Microserfs

MONDAY

Rained all day (32mm according to Bug). Read a volume of Inside Mac. Drove over to Boeing Surplus and bought some zinc and some laminated air-safety cards.

TUESDAY

Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.

Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald’s there.

There were soggy maple leaves all over the Hornet Sportabout this afternoon. The orange colors were dizzying and I must have looked like such a space case staring at the car for fifteen minutes. But it felt so relaxing.

Susan was talking about art today, about that surrealist guy who painted little businessmen floating through the sky and apples that fill up entire rooms — Magritte. She said that if Surrealism was around today, “It’d last ten minutes and be stolen by ad agencies to sell long-distance calls and aerosol cheese products.” Probably true.

Then Susan went on to say that Surrealism was exciting back whenever it happened, because society had just discovered the subconscious, and this was the first visual way people had found to express the way the human subconscious works.

Susan then said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, “really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images.”

So this got me to thinking … what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine’s subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?

So I stare at my MultiSync and my PowerBook and wonder … “What’s going through their heads?”

To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labeled SUBCONSCIOUS.

Cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. Read the phone book for a while. Read a Wall Street Journal. Listened to the radio.

Karla’s been living here three weeks and I’m not sure I’m not going to screw things up. It’s all so new. She’s heaven. Imagine losing heaven!

Personal Computer

I am your personal computer

Hello

Stop

Being

Carbon

CNN

LensCrafters magnetic ID card instant noodles dodecahedron

Lawry's Garlic Salt

666

airbag

employee number

birth

ATM

808 Honolulu 503 Klamath Falls 604 Victoria

702 Las Vegas 206 Tacoma 916 Shasta

oatmeal

cherry flavored antacids

holodeck

Sierra

NCC-1701

Schroder Wagg/London

laxatives

Rubbermaid

Courtyard Marriott

Big Guip

liquid money

Rank Xerox

WEDNESDAY

Todd and I tied our “Ship-It” awards to a rope behind my AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback wagon and dragged them for an hour around the suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond.

Net result: a few little nicks and scratches. They are awesomely indestructible.

I try to imagine someone or some new species in fifty million years, unearthing one of these profoundly unbiodegradable little gems and trying to deduce something meaningful about the species and culture that created it.

“Surely they lived not for the moment but for some distant time — obviously a time far, far beyond their own era, to have created such an astounding artifact that would not decay.”

“Yes, Yeltar, and they inscribed profound, meaningful, and transcendent text inside this miraculously preserved clear block, but alas, its message remains forever cryptic:”

EVERY TIME A PRODUCT SHIPS,

IT TAKES US ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE VISION:

A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK AND IN EVERY HOME.

Dad phoned to ask me how to hook up a modem. He’s joining the Net now.

For three days last month he ended up on the green velveteen living room couch, sleeping endlessly. Or else he’d come sit with me in my office while we finished debugging for shipping. He seemed to like that. But he was so fragile, and when Karla and I drove him out to SeaTac airport he sat in the backseat, rattling like a stack of Franklin Mint souvenir plates.

Mom keeps sending me clippings about the information superhighway and interactive multimedia. She clips things out of the San Jose Mercury News (her librarian’s heart). This highway — is it a joke? You hear so much about it, but really, what is it … slide shows with music? Suddenly it’s all over the place. EVERYWHERE.

Morris e’d me back from Amsterdam:

»1 tried one and they’re not uery good, so don’t romanticize them. They have a curry taste, and they’re full of frozen *peas* (of all things). More importantly, by eating “burgers,” aren’t you just still buying into the “meat concept.” Tofu hot dogs are merely an isotope of meat.

»lf you yourself are a uegetarian, but still dream of burgers, then all you really are is a cryptocarniuore.

Went to Nordstrom’s. Watched Wings on The Discovery Channel.

Bug sulks in his room all day, listening to Chet Baker, restoring his antique Radio Shack Science Fair 65-In-One electronic project kit, and memorizing C++ syntax. Susan house hunts. Todd lives at the Pro Club gym. Abe has been reassigned to a subgroup in charge of designing a toolbar interface. Whooo-ee!

I think Abe’s being punished for going sailing that day with his friends during the week we were all in crunch mode. We don’t see him much — he’s back in Microsoft time/space again. He gets home late, feeds his neon tetras sprinkles of ground-up, freeze-dried poor people, chides us all for not exhibiting more enterprise, and then sleeps.

2:45 a.m. Drove into Seattle tonight with Todd in separate cars. Todd scored at The Crocodile and at the moment he and his “date,” Tabitha from Tukwila, are in his room getting acquainted.

Bug is here in the living room watching “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoons on the VCR, “looking for subtext.” I can’t believe it, but I’m getting into it, too. (“Wait, Bug — rewind that back a few seconds — wasn’t that a Masonic compass?”) Karla was asleep ages ago. She stayed home and watched The Thornbirds on the VCR with Susan. (“It’s a girl thing. Scram.”) Karla has an unsuspected fathomless capacity for sleep of which I am most envious.

Continued adding to my computer’s subconscious files.

Welcome to Macintosh

Carl's Jr.

Gore-Tex®

gray metallic Saabs

Barry Diller KISS

mini-bars

ads for pearls

outer space

frequent flyer points

Oscar de la Renta

minimum wage

manufacture

dungeons

magazine scent strips

Bell Atlantic

phone jacks

F-16

Calvin Klein

bourgeois decay images

Upload

Sparkletts

flame broiled

switchbox

the DMV

MiG-29

Han Solo

Download

Drive

Tori Spelling

Advil

Rosslyn

You jerk

Kotex

Langley

Lee Press-ons

THURSDAY

I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction — the asphalt and cement kind — Dewey Decimal number 625.79 — and there haven’t been any published on the subject for two decades! It’s bizarre — like a murder mystery. It’s as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in 1975. Sizzler titles include:

Bituminous Materials in Road Construction

Surface Texture Versus Skidding

Engineering Study: Alaska Highway

Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability

Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Median Berms and Circles

Actually, there weren’t all too many books on freeways ever published in the first place. You’d think we’d have whole stadiums devoted to the worship of freeways for the amount of importance they play in our culture, but no. Zip. I guess we’re overcompensating for this past shortcoming by our current overhyping of the InfoBahn — the I-way. It’s emerged from nowhere into this big important thing we Have to Know About.

I have borrowed, among others, the seminal work on the subject: Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), by Robert F. Baker, editor; Van Nostrand and Reinhold Company. It’ll help melt away my lax days before I join a new product group.

We ripped away some wallpaper in the kitchen by the fridge and found that underneath the various stratum of paper (daisies; Peel n’ Stick pepper-mills), in condition just as fresh as the day they were written, the words:

one mellow day

June 6, 1974

I’m long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you

d.b.

Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you’re gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then … cheap!

At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell’s Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell’s soup flavors:

Creamy Dolphin

Lagoon

Beak

Pond

Crack

Note: I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212° Fahrenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off — it’s so hot it’s undrinkable — and by the time it’s cool, you’re sick of waiting for it to cool and that “coffee moment” has passed. At least Starbucks doesn’t stink like sweet coffee-flavoring chemicals … like the way you’d expect a Barbie doll’s house to smell.

Saw a documentary about the commodities market. Read some books that were lying around. Watched some old 1970s TV shows later. I remembered an old Nova episode in which German hackers published a secret document, and some Ph.D.³ hippie geek from UC Berkeley tracked them down with a baited document. Was this hippie geek tricked into trapping one of his own kind by the NSA or some other such organization? Ethics.

Then I started to think about those old Time-Life books with such all-embracing names like, “The Elements,” and “The Ocean,” and of how the information in them never really goes out of date, whereas the computer series books date within minutes: “Most ‘personal computers¹ now contain devices called ‘hard drives’ capable of storing the equivalent, in some cases, of up to three college textbooks.”

Felt a bit random.

