Microserfs

EIGHT MONTHS LATER Las Vegas, Nevada Thursday, January 5, 1995

The Alaska Airlines captain said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the city of Las Vegas is below us to your right. You will be able to see the pyramid of the Luxor Hotel …”

The 727 lurched sideways as its human cargo chugged like Muppets to view a Sim City game gone horribly wrong: the Luxor Hotel’s obsidian black glassy pyramid, and beside it, the Excalibur’s antiseptic, Lego-pure, obscenely off-scale Arthurian fantasy. Farther up the Strip was the MGM’s jade glass box with 3,500 slot machines and 150 gaming tables representing the largest single concentration of cash points on earth—“the Detroit of the postindustrial economy,” Michael declared.

It was pleasing for me to see so many of the faces of the people in my life, lit by the glow of the cabin windows — Karla, Dad, Susan, Emmett, Michael, Amy, Todd, Abe, Bug, and Bug’s friend, Sig — their faces almost fetally blank and uncomprehending at the newness of the world below into which we would shortly dip.

Sig is an ophthalmologist from Millbrae who convinced Bug that he wasn’t stereogramatically blind. He’s a vast improvement over Jeremy, and Bug is suddenly so much more himself, relaxed and joking and just … glad. Back at SFO Airport Sig and Bug adopted a J. Crew fashion thing: instead of vogueing, they “Crew.” When we shout the word “Crew!” they’d freeze into a rehearsed series of maniacally-smiling dorky male model poses. It was good for laughs the whole flight down. Also, Bug almost got whiplash from craning his neck halfway through the flight trying to catch a glimpse of the ultrasecret Groom Lake military facility. He told me, “They have UFOs and aliens cryogenically frozen there.”

I said, “Right, Bug. As if Alaska Airlines is allowed to fly over a top secret base,” and Bug replied, “Look down there, Dan — that’s the place where they staged the fake moon landing back in 1969.” I looked, and it did resemble the moon.

So I started to torment Bug about his new 3-cylinder Geo Metro, and Amy joined in, saying, “God, Bug, you couldn’t even kill someone with that thing. You could maybe nudge them to death, or something …” And then she pretended she was at her doctor’s office and her doctor was saying, “Amy, this rash you’ve got … have you had prolonged exposure to rodents, perhaps, or small dogs, maybe 3-cylinder cars?” and Amy says, “Well, yes, actually, I have noticed a Geo following me around and nudging me considerably … I just assumed it was maybe a lost student driver but now that I think about it, that’s where my rash is coming from!”

Susan, Karla, and Amy have really Chyx’d out for the CES — bulletproof vests over tiny little tube tops (Susan has declared that it’s her responsibly as a feminist media figure to singlehandedly revive the tube top), baggy jeans worn low on the hips, and black sunglasses. Susan continues to gain celebrity with Chyx (New York Times business section last week). All three of them decided to dress “Tough Love” because Ethan told them the fair is 99 percent male and they don’t want to look “like dweeb bait.”

I, as ever, am clad in my Riot Nrrrd staple: Dockers and Gap pocket-T. Dad was in Brooks Brothers, and now that his hair’s turned snow white over the last year, he makes a singularly trustworthy impression as a representative for the company. (And he also finally speaks C++.) Todd was wearing a trench coat because he’d read in the Chronicle that it was raining in Las Vegas. We told him he looked like Secret Squirrel, the old cartoon character, and the coat soon vanished. Todd also unveiled his new “hockey hairdo” on the flight: short on the top and long in the back. I guess this is because of the hockey strike. Todd bought season tickets to see the Sharks.

Also on the plane was a company called BuildX which is doing an Oop!-like product, down in Mountain View, and there were eight of them and they had matching black sweatshirts with a futuristic BuildX logo on them and they looked like the Osmonds or the Solid Gold Dancers. We didn’t talk to them the whole flight.

Ethan couldn’t come. He’s back in Palo Alto, staying with Mom while he does his chemotherapy, which appears to be going well, even though it makes him crabby. He’s starting to lose a little hair, not too bad, and this is a terrible observation but his dandruff is finally clearing.

Dusty is still in disbelief that her baby wasn’t a grapefruit and is also at Mom’s house for a few days while we’re at CES, nursing Lindsay Ruth and keeping Ethan company. Mom is giving her a crash course in motherhood, dragging out embarrassing baby photos of me and tiny little jumpers that I had no idea she kept. Dusty sits and stares at Lindsay for hours on end, saying to anyone who’ll listen, “Ten toes! Ten fingers!” Lindsay was delivered on the evening of the final round of the Iron Rose IV competition, and Todd told me on the flight down that Lindsay Ruth was named after movie-of-the-week star and Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, as well as for a Bible person. He hasn’t really talked about the baby yet — I think it’s finally sinking in that he’s a father, now that he’s got the physical proof.

Luggage lost; luggage retrieved; Vietnam veteran taxi driver; Gallagher billboards. We checked into our hotel in a daze — a creakingly old hotel called the Hacienda. (Best not discussed. It’s sole redeeming feature is its location right next door to … the extravagant-beyond-all-belief pyramid of the LUXOR.)

