Microserfs

MONDAY

Everybody’s decided what title to put on the business cards Susan designed.

Bug: “Information Leafblower”

Todd: “Personal Trainer”

Karla: “Who can turn the world on with a smile?”

Susan: “Her name is Rio.”

Me: “Crew Chief

Ethan: “Liquid Engineer”

Michael: “You’re Soaking In It”

We got in this discussion about the word “nerd.” “Geek” is now, of course, a compliment, but we’re not sure about “nerd.” Mom asked me, “What, exactly, is the difference between a nerd and a geek?”

I replied, “It’s tougher than it seems. It’s subtle. Instinctual. I think geek implies hireability, whereas nerd doesn’t necessarily mean your skills are 100 percent sellable. Geek implies wealth.”

Susan said that geeks were usually losers in high school who didn’t have a life, and then not having a life became a status symbol. “People like them never used to be rewarded by society. Now all the stuff that made people want to kick your butt at fifteen becomes fashionable when fused with cash. You can listen to Rush on the Ferrari stereo on your way to get a good seat at II Fornaio — and wear Dockers doing it!”

Todd, not surprisingly, added, “Right now is the final end-stage when God said the meek shall inherit the earth. Is it a coincidence that geek rhymes with meek? I think not. A dipthongal accident.”

Mom said, “Oh you kids! I guess I’m just not in the loop.”

Being “in the loop” is this year’s big expression. Only three more weeks remain before the phrase becomes obsolete, like an Apple Lisa computer. Language is such a technology.

All day Michael kept on humming a refrain from the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere.” I asked him to sing something a bit more uplifting. The flu epidemic has left us all at low ebb. Or does Michael know something about E&M Software that we don’t? I dare not ask.

Pi fight! Late afternoon:

It turns out that Ethan knows pi up to 10,000 digits, just like Michael, so the two of them sat there in the Habitrail and banged off strands of numbers, like a Gregorian chant. In stereo — it felt religious. Work stopped dead and we sat there listening.

“Four.”“Four.” “Seven.”“Seven.” “Zero.”“Zero.“ “One.”“One “ “Eight.”“Eight.” “Three.”“Three.” “Eight.”“Eight.” “Nine.”“Nine.” “Zero.”“Zero.” “Three.”“Three.” “Four.”“Four.” “One.”“One.

Ethan has risen in our collective estimation considerably as a result.

I must add that Dad visits the Habitrail every single night, recharging Michael’s Tang and bringing him serial volleys of snacks. “Some fruit leather, Michael?—oh look — there’s one blueberry strip remaining. “ I’ll say, “Hi, Dad,” and he sort of turns around and stumbles for words and grunts, “Hi, Dan.”

But then I suppose I ought to be grateful. Dad looks 1,000 percent better than he did up in Redmond — so long ago, it now seems. His hair’s going white, though.

Also, Michael is using Jed’s desk and lamp in his bedroom down the hall from my room. Mom and Dad moved all of Jed’s things to Palo Alto when they moved, as though he was just away at school. I’m not even using my old lamp. Everyone else uses IKEA and lawn furniture.

I recognize that I’m avoiding something here: Michael using Jed’s lamp. Dad hasn’t mentioned Jed once since Michael moved in. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. I’m in denial.

TUESDAY

The house down the hill from us burned down around two in the afternoon. Fwoosh! We all went out on the verandah and watched, drinking coffee and sitting on an old pool slide turned onto its side. Mom was loading up the car, but Dad said it was no big deal because the vegetation wasn’t dry enough for “you know, another open-hills thing.”

A pair of hawks nesting nearby were diving into the smoke plume. I guess there were mice and things running away. Like a buffet table for birds.

The first time I ever saw a house burn down was the first time I heard the English Beat version of “Tears of a Clown” on the radio, and the two memories are toasted onto each other in my head like an EPROM.

Memory!

Later, Michael and Dad and I were buying AAA batteries at the Lucky Mart down on Alma Street, a main corridor through Palo Alto, and then out in the parking lot Michael and Dad began waving at the CalTrain that was screaming northward up the tracks, headed into the Palo Alto station. Once it had passed I asked Michael, just by way of conversation, why it is that people wave at trains.

He said, “We wave at people in trains because their lives — their cores — are so intensely and powerfully reflected in the inexorable, unstoppable roaring dreams of motion and voyage and discovery, which trains embody. One can’t help but admire the power and brutality and singularity of decision a moving train implies. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Underwood?”

Does Michael practice these things? Where does he get them from? And wouldn’t you just know Michael’s a train nut like my dad.

I say “Ummm …” a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. “It means you’re assembling data in your head — spooling.”

I also say the word “like” too much, and Karla said there was no useful explanation for people saying this word. Her best guess was that saying “like” is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known. Not too flattering.

I think I’m going to try and do mental Find-and-Replace on myself to eliminate these two pesky words altogether. I’m trying to debug myself.

Karla is cindent herself, too. She’s becoming a womanly woman. She’s growing her hair and trying to look like an adult. Right now she looks in between, as do most techies. Her skin certainly looks better. Actually, we all have better skin … except maybe for Ethan. California sunshine and an attempt to at least slightly cut the crap food seems to have positive epidermal results.

Smoother skin in seven days.

Karla drinks Ovaltine instead of coffee. She drinks it from her high school reunion mug. Her reunion actually had custom mugs, and this is so weird. Susan looked at the mug last week and asked, “Your high school reunion had horizontally cross-marketed merchandise tie-ins? Where’d you go to high school … Starbucks?”

Apparently there’s some company in Texas that helps you market your reunion.

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

Misty busted into my work space after all the fire engines and everything left, and pawed and slobbered all over me. She smelled like roses and top-soil, so I guess she was down in her special grotto in the lower yard.

Ethan came into the office shortly afterward trying to lug Misty out, but instead Misty barraged him with dirty fur and mouth goo, and I know Ethan enjoyed it. He said to her, “Quite often I feel like pawing and slobbering over people I like, too, but I never, of course, actually do it.”

I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals — things like, aren’t you just the cutest little kitty … that kind of thing, which I wouldn’t dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

Misty really would have made a terrible seeing-eye dog. She’d bound into traffic to greet truck drivers. Ethan lured Misty outside with a Cocoa Puffs promotional Frisbee, and then stood, wearing his sunglasses, beneath the balcony’s shade and played with her a while. He didn’t seem to mind the muck all over his Dolce & Gabbana three-piece.

Ethan just wants some company. He’s spending far more time around the Habitrail these days since The Hug. We all hug Ethan a lot now because suddenly he’s human and Karla held a small meeting the day after the bandage-removal episode and told us all we had to be extra kind to Ethan. I haven’t mentioned it at all to Ethan though — too weird. Susan was in shock.

After a while Ethan and I went down to look at the rubble of the house below. Gone. Fwoosh!

Ethan said something provocative and left me dangling. He muttered something about “Michael’s expensive little addiction,” and I said “Robitussin? It’s cheap,” and Ethan said “Robitussin?” so I said, “Well, what did you mean then?” and he said, “Nothing.” I hate it when people only open the floodgates a little bit, and then close it up again.

Oh — Ethan is trying to wean himself off eel phones. Good luck!

I heard a lovely expression today about brains — an ad for smart drugs touting thicker, bushier dendrites.

Moist little tumbleweeds blooming inside one’s skull.

Susan was doing her biannual hard-drive cleanup, which is half chore/half fun — going on a deleting frenzy, removing all those letters that once seemed so urgent, that now seem pointless, the shareware that infected your files with mystery viruses and those applications that seemed groovy at the time.