Capture

specific

functions

Microsoft

Navajo

NASA

Flesh-eating bacteria

Arthur Miller

Kristy McNichol

Lance Kerwin

skateboard

trail mix

PERL

Job description

toner cartridge

very

really

a lot

ummm…

Martin-Marietta

FRIDAY

Susan and Karla came into the living room when I was reading the Handbook of Highway Engineering, and they both flipped out. They totally grokked on it. We kept on oohing and ahhhing over the book’s beautiful, car-free on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses—“So clean and pure and undriven.”

Karla noted that freeway engineers had their own techie code words, just as dull and impenetrable as geek talk. “Examples: subgrades, partial cloverleaf interchanges, cutslopes, and TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) …”

“They even abused three-letter acronyms,” said Karla, who also decreed that Rhoda Morgenstern would have dated a freeway engineer back in the 1970s. “His name would have been Rex and he would have looked like Jackson Browne and would have known the compressive strength range of Shale, Dolomite, and Quartzite to the nearest p.s.i. × 10³.”

I am really terrible at remembering three-letter acronyms. It’s a real dead zone in my brain. I still barely can tell you what RAM is. Wherever this part of the brain is located, it’s the same place where I misfile the names and faces of people I meet at parties. I’m so bad at names. I’m realizing that three-letter acronyms are actually words now, and no longer simply acronyms: ram, rom, scuzzy, gooey, see-pee-you…. Words have to start somewhere.

Karla told me about when she was young. About how she remembered “trying to make — no, not make, engineer—Campbell’s Vegetable Soup from scratch — chopping up the carrots and potatoes to resemble machine-cut cubes — getting the exact number of lima beans per can (4).

“I grew up with assembly lines, remember. My favorite cartoon was always the one with the little chipmunks stuck inside the vegetable canning factory. I used to guess at the spices, too. But in the end it never worked because I didn’t use beef stock or MSG.”

Random day. Fed on magazines for a while. Radio. Phone call from Mom, and she talked about traffic.

Industrial Light & Magic

jump

hit

We're just friends

run

multi-user dungeon

Ziggy Stardust

Sky Tel paging

FORTRAN

IKEA

Wells Fargo

Safeway

hummingbird

I am an empath

4x4

Kung Fu

Death Star

platform

oligarchy

Highway 92

Deuteronomy

Staples

Pearle Express

Kraft singles

cordless

brain ded

Silo

an executive lifestyle

Maybelline

implicator

Insert

Font

Format

Tools

SATURDAY

Oh God.

I knew I’d do something. Karla’s on the warpath because I forgot our one-month anniversary. Doh! She gave me until bedtime tonight to remember, but I still forgot, so now she’s not speaking to me. I tried to tell her that time isn’t necessarily linear, that it flows in odd clumps and bundles and clots. “Well, err, um—what exactly is a month, Karla? Ha Ha ha.”

“I don’t know about you, Dan,” she interrupted, “but I programmed my desktop calendar to remind me. Good night.” [Insert one frosty glare here. A bored yawn; a bedroom door nudged closed with little baby toes.]

It’s nice to see this romantic side to Karla’s personality — an unexpected bonus — but still, nobody likes THE COUCH. And so now after weeks of blissful insomnia-free sleep, I’m yet again PowerBooking my daily diaries here on the acid green couch in a big big way.

Comely superstar Cher hawks cosmetics on late-nite TV. Mishka is also spending tonight in the living room and she is making foul smells indeed. At least it’s raining out — buckets — and the weird too-hot summer is over.

Tomorrow I will program my desktop computer to remind me of every one of our anniversaries, monthly or otherwise, until the year 2050.

Actually, we all have so much free time now. Karla, Todd, Bug, and I sit around awaiting our next product group assignment, feeling deflated and just plain exhausted. We forget about clock-and calendar-type time completely.

Today, while raking the front lawn, Todd said, “Wouldn’t it be scary if our internal clocks weren’t set to the rhythms of waves and sunrise — or even the industrial whistle toot — but to product cycles, instead?”

We got nostalgic about the old days, back when September meant the unveiling of new car models and TV shows. Now, carmakers and TV people put them out whenever. Not the same.

Yes, Karla moved in a month ago. We’re an item.

Todd, Abe, and I lugged her “ownables” from her geek house down the street up to our own geek house at the top of the cul-de-sac: futon and frame … cluster o’ computers … U-Frame-It Ansel Adams print … and dumped it all into Michael’s empty room. And then, once she installed herself in our house (“Think of me as a software application“) she announced that she was an expert in (thank you, Lord …) shiatsu massage!

Mom phoned this afternoon. Out of the proverbial blue she said to me, “The house! The soil up in the hills is settling and the roof’s rotting. The door and windows need replacing. I just stand here and feel the money being sucked out of my body. At least we had the foresight to buy it when we did. But all my librarian’s salary goes into the house. The rest goes to Price-Costco.”

Money.

I changed the subject. “What did you have for dinner?”

“Those pre-formed pork by-product patties. And ramen noodles. Like the food you kids eat when you do your coding all-nighters.”

It was a “Listening-Only” call.

“I know, Mom. How’s Dad doing?”

“Prozac. Well … something like Prozac. At least he doesn’t obsess on the garage anymore. He goes out in the morning I-don’t-know-where looking for work. Let’s not get into it. God, I wish I drank.”

Life is stressful in Palo Alto. I send Dad $500 every month. It’s all I can spare on the 26K I make here ([$26,000 / 12] - taxes = $1,500).

It was a really bad phone call, but Mom just needed to vent — she has so few ears in her life who will listen. Who really ever does, I guess?

Michael never did return from Cupertino.

Rumor had it Bill had Michael secretly working on a project called Pink, but nothing ever came of the rumor.

A delivery firm specializing in high-tech moves carted Michael’s things to Silicon Valley. His pyramid of empty diet Coke cans — his suitcase-worth of Habitrail gerbil mazes — his collection of C. S. Lewis novels. Gone.

Fun fact: We found about 40 empty cough syrup bottles in the cupboard — Michael is a Robitussin addict! (Actually, he bulk-buys knockoff house brands — he’s a “PayLess Tussin” addict.) The world never ceases to amaze.

It’s late at night. Basketball on TV; computer and fitness mags everywhere. Let me talk about love.

Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart? You remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everybody keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you’re in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.

Let me try again. I’m not good at this.

Karla and I fell in love somewhere out there—I think that’s the way it happens—out there. The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.

Karla and I would talk about computing and coding. Our minds met out in the crystal lattice galaxy of ideas and codes and when we came out of our reverie, we realized we were in a special place—out there.

And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them, “Will you take my heart — stains and all?” and they say, “I will,” and they ask you the same question, and you say, “I will,” too.

There are other reasons Karla’s lovable, too, reasons not so poetic, but just as real. She’s like a friend to me, and we have all of these common interests—“mind meld”—whatever. I can discuss computers and Microsoft and that part of our lives — but we also have esoteric conversations that have nothing to do with tech life. I’ve never really had a friend this close before.

And there’s the nonlinear stuff: Karla’s intuitive and I’m not, yet she’s still on my frequency. She understands why yaki soba noodles in a plastic UFO-shaped container from Japan are intrinsically glorious. She scrunches up her forehead when she knows she’s not explaining an idea as clearly as she knows she can, and she gets frustrated.

Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

As I type this in, I feel small arms around my neck and a kiss on my jugular and I don’t know, but I think I may be forgiven. I hope so because my forgetting the anniversary thing was an honest mistake. I’m new at this love thing.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Cedars Sinai

starburst explosion

Gak

UNDO

Ctrl Z

CtrI Z

CtrI Z

Phoenix

Cleveland

Luis Vuitton

Kalashnikov

Waxahachie

LA Lakers

San Antonio

bubble economy

Creamsicles

Livermore

the place for ribs

Taylor Sequences

frog

Bleeding eyeliner

Colossal

SUNDAY

Todd’s obsessing on his body big-time these days. This afternoon he came in late from the gym and sat on the living room Orlon carpet flexing his arm and staring at his muscles as they bulged — buff and bored. His biggest project at the moment is making pyramids out of his empty tubs of protein supplements with their gold labels that resemble van art from the 1970s. Why do nerds make pyramids out of everything? Imagine Egypt!

