Of the PowerPoint variety, that is. If only I had 31 real slides. There would be straight slides, fast slides, curly ones, one or two you could climb up. Our yard would be even more popular with the neighborhood kids.

They’d have to get in line.

Except for that slide that should be renamed The Stick. You run across them every now and then. The slide that burns, rather than exhilarates. And if the sun is out, there’s no saving the skin. The guy who’s in charge of sand blasting the slides must have taken a long lunch that day. That guy took a lot of long lunches.

I don’t know if there is a formally documented ratio of good slides to bad ones. Safe bet if I owned 31 of them I’d get a lemon somewhere in that mix.

No, instead I have 31 slides on graphic storytelling. Charts and graphs and maps and things. I’ll talk about those tomorrow, and hope that all of the graphics on my slides are accurate. A mistake in a pie chart would be embarrassing.

Warm. Sticky. Muggy. A little gross, actually. Somehow the part of the brain that keeps polite social constructs, like calendars, is communicating with the lesser senses and glands. What might be an acceptable bit of weather for early or late summer just feels wrong as October rounds third.

Everywhere, windows that had been wedged up for weeks were lowered today. The air must return because the soggy towel that was hanging in the air outside was coming into the more pleasant environments.

Weather being the most temporal of things we consider, we naturally keep records of a lot of it. Today broke a 70-year-old high temperature mark. Sunday marked a record as well. Tomorrow could, too. Eighty-five isn’t especially hot, just in the wrong place.

The rain is coming behind it. After that, the cooler temperatures. And then we’ll start dreaming for spring.

As is required I will now post my Walkman memories. Thirty years later, Sony has shut down the line. They’ve remained popular in Asia, even as they fell out of favor in the United States, which means the news doesn’t impact us much. After Walkman came Discmans, Minidiscs and then mp3 players, and they all had that same delicious promise of transportable, personal music.

And they were slimmer. The Walkman, even when it was new, always felt bulky. That came with the medium, but this was in a time when something bulky could mean Something Substantial.

They were expensive, too. And we were somewhere in the neighborhood of happily poor. So when I finally got one, probably four or five years into the American version of the Walkman’s popularity before I got my first knockoff. It was blocky. The headphones had bright orange mufflers. The adjustment bar didn’t work the same way as the Walkman’s, but ultimately I thought it worked better.

I loved the clip on the back of the thing, but disliked it’s inability to keep the player on my belt. Those bright orange foam mufflers wore out in a hurry and the plastic edges of the headphones themselves weren’t exactly pleasant. I probably went through more headphones than I did players.

I’ve done that in every medium since, come to think of it.

I believe I might have received that first Walkman knockoff at my great-grandmother’s for a Christmas session I only vaguely remember. I remember playing it a lot, mostly at my grandparents’. I liked to be outside all the time and there were often no children around my age, so I listened to a lot of the dreadful music we all listened to when were young and impressionable.

I remember borrowing a neighborhood kid’s tape and I thought I broke it. It slowed waaay down, and I thought I was going to have to buy the guy a replacement copy. So I asked my uncle, because he’s a very savy man, what the problem might be.

“Let me hear it,” he said.

So I described it to him, out of fear that the pop-rock ‘n’ roll that was on the tape might not meet with his approval. The drums seemed to work right, but the guitars were dragging. My uncle suspected I did not ruin the tape — I was playing it constantly — but had worn out the batteries instead. He was right, I was relieved. Apparently I’d never had a bad battery experience before that.

Told you, we were happily poor.

I think I owned two tapes at the time, Beat It and a Beach Boy’s greatest hits. Not a bad start to an overly indulgent collection.

Eventually we’ll decide we don’t need to own things like music or books in a tangible form. I especially like my books, enjoy my liner notes and the stacking and ordering of things. I might be one of the last people to accept that day. I think it’ll come when I can have access to every book or every song just floating up in the ether. Everything at your fingertips, everything of superior quality, for free at my every whim. Maybe without even having to even type a series of keywords.

Then we can all get Billy Idol or Symphony 41 whenever the mood strikes us. And, if you think about it, we’re getting really close.

Check out this video:

The Power of Music from Life File Videos on Vimeo.

Leslie-Jean Thornton, a journalism professor from Arizona State found that today. I love documentaries like this, the ones that try to say as much with the edits and production choices as the raw content itself. There’s plenty of character in 90-year-old Jack Leroy Tueller’s hands and face and that powerful two-minute story, just one of a life full of memories could be told in a lot of different ways.

I’d like to think I’ll have the chance to shoot some more of those (I got to take part in one WW2 oral history last December), even if they are brief anecdotes like this. (Maybe when I get my dissertation under control next year … ) Tueller has more. And more still.

“Veterans should not retire. They should tell everyone who listens or reads what a wonderful life this is, and what a wonderful country this is.”

That’s a guy who’s mother was essentially killed by his drunken father. And then he turned six. He discovered the trumpet a few years later, worked as a janitor through school. Then he had his trumpet stolen, so he spent his tuition money on a new one. Then the war came. And that’s the start of a wonderful life.

He’s right, you know.

He got married, went off to Europe. Flew one plane, one single plane, through 140 missions. He flew in Korea, retired a colonel, has been married almost 70 years. Oh, and there’s this:

While visiting China, he participated in a test of the repaired aircraft by flying a MiG-21 in a mock dogfight. He was 78 years old and hadn’t piloted an airplane in years when he went up against skilled young pilots that day. The young pilots performed various evasive maneuvers thinking Tueller would try to stay on their tails. In a concession to age, he didn’t take the bait. He waited until they were done with their acrobatics and then came out of the sun and beat them.

The world might be full of men and women like that, but you’d always take a few more.