Too Much Hash Tagging

The drummer thought I was crazy.  “You don’t want in laws”, he said.  And he was probably right. 

I’d spent too much time broke, and wasn’t about to start making money on the strength of my communications skills.  I’m a college drop out, but not of my own choosing.  Heck, I liked college, what I could get out of it.  It wasn’t anything like the schools I’d been going through before, but then again, I couldn’t remember much of those either.  I’d been mostly independent study, and when I went to college, I caught next to nothing of the point that the tenured Professors were trying to make.  The only thing I noticed for sure was that the reading lists added up to more words than hours available.  That was what broke me.

I started seeking tricks to get around the doubling down that the Professors’ Grad Assistants used to slam the students who made it through phase one.  Economics was great as a dialogue on sex, sexual attraction, and figuring out the language of the possible “economy” of supply and demand.  It helped, I think, that there was a pretty girl sitting next to me; then again, maybe it didn’t help, because by the time the class ended, I had zero memory of any of it – just notes.

It was economics that led me to computers – well that’s not entirely true, not being able to afford the schooling and being stuck in a system that only had one speed for learning led me to “the outside”, where Microsoft led me to computers; I’ve never liked the Apple Computer culture, ever since the Mac II didn’t connect to any networks, and then, well when the Apple people grew so snitty about everything not Apple.  Meeting up with Microsoft’s computer universe changed the way I thought, even if Microsoft didn’t exactly lead me into any of it.  It was a language that became available.  Economics – the sexual innuendo engine economics – and Electricity incorporated into human readable code!  It was like waking up and wanting to go to school again. 

The “web programming people” weren’t as snitty as the Apple people, not at first anyway.  It isn’t until you start taking away “their money” by using the systems they designed in ways they didn’t imagine that they become like Grad students looking for a classroom to abuse.  They won’t tell you this, but there’s a reason why the engineers don’t like the English majors, and the English majors don’t know what the engineers are talking about.  The reason grew up when a few musicians decided they were going to expand their English major background into engineering; the journeymen electricians did not like that development at all.  The drummers didn’t much care, understanding when the beat is up.

One of my favorite musicians who I studied outside of the school systems because there were no formal music study systems in school for me after the 4th grade – except for whatever happened to be published by Musicians Institute or Berklee College of Music & Hal Leonard – once said prominently that one of the key sounds in music is the note that is not heard or played.  Well, I’m here to tell you that the engineers want to keep their trick in the silent bin, that’s for sure.  It’ll all be too much work; it’d be kind of like getting a message through to the farmer’s daughter, or electricity to the last train to Clarksville.

That’s all beside the point.  What good does it do if you understand a language that isn’t written yet because it’s hidden inside the language that’s written? 

I thought about what the drummer said, about in laws, and said, “There are probably too many hash tags at the grocery anyway”.  I have no idea if he knew what I meant.

I picked up my iPad and wrote a Tweet:  “There was plenty of electricity at the hotel; I saw it at the cafe.”