The Cablevision was out for some reason, and Todd was just lying there, flexing his arms on the floor in front of the snowy screen. He said to me, “There has to be more to existence than this. ‘Dominating as many broad areas of automated consumerism as possible‘—that doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.” Todd?

This speech was utterly unlike him — thinking about life beyond his triceps or his Supra. Maybe, like his parents, he has a deep-seated need to believe in something, anything. For now it’s his bod … I think.

He said, “What we do at Microsoft is just as repetitive and dreary as any other job, and the pay’s the same as any other job if you’re not in the stock loop, so what’s the deal … why do we get so into it? What’s the engine that pulls us through the repetition? Don’t you ever feel like a cog, Dan? … wait — the term ‘cog’ is outdated — a cross-platform highly transportable binary object?”

I said, “Well, Todd, work isn’t, and was never meant to be a person’s whole life.”

“Yeah, I know that, but aside from the geek-badge-of-honor stuff about doing cool products first and shipping them on time and money, what else is there?”

I thought about this. “So what is it you’re really asking me?”

“Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity? Microsoft is no Bosnia.”

Religious upbringing.

Karla came into the room at this point. She turned off the TV set and looked at Todd square in the eyes and said, “Todd: you exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species—you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species currently has major problems and we’re trying to dream our way out of these problems and we’re using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthly paradise — the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear.”

She sat down on the couch, and there was rain drumming on the roof, and I realized that there weren’t enough lights on in the room and we were all quiet.

Karla said, “We all had good lives. None of us were ever victimized as far as I know. We have never wanted for anything, nor have we ever lusted for anything. Our parents are all together, except for Susan’s. We’ve been dealt good hands, but the real morality here, Todd, is whether these good hands are squandered on uncreative lives, or whether these hands are applied to continuing humanity’s dream.”

The rain continued.

“It’s no coincidence that as a species we invented the middle classes. Without the middle classes, we couldn’t have had the special type of mindset that consistently spits out computational systems, and our species could never have made it to the next level, whatever that level’s going to be. Chances are, the middle classes aren’t even a part of the next level. But that’s neither here nor there. Whether you like it or not, Todd, you, me, Dan, Abe, Bug, and Susan — we’re all of us the fabricators of the human dream’s next REM cycle. We are building the center from which all else will be held. Don’t question it, Todd, and don’t dwell on it, but never ever let yourself forget it.”

Karla looked at me. “Dan, let’s go out and get a Grand Slam Breakfast. I have $1.99 and it’s burning a hole in my pocket.”

Susan taped the following clipping from the Wall Street Journal to her door (which won’t be hers much longer — she’s moving soon): Sept. 3, 1993, a little while ago. The clipping was about the Japanese rainy season that started this year in June, and never ended:

A typhoon flooded the moats of Japan’s

imperial palace in downtown Tokyo.

Imperial carp fled their home for the first

time and flopped in knee-deep waters covering

one of Japan’s busiest intersections. \

Susan’s “totally right-lobe” now.

I tried to find her and ask her what she meant with the article, but she was out on Capitol Hill getting pixelated with her no-doubt right-lobed grunge buddies.

Susan quit the day after she vested and began “running with the wolves”—or so she announced to all of us the morning after her Vest Fest. She unveiled her new image as we were sitting in front of our Mitsubishi home entertainment totem, eating our last few boxes of Kellogg’s Snak-Paks with plastic spoons, deconstructing old Davey and Goliath cartoons, and trying to figure out how/if to wake up my Dad, who was still passed out on Michael’s bed.

Susan’s previous image — Patagonia-wearing Northwest good girl — had been shed away for a radicalized look: bent shades, striped Fortrel too-tight top, Angela Bowie hairdo, dirty suede vest, flares, and Adidases.

“Wow,” said Bug. “What a stud.”

She stormed past us, stopped at the top of the stairs, said, “Fuck it. I’m tired of being Mary Richards. I’m off to hold up a 7-Eleven,” and then clomped down to the driveway.

I think she expected us to be a bit shocked, but you know, it’s actually really great when a person reinvents themself. We finished our Froot Loops and soy milk.

Todd came up to me later tonight and said, “Dan, I wouldn’t fuck around so much if I could meet somebody like Karla.” This freaked me out and I got this awful feeling that I think is jealousy, but I can’t be sure, because it was a new feeling, and nobody ever tells you what feelings are supposed to be like. But Todd saw this and said, “That’s not what I meant, Dan. I’m not gonna jump her. Gimme some credit. But man, where do you find someone like her?”

“Yeah, she’s something else,” I said blandly, masking my interior burn. “She’s so smart, but not just coding-smart. She thinks like a preacher, but not a by-the-books preacher. She believes in something.”

Watched an old documentary about NASA. Then afterward I saw this documentary about how codfish have been gill-netted into extinction in Newfoundland in Canada, so I went out to Burger King to get a Whaler fishwich-type breaded deep-fried filet sandwich while there was still time.

I think I’m going to keep my diary more regularly now. Karla got me to thinking that we really do inhabit an odd little nook of time and space here, and that odd or strange as this little nook may be, it’s where I live — it’s where I am.

I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason. Unshackled!

UV rays

... arms armor ammo health

Brillo

Chicken Marsala

WW3

backlit Plexiglas

N x S x T

Tetris

Tonopah, Nevada

locate the source of urges

cat food

System Seven

Woodside

Los Altos Hills

San Jose

Space Cruiser

8

17

32

487

Superstar

Fear Uncertainty Doubt

Crashed in a cornfield

COBOL

Steak house

Calorie factory

Format?

Reject?

MONDAY

Melrose Place night tonight. We double-clicked onto the “BRAIN CANDY” mode. We’re all addicts.

We like to pretend our geek house is actually Melrose Place.

Tonight Abe said, “I wonder what would happen if we all started randomly going nonlinear like the show’s characters. What would happen if our personalities became divorced from cause and effect?”

“We could take turns going psycho,” said Bug.

Susan, writing the words D-U-R-A-N/D-U-R-A-N on the proximal phalanges of her fingers, said, “You already are psycho, Bug. That doesn’t count.”

Susan read aloud bits from the Handbook of Highway Engineering:

“‘Improperly installed or unwarranted signals can result in the following conditions:

—Excessive delay

—Disobedience of the signal indications

—Use of less adequate routes to avoid the signal

—Increase of accident frequency …”’

She paused and looked at the fire for a while. “I wonder if this guy is alive and if he’s married?”

I called to see if Mom was feeling better, and she was. She’s signed up for swimming classes at the local pool. But the big news occurred when Dad got on the extension line and shouted at me, “I’m employed!”

“Way to go, Dad. I told you something would come up. What are you going to be doing?”

“Oh — this and that. Michael is certainly one bright young fellow. Odd. But bright.”

“You’re working for Michael?”

“I certainly am.”

“At Microsoft?”

“No, he’s starting something else, a new company.”

“He IS? What are you working on there?” (*Shock*)

“And he’s living in one of the spare bedrooms — can you believe it?”

(Good God!) “Yes, I can. And your job description?”

“Here, your mother wants to speak to you …”

Mom chatted about being relieved with Dad’s salary plus rent money flowing in. But the job description never arrived. Nor any clue about this mysterious new company.

We have a new word for vaporware: Sea Monkeys, as in, “ScriptX is really Sea Monkeys!”

Susan said, “Remember when you were a kid and sent away for that little nuclear family with Dad wearing a crown and everything, and instead all you got was … brine shrimp?”

