3 Inferiority

SATURDAY (Several weeks later)

We took a few hours off to attend a Halloween barbecue at the chic San Carlos home of Oop!’s president and CEO, Ethan, Mr. “Let’s-Ship-Units!”

Also in attendance were a crew of Apple workers Ethan is scanning for “hireability.”

The evening was a typical geek get-together, and conversation stayed along conventional lines: the Menendez brothers, consumer and military aviation, and hiring/firing gossip. But the mood was also tinged with an atypical moroseness: Crunchy Frog jokes blended with tales of fiscal woe. Apple people are all trying to get laid off so they can get the layoff financial package — so everybody’s trying to be as useless as possible. It’s a shock, let me tell you. And they’re all frightened the PowerPC’s going to bomb and they’re worried about the Newton — and they’re frightened they might merge with Motorola or IBM and lose their identity, and—gosh, they have a lot to worry about, it seems.

“It’s all so … anti-coding” said Todd, dressed as Atlas. (Speedo swim-suit and a globe tied to his shoulder. Show-off.) “It’s the total opposite of Microsoft. It’s not the way, you know, we’ve been raised to think about Apple.”

“Hey, Pal — just goes to show you what happens without a Bill to whip people into shape,” said Ethan, dressed as “Money”—his face painted green underneath a green George Washington wig that was actually a rented Marilyn Monroe wig misted with green hair spray. “Without a charismatic at the helm, you’re history.”

Apple is kind of depressing, we agreed dispiritedly. Not at all what we expected, but we bravely try and Keep the Faith. We’re trying to find somebody to give us an Apple campus tour.

Nobody rules here in the Valley.

No Bills.

It’s a bland anarchy. It takes some getting used to.

Ethan, Oop!’s president, is somewhat evil. Well … amusingly evil. Smarmy? Perhaps that’s the right word. White-toothed and always impeccably dressed, he’s what Karla calls a “killer nerd.” For some reason, he’s paying a lot of attention to me and keeps giving me all sorts of confidant-type information. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or to consult an exorcist.

Sitting next to a burning Tiki torch spiked into the ground, beneath an orange tree, Karla said to me, “You know, Ethan’s been a millionaire and filed for Chapter Eleven three times already — and he’s only 33. And there are hundreds of these guys down here. They’re immune to money. They just sort of assume it’ll appear like rain.”

While decoding Ethan’s existence we were removing stray grass seeds from each other’s Clockwork Orange thug costumes. I said, “There’s something about Ethan that’s not quite oxymoronic, yet still self-contradictory — like an 18-wheeler with Neutrogena written on the side — I can’t explain it. The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic — geeky and rich and hip. I’m undecided if I even like Ethan — he’s definitely not one of us. He’s a different archetype.”

Inspired by Ethan’s costume, we discussed money. We decided that if the government put Marilyn Monroe on a dollar coin, it would be popular enough to succeed. “And if they want to replace the five-dollar bill with a coin,” said Susan, approaching us from the hibachi, “they can use Elvis.”

Susan didn’t go out of her way to dress up this year and came as a biker chick. She was miffed at discovering that the assembly language programmer from General Magic she’d been chatting up all night was married. She swigged Chardonnay from a bottle, yanked an unripe orange from a tree, and said, “You guys are talking about Ethan? Being with Ethan is kind of like, well … like when you’re sleeping with somebody who doesn’t know what to do in bed but who thinks they’re really hot stuff — and they’re rubbing one part of your body over and over, thinking they’ve found your ‘Magic Spot’ when all they’re doing, in fact, is annoying you.”

Susan and Ethan never agree on anything, but it’s not sexy disagreeing. It’s just disagreeing.

There was a pause as the party slowed down, and Karla said, “Isn’t it weird, the way Michael arrived without a costume, but he still looks like he’s in costume?” She was right. Poor unearthly Michael.

Ethan was telling us the story of how he hooked up with Michael, how they met shortly after Michael’s mystery trip to Cupertino, at the Chili’s restaurant on the Stevens Creek Boulevard strip — a few blocks away from Apple — a tastefully landscaped four-lane corridor of franchised food and metallically-skinned tech headquarters.

“Michael was inking out all of the vowels on his menu,” Ethan reminisced fondly, sitting down with us under the tree. “He was ‘Testing the legibility of the text in the absence of information,’ as I was later informed. And when I saw him order a dozen tortillas, some salsa, and a side of Thousand Island dressing, I knew there had to be something there. How rrrright I was.”

“Michael is going to be your mother lode for the mid-1990s?” Susan asked ingenuously.

“Well, Miss Equity — for your sake, you’d better hope so.”

We went in the house to warm up. Ethan’s living room is painted entirely in white enamel, and lining the ceiling’s perimeter are a hundred or so 1970s Dirty Harry bank surveillance cameras whirring and rotating, all linked to a wall of blue-and-white, almost-dead TV sets. A surveillance fantasy. “I used to date an installation artist from UC Santa Cruz,” is all Ethan says about his art.

His house is small, but I think he enjoys being able to tell people he lives in San Carlos. San Carlos, just north of Palo Alto, is called Nerd Hill. The big problem in San Carlos is, apparently, deer—which eat all the rose shoots and the young tree buds. “There’s this guy there who sells bottled mountain-lion urine he collects at zoos. You spritz the stuff around the yard to scare the deer away. It’s like, ‘Hey, pal — check out the cougar piss!’” Ethan held up a small, clear-yellow vial. “I’m investing in a biotech firm that tricks e. coli bacteria into manufacturing cougar pheromones.”

Ethan is so extreme. He has this Patek Phillipe watch, which cost maybe ¥2,000,000 (purchased at Tokyo’s Akihabara district, the nirvana of geek consumption, with all signage apparently in Japanese, English, and Russian). He says that every time he tells the time, he’s amortizing the cost.

“Well, I’m down to $5.65 a glance, now. If I check the time every hour from now to the year 2023, I’ll be down to a dime per look.”

Ethan’s nine blender settings are labeled with little LaserWriter labels in 7-point Franklin Gothic:

1) Asleep

2) In-flite movie

3) Disneyland at age 25

4) Good $8.00 movie

5) IMAX with Dolby

6) Lunch w/D. Geffen and B. Diller

7) Disneyland at age 10

8) Aneurysm

9) Spontaneous combustion

Ethan’s dandruff is truly shocking, but you know, life isn’t like TV commercials. Karla and I spent thirty minutes trying to think of tell-your-friend-he-has-dandruff scenarios that wouldn’t insult him, and in the end, we couldn’t. It’s so odd, because every other aspect of his grooming is so immaculate.

3:10 A.M. Just got back from Ethan’s party. We’re “flying to Australia” tonight — that’s our in-house code word for pulling an insane, 36-to 48-hour coding run in preparation for a meeting Ethan has with venture capitalists.

E-mail from Abe:

You actually left.

I never thought that could happen. How could you have left Microsoft so EASILY!?!? It’s such a good set up. The stock’s supposed to split in Spring. Who’s yourBill?

I’m putting word out on-wire at Microsoft to locate new roomates, but still it feels pretty strange to be without rfoomates. A whole month now! I’m writing my ad for the inhouse BBS:

“SPACE! …

Not your final frontier in this instance, but there’s lots of it here and its not a bad deal: Redmond, 5 minutes from Microsoft. Live in regal early 1970s splender. Dolby THX sound. Adirondack style chair made from old skis. Trampoline. Own bathrooom. Pets okay. $235.00”

BTW: Did you know that Lego makes a plastic vacuum cleaner shaped like a parrot to pick up stray Legos??

SUNDAY

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that’s the surest way to tell which company to invest in. “If the techies aren’t grinding, the stock ain’t climbing.”

Karla doesn’t like my being friends with Ethan. She says it’s corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I’ll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.

Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into “Marvins” and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

Oh — earlier today, driving up Arastradero from Starbucks, the sunset was literally almost killer.

It was all we could do not to crash the car looking at the pinks and oranges. And the view from Mom and Dad’s house on La Cresta Drive was staggering: from the San Mateo bridge to the north, practically down to Gilroy in the south. The Alameda Mountains were seemingly lit from the inside, like beef-colored patio lanterns, and we even saw a glint from the observatory atop Mount Hamilton. And the dirigible hangar at Moffet Naval Air Station looked as if the Stay-Puft marshmallow giant was lying down to die. It was so grand.

We sat there on the sagging cedar balcony to watch the floor show. The balcony sags because the sugary brown soil underneath all these older ranch houses is settling; floors bump; doors don’t quite close true. We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom’s golden retriever that she bought two years ago secondhand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she’s too affectionate. It’s a flaw we don’t mind.

It was just a nice moment. I felt like I was home.

Karla also keeps a diary, but her entries are so brief. For example, she showed me a sample entry for the entire trip to California, all she wrote was: Drove down to California. Dan drew a robot on my place mat at lunch in south Oregon and I put it in my purse. That was it. No mention of anything we talked about. I call it Reduced Instruction Set Computation diaries.

MONDAY

Karla and I took an R&R break and drove 40 miles up to one of the Simpsons bars in the City — the Toronado, where they play The Simpsons every Thursday night. Except I realized it was Monday, so no Simpsons. I can never get the dates right anymore. But soon enough they’ll be syndicated on the junky stations every night until the end of the universe, so I suppose I’ll survive.

We took the wrong off-ramp (a deadly mistake in San Francisco — they STILL haven’t rebuilt after the 1989 quake; the 101/280 connector links are so unbelievably big and empty and unfinished) and we got lost. We ended up driving through Noe Valley by accident — so pretty. Such a VISION, this city is. I suppose the City is putting all its highway-building energy into building the mention-it-one-more-time-and-I’ll-scream information superhighway.

