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5 TrekPolitiks

MONDAY January 17, 1994

An earthquake hit Los Angeles at 4:31 this morning and the images began arriving via CNN right away. Karla and I stayed home to watch, and when Ethan, a Simi Valley boy, heard about it on the radio driving in from San Carlos, he ran right through our front yard’s sprinkler to watch our TV. (His own Cablevision bill remains unpaid.) Damage seemed to be localized but extreme — the San Fernando Valley, Northridge, Van Nuys, and parts of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades.

“The freeways!” moaned Ethan. “My beloved freeways — Antelope Valley, ripped and torn, the 405, rubble — the Santa Monica freeway at La Cienega — all collapsed.”

We’d never seen Ethan cry. At the sight of some particularly devastated overpass, he told me, “I kissed my first date beside that off-ramp — we’d sit on the embankments and watch the cars go by.”

Anyway, it really did make us sad to see all of this glorious infrastructure in ruins, like a crippled giant. We ate breakfast, leafed through the Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), and watched all the collapsed structures.

Mom made us hot chocolate before she went to the library and then dropped us off at the office on her way. Ethan was a mess all day.

Dad quit his night course in C++ because all of the kids in his class were seventeen and they just stared at him and didn’t think he could be a student because he was too old. The students were saying things to each other like, “If he comes too close to you shout, ‘You’re not my father!’ as loud as you can.” Kids are so cruel.

So we’re going to teach Dad C++ instead.

Random moment: This afternoon I was in the McDonald’s on El Camino Real near California Street and they had this Lucite box with a slot on top where people put their business cards. It was stuffed with cards. Really stuffed.

But the weird thing was, I couldn’t locate anything on the box saying what the cards were to be used for. So I guess it’s just this human instinct to stick your business card in a slot. Like you’re going to win … what—a free orange drink machine for your birthday party? I saw a woman’s card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying “Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business.” Here’s this Stanford graduate at McDonald’s putting his card in a box at random. I just don’t understand people sometimes. Didn’t he learn anything at Stanford?

Geek party tonight. Relief! Without geek parties, we’d never see anybody but OURSELVES, day in, day out. And the big news of the day was that Karla and I found a place to house-sit — it belongs to a woman who got the layoff package from Apple. We move in this weekend (yayyy!), and the move comes as some relief as the Karla/Mom not communicating thing is oddly wearing on all of us.

The party: It was in San Francisco (the “sit-tay,” as now cooler-than-us-by-virtue-of-living-there Bug and Susan call it), in Noe Valley at Ann and Jorge’s, Anatole’s friends. Jorge’s with Sun Microsystems and Ann’s with 3DO. There were LARGE quantities of delicious, snobby San Francisco food, great liquor, industry gossip, and TVs displaying earthquake damage all over the apartment. Since us Oop!sters are all broke, we saved pots of money by not eating all day before the party. We never eat before geek parties.

In the moneyed world of Silicon Valley, nothing is uncooler than being broke. Karla and I were both curious to see how Ann and Jorge live. When we arrived, I was overwhelmed by the hipness factor. And where are the GEEKS? Everyone was dressed…. like real people. Where were the ironic fridge magnets? The futons? The IKEA furniture? The Nerf products? The house looked as though it had been made over by Martha Stewart. There were REAL couches, obviously purchased NEW, in red velvet with gold and silver silk throw pillows; Matisse-derived area rugs; little candles everywhere; a REAL dining table with SIX chairs around it in its OWN ROOM with vases and bowls full of pine cones on the mantel. These people were like ADULTS … seamless!

Susan said they’ve merely disguised their evidence of not having a life: “I mean, it’s like you go to somebody’s house for Thanksgiving and they’ve spent eighteen hours covering the rooms with little orange squashes and quinces and crepe paper, and the meal is like Henry the Eighth, and you can’t eat because you get this creepy sick feeling that the person who did the dinner has nothing else to do with their life. It’s the dark side of Martha Stewart’s Living.”

Ethan said Susan still felt guilty for putting too much work and money into our gift baskets at Christmas.

I thought that overdecoration and nice houses might be the regional version of the never-used kayak in the garage up at Microsoft. But a darker thought emerged: these may possibly be techies who HAVE A LIFE, and they’re upping the ante for the rest of us.

Susan, in spite of ragging on the decor with us, started fellating our hostess, Ann, over the subject of houses. They were talking about some expensive store in Pacific Heights where no doubt all of this furniture comes from.

Ann: “Fillamento, it’s on Fillmore and Sacramento. They have the best stuff, I just got this amazing coverlet for our bed there. They had to special-order it from Germany, but it is so gorgeous … do you want to see it?”

Susan: “Of course!”

Off they went, comparing decor purchases. You’d never know that Ann used to be a chip designer.

The local rage is obscure, expensive premium vodkas — it’s the litmus of cool at geek parties. Later on, Susan, Karla, and I were standing around drinking Ketel-1, when some guy who’d been checking Karla out came up and said, “Hi, I’m Phil, I’m a PDA.”

PDAs are what Newton is — it’s an acronym for Personal Digital Assistant.

“You look more analog than digital,” Susan oh-so-wittily batted back at him.

“It stands for Peons Down at Apple!” Phil chortled, ignoring Susan, and zooming in on KARLA. It was really embarrassing, because Susan wasn’t picking up on the fact that she was being ignored by Phil. Karla was grossed out by Phil, and I was on red alert about this big hulk zooming in on Karla. I inserted myself between him and Karla. “Maybe it stands for Public Display of Affection.” I put my arm around Karla and introduced everybody.

Susan was laughing at Phil’s jokes — she’s so desperate for a dating architecture in her life, and when Phil turned around Karla mouthed the words: REMOVE HIM FROM MY LIFE to Susan, then grabbed my shoulder, and we went off to the den to marvel at the amount of stuff owned by our hosts. We felt like East Germans visiting West Germany for the first time. Phil, meanwhile, sensing defeat, finally noticed Susan, and began chatting her up.

For the next hour, we watched Phil regale Susan with exciting tales of product meetings, shipping deadlines, engineering crises, and code names for products.

I can’t stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.

Here, it’s so much more complicated — you’re supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom’s or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed. It makes me miss Redmond, but at the same time, it is kind of inspiring. I feel conflicted.

Even Michael noticed, with a rare lapse into pop culture: “Perhaps David Byrne was talking about the geeks inheriting the earth in that Talking Heads song, ‘This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My God! How did I get here?”’

Bug talked to a guy who’s a game producer at a company called PF Magic. (What’s up with all of these companies named “Magic”? Is it some New Age/George Lucas-type deal or what? Uniquely Northern Californian.) Bug thinks the guy might be gay, but it was hard to tell. “All the guys around here dress well enough to have their heterosexuality be suspect … it’s not very helpful for me.”