Susan’s own efforts did get me to do a brief cleanup of my own hard drive. I thought of Karla’s equation of the body with the computer and memory storage and all of that, and I realized that human beings are loaded with germs and viruses, just like a highly packed Quadra — each of us are bipedal terrariums containing untold millions of organisms in various states of symbiosis, pathogenisis, mutualism, commensualism, opportunism, dormancy, and parasitism. We’re like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, enclosed in a perpetual probabilistic muzz of biology.

I posted a question on the Net, asking bioheads out there what lurks inside the human hard drive.

Michael and Dad were out in the backyard later on watching R2D2 clean out the pool. There was a fair amount of soot because of the fire.

Around midnight I was in the reflective mode and walked around the streets by myself. I felt as though I was walking around the neighborhood on Bewitched. “Look—it’s Larry Tate driving a big, ugly mattress of a car! One great big honking machine.”

I thought about the word “machine.” Funny, but the word itself seems almost quaint, now. Say it over a few times: machine, machine, machine—it’s so … so … ten-years-ago. Obsolete. Replaced by post-machines. A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

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WEDNESDAY

This morning I was sitting by the pool with Michael, watching him watch the R2D2 pool cleaner. I mentioned last night’s machine/progress notion. He was eating a Snickers leftover from Halloween trick-or-treating, and said, “If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than their own, then BINGO, you believe in progress whether or not you even think so.”

So I guess I believe in progress.

Michael was staring into the clean blue fluid, an anti-Narcissus, and he twiddled his index finger in it. He said, “You know, Daniel, I wonder if, after all these years, I have been subliminally modeling my personality after machines — because machines never have to worry about human things — because if they don’t get touched or feel things, then they don’t know the difference. I think this is a common thing. What do you think?”

I said, “I think nerds secretly dream of speaking to machines — of asking them, ‘What do you think and feel — do you feel like me?”’

Michael asked me, “Do you think humanoids—people—will ever design a machine that can pray? Do we pray to machines or through them? How do we use machines to achieve our deepest needs?”

I said I hope we do. He wondered out loud, “What would R2D2 say to me if R2D2 could speak?”

My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

HELLO

My name is:

UNIX

Friend

or

Foe?

I went out shopping for memory this afternoon with Todd and Karla. I had to get a strip of 27512 EPROMs — at Fry’s, the nerd superstore on El Camino Real near Page Mill Road. I had to grovel to Ethan for the petty cash; so degrading.

The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day — if not the week — and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Therefore, to get guys to shop, a store has to eat up all of their MSE calories in one crack-like burst. Thus, Fry’s concentrates only on male-specific consumables inside their cavernous shopping arena, aisles replete with dandruff, bad outfits, and nerdacious mutterings full of buried Hobbit references.

Near the EPROM shelves, Karla, Todd, and I were marveling at the pyramids of Hostess products, the miles of computing magazines, the cascade of nerdiana lifestyle accessories: telecom wiring supplies, clips, pornography, razors, Doritos, chemicals for etching boards, and all the components of the intangible Rube Goldberg machines that lie just beneath the Stealth black plastic exterior of the latest $1,299.99 gizmo. The only thing they don’t have is backrubs. Karla tried to find tampons and failed. “Make mental note,” she said, speaking into an imaginary Dictaphone machine, “Fry’s sells men’s but not women’s hygiene products.”

Shortly after, over near the model train mock-up of the Wild West “Canyon City” was when I suddenly saw this kid who looked just like my dear departed brother Jed. And that’s when I, well, freaked out.

I stood frozen, and Karla was saying, “Dan, are you okay?” Then Todd walked by, and looked over toward where I was staring, and blurted out, “Hey, Dan — that kid looks just like the kid in the pictures in your Dad’s den.”

Karla then understood, and moved to stand in front of me, and Todd said, “Uh oh …” and headed off to the CD player aisle. Karla said, “Dan, come on. Let’s go.”

But I said, “That’s him, Karla. I’m okay. But look at him. That’s what he looked like.”

We followed this doppel-Jed around, but it felt too weird stalking someone, so we stopped ourselves. I forgot my EPROMs, and we went and sat on a parking island outside.

Todd came out and said, “Sorry about that.”

I said it didn’t matter, but you know what Todd said? He said, “I think it does matter. And I do care. So can you please tell me? Sometimes I think you underestimate me, Underwood. So just give me a chance, okay?”

So we went to The Good Earth for turkey burgers and Smoothies (Todd’s gym food) and I explained Jed to Todd. I think I do underestimate people. I don’t know why I keep these things cramped up inside me. And I think Todd is a friend to call me on it.

Afterward I quietly went into Dad’s den, closed the door behind me, and looked at Jed’s old photo, in an oval frame, lost amid Dad’s knicks and knacks. There he was as he always will be, slightly yellowed, forever twelve and forever smarter than me.

I guess I feel dumb in the same way Karla feels dumb. Except Karla really is smart compared to her family, and I really am dumb — compared to Jed. He wrote such lovely things when he was here — stories about air pilots working with scientists fighting to protect Earth from being stolen. Imaginative.

You just can’t compete with the dead. It would be easier if I had another brother or a sister, but I was born after the Pill.

Anyway, this is all to say I went into the worst head space all afternoon, as though I’d taken eleven of those cold tablets containing both an upper and a downer to cancel out the mutual side effects. So I merely felt buzzed. Just like after too much coding.

Abe’s e-mail is getting more frequent and more personal. I think he’s losing it up at Microsoft. He doesn’t like his new roommates and would seem to be missing us.

The 2 new roomates are both engaged to partner units and don’t want to hang out. They’re NEVER here.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with my not having a life. So many people no longer have Hues that you raeally have to wonder if some new mode of existence is being created which is going to become so huge that it is no longer on the moral scale - simply the way people ARE. Myabe thinking you’re supposed to “have a life” is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be.

How do we know that all of these people with “no lives” aren’t really on the new frontier of human sentience and perceptions?

I only need 2 hours of people a day. I can; get by on that amount. 2 hours of FaceTime.

I replied:

2 hours of FaceTime is not good enough Abe.

YOU are not a productmanager, and life is not a product … though wouldn’t it be SO MUCH CLEANER AND EASIER were that so.

Nonetheless, this line of thinking reminds me of the URBRN LEGEND of a Japanese exchange student who thought he was sauing money by eating nothing but Top Ramen noodles every day for a year, but he died of malnutrition before he graduatd.

After sundown, Karla and I went out to the garage to see Dad’s model train world. Mom says he hasn’t been in there at all since he began working with Michael — after returning from “his episode” up in Redmond. I guess this is a good sign — that he’s stopped obsessing and is out in the world and doing new things.

Todd and Michael had plonked down two monitors right in the middle of the landscape directly atop a farm. They had arranged the small animals in small herds atop the monitors, which are coaxial’ed into the Habitrail. The monitors were displaying some Gouraud-shaded Oop! bricks, rotating them in 3D space. Oop! is looking really good, by the way. It looks fresh and modern, as if the future is being squeezed out of the monitor screens like meat from a hamburger grinder. Todd taped a note to one monitor saying, PLEASE GOD, LET RENDERING TIME GET CHEAPER AND FASTER.

Karla had brought along a feather duster and she dusted off the mountains and the village and the little white house Dad built where Jed is supposed to live. I turned on the trains, and we watched them drive around, through the towns, over the mountains, past the rotating building blocks, and then we turned the trains off, and turned the lights out and left. Dad doesn’t seem to mind “us kids” stealing his world.

We call the two systems in the garage “Cabernet” and “Chardonnay.”

Three other system units (two Quadras and a Pentium) are called “Ogre,” “Hobgoblin,” and “Kestrel.” Two file servers are called “Tootie” and “Blair.”