Reading a book about viruses. Went into Boeing Surplus again. It was Monday, so all the new magazines were in.

Karla and I were here in my room, lying on my bed — bare legs akimbo — and we made this really embarrassing observation that neither of us have tan lines — that we spent all summer in the crunch mode to meet shipping deadline.

Karla began talking all Star Trekky again — the best thing about her.

She said, “I don’t believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively — there simply aren’t enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as ‘peripheral memory storage devices.’”

Hence, *bliss*, shiatsu.

“You know yourself, Dan, that every sitcom ever broadcast is stored in your brain — that’s terabits of terabits of memory — as well as the details of Burt and Loni’s divorce. Brains just don’t have enough space to handle all these bits. And so I decided to learn shiatsu massage — as a means of thawing memory frozen inside the body.”

I thought about this. The concept of body as hard drive seemed very plausible to me.

I couldn’t believe we had been enemies for so long. Trek on, woman!

So Dad’s working — for Michael. Michael is hiring people. That is so random. The world is indeed chaotic.

Space Needle

1962

Mattel

C+++++++++++

silver lens sunglasses

Redmond

Schaumberg, III.

Interstate 80/287, NJ

Dallas Galleria/LBJ Fwy.

Torrey Pines/UTC Sorrento Valley, Ca.

Metroplex/lrvine, Ca.

King of Prussia/Route 202

Tandy Corp., Fort Worth, Texas 76107

relentless . . .

crispy . . .

fluids . . .

200 years from now

Ebola Reston

Marburg

Hepatitis non-A/non-B

Ebola Zaire

Sabia

Michelangelo

Machupo

Rift Valley

Hanta

TUESDAY

A FedEx pack arrived today with letters for everybody: Roommates@Geek House followed by our postal address. Talk about news. Michael’s offering all of us jobs at a start-up company he’s assembled down in Silicon Valley.

Excerpts from Michael’s letter:

… People our age are abandoning the tech megacultures in droves, starting up their own companies, or joining small, content-based start-ups. There’s a recruiting frenzy going on … multimedia craziness. and the big companies that aren’t minting money are hemorrhaging brains. It’s intellectual Darwinism.

… The five of you are rudderless at the moment. Is now not the time to take a risk and jump into the future?

… Some say that the world is visibly cleaving into a race of information Haves, and a race of information Have-Nots. Whatever. Let me simply say that history is happening, it’s happening now and it is happening here, in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco.

… Tell me, are you seriously going to be at Microsoft 20 years from now? 15? 10? 5? Or even 2 years? At what point do you decide that you have to take your own life into your own hands?

… At the very least, you’ll make an okay salary if you work with me; at best, you’ll gain equity in something that might become very valuable; I have an idea for a product that I think will be very popular. And wouldn’t it be amusing for all of us to be together again!

… I must have your decisions immediately. Do call.

Most definitely yours, Michael

Michael has designed this amazing code and the scary part is completed already — the proprietary work that could only have sprouted from Michael’s brain — Object Oriented Programming from another galaxy. And he’s been doing it in his spare time — as a game called Oop!. He offered me a job coding, as opposed to just testing … who knows how long it’ll take me to move up to coding at Microsoft?

He sent us a rough draft of a product description he’s written plus ERS — Engineering Requirements Specifications. Herewith:

Oop!

Oop! is a virtual construction box — a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick has eight “bumps’ an Oop! brick can have from eight to 8,000 bumps, depending on the precision demanded by the user.

Oop! users can virtually fly in and out of their creations, or they can print them out on a laser printer. Oop! users can build their ideas on a “pad” or they can build their ideas in 3D space, a revolving space station; running ostriches … whatever. Oop! allows users to clone structures, and add these clones onto each other, permitting easy megaconstructions that use little memory. Customized Oop! blocks can be created and saved. The ratios and proportions of Oop! bricks can also be customized by the user in much the same way typefaces are scaled.

Imagine:

“Oopenstein”—flesh-like Oop! bricks or cells, each with ascribed biological functions that allow users to create complex life forms using combinations of single and cloned cell structures. Create life!

“Mount Oopmore”—a function that allows users to take a scanned photo, texture map that photo, and convert it into a 3D visualized Oop! object.

“Oop-Mahal”—famous buildings, preconstructed in Oop! that the user can then modify as desired.

“Frank Lloyd Oop”—architectural Oop! for adults.

As Oop! users won’t have the actual plastic blocks in their hands, Oop! generates new experiences to compensate for this lost tactility: feedback loops … hidden messages … or “rewards” for properly completing a kit; i.e., King Kong will climb up and down your Empire State Building and install the flag if you finish. Oop! comes equipped with “starter modules” such as houses, cat shapes, cars, buildings, and so forth that can be added on to or modified or finished in an unlimited number of colors or surfaces: slate, leopardskin, woodgrain, and so forth. Oop! structures can grow hair or plant life. Oop! structures can be distorted, stretched, morphed, or “Jell-O’d.” Oop! users can dissolve the connection lines between bricks to create “solid” structures.

Oop! constructions can be saved in memory or they can be “destroyed” by:

“Los Angeles” (earthquake simulator)

“Pyro” (fire and melting)

“Ruins” (decay simulator: x-numbers of years of decomposition can be selected and simulated. Imagine your ranch house rotted into fragments and covered in kudzu or a variety of choking vines. Another idea: “Flood”)

“Big Foot” (elder sibling emulator: kicks constructions into bits)

“Terror!” (a bomb explodes either inside or outside the structure)

As the Lego Generation ages (and as the Oop! product invariably grows more sophisticated), Oop! becomes a powerful real-world modeling tool usable by scientists, animators, contractors, and architects. Object-Oriented Programming design allows great flexibility for licensees to develop cross-platform software add-ons.

Build every possible universe with …

Oop!

We felt surreal from Michael’s offer.

At sundown, we congregated in the living room, turned off the ESPN₂, cracked open two Safeway fire logs, and chewed over Michael’s data, while Mishka chewed up a Windows NT box. We felt like a Magritte painting.

We talked some more, but the basic idea was clear. As Abe said, “It’s virtual Lego — a 3-D modeling system with almost unlimited future potential.”

“Oop! sounds too fun to resist — like that pile of FREE BIRD SEED in the old Road Runner cartoons,” said Bug.

Susan said, “Maybe Oop! is Sea Monkeys. Maybe it seems unbelievably fun, but in the end winds up as a cruel, bitter letdown upon arrival.”

“I doubt it,” said Abe. “Michael’s a genius. We all know that. And the ERS looked great.”

“Just think,” said Karla, “Lego can be rendered into anything, in 2 or 3 dimensions. This product has the possibility for becoming the universal standard for 3-dimensional modeling.”

We silently nodded.

And we didn’t talk much. We just looked into the flames and thought.

Mom called. She’s learning the butterfly stroke — at 60!

Karla kept on talking about bodies, her obsession, tonight, about an hour ago before she fell asleep and I, as ever, remained wide-eyed and awake.

“When I was younger,” she said, “I went through a phase where I wanted to be a machine. I think this is one of the normal phases that young people go through now — like The Lord of the Rings phase, the Ayn Rand phase — I honestly didn’t want to be flesh; I wanted to be ‘precision technology’—like a Los Angeles person; I listened to Kraftwerk and ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan.”

(A concerned pause.) “Oh … is your foot twitching, Dan? Let me fix it for you ….

(Insert foot massage here.)

“That was a decade ago, and years have passed since I had had that particular dream of wanting to become a machine.

“Then four summers ago when I was visiting my parents down in McMinnville, I accidentally fell back into the body/machine dream.

“It was a summer day — too bright out — and I was walking amid the family’s apple orchards and developed a brain-splitting, wasp’s sting of a headache and became nauseous. I walked into the house and went into the basement to be cool, but I threw up on the cement floor next to the washer and dryer. I lost control of my left arm and then I passed out on top of a stack of laundry for three hours. Dad freaked out over the paralysis and drove me into the city and we did a brain scan to check for stroke damage or clots and stuff.