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We’re so sick of it!

On the mountain coming in from the airport they have what has to be the world’s ugliest sign saying, SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY, in huge white letters up on the mountainside. You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a trade convention.

“If they changed it to POSTINDUSTRIAL city, it might be meaningful,” said Karla.

Anyway, we couldn’t find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District.

San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and listen to the Germs’ first album. Everyone here is so young — it’s like Microsoft that way — a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there’s an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places. It’s a big town that feels like neighborhoods: a municipal expression of Local Area Networks.

And I must admit I’m impressed by the level of techiness — people here are fully jacked in. Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF coffee bar circa The Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:

thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers

a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner’s old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)

used mismatched furniture

bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)

a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)

sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads

multi-pierced bodies

a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair

nightclub flyers

Parking in San Francisco is a nightmare. There are no spots. We decided that the next time we came we’d bring our own spots with us. We decided to invent portable, roll-up spots, like those portable holes they use in cartoons. Or maybe a can of spray-on parking spot remover to get rid of other cars. It’s crazy there, that way. Just crazy. In the end we said a prayer to Rita, the pagan goddess of parking spots and meters. We shot out beams of parking karma into the hills ahead of us. We were rewarded with fourteen luxurious feet of car space. Rita, you kooky goddess you!

Learned a new word today: “inferiority”—it means, being inside somebody’s head.

Michael has a new obsession: he sits on the patio beside the pool and watches the automated Polaris pool-sweeper scrape decomposed eucalyptus leaves off the pool’s bottom. The pool sweeper looks like R2D2 as it hobbles about its duties, and I think they’re becoming best friends.

Oh — we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don’t mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He’s a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He’s a real turtlenecker — one of those French guys who’d be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.

He said that it was at Clinton’s congressional speech when John Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton that everybody realized Apple was way out of control. Personally, I thought it was glamorous. Then he hit us with a bombshell, which was that Apple never had a contingency plan in the event that they lost the Look & Feel suit. They totally believed they were going to win. Maybe the PowerPC will save them. We warned Anatole not to discuss Look & Feel with Bug, but he said they’d already discussed it and that Bug had seemed bored by it. Bug’s forgetting his roots! California’s turned him mellow.

Also, Anatole says nobody’s simply at Apple; they’re still at Apple. It would appear that none of what we hear matches the One-Point-Oh, Gods-in-the-Clouds mental pictures we have of the company. But like most gossip, it merely makes us want to be closer to the core of the gossip itself. We’re all drooling for a chance to visit Apple, except a chance never seems to appear. Anatole is useless in this regard. We think he burned some bridges before he left — expense report fudging?

And of course Anatole is a genius. In the Silicon Valley the IQ baseline (as at Microsoft) starts at 130, and bell-curves quickly, plateauing near 155, and only then does it decrease. But the Valley is a whole multi-city complex of persnickety eggheads, not just one single Orwellian technoplex, like Microsoft. As I said — it’s sci-fi.

Bug accidentally used the term information superhighway, and so we were able to administer a beating.

TUESDAY

Our money situation is tight.

Trying to find money through venture capital is a long, evil, conflictual process full of hype and hope. If I have learned anything here, it’s that snagging loot is the key struggle and obsession of any start-up. Fortunately for us, Michael and Ethan have agreed that the best thing to do is to be an R&D company (research and development) and get another company to “publish” our products. That way we don’t have to hire our own sales and marketing people, or shell out the enormous amounts of money it takes to market software. We still need funding to build the product, though.

Susan’s freaking out worse than anybody. Maybe that’s why she and Ethan disagree on everything. He always says everything’s “fabulous,” while she fumes.

Today Ethan called Silicon Valley “the ‘moniest’ place on earth,” and he’s probably right. Everything in this Valley revolves around $$$… EVERYTHING. Money was something you never had to think about at Microsoft. I mean, not that Microsofters don’t check out WinQuote daily, but here, as I have said, there’s this endless, boring, mad scramble for loot.

For financial reasons, we have to work at Mom and Dad’s place, until we’re flush with VC money.

We work at the south end of the house in a big room that was supposed to be the rumpus room, back during the era when society still manufactured Brady children. It has been completely converted into the tasteful carnage of our “Habitrail 2.” We call it Habitrail 2 because it’s a big maze, because its ventilation hinges on the anaerobic, and because paper is everywhere, just like gerbils nesting inside a Kleenex box. Michael has installed his own two pet gerbils, “Look” and “Feel,” inside his astoundingly large yellow plastic Habitrail kit, which encircles the office … decades’ worth of collecting. We get to hear Look and Feel scampering about endlessly while we work. Karla likes the Habitrail setup because it reminds her of the old cartoon with the chipmunks trapped inside the vegetable factory. She and Michael are continually adding on to it. It’s their common bond.

At a glance around the Habitrail 2, there are Post-it notes, photocopies, junk mail, newspapers, corporate reports, specs, printouts, and litter, plus thumbed-to-exhaustion copies of Microprocessor Report, California Technology Stock Letter, Red Herring, Soff•Letter, Multimedia Business Report, People, and The National Enquirer. You get the feeling that if you only reached into this paperstorm you could withdraw a strand of six pulsating rubbery pink gerbil babies. Paperless office … ha!

There is a billiard table covered with SGIs, MultiSync monitors, coding manuals, printouts, take-out food boxes, coils, cables, dry-erase pens, and calculators. Over by ‘The Dad Bar” (diamond tufted leatherette; “Tee Many Martoonies”-style knickknacks) there are compiler manuals, more monitors, and an EPROM chip toaster stacked alongside cases of Price-Costco diet Cokes and fruit leather whips. (My workspace, I am pleased to say, is spotless, and my barely scratched Microsoft Ship-It Award rests proudly underneath a Pan-Am 747 plastic model.)

Needless to say, Far Side cartoons are taped everywhere. I think techies are an intricate part of the life cycle of The Far Side cartoon, the way viruses can only propagate in the presence of host organisms. Susan says, “We are only devices for the replication of Far Side cartoons.” Now that’s one way of looking at humanity.

And of course there are two long couches for those flights to Australia.

Mom is happy to have our pittance of rent money, and my commuting time is ninety seconds, as I live with Karla in one of the guest bedrooms.

The main drawback about the Habitrail 2 is the ventilation, which could be better. Todd calls it “hamper fresh” We’d keep the sliding door leading into the backyard open more often, but Ethan doesn’t want dust and insects infecting our technology. Or Mom’s golden retriever, Misty.

Habitrail 2 also features:

4-fingered cartoon gloves

ubiquitous Nerfiana

24 Donna Karan coffee mugs (long story)

a decaf coffee tin labeled “666”

GoBot transformer-type toys

Glass beads at the door, like the ones Rhoda Morgenstern had

herbal tea packets and tea-making apparatus

several Game Boys

three 4‘-x-8’ dry-erase wall boards

a diet 7-UP pyramid

an extensive manga collection

T2 spin-off merchandise

one Flipper thermos

We inhabit our workstations daily for a minimum of 12 hours. We use brown and white plastic folding patio chairs, so our backs are completely shot. So much for ergonomics. (Thank God for shiatsu.) There’s the occasional Homer Simpson “doh!” punctuating the air when someone’s cursor bleeps, or the occasionally muttered piss and crap. No one can agree on music, so we play none. Or use Walkmans.

We’re doing a Windows version and a Mac version of Oop!. And Michael’s drafted the coolest ERS for the graphics, AI, interface, and maybe sound. Just killer stuff, all patentable. Michael needs us to bring his vision to life. Our jobs are:

Michael: Chief Architect. He has the overall vision. He also writes the core engine that drives the graphics and modeling algorithms. He rules the engineers — us.

Ethan: President, CEO, and Director of Operations. His job is to find investors to fund us, find a company to publish and distribute our products, and to run the business day-to-day. Most companies have a CFO, but we can’t afford one, so Ethan does the bill-paying, accounting, taxes, equipment-buying, and all that stuff.

Bug: In charge of database and file I/O (Input/Output). It’s how Oop! stores information to and from the hard drive; it’s really complicated, and the kind of thing Bug loves.

Todd: He is “Ditherman”—working on the graphics engine and printer driver. All of the graphics need to be converted into an output format in order to be printed by a printer.

Me and Karla: We’re working on the cross-platform class library so Oop! will run on both Mac and Windows. I’m Windows lead, she’s the Mac lead.

Susan: She’s the User-Interface Designer; in charge of the look-and-feel, the graphics, all that. She’s the U-I police keeping me and Karla’s code in sync.

Mom has a collection of rocks. This sounds weird, and it really is weird. She has this small pile of rocks on the patio that just sits there. I ask Mom why she likes them, and she says, “I don’t know, they just seem special.”

So is this something that might lead to her requiring medication? I mean, they’re not even nice-looking rocks. I keep looking at them and try and see what she sees, and I can’t.

As stated, Karla and I are working on the same things, just in different formats. She’s Mac, I’m Windows.

“Entirely appropriate,” says Karla, “because Windows is more male, and Mac is more female.”

I felt defensive. “How so?”