Bug has done a little damage himself over at the Stanford Shopping Center, as part of his new program to “become enculturated into my new lifestyle.”

It would be so weird to all of a sudden have to take all of the myths and stereotypes and information about another kind of sexual orientation and somehow wade through them in order to construct yourself within that image. Susan’s kind of doing it, too, but within heterosexuality — all of a sudden she’s a Sexual Being, and I think she’s having to learn as much about sex as Bug is, even though theoretically she’s been heterosexual all her life.

Many geeks don’t really have a sexuality — they just have work. I think the sequence is that they get jobs at Microsoft or wherever right out of school, and they’re so excited to have this “real” job and money that they just figure that the relationships will naturally happen, but then they wake up and they’re thirty and they haven’t had sex in eight years. There are always these flings at conferences and trade shows, and everyone brags about them, but nothing seems to emerge from them and life goes back to the primary relationship: Geek and Machine.

It’s like male geeks don’t know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it’s a user interface problem. Not their fault. They’ll just wait for the next version to come out — something more “user friendly.”

Ethan got through to his parents on a cellular phone around sunset; he learned they were having the grandest of times, barbecuing burgers and corn on the front lawn, and meeting their neighbors for the first time in years. “Mom said the Ronald Reagan Library was untouched. Like I care.”

I think he wanted more drama. I think he would have been happier to hear that his mother was pinioned beneath a collapsed chimney, trickling blood into the phone receiver held up to her ear by his father.

Todd didn’t come to the party. He was out on an actual, real, genuine, not-fake, date-style DATE tonight.

I‘m coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious … that, no matter how you look at it, machines really are our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn’t come down to earth and make machines for us … we made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls … by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving.

Champaign-Urbana

Her parents are engineers but that wasn’t enough to keep them together.

Pull the wires from the wall

Chelyabinsk-70

TUESDAY

Shake-up: Todd has begun seeing a female body builder named Dusty, so I guess Armageddon can only be a little ways away. And here’s the freaky part — Dusty codes! She’s done systems for Esprit and Smith & Hawken. But she’s the uncodiest female I’ve ever met.

“We met at the protein drink sales case at Gold’s Gym,” beamed Todd, showcasing Dusty, who emerged into our office like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. “Dusty,” Todd called, “strike the pose!” From offstage a ghetto blaster pumped out thwomping lipstick-commercial Eurodisco.

Dusty — late twenties or early thirties, with titanium hamstrings (and perhaps too much time spent in tanning booths) in ragged fringed hotpants and a ripped T-shirt commenced vogueing official International Bodybuilding Federation poses. We gaped openly. Such brazen posing!

Dusty then grabbed Misty, who Mom brought downtown and then promptly left with us while she did some shopping, and twirled her by the paws in circles above our office’s Lego garden. All that was missing were popping flash bulbs and a smoke machine, and Misty, unused to being picked up in such a manner, was blissed and became Dusty’s instant lifelong fan.

Dusty put down the now-dizzy Misty and said, “Yeah …” in a Chesterfields-smoked-through-a-tracheotomy-slit voice (Dusty gets her voice from barking out aerobics commands, which, Todd informs us, she teaches) “… all those big plastic tubs of branch-chain protein growth formula with gold lettering — Toddy and me were fighting for the last container of MetMax.”

Their eyes met and they squeezed each other’s hands — it’s a good thing they like each other, because otherwise it would be like two monster trucks chewing each other up at the Kingdome.

Karla and Susan were being catty about Dusty:

Karla: “Dusty — sounds like the name of someone who rides in a radio station traffic news-copter.”

Susan: “She looks like she just escaped from an Ice-Follies Smurfs-on-Ice mall show — tousled mall hair, spandex, and perky perma-smile.”

Michael closed his door. He doesn’t like this side of human nature, but later Karla said it’s because he’s attracted to super-strong women. “Trust me,” she said. “I can tell these things.”

Ethan is building a Lego freeway cloverleaf. Once it’s finished, he’s going to smash it and repair it. He’s been horrified by the Northridge quake in Los Angeles. He’s indeed a Valley boy.

At a Canon photocopy shop he enlarged a news wire photo of the collapsed Antelope Valley freeway to up to wall-sized and hung it in the office as a model to build from. I suppose he should have used the money to pay his CABLE BILL, but Karla thinks he likes to have an excuse to visit us more at the office.

Michael wisely allows no cable in the office and has forbidden us from playing Melrose Place and hockey fight dubs on the office VCR unit.

Ethan has already demolished the Wilshire Modernist block of the Palo Alto City Hall Dad constructed.

“Reconstruction is part of the plan,” said Ethan, and Dad, although miffed, took pity on Ethan and decided not to get huffy.

We LOVE our new office and we no longer have to worry about rubbing our fingers on surfaces and finding accumulations of Ethan’s dead scalp particles. Dad has a Dustbuster mounted on the wall. We also have SPACE.

Nobody scored last night. Susan got Phil’s phone number and Bug got the PF Magic guy’s number, even though he’s not sure if he’s straight or not. The 1990s!

Susan was a bit sheepish around me and Karla, because she knows Phil is a loser, and she knows that we know.

Tech moment: we have our own Internet domain and are subservient to nobody. Our house is wired directly to the Net with a mail-order 486 using Linux on a 14.4 modem with a SLIP connection to the Little Garden (an Internet service provider down here). I am now daniel@oop.com.

“@”could become the “Mc” or “Mac” of the next millennium.

Surprise: Mom told me that Dad’s been looking for work elsewhere — and that Michael knows about it. “He needs to be among his own kind, dear.”

Actually, today was just a big waste of a day, work-wise. I didn’t get anything done because I had too many interruptions. I’d start to do something, then I’d be distracted by something else, forget what I was doing in the first place, and then get so worried that I wasn’t getting anything done, that it wrecked even further my ability to get anything done. Sometimes too much communication is too much communication. I should rent a Nature video and relax, but instead, tonight we rented The Poseidon Adventure and watched the ship turning upside down scene over and over about fifty times and then we rented Earthquake and watched LA dismantle itself about fifty times, frame-by-frame.

Mom was in the breakfast nook typing a letter to her sister on an IBM Selectric and we got into an argument about whether anybody made them anymore. Maybe in Malaysia.

WEDNESDAY

Dusty is now working with us! Michael hired her under the condition that she devote herself to the company and confine her body experimentation to off-hours — as well as to forgo aerobic instruction moonlighting altogether until shipping. “And no smart drugs!” said Michael. “Not that it’s my business, but smart drugs turn people into Tasmanian Devils, not Einsteins.”

“Touche, Michelangelo,” said Dusty. “That’s French for meow.” She has a hard time calling anybody by their real name.

Dusty was trying on a new marigold yellow posing bikini she’s hoping to wear in this Fall’s Iron Rose IV Competition in San Diego. Dusty herself was the color of a roasted turkey.