“They injected all sorts of isotopes into me and I found myself part of a literal body/machine system — being bodily radioactive — and inserted like a fuel rod into a body-scanning machine. I remember saying, to myself, ‘So this is the feeling of being a machine.’ I felt more curious about death than I felt afraid; I felt glad to be no longer human for a few brief minutes.”

“Was there a blood clot?” I asked.

“No. Simple sunstroke. And the feeling of my being a machine evaporated quickly, too. But the whole incident made me decide to discover my body, pronto. Here,” she said, scratching my tender inner forearms lightly with her fingernails, sending me into paroxysms of delight. “How does that feel?”

“Glrmmph.”

“Just as I thought. People who do repetitive work on keyboards tend to have highly erogenous forearms and shoulder cuffs. Now, you scratch me.”

I did, and then we scratched forearms together, and I felt like the two of us were in a nature documentary on mating African veld animals.

“Of course,” she said, “you’ll have to learn all of this stuff, and you’re going to have to reciprocate on me.”

“Body 101 — sign me up now.”

“Daniel …”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever been held before?”

“You always ask me these embarrassing, left-field questions. What do you mean, have I ever been held before?”

“Exactly what I said. Have you?”

“Why, ummm …” I thought about it. “No.”

“I thought so.”

I realized that I envied Karla’s way of just talking about whatever was on her mind. She’s fearless, exploring her theories and neuroses with the conviction that self-knowledge will bring the solutions. The more I notice this, the more I admire this.

We did spoons for a while, and then she said, “I remember being young, in school, being told that our bodies would yield enough carbon for 2,000 pencils and enough calcium for 30 sticks of chalk, as well as enough iron for one nail. What a weird thing to tell kids. We should be told our bodies can transmutate into diamonds and wine goblets and teacups and balloons.”

“And diskettes,” I added.

Q: If there were two of you, which one would win?

Jeffersonian individualism

victim

winner

loser

thief

http://www.city.palo-alto.ca/

Lexus.cel phone.traffic.

My body type was in last year.

We can no longer create

the feeling of an era . . . of time being

particular to one spot in time.

WEDNESDAY

Bug ranted a bit about Lego in the afternoon while we ate Arrowroot cookies and bounced on the trampoline. The air was cold and our breath visible. We were all wearing laundry-day junk clothes and we looked like scarecrows flailing about. Why are we all so hopeless with our bodies?

Bug said, “You know what really depresses the hell out of me? The way that kids nowadays don’t have to use their imagination when they play with Lego. Say they buy a Lego car kit — in the old days you’d open the box and out tumbled sixty pieces you had to assemble to make the car. Nowadays, you open the box and a whole car, pre-fucking-built, pops out — the car itself is all one piece. Big woo. Some imagination-challenger that is. It’s total cheating.”

I got to thinking of my own Lego superstitions. “When I was young, if I built a house out of Lego, the house had to be all in one color. I used to play Lego with Ian Ball who lived up the street, back in Bellingham. He used to make his house out of whatever color brick he happened to grab. Can you imagine the sort of code someone like that would write?”

“I used to build with mixed colors …” said Bug.

“What do I know?” I said, pulling my foot out of it.

Karla cut in, “I had this friend, Bradley, who had a major Lego collection and I’d cheat, lie, and steal to go to his house and play with it. Then one day Bradley’s mother put his Lego in the bathtub to wash it off. It was never the same — diseased, sort of — stinking, like the water was turning into feta cheese inside the plastic tubes of the locking devices. I think his memories of Lego must be pretty different from my own.”

Bug said, “For designing games, Lego makes a great quickie simulator for figuring out mazes for gaming levels.”

“You’ve designed games before?” I asked.

“I’ve done everything you can do on computers. I’m 31.”

Maybe we underestimate Bug. When I stop and think about him, he’s so full of contradictions — it’s like there’s one big piece of him, that if only I knew it, it would make sense of everything.

Since Michael’s offers came in, we’ve all become really quiet, I’ve noticed. We’re all mulling it over. Our doors are closed; phone calls are being made to the 415 and 408 area codes. Karla says we’re all trying to figure out what we really need in life, as opposed to what we simply want.

A weird shiatsu moment: Karla focused on a piece of my chest, just above the Xyphoid Process (that weird thing in the middle of your ribs) and *bang* out of the blue I started bawling. I couldn’t stop. So I guess I have memories hidden away that I don’t think about.

1999: The people were lying on the ground.

Demonize the symbolic

analysts.

You're smarter than TV.

So what?

Uranium and Beethoven.

Define random

MFD-2DD

Ezekiel

Sony

THURSDAY

A random sort of day.

Woke up late; went on a CD rampage at Silver Platters in Northgate; bacon burger at the IHOP. Karla taught me some shiatsu basics — pressure points and stuff. (“Massage is a two way street, mister …”

I‘ve been with Karla way over a month now, and just when I think I’m starting to understand her, something happens that makes me realize I don’ One truly weird thing about her is that she never calls her family or talks about them. All she’ll say is that they’re psychotic, as if everybody else’s family isn’t.

She’s a good deflector. She structures conversations so that her family never arises. Like today, I brought up the subject of phoning her parents sim ply because it was Sunday (call me old-fashioned — or at least an AT&T consumer victim) and she said, “McMinnville, Oregon — area code 503.”

“Huh?”

“North America is running out of area codes. There’s only two or three left, and they’ll be gone soon enough. Suburban Toronto, Ontario, just got 905. West Los Angeles got 310. Suburban Atlanta got 706. Faxes and modems are eating up phone numbers faster than anyone ever thought they’d be eaten up. We’ve exhausted our supply of numbers.”

“Your point being …?”

“Only one thing—eight-digit phone numbers. Disastrous, because all new phone numbers will be like those European numbers that are eight d long and impossible to remember.”

Karla then discussed a theory called “Five plus-or-minus-two memory.”

“Most humans can only remember five digits at most. Exceptional people can remember up to seven (Michael, incidentally knows π up to, like 2,000 digits). So the chances are that phone numbers will be broken up into four and four, for easier memorization,” she announced confidently.

“So are you going to call your family, or what?” I asked.

“Maybe. But let me digress a bit. Here’s something interesting … did you know you can figure out how important your state or province was circa 1961 by adding up the code’s three digits? Zero equals 10.”

“No.”

“It’s because zeros used to take forever to go around the little rotary dial — while ones zipped along quickest. The lowest possible code, 212, went to the busiest place, New York City. Los Angeles got 213. Alaska got 907. See my point?”

Karla always comes up with the best digressions. “Yes.”

“Imagine Angie Dickinson in Los Angeles (213) telephoning Suzanne Pleshette in Las Vegas (702) sometime before the Kennedy assassination. She dials the final ‘2,’ breaks a fingernail, and cusses a shit under her breath irritated at Suzanne for being in a location with a loser area code.”

“How come you won’t call your family?”

“Dan, let it rest.”

Karla’s learning things about me, too. Like the fact that I don’t like shopping but I am a new product freak. Slap a “NEW” sticker onto an old product, and it’s in my cart. The day they introduced Crystal Pepsi, I harassed the local Safeway manager almost daily until it arrived. I thought this new Pepsi was going to be like regular Pepsi, except minus the plutonium stuff that turns it brown. Then I tasted it — it was like 7-Up and Dr. Pepper and Pepsi and tap water all sort of randomly mixed and decolorized. Downer!

I guess Pepsi wishes they had John Sculley at the helm for that one.

Karla brought me a whole fun-pak of clear products — Crystal Close-up, All “free” detergent, Crystal Pepsi (I guess she didn’t know my feelings about it), and Crystal Mint breath drops. In a universe parallel to ours, she no doubt brought me Crystal Bologna, too.

nCube computers

simulating the Tokyo

power grid

They left a dead escalator, chewed and torn lying on the pavement like a dead gray candy necklace.

