I Am A Camera

Our Coolpix camera is broken.

The camera before this one came with an extended warranty, as we were suckers before the salesman. Then we lost the camera for awhile, and the warranty didn't help us, since you had to HAVE the camera in order to get it replaced. So we bought a new camera, this time without the warranty because we figured we'd be more likely to lose the camera than to break it.

Guess what? We really should have sprung for the warranty.

Anyway, here are things you're going to have to picture in your mind, since no photographic evidence exists:

• Sam and Caleb at the Washington County Fair, greeting the animals and sitting atop the tractors.
• Sam and Caleb touring the zoo with Cannon. For about the 93rd time this summer, we took in the Sea Lion show.
• Dinner with Hannah Grace at Bob and Joan's fantastically kid-friendly clubhouse.
• The farewell party for Sarah and Bayard at the understoried Landmark Lanes. The Good Doctor Godsave and his bride are moving to Oklahoma, and I will miss them sorely. I lose two great drinking buddies and two of Milwaukee's brighter links to the larger literary world.
• A trip to South Shore park with the boys and Olin.

Between and throughout all this, planes screamed overhead as a part of the annual Air and Boat Show. There's nothing like a fighter jet buzzing insanely close to one's roof to quickly, effectively, and traumatically wake one's children from naptime. I dig big shiny machines as much as the next guy, but can't we turn this sh*t down a little?

Here's Schopenhauer, on noise:

The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true -- nay, a great many people -- who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of opportunity.

That's right, Air Show fans. Schopenhauer's calling you stupid, because you like loud things. We philosophical smarties, with our poetry and art, can't stand that stuff, and aren't afraid to let you know about it. Now, get off my lawn.