“Well, Windows is nonintuitive … counterintuitive, sometimes. But it’s so MALE to just go buy a Windows PC system and waste a bunch of time learning bogus commands and reading a thousand dialog boxes every time you want to change a point size or whatever … MEN are just used to sitting there, taking orders, executing needless commands, and feeling like they got such a good deal because they saved $200. WOMEN crave efficiency, elegance … the Mac lets them move within their digital universe exactly as they’d like, without cluttering up their human memory banks. I think the reason why so many women used to feel like they didn’t “understand computers” was because PCs are so brain-dead … the Macintosh is responsible for upping not only the earning potential of women but also the feeling of mastering technology, which they get told is impossible for them. I was always told that.”

Remember at the very end of Soylent Green where Charlton Heston screams, “Soylent Green is people!!!!”? Well, I had that same sort of feeling today when Anatole began telling us about working life down at Apple … “Apple is Microsoft!!!” He told us that the moods on the two “campuses” are almost exactly the same, and that the two corporate cultures, although they purport to be the opposite of each other, are actually about as different as Tide and Oxydol.

Anatole was indent around all day today and on the drywall he made this big list of similarities and differences between Apple and Microsoft. Herewith:

Microsoft: waiting for stock to vest

Apple: trying to get laid off

Microsoft: “the Campus”

Apple: “the Campus”

Microsoft: make money

Apple: “1.0” sensibility

Microsoft: Microsoft Way

Apple: Infinite Loop

Microsoft: Bill

Apple: (no longer any equivalent)

Microsoft: Apple envy

Apple: Microsoft envy

Microsoft: boring buildings/good art

Apple: good buildings/art a sideline only

Microsoft: better cafeterias

Apple: better nerd toys

Microsoft: soccer field

Apple: sculpture garden

Microsoft: I-520

Apple: I-280

Microsoft: Intel

Apple: Motorola

Microsoft: average age: 31.2

Apple: average age: 31.9

Microsoft: gray Lexus

Apple: white Ford Explorer

Microsoft: not wild at creating new things but good on follow-through

Apple: good at creating new things but not wild on follow-through

Microsoft: no one ever gets fired

Apple: no one ever got fired... until the layoffs started

Microsoft: wacky titles on business cards

Apple: wacky titles on business cards

Microsoft: eerie, Logan’s Run-like atmosphere

Apple: eerie, Logan’s Run-like atmosphere

Microsoft: uneasy IBM symbiosis

Apple: uneasy IBM fusion

Microsoft: 13,200 employees

Apple: 14,500 employees

Microsoft: people hired in 1991-92 being shuffled around

Apple: people hired from colleges in 1988-89 being turfed

Microsoft: stock set to split

Apple: stock price at cash liquidation value of company; now's the time to buy!


Still no tour of the Apple facilities, I note.

* * *

Today was one of those days where it was warm if you were standing in the sunlight, but the moment you left it, you froze.

* * *

I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and the rocks took flight, the earth exploding... and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too

The man from Whirlpool came to fix the washer today, and he found Black Widow spiders nesting underneath its broken engine, and he showed me the web, and I found myself thinking of catching you, biting you, spinning you within my limbs and setting you free

Don't tell me this isn't true.

Tell me you feel this fire.

Oxydol

Revell

makeover

throw cushion

binder paper

lipstick

WEDNESDAY

Down at the library, Mom made up a list of “deer-proof” plants for Ethan. She got it from Sunsets Western Garden Book. Mom loves Ethan. He’s a go-getter.

During lunch, as Ethan, Todd, and I drove in Karla’s Carp through the Carl’s Jr. drive-thru, Ethan gave us an inspirational chat. “Guys, the last thing we want,” he said, “is to seem to be hurting for money. Venture capitalists like to see stability first. Only then will they come in with cash.”

Todd expressed some disappointment that Oop! was, in fact, quite desperate for money, in spite of Michael’s and Susan’s infusions.

He replied, “Todd: fate hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don’t take them, Fate says to itself, ‘Oh I see — this person doesn’t like opportunities,’ and stops giving them to you.”

I notice that I had to pay for the Western Burgers and fries and diet Cokes.

“Think of money this way,” he went on, “take an initial sum and teach it to multiply itself, the way you copy-and-paste text to multiply it. Never think of money in terms of numbers. Only think of money in terms of other things. For example: two weeks of bug-checking equals a Y-class ticket to Boston. That sort of thing. If you think of money simply as numbers then you’re doomed.”

Ethan then fed a used Band-Aid from his index finger to a seagull squatted on a landscaped berm beside the road, and Todd and I lost our appetites. We gave Ethan our meals and dropped him off at his dermatologist’s office.

Melrose Place night. One hour of work-free bliss and catcalls as the six of us monopolize the living room TV. It’s better than the Academy Awards — and every week, too. Added bonus: 90210 as an hors d’oeuvre.

Susan noted tonight that the computers in Billy’s office aren’t connected to, or plugged into, anything. But this just made the show even better.

Todd chugged Snapples. He calls them “Workahol.”

We all made fun of the commercial for Mentos mints, saying “Mentos” all night with a goofy European accent. “Mentos” It’s so dumb.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I still don’t really know what Dad does for Michael. I am amazed that I can be this clueless, but all either of them will say is that he’s working on our final corporate space in downtown Palo Alto. But can we afford this? I thought we were hurting for money. I am going to try and sleuth out what he’s doing. Whatever it is, it’s totally sucked up all of his model train-making energy. He doesn’t go near the garage anymore.

I told Karla what Ethan said at lunch, about teaching money to multiply itself. She said Ethan’s talking “bollocks.” I asked her what that word meant, and she said she wasn’t sure — it was a term from the punk rock era. “Something to do with anarchy and safety pins.” We’re going to e-mail someone in England and find out what it means.

THURSDAY

Today we were talking about the name of our corporation. It’s so boring — E&M Software. Obviously, that’s Ethan and Michael, and it is their company, but Michael said if we had a better idea we could change it. Since we haven’t shipped anything yet anyway.

Over the day, we wrote our suggestions on our code-blemished dry-erase wall. This is a really common thing down here: dry-erase boards covered in name suggestions. Here are some of our own:

“Cybo”

“GeekO”

“1410 C°” (Michael suggested this — it’s the melting point of silicon.)

“@” (My suggestion. Susan said the name sounded too skateboardy, and Ethan said that somebody’s probably already used it, anyway.)

“Clean Room” (Abe’s e-mail suggestion and my favorite — Lego was always hell to clean up.)

“Dead Pixel”

“Xen” (Pronounced “Zen.” Half the companies down here have an × in their name.)

“InfiniToy”

“Bottomless Box”

“Dangerously Overcrowded Electrical Outlet”

“Box of Oily Rags”

“Dream Enabling Technologies” (Ethan suggested this to a chorus of gagging noises.)

“WaferMap” (Suggested by Susan, but then immediately nixed by her as “Too 1981,” but Michael liked the idea of InterCapping — mixing capital letters in with lowercase letters.)

Something “European” (Karla: “Americans can only digest one new extremely weird European word every two years. It’s a fact. My proof: Nadia Comaneci, Häagen-Dazs, and Fahrvergnügen. We can become this year’s scary European word.”) Everybody agreed in principle, but nobody knows any other languages besides computer languages, except Anatole, but he’s like the wacky upstairs neighbor from a sitcom, and not a part of our core team, so the idea died.

“Cher” or “Sting” (Ethan suggested something one-syllable. So we asked which syllable in particular, and he blanked. “Ummm …” doesn’t count.)

“:•)” (Mom wrote this one, saying, “They’re called emoticons—I read about them in USA Today. They’re like sideways happy faces.” We all ganged up on her: “We hate those things!” Everyone except for Bug who, as it turns out, loves them. And then Susan ‘fessed up that she liked some of them. And then Todd. And then Karla. I guess emoticons are like Baywatch—everyone says they don’t watch it, but they really do.

Mom, the librarian, said: “Just think of how confused librarians would be! I mean, what would they file it under? Diacritical marks are extraordinarily confusing.” I was pleased to note this anarchical streak in her. “We could call the emoticon,;•), ‘WINK’”

Ethan asked what keyboard character the “nose” was, and Michael quickly replied, “It’s a dingbat — OPTION-8 on a Mac keyboard using Word 5.1. PCs use the asterisk.”

“Interiority” (The winner, and my suggestion. Prize: a Nerf Gatling gun.) So now we’re making Oop! an Interiority product.

Housing update: Bug and Susan now live 40 miles north in San Francisco. They drive the 280 against the rush-hour traffic, it’s not too bad.

Susan lives in the sumptuous 2-bedroom apartment next door to Bug’s seedy bachelor “bedsitter.” We gloated at their decision to live next to each other, but Susan told us to stop smirking like dungeonmasters. “Don’t think I don’t know what I’m in for. I warned Bug that if I smell even one of his crappy little Dinty Moore meals through the walls, I’m going to get him evicted.” Susan just doesn’t want to admit she doesn’t want to be alone. She acts all tough and wolfwoman, but it’s all bark. Michael lives in the other spare room down the hall from me and Karla. More to the point, he announced he’s moving to a personalized 1-800 number. That’s where he really lives — 1-8001and. Todd’s renting a room in a geek house — Stanford grad students — near the Shoreline exit off the 101 in order to be closer to the Gold’s Gym. He lives at the gym. It’s lots of EZ-to-access free sex. Abe is still in Redmond. We miss him, but then we do talk to him daily over e-mail. Probably more than we did when we were there.

I yawned too loudly this afternoon, and Susan said, “Don’t you ever sleep, Dan?”

Karla, hearing this, said, “She’s right, Dan — you’re insomniacal again. So, what’s the deal?”