Imagine:

In Florida the wind is rattling the chimes.

You look over the alligators and

the sea grass and water. There it is:

The rocket's burn. The best century ever.

We were here. But now it's time to go.

The past is a finite resource.

Shinhatsubai!

FRIDAY

Another Presto Log fire in the living room. Abe lectured us about his Theory of Lego. It felt like school.

“Have you ever noticed that Lego plays a far more important role in the lives of computer people than in the general population? To a one, computer technicians spent huge portions of their youth heavily steeped in Lego and its highly focused, solitude-promoting culture. Lego was their common denominator toy.”

Nobody was disagreeing.

“Now, I think it is safe to say that Lego is a potent three-dimensional modeling tool and a language in itself. And prolonged exposure to any language, either visual or verbal, undoubtedly alters the way a child perceives its universe. Examine the toy briefly …”

We were riveted.

“First, Lego is ontologically not unlike computers. This is to say that a computer by itself is, well … nothing. Computers only become something when given a specific application. Ditto Lego. To use an Excel spreadsheet or to build a racing car — this is why we have computers and Lego. A PC or a Lego brick by itself is inert and pointless: a doorstop; litter. Made of acrylonitrile butadiene stryrene (ABS) plastic, Lego’s discrete modular bricks are indestructible and fully intended to be nothing except themselves.”

We pass the snacks. “Soylent Melts”: Jack cheese and jalapenos microwaved onto Triscuits.

“Second, Lego is ‘binary’—a yes/no structure; that is to say, the little nubblies atop any given Lego block are either connected to another unit of Lego or they are not. Analog relationships do not exist.”

“Monogamous?” asks Susan.

“Possibly. An interesting analogy. Third, Lego anticipates a future of pixelated ideas. It is digital. The charm and fun of Lego derives from reducing the organic to the modular: a zebra built of little cubes; Cape Cod houses digitized through the Hard Copy TV lens that pixelates the victim’s face into little squares of color.”

Karla and I discussed what we’re planning to do. We don’t have much time to choose; Michael needs a response by the end of this week. Michael is offering me a 24K salary plus 1.5 percent of EQUITY as opposed to my Microsoft 26K plus 150 shares vested over 3.5 years. Plus the opportunity to be a coder, and be closer to Karla on the food chain, and even best of all, the opportunity to be with Karla in the same product group again.

SATURDAY

It was another rainy night that called for a fire. We’d most of us spent the day processing all of our new career option data.

We ran out of fire logs and had to light a real fire with flammables culled from around the house: a Brawny paper towel carton full of junk mail and bits of furniture too ugly to even throw out. And then Bug found a packaged fire log in the garage with (he read from the wrapping), “’Realistic-looking flames and colors’—you can put anything on a label and people will believe it. We are one sick species, I tell you.”

The fire was huge and felt religious, and triggered among all of us a discussion of our youthful pyromaniac tendencies. Our conversation became an unexpected bonding experience for us. We talked about pipe bombs, M-80s, Lysol spray can flame-throwers, sodium chunks borrowed from chem labs, potassium nitrate melted together with sugar into smoke bombs, firecracker bricks, MJB cans filled with gasoline into which lit matchbooks are tossed, and methane bubbled through water mixed with Joy dishwashing liquid (“fiery bubbles of doom”).

Question: Is there an alt.pyro on the Net? Probably. There’s something there for everybody.

Susan was able to dig up area code data from, of all places, Trieste, Italy — on the Net. It turns out that North America is creating up to 640 new area codes by allowing digits other than zero or one to go in the middle. So there can be area codes like 647 and 329. With roughly eight million phone lines possible per code, “That makes for roughly 5.1 billion new portals to fun.”

Karla was relieved that we don’t have to have eight-digit phone numbers, “at least until some new, as yet uninvented technology, eats up the old ones again.”

Then we digressed into a discussion of how the word “dialing” is itself such an anachronism — a holdover from rotary phones. “Inputting” would be more true. And who came up with the word “pound” for the “#” symbol. Wouldn’t “grid” have been easier and more fun? I mean, “pound”

Or think of how dumb it is to say, “I’m going to the record store.”

Technology!

You may

have already won!

Technology of mythic strength given surrealistic applications.

Socially disengaged meritocratic elites.

Sporting goods stores always smell like the most

advanced plastics.

Did the neutron bomb ever actually get built?

SUNDAY

Bug is going to accept Michael’s offer. This is out of character, given that Bug worships Bill and the corporate culture of Microsoft so much. But he seems quite jolly and decisive about the move. I think the fact he was slated for transfer to the Converter Group in Building Seventeen, a notoriously glum Campus locale, added some oomph to his decision. Bug is a good debugger. That’s how he got his name, so Michael’s probably getting a good deal in hiring him. I still can’t figure out why he never got stock options.

Todd, too, has decided to go, perhaps also propelled by his transfer into the OLE Group (Olé!), over in the Old Buildings.

This is the Object Linking and Embedding Group that writes code for an application allowing a user to drag part of, say, an Excel document into a Word document. About as much fun as it sounds.

Susan’s accepting — and she’s forking up some of her vesting money as seed capital for a larger equity stake — and she’s clinching the title of Creative Director. “I’ll be the Paul Allen of interactivit

Abe, however, is saying no. “What — you guys want to leave a sure thing?” he keeps asking us. “You think Microsoft’s going to shrink, or are you nuts?”

“That’s not the point, Abe.”

“What is the point, then?”

“One-Point-Oh,” I said.

“What?” replied Abe.

“Being One-Point-Oh. The first to do something cool or new.”

“And so in order to be ‘One-Point-Oh’ you’d forfeit all of this—” (Abe fumbles for le mot juste, and expands arms widely to showcase a filthy living room covered with Domino’s boxes, junk mail solicitations, Apple hard hats, three Federal Express baseball caps, and Nerf Gatling guns) “—security? How do you know you’re not just trading places … coding like fuck every day except with a palm tree outside the window instead of a cedar?”

Karla reiterated what she said to Todd, about humanity’s dreaming, but Abe is too scared, I think, to make the leap. He’s too set in his ways. Repetition breeds inertia.

My computer’s subconscious files continue still to surprise me. Who would have known that these are the words my machine wanted to speak? Well, actually, I know that it’s me speaking through the computer, sort of like those really quiet guys who go all nuts when you give them a wooden puppet — ventriloquists — and these aspects of their personalities you didn’t even know existed start screaming out.

MONDAY

Abe has actually provoked Karla and me into deciding, *yes*. We both gave Shaw our two weeks’ notices, and basically he said we might as well leave at the end of the week since we’re not currently “with project.”

With start-ups: you get a crap shoot at mega-equity but more importantly, it’s true, you do get a chance to be “One-Point-Oh.” To be the first to do the first version of something.

We had to ask ourselves, “Are you One-Point-Oh?”—the answer is what separates the Microserfs from the Cyberlords.

But beyond this there’s what Karla said — about being human, and the dream of humanity. I get this little feeling that we can all of us speed up th dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

THURSDAY Later that week

Preparing for this weekend’s yard sale, I found a half-pound lump of hamburger meat in the garage that had been sitting in a Miracle Whip jar for about four months — an experiment I had forgotten about. The meat was still kind of pink, with gray fuzz growing on it. “A test to see if the beef industry pumps up cattle with preservatives,” I told Karla.

She looked at the jar. “Your brain,” she said dismissively, “during the last half-year here at Microsoft.”

Mom phoned. She sounds so much better now that the economic stress is off her and that she’s exercising. After a short while I got to asking what it i that Dad does for Michael exactly—“So what’s Dad’s job, Mom?”

“Well, I’m not sure. He’s never here. He’s driving with Michael up and down the Peninsula … picking things up. Fixing up the office, I think.”