Karla and Susan were once again certainly gaping. But in the end they broke down, approaching her, asking probing questions, touching her body like it was the monolith in 2001. They’ve—we’ve—never seen such a hyper-articulated body before. It reminds me of the first time I ever saw an SGI rendering at full blast.

“Toddy” has bailed out of his geek house near the Shoreline off-ramp and has moved in with Dusty up in Redwood City. Eyebrows shot up at the news of such speedy cohabitation, and then Todd confessed he and Dusty had been seeing each other for MONTHS. How could he keep a secret like that in an office as small as ours?

Look and Feel escaped this afternoon from their newly reconfigured Habitrail and chewed up the caboose on Michael’s Lego train. So they’re on probation now.

All of us went to the Tonga Room at the Fairmont in San Francisco to celebrate Dusty’s first day as our hacker, working with Michael. It was this incredible blowout, like in college. Dusty cut in front of all these people who were lined up to get in and then blithely waved us over to the table she’d procured. Cool! She’s a bulldozer.

The Tonga Room is filled with rich dentists from Düsseldorf watching this Gilligan’s Island fake Tiki raft float across an old swimming pool while fake thunder and rain roar, and a live band plays disco medleys. We ordered these ridiculous umbrella and fruit-wedge drinks with high centers of gravity, so every time somebody got up to dance (Oye Como Va!), all the drinks fell over and the waitresses just wanted to kill us. We had to switch tables three times because of the fruit pulp buildup, and the ochre tablecloths looked like swamps of barf.

Two things: Dusty said, “I put myself through school working as a waitress. The guys loved me. I brought them food and beer — and then I left them. Pigs.”

Karla and Susan said, “Amen,” much to my horror. They were all wearing those little drink umbrellas in their hair.

Michael noted that the Tonga Room uses a form of ice that is neither cubic nor slush-based: “Someone had better notify 7-Eleven immediately. It’s a niche!”

Dusty gave Susan lessons in dating architecture: “Tech women hold all the cards, and they know it. Tech men outnumber tech women by about three to one, so the women can choose and discard mates at will. And let’s face it, it’s cool for a guy to be dating a tech chick.”

I inwardly agreed with this. “Tech chicks” all seem so much wiser and mature than the guys (the Karla Attraction Factor) that I think they must get fed up. I overheard Susan and Karla complaining about tech guys at a geek party last month, and I started to feel a little insecure. Up at Microsoft, geeks looked exactly like what they were — nerds, misfits, Dungeons & Dragons players out on day pass. Down here in the Valley, these tech guys are good-looking — they can pass in the “normal” world without revealing their math team past. Whenever Susan and Karla started gushing over some cute guy, I started saying, “He’s probably in MARKETING.” It made me feel better.

Susan, nonetheless, wanted to know why she was having such a dating problem. Dusty said, “I think your problem is that you think everyone else is a freak except you, but everybody’s a freak — you included — and once you learn that, the World of Dating is yours.”

I thought Susan would go ballistic, but instead she agreed.

THURSDAY

Dad was out today — job hunting. Anywhere else on earth except here in the Valley he wouldn’t have a chance, but here he might find something.

Bug is freaked out because Magic Eye stereograms, the black light posters of the 1990s, don’t work with him. He’s worried it’s color-blindness linked, and he called the Garage Museum down in San Jose to see if it means something bad. He remembers those genetics charts they had there. “I’m stereogramatically blind!”

Ethan and I went out for a drink again. He was really swigging down the drinks, and so I asked him if it was smart to drink while taking antidepressants. He said, “Technically no, it’s a pretty fuck-witted thing to do, but drinking allows me to take an identity holiday.”

I asked him what this meant. He said that since the new isomers of antidepressants are rewiring his brain, and since he’s becoming a new person because of it, every day he forgets more and more what the old person was who used to be.

“On the stuff I’m taking, booze never really makes you smashed,” he said, “but it does allow me to remember the sensation of what I used to be and feel like. Just briefly. Life wasn’t all bad back then. I’d never go back to it full time, but I do get nostalgic for my old personality. I imagine in a parallel-forked road universe there’s a sad, fucked-up Ethan, achieving nothing, feeling cramped, and going nowhere. I don’t know. Once you’ve experienced the turbo-charged version of yourself, there’s no going backward.”

He had another Wallbanger—“You know, pal — maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time — sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs.” He took a final sip. “Nahhhh …”

Susan caught a cold, “From having my panties systematically saturated with fruit pulp at the Tonga Room.”

Tomorrow we move into our house-sitting house.

Before bed I told Karla about Ethan’s identity holiday — of drinking to recapture the feeling of what your real personality used to feel like.

“It’s all about identity,” she said.

She said, “We look at a flock of birds and we think one bird is the same as any other bird — a bird unit. But a bird looks at thousands of people, at a Giants game up at Candlestick Park, say, and all they see is ‘people units.’ We’re all as identical to them as they are to us. So what makes you different from me! Him from you? Them from her? What makes any one person any different from any other? Where does your individuality end and your species-hood begin? As always, it’s a big question on my mind. You have to remember that most of us who’ve moved to Silicon Valley, we don’t have the traditional identity-donating structures like other places in the world have: religion, politics, cohesive family structure, roots, a sense of history or other prescribed belief systems that take the onus off individuals having to figure out who they are. You’re on your own here. It’s a big task, but just look at the flood of ideas that emerges from the plastic!”

I stared at her, and I imagine she was assuming I was digesting — compiling — what she’d just told me, but instead, all I could think of, looking into her eyes, was that there was this entity — Karla — who was different from all others I knew because just under the surface of her skin lay the essence of herself, the person who thinks and dreams these things she tells to me and only me. I felt like a lucky loser and I kissed her on the nose. So that’s me for the day.

Oh … I found a big stack of old Sunset magazines for sale in a secondhand shop. I bought them for Mom. She’s a Sunset freak. Mom picked them up like they were feathers. She’s strong now. She’s all for Dusty developing her body. She and Dusty have been comparing notes. It’s such a relief when your friends date cool people.

FRIDAY

Abe:

Today I called 1-800 numbers and ragged on companies about therir products. I complsined to the Matell hotline (1 -800-524-TOYS) that the new Hotwhheels aren’t as cool the ones I had when I wazs growing up. The only decent one they have is a Lexzus SC400. I’ve bought 3 of them (the toys), but be this as it may, Mattel is NOT exonerated. Where are the Bubble cars, may I ask? So this is my life, Dan. C’est la Vie.

Mattel karma! Susan came storming into the office late in the afternoon, having just visited a Toys-R-Us store in pursuit of a present for her niece. Susan was furious about Mattel products, too — in particular about Barbie dolls. As I was the only person in the office, I received the entirety of her postfeminist critique.