I admitted the truth — that I was having bad dreams. Not insomnia, but bad dreams, which is different. I said it’s just a patch, and it’ll probably pass. I also told them that for the time being, when I go to sleep, I try not to have any dreams at all—“as a precautionary measure.”

“You mean you can turn your dreams off, just like that?” Susan asked. I said, “A little bit. A nightmare doesn’t count as sleep, so I don’t get any real rest. I wake up even more tired.”

Michael overheard this and said, “But that’s so inefficient!”

He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. “I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It’s more like I’m running ‘test scenarios’ in my head at night — like RAND Corporation military simulations.”

Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping.

E-mail from Abe:

Fast food for thought: Do you know that if you feed catfish (America’s fauorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-ouer grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flauor (marine or otherwise) of their own? Thus they beocome whatever coating you apply to them (i.e. Cajun, xesty Cheddar, tangy ranch) They’re the most postmodern creatiures on earth … metaphores for characters on Merlrose Place … or for coders with NO LIFE.

Found out what bollocks means, from a Net user at a university in Bristol. Those Brits are a cheeky lot! It means, “balls”!

FRIDAY

Abe e-mailed from Redmond. He finally fessed up to something that I’ve known a long time — that nobody really knows where the Silicon Valley is — or what it is. Abe grew up in Rochester and never came west until Microsoft.

My reply:

Silicon Ualley

Where/what is it?

Its a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this.

They dont actually MANUFACTURE much by way of silicon here anymore … the silicon chip factories are mostly a thing of the past … it’s no longer a cost effective thing to do. Chips are printed and etched here but the DIRTY stuff is offshored. *CLEAN* Intellectual properties are created here now, insted.

Palo Alto:

Population: 55,900

Size: 25.9 square miles

I used to live here when I went to Stanford, so I know it pretty well.

Palo Alto is half bedroom suburb, half futuristic 1970s science fiction movies starrring Charlton Heston. It has lush trees, relatiuly fear-free schools, and only a few malls. Its real estate was the first in America to hyperinflate, back in the 1970s.

The *BIG* thing about Palo Alto is that, as a city, it designs tons of incredibly powerful and scary shit inside its science parks, which are EVERYWHERE.

The science parks are these clean boxes set atop eerie, beatifully maintained lawns that have never felt the crush of a football. There’s this senssation that something weirds going on, but you can’t articulate it, because the weirdness is 9too deep.

Once you leave the Camino Real, the main strip, the city becomes deadly quiet, exept for the occasionnal BMW, Honda or truck carrying 50-foot lengths of PVC tubing encasement for optical fibers.

I broke down and asked Dad today, “Dad, what exactly are you doing for Michael?” and he said, “Well, Daniel, I haven’t really signed a nondisclosure form on the subject, but I did promise Michael I’d keep it top secret until it was time to reveal.”

Gee, thanks.

Susan and Ethan are actually united on an issue — a local crusade against leaf blowers — the gas-fired kind. The noise from them is, I have to agree, something shocking. They phoned Palo Alto City Hall and got some poor civil servant on the line and harangued them. Ethan screamed, “After a certain point, decibels turn into BTUs. We’re melting here.” Susan phoned up and screamed, “Is Palo Alto Spanish for leaf blower? Ban these things NOW!”

It’s fun to watch your friends get random. Especially when they’re ragging on something that’s a direct metaphor for their personalities.

I have noticed that on TV, all of these “moments” are sponsored by corporations, as in, “This touchdown was brought to you by the brewers of Bud Lite,” or “This nostalgia flashback was brought to you by the proud makers of Kraft’s family of fine foods.”

I told Karla, “I’m no sci-fi buff, but doesn’t this seem like a dangerous way to be messing with the structure of time — allowing the corporate realm to invade the private?

Karla told me about how the city of Atlanta was tampering with the idea of naming streets after corporations in return for paying for the maintenance of infrastructure: “Folgers Avenue; Royal Jordanian Airlines Boulevard; Tru-Valu Road.”

“Well,” I said, “streets have to get names somehow. The surnames Smith, Brown, and Johnson probably looked pretty weird when they first started, too.”

Karla said, “I think that in the future, clocks won’t say three o’clock anymore. They’ll just get right to the point and call three o’clock, ‘Pepsi.’”

During tonight’s massage lesson, Karla said, “Remember living in that enormous furniture-free rancher up in Redmond with all the rain clouds and everything? It feels like a long time ago. I sort of miss it.”

I said nothing. I don’t miss it. I prefer the chaos of here to the predictability of … there.

My body felt like overcooked spaghetti after tonight’s session. Yeah!

I tried Ethan’s theory about copy-and-pasting. I was mesmerized by the results — think and grow rich:


money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money


I stared at an entire screen full of these words and they dissolved and lost their meaning, the way words do when you repeat them over and over — the way anything loses meaning when context is removed — the way we can quickly enter the world of the immaterial using the simplest of devices, like multiplication.

SATURDAY

Poor or not, life has become coding madness all over again — except this time we’re killing ourselves for ourselves, instead of some huge company to whom we might as well be interchangeable bloodless PlaySkool figurine units. We began coding the day after we arrived. Michael’s code is elegant stuff — really fun to tweak. And there’s certainly lots of it. No shortage of work here. And there’s so much planning, and we all have our milestone charts pasted up on our booth walls.

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy — living and working inside of coding’s predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our paychecks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

Bug has surprised us with his untapped talent for generating gaming ideas and coding short cuts. Ethan called him a Burgess Shale of untried ideas. He’s blossoming — at 32!

Michael has an office more or less to himself, behind the bar, and walled off with sound baffles. He shares it with Ethan, who visits only twice a day for “face-time”: first to talk with Michael in the morning — and then once in the afternoon for a wrap-up. The downside of a closed door office is the overaccumulation of dead skin particles. With Ethan’s dandruff, the floor looks like Vail, Colorado.

Not infrequently, Michael locks himself inside and geeks out on code. We call this bungee-coding. He always does his best work when he really geeks out. Nobody’s offended — it’s the way he is.

I asked Mom what she knew of Dad’s work with Michael. She said it’s Top Secret, but she gave me a clue: his fingers are all red and sore at night. “Don’t worry about it, Dan, he’s happy, and so as long as the Feds aren’t called in, let him be.” So much for curiosity.

I tried looking at Mom’s rock collection today. They continue to perplex me. Beauty is absolutely in the eye of the beholder.

Todd broke the 400-pound mark on the bench press today and celebrated by making protein drinks for everybody, but they had a rotting protein odor. We pretended to enjoy them, then formed tag teams running to the laundry sink to dump them.

I looked at Dad’s hands and they are indeed all chafed and red.

Susan’s dating some guy from Intel, but I don’t think it’s going to work, because Intel’s corporate culture is so weird.

“They’re like Borgs,” says Susan. “They have one mind. They’re like this sci-fi movie I once saw where if one child in a village learned something, all the other children learned it simultaneously. It’s a hive mind. You get the feeling there’s a sub-audible tape playing that says, resistance is futile … you WILL assimilate …” And then Susan got thoughtful and said, “The more I think about it, it’s actually like Microsoft. In fact all huge tech firms are like Microsoft.”

Went out for a drink with Ethan at the Empire Tap Room on Emerson Street. He said, “There is no center to the Valley in any real sense of the word. There is no one watching; it’s pretty, but it’s a vacuum; a kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings.”

I know what he’s talking about — the deficit of visionaries — the center-less boredom of Valley life. I mean, if I really think about it, Valley people work and sleep — work and sleep and work and sleep and somewhere along the line the dream border is blurred. It’s as if there is a collective decision to disfavor a Godhead. It’s not despair; they just want the Real Thing. The Beast.

And the penny pinching! The nondisclosure forms! The extreme wealth of the high-IQ’ed genetic gift baskets who won on the Punnet Square of life! I suppose this is the birthplace of the new postindustrial economy here amid the ghosts of apricot orchards, spinach farms, and horse ranches — here inside the science parks, industrial areas, and cool, leafy suburbs. Here, where sexy new technologies are being blueprinted, CAD’ed, engineered, imagineered, and modeled — post-machines making countless millions of people obsolete overnight.

Palo Alto is so invisible from the outside, but invisibility is invariably where one locates the ACTION.

Worked until 3:30 A.M. Breezy night. Went for a walk down La Cresta Drive. So quiet. I got to feeling meditative. I felt as though my inner self was much closer to the surface than it usually gets. It’s a nice feeling. It takes quiet to get there.

* * *

The liquid engineers left the pool heater on too long, and at night, chorine vapors rose above the plant life of the planet, and I

imagined my flesh,

being inside the pool, being warm, and protected, feeling gravity, but able to mock it as I floated. Would you float with me now, if I asked you, would you jump in the pool and not even bother to strip? Could I strip you down, remove your clothing and we would fall inside the water together?

It scares me.

I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again.

This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you.

You stole my loneliness

No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my Windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.

SUNDAY

Michael made us attend: “Interactive Multimedia, Product Design, and the Year 2000” It was at a Hyatt or something down in San Jose. Michael wanted us to have “a good overview of the industry.” We barely made it through the event.

The day after the seminar, I might add, Michael bought us all San Jose Sharks inflatable toys as penance. (The Sharks are *huge* here. I think I’m already beginning to bond with them.) If my ship comes in this year, I’m going to buy season’s tickets for next year’s games. Can’t wait for the season.

I e-mailed my notes to Abe.

“29 Steps: My Trip

to the

Interactive Multimedia Seminar”

by Daniel Underwood

1)

Some people believe that the suspension of disbelief is destroyed by interactivity.

