Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember that my friend Brock (D.) had an embarrassing hobby -- embarrassing to him. He was one of a number of people in my life that I have gotten involved with because I liked their names like Belinda (see the post of 4/15/2003 here) and Margot (see 4/27/2002 here and 3/14/2002 here). He was also one of the two kids in my class who really knew computers, specifically RSTS, the great system on DEC's PDP-11. (I got him to tell me the password for the 1,2 account -- that is the manager's account, and then created my own 1,100 or something: the first 1 gave you managerial privileges. But I got caught by the manager, George Koul-something -- the password was Koul -- who happened to do a Systat on me the first time I logged in.) But I liked him too: he was handsome and winningly shy and attractively quirky. It turned out his secret hobby -- not a hobby really, but lessons that I think his mother encouraged or maybe forced him to take -- was lock-smithing. What a wonderful thing to understand. (I had a theory about how locks worked, but Brock basically told me I was wrong.) I remember that his mother named him after some movie star she liked -- I think the movie star's last name was Brock. A little later when I read all that Stranger in a Strange Land stuff about "grocking" ("I grock you") I was unfortunately reminded of Brock. Whatever our relationship was, we didn't grock each other.

posted by william 12:32 AM
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