Inception and emacs

He felt that he, too, was stranded on that shore, unable to commit to a leap.

There are three bees who have made their way through my window, and don’t seem to be able to make it back out again. According to the chromatic tuner that i keep next to me for when a situation such as this arises, they are buzzing in the key of f. Normally i prefer silence when i’m working, but for these bees i feel happy to make an exception.

I’m standing at a chest of drawers, which doubles as my makeshift standing desk - hence why i’m standing at it. The surface is covered with junk: a clay turtle, an egg timer, a cow figurine painted like a watermelon, and a chromatic tuner, because it’s funny how often a situation arises when a tuner comes in handy.

In the middle is my computer, or to be more precise, half of my computer. It’s definitely seen better days than it sees now: i’ve removed the screen, because the backlight stopped working; there is a hole where the trackpad used to be; it no longer runs off of battery, instead wired permanently to the mains, the greatest form of humility that a laptop could imagine, had a laptop a brain. Its green chassis is covered in scribbles, careless sharpie tattoos noting where the bios is and an assortment of useful commands.

The smell of chocolate hits me. On the other side of the room is a pile of Easter eggs, softening in the sun. I won’t be able to eat them, my stomach is too full of tomato juice and jalapenos from last night’s meal.

I’m running alpine linux. There’s no particular reason for this, I’d heard some positive things about it and decided to try it out. I’ve recently been rewriting my emacs configuration, and there is no better way to try it out than to see whether it works after booting emacs for the first time on a new machine.

But i don’t have x running on this machine, and i don’t have wayland running either. I could say that doing everything in the tty was a deliberate choice, fast and focused, no risk of being able to immediately open a browser and while away the day looking at unproductive things, but the truth is that trying to set up x kept resulting in errors. When I log in, tty1 boots me straight into emacs, and for most things that’s all i need. Maybe i’ve already spent to much time in stockholm; images are a distant memory. It truly is the year of the linux desktop, and the linux desktop still looks like nineteen eighty.

At the moment i’m writing this document having connected to the tilde.town server via ssh. I used emacs’s ansi-term, and have spawned another emacs over this remote connection. I have two mode lines now. The latency is high. Yet typing in this way feels more enjoyable than had I been doing it locally. Why? Perhaps it is the sense of foolishness, the idea that it is absolutely not a good idea. The same reason that people like to walk across train tracks. Maybe after i have written this, I will M-x ansi-term here and connect to another server. The way it takes a keypress longer each time to register is strikingly reminiscent to me of the way that time slows down in inception. Perhaps me and Nolan are more similar than it would first appear. Maybe he makes a habit of creating chains of secure shells within Emacs. If I ever get the chance, I will ask him.

The bees have gone now. The only sound is my hands hitting a chiclet keyboard. Not quite the inspiring clack-clack-clack that it could have been, if i had only got around to finishing soldering the keyboard that now lies, half skinned, on the desk behind me. Maybe one day.