Our two printers are called “Siegfried” and “Roy,” because they’re all shiny and plastic.

Our SGI Iris workstation running an old version of Vertigo software is named, of course, “HAL.”

I’m trying to end this day on an up note, but it’s hard.

THURSDAY

Mom was cleaning out the spice rack in the kitchen. I watered her philodendron plant. She was really funny. She said she eats ripple chips for breakfast now. She says it’s a bad habit and she’s trying to break it and she blames “us kids”! She always says, “You kids.” We like it, even though I think I stopped thinking of myself as a kid about four years ago. I don’t mind responsibility. I guess that’s why I don’t mind the repetitive nature of computer work.

Boy did I get a response to my Net question about the organisms that lurk inside the human body. My Pig Pen theory was indeed confirmed: the average human body contains 1 × 10¹³ cells, yet hosts 1 × 10¹⁴ bacterial cells. Long, scary names:

Escherichia coli

Candida albicans

S. aureus

Klebsiella

Actinomyces

Staphylococcus

It really makes you take seriously all these articles in the news about old diseases becoming new diseases. I took so many antibiotics and sulfas for zits in my teens that I’m going to be felled by the first postmodern virus to walk down Camino Real. Doomed.

I mentioned all these microbes to Susan and I think she’s going to become germ phobic. I could see it in her eyes. Fear.

Karla asked me what I thought of modern yuppie parents who smother their kids with attention and affection — those households where the kid rules and everything in the universe revolves around making sure they get touched enough by their parents.

I paused and tried to be honest and the answer blurted out: “Jealous.” Susan overheard and started singing “Cars,” by Gary Numan, and we all started singing it. Here in my car, I can only receive, I can lock up my doors …

And then the moment passed. I e-mailed Abe on the subject, and he was online, so the response came back immediately:

I come from one of those “zero-kidney” families … we all made this agreement once … that if anybody else in the family needed a kidney it was going to be, “Well, sorry … Been nice knowing you.”

I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to understand my body. Becauze our family was so zero-touch.

As I type, I’m bouncing my 11 pound ball of rubber bands contructed form my daily wall Street Journal. It grows.

I learned a great new word today: “deletia.” When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write:

[deletia]

It stands for everything that’s been lost.

Dad bought a P/S2 Model 70 computer just before he got fired. He stores it out in the garage with the train world. Locked deep inside the P/S2’s brains memory are WordPerfect, a golf application, and some genealogical data he tried to assemble about our family, but which he abandoned after he finally realized that our family erased itself as it moved across the country.

FRIDAY

Dad mouthed a Michaelism today: “If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than the human brain at some point, then, BINGO, you’re a de facto believer in Progress.”

My ears were burning when I heard him say this, and it was all I could do to not say, “That’s Michael’s quote.” My ears were red.

E-mail from Abe:

lm re-reading all my old TinTin books, amd I’m noticing that there are all of these things absent in the Boy Detectiue’s life … religion, parents, politics, relationship, communion with nature, class, love, death, birth … it’s a long list. And I find that while I still love TinTin, I’m getting currious about all of its invisible content.

The Valley is so career-o-centric. So much career energy! There must be a 65-ton crystal of osmium hexachloride buried 220 feet below the surface of Menlo Park, sucking in all of the career energy in the Bay Area and shooting it back down the Peninsula at twice light speed. It’s science fiction here.

Mom’s signed up for a ladies 50-to-60 swim meet. It’s next week.

Susan bought a case load of premoistened towelettes at Price-Costco. She’s mad at the rest of the Habitrail because it’s such a pigsty. She daintily wipes off her keyboard and screen and as she does so she says, “Man, I need a date, bad.”

Karla’s hair is down past her shoulders now. And she bought a dress with pink wildflowers on it, and it’s funny, the way she’s the same as ever, yet also reformatted, and it makes me look at her with a new fascination.

She’s eating all sorts of food like a total person now and I’ve noticed that when I work on her body, she’s just not as tense anymore. Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I’m on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

Daydream: today the traffic was locked on the 101. I saw visions of the Valley and snapped out of my daydream jealous of the future. I saw germanium in the groundwater and dead careers. I saw venture capitalists with their eyes burned out in their sockets by visions of money, crashing their Nissans on the 101 — past the big blue cube of NASA’s Onizuka Air Force Base, their windows spurting fluorescent orange blood.

SATURDAY

Bug’s dream came true today. He got to visit Xerox PARC with a friend of a friend from Seattle. Back with us in the Habitrail, while arranging a handful of purple iceplant flowers nipped from the PARC’s groundcover, he filled us in on details: “It’s set in a purposefully blank location — they cover up all outside traces of civilization with berms and landscaping devices so you feel as if you’re nowhere. Feeling like you’re somewhere must be bad for ideas.

“Anyway, there’s nothing but chaparral and oak trees on the hill to the west, and you feel like you’re on a virgin planet, like the planets they visit on Star Trek. It feels really ‘outposty.’ But not scary, like you’re in Antarctica. And the lobby — it’s like a really successful orthodontist’s waiting room in the year 2004. And guess what … I got to sit in the Bean Bag Chairs!”

An hour later we were all back at work, when apropos of nothing, Bug said, “Ahem, “ called our attention, and announced that he’s gay. How random!

“I’ve been inning’ myself for too long,” he said, “and now it’s time to out myself. It’s something you’ll all have to deal with, but believe me, I’ve been dealing with it a lot longer than you.”

It never even entered our heads to think Bug was anything except a sexually frustrated, bitter crank, which is not unusual up at Microsoft, or in tech in general. I think we all felt guilty because we don’t think about Bug enough, and he does work hard, and his ideas really are good. But we’re just so used to him being cranky it never occurred to us he had an interior life, too.

I asked him, “But what about the Elle MacPherson shrine, Bug?”

“Replaced. Marky Mark for the time being, but he’s only a phase.”

“Oh, Bug …” said Karla, “how long have you been deciding this?”

“Always.”

“Why now!” I asked. “So late.”

“Because now is when we all explode. We’re like those seeds you used to plant on top of sterile goop in petri dishes in third grade, waiting to sprout or explode. Susan’s exploding. Todd’s going to explode. Karla’s germinating gently. Michael’s altering, too. It’s like we’re all seeds just waiting to grow into trees or orchids or houseplants. You never know. It was too sterile up north. I didn’t sprout. Aren’t you curious to know what you really are, Dan?” I thought about it. It’s not really something you think about. “Now I can be me—I think,” Bug said. “This is not easy for me. Let me repeat that — this is not easy for me.”

“Does this mean you’ll start dressing better? “ asked Ethan. “Yes, Ethan. Probably.” So that was that.

Maybe he’ll be less cranky now. Karla and Susan said they were proud of Bug. I guess it did take guts. He’s a late bloomer — that’s for sure. And me? Am I curious to know what I really am? Or am I just so grateful to not be a full-scale, zero-life loser that it doesn’t matter?

Bean bag chairs: how odd it is that they’re still … I don’t know … a part of the world.

Dad signed up for a night course in C++. He’s going to make himself relevant.

Susan’s sister sent her a bag of pot via FedEx. She wrapped it in magazine scent strips to foil FedEx dope dogs. What a good way to make those things do something useful.

Bug’s right. We are all starting to unravel. Or sprout. Or whatever. I remember back in grade school, VCR documentaries on embryology, and the way all mammals look the same up until a certain point in their embryological development, and then they start to differentiate and become what they’re going to become. I think we’re at that point now.

SUNDAY

My sense of time perception has gone all screwy. Sundays always do that to me. One day is so much like every other day here, and yet every day is somehow different. I designed a little program that I click into every time I get an interruption — like a phone call or someone asks me a question — or I have to change a tape in my Walkman. My average time between interruptions is 12.5 minutes. Perhaps this is part of my time schism.

