I have a pet theory that each of us has a go-to comfort food that our body craves when we are ill. Our own personal manna, if you will, that makes being sick a bit more bearable. Mine is the mashed potatoes and gravy from Lee’s Famous Recipe. When I’m in the throes of a sock thing, my body begins to yearn for those instant potatoes, that spicy gravy. Like it did today.
Yesterday’s malaise continued into today. I woke up with some body aches and a gnarly fatigue. The kind where it takes a conscious effort to do things like standing up. Rather than trying to fight that extremely fun combo and feeling miserable all day, I instead took the day off work. I slept a couple of hours, watched BLACK PHONE 2, and finished CONGO. It might almost have been a fun, chill day had I not felt like ass for most of it. At least the mashed potatoes and gravy were a balm for the spirit.
I’m feeling much better this evening. Hopefully that will hold for tomorrow.
‡
I was put in the mood to reread CONGO for the umpteenth time after chatting with a comrade about how much we both liked it. It had been five years since the last time I’d read it, long enough for me to not remember many of the book’s particulars. CONGO is still a fun, fascinating read. Curiously, this time I noticed myself having a different reaction to certain elements of the book.
Crichton loved himself a good infodump. Every several pages, he would step away from the narrative for a page or two to explain to the reader some bit of technology, science, history, etc., that was relevant to whatever some character had just said or thought. In CONGO, because of the plot, he educates and speculates a lot on computing and telecommunications. What felt noticeably different to me this go-around was just how quaint that aspect now seems, 46 years on. It’s no fault of Crichton’s; time comes for all sf writers.
No doubt much of CONGO’s scientific and technological bona fides felt cutting edge back in the late 70s, when Crichton was working on it. Now, viewed through a portal of nearly half a century, it feels a bit like some novel strain of retrofuturism.
Although the first computer manufacturers in the 1940s had predicted that four computers would do the computing work of the entire world for the foreseeable future, experts anticipated that by 1990 there would actually be one billion computers — most of them linked by communications networks to other computers. Such networks didn’t exist, and might even be theoretically impossible. (A 1975 study by the Hanover Institute concluded there was insufficient metal in the earth’s crust to construct the necessary computer transmission lines.)
The man got a lot of it right, and just as much wrong. It’ll be fun to see what I take away from CONGO when I read it again in another five years.
LAST READ: CONGO, Michael Crichton
LAST WATCHED: BLACK PHONE 2