I'd planned to write tonight about Luddites -- not the nineteenth century opponents ofindustrialization, mind you, but the folks in my everyday world who despise and resist technology and innovation. They plague me in this lifetime, in my everyday world, Luddites do, clearly some sort of penance for revolutionary treason in a past life or cyborgian selling out in this one. "Wait, Luddites?" you say. "Don't you work in technology?" "I KNOW!" I respond with the full fury of capslock. But even beyond the day-to-day-fear-of-learning-how-to-copy-paste, I seem to be destined to do battle with those who hate technology. My arch-nemesis is a Luddite (although come to think of it, I really should pick a new arch-nemesis as mine is aging and ineffectual, like Ernst Blofeld but without the Nehru jacket or nifty gadgets. Evil genius aside, he is, after all, a Luddite.)

So yeah, Luddites. I wanted to start this post (a post about the fear of Ctrl-C as a window into a fear of change blah blah blah) with a quotation about King Ludd. While I could remember the Lord Byron one that now titles this entry, I thought perhaps there was a different quotation as an epigraph to The Monkey Wrench Gang. And I went to my bookshelf to find my copy.

And here's where my evening and this blog post get totally sidetracked.

A couple of months ago, I decided to rearrange my office, including moving the bookshelves that line the walls. This, of course, required removing all the books, and as I went to replace them all, I was struck with what at the time seemed like a brilliantly funny idea, but after a prolonged and frustrating search for my copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang now seems completely ridiculous.

My (not funny) idea: Instead of arranging my books in a sensible fashion (grouped by author, topic, genre, size) I placed authors next to others that would irritate them. Bookshelf purgatory of sorts. As in, let's stick Derrick Jensen next to Sigmund Freud. Let's squeeze William Gibson between Charlotte Brontëand Jane Austen. Let's intersperse Jean Baudrillard with Captain Underpants. Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, meet your neighbor Vladimir Lenin's What Is to be Done? Fight Club, say hello to Charlotte's Web.

If you are familiar with Ed Abbey, you'll see immediately why this might make locating The Monkey Wrench Gang problematic. Just about everyone on my bookshelf would either piss him off or be pissed off by him (with the possible exception of Dave Foreman, who rests nicely next to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.) I have a lot of books, and I walked around my office, scanning the shelves for a long-ass time. Then I looked on the shelves in my bedroom and found much to my dismay that the novel was sitting on the bookshelf closest to my bed, meaning Ed Abbey was rubbing up against me. OMG YUCK!

And if it wasn't 10:30 at night, I would totally rearrange my bookshelves.

And write a real blog post about Luddites.