“The aisle — it was pink — I mean, the entire aisle was this shocking, moist, Las Vegas labia pink color, and it was a big aisle, Dan. Tens of thousands of Barbies gazing vapidly at me — this wall of mall hair — the aisle haunted with the ghostly sound of purged vomit yet to come — of unsustainable desire. Their necks thicker than their waists; sparkles; an incitement to eating disorders—”

Susan was just going on and on, so I used that tactic you use on little kids who won’t stop crying — I simply changed the subject. I told her how weird it is to think that simply by walking down the wrong aisle at Toys-R-Us at the wrong moment in your child’s development, you can forever screw up their future: “They have a whole aisle devoted to McDonald’s restaurant products — french-fry making machines, burger makers, shake makers … Say you overlook the computer aisle and walk down the McDonald’s aisle instead — one tiny error and your kid’s got a drive-thru headset surgically embedded in his cranium for the next seven decades.

“Toy stores are like Brave New World. Mom! Pop! Choose your aisle correctly. That’s all I can say.”

I later e-mailed this Huxleyan thought to Abe who replied:

*1959*

100th McDonald’s: Fon du Lac, Wisconsin *1960*

200th McDonald’s: Knoxville, Tennessee *1964*

Filet-o-Fish born *1966*

First indoor-seating McDonald’s: Huntsville, Rlabama

*1970*

First McDonald’s breakfast: Waikiki, Hawaii *1973*

Quarter Pounder born *1975*

Egg McMuffin born *1975*

Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonions-onasesameseedbun

*1983*

McNuggets born

At the office we’ve decided that instead of Friday being jeans day, we’d have Boxer Shorts Day instead. It’s way comfier, way sexier, and it’s funny watching Michael admonish the male staff members, “Er … gentlemen: no units displayed if at all possible.”

Dad came in to the office from job hunting around sundown. We made him a Cup O’Noodles and played some crank phone call tapes to cheer him up. Dusty tried to get him to wear a pair of striped boxers but Dad politely refused. Later on I went up to the house and helped him remove an old basketball hoop above the garage that’s been there since the dawn of bellbottoms. I fell and cut myself on some of Mom’s rosebushes, and I know it’s corny, but I got to thinking, it’s no surprise roses are the Official Flower of Love.

My hard drive accidentally trashed today’s file, so I include a snippet of the trash here as a curiosity piece. Language!

All 11I 11 It the office we" live decided that instead of Friday Fll11113636111136being jeans day, we" 11111111113636373733d have Boxoi Shorts Day instead. It" 11113838393940404141424243434444s way comfici, way sexier, lllland it"lllls funny watching Michael admonish the male stall members, ""1111451111114545464647474811114848Please guys, no units displayed if at all possible.""! 111494950505l&f&v&w&x&z&A&e&i&a&A&n&O' '4'O'S'['_'o 'Q'U**"*t*l*}+ + + L + h + v, ,?,'-9-a-}-A-6-0-©-*-0-»-A-0-fl-,,-AOU. .?.G.O.S.T.b.l.~.N.6.e.e.i.i.u.ii.B.0/ / /S/b/c/d/e/A/6oOO¥Of~lT'lJnLrt^^^ " " I " I A A I " „ " „ " „ " " U " U " " " U " " U " U " \ ] c U A V A I vUAcH]UA]c$\]cPR5151525253535454555556561111111111Dusty tried to get him to wear a pair of striped boxers but Dad politely refused.

SATURDAY

Today was the day Karla and I finally moved into our (temporarily) own place … the Apple friend of Anatole who’s going to Tasmania for eight months to study batik (she got the layoff package … it’s like backward Microsoft) and so we’re house-sitting for her. Like so many techie houses, it’s big, sterile, stuffed with consumer electronics, and there’s nothing on the walls and there are about six empty rooms lit by dozens of skylights. At least it’s not one of these big Mediterranean 1980s stucco houses Susan calls “Drug Lord” houses — ostentatious stucco monuments with a Porsche 928-S parked out front.

Anyway, to remedy the house’s sterility we’re doing what Ethan did with his photo of the collapsed freeway overpass, and we’re making photocopy blowups of cool images. We’ve made blowups of Barry Diller (inventor of the Movie of the Week back in 1973 — in an office inside the ABC Entertainment Complex, Century City, Los Angeles, California) as well as a blowup of the ABC Entertainment Complex’s twin towers.

I also enlarged an elegant undamaged California freeway cloverleaf from the seminal Handbook of Highway Engineering. And needless to say we did a double portrait of BILL. One right-side up — another upside down.

Ethan delivered to us a bottle of 1977 Cabernet as a housewarming present and said he felt jealous of our posters — the highest compliment, coming from him.

Todd and Dusty seem to have found soulmates in each other. They spend their precious few hours of post-code time discussing the vagaries of the New Human Body — in the office and at gym, deciding which mini-muscle needs alteration, discussing steroids as though they were Pez, and figuring out the mechanics of cosmetic surgery. They want to become “post-human” —to make their bodies like the Bionic Woman’s and the Six Million Dollar Man’s — to go to the next level of bodyhood.

Todd was in a chatting mode today — love’s first sweep, and I know what it is — and he told me of how happy Dusty makes him feel, of how pretty he thinks she is, of how she seems to believe in something and to believe more than Todd believes. “It’s as if all those one-night stands never mattered. Because all I care about is Dusty crushing my body (Have you ever done that Daniel … been crushed? God, is it sexy) and having her speak to me. Nobody’s ever spoken to me before. I mean, not to me. I was always just a soul to be harvested or a human unit. But with Dusty I’m me, and I don’t have to fake normality.”

“That’s how I feel with Karla,” I said.

Todd said, “She pumps me. Love is just this great big pump.”

Todd, on top of his coding work, is designing an Oop! Muscleman starter kit that will fold and mutate like a GoBot or a protein molecule into bulldozers, tanks, satellite stations, and Kalashnikovs. Michael thinks it’ll be a big hit.

Michael is making each of us design an Oop! starter module so that we can utilize all segments of our brain aside from the cattle-blindered coding part of our brain. Michael is really such a slave driver. He squishes everything he can out of us. It’s very Bill, so we can relate to it. I’m doing a space station.

Susan, among her many tasks — the main one of which is designing the Oop! user interface — is designing a dancing skeletons program. She has a burned-out Stanford medical grad student converting all human bones into Oop! bricks, which are in turn linked, like bones in the human body. But she’s also having other animal skeletons digitized, and she’s designing her program so that users can build new species. Flesh comes next.

Ethan is even developing a game — one where players train dolphins for the Department of Defense and he’s designing Oop! weaponry and boats and submarines.

Karla’s designing a vegetable factory in which small chipmunks trapped inside must run for their lives or end up diced (“God bless Warner Brothers”); Bug is designing a castle with dungeon, and I must say, it’s good. He’s come up with “torture nodes.”