I mentioned these interruptions to Todd who said, “I’m still doing 18-hour days like up at Microsoft, except instead of doing just one thing, I’m doing a hundred different things — my job is so much better. More diversity. It’s the diversity of interruptions … time becomes initiative driven’ as opposed to passive.”

He then added that in Christian eschatology (“the study of the Last Things”) it is always made very clear that time and the world both end simultaneously, that there is no real difference between the two.

Then he panicked, worrying that he was doomed to turn into his parents, and roared off to the gym. He’s doing upper body today. He alternates upper and lower body. He never sleeps. That’s how he names his days: Upperbodyday; Lowerbodyday; Absday; Latsday … Sometimes I admire his single-minded drive to achieve muscular perfection, and sometimes I think he’s a freak.

I read about fishermen off the Gulf Coast whose net, dragging the ocean floor, snagged a sunken galleon, and when the net was raised, a shower of coins fell on the ship’s deck. Talk about a story to appeal to us here in the Valley!

Sent out my Christmas cards today — I went to McDonald’s and got a stack of “JOIN THE FAMILY” job application forms and filled them out for everybody. The only remotely personal question the form asks is: Sports? Activities?

Here’s what I wrote for everybody: “Abe/Susan/Bug/Michael/etc … greatly enjoys repetitive tasks.”

“Geek party” night: it’s kind of like if we were in Hollywood and going to an “industry party.” That guy Susan met from General Magic had a party up at his place in the Los Altos Hills. All day at the office Susan and Karla talked about what they’re going to … wear. It was really un-Karla, but I’m glad she’s getting into her body and taking pride in it.

Susan’s on the prowl, so she wants to look sexy, techie, “fun,” and serious all at once. Good luck. She complains to Karla that “I’ve got period boobs … they feel like they’re going to go on a lactating spree momentarily.” She’s so tell-it-like-it-is, but Susan …

Karla said, “Well, that could work to your advantage if you wear that Betsy Johnson dress.”

“Excellent idea!” Susan was motivated.

At geek parties, you can sort corporate drones from start-up drones by dress and conversation. Karla and I stood next to two guys who work on the Newton project at Apple. They talked with unflagging enthusiasm about frequent flyer miles for about 45 minutes. They had a purchasable Valley hip. One guy had the mandatory LA Eyeworks glasses and a nutty orange vest worn over baggy jeans. The other guy had Armani glasses and a full Calvin Klein ensemble, but not a matching ensemble, mind you—“thrown together” in “that expensive way.” You can’t help but be conscious here of how much everything costs, and where it comes from.

Newton Guy One: I’m trying to make United Premiere Executive 100K. Are you 100K yet?

NG 2: Oh, yeah, right after Hanover this fall. And you’ll never believe this — I was late for a flight the other day, and when the woman at the United counter pulled up my record, I looked at the monitor and my name was surrounded by DOLLAR SIGNS. How subtextual.

NG 1: Wow, great! (Obviously genuinely impressed) I think I might make it if they let me fly United to Japan the next two times. Fucking Apple Travel. I now have frequent flyer miles on Alitalia, Northwest, JAL, Lufthansa, USAir, Continental, American, and British Air. I wish we flew Virgin Air … that would be the coolest.

NG 2:1 like the toiletries case from British Air.

NG 1: They used to be cooler … all the stuff used to be from the Body Shop. But Virgin Air rules because you get your own video game monitor and you can play SEGA Games with other passengers.

NG 2: All over the plane? Or just business class?

NG 1: I don’t know. Business class only, I think. I guess it would be cooler if you could play with the 13-year old kids back in coach … SEGA should send group testers on flights and do market research that way! (Titters.)

Karla and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes, but were impressed. APPLE! NEWTON! JAL FIRST CLASS! I don’t have frequent flyer miles on any airline.

Loser.

MONDAY

Anatole’s Lexus has a vertical slot in its dashboard. It’s a coffee cup holder that pops out and does this flip-flip-flip origami thing—whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—and becomes horizontal.

Karla and I went out around sunset and had coffees and sat in the car. This was the highlight of the day, so you can imagine how dull the day was.

Stocking stuffers: I bought these red “panic buttons” at Weird Stuff, the computer surplus store across from Fry’s on Kern Street in Sunnyvale. It’s a fake IBM button with adhesive tape on the back that you’re supposed to tape on to your board and push whenever you’re feeling “wacky.”

I felt really sad for the panic buttons, because panic seems like such an outdated, corny reaction to all of the change in the world. I mean if you have to be negative, there’s a reasonable enough menu of options available — disengagement — atomization — torpor — but panic? Corrmrny.

I mentioned to Abe about my lessons in shiatsu and the weird relationship people in tech firms can have with their bodies. He replied:

I know what you mean about bodeis. At Microsoft you pretend bodies dont’ exist … BRAINS are what matter. Vou’re right, at Microsoft bodies get down played to near invisibilty with unsensual Tommy Hilfiger geekwear, or are genericized with items form the GRP so that employees morph themelfves into those international symbols for MAN and WOMAN you see at airports.

Susan got a job offer from General Magic — that guy she chatted up at the Halloween party recommended her — and Todd got a job offer from Spectrum HoloByte. At first I couldn’t imagine why — then he told us that someone at the gym must have recommended him. It’s occupational cannibalism here. Both offers are tempting. But Susan’s got too much money stoked into the Oop! fire to leave, and Todd’s simply too into it. But it’s nice to know that if Oop! flushes the toilet, there’s a Plan B ready.

Oop! isn’t about work. It’s about all of us staying together.

TUESDAY

We ate lunch in Chinatown up in SF only today, and there were these paper birds strung from the ceiling and this little kid who wanted to touch the birds and his father lifted him up to touch them. I didn’t realize, but I was staring at the whole thing the whole time, and zoned out of the conversation, and then I realized Karla was watching me.

Time time time. It’s such a current subject. It’s like money — if you don’t have it, you think about it too much.

Karla’s been thinking about time, too. Tonight during shiatsu training, with me flat on my stomach, my back and sides being poked and pummeled, her voice, disconnected from her body, informed me that in general, “One’s perception of time’s flow is directly linked to the number of connections one has to the outer world. Technology increases the number of connections, thus it alters the perception of having ‘experienced’ time.

“It’s a bell-curve relationship. There’s actually an optimum point at which the amount of technology one owns extends the amount of time one perceives or experiences.

“It’s as if your brain holds a tiny, cashew-shaped thalamus going tick-tick-tick while it meters out your time dosage for you. There’s a technological equilibrium point, after which, it’s all downhill.”

Abe e-mailed a response to my time stuff:

Once you’ve used your brain flat-out, you can’t go into the SLOW mode. You can’t drive an Infinite J-3B and then get downgraded to an Daewoo. Brains don’t workd that way.

WEDNESDAY

This morning Dad was singing “Road to Nowhere.” Michael is reprogramming my father. I have to figure out a way of dealing with this.

Whenever Anatole gets too European and insufferable — complaining too much, basically — we say to him, “Hey, Anatole, your turtleneck’s showing.” He doesn’t get this particular joke. “But I am not wearing a turtleneck …”

Anatole told us this really great thing, how at Apple they used to have a thing called RumorMonger that allowed employees to anonymously input up to one hundred ASCII characters worth of gossip into the system. So Todd hacked together a quick in-house version for our network, called Rumor-Meister. It got way out of control almost immediately:

1) SUSAN SHOPS AT TARGET BUT PUTS HER STUFF IN NORDSTROM BAGS

2) DANIEL SELLS HIS USED BOXERS VIA MAIL ORDER … $5.00 PER DAY OF WEAR

3) BUG SWEATS TO THE OLDIES

4) DAN … THOSE DOCKERS … HIP!