2)

The people who attend “Multimedia Seminars” aren’t the same people who design games. Their shirts are ironed, they carry unscuffed leather attaché cases, they’re infinitely earnest and they look like they work for Prudential-Bache and Kidder-Peabody. These suits are all bluffing now, but soon enough they’ll “get it” and they will become “visionaries.”

3)

Narratives (stories) traditionally come to a definite end (unlike life); that’s why we like movies and literature — for that sense of closure —because they end

4)

The stakes for multimedia may actually turn out to be embarrassingly small in the short run — like Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, or Hasbro cranking out board game versions of The Partridge Family, The Banana Splits, and Zoom.

5)

With interactivity, one tries to give “the illusion of authorship” to people who couldn’t otherwise author.

Thought: maybe the need to be told stories is like the need to have sex. If you want to hear a story, you want to hear a story — you want to be passive and sit back around the fire and listen. You don’t want to write the story yourself.

6)

This sick thing just happened: I had this moment when I looked up and everyone had been picking at the baby zits on their foreheads and everybody’s forehead was bleeding! It was like stigmata. So gross. Even Karla.

7)

“There’s an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project.” (*TRUE*!)

8)

Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don’t have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

9)

The 8 Models of Interactivity (as far as I can see)

i) The Arcade model

Like Terminator: kill or be killed.

ii) The Coffee Table Book model

Enter anywhere/leave anywhere; pointless in the end; zero replayability factor.

iii) The Universe Creation model

I built you and I can crush you.

iv) The Binary Tree model

Limited number of options; reads from left to right; tightly controlled mini-dramas.

v) The Pick-a-Path model

Does our hero smooch with Heather Locklear, or not— you decide! Expensive. Unproven entertainment value. Audiences don’t pay money to work.

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)

For adolescents: half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

vii) The Agatha Christie model

A puzzle is to be solved using levels, clues, chases, and exploration.

viii) Experience Simulation models

Flight simulators, sport games.

10)

I wonder if we oversentimentalize the power of books.

11)

Studios in Hollywood are trying to sucker in writers by burying multimedia rights into the boilerplate of contracts. It’s intellectual gill-netting. They say they’ve “always been doing it historically” … assuming “since July” means historically.

12)

The extraordinary cost of producing multimedia games theoretically is supposed to exclude little companies from entering the market, but it’s the little companies, I’m noticing, that are coming up with all of the “hits.” Hope for Oop!.

13)

Karla and I met this cool-looking woman at lunch, Irene, and so we had coffee with her before the afternoon session began. It turns out she’s a makeup artist for multimedia movies, and she wants to get into production herself. Karla said, “Gee, you look really tired,” and she said, “Oh — I’ve been working double shifts every day for two weeks.”

So I asked her, “What kind of things are people filming for multimedia games?” and she said, “It’s always the same … Sir Lancelot, Knights of the Round Table, thrones, chalices, damsels. Can’t somebody come up with something new? My Prince Arthur wig is getting all tired-looking.” I suggested she use a Marilyn Monroe wig.

14)

Ideally in a game you have hardheaded adventures, but at the end you get a glimpse of the supernatural.

15)

In Los Angeles everyone’s writing a screenplay. In New York everyone’s writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone’s developing a multimedia product.

16)

There’s a different mental construction in operation when you’re playing tennis as opposed to when you’re reading a book. With adrenaline-based competitive sports, the thought mode is: “I want to kill this fucker. “ It’s the spirit of testing yourself; accomplishment. You are gripped. Suspension of disbelief is not an issue

17)

A multimedia product has to deliver $1 per hour’s worth of entertainment or you’ll get slagged by word-of-mouth.

18)

The great Atari gaming collapse of 1982 (*sigh* I remember it well).

19)

Games are about providing control for nine year olds … “the bigger and neater the entity I can control, the better.”

20)

Multimedia has become a “packaged goods” industry now. The box copy is more important than the experience. But how do you write cool sexy box copy for a game like Tetris? You can’t.

21)

Cool term: “Manseconds”: (Ergonomic unit of measurement applied to keyboards, joysticks).

22)

“ Embedded intelligence”: (Intelligence buried in the nooks and crannies of code and storyboard design).

23)

Last year at a Christmas party up in Seattle, there were all these little kids — all highly sugared and on the brink of hysteria — but instead of screaming, they sat complacently by the TV playing SEGA games. The games were like “Child Sedation Devices.” It was spooky.

Susan was there. She said, “Just think, in 50 years these same kids will be sitting at the switches of our life-support systems figuring out a way to play a game by biofeedbacking our failing EKGs. Me, I seem to remember that when I was younger, overly sugared brats were sent down into the basement to fend for themselves, like Lord of the Flies.”

24)

How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? (“Cardigan: The Adventure”)

25)

Flight Simulation games are actually out-of-body experience emulators. There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed.

26)

“The replayability problem “ (Engineering a desire for repetition).

27)

I think “van art” and Yes album covers were the biggest influence in game design.

28)

I wonder if I’ve missed the boat on CD-ROM interactive — if I’m too old. The big companies are zeroing in on the 10-year-olds. I think you only ever truly feel comfortable with the level of digitization that was normal for you from the age of five to fifteen. I mean sure, I can make new games workable, but it won’t be a kick the way Tetris was. Or will it?

29)

In the end, multimedia interactive won’t resemble literature so much as sports.

MONDAY

Random moment earlier tonight: out of the blue Todd asked everyone in the Habitrail 2, “When they make processed cheese slices that are only 80 percent milk, what’s the remaining 20 percent made from?”

Michael replied instantly, “Why, nonmilk additives, of course.”

Today we learned that Bug had a piece of shareware on his computer that installs wood paneling all over your Macintosh desktop — and he didn’t even tell us! Grudgingly he gave us a download. “It’s called shareware, Bug, not hogware.”

So now we all have digitized wood paneling on our desktops. The rumpus room dream lives on inside our computer world.

Abe-mail:

I am going to RRNT today. 2 things:

1)

The US Dollar is the working currency not only of the domestic econimy, but of nearly every other country on earth (minus Europe and Japan). That must count for somethin. It’s obviously grossly undervalued. Why dows the Federal Reserve keep the value so low?

(insert conspiracy theory here)

And WHATS WITH THESE MUTUAL FUNDS AND PENSION FUNDS? I REFUSE to believe that money put into a bank in 1956 is *still* money in 1994.

1956 money may still technically be “there” (wherever “there” is) - but it’s undead money. It’s sick. Evil.

I can’t believe that *l*, of all people, am saying this, but there’s soemthing obscene about money that sits inside a bank and collects interest for decades. “It;s hard at work,” we’re told …

OH RIGHT!

No, I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realixe that money has a half-life - a decade or so? and then it becomes perverse and random. Expecting a pension kids? Ha hah ha!

I’m feeling like Bug today.

2)

Easter egg

platform

surfing

frontier

garden

jukebox

net

dirty linen

pipeline

lassooo

highway

We will have soon fully entered an era where we have creatted a computer metaphor for EVERY thing that exists in the real world.

Actually when you think about it, *euerything* can be a metaphor for *anything*.

To quote YOU, Daniel: “I mean, If you realy think about it.”

Abe has a friend in research who’s working on “metaphor-backwards” development of software products. That is, thinking of a real-world object with no cyber equivalent, and then figuring out what that cyber equivalent should be. Abe’s worried because at the moment he’s working on “gun.”

Thought: sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e., 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to now, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.

Actually, I’ve noticed recently that conversations always seem to reach the point where everybody says they don’t have any time anymore. How can time just … disappear? Early this morning I told this to Karla as we were waking up and she said she’s noticed this, too.

She also said that everybody’s beginning to look the same these days—“Everybody looks so Gappy and identical.” She considered this for a second. “Everybody looks the same nowadays because nobody has the time to differentiate themselves — or to even shop.”

She paused and looked up at the ceiling. “Your mother doesn’t like me.”

“How can you get so random out of nowhere? Of course she does.”

“No. She doesn’t. She thinks I’m a hick.”

(Oh God—not this stupid stuff again.) “You two never talk, so how can you even tell?”

“So you admit she doesn’t like me?”

“No!”

“We have to do something together. We have no shared experiences or memories.”

“Wait a second — don’t I count?”

“Maybe she sees me as stealing you.”

“Mom?”

“Let’s arrange a lunch. We’ve been here how long? And we’ve never even had a lunch out together.”

“Lunch? That’s not much.”

“Memories have to begin somewhere.”

Now that I think about it, Mom never comes over to our work area. Ever. And the two of them never really do chat. It occurs to me that I should have noticed, and I realize that I’m worried about it.

A crisis in my new-and-improved life.

We shot Nerf darts (Jarts) for a few hours this afternoon down in the backyard to allow the sunlight to reset our circadian rhythms. We drank Napa Valley Cabernet like we were Cary Grant and made Klingon jokes. We used Dad’s Soviet binoculars to inspect the enormous blue “Jell-O cube” down in the Valley below — a.k.a. the Air Force Satellite Control Facility, at Onizuka Air Force Base in Sunnyvale.

A citrus tree was blossoming outside the house; the air was lemony fresh and smelled like an expensive hotel’s lobby.

Ethan was, as usual, in a beautiful suit, like one of those suntanned Academy Awards guys. (But again, his dandruff!) He greeted us with, “Good afternoon, my precious content delivery system.”

We asked Ethan if he wanted to throw Jarts with us, but he said, “Love to, kids, but antidepressants make me photosensitive. Sunlight kills me. My retinas’ll get etched like a microchip. You kids keep on playing. Sunlight is good for productivity.” He and Dad then went into the kitchen to discuss psychopharmacology while Mom made us a tray of Dagwood sandwiches.