“Carpentry?”

In a whisper: “It keeps him out of my hair all day. And he seems happy to be needed.” Resumption of normal tone: “So when will we be seeing you down here?”

“Next week.”

My body: Today I’ve been feeling angry all day, and I have to get it off my chest. I went to Microsoft for the last time to clean out my office. Our section, having recently shipped, was unusually empty, even for a Sunday. I was all alone there for the first time, ever, I think.

I got to thinking of my cramped, love-starved, sensationless existence at Microsoft — and I got so pissed off. And now I just want to forget the whole business and get on with living — with being alive. I want to forget the way my body was ignored, year in, year out, in the pursuit of code, in the pursuit of somebody else’s abstraction.

There’s something about a monolithic tech culture like Microsoft that makes humans seriously rethink fundamental aspects of the relationship between their brains and bodies — their souls and their ambitions; things and thoughts.

Maybe if this thing with Karla hadn’t started I never even would have noticed — I’d have accepted my sensory-deprivation lifestyle without a second thought. She’s helping me get closer to getting a life — and having a … personality.

I erased the office voice mail message that has served me well for the past six months:

“Thank you for phoning the powerful Underwood personal messaging center.

Press one for Broyhill furniture

Press two for STP, the racer’s edge

Press three for the roomy, affordable Buick Skylark

Press four for Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat

Press five for Turtle Wax

Press six for Dan

Press pound to repeat this menu.”

Shaw, of all people, came in, and he made this awkward little speech about how he was going to miss me, but I just wasn’t in the mood. Shaw, ever the Boomersomething, says that he never got into Lego when he was a kid. “Too 1950s for me. I liked Kenner’s modular skyscraper kits. ‘If it’s from Kenner, it’s fun … SQUAWK!”

Shaw did point out that now that we’re off Microsoft’s e-mail system, we’re going to get to invent new log addresses.

I think when people invent their Net log names, they reveal more about themselves than their given names ever reveal. I’m going to have to choose my new name carefully.

I figure there must have been a time in the past, like the year 1147, when there was a frenzy of family-naming—Smith and Goodfellow and Green and stuff — not unlike the current self-naming frenzy spawned by the Net. Abe says that within 100 years, many people will have abandoned their pre-millennial names and opted for “Nettier” names. He says it’d be inspiring to see people use other letters of the keyboard in their names, like %, &, ™, and ©.

Susan asked me later how I ended up at Microsoft in the first place. I told her, “No big surprise: I was 22 … it seemed like a studly thing at the time. Microsoft got what it wanted and I got what I wanted, so all’s fair and no regrets.”

I asked her: She said it was to get away from her parents and having to visit either of them because they were both trying to rip apart her loyalties in some nasty custody war.

“I wanted to go to a place where loyalty wasn’t an issue. Ha! I wanted to not have a life because life back East sucked big time. So I made the choice to come here — we all made the choice to come here. Nobody was holding a carbine up to our temples. So us crabbing about our zero-life factors isn’t up for debate, really. Yet do you remember, Dan — do you remember ever having a life? Ever? What is a life? I think I once had one — or at least dreamed of having one — and now with going to Oop!, I kind of feel like I have a hope of life again.”

I said I remembered having a life, back with Jed and being a kid, and Susan said being a kid counted as life only sort of. “It’s what you do after you’re a kid when life counts for real.”

I said, “I think I have a life now. With Karla, I mean.”

She said, “You guys really like each other, don’t you?”

And I said — no, I whispered—“I love her.”

I’ve never told anyone that yet — except Karla. It felt like I jumped off a steep cliff into deep blue water. And then I wanted to tell everybody.

More body talk: Karla believes that human beings remember everything. “All stimulation generates a memory — and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes,” she says. “You were right.”

“Lucky for me,” I reply, “my own memories tend to get stored in my neck and shoulder blades. My body has never felt so … alive—I wasn’t even aware I had one until you woke it up today. Life’s too good.”

Sometimes I think my subconscious has bad days, and I can’t believe how mundane the stuff that I write into the file is. But isn’t that the deal with a pe son’s subconscious … that it stores all the things you aren’t noticing visibly?

I'm driving up Interstate 5. It is raining and I remember I have to pick up paper towels and decaffeinated coffee at Costco.

And how did you feel about that?

Mom. . .

Dad . . .

I'm okay. I am not being starved, or beaten, or unnecessarily frightened.

Dropshadow lettering

Granite backgrounds

Hand

Held

Game

This is the end of the Age of Authenticity.

Oracle

NeXT

Ampex

Electronic Arts

SATURDAY

Garage sale day.

It was a real “Zen-o-thon”—we decided the time had arrived to shake ourselves of all our worldly crap and become minimalists — or at least try starting from scratch again — more psychic pioneering.

‘This is so ‘Zenny,’” Bug said happily, as some poor cretin purchased his used electric razor (ugh!) as well as his collection of Elle MacPherson merchandise.

Also for sale:

Japan Airlines inflatable 747

official Hulk Hogan WWF focus-free 110 signature camera

antique Ghostbuster squeeze toys

Nick the Greek professional gambling home board game

Ping-Pong table

shoe box full of squirt guns

blenders (2)

vegetable juicer

dehumidifier

unopened cans of aerosolized cheese food product

M. C. Escher pop-up books

far too many Dilophosaurus figurines

huge Sony box full of collected Styrofoam packing peanuts and packing chunks from untold assorted consumer electronics

The big surprise? Everyone sold everything—everything—even the box of Styrofoam. Bug’s right: We’re one sick species.

And my car sold, too — in a flash, to the first person who came around to look at it. Wayne’s World did wonders for the secondary market of AMC products.

Actually, the Hornet was such a bucket I was surprised it sold at all. I was worried I’d have to drive it south. Or abandon it somewhere.

Now I am virtually possessionless. Having nothing feels liberating.

National Enquirer:

“Loni’s Diary Rips Burt Apart”

He threatened her with a gun in jealous rage

He locked her out of her honeymoon suite

He hid vodka in water bottles

PLUS: Burt: “I wanted to ditch her at the altar.”

Exclusive interview on his tell-all book

I do not want this to be me.

SUNDAY

Today we left for California and Karla did her first major flip-out on me. I suppose I was being insensitive, but I think she overreacted by far. In packing her Microbus, she buried all of the cassettes we were going to be using for the trip deep inside the bowels of luggage. I said, “God, how could you be so stupid?”

Then she went crazy and threw a toaster oven at me and said things like, “Don’t you ever call me stupid,” and “I am not stupid,” and she piled into the van and drove off. Todd was standing nearby and just shrugged and went back to bungeeing his Soloflex on top of his Supra. I had to take off in the Acura and catch up with her down by the Safeway, and we made up.

Karla said good-bye to her old geek house’s cat, Lentil, named as such because that’s how big its brain is. Nerds tend to have cats, not dogs. I th this is because if you have to go to Boston or to a COMDEX or something, cats can take care of themselves for a few days, and when you return, they’ll probably remember you. Low maintenance.

Bug was like a little kid, all excited about our “convoy” down to California and was romanticizing the trip already, before we’d even left. The worst part was, he had his ghetto blaster on and was playing that old ‘70s song, “Convoy,” and so the song was stuck in our heads alld

Cars for the trip:

Me:Michael’s Acura Karla:her Microbus Todd:his Supra Susan and Bug:their Tauri with U-Haul trailers

Todd said that our “car architecture” for our journey is “scalable and integrated — and fully modular — just like Apple products!”

Somewhere near Olympia, Bug’s car rounded a bend and it was so weird — gravity pulled me into an exit off-ramp. And then everyone else trickled in, too. Served him right for lodging the virus of that dopey song in our heads. It was like in third grade, when you ditch someone. It just happens. Humans are horrible.

Then we all felt really horrible for ditching Bug, and we went out chasing him, but we couldn’t find him and I got a speeding ticket. Karma.

