A Column by John Estridge
Most every column I have ever written, and they began in 1989, has been about me being an idiot.
Recently, I wrote a column showing where, much like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory I was tested. However, where Sheldon was found to not be crazy, I was declared an idiot. Smash Mouth’s All Star song is sort of my anthem concerning that aspect of myself.
However, one of the areas where I can display this character and intelligence flaw in the best way is in the field of technology. Ask Brandon Banks, local IT guru. His office used to be in the newspaper office, which was a mistake for him because I would inundate him with very stupid questions. But he was patient with me and never tried to poison me or anything – that I know of.
Thus, I was a late comer to Facebook. Many people I know hate Facebook and refuse to take part. I am not that way at all. I have embraced Facebook in many instances for the very reasons many of my friends have shunned it.
One of my favorite exercises is to scroll down through the newsfeed and read people’s dramas. To this day I am totally amazed what people will write down for the entire world to read. Many times it almost falls under the TMI category, but again, not for me. The stupider and the more personal posts are the better and more interesting ones for me.
When I finally got into Facebook – and I am not afraid to say the reason I waited as long as I did was not knowing how to create an account — I had the mistaken impression it was like a diary. My first post was about what I had for supper that night and what I planned to have for supper the next night. Anyone who sees my pot belly enter a room about 90 seconds before the rest of me can attest to the fact food is very important in my life.
But it is good I have children who have totally embraced my idiotness and are not afraid to guide me away from those public instances as much as possible by telling me outright and unabashedly when I am being foolish. It is really a much-used hotline and a full-time job for all of them because being foolish for me is about like breathing air.
Thus, I no longer post about my meals.
While it may not be a diary, many people do tell the world what they are doing at any given moment, via selfies and words. Even if they are 1,000 miles from an unguarded home with all of their possessions just sitting there all alone and unprotected, they will gladly tell people where they are and when they expect to get home.
I am very proud to say even I am not that stupid, but many of us are.
That sort of gets me to the actual beginning of this column.
Another fact I talk about a lot in my columns since I was fired as the newspaper editor, is how much I love my relatively new job at the Brookville Public Library. I am a researcher in the history and genealogy department. The powers that be have placed me securely in a dark corner of the library’s basement pretty much away from the public and most of my fellow employees. For a while I pondered there may be some ulterior motives for my placing by my superiors, but like many things of that type through my life, I choose to ignore the negative implications of something and focus on the positives, even if I have to make them up.
Thus, I think of my isolation not as they are trying to hide me from the public because I am old, fat, ugly and doddering but they want to give me silence and a peaceful environment so I can go about my important endeavors. Really, I have convinced myself of that, sort of.
An aside here: currently, I am entering the last week of a three-month episode in my life where I have put an ointment one can get only through prescriptions on my face to heal my basal cell carcinoma condition.
Before I go any further, my complaining about this treatment is in no way comparing myself to those who really suffer with cancer treatments. In comparison to those people, what I have gone through is very insignificant. But because I am male and as a species we complain about everything medical I am complaining about this now.
My doctor said my condition is the good kind of cancer. Now, I think that is an oxymoron but who am I? The ointment has chemotherapy in it and people can be harmed by inadvertently coming into contact with it. For that reason, I have not gone to get my haircut in the three months I have been doing this. Also, it leaves my face raw, I think it is sulfuric acid instead of chemotherapy, but again who am I? Because my face is raw, I cannot shave. Even though I am bald, My Long Suffering Wife Ruth says helpful things like “boy you really look shaggy,” or “do you want to wear your hair in a pony tail?” And there are times she just puts her hands over her eyes and flees whatever room I am in.
But I have been amazed at the number of people who do not ask me about the red, raw looking aspects of my face let alone my Eiensteinish hair and Deliverance-like whiskers. It has led me to believe those lesion-type things on my face, my caveman like hair and elderly mountain-man whiskers are not that far away from how I look normally.
So, I understand my superiors hiding me away from the public.
End of digression
Many times in researching historical things in the county’s past as well as genealogy aspects about families, I use the microfilm records of the local newspapers.
Please don’t tell my bosses but when I get into some of those newspapers from the 1800s – well all of them from that time and more recent — I sometimes forget the exact reason I am looking at those issues. Instead, I just become immersed and entertained by how they were written and the different things that people said about each other both way back then and not in our too-distant past. But especially papers from the 19th Century: they are delightful.
Really, newspapers of that day, at least in Franklin County, was the direct link to and the predecessor of Facebook.
Usually, world and national news were on many of the pages. I am sure somebody sent something like a news service out to the various newspapers of that time and many newspapers had the same articles and believe me some of those articles were really strange.
There would just be a few pages of local news. And usually, other than putting down the opposite political party – Brookville Democrat was for Democrats and the American was for Republicans – there was not any local news like people of today understand news.
Instead, it was a Facebook newsfeed.
It told of so and so going to so and so’s house and having supper or tea or something. People didn’t even have to travel out of town, but if they did, wow that was a big deal. No, they could just go down the street and their names and the names of those they visited were there in the blip for all to read.
And of course, the paper listed who had cholera at any given time.
To help make our research or the research of the many people from the public who come to the library to study their ancestors for themselves easier we have binders full of indexes for those 19th Century papers. However, the indexes for the most part are just about births, marriages and deaths.
It does not even scratch the surface regarding historical information.
Maybe because I am an idiot, I do not get bored. I am easily entertained. I like to do endless indexes. I tell Ruth what I do in my hours at the library, and she looks at me even more strangely than she usually looks at me.
Every now and then she will say things like “Most people would not like to do that even for a few minutes but you find that very interesting and you can’t wait to get to work.”
I try to ignore that also. Being an idiot, it is not hard to ignore things like that.
So, one of my planned projects at the library, and my boss Julie has told me if I even get one fourth of my planned projects done, I will have to live until I am about 133 years old, is to fully index those 19th Century newspapers so people can read about so and so going to so and so’s house and doing absolutely nothing interesting.
Much like the Facebook newsfeed.