Ethan told me something really cool. He said that the reason lion tamers brandish chairs while cracking the whip is because the lions are mesmerized by all four points of the chairs’ legs, but never all of them at the same time — their attention is continually distracted, and hence they are subdued.

Ethan talks so “big-time.” I’ve never heard people talk this way before. Susan says he talks like characters in a miniseries.

I agree with Susan that Ethan is annoying, but it’s hard to peg exactly why — there are all these little things that he does that just add up to ANNOYING. When I really think about it, I realize that if someone else did those things they probably wouldn’t annoy me. It’s just the way he is, all smarmy and fake genuine. Like he’s always coming into the office and going up to me and saying, “How are you” in this concerned voice while looking deep into my eyes. Retch. Like he cares. And when I say, “Fine,” he squeezes my shoulder and says, “No, really, how are you?” as though I wasn’t really being honest. “I know you’ve been working hard.” I never know what to say so I always just look back at my screen and keep on coding.

Another annoying thing he does is ask you something about what you’re working on, and just as you start really talking about it, he takes over and somehow ties it into an anecdote about himself. Like I was telling him about the problems we were having deciding whether or not Oop! will have sounds or not, and how we’re trying to calculate the extra memory space sound would occupy and whether or not having sounds adds enough value to justify the extra work. It was like Ethan was just waiting for a place where he could break in. He said, “Added value. What an arbitrary concept, since it’s different for every person.” He then launched into this story of holidaying in Bali, staying in little shacks at this super-resort called Amand-something which cost $400 a night which even had little slaves to do his bidding. In his mind it tied into the notion of “value-adding,” but my question about sound and memory was lost.

I sure wish we had that Bali money back now.

One must grudgingly admit Ethan does seem to know a good deal about Valley business. Like many people in computers and gaming, he never went to college. He designed a game that sold millions in the Pong era, became a millionaire, went bust with Atari, became a millionaire again in Reagan’s ‘80s with a SEGA-based something-or-other, went bust again, and now I guess he’s going to become a multimillionaire in the Multimedia ‘90s.

His tech credentials are good, too. Somewhere amidst all the money he did manage to squeak in work with Xerox’s El Segundo Lab and TRW in Redondo Beach.

I‘ve never seen a stock get more attention than 3DO. Everybody’s wondering if they should invest in it. I mean, if we had money to invest. I must remember to drive by their parking lot some Sunday afternoon.

Karla asked Mom out to lunch and Mom balked at first—“I don’t know how much time the Library can spare me for.” That kind of thing. I mean, if someone wants to have lunch with you, they simply don’t make pseudo-excuses like that.

But Karla wore her down, like someone who’s been to Anthony Robbins lectures. The three of us are going to have lunch later this week, but I hope it isn’t a grudge match.

I asked Michael what he wanted for his 25th birthday next week. His message flashed onto my screen at 2:40A.M., from his office where he was working with the door shut:

»Birthday:

I want one of those keys you win in video games, that allows you to blast through walls and reach the next level - to get to *the other side*.

This is a particularly long message for Michael whose e-mail tends to be about three words long, normally. A carriage return, punctuation marks and everything!

Now that I’ve been thinking about it, I’m not sure what exactly Oop!’s money structure is. Wouldn’t it be a sick joke if I got into something without understanding the financial underpinnings … if I hadn’t even bothered to ask the questions I’m supposed to ask because I’ve never had to ask them before because I’d been coddled to death by benefits at Microsoft? Naaaaah …

There was a windstorm last night and a bunch of branches blew off the eucalyptus tree beside the garage. Around sunset Bug, Karla, and I pretended we were a trio of evil Finnish masseuses named Oola, swatting naughty victims with much vim. I’ve got mentholated scratches all over my arms.

Karla is preparing a list of subjects to discuss at lunch with Mom. I said, “Karla, this is a lunch, not a meeting.” She wants to make a good impression so badly. I am surprised by how much that pleases me.

Michael is furious at Todd for taping over a VHS cassette of Oop! graphic animation that Michael had done as a demo for potential investors. Todd replaced it with The Best of Hockey Fights III.

Todd and Susan have the flu, so I guess we’re all doomed for it now. And Ethan’s been acting weird all week. Our bank account must be running on fumes again.

* * *

unraveled brown

cassette tape

on the freeway

Staples

CK-one

PIN number

basketball hoop

If we were machines, we'd have the gift of being eternal and I want you to understand

TUESDAY

Everybody’s flu-ridden today except for Ethan and me. Ethan asked me to accompany him up to Electronic Arts in San Mateo, and then down to a VC meeting out at the Venture Capital mall at the corner of the 280 and Sand Hill Road — in his ruby red Ferrari.

“The Ferrari is like a rite of passage here for new money. You buy one at 26, get it out of your system, flip it for a gray Lexus or Infiniti, and then you drive gray sedans the rest of your life. I keep mine because I can’t afford anything else at the moment, and I can’t afford the capital gains taxes if I sold it. I should get one of those ‘ don’t laugh: at least it’s paid for’ bumper stickers. Nobody would appreciate the irony that I’m holding on by my teeth.”

We roared south past the rolling hills that oozed trees and fog. I looked down at the palm of my hand, slapped it, and said, “Hey, Ethan — I’m looking at my sympathy-o-meter, and the needle isn’t moving.”

“It’s the Valley, pal — think sideways. This is the Lexus Freeway, the most scenic in America.”

I told Ethan about the book on freeways I had read, Robert F. Baker’s Handbook of Highway Engineering; Ethan in turn told me that 280 — the Lexus Freeway — is also nicknamed the Mensa Freeway.

I looked in the glove compartment and there was a bottle of Maalox cherry. Ethan said, “I keep Maalox in the glove compartment of the car, and sometimes I swig it like a wino in parking lots before meetings. I once walked into this meeting with dried white Maalox powder caked on my lips and everybody thought it was coke or something. I told them it was Pixy Stix and they said, oh, how cute, but they still thought I was coked out. Man, if they only knew the truth—that a Pixy stick would burn a crater in my stomach like Mt. Saint Helens.”

Then we got into a discussion about volcanoes, and the year Mt. Saint Helens erupted and that old guy who lived on top of the mountain, who was all crotchety, and wouldn’t leave, and everybody thought he was a real individual — and then he got creamed when the mountain blew. And this got me thinking of all the people at IBM, and I got to thinking about Dad and …

This is my first-ever VC meeting. Ethan has attended hundreds of them during his Valley career. Apparently, the Monday Partner’s Meeting is a Silicon Valley tradition, according to Ethan. They mostly occur up at the venture capital “mall” at the corner of Sand Hill Road and Interstate 280. Monday is when partners agree to agree. And Tuesday is when the decisions are acted upon.

Fifteen years in the business have loaned Ethan a rote tour-guidish quality. Humming up the 280, he further briefed me on the situation:

“Initial presentations are made by capital seekers. If their idea seems promising, then there’s a callback for a broader presentation — not unlike Broadway.

“The ‘VC team’ by then will have run due-diligence checks — spoken with insiders who have provided background on an idea — its suitability or marketability — as well as checked the technical robustness of the idea. Essentially, they must know what is the significance or defensibility of the technology underlying the idea? What is the overall viability of the idea? What do you have that the others don’t? Is the necessary technical acumen on the team? Michael and I have been through this already. Today is the callback.

“We passed all of the techie checks, but the VC firms aren’t quite sure about Oop!’s marketability. With round-one seed capital, all the risk is ahead of you. Plus, software is a consumer, not a corporate business now — it’s 10,000 units off to CompUSA instead of one jumbo unit to Delta Airlines or National Cash Register.

“This isn’t good for us, because Silicon Valley firms have little or no experience with Procter & Gamble-style focus grouping, but they won’t admit it. So they pose as multimedia visionaries instead. They might as well be slitting open a sheep and reading the entrails. It’s a big exercise in chain-yanking. Let the floor show begin!”

We arrived and got out of the car. “Ethan, here — some leaves have fallen on your shoulder.” I snowplowed away drifts of dandruff from his suit. “There,” I said, “all set.”

Condensed Version …

Venture Capital Meeting (My First [and Last])


1


Me:

(I’m dressed like an outpatient; these VC people are dressed like they’re about to whisper a deal into David Geffen’s left ear. Why didn’t Ethan dress me properly? He began flaking the moment we walked in the doorway. His shoulders!) “Hello.”


2)


VC Woman with Barbra-Streisand-in-Concert Hairdo:

“Investors want to see a committed, marketing-sensitive visionary at the product’s helm.” (Who the heck is that … Michael? Marketing Sensitive?)

3)


Me:

(Nodding and seeming interested)

“Hmmm…”


4)


A different VC with an eerie resemblance to Barry Diller:

“One of the main reasons people start companies is to control their environment and the people they work with.” Michael nods. Ethan agrees.


5)


Richie Rich Boomersomething with loud Hermes tie:

silence


6)


Barbra:

(earnestly)

“Is there — an opening for world class leadership in this product’s area?”


7)


Barry:

“Start-ups appeal either to jaded cynics — because they know the way things really work — or to the totally naive — because they don’t. Which are you?”


8)


Ethan:

“We’re that irreducible 5 percent of talented people — our culture’s pearl divers.”


9)


Young VC guy, who would be the same age as Rosemary’s Baby:

“You’ll need more than lots of pearl divers …” (smug titters) “You need focus groups. People surprise you. They tell you that what you thought was worth $99 is only worth $29.”