Michael wants Oop! users to be able to play Doom-like chase games throughout whatever we build, and is working to form an allegiance with a company up-Bay in San Francisco that provides a multiline server so that nerds in different area codes can game together.

Michael was on a rant, quite justified, I thought, about all of this media-hype generation nonsense going on at the moment. Apparently we’re all “slackers.” “Daniel, who thinks up these things?”

Michael pointed out that humans are the only animals to have generations. “Bears, for example, certainly don’t have generations. Mom and Dad bears don’t expect their offspring to eat different kinds of berries and hibernate to a different beat. The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.”

Michael’s theory is that technology creates and molds generations. When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant. Each of us as individuals becomes our own individual diskette with our own personal “version.” Much more logical.

Mom couldn’t get the garage door opener to work, so I fixed it for her. We took Misty for a walk along La Cresta. The stop sign at the corner of Arastradero was completely covered with Scotch tape, pieces of ribbon, and empty balloons from where people mark off birthday parties. It was funny.

Ethan’s freeway is taking far longer to build than he anticipated and it “eats bricks like crazy.”

I asked Dusty if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said, “No, but indeed I rilly, rilly lusted after them in my heart. Hippie parents, you know. Rill crunchy. I had a Raggedy Ann doll made in, like, Sierra Leone. And all I rilly desired was a Barbie Corvette — more than life itself.”

*sigh*

“So instead I played with numbers and equations. Some trade-off. The only store-bought toy I was ever allowed was a Spirograph, and I had to beg to receive it as a May Day present. And I had to pretend I wanted it because it was mathematical — so clean and solvable. But my parents were suspicious of mathematics because math isn’t political. They’re like, freaks.”

Dusty’s forearms resemble Fopeye’s. And they have pulsing veins that look like a meandering river. Ethan and I were talking, when he shouted across the room, “Jesus Christ, Dusty — I can take your pulse from over here.”

I asked Karla if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said (not looking up from her keyboard), “This is so embarrassing, but not only did I play with Barbies, but I played with them up until an embarrassingly late age — ninth grade.” She then looked over at me, expecting reproach.

This did come as some surprise; I suppose it revealed itself on my face. She began typing again, and speaking over the clack of her fingers on the keyboard.

“But before you go and think I’m a lost cause, you should know that I gave my Barbie admirable pursuits — I took apart my brother’s Hot Wheels and made a Barbie Toyota Assembly Plant, giving Barbie white overalls, a clipboard, and I provided jobs for many otherwise unemployed Americans.” She paused and looked up from her keyboard. “God, no wonder my parents refused to believe I was intelligent.”

MONDAY

This afternoon while visiting Todd and Dusty’s cottage in Redwood City, I tried to find a snack in their fridge.

Bad idea.

Pills, lotions, capsules, powders … anything except what normal human beings might call “food.” There was a Rubbermaid container of popcorn. There was Turbo Tea, Amino mass, pure Creatine, Mus-L-Blast 2000+, raw chickens, Super Infiniti 3000, and chromium supplements as well as small bottles I thought it more polite not to inquire about.

I really have to wonder if Todd’s doing steroids. I mean, he’s just not physically normal. We’re all going to have to face this.

Dusty was out at the Lucky mart buying bananas and kelp. I asked Todd, “Shit, Todd — what is it exactly you want your body to do for you? What is it your body’s not doing for you now that it’s going to do for you at some future date?” Not really Todd’s sort of question.

“I think I want to have sex using a new body which allows me to not have to remember my ultrareligious family.” Todd mulled this over. We looked around the apartment, strewn with hex dumbells and rubber flooring mats. “My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around.”

Susan was sulking about her dating architecture here in the Valley. Her fling with Mr. Intel ended long ago — she says Intel’s culture is too macho to accept macho women. Phil the PDA was history eons ago. She kept talking about that Mary Tyler Moore episode where Mary tabulates the number of dates she’s had over the span of her dating career and gets depressed. And then there was a big debate as we tried to remember if that was the episode where she began dating Lou.

Susan only seems to meet techies. (“Well, Sooz,” says Karla, “you do spend almost all of your time in the Valley …”)

“It’s not just the techiness, Kar — it’s that the number of flings I’ve had in my life now outnumbers the number of relationships. I’ve crossed a line.”

Tonight she has a date with a Marina District tattoo artist, so we’re all expecting her to show up tomorrow with a Pentium chip etched into her shoulder.

The thing about Susan is that she’s making the leap into self-reconstruction so late in life. Her new dominant attitude comes from a genuine need, but it’s so twisted by years of — I don’t know exactly what. I don’t know as much about Susan as I ought, I suppose. Her IBM upbringing and all of that. But the subject … how to broach it?

Ethan seems to have forgotten his partially completed freeway. We’ve nicknamed it the “Information Superhighway.”

Susan reformatted and zinged-up Dad’s resume on Quark. He used a (oh God …) dot-matrix printer to do his old resume. Mom’s Selectric would have even been cooler.

This afternoon I mistakenly said Palo Alto was in the “Silicone Valley,” and Ethan snapped at me, “Silicone is what they put inside of tits, Dan-O. It’s Silikawn …”

Boom! Dusty began telling us about her first breast implants at age 19, its subsequent failure, her litigation and her support groups — tales of black goo seeping from nipples, “… immunosuppressive globules of silicone gel migrating through my blood system, triggering this never-ending yuppie flu. It was awful. That’s how I got into body manipulation and extreme health … because of the globules.”

Yet again, the Dustmistress had us all riveted. Karla and Susan are now totally obsessed with Dusty’s arms, which are like leather-sheathed steel cables from the Bay Bridge, all digitally animated like Spielberg dinosaurs. When she flexes her arms, you feel queasy — like you’re going to be eaten. She says that because she has long arms, she has to work “harder to the power of three” to make them appear as proportioned as they would on a shorter woman. She’s a calculus whiz.

The cattiness with Dusty ended quickly. Now they all like each other. Actually, I think it goes deeper than “like”—but where or how, I don’t know.

Dusty’s older than Todd by about five years. During a carbo-loading break later in the day, she started telling me and Karla all this personal stuff. It doesn’t take much with Dusty. The distinction between herself and the public is muzzy.

“I made the switch and started liking younger guys about two years ago. The older ones kept getting all serious … and wanting to discuss marriage. The young kids are puppy dogs and when I want to get rid of them, I just start talking babies and before you know it they start giving me reasons why they have to hang out at their friends’, and why they can’t come over.”

She found a piece of skin on her chicken breast and picked it off.

“I think that once I start having babies, I’m going to forget my body. But tell that to Toddy and you’re dead meat. I think he’s ‘a keeper.’ Remember — I can crush you into cat food with my thumb and index finger alone.”

And she could!

Karla says that Dusty’s freaked out that any baby she might have will be a freak because of the fantastic quantities of scary digestibles she’s eaten over the years, on top of her implants and her flirtations with bulimia and extreme diets.