5) TODD HAS SAGGY NIPPLES FROM TOO MUCH BODY BUILDING THEY’RE CALLED ‘BITCH TITS’

5) TODD WEARZ DEPENDS WHEN HE BENCH PRESSES BECUZ UTHERWIZE HE’LL EVACUATE HIS BOWELS ON THE BENCH

7) KARLA PAID TO SEE “THE BODY GUARD”

8) BUG LAUGHS AT GARFIELD CARTOONS

9) KARLA CAN’T ACCESSORIZE

10) SUSAN HAS COMBINATION SKIN

11) TODD SMOKES ‘MORE’ CIGARETTES

12) I CAN HEAR KARLA’S COLOSTOMY BAG SLOSHING

13) ETHAN’S FERRARI IS A KIT CAR

14) ETHAN BUYS TIRES AT SEARS

15) BUG LOVES BARNEY

16) KARLA THINKS SHE’S A SUMMER BUT SHE’S REALLY A FALL

17) BUG HAS 2 RAFFI CASSETTES

18) DAN HAS A YANNI CD IN HIS CAR

19) ETHAN’S VISA LIMIT IS $3,000

20) SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY

21) DAN: LISTERINE KILLS GERMS THAT CAN CAUSE BAD BREATH

22) DAN STILL LIVES WITH HIS MOTHER

23) BUG SHOPS AT CHESS KING

24) MICHAEL’S SHIRT SMELL LIKE GERBIL PEE

Todd quickly removed the program from the system.

Ethan had a time crisis. “I look at my Daytimer and see: CES in January, COMDEX in May, Tim’s wedding in July, etc., and I realize the whole year is over before it’s even begun. What’s the point of it all? It’s all of it so predictable.”

Mom won a swim meet this afternoon, so we dug out the nickels from under the seat cushions and went out for a low-fat dinner to celebrate. She’s so fit these days.

I was driving down from the 280, down Peter Coutts Road, up by Systemix, Wall Data, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and the Wall Street Journal printing plant — up where Dad used to work before he was rendered obsolete — and who should I see taking a stroll together but Dad and Michael! They were lost in discussion, their arms donnishly held behind their backs.

I pulled the car into a side street and ran out to join them. Upon hearing me yell their names, they turned around, absentmindedly interrupted, utterly unfazed at seeing me. I asked what they were doing and Dad said, “Oh, you know — just taking a stroll past the old hunting grounds” (IBM).

Cars hummed by. A tech firm’s lawn sprinkler spritzed. I didn’t know what to say, surrounded by all these blank buildings with glassed-out windows, these buildings where they make the machines that make the machines that make the machines.

I began walking up the hill with them and shortly we were in front of IBM. I felt humiliated for my father, because surely there’d be employees behind the reflecto windows saying, “Oh look, it’s Mr. Underbill stalking us. He must have really lost it.”

But Dad seemed unfazed. I said, “Dad, how can you even look at those people?”

He replied, “You know, Daniel, I have noticed that people are generally quite thrilled to have change enter their lives — disasters are weathered by people with a sturdiness that is often unlike their day-to-day personality.”

Michael piped in, “Just think of the Mississippi River floods. All those people having barbecues up on their roofs, waving to the CNN helicopters — having a grand old time.”

“Precisely,” said Dad. “I’ve realized that people most dread the thought of actually initiating change in their lives and we old people are obviously the worst. It’s hard coping with chaos and diversity. We old folks mistake the current deluge of information, diversity, and chaos as the ‘End of History.’ But maybe it’s actually the Beginning.”

This sounded like Michael-style words coming out of my father’s mouth. Brainwashed!

He continued. “Old people have more or less dropped out of the process of creating old-fashioned-style history. We’ve been pushed to the side, and nobody’s pointed out to us what we, the newly obsolete humans, are supposed to do.”

“The only thing that is immune to change is our desire for meaning,” added Michael, to my overweening annoyance.

We scurried across the street during a lull in the Lexuses, and began walking down the hill. “Don’t ask me to explain this eight-jobs-in-a-lifetime reality we now inhabit. I could barely deal with the one-job-in-a-lifetime world,” Dad said.

The sun was golden — birds swung in the sky. Cars purred at a stoplight. Dad looked so relaxed and happy. “I always assumed that history was created by think tanks, the DOE and the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California. I assumed that history was something that happened to other people — out there. I never thought history was something my kid built in the basement. It’s a shock.”

I told him about the new word I’d learned, deletia, and Dad laughed. “That’s me!”

We were soon down at El Camino Real. I had to go back to my car. I asked, “Are you guys driving? You need a ride anywhere?”

“We’ll walk,” said Dad. “But thanks.”

“See you back in the Habitrail,” said Michael.

Yeah. Right.

Karla was outside the house watering the herb garden with a can when I drove up. I told Karla that it was really unChristmassy of me, but I wanted to kill Michael.

“Michael? What on earth for?”

“He’s …”

“Yes?”

“He’s stealing my father.”

“Don’t be silly, Dan. It’s in your head.”

“Dad never talks to me. He’s always with Michael. Shit, I don’t even know what he does with Michael. They could be selling bomb implosion devices to the Kazakhs for all I know.”

“Maybe they’ve become life-partners,” said Karla.

“What?”

“It’s a joke, Dan. Calm down. Get a grip on yourself. Listen to yourself. First of all, Michael couldn’t shoplift a Nestle’s Crunch bar, let alone a parental unit. He’s not the type. Has it ever occurred to you they might simply be friends?”

“He knows about Jed. He’s trying to be Jed. And I can’t compete.”

“This is nonsense.”

“Didn’t I say that about you and your family?”

“But that’s different.”

“How?”

“Because … because it is.”

“Good logic, Karla.”

She came up to me. “Feel yourself — you’re lucky you didn’t get the killer flu. Your muscles are as rigid as a crowbar. You’re making yourself sick thinking like this. Come on — I’ll do your back. I’ll talk you down from this.”

As she plucked the knots from out of my body, removed the abandoned refrigerators and couches and sacks of garbage from underneath my skin, she talked in the way she does. She told me, “Bodies are like diskettes with tags. You click on to them and you can see the size and type of file immediately. On people, this labeling occurs on the face.”

Prod, prod, rub, poke.

“If you know a lot about the world, that knowledge makes itself plain on your face. At first this can be a frightening thing to know, but you get used to it. Sometimes it can be off-putting. But I think it is only off-putting to people who are worried that they themselves are learning too much too quickly. Knowing too much about the world can make you unloving — and maybe unlovable. And your father’s face is different now. He seems like a new man — different than when he first drove up to the old house in Redmond. However he may have changed, it’s for the better. So don’t lose sight of that.”

Grudgingly: “All right.”

If it weren’t for Karla, sometimes I think I’d just implode.

FRIDAY, December 24, 1993

Software fun: Work crawled to a standstill today as Bug shared anagram software that spits out all the combinations of words you can make with your name. Michael was mad, because we lost several combined people-hours doing it. Everyone’s faxing and e-mailing their relatives and friends their name-as-anagram for Christmas tomorrow. It’s the low-budget gift-giving solution.

Everybody’s also downloading shareware and scuttling about the valley cobbling together melanges of bootleg software programs to give as presents. We’re all broke!

It seems everybody’s trying to find a word that expresses more bigness than the mere word “supermodel”—hyper model — gigamodel — megamodel. Michael suggested that our inability to come up with a word bigger than supermodel reflects our inability to deal with the crushing weight of history we’ve created for ourselves as a species.