10)


Barry:

Sugarishly: “We have to function as parents to new companies who are in the process of growing up.”


11)


Hermes tie:

more silence


12)


Ethan:

“That’s where I come in.” (give prisoner last cigarette)


13)


Ethan:

(now on a roll)

“VC was in a lull until spring of 1992, and then came” [awed pause] “convergence., Unless there’s a breakthrough hit, by 1997, multimedia is going to be a leper industry. We have the missing killer app right here.”


14)


Barbra:

“Yes, but as a VC firm we like to feel we’re beyond ‘the hit thing’ now. In general, we don’t like small, technology-oriented companies. There’s nothing the world wants as little as a new technology company. If you give a company $2 million, they’ll spend it all and never ship a profitable product.”


15)


Hermes tie:

noise of his silence equals noise of his tie


16)


Rosemary’s Baby:

“With a round-one seed, all of the risk is ahead of you.”


17)


Barry:

“Frankly, we’re not totally convinced you have a crew that can market your product, that is, should it even make it past beta.”


18)


Me:

(Detached metaphysical perspective: as we speak, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a quarter of a mile south, running underneath the Mensa Freeway, is quietly blowing up atoms into quarks and bosons and leptons and Fruity Pebbles.) “Hmmm.”


19)


Ethan:

“Frankly,” (Oooh — everybody’s trying to compete with each other through overuse of the word frank) “I have brought four products to market myself. Four very successful products. (Unspoken sentiment hangs in the air like dying fart: “Yeah, but your companies all tanked within a year.”) “Our staff is so dedicated to the project they are working without pay until an alpha version is ready.”


20)


Me:

(Inside thought balloon above my head as Ethan looks at me and gave me this big You’re-fucked-and-you-have-no-choice smile, in front of all these suits): “What do you mean working without pay?”


21)


Me:

(Out loud)

“We have to have a product that works first, and we can take care of the business side, with your help …” (The one thing I say and it’s obsequious and stupid. Q: Do I feel like a liability? A: Yes.)


22)


Hermès Tie:

“We’d like to help you … mwah mwah mwah (Charlie Brown’s Teacher noise) … no infrastructure … mwah mwah mwah … no corporate plan for growth … mwah mwah mwah.…” (Pull trap door)


23)


Rosemary’s Baby:

(Parting shot to me, in confidence, after the others have left — like he’s really helping us out as he discreetly escorts me toward the Mission oak doorway): “You probably wouldn’t want to work for a VC-funded firm because in the end they’ll just crack the whip and force you to ship, even if it’s not entirely full-featured.”


24)


Suits:

(I paraphrase)


“Please fuck off and die.”


25)


Ethan:

“Dinner, dance, and a kiss at the door. So much for meeting number 216. Well, pal, there’s a saying down in these parts: twenty-four hours heals all wounds.”


26)


FIN

I asked Ethan in the Ferrari on the way back to the office, “What do you mean we’re working without pay?” and he said, “Well, technically, yes.”

I flipped out: “Yes?!”

Then he said, “Well, technically, no”

“Ethan, what the fuck is going on?” I asked.

“Don’t be so petty bourgeois, Dan. Look at the big picture.”

The Ferrari passed about eight cars in one fell swoop. I didn’t want to look petty. “I’m not petty, Ethan, “I said.

“And I am?”

“That’s not the issue.”

“Stop being so linear about money. Be horizontal. It’s all cool.”

I asked Mom what she thought of Karla and she said she thought she was “delightful.” Sounded a bit forced.

No flu symptoms yet.

WEDNESDAY

Lunch today.

Karla was draggy with the flu, but she forced herself to come. She, Mom, and I went to lunch at the Empire Grill and Tap Room. As we entered, there were two seeing-eye dogs and two blind masters standing near to each other. Within seconds, Mom was down on the floor chatting with the dogs. She then interrogated the dogs’ owners: “Do you two hang around together a lot? Do your dogs get to visit each other? They would make good company for each other, you know.” (My mother the matchmaker.)

The two owners laughed and said, “I should think so — we’re married.”

Mom exclaimed, “Oh — how wonderful — they can discuss their jobs with each other!” (Mom’s a true Silicon Valley girl — she grew up here, down in Sunnyvale.) “Oh my, you must meet Misty—” and she raced out to the car to fetch Misty, and the three dogs were soon sniffing each other.

I was aching to get to lunch, but Mom and the two blind people were deep in DogTalk. I went out to Mac’s and bought a copy of the San Jose Mercury News. When I returned they were still there, laughing. They exchanged cards, and afterward I asked Mom what they were laughing about, and she said, “We tried to think of the worst seeing-eye breed imaginable and we came up with the idea of the ‘seeing-eye whippet,’ prancing into traffic … isn’t that a riot? Perhaps you could make a video game out of it, like that Pong game that was so much fun that Christmas years ago.”

Mom, like most people her age, will know Pong as their sole video game experience. It’s tragic.

At lunch, Mom preempted all other conversation starts by discussing Michael. “Sometimes I think that Michael is ummm—autistic.” She blushed. “Oh, of course, what I mean to say is — well — have you noticed?”

“Michael’s not like other people,” I said. “He goes off into his own world — for days at a time sometime. A few months ago he locked himself into his office and we had to slide food under his door. And so he stopped eating any food that couldn’t be slipped underneath a door.”

“Oh, so that explains the Kraft cheese slices. Carton-loads.”

Karla, still low energy from the flu, broke in: “You know, Mrs. Underwood, I think all tech people are slightly autistic. Have you ever heard about dyspraxia? Michael is an elective mute.”

“No.”

“Dyspraxia’s like this: say I asked you to give me that newspaper. There’s no reason on earth why you couldn’t. But if you had dyspraxia, then you’d be blocked and you’d just sit there frozen. Dyspraxia is the condition where you become incapable of initiating an action.”

“Then everybody is dyspraxic, dear. It’s called procrastination.”

“Exactly. It’s just that geeks are slightly more so than most people. Autism’s a good way of focusing out the world to exclude everything but the work at hand.”

I added that Michael was also the opposite of a dyspraxic, too. “If he has an idea, he acts on it. But he has to put the idea into action immediately—like this company — or with an elegant strip of code. He’s a blend of the two extremes.”

Karla added, “The doors in Michael’s brain are wide open to certain things, while simultaneously nailed shut to all others. And we must admit, he does get things done. He has no brakes on certain topics. He’s a true techie geek.”

Mom looked askance.

I said, “You can say geeks now, Mom.”

“Yes, well, you geeks are an odd blend of doors and brakes.”

The discussion changed to the (groan) information superhighway. “Do you think libraries are going to become obsolete?” she said stirring her coffee and fearing for her job. “Books?”

Karla lapsed into a discussion of the Dewey decimal system and the Library of Congress cataloging system, which was numbing to say the least. Mom found herself begrudgingly getting very into the discussion of cataloging. Librarians love order, logic, and linearity.

In the end lunch was like a balloon with not enough helium in it to float — not enough helium in it to even puff it up, really. I think the dynamic of Mom and Karla’s relationship has been set. At least they don’t hate each other. Truthfully, I’m a little worried … why is Mom being like this?

Later on, I found myself being the only person working in the office. It was so strange, and I can’t remember the last time this happened. Actually, I wasn’t totally alone: Look and Feel were scurrying about inside their Habitrail. But other than that, I was alone. It was odd to be the only person in the office. I wished I could go to Kinko’s and photocopy myself … be more productive.

Karla found this allergy medicine I’ve been taking and said, “This is what’s been causing your nightmares.” She could be right — I hope she is. I’m going to stop as of today.

THURSDAY

No nightmares last night.

FRIDAY

Again, no nightmares. Problem solved?

Misty came into our work space and barked at Look and Feel. Gerbils really stink. I’ll be glad if we ever get out of this space.

SATURDAY

Karla and I were watching cartoons, and that old Warner Brothers cartoon came on with the frog that’s buried in cement in the 1920s and comes alive and sings and dances, but only in front of one person. Karla looked at it and said, “That’s me around your mother. I sit around and say ‘ribbet’ around her, but I’m the dancing, singing frog around you.”

Everyone is getting a cold and sounds nasal and scary. Todd said, “Man, you don’t want to see the stuff coming out of my nose into the Kleenex. Eggs Benedict.” Thanks, Todd.

Look and Feel had babies! We think there are five, pink and plump, so we’re going to call them Lisa, Jazz, Classic, Point, and Click. We hope they don’t get eaten by their parents. We put raw hamburger into the Habitrail tubes to keep Look and Feel away from “the kids.” The Habitrail is actually rather like Logan’s Run. Imagine gerbils with little 1970s feathered hairdos!

I was up at Ethan’s frighteningly chic house tonight (all those bank cameras) and told him about the other night, when I wished I could go to Kinko’s and photocopy myself. He misunderstood me. I merely wanted to increase my productivity, but he thought I was getting all cosmic and wanted to discuss the universe, and this became a cue for Ethan to commandeer the conversation into his direction, as usual.

Ethan did the “Ethan Thing” and went off on a tangent about himself. He said, “I’ve already photocopied myself!”

He explained: “People tend to assume that as we get older, years naturally start feeling shorter and shorter — that this is ‘nature’s way.’ But this is crap. Maybe what’s really happening is that we have increased the information density of our culture to the point where our perception of time has become all screwy.

“I began noticing long ago that years are beginning to shrink — that a year no longer felt like a year, and that one life was not one life anymore — that “life multiplication” was going to be necessary.

“You never heard about people ‘not having lives’ until about five years ago, just when all of the ‘80s technologies really penetrated our lives.” He listed them off:

“VCRs

tape rentals

PCs

modems

answering machines

touch tone dialing

cellular phones

cordless phones call screening

phone cards

ATMs

fax machines

Federal Express

bar coding

cable TV

satellite TV

CDs

calculators of almost other-worldly power that are so cheap that they practically come free with a tank of gas.”

“In the information Dark Ages, before 1976, before all of this, relationships and television were the only forms of entertainment available. Now we have other things. Fortunately depression runs in my family.”

“Fortunately?” I asked.

“Absolutely, pal. I couldn’t figure out a way of rigging my brain to work in parallel instead of linear mode — and then they invented Prozac and all the Prozac isomers and kablam!—my brain’s been like an Oracle parallel processing server ever since.”

“I’m not sure I get this, Ethan.”

“Prozac is great — and I think it goes beyond seratonin and uptake receptors and that kind of thing. I think these chemicals physically rewire your brain to think in parallel. It literally converts your brain from Macintosh or IBM into a Cray C3 or a Thinking Machines CM5. Prozac-type chemicals don’t suppress feelings — they break them down into smaller ‘feeling units,’ which are more quickly computationally processed by the new, parallel brain.”

“I think I need a second to digest this, Eth—”

“I dont. Linear thinking is out. Parallel is in.”

“Explain to me more clearly—how does whatever you take affect your time?”

“I remember once when I was majorly depressed for, like, six months. When it ended, I felt like I had to make up for those six ‘lost’ months. Man, depression sucks. So my logic is, as long as I’m not bummed, I’m not wasting time. So I make sure I’m never bummed.” He seemed quite happy to be telling his theory.

“You know how when somebody says, ‘Remember that party at the beach last year?’ and you say, ‘Oh God, was that last year? It feels like last month‘? If I’m going to live a year, I want my whole year’s worth of year. I don’t want it feeling like only one month. Everything I do is an attempt to make time ‘feel’ like time again — to make it feel longer. I get my time in bulk.”

I left Ethan’s thoroughly depressed, and not sure whether I still disliked Ethan or just felt sorry for him. I e-mailed Abe with a synopsis of Ethan’s time theory, and he was online and answered me right away:

»What would happen if TV caracters continued their theoretical lives in our linear time … Bob and Emily Hartley, in their early 70s now, would be living in their brown apartment, wrinkled and childless. Or Mary Tyler Moore, now 60 … surely bitter, alone, sterile …

Prozac!

* * *

SpaghettiOs

Aspirin

invasion

What's My Line

Jell-O simulator

Russian winter

Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?

A: You already are an animal

SUNDAY

Ethan phoned me and asked me to come over to San Carlos. When I arrived, he was on a cordless phone in his kitchen, leaving me in his ultra-monitored living room reading his copies of Cellular Buyer’s Guide, Dr. Dobbs Journal LAN Times—and Game Pro (#1 Video Game Magazine).

He came out of the kitchen wearing an Intel T-shirt — rare, as I’ve never seen him in anything but a shirt and tie in all the time I’ve known him. He was wearing jeans, too. “It’s Friday—’jeans day,’ pal,” he said.

He then sat down on the couch beside me and there was this silence as he shuffled his coffee table magazines back into geometric orderliness after my perusal, and then he sat back on the white leather with his arm behind my back.

I pointed out that his copy of Binary File Transfer Monthly was possibly the most boring document I’d ever seen in my life. He said, “Well, what if it were actually a copy of Penthouse Forum letters encrypted as something so dull and opaque, that nobody would realize that it was something else. Imagine an encryption system that could reconfigure the words, 7 am a sophomore at a small midwestern college‘ into ‘Does not conform to ITCU Convention specifications for frequency ranges.“’ It’d be the biggest stroke of encryption genius since the U.S. military used Navajo Indians to speak freely over the radio about top secret operations.”

He then became quiet and still, and the presence of his arm behind me was eerily warm. I stiffened my posture. The scenario felt so charged — the whole situation. I felt like a Yankee schoolteacher on a Hollywood casting couch. He said to me, “I have something important I have to ask of you, pal,” and I thought, “Oh God — here it is … I’m going to get hit on.”

He then removed his T-shirt, and I was trying to be cool about the situation, and I was truly freaking out as Ethan’s not really my, err, cup o’ tea. He was reading my mind and said to me, “Don’t be a prig — I’m not gonna jump you, but I am going to ask you a favor.”

“Oh?”

“Chill out, it’s not that kind of favor.” His missing T-shirt revealed a torso of average buffitude, “You can see, I’m no Todd,” he said, and then he turned around, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I gasped. His rotation revealed his back covered in a matrix of bandages, dried blood and micropore tape, and it looked as if several soiled disposable diapers had been taped to his skin all higgledy-piggledy. “It’s this … these”

I said, “Ethan, what the fuck is this all about? Did you have an accident? Jesus!”

“Accident? Who gives a shit … ozone … a bologna sandwich I ate in third grade … one hour too many in front of a Russian-built VDT. But it’s a part of me, Dan … the damage … the whateverthefuck it is. It’s moles gone bad. Maybe they’re gone forever and, well, maybe they’re not.”

I was trying to look away, but he said, “That is so fucking insulting,” and he jumped up and sat on the coffee table facing away from me, sticking the bandages in my face. I then looked and was mesmerized by this bio-mash of cotton, plastic, and body fluids barnacled to his skin. I didn’t say anything.

“Dan?” he asked.

“Yeah …”

“You gotta remove them for me.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s nobody else who’ll do it for me. You know that, Dan?”

“There’s nobody?”

“Nobody.”

I looked some more and he said, “Doc hacked ‘em out of me like they were divots on the thirteenth fairway a week ago. And not one of you dumb bastards ever even bothered to ask why I was going to the dermatologist. Nobody asked and I had nobody to tell.”

“Jesus, Ethan — we thought you were going to the dermatologist about your dandruff.”

“I have dandruff?”

“It’s, ummm, nothing out of the ordinary.” I touched the bandages and they felt crackly, like Corn Flakes.

“You said I had dandruff?”

“Ethan. Discussing body malfunctions is like discussing salaries. You don’t do it.”

“Fine. Can you just remove them? They itch. They hurt.”

“Yeah, of course.”

He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution, rubbing alcohol, and old shirts cut into strips for rags. And so with him on the coffee table I removed chunk after bloody chunk, snipping away at his back and pulling scraps away, horrified at exactly how much of him had been removed.

We were talking. He said he can’t believe how far dermatology has advanced in the past ten years. “They can practically put a small video camera inside your body and the doctor says to you, This is how your zit sees the world,’ and they have a camera looking out from inside the zit.”

I asked him what his prognosis was, and he said, “Shhh, pal — it’s just the devil in me, but let’s hope he’s gone.”

In the end, after all of the plastic, cotton, and dried blood and rags were gone, his back looked as though craters of the moon had been stitched together, violet and swollen. I used a small hair dryer and dried off the stitches, and when I turned off the hair dryer, the noise was somehow shocking, and Ethan still sat there, hunched and breathing, and I felt sorry for him, which is something I would never have thought imaginable toward Ethan. I said, “The devil in you, the devil in me,” and I grabbed him as gingerly as I could from behind and he moaned, but it wasn’t a sex moan, just the moan of someone who has found something valuable that they had thought was lost forever.

We lay down on the couch, me clasping his chest from behind, his breathing becoming deeper and slower, and he said, “You and Karla do that shiatsu stuff, right?”

“Yeah. We do. But you’ve got a few too many stitches for that at the moment.” I told him a bit of Karla’s theories of the body and memory storage. He laughed and said, “Ow!—Christ, stitches hurt,” and then he said, “Well, if that’s the case then think of me as a PowerBook dropped onto a marble floor from a tenth-story balcony.”

I said, “Don’t laugh at yourself. Your body is you, too.” I felt like I had to heal here, or else something would leave Ethan forever, so I held him a bit tighter. “Karla told me that in other cultures, the chest is often thought of as being the seat of thought. Instead of slapping yourself on the forehead when you forget something, like a V-8, instead you slap yourself on the chest.”

Ethan said, “I guess that if you start young enough, you could actually consider your toes as the seat of your thought. If you tried to remember something, you’d scratch your toe.”

I said this is possible.

And then I simply held him. And then we both fell asleep, and that was six hours ago. And I have been thinking about it, and I realize that Ethan has fallen prey to The Vacuum. He mistakes the reward for the goal; he does not realize that there is a deeper aim and an altruistic realm of technology’s desire. He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality. I feel it is up to me to help him become found. It is my work, it is my task; it is my burden.

* * *

I am Bills machine

I may be the largest machine that will ever be built.

I may be the richest machine that will ever be built.

I may be the most powerful machine that will ever be built.

Raised with Cheerios and station wagons.

Diagonal-slotted parking stalls of the Northgate mall.

As a child I once drove in a sedan's backseat along Interstate 5 and looking out the windows I saw my city beside the sea, dreaming in airplanes and wood; metal and rock ballads ... better ways of living. Golden sun falling on this city that wanted for more; sailboats atop the golden water.

Pocket calculators

sneakers

cheeseburgers

Datsun

The challenge of newness

Saturday morning cartoons recycling programs crying Indians.

You think you can live without me, but just try.

You desire images of a better tomorrow; I feed you these images.

You dream of a world in which your ego will not dissolve.

I am the architect of the arena.

Reconsider your notions of what you think will rescue you from a future sterilized of progress.

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