“She’s done it all,” says Karla, “steroids, uppers, downers, coke, poppers, Pritikin, Oprah …”

Went with Karla up to Mom and Dad’s and helped them sort things out for recycling. When nobody was looking, I hucked some fallen tangerines at the Valotas’ house down below ours. Mr. Valota is this Gladys-Kravitz-from- Bewitched type guy who somehow taps into all of the misinformation, apocrypha, and bad memes floating about the Valley and feeds them back to Mom in the aisles of Draeger’s in Menlo Park. He’s always saying discouraging things about Oop! to Mom. Gee thanks, Mr. Valota.

I liked hearing the tangerines go thunk as they hit the cedar shingles of his lanai. It’s never the Mr. Valotas of this world whose houses burn down.

I was breathing really hard as I was carrying the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers to the end of the driveway. I hope nobody noticed that I’m way out of shape.

Abe’s list of things to do on how to get a life:

1) Move out of a group house

2) Get involved in non-computer-related activities

3) Treat yourself to a bubble bath (I couldn’t think of anything else)

TUESDAY

Dusty’s twin sister, Michelle, came to visit. She’s a collagen sales rep for a biotech firm near San Diego and like a plumper, less turbo-charged Dusty.

She ambled around the Lego garden for a while, watched us code, then yawned pointedly. After further multiple theatrical yawns, she then pulled two Simpsons dubs on VHS out of her purse and started watching them on the VCR, and one by one we melted away from our workstations and began watching along with her.

Michael arrived with Dad, found us recumbent and laughing, freaked out, and sent us back to work, sending Michelle packing on the CalTrain. Michael is now Bill!

Dusty said Ciao, and resumed tweaking her algorithms. Dusty’s poor parents — all they wanted was a nice pair of folk-singing, shawl-knitting Leslie Van Houtens and Patricia Krenwinkels. Instead they got two lighter-complexioned Grace Jones replicants morphed together with a Malibu Barbie.

Date update: Susan is without a tattoo.

It turns out Dusty’s an expert on, of all things, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (UC Santa Cruz undergrad). Talk about pure randomness. She did this to please her Leftoid hippie freak parents. (“It was an accelerated program that only took two years,” she says. “Subjectivity is so much faster to scale.”)

Discovering that Dusty was well informed about some calcified aspect of European history was like discovering — I don’t know — like discovering that the happy face on the Kool-Aid pitcher is a cross-dresser. It’s so random.

I mention this because tonight Todd and Dusty had dinner with a crew of moping ex-Marxist buddies of her parents over in Berkeley — all of them feeling left behind by the tide of history, singing freedom songs with a 5-stringed guitar; facial hair. That kind of stuff. There were probably lots of candles.

I think the religious feeling made Todd homesick for his religion-frenzied parents in Port Angeles. He returned to the office, brooded, and then he started to cry, then he went out on the lawn and didn’t return for an hour.

Oh, and this afternoon I caught Ethan scrounging under the couch cushions, in pursuit of lost coins. The embarrassment!

WEDNESDAY

Big gossip — Todd has announced he’s becoming a … Marxist! Of all things.

“Oh, Christ, Todd,” said Ethan, “that’s like announcing you’re becoming Bugs Bunny.”

Karla asked, “A Marxist? But Todd — the Wall came down in 1989.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“No, of course it doesn’t,” said Ethan.

“Arrogant bourgeois cochon,” Todd slung back.

So anyway, Todd’s found something external to believe in. I don’t think it’s a matter of dumbness or smartness, just his need to need, as ever.

Ethan was on the warpath: “If Todd expects us to treat him with some sort of respect just because he believes in some sort of outdated, cartoon-like ideology, he has another thing coming.”

Ethan is being “reactionary” (Todd told me the word). But, as with any recent conversions to any new belief, Todd does exude a righteousness that is a touch off-putting, if not boring.

Michael said of the matter, “Everything else aside, his preaching interferes with his coding — as if bodybuilding didn’t already use up enough of his brain’s CPU. I think his parents being so religious and all, he has been trained with a deep need to follow.”

Karla said, “Let’s call them Boris and Natasha from now on.”

Karla and I were both perplexed as we discussed the change in bed. “Where on earth did politics come from?” I asked. “Todd’s gone from being historically empty to becoming a young post-Marxist, post-human code cruncher. Converted on the posing dais, I suppose.” “Red in his bed.”

So who says people don’t change?

Abe e-mailed from his mini-holiday in Vancouver:

I’m at the Westin in Vancouver. Room service asked me, inocently enough, “How many people will be eating?” and I replied, “2”, because I didn’t want to seem like I was alone. Which I wwas. How bad is this on a scale of one to ten?

My reply:

Abe … it’s an *ELEVEN*

Dad got a callback from Delta Airlines for a job in their billing systems department. “It’s tangential to high-tech — not really part of it — but …” Dad’s interview is in two days. Bug and Dad went into town to get their hair cut together at one of those barber shops with a stuffed bass on the wall. Bug said it was like going to a Toppy’s in Moscow.

Political nuttiness:

Todd: “Marxism presupposed that technology would never pass beyond a certain point … Marxism’s 19th-century creation lends it an attractive distance in the postindustrial, late capitalist era.”

Ethan: “There is more to prosperity than envy and redistribution.”

Susan: “I‘m sure the Hollywood unions are just waiting with bated breath for coding and multimedia production to unionize. What’s it going to be — I write the code and then somebody from I.A.T.S.E. comes in and has to press the RETURN key?”

Me: “TIME OUT!”

Politics only makes people cranky. There must be some alternative form of discourse. How is political will generated? Susan is embarrassed to be agreeing with Ethan over something. Normally they squabble over everything.

Michael caught us playing Doom on the office operating system and flipped out … or rather, he deleted it from the system and gave me a lecture about lost people-hours when I later asked him to please reinstall it. In the end he did, because it would be catastrophic to worker morale to not be able to hunt and kill your co-workers.

“And Daniel, they have a new version called Doom II coming out in October, and rumor has it that pirated versions have a hard-drive-trashing virus, so all I ask is that you don’t even consider installing it.”

Good luck.

Bug was so mad that he wanted to write a Marburg virus and stick it in Michael’s machine, but this is just typical Bug ranting. The Marburg virus is so dangerous, it can’t even be studied. Thirty-seven German laboratory workers died in conjunction with it.

THURSDAY

Todd called me a cryptofascist today.

In honor of this,

I’m formatting this particular paragraph

flush right.

Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now—“We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory ‘out there’ than exists inside ‘all of us.’ We’ve peripheralized our essence.”

