as the Dad is, he at least understands that there is both no running away from Christopher's problems nor any benefit to pretending to run away. Both parents are flawed, but who's weren't?