We got off work early (7:00) to shop, but we all came back in around 10:00 and started working again, until around 1:00. Slaves, or what?

Around midnight, December 25, Susan grunted, “Uhhh, Merry Christmas.” We all reciprocated, and then went back to work.

Christmas Day, 1993

We sat inside and opened prezzies over coffee. Outside it was Richie Cunningham weather — like from Happy Days when Ralph Malph and Potsie come over and ding the doorbell, and they’re wearing their varsity coats and they say, “Hello, Mrs. C.” and the weather outside is … simply weather.

But where is everybody’s family? Why isn’t everybody with their families? Nobody went home. Bug still can’t face his parents in Idaho; Susan either (her mother is in Schaumburg, Illinois; her father is in Irvine, down south); Karla — not likely. Only Anatole went to visit his parents, and then only because they’re three hours north in Santa Rosa.

Anyway, we’re all so broke this year that we agreed not to buy anything expensive for anyone, and it was fun. Gag gifts. Christmas really brings out the geek in tech people:

• From Todd to Bug: a brown Wackenhut security baseball cap

• From Karla to me: the IBM PC version of The $100,000 Pyramid

• From me to Karla: a Hewlett-Packard calculator with jewels for buttons

• From Ethan to all of us: CandyCaller toy cellular phone filled with candies

• From Bug in all of our stockings: Dream Whip, nondairy whip topping

• From me to Karla: a Play-Doh fun factory insect-shaped insect extruding device (“Look — softer, less crumbly Play-Doh,” she squealed.)

• From various people to various people: Ren & Stimpy screen-savers (“Screensavers are the macramé of the ‘90s,” Susan boldly exclaimed.)

• From Susan to all of us: HANDMADE Martha-Stewart-y gift baskets, which made us all feel cheap. Michael asked her outright: “Susan, where did you find the discretionary time to assemble these?” She looked guilty, and then told Michael to piss off, and it was funny. Michael whispered to me: “Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.”

For some reason, everyone gave Susan premoistened towelette-related products. It’s one of those jokes that went out of control the way sometimes things go out of control for no obvious reason. A spontaneous nonlinear event. She received:

• 124 klear screen™ premoistened towelettes, “with love from Dan and Karla” (I also mailed Abe a bottle of Spray-N-Clean so he can remove the nasal encrustations on his Mac screens)

• Celeste® sani-com 3205 premoistened towelettes specifically targeted for consumer electronics mouthpieces — from Ethan. (“‘Cleans and freshens communications equipment.‘ I stole a wad of them from business class on United last year.”)

• “Pocket Wetty” brand premoistened towelettes from Japan, made by Wakodo KK. (¥ 145, thank you, Anatole.)

Everybody gave Mom a rock for Christmas and she said they were the best presents she’s ever had. Everybody tried to give her a really good rock. It’s so weird — everyone genuinely tried to find a cool rock.

Todd made a joke about Charlie Brown trick-or-treating and getting a rock in his bag, and saying, “I got a rock, “ but Mom didn’t catch the media reference.

Needless to say, there was much merchandise from Fry’s:

• From me to Dad: a wall calendar with pictures of different model train sets for every month

• From Abe to Susan: Copy of Quicken, the oddly religious personal/financial software program that has no option for roommates or other non-Cold War era sex/space-sharing alliances.

• From Susan to Todd: SIMMs (Macintosh memory modules: Single Inline Memory Modules)

• From everyone to everyone: Video and audio cables

• From Michael to Dad: an old-fashioned red Craftsman tool chest

• From Santa to all of us in our stockings: diet Cokes, Hostess products, blank video tapes, and batteries!

Of course: minivan-loads of Star Trekkiana—

• three British import CDs of William Shatner karaokeing “Mr. Tamborine Man” (famous career mistake #487) as well as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”

• Starlog magazine subscriptions

• bootleg galley proofs of the upcoming Gene Rodenberry biography

• Next Generation mouse pads

• photo glossies of Data, Riker, Deanna Troi, and Wesley from Star Trek: The Next Generation

• a plastic Starship Enterprise Control Center as well as a Franklin Mint Starship Enterprise replica

• a Deep Space Nine yo-yo, but no one has really clicked into Deep Space Nine yet, so it wasn’t popular and sat on the coffee table

Overheard: “It got rated four-and-a-half mice by MacUser!”

Mom made a turkey for dinner, and wore pearls and hammed it up as a TV mom. We all ate together in the “formal” dining room. Christmas is traditionally a bigger deal in our house, but we all see each other so much, it was no big deal being together. We talked about Macs and product.

In the background the TV set was playing a Wheel of Fortune rerun, and was making a ding-ding-ding sound. Mom asked, “What’s that noise,” and Susan said, “Someone just bought a vowel.”

Then the BIG surprise was that ABE appeared! Like something from a Disney movie, right in the middle of dinner, in a white rental car, laden with Sony products, bottles o’ booze, and a big box with a spectacular bow on top for Bug — a paper shredder from a surplus store. Bug was positively sniffling with gratitude (“It’s the nicest present anybody’s ever given me!”) He spent the rest of the afternoon wrapping newspapers and lighting flash bombs of the shredded remnants in the fireplace, ridding the Habitrail of several months and stratum of bedding material, and it looked quite presentable at the end of it.

After dinner we forced Abe into the van and drove him to 7-Eleven to buy him more Christmas presents, so he ended up with copies of People, microwaved cheeseburgers, Reese’s Pieces, and string as gifts. I realized how much I liked Abe, but I wonder if I’d ever have recognized that if I had kept living in the group house. I think our e-mail correspondence has given us an intimacy that face-to-face contact never would have. Irony!

I almost made Dad a cardboard sign saying,”WILL MANAGE FOR FOOD“ but then I felt like a bad, bad son, and then, like clockwork, I got to feeling depressed for fifty something’s, imagining them standing at the corner of El Camino Real and Rengstorff Avenue holding up such a sign. And I can’t believe Michael got Dad a nice tool kit for Christmas. How fucking thoughtful.

SUNDAY December 26, 1993

All family’ed out.

Karla and I drove down the hill to Syntex, birthplace of the birth control pill, a little bit below Mom and Dad’s house, down on Hillview Avenue — a 1970s utopian, Andromeda Strainishly empty tech complex. We sat in the grass amphitheater by the leafless birch trees, looked at the sculptures from the sculpture garden, walked over the walkways and pretended we were Susan Dey and Bobby Sherman on a date, falling through a dark cultural warp, and landing inside the technological dream that underwrote the free-wheelin’, swingfest TV-lifestyle of that era.

Syntex was the first corporation to invent the “workplace as campus.” Before California high-tech parks, the most a corporation ever did for an employee was maybe supply a house, maybe a car, maybe a doctor, and maybe a place to buy groceries. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations began supplying showers for people who jogged during lunch hour and sculptures to soothe the working soul — proactive humanism — the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private. In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at “campuses” like Microsoft and Apple — with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability.

Give us your entire life or we won’t allow you to work on cool projects.

In the 1990s, corporations don’t even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.

Karla and I felt like the last couple on earth, walking through the emptiness. We felt like Adam and Eve.

I told Karla that Ethan doesn’t think biotech is such a hot investment because it’s “too 9-to-5,” and the workers follow non-techie time schedules, and their parking lots NEVER have cars in them on Sundays. Actually, to this day, Ethan is still trying to find a biotech firm with Sunday workers. He says that once he finds one, he’ll be able to invest the farm, lie back, and retire. If only Ethan had something to invest!

Karla picked some iceplant flowers, the semiofficial plant of the hightech world because it stabilizes hillsides so quickly. She said it’s thornlessness makes it “the Play-Doh” version of cactus.

We were being very freestyle. We discussed whether we should go try and crash into the research institute off the 280 where Koko the gorilla lives with her kitten. Karla said that the transdermal nicotine patch was invented just over the hill, on Page Mill Road, near the Interval Research Corporation headquarters. History! Then Karla suggested we visit Interval Research’s campus and see what it’s like: “If Syntex was the 1970s and Apple was the 1980s, then Interval is the 1990s.”

Interval Research’s headquarters were like a middle-class honeymoon hotel in Maui circa 1976, and slightly gone to seed, with Gilligan’s Island-style lagoonlets between the buildings and a lobby with a vaguely medical/dental, is-this-where-I-drop-off-my-urine-sample? feel.

And (important) there were CARS in the parking lot, even on the Sunday after Christmas.

Karla said she knew this girl Laura who worked there, and so we checked, and she was there. We rapped on her window, overlooking the central courtyard’s lagoon, and she looked up and came out and let us in. Laura has an IQ of 800, just like Karla. She invited us inside and we played pool at their pool table. The pool table is to the 1990s what PARC’s bean bag chairs were to the 1970s.

Interval Research is so weird because nobody knows for sure what it is they really do there. They have stealth cachet. Laura does something on neural nets.

People project onto Interval’s blankness either their paranoia or their hope. People always get emotional when you mention it. Interval was the think tank-slash-company Paul Allen from Microsoft started when he learned he had something terminal. His disease left after he founded it.

Interval’s mandate is solely to generate intellectual properties, not to develop products — a heresy in Silicon Valley. If an idea is good enough, the unwritten concept is that there’s an in-house VC dude in the form of Paul Allen to foot the bill. No wonder people get jealous — imagine not having to struggle for start-up money — the intellectual freedom!

Abe is against the lack of gung-ho-ishness in pure research. He says Interval is an intellectual Watership Down. We have to remind him that since the government has pulled out of Big Science, someone has to do pure theoretical research. He grudgingly agrees.

Laura used to be at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, but left a year ago. When she started at Apple, they had a 3-to 7-year yield time for theoretical research; a project had to pay for itself from three to seven years after its start. In the early 1990s, the yield time dropped to one year—“Not one-point-oh enough,” said Laura. “Here, it’s 5-to 10-years’ yield time. That’s good.”

We asked her what the difference was between Apple and Interval, and she said that Apple tried to change the world while Interval tries to affect the world. “We have a touchie-feelie reputation,” she said, “probably because of Brenda Laurel’s work in gender and intelligence, but believe me, it’s heaven to be able to do pure math, theoretical software, or watch Ricki Lake if you need to.” (I should add, Laura is a real pool shark. I pointed this out and she said, “Oh, it’s only math.”) Brenda Laurel is the woman responsible for research into how women interact with math. She’s the Anti-Barbie.

“Staff here are a bit older, too,” she said, “and people mostly only get in via recommendation. There’s no snatch-the-pebble-from-my-hand koan routine for prospective employees. And there’s no reporting tree. It’s post-grad school, sort of. Everybody’s supposed to be equal, too, but of course you have sub-equal and super-equal personalities. They fall into planet/moon relationships soon enough. But for the most part, we’re all start-up types, ex-academic and ex-corporate types who want to keep the one-point-oh flame alive.”

Laura cleaned up at pool. I felt goofy losing, the way you do with pool. Pool is like rollerblading: you have to pretend you’re the cooly-wooliest person on earth, while you’re quietly cringing inside.

Other techies came and went, and it felt refreshingly like a normal workday. Karla promised to fix Laura up with Anatole. Laura used to have a crush on him back at Apple. L’amour, l’amour. I was a little underwhelmed. I guess I was expecting them to be doing Tesla Coil experiments or building jets out of Mylar. Or 3,000-lb. onions being carried out of the parking lot with machine-gun totin’ guards alongside the truck.

I said that since Anatole’s friends were going to help us alpha test Oop!, maybe we could get her closer to Anatole if she wanted to help test. She agreed immediately. Talk about Tom Sawyer painting a fence white!

When we got home, Mom and Dad were just back from a bike ride along the Foothills Expressway. They were sweating, and Misty was licking them in pursuit of sodium. After this, they watched Martha Stewart tapes and felt guilty for not orchestrating their lives more glamorously.

Bug popped by en route to a party in San Jose. We told him about our trip to Interval and he told us that the replacement paradigm for Graphic User Interface was going to emerge from there, and that PARC’s 1970s desktop metaphor work had become the “intellectual avocado-colored appliance of the computer industry.”

“My, how fickle are our allegiances,” said Karla.

“Oh come on, Bug,” I said, “can’t you be even a bit bitter about PARC anymore?”

“I can foam about PARC forever,” said Bug, “or I can groove on the next PARC-like think tank. I choose to groove. Where’s your mom, Dan? I brought her a rock she might like.”

Bug is spending part of his off-time developing a traffic-monitoring routine for offices that allows office workers to minimize the number of times they bump into each other in the hallway. He was inspired by that cartoon character, Dilbert, who freaks out every time he has to walk down a hall with somebody else. “I mean, what’s a person supposed to say, Kar? How often can a person regenerate fresh and witty banter each and every time they bump into a person? Oohhh … nice carpeting. Oohhh … what an attractive Honeywell thermostat control switch next to the photocopier. Human beings weren’t designed to bump into each other in hallways. I’m providing a valuable postindustrial service. Microsoft would have been heaven if my system had been operative and in place.”

SATURDAY New Year’s Day, 1994

Abe left for SFO Airport and then we all went for a drive in the Carp — Karla, Ethan, Todd, Bug, and I.

We drove past the home of Thomas Watson Jr., 99 Notre Dame Avenue, San Jose, California. Watson steered IBM into the computer age — and was made prez of the company in 1952. In 1953 he developed the first commercial storage device for computers. He died on a New Year’s Eve.

On the radio we heard that Bill got married, on Lanai in Hawaii, and we all screamed so loudly that the Carp nearly went off the road. And apparently Alice Cooper was there. So to celebrate we played old Alice Cooper tapes and purchased a “Joey Heatherton” fondue kit in a secondhand store and later on boxed it up to mail to Microsoft. They’ll probably think it’s a bomb.

“Ooh, Bill — please, please feed me another bite of hot, bubbly cheese cube, “ Susan whispered in a little girl voice in the backseat.

“I feel as though we’re in a witness relocation program,” said Todd. “You can leave Bill, but Bill will never leave you.”

We also went to “The Garage,” the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. We were expecting a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of exhibit, with bioanimatronic Deadheads hacking an Altair inside a re-created 1976 Sunnyvale Garage.

Instead there was a mock clean room, a Silicon Graphics 3D protein simulator, and a chromosome map in the biotechnology section: Goiter: bottom of gene pair no. 8 Epilepsy: lower half of gene pair 20 Red hair color: middle of pair 4 Albinism: lower 11th pair

Karla said that a quarter of all pure white cats are deaf — that the trait of whiteness and the trait for deafness are entwined together, so that you can’t have one without a possibility of the other.

This segued into a discussion of algorithm breeding that lasted well until we arrived in Berkeley where we went to a yuppie-style party at a college friend of Karla’s. Ethan drank too much and told loud jokes, and the yuppies weren’t happy. We had to take him into the backyard and cool him off. He said, “What’s a bar bill but a surtax on reality.” We’re not sure if he has a drinking problem.

The music was Herb Alpert and Brazil 66. It could easily be your own parents’ party, circa Apollo 9. Later, even though we all agreed not to, we ended up surrounding a Mac and oohing and aahing over a too-tantalizing piece of shareware.