1-5 is a radar hell.

During a roadside break I asked Karla why she didn’t want to go visit her parents in McMinnville, but she said it was because they were psychotic, and so I didn’t press the matter.

The Microbus is covered in gray bondo with orange bondo spots all over it. We call it The Carp.

We found Bug south of Eugene. He didn’t even know about the ditch, so now all of us have a dark secret between us.

Along 1-5, just outside a suburb of Eugene, Oregon, there were all of these houses for sale next to the freeway, and they were putting these desperate signs up to flog them: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU WOULD BE HOME RIGHT NOW. Karla honked the horn, waved out the window of the Microbus and pointed at the sign. Convoy humor.

We made this rule that we had to honk every time we spotted road kill, and we nearly burned out our horns.

On a diner TV set we saw that in Arizona, the eight men and women of Biosphere 2 emerged into the real world after spending two years in a hermetically sealed, self-referential, self-sufficient environment. I certainly empathized with them. And their uniforms were like Star Trek.

We switched vehicles and I drove Karla’s Microbus for a while, but the Panasonic rice cooker in the rear filled with rattling cassette tapes drove me nuts. It was buried too deeply inside the mounds o’ stuff to move, so around Medford we switched vehicles again.

We crossed the California border and had dinner in a cafe. We talked about society’s accelerating rate of change. Karla said, “We live in an era of no historical precedents — this is to say, history is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes. You can’t look at, say, the War of 1709 (I made this date up, although no doubt there probably was a War of 1709) and draw parallels between then and now. They didn’t have Federal Express, SkyTel paging, 1-800 numbers, or hip replacement surgery in 1709 — or a picture of the entire planet inside their heads.”

She glurped a milkshake. “The cards are being shuffled; new games are being invented. And we’re actually driving to the actual card factory.”

Psychosis! We were discussing Susan’s new image at dinner, when I told Karla about this really neat thing Susan’s mother did when Susan was young. Susan’s mother told Susan that she had an enormous IQ so that could never try and pretend she was dumb when she got older. So because of this, Susan never did feign stupidity — she never had any fear of science or math. Maybe this is the roots of her whole Riot Grrrl transformation.

On hearing this news, Karla went nuts. It turns out that Karla’s parents always told her that she was stupid. Everything in life Karla had ever achieved — her degrees and her ability to work with numbers and code, had always been against a gradient of her parents saying, “Now why’d you want to go filling your head with that kind of thing — that’s for your brother Karl to do.”

“Karl’s nice, and we like each other,” Karla said, “but he’s a total 100 — center of the bell curve and no way around it. My parents drove him crazy expecting him to be a particle physicist. All Karl wants to do is manage a Lucky Mart and watch football. They’ve always refused to see us as we are.

Karla was off and running:

“Here’s an example — once I went home to visit and the phone was broken, so I began fixing it, and Dad took it away and said, ‘Karl should give that a try,’ and Karl just wanted to watch TV and couldn’t fix a phone if it spat on him and so I was screaming at my Dad, Karl was screaming at my Dad, and my Mom came in and tried to discuss ‘women’s things’ and drag me into the kitchen. Meatloaffuckingrecipes.”

Karla was just fuming. She can’t bring herself to forgive her parents for trying to brainwash her into thinking she was dumb all her life.

Later, we got too bagged to drive, so we pulled into a Days Inn in Yreka. During a pre-bedtime shiatsu break we started talking about Spy vs. Spy, that old comic in Mad magazine, and how the very first time you read it, you arbitrarily chose either the black Spy or the white Spy and you voted for your color choice unflinchingly for the remaining period of your Mad magazine-reading phase.

I always voted for the black Spy; Karla voted for the white. Silly, but for a moment we had a note of genuine tension.

Karla broke the tension. She said, “Well, it’s at least binary, right?” And I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Are we geeks, or what?”

(Insert one more foot massage here.)

Even later on, Karla spoke to me again. “There’s more, Dan. About the stupid business. About the sunstroke.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear this. “I figured as much. So … you want to tell me?”

The stars outside the window were sort of creamy, and I couldn’t tell if I was seeing clouds or the Milky Way.

“There was a reason I was back at the house a few years ago … the time I had the sunstroke episode.”

“Yeah?”

“Let me put this another way. Remember back up at Microsoft when you brought me the cucumber roll … just out of the blue like that?”

“I remember.”

“Well—” (she kissed my eyebrow) “—it’s the first time I can remember ever wanting to really eat, in like ten years.” I was quiet. She continued talking: “Back when I had my sunstroke episode, I hadn’t eaten in so long and I weighed about as much as a Franklin Mint figurine. My body was starting to die inside and my parents were worried that I’d gone too far, and I think I even scared my self You think I’m small now, Buster, you’d better see … well you won’t because I destroyed all photos … pictures of myself taken during my ‘phase’ as my parents call it.”

She was fetal and I had my left hand underneath her feet and my right on top of her head. I cupped her closer and pressed her against my stomach and said, “You’re my baby now: you’re a thousand diamonds — a handful of lovers’ rings — chalk for a million hopscotch games.”

“I didn’t want to do what I was doing, Dan — it just happened. My body was the only way I could get my message across and it was such a bad message. I crashed myself. In the end, it was work that saved my life. But then work became my life — I was technically living but without a life. And I was so scared. I thought that work was all there was ever going to be. And oh, God, I was so mean to everybody. But I was just running so scared. My parents. They just won’t accept what was going on with me. I see them and I want to starve. I can’t let myself see them.”

I put my forearm in the crook of her knees and pulled her as tightly together as she could go. Her neck rested on my other arm. I pulled the blankets over us, and her breath was hot and tiny, in little bursts like NutraSweet packets.

“There’s just so much I want to forget, Dan. I thought I was going to be a READ ONLY file. I never thought I’d be … interactive.”

I said, “Don’t worry about it, Karla. Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We’re human; we’re amnesia machines.”

It’s late and Karla’s asleep and blue by the light of the PowerBook.

I’m thinking of her as I input these words, my poor little girl who grew up in a small town with a family that did nothing to encourage her to use her miraculous brain, that thwarted her attempts at intelligence — this frail thing who reached out to the world in the only way she knew, through numbers and lines of code in the hope that from there she would find sensation and expression. I felt this jolt of energy and this sense of honor to be allowed entrance into her world — to be with a soul so hungry and powerful and needful to go forth into the universe. I want to feed her.

I …

There’s this term used in computers, where you try and squish something into another operating system holus-bolus, and the results are not always effective. The term is called “spooging.” An example might be, “Consumer don’t know it, yet, but Microsoft is going to spooge a lot of the interface of Word for Windows into the Word for Mac 6.0 version, and rumor has it the new Mac version will operate slow as a glacier, too, because of it — it’s too nonintuitive for the Mac-user.”

I say this because I think I’m about to spooge here, but I can’t think of any other way to express what I feel.

For starters, it was funny, but after Karla told me about her and her family some more, about her eating problems, now a thing of the past, we got into a discussion of what may be the ultimate question: Is our universe ultimately digital or analog?

After this, as I said, Karla fell asleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. What else is new?

I remembered something Antonella from Nintendo once told me about her job at a day-care center, about storytelling to kids — about how the stories the children liked the best were the ones in which the characters fled their old planets amid great explosions, leaving everything behind them to start a new world.

And then I remembered this book-writing program my mom told me about from someone in her library. The big deal in book writing is to quickly establish at the very beginning what it is that the characters want.

But I think that the books I really enjoy are the ones in which the characters realize, only in the end, what it was that they secretly wanted all along, but never even knew. And maybe this is what life is really like.

Any way, I have spooged. Good night little PowerBook — my world will shortly end for today, as will the universe, whether digital or analog — with sleep.

Personal

Computer

Stars

drinking glasses

wrapped in tissue paper

burnt arborite

dial telephones

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