He went on:

“Given this new situation, the presumption of the existence of the notion of ‘history’ becomes not necessarily dead but somewhat beside the point. Access to memory replaces historical knowledge as a way for our species to process its past. Memory has replaced history — and this is not bad news. On the contrary, it’s excellent news because it means we’re no longer doomed to repeat our mistakes; we can edit ourselves as we go along, like an on-screen document. The transition from history at the center to memory on the periphery may prove to be initially bumpy as people shed their intellectual inertia on the issue, but the transition is an inevitability, and thank heavens we have changed the nature of change itself — the prospect of cyclical wars and dark ages and golden ages has never particularly appealed to me.”

Finally:

“And the continuing democratization of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of ‘knowledge is power’ is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able — knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish.”

I changed the subject to that of tickets to the upcoming Sharks game in San Jose.

FRIDAY

Todd apologized for calling me a cryptofascist and called me “benignly centrist,” instead. The formatting for this paragraph is obvious.

Dad had his interview with Delta. “An interview’s an interview’s an interview,” he said. I think he just doesn’t want to overly raise his hopes.

I later told Dusty Michael’s theory of history being dead and she went goggle-eyed. Dusty said conspiratorially, “Michael may be a crypto-Marxist.” (Oh God …) She kept blabbing, and it’s so weird to see Dusty’s mouth moving and genuine political words emerge. It just doesn’t mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office.

I surprised Dusty. I said that, “Since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik of this Benetton world we now live in.” She said, “Hey, Danster — I underestimated you.”

It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm — as such.

SATURDAY

Dusty made a “Bulimia Top Ten List.” Dusty is so incredibly willing to discuss her body. She even confessed she had to become a big-time shoplifter to support her habit. “Hey babe — bulimia ain’t cheap.” Karla was, needless to say, silent on the subject.

Bulimia Top Ten List:

• several buckets of Haagen-Dazs strawberry

• two large spaghetti dinners

• large box of Godiva chocolates

• stack of eight grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup

• entire cheesecake

• two dozen chocolate pudding cups

• four hundred grapes

• bucket of McDonald’s french fries

• even larger box of Godiva chocolates

• largest box of chocolates in the universe

Dusty is designing a cosmetic surgery program for Oop! as her creative project. Basic body and facial structures are loaded into the system, and by sucking and implanting bricks in and out, Oop! users can reengineer whatever body shape they want.

Dusty’s being stringent in using 100 percent genuine medical parameters, so even if you wanted to, you couldn’t transform Arnold Schwarzenegger into Christy Turlington. “You can only max out the potential of what’s already there. Users must know the body’s limits.”

She and Susan are sharing bone parameters from Susan’s dancing skeletons product.

Speaking of Christy Turlington, I have noticed that a fair number of women seem to want to be her. In fact, I have noticed that if modern conversations don’t switch to the disappearance of time, they shift to discussions of supermodels. I guess supermodels are like geeks, but instead of winning the Punnet Square of brains, they won the Punnet Square of looks. It must be bizarre being fabulously good-looking. I mean, at least you can disguise brains.

Supermodel; Superhighway. Coincidence?

The Boris and Natasha nickname is really catching on. We actually use the names to their faces. I think they love it.

I keep forgetting Susan’s rich, but she is. She came back from grocery shopping at Draeger’s with edible flowers ($1.99 a tub) and Bear Head mushrooms ($ 19.99/lb.—they look like white coral). Karla and I buy noodle-helper-style boxed products at Price-Costco. We’re going to have to start eating better. Food is too good here, and eating crap makes you feel like such an outsider in the Bay Area.

Rants are the official communication mode of the ‘90s.

Karla asked Dusty what she thought of Lego, and this triggered a mega-rant:

“What do I think of Lego? Lego is, like, Satan’s playtoy. These seemingly ‘educational’ little blocks of connectable fun and happiness have irrevocably brainwashed entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular — populated by bland limbless creatures with cultishly sweet smiles.”

(“Minifigs” are what the tiny Lego people are called — Dusty must learn the correct terminology.)

“Lego is directly or indirectly responsible for everything from postmodern architecture (a crime) to middle class anal behavior over the perfect lawn. You worked at Microsoft, Dan, you know them — their lawns … you know what I mean.

“Lego promotes an overly mechanical worldview which once engendered, is rilly, rilly impossible to surrender.”

“Anything else, Dusty?”

“Yes. Lego is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of smell, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination, and death. Try imagining a forest made of Lego. Good luck. Do you ever see Legos made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No — grotacious, or what?”

“Sure, Dusty, but what do you think of Michael’s product idea — his coding?”

“It’s rilly, rilly brilliant.”

We’ve decided that we must have entertainment to break the monotony of coding and work.

We tried going to movies at the Shoreline Cineplex, but movies at a theater take FOREVER to watch — no fast forward. And VCR rental movies take forever to watch, even using the FFWD button.

Then Karla accidentally discovered this incredible time-saving secret — foreign movies with subtitles! It’s like the crack cocaine equivalent of movies. We watched a Japanese movie — an artistic one, at that (Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth)—in less than an hour. All you have to do is blast directly through to the subtitles, speed-read them, and then blip out the rest. It’s so efficient it’s scary.

“Why can’t they subtitle English movies?” asked Karla. “I mean, they do books-on-tape for commuters. Subtitled English movies would fill a potentially big niche. No one has time anymore.”

Mr. Ideology himself (Boris) walked in, and Ethan couldn’t resist telling him that he’d run a search on Lenin on an on-line encyclopedia, and it turns out Lenin’s name means nothing. “It’s a made up name — like Sting — he just showed up at the dacha one morning and said, ‘Call me Lenin.’”

Todd responded by saying, “Just goes to show you how he was postmodern a century ahead of his time.”

Dusty was trying to tell us all about “Mehrwert“—surplus value per unit of time/labor: “A worker creates more value than that for which he is compensated. You know?”

Michael went purple, like a Burger King manager who hears one of his employees discuss unionization.

And then Karla screwed Michael’s notions of production up even further by passing along a meme somebody spammed her on the Net that day, that any multiple of 6, minus one, is a prime number. Easy as this was to disprove, all work stopped immediately as everybody set out to prove its validity.

Todd pointed out something I thought was really true. He said that when future archaeolgists dig up the remains of California, they’re going to find all of these gyms and all of this scary-looking gym equipment, and they’re going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Went for late coffee at the Posh Bagel on Main Street in Los Altos. The white lights in the trees were so pretty. Human beings can’t be all that bad.

SUNDAY

Dusty is furious with Todd. She discovered a collection of cans of aerosol “religious sprays” he had hidden in his cupboard — like “Aerosol Stigmata” and “Santa Barbara in a Can.” His mom sends them to him from Port Angeles. She buys them from a Catholic mail-order house in Philadelphia. It’s so weird, but these sprays really exist.

Todd sulked: “She threw them out like time-expired antibiotics.”

In order to foster a less combative working environment, Michael and I are trying to think of the most apolitical environment possible. We finally hit upon Star Trek as a zero-politics zone. So I introduced the notion of TrekPolitiks to the office.

