A Moment of Clarity

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A personal reflection sparked by Olivia Laing’s excellent 2013 book The Trip to Echo Spring.

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Every alcoholic in recovery has a collection of anecdotes that can be simultaneously heartbreaking, outrageous, and hilarious. Perhaps they are hilarious only to fellow alcoholics; perhaps they can not even be listened to by outsiders. For an outsider, most alcoholic anecdotes may as well conclude with the same dark punchline, an interchangeable rubber-stamped ending: “And then I got away with it again.” Or, “I didn’t die that time, either.” And then comes the next hair-raising—or eyebrow-raising—tale.

Every alcoholic in recovery is living a story with a weird ending, if they remain in recovery. It is that two-word pair there, “in recovery,” that provides the surprise, the weirdness, a period of life as surprising to behold as some of the antics, the many bizarre actions and activities and inactions and inactivities that were surprising for outsiders to watch unfold in the previous life.
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Today in History: April 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first mobile phone call was made 43 years ago today. A Motorola employee named Martin Cooper stood in midtown Manhattan, near a temporary base station, and phoned Motorola’s rival Bell Labs headquarters in New Jersey.

The moment was not recorded, but the event took place at a press conference, so Cooper is reported by many sources to have said to his competitor, “This is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone.” He was using an early version of the company’s DynaTAC mobile phone, which became commercially available and ubiquitous in the mid 1980s. The battery inside the two-and-a-half pound “brick” (seen above, on the cover of Popular Science from July that year) gave users 20 minutes of talk time and then needed to be charged for 10 hours.
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Written by Hand

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I awoke to a sticky note like the one pictured above this morning (stolen from my stash without repayment!) bearing a note from my girlfriend. Today she had made my coffee before she headed out.

It is always a welcome sight. (The handwritten note, not just the coffee.)
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