Anecdote: We talked with Pablo and Christine, Karla’s “we-have-a-life” friends who were having the party. I asked them, “Are you married?”

“Well,” said Pablo, “we went down to Thailand and a guy in a yellow silk robe waved his hands around our bodies and …” Pablo paused. “You know, I suppose we don’t really know if we’re married or not.”

“It was sort of Mick-and-Jerry,” said Christine.

Later on, Pablo was telling this deep intimate story about how he found religion in the hinterlands of Thailand, and just at the most intense, quietest moment in the storytelling, Ethan walked into the kitchen, overheard a snatch of conversation, and said, “Thailand? I love Thailand! I’m dying to build a chain of resorts all over Thailand and Bali, kind of like Club Meds but a little more nineties. I’m gonna call them ‘Club Zens,’ right? ‘Cause of the Buddhism thing. There’s all kinds of statues and monuments over there I could use to make it look authentic — like you’re in a monastery, but with booze and bikinis. Now that’s nirvana! As soon as I make my next million …”

It was a very “Ethan” moment.

Oh-at the Museum in San Jose there was a pile of this stuff called aerogel — solid, yet almost entirely air. It seemed like thoughts made solid. It was so lovely.

Another “Oh”—Susan complains that Bug stays up all night shredding paper and the whirring of the rotors is driving her nuts.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS Me: to penetrate the Apple complex Karla: undisclosed (doesn’t want to jinx) Ethan: to slow down time Todd: visit junkyards more often, to bench 420, and to have a relationship Susan: to hack into the DMV and to have a relationship Bug: to overhaul his image and to have a relationship

680X0 a burning Lego Los Angeles moon 880 Nimitz Freeway Premium Saltine crackers Control and the feeling of mastery I Robot

The Apollo rocket designers and the NASA engineers of Houston and Sunnyvale grew up in the 1930s and 1940s dreaming of Buck Rogers and the exoterrestrial meanderings of Amazing Stories. When this aerospace generation grew old enough, they chose to make those dreams in metal.

TUESDAY January 4, 1994

Woke up sick this morning — finally got the flu. I thought it might be a hangover, but no. In spite of the fact that I think I feel like death-on-a-stick, I want to write down what happened today.

First, Michael bounced through the sliding doors around noon in a shiny happy mood, and invited us all out to see our (game show tone of voice) … new office! Ethan sold his Ferrari to do the lease. “Farewell 1980s!” he said. (He drives a 1987 Honda Civic now. “I feel like I’m in high school.”)

Uncharacteristically brash, he yelled, “Convoy! Everybody … down to our new office. You, too, Mrs. Underwood … we’ve been liberated from the Habitrail.”

We stuffed ourselves into two cars and drove through the vine-covered suburbs and carefully mowed, Frisbee-free lawns of Palo Alto’s tech parks, to Hamilton Street, a block south of University Street downtown. And it was there that we learned what Dad has actually been doing all this time.

As Michael opened a second-floor oak door, he said to me, in a voice intended to be heard by everybody, “I figured your father’s talents as a model railroader might have translatable applications into our world here …”

The wet paint smelled like cucumbers and sour cream and made me a bit pukey, but the feeling passed as I saw what lay before us … the most sculptured environment I’ve ever seen — an entire world of Lego — hundreds of 50 × 50-stud gray pads on the floors and on the walls, all held in place with tiny brass screws. Onto these pads were built skyscrapers and animals and mazes and Lego railroads, sticking out of the walls, rounding corners, passing through holes. The colors were shocking; Lego-pure. A skeleton lay down beside a platoon of robots; cubic flowers grew beside boxcars loaded with nickels that rounded the blue railroad bends. There was a Palo Alto City Hall — a ‘70s Wilshire modernist box — and there was a 747 and a smoking pipe … and … everything in the world! Pylons and towers of color, and dogs and chalets …

“I think your father should take a bow, don’t you, Daniel?”

Dad, who was in the back tinkering with a castle, looked flustered but proud, and fidgeted with a stack of two-stud yellow bricks. This universe he had built was a Guggenheim and a Toys-R-Us squished into one. We were having seizures, all of us. Susan was livid. She said, “You spent my vested stock money on … Lego?” She was purple.

Ethan looked at me: “Michael’s addiction.”

I, too, was flubbered. In the magic of the moment I looked up into the corner — and I caught Mom looking, too — at a small white house in the far back corner, sprouting from a wall, with a little white picket fence around it, the occupant inside no doubt surveying all that transpired beneath its windows, and I said, “Oh, Dad, this is — the most real thing I’ve ever seen.”

And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?

What follows I will write only because it’s what happened, and I’m sick, and I don’t want to lose it — I might accidentally erase the memory. I want a backup.

What happened was that while everyone was oohing and ahhing over the Lego sculptures (and staking out their new work spaces) the colors in front of my eyes began to swim, and everybody’s words stopped connecting in my head, and I had to go down to the street for fresh air, and I wobbled out the door.

It was a hot sunny day — oh California!—and I walked at random and ended up standing on the blazing piazza of the Palo Alto City Hall, baked in white light from the suntanning cement, the civil servants around me buzzing in all directions, efficiently heading off to lunch. I heard cars go by.

My body was losing its ability to regulate its temperature and I was going cold and hot, and I wasn’t sure if I was hungry or whether the virus had deactivated my stomach, and I felt like my system was getting ready to shut down.

I sat in this heat and light on the low-slung steps of the hall, feeling dizzy, and not quite knowing where I was, and then I realized there was somebody sitting next to me, and it was Dad. And he said, “You’re not feeling very well, are you, son.”

And I said, “Nnn … no.”

And he said, “I was following you down the streets. I was right behind you the whole time. It’s the flu, isn’t it? But it’s more than just the flu.”

I was silent.

“Right?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m a young man, Daniel, but I’m stuck inside this old sack of bones. I can’t help it.”

“Dad …”

“Let me finish. And so you think I’m old. You think that I don’t understand things. That I never notice what goes on around me — but I do notice. And I’ve noticed that I’m maybe too distant with you — and that maybe I don’t spend enough time with you.”

“FaceTime,” I said, regretting my bad joke as the words slipped out.

“Yes. FaceTime.”

Two secretaries walked by laughing at some joke they were telling, and a yuppie guy with a stack of documents walked past us.

The inside of my head did a dip, like on a ride at Knott’s Berry Farm. I found myself saying, “Michael’s not Jed, Dad. He just isn’t. And neither am I. And I just can’t keep trying to keep up with him. Because no matter how hard I run, I’m never going to catch up.”

“Oh, my boy …”

My head was between my legs at this point, and I had to keep my eyes closed, because the light from the piazza was hurting me, and I wondered if this was how Ethan’s eyes felt on his antidepressant chemicals, and then I started thinking of a small plastic swimming pool Jed and I used to play in when we were babies, and I think my mind was misfiring. And then I felt my father’s arms around my shoulders, and I shivered, and he pulled me close to him.

I was too sick, and Dad’s words weren’t registering. “You and your friends helped me once when I was lost. The whole crew of you — your casual love and help — saved me at a time when no one else could save me. And now I can help you. I was lost, Daniel. If it weren’t for you and your friends, I would never have found the green spaces or the still waters. My mind would not now be calm …”

But I don’t remember what I said next. I have faint memories — my arms touching the warm cement — of a stop sign — of a sago palm branch brushing my cheek; my father’s worried face looking forward right above my own; the clouds above his head; birds in the trees; my father’s arms beneath me; depositing me within the Lego garden; my mother saying, “Dear?” and my father’s voice saying, “Its okay, honey. He just needs to sleep for a long, long time.”