Susan said, “Ever notice how, like, nobody ever goes shopping on Star Trek? They’re a totally post-money society. If they want a banana they simply photocopy one on the replicator. Substitute Malaysia or Mexico for the replicator, and make Palo Alto the Bridge, and bingo: RIGHT NOW = STAR TREK.”

It’s true.

If you think about it.

I added, “Ever notice how they never have to report to anybody on Star Trek? No suits zoom in from Star Fleet Corporate and hold them fiscally responsible for frying a dilithium crystal doing doughnuts in the Delta Quadrant. Or Star Fleet Marketing, for that matter.” (Pointed glares at Ethan.)

Karla likes the notion of TrekPolitiks. “Left vs. right is obsolete. Politics is, in the end, about biology, information, diversification, numbers, numbers, and numbers — all candy coated with charisma and guns.”

Karla like myself is of the new apolitical pick-and-choose style of citizen. I think politics is soon going to resemble a J. Crew catalogue more than some 1776 ideal. If somebody wants to run for office, they had better be able to explain why they want to run for office. Wanting to be a candidate seems, in itself, reason for exclusion.

Dusty said, “Thomas Jefferson never anticipated Victoria’s Secret catalogues and media-induced social atomization. Just think — we’re rapidly approaching a world composed entirely of jail and shopping.” She paused to consider this, said, “Grotacious!” then she went for a jog.

Dad had his second callback from Delta.

Karla apparently noticed my breathing the other day when I was carrying the trash cans to the end of the driveway. She has decided I should start going to the gym. “You have to add more megs to your hard drive. I’m going, too.” She’s right — we both need meat on us — excuse me — we both need more crystal lattice added on to our drives.

Every time I look at Karla, she changes and changes, and now I realize other men are looking at her and this makes me have to look at myself, and what I see is sort of scrawny. Suddenly Karla can date higher on the geek food chain than me if she wants to — she can date all the Phils-from-Apples of this world — she has entered the realms of buffness and cleft chins. I care about being with her too much to lose her to a … Phil unit. To lose her ever, to anyone. I can’t imagine losing her. I must make myself stronger. I must build a better me. I must become the Bionic Man.

It turns out that if you tape TV shows that are close-captioned, you CAN have English language subtitles. Our entertainment universe has multiplied itself!

MONDAY

Susan told us today what our characters and powers would be if we were on Star Trek:

Michael:

Disembodied neocortex afloat inside a tank of nutrient-bearing solution; has ability to see back and forth in time; communicates via LEDs and a synchronized swim team of hybridized dolphins living in a satellite-linked inlet on the Goa Coast.

Todd:

Repairer of broken machines; has tools instead of fingers; regulation hunk required by TV network to stimulate sales of tie-in merchandise; able to telepathically determine sexual coefficient of alien beings; skin can turn to gold by beaming himself to the planet TanFastic.

Karla:

Crew Biologist; able to camouflage feeling with scientific theories; superior intelligence allows for dominance over all males or spore-bearing entities.

Me:

Token earthling; prey to foibles and pratfalls of all humanity (thanks Susan).

Bug:

Feathered creature picked up in sympathy from a collapsing Throm Nebula; most likely to say uncontrolled, angry things about fellow cast and crew members to Entertainment Tonight years after the series ends up in syndication … lack of Screen Actors Guild residuals plus an addiction to cosmetic surgery will provide an impetus.

Susan herself:

Priestess of the Right Lobe; erotic female interest demanded by TV networks; will devour males if overly excited; designs castles while sleepwalking; flawless plastic skin; thighs conceal bevatron guns.

Dusty:

Bionic creature from a destroyed Valley planet: disciplinarian; feeds on × rays; arms contain snakes that will fight her wars.

Ethan:

Bearer of the Dark Force; can transmute feces into uranium; owns hyperspace cruiser that can vanish and reappear at any moment across time, space, and money.

Abe:

Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter: his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.

Went to the gym for the first time today and my body feels like an East German Trabant car running on linseed oil crashing into a stack of burning televisions. The pain!

Susan’s going psycho over an asthmatic Detroit car artist named Emmett who Michael brought in to do drawings and storyboards. (“We run a very disciplined little software shop,” says Ethan. “Detroit really knows how to crack the whip!”)

I think it would be a very scary thing at this point in Susan’s sexual radicalization to be the subject of her infatuation. Good luck, Emmett.

Oh — Emmett’s last name is—Couch—isn’t that a hoot! And his big personal beef is Japanese animation. He says that SEGA and Nintendo are responsible for the “subtle but massive Hello-Kittification of North American animation. You can kiss our Hanna-Barbera heritage good-bye.” How can anybody take this so seriously?

Emmett has 4,000 manga comics from Japan. They’re so violent and dirty! The characters all look as if they’re saying unbelievably important things — talking to God and the Wizard of the Universe — but when you translate them, all they’re really doing is making belching noises. Susan has discovered in these manga a rich source of fashion ideas.

The more we realize our Lenin jokes rankle Todd, the more the Lenin jokes grow out of control. Even Mom got into the act and made “Lenin’s Face” cookies, dropping them into the office on her way to work. We told Todd to close his eyes and touch them and describe their texture—“kind of leathery — kind of dry — kind of … chewy — kind of like …” (opens his eyes). Ethan: “An embalmed syphilitic tyrant?”

“You assholes! Oh, sorry, Mrs. Underwood.

I learned a new expression today: “protein window.” Todd told it to me.

Apparently, after you bodybuild, you have a two-hour time window in which your body can suck up amino acids. This is your protein window. I was talking to him and he said, “Man, I’d like to talk some more, but my protein window is closing,” and he ran off to the kitchen and ate a chicken. What a decade this is.

I forgot to eat while my protein window was open. Maybe that’s why I’m in pain.

Abe mail:

In the future all planets will have roman numerals after their names and have one or two sylable names that sound like Dupont carpet material from 1966… Norlon IV … Erthrea IK … Gil II

Bug has joined a “Lego Bobsledding Team” and has plummeted to a new nadir of Nerddom. It’s over in Berkeley — they use Mattel Hot Wheels tracks, bet with Monopoly money, have megaphones and everything. Lego trophies, too.

Todd called me “decadent” today — this, after he discussed protein windows! I couldn’t believe it. He said I was decadent because I was eating Lucky Charms. He said they were “symptomatic of a culture in decline — sucrose hysteria, you know.”

I said, “But Todd, Lucky Charms were invented during the Johnson Administration. Society couldn’t have been more anti-decline than it was then. Guns and butter … I can’t believe I’m even talking to you seriously about this. This is silly beyond belief.”

Anyway, that was the seed notion. Karla and I wrote a big list of “decadent cereals” on the office dry-erase wall:

CAP’N CRUNCH: