Unspent Thoughts

I'm a bit of a recluse during the holiday season. I don't like parties because my hearing makes understanding others difficult in a noisy environment. Noisy parties tend to give me violent headaches. I don't like going places because the drivers are rude or stupid, possibly drunk, and the traffic becomes frighteningly dangerous. I don't give Christmas presents because I'm usually depressed from mid-November through the first half of January. Those close to me have learned that I'm happy to receive nothing at all. I stopped writing my annual summary letter a decade ago and I don't send cards any more. I do like being with friends and family as long as the environment isn't noisy. I also like to eat. But I derive no benefit from exchanging presents with others. I hate to go shopping because:

• I hate crowds, particularly when composed of unruly, frustrated, rude people;
• The stores mostly sell junk this time of year;
• Nobody knows what to get me;
• Inappropriate gifts annoy me;
• It becomes exceedingly difficult to find parking, even with my handicapped status;
• The weather is frequently disagreeable in late autumn;
• Communicable diseases run rampant this time of year.

I was surprised to find a package in the mail today, addressed to me, with a customs sticker that said it contained CDs, from Derek in London. I noticed that my address was on the back of the package and that the customs sticker covered the area where the address normally would go but I figured Derek was just being thrifty. The rather clumsily applied tape that closed the package was also typical.

There were three jewel-box CD containers, each with two CDs. All were audio books of Chaucer in Middle English, three different selections from the Canterbury Tales. I had, some weeks ago, made an offhand comment to the effect that I would enjoy finding some Chaucer recorded in the original language. I never expected Derek to follow through on it.

I like Chaucer. I like Middle English. I would rather hear Troilus and Creside than the Canterbury Tales but I had been unable to find either when I was still buying recordings (more than a decade ago) and I hadn't looked for them since that time.

I gave up buying CDs because of the companies selling them, who claimed I was a pirate stealing their lifeblood because I wanted to copy a mix of music from several sources to my own CDs. I was copying music from CDs I had purchased and I felt I had a right to rearrange the sequence of music to be played. Besides, I wanted to become familiar with the software and hardware involved. But the music industry started going after those who shared their music, particularly using the Internet.

Yes, I had Bit Torrent on my machines intermittently. I had never been satisfied with it and I'm pretty sure I was never able to get anything downloaded using it. Suddenly, though, I couldn't use my computer because other people were using it to transfer their files. That is the problem with Bit Torrent and its ilk. The stuff I had tried to download, images of free software release DVDs, was perfectly legal and contained no audio or video nor other copyrighted material. My brief attempt to do something perfectly legal brought me accusations of piracy and threats that my access to the Internet would be shut down.

My personal opinion is that the music and video organizations that attempt to limit or control our ability to make duplicates for our own use are the pirates; they want to control distribution of music and video so they can continue to make outrageous profits on material that should be released to the public domain after a reasonable interval. Their strong-arm tactics are annoying and insulting.

My response was to stop purchasing the products they were selling. I didn't pirate their stuff, I simply did without. I have enough music and video to keep me going for a long, long time (and I probably don't have a long time left on this planet).

Back to my present: the disks contain voices with a background so quiet you can hear the soft clicks that result from the editing process. I've heard only one voice so far, the Preamble being a monologue. I haven't listened to anything else yet. I was alone in the house and there was background noise from the freeway and from traffic on our street, but I could hear everything very well. And I could understand a lot of what was being said in Middle English despite not having worked at it for many years. I could hear, specifically, where I had made errors in my attempts to read similar material aloud. Hearing it done correctly was one of the reasons I wanted the recordings.

Thank you, Derek.