We left the hotel to register at the Convention Center, many football fields’ worth of sterile white cubes, which are as attractive as the heating ducts atop a medical-dental center. The look on all the registrees’ faces was great. You could tell that all they could think of was sex and blowing their money later that night. It was so transparent. Las Vegas brings out the devil in everyone.

Las Vegas: it’s like the subconsciousness of the culture exploded and made municipal. I was so overwhelmed by it that I ended up reviving my old-style subconscious file from last year. Herewith: vasectomy reversal billboard breakfast moccasins Siegfried & Roy Sahara Compaq Nokia NY Steak & Eggs $2.95 47-Tek control. remote. keno forgotten cocktails social interface name tag cardboard IBM box Cheddar is it loud? interactive virgin tanked girl Flamingo reflective surfaces dry ice

Moon

American

Floyd

Heywood cities destroyed fight win win win morphin mighty Nam-1975 VFX-1 monster lab colonize air lock thrust Bob boy game orb 64 bits tatami pods rings Softimage object popping anti alias lemon BAR

trilinear MlPmap interpolation

Ultra 64

gravy

Samsung paper napkin cherry

synthetic

emotional

response Nye County, Nevada Dept. of Energy traffic lights White Tigerzoid computer personal floral carpeting Howard Hughes Parkway *69 cinderblock walls escort leaflets First Interstate 00 implant beverage strip bell Big Endian I Endian

When we returned to the hotel to change, Karla’s and my room somehow became the party room. None of us except for Anatole, who’s here to schmooze Compaq, have ever been to Las Vegas before, let alone a CES. (Amy called us “bad American citizens.”) We were all giddy at the prospect of an evening’s unchained fun; sleazy adventure divorced from consequences.

Anatole and Todd brought up vodka, mixer, and ice. Our ancient queen-size bed was as concave as a satellite dish — the same mattress must have been mangling the lumbars of low-budget gamblers since the Ford Administration — so we sat clustered in its recess like kangaroo babies inside Mom’s pouch. Chugging V&Ts, we surfed through the channels, high on simply being in Las Vegas, even just watching TV in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

The TV began showing these three-minute pay-TV movie clips. (“Hey, let’s watch Curly Sue!”) Then one came on touting the AVN Awards, the Adult Video News awards. Susan yelled, “The Stiffies!” It’s an actual Academy Awards-style show for porn people. We had to pay. It was simply too juicy not to. People were sashaying up the aisles to collect awards for things like “Best Anal Scene” and they were getting all teary and emotional making acceptance speeches. It was unbelievable. Awards for, like, “Best Group Scene.”

Dad was fortunately in his own room, talking on the phone with a friend from Hewlett-Packard he was having dinner with that evening. But really, the whooping we all made … we were just the sort of people you don’t want staying in the room next to you.

Anatole said, “Oh look—that actress there—she was in the booth across from my old company six years ago — and now she’s won an award!” Anatole actually seemed quite proud. “In the old days, you had 12 computer game geeks and 12 porn stars all crowded into the most remote corner of some remote convention building. We were the freaks of the convention. Now we run it. Ha!”

Amy and Michael went into the bathroom and emerged with Kleenex boxes on their feet: “We’re Howard Hughes!”

We phoned Mom, and she said Ethan was woozy from today’s treatment. Lindsay is pleasingly, Gerberishly plump, and former bodybuilding enthusiast Dusty is eating my family out of house and home. Misty, who hasn’t shed an ounce since starting her diet last year, follows the “Madonna and child” everywhere. “Dusty’s a sucker for dog-begging,” says Mom, “and I keep trying to tell Dusty not to feed the dog, but it’s not working.” Mom sounds pissed, but she has to learn that her dog is never going to be slim. So, all in all, it sounds like things are fine there.

Mom asked, half-jokingly, but also for real, if Dad was pulling his weight as our company rep, but I said we wouldn’t be able to tell until tomorrow.

The ten of us double-cabbed (20-minute cab wait) up the Strip (clogged) to a Sony party Todd had gotten us semi-invited to, and dropped Dad off at the MGM Grand along the way. All three Chyx in the two cars shouted in practiced tra-la-la voices, “Good night, Blake Carrington, you hulking piece of man meat!” Dad’s ears turned bright red. I think the porno awards were a bad influence on them.

At the Sony party, we all got weirded out because suddenly all of the people at the party looked like they were porn stars, even though they were just real people. It was only because all of the Stiffie Award winners and their film clips were still in our brains that we were perceiving this. And then we realized that viewed from a certain perspective, all people can look like porn stars. So for a few minutes there, humanity seemed really scary indeed. I wonder how porn people’s mind-body relationships are — I can’t imagine. Their bodies must be like machines to them, or products to ship, but then they’re not the only ones — Olympic athletes and geeks and bodybuilders and people with eating disorders.

But the Sony party … we checked out the live-action footage in the new Sony games, and the acting — it was so cheesy. It was like porn acting. This merely reinforced our collective impression that the real world is a porn movie. Talking to a Sony executive named Lisa, I asked her how they went about recruiting talent for games, without actually saying that their live action sucked. She told me that industry people aren’t realizing yet just how unbelievably expensive it is to shoot any sort of game with live action. “Just say the words ‘live action,’ and the price goes up a million dollars,” she said.

I then wondered out loud if starring in multimedia products is going to be the modern equivalent of appearing on the Hollywood Squares. Michael and Amy lapsed into a lovebird recital of questions from an old version of the Hollywood Squares board game they both had as children:

“Q: True or false: Frank Sinatra never wears jewelry of any kind. “ “A: False.”

“Q: True or false: The average person can hold their breath for 45 seconds. “ “A: True.”

“Q: According to Cats magazine, should you tranquilize your cat before taking it on an airline flight?”

“A: No.”

The two of them irritated all the Sony people, because everyone was trying to be so smooth and Hollywoodish tonight, and not be geeky, and Michael and Amy were destroying the illusion. And then they started smooching, and this confused everybody further. Geeks smooching?

You could tell the LA people there — the attitude — they all looked like — minifigs, I guess. Wait … am I being tautological? But really, Los Angelenos are like a completely different species from Bay Area people. There really is this whole North/South dichotomy in California. They truly are two different states.

Michael said, “Los Angelenos dress like they’ve been focus-grouped.” We decided that in game shows in the future, contestants will win a free focus-grouping, where they spend six hours with ten demographically preselected focus-groupers commenting and criticizing all aspects of their lives. Then, they get to watch the next winner get ripped apart behind a two-way mirror. Forget year-supplies of Rice-A-Roni and bedroom sets.

We were talking with another woman, also named Lisa (which wasn’t hard to remember because every single woman we met there was named Lisa). “Last year all of the studio executives were bluffing it about multimedia,” she said, “but this year they’re starting to panic — they don’t have a handle on what they’re doing and it’s starting to show, and mistakes are costing them a pile of money — trying to spooge Myst into a feature-length movie; trying to spooge movies into CD-ROMs. It’s a mess. And New York still doesn’t have a clue. Usually they’re first, but with multimedia, they’re babies and it annoys the hell out of them. The people who really do know what’s going on are the people who aren’t posing as visionaries.”

I thought about it and she’s right — the geeks aren’t flying down to LA to take studio executives out to schmooze dinners at Spago. Spago has to come to the geeks. Spago must hate that.

Amy suddenly piped up and said to the Lisa-unit, “Exactly. I’m working on the Tetris property for Castle Rock, and I can’t believe how many bozos are calling the shots in a medium they have no expertise in! They’re all faking it!”

The Lisa believed her — hook, line, and sinker! She obviously had never even seen Tetris. This was fun.

Amy continued, “In the history of games-into-movies, I think only Tron has begun to scratch the surface of what can be done … and that came out in ‘82. Just because a game has characters doesn’t mean it can tell a story … Take Super Mario Brothers. Whoever okayed the $45 million budget for that lemon must have had a lot of explaining to do.”

Lisa nodded and asked, “So what’s your budget?”

Amy smiled and said, “The live action sequences are really going to add up — I think we’re shooting for around 30 mil.”

Lisa, “Do you have a card? Let me give you mine …”

Across the room, Anatole was busy chatting up a Lisa-unit, misguidedly trying to impress her with his “extreme knowledge” of Sony products.

“The good thing about Sony products,” said Anatole, “is that they always say exactly what they are right on the front of them. For example, the CFD-758 CD-radio cassette recorder, or the TMR-IF310 stereo transmitter, or the 9-band ICF-SW15 FM/MW/SW receiver.”

But evidently his Frainch accent made the above conversation sound alluring, and he and his Lisa were pair-bonded for the evening. Karla said, “Ever notice how when Anatole’s around girls, his accent thickens?”

Susan was chatting with a male Lisa-unit solely to torment Emmett, but he’s used to it by now. Susan was a real cachet addition to our party. She’s become such a cult figure with Chyx. It was like Jim Morrison had entered the room, and she was swamped with admirers.

Then Amy said in a loud and unbelievably embarrassing voice, “What the fuck is with this place? Every single chick here is named Lisa.”

Michael swam in to smooth things over: “She’s from Canada.”

“Michael, you promised we’d have martinis and lose a hundred dollars at roulette. And the food here stinks and you know it.”

“And right you are.”

And the two of them vamoosed off to the MGM Grand.

Karla and I and a few Lisas tried to guess what the charades hand signal would be for “interactive multimedia product.” A movie is where you turn a camera reel; a song is where you hold your hands up to your lips; a book is two palms simulating open flaps. All we could come up with for multimedia was two hands going fidgety-fidgety in space. A definitive interface is certainly needed, if only to make charades an easier game to play five years from now.

After we left the Sony party, we wandered around the grounds of the yuppie hotel, and I never realized it, but Todd’s a mean drunk. Maybe his new haircut is bringing out “The Asshole Within.” He went around the pathways kicking muffins into the hot tubs and sticking pilfered beta versions of Sony CD ROMs down the hotel’s miniature fake rivers, and screamed at all of us, calling us geeks. Hellooooo … like, this is some big surprise, or something? I suspect that becoming a father and spending the last two months (as did we all, Dusty included, barely able to reach her keyboard over her watermelon stomach) pulling trip after trip to Kuwait while tweaking code for the Oop! beta version for Las Vegas — it all got to him and he’s releasing the pressure. We all feel it. Tomorrow and Sunday we find out if Oop! (and Interiority Co.) have a strong future.

Todd was wearing his Secret Squirrel trench coat, but we dared not mock it. And then he vanished, probably to pick a fight at a sports bar.

We checked out the burning lava water show in front of the Mirage and the people in the city began weirding me out. Las Vegas must be the only place left where it’s politically correct to wear a fur coat. They were just the sorts of people who would have gone to Las Vegas, not Boulder, in The Stand, and here they were.

We were standing next to this huge sculpture of post-human white lion tamers Siegfried and Roy not far from the lava, and then Bug and Sig got into this discussion about how Henry Ford made Model Ts for ten straight years without one change, and then GM came along with something spiffy, and Henry laid everybody off, retooled, came out with the Model A, and then built that without a change for another five years, and then Plymouth came out with something spiffy and Ford finally had to accept the notion of competition and styling.

We tried to imagine making a product without any changes for five years, but we couldn’t. Then we noticed that all the cars on the Strip look the same: Chryslers and Tauruses and Toyotas … they all have “bubble-butts” that look like they came from the same mold. So by default we’re right back to Henry Ford again. We figured that tail fins would come back in, simply because people are going to have a consumer revolt against how boring and blob-like cars are becoming.

At the mall in Caesar’s Palace we bumped into the BuildX team at the Warner Brothers store. We bought our Marvin the Martian coffee mugs and house slippers, glared at the BuildX team, and left.

I wonder if Bill ever runs into John Sculley or Steve Jobs at a 7-Eleven.

We all wanted to go to the Luxor and play the games and do the rides there, inside the pyramid’s interior. Emmett informed us that SEGA has its only showcase arcade there, where you can play the brand-new-almost-beta games. It’s a brilliant marketing idea because normally arcade games don’t enjoy the same kind of brand recognition and loyalty that home games do, but after visiting the SEGA arcade, the logo is burned into your brain permanently. It’s like allowing a McDonald’s orange drink machine at your child’s birthday party. Later, we ran into Dad and we were gamed-out, so we all went to the Tut’s Hut. We were starved.

The Tut’s Hut kitchen was closed and we were begging for food — any sort of food — and the waitress brought over a plastic cup full of garnishes: pineapple wedges, maraschino cherries, and strawberries. I made a joke to her, that my Dad was an alcoholic barfly, and that growing up I ate garnishes as meals almost every night — but then the waitress got all weird, and Karla reminded me that people often move to Las Vegas to forget things, and she stopped coming to our table, and Dad, sitting two seats over, was embarrassed because he’s not used to this kind of joke.

The Luxor has a laser beam of pure white light that shoots up from the tip of its pyramid and I’d never seen anything so tall, and never knew this beam of light existed. Pure and clean, and seen from the ground, it’s so powerful that it really appears to puncture the atmosphere. I started rambling on about the laser, but everyone thought I’d gone loony and Abe told me to be quiet.

Ethan would have liked the light beam because the whole Luxor pyramid thing is sort of like the pyramid on the dollar bill, so I sent him a postcard. Instead of having a faux Egyptian theme, the Luxor should get to the point and have a U.S. Mint theme.

Todd was in the lobby of the Hacienda when we walked in, at around 2:30 A.M. He had a plastic container full of Kennedy dollars and was drunk on free drinks, but his meanness was gone. The casino noise was horrendous. It put Palo Alto’s gas-fired leaf blowers to shame. As Karla and I were walking to the elevator bank, Todd came with us and did his impression of the machines: “Dollar slots go koonk-koonk-koonk-koonk-koonk; quarter slots go kathunka-thunka-thunka-thunka; dime slots go nink-nink-nink-nink-nink.” He did a really good job as a machine. I think he bonded with the slots. We commended him on his performance and sent him wonkily tottering back onto the floor to lose his remaining coinage. He said, “It’s an upperbody night!” and flexed his bicep at us.

Karla fell asleep quickly, but as ever, sleep eluded me, and I went downstairs to the casino and half-assedly played the slots until my $20 in quarters was gone.

Sands

stolen watches abandoned wedding rings

buried cinderblocks full of $100 bills.

You want to surrender.

Subjected to the random, you acknowledge your inability to comprehend logic and linear systems. 21 royal flush barbecue sauce garage door openers antenna La Quinta three lemons plastic bucket woofer touch-tone calling card

We generate stories for you because you don’t save the ones that are yours.

FRIDAY

Todd made out last night with a Lisa-unit from the Sony party, which he returned to after screaming at us. This morning he burst into Karla’s and my room and confessed, teary eyed, and carrying a basket of croissants. It was a bad start to a weird day. He was sick with remorse.

Anatole was in the bathroom borrowing Karla’s blowdryer, so he heard everything through the door. Todd made me, Anatole, and Karla swear on a stack of Bibles that we would never say anything to Dusty. Anatole launched into one of his “een my couwntree …” tirades about how French men all had mistresses, but he stopped when he saw how sad Todd looked.

Todd was morose and silent all day. I thought about Dusty and Lindsay Ruth at home, and was glad he felt miserable, but he’d been in such denial over his new family unit that he was bound to explode. At least he didn’t SLEEP with a Lisa.

Also, it was raining outside. Raining. It was so odd to think of Las Vegas having weather, like it was a real place. But since everyone’s always indoors in the casinos, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

There was once a Twilight Zone episode where adults were prisoners of the whims of a ten-year-old boy, Anthony, who could change the world simply by thinking the change into existence — he could make snow fall on crops — he could erase people — he forced everybody to watch TV that showed nothing but dinosaurs and cartoons. And all anybody could say, to prevent themselves from being erased themselves, was “That’s good, Anthony, that’s good.” A focus group of one.

The CES is a trade show like all other trade shows: thousands and thousands of men, for the most part, wearing wool suits with badges saying things like: Doug Duncan, Product Developer, MATTEL … or NASA, SIEMENS-NIXDORF, OGILVY & MATHER, and UCLA, and so on. Everyone loads up on free promo merchandise like software samplers, buttons, mugs, pins, and water bottles as they dash from meeting to meeting. The booths are all staffed by thousands of those guys in high school who were good-looking but who got C+’s; they’re stereo salesmen now and have to suck up to the nerds they tormented in high school.

We Oop!sters were in and out of meetings all day, mostly earnest affairs held in little rooms above the convention floor. They look the same in every hotel: chrome & glass rental furniture, extension telephones, and a water cooler. All these people meeting inside, wearing the first good suit in their life, turning old right before your eyes.

We were really just there to schmooze and do PR, since our distribution’s taken care of, and to approach people to develop Oop! starter modules. Standard stuff. We also did “seed plants” … who you give your hardware to prerelease is a high status issue.

But I must say, there’s something timeless about the false sincerity and synthetic goodwill of meetings, the calculated jocularity and the simian dominant-male/subordinate-male body language. At least the presence of Karla, Susan, and Amy saved us from the inevitable stripper jokes. Karla pointed out how in marketing meetings at Microsoft, everybody was trying to be fake-perky, and trying to fake having ideas, while at CES, everybody’s trying to be fake-sincere and trying to fake not looking desperate.

Also, later, during rare, quiet moments, I’d look through the windows at other people’s meetings, and they looked like Dutch Master cigar box people, but modernized. Old, but new … like a cordless phone resting beside a bowl of apples.

We had a “hunch lunch” in the hallway outside the Intel theater to compare notes on how the meetings were going. The Convention Center has the worst food on earth, served in the most humiliating, chair-free, low-dignity manner possible. People looked like dogs, hobbled over, eating high-sodium, byproduct-enriched, grease-lathered guck. Convention Center food in your stomach is like having fifty chest × rays, it’s so toxic. In fact for the rest of the day, the “chest × ray” became our official standard of measurement for something that is probably very bad for you, which shortens your life, but which won’t take its toll until much later on. If we met someone really horrible, we said they were like “ten chest × rays,” and we’ll probably die three days earlier than if we had never met that person.

After lunch, we went to see the Pentium movie at the theater Intel put up in the main lobby. It was about how interactivity was going to make your life better in the future, and we couldn’t stop giggling because of all the Pentium jokes about decimal points being spammed around the Internet. You knew that every single person watching the show was, too.

“0.999999985621,” I whispered, setting everybody off into spasms again, and finally we had to leave because we were annoying too many people with our giggling.

I guess if you find jokes about decimal places interesting, then you truly are a geek.

In the afternoon, in between meetings, Susan spent most of her time in the SEGA-Nintendo building, and reconnoitered with her fellow Chyx at the Virgin Interactive mini-bar. There was a rumor that supermodel Fabio was signing autographs in another building, so Susan and Karla dashed over to check it out. Sure enough, His Hairness himself was signing calendars and paperbacks among the booming car stereos. Susan and Karla stood in line for an hour and finally they each got their “magic moment”: a few snatches of intimate conversation, sealed with a kiss and, more important, a Polaroid. Susan’s going to post hers on the Net. I asked Karla what he said to her and she said, “Stereos are my passion … but only after you.” Gag.

Todd got sullen because Susan and Karla kept on discussing Fabio’s pectoral muscles … “They’re like beef throw cushions … they’re like fifty-pound flank-steak Chiclets … they’re like …” and Todd would say, “Enough already.”

Went to about seventeen meetings altogether. At CES, everybody name-drops their hotel all the time. Hotelmanship is a big CES status issue — people kept on asking us during the day where we were staying. They’d say, “So, uh” (charged moment) “where are you staying?”

And we would casually reply, “Oh, the Luxor.”

Las Vegas hotels are similar to video games — games and hotels both plunder extinct or mythical cultures in pursuit of a franchisable myth with graphic potential: Egypt — Camelot — the Jolly Roger. We found ourselves feeling a little sorry for hotels that couldn’t afford to lavishly re-create mythical archetypes, or were simply too stupid to realize that the lack of a theme made them indistinguishable. It was as if the boring hotels couldn’t figure out what was going on in the bigger scheme of Western culture. Hotels in Las Vegas need special effects, rides, simulators, morphings … today’s hotel must have fantasy systems in place, or it will perish.

Todd went to see Siegfried and Roy, and afterward made this big deal of showing Karla and me his program when we were standing in line waiting to go on the virtual reality theme ride. We were underwhelmed to say the most. Todd was quite impressed, however, with Siegfried and Roy themselves as proud examples of science and surgery combining in the name of entertainment and tanlines. He seemed wistful for his bodybuilding days of not even a year ago. “Siegfried and Roy are very obviously at the extreme end of some exciting new paradigm for the human body,” said Todd. “’See Tomorrow’s Face, Today.’”

But then the big drama du jour was when Todd caught his parents gambling … right there on the main floor of the Luxor! They were at the quarter-slot video poker machines, and talk about weird. They were glued to their machines, really scary, like those mean old pensioners who smoke long brown cigarettes and scream at you if they think you might be contaminating their machine’s winnability karma. Todd ran up and “busted” them, and it was really embarrassing, but also too good to miss. I mean, they were all screaming at each other. Todd was truly freaked out to see his parents so obviously engaging in the “secular” world. And wouldn’t you just know it, his parents are at the Hacienda, too, and it really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they’re too contrived to be believed, and then real-life happens, and you wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.

Todd came to our room and ranted for a while about what hypocrites his parents were, and it took all my restraint not to remind him that he had “sinned” himself with a Lisa-from-Sony just the previous evening. Karla took him out on the Strip for a walk and I had some peace for the first time all day.

I called Mom from the hotel during this period of peace. I’d turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was black and sensationless. All there was in the room was my voice and Mom’s voice trickling out of the phone’s earpiece, and this feeling passed through me — this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they’re alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one sense, all we are is our voice.

SATURDAY

BILL was in town launching a new product, and it was so bizarre, seeing his face and hearing his voice over the remote screens inside the convention floor. It was like being teleported back to eleventh-grade chem class. Like a distant dream. Like a dream of a dream. And people were riveted to his every gesture. I mean riveted, looking at his picture, trying to articulate the charisma, and it was so odd, seeing all of these people, looking at Bill’s image, not listening to what he was saying but instead trying to figure out what was his … secret.

But his secret is, I think, that he shows nothing. A poker face doesn’t mean showing coolness like James Bond. It means expressing nothingess. This is maybe the core of the nerd dream: the core of power and money that lies at the center of the storm of technology, that doesn’t have to express emotion or charisma, because emotion can’t be converted into lines of code.

Yet.

I kind of lost focus after a while, and I wandered around and picked up a copy of the New York Times lying next to an SGI unit blasting out a flight simulation. There, on the third page of the business section, not even the first, was a story about how Apple shares were going up in value as a result of rumors of an impending three-way buyout by Panasonic (Holland), Oracle (USA), and Matsushita (Japan). My, how things change. That’s all I can think. Apple used to be the King of the Valley, and now they’re getting prospected like a start-up. Time frames are so extreme in the tech industry. Life happens at fifty times the normal pace. I mean, if someone in Palo Alto says to you, “They never called back,” what they really mean is, “They never called back within one week.” A week means never in the Silicon Valley.

Todd was off all day having ordeals with his parents, and Bug, Sig, Emmett, and Susan walked around hoping they’d “accidentally” bump into Todd in order to eavesdrop a little, but to no avail. MacCarran Airport is right next to downtown Las Vegas, and a plane flies over the city every eleven seconds. Karla and I were walking between pavilions and we saw Barry Diller in a gray wool suit (and no name tag). We sat down on a riser near the piled-up plywood freight boxes to rest our feet, and watched the planes fly by. We were both over stimulated.

Karla was fiddling with the Samsung shoelace holding her badge, and she looked up at a plane in the sky and said, “Dan, what does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?”

It’s a good question, I thought. I mentioned how weird it was that everybody keeps on asking, “Have you seen anything new? Have you seen anything new?” It’s like the mantra of the CES.

Karla pointed out that there’s really not that many types of things a person can have in their house in the end. “You can have a stereo and a microwave and a cordless phone … and the list goes on a bit from there … but after a certain point you run out of things to need. You can get more powerful and expensive things, but not really new things. I guess the number of types of things we build defines the limits of ourselves as a species.”

Nintendo’s Virtual Boy seemed the most advanced thing we’d seen here. SEGA won the Noisiest Booth award, and that’s saying a lot at CES.

Bug, Sig, and Karla were all a bit annoyed by how “family-oriented” the city had become, and we yearned for traces of its proud history of sleaze and corruption. I mean, if you can’t get lost in Las Vegas, then what’s the point of Las Vegas?

During a 90-minute between-meeting lull, we decided to go to the Sahara to check out the porn component of the show, a highly secured second-floor salon room chockablock with the latest in, errr … cyber stimulation.

There were no empty cabs to be found so we ended up sharing a stray Yellow Cab with the worst transvestite on the planet, Darleena: great big hairy knuckles and five o’clock shadow like Fred Flintstone. Darleena kept on talking about the day last year when she met Pamela Anderson of Baywatch at the Hefner Playboy mansion. For half a mile she discussed breast augmentation with Sig (the doctor).

As a joke I told Darleena that Karla sometimes likes to dress up like a small Edwardian boy, and Darleena got all interested. It was a fun ride.

The porn pavilion itself was creepy. This weird porn energy and lots of women with breasts like basketballs. It sounds so great in that bachelor fantasy way, but then you see it, and you freak out. Actually, pornography really just makes sex look unappealing.

After about thirty minutes we’d reached our limit, and were heading toward the door when we saw the crowd surge in the direction of one particular booth, and we looked, and there was John Wayne Bobbit, dressed in Tommy Hilfiger, like a Microsoft employee, standing amid all of these silconized inhabitants of the planet Temptron 5.

Bug said, “Here it is, one day you’re just a nothing buttwipe who cheats on his wife living in the middle of nowhere and then, BAM!, two years later you’re wearing Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers surrounded by eleven women with seventy-inch breasts in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the whole United States of America wondering if your dick works.”

The real world is a porno movie. I’m convinced.

I got to thinking about sin, or badness, or whatever you want to call it, and I realized that just as there are a limited number of consumer electronics we create as a species, there are also a limited number of sins we can commit, too. So maybe that’s why people are so interested in computer “hackers”

—because they invented a new sin.

McDonald’s: “Paying homage to Ronald,” said Amy, pulling into the driveway beneath the golden arches.

Everybody tried to remember the last time they ate a real vegetable.

“Pickles or iceberg lettuce don’t count.”

We were all stumped.

This McDonald’s was offering a free 16-oz. soft drink if a student brings in a report card with an A. If they have two As, they get a drink and a small fries — three As, and they toss in a cheeseburger to boot. Amy said, “Look out, Japan!” But then she realized, “Las Vegas doesn’t have schoolchildren, does it?”

Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, “Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems.”

“Huh?”

“Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself — which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species — food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy: animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers.”

“Oh.”

“Nonetheless, chaos will ultimately prevail, just as one day, all of this will be dust, rubble, and sagebrush once more.”

“Oh.”

“But you know, the good chaos.”

I felt like my IQ had shrunk to one digit.

Amy and Michael began making out right there next to the McDonald’s-world play station.

Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit. I think this has been lost on everybody in the Las Vegan blur, but it would appear that we’re all still employed, and that our risk has become solid equity, but you know what? All I care about is that we’re all still together as friends, that we’re not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn’t. It’s there, but it’s not emotional. It’s simply there.

After dark Karla revealed to me that she, too, was fascinated by the laser beam, so we told everybody we were returning to the Hacienda next door, and instead drove our rented Altima sedan northeastward on Highway 15, to see how far away we could drive and still see the pyramid’s laser beam. I had heard that air pilots reported seeing it from LAX. I wondered if astronauts could see the beam from outer space.

It was an overcast night. We drove and drove, and at forty miles out we realized that we hadn’t been paying attention, and the laser beam was gone. We stopped in at a diner for hamburgers and video poker, and we won $2.25, so we were “a cheeseburger ahead for the evening.”

We then got back into the car and drove back toward Las Vegas, and around twenty-six miles outside of Las Vegas we were able to see the Luxor’s beam of light up in the sky again. We pulled the car over onto the highway shoulder and gazed at it. It was awe-inspiring and romantic.

I felt so close to her.

Later, back at the hotel, I was PowerBooking my journal entry and I could feel Karla watching me, and I got a little self-concious. I said, “I guess it’s sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories …”

She said, “Not at all … because we use so many machines, it’s not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory — first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.”

Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history’s pace feels faster, it is “accelerating” at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster. “Soon enough all human knowledge will be squished into small nubbins the size of pencil erasers that you can pea-shoot at the stars.”

I asked, “And … what then — when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?”

She said that this is not a frightening question. “It is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably, I imagine, use these new memory pebbles to build new paths.”

Like I said … it was romantic.

SUNDAY

What happened was this: I was looking out the window and Todd was fighting with his parents out on the Strip, down below the Hacienda’s sign. How long was this going to go on? I decided I had to help Todd and so I went down to see if I could “Stop the Insanity!” Just as I joined them, Karla came running out. We all turned, and I saw her coming, and I could tell something was very, very wrong.

She collected her breath and said, “Dan, I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s been an accident.”

I said, “An accident?”

She said that she had just spoken with Ethan in Palo Alto. Mom had had a stroke at her swim class, that she was paralyzed, and no one knew what would happen next.

Right there and then, Todd and his parents fell down on their knees and prayed on the Strip, and I wondered if they had scraped their knees in their fall, and I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling, something I have talked about, and something I was now doing. plane window green squares towers lights telephone lines baggage

The New World dream

The extended arm

The caravan traversing a million miles of prairie Cross the uncrossable

Make that journey and build the road along the way.

You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams.

Two Weeks Later TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1995

Hanshin Expressway

Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you’ve never seen before.

Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its contents smashed against walls

Western Washington State, minus Seattle’s metro region, is assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995 R U Japanese? thin blood rear-view mirror Nirvana Unplugged Hawaii what I wanted what really happened Nikkei Index Embolus Cerebrovascular event Possible reversibility Monsterbreaker Mothermaker Kidnapper System-beater Codebreaker Sharkprincess Keypadburner Skywalker Clot

Godseeker

Braineater

This is the day of days, and so the telling begins.

Karla massaged Mom’s back in Mom’s new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master’s brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-100s; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom’s brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching limbs appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster’s voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

Karla spent the morning massaging the lax folds of Mom’s skin. I wonder, is she there? It is what I … we have lived with for weeks, we who look into Mom’s eyes and say, Hello in there, thinking, We are here. Where are you, Mom? Where did you go? How did you disappear? How did the world steal you? How did you vanish?

Actually, Karla was the first to cross the frontier between words and skin; speech and flesh.

Karla invaded Mom’s body. Last week Karla removed her Nikes, took a plastic squeeze bottle of mineral oil from the bathroom, cut it with sesame oil, and crawled atop Mom’s prone form on the foldaway rental bed. She told Dad to watch, told him that he was next, and so Dad watched.

Karla dug and sculpted into my mom’s body, stretching it as only she knows how to do, willing sensation into her flesh, into her rhomboids, her triceps, her rotor cuffs and spaces where probing generated no reaction; Karla, laser-beaming her faith into the body of this woman.

Last week was the beginning, the Confusion, when everything seemed lost, the image of Mom lying frozen and starved of oxygen in the Rinconada swimming pool haunting us. Ethan meeting us at the hospital, his own skin the color of white fatty bacon embedded with an IV drip; Dusty and Lindsay, Dusty sucking in her breath with fear, and turning her head from ours, then returning her gaze and offering us Lindsay as consolation.

There had been discussions, a prognosis, pamphlets and counselors, workshops and experts. Mom’s functions may one day be complete and may be one day partial, but as of today there’s nothing but the twitches and the knowledge that fear is locked inside the body. Her eyes can be opened and closed, but not enough to semaphore messages. She’s all wired up and gizmo’ed; her outside looks like the inside of a Bell switchbox.

What is her side of the story? The password has been deleted.

Karla would take Dad’s hand over the last week and make it touch Mom, saying, “She is there and she has never left.”

And it was Karla who started us talking to Mom, Mom’s eyes fishy, blank, lost and found, requiring an act of faith to presuppose vivid interior dimensions still intact. Karla who made me stare into these faraway eyes and say, Speak to her, Dan: She can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day. Talk to her, Dan: tell her … today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn’t that just fine?

And so I told Mom these things.

And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.

And Karla gently guided Dad up onto the foldaway, saying, Mr. Underwood, roll up your sleeves. Mr. Underwood, your wife is still here, and she has never needed you more.

And there’s Bug, reading Sunday’s color comics to Mom, trying hard to make The Lockhorns sound funny, then saying to his unresponsive audience, “Oh, Mrs. Underwood, I understand your reaction completely. It’s like I’m reading 1970s cocktail napkins out loud to you. I must admit, I’ve never liked this strip,” and then discussing the politics of syndication, and which comic strips he finds unfunny: The Family Circus, Peanuts, Ziggy, Garfield, and Sally Forth. He’s actually more animated than he is in conversations with us.

There is the image of Amy telling rude jokes to Mom and Michael trying to curb the ribaldry, but being swept away by the filth, and Michael responding with Pentium jokes.

There is Susan, washing and cutting my Mom’s hair, saying, “You’ll look just like Mary Tyler Moore, Mrs. U. You’ll be a doll,” and discussing new postings on the Chyx page.

There is Ethan, Ethan on the brink of erasure himself, saying, “Well, Mrs. U, who’d have thought that I’d be the one to monitor you. Don’t tell me it isn’t funny. Because it is, and you know it. I’d change your bandages for you, but you don’t have any and that’s a big issue here.”

There are Dusty and Todd, demonstrating leg-stretching exercises, discussing physical therapy and how to keep her muscles in tone for the day they once again receive their commands.

And there is Abe, who brought in a tub of money, a tub full of coins, and said, “Time to sort some change, Mrs. U. Not much fun for you, but I’ll try and be talkative while I sort … oh look … it’s a peso. Woo!”

Last week there was a jolt. Last week Karla said, “You have to go further, Dan, you have to hold her body.”

I looked at Mom’s body — so long in not holding — and I thought of families who have had to watch a member die slowly and who have said all that can possibly be said to each other — and so all that remains is for them to sit and lie there and nitpick over trivialities or talk about what’s on TV — and so I held Mom’s body, and told her how my day had gone. I talked about stoplights on Camino Real, line-ups at Fry’s, rude telephone operators, traffic on the 101, the price of cheese singles at Costco.

This afternoon, this afternoon of the day of days.

I, in this mood where this earthly kingdom was beautiful in spite of life’s cruel bite, took the CalTrain and BART over to Oakland just to get out of the house, to thwart cabin fever. Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to encourage that amnesia.

Along a roadside I saw an unwound cassette tape, its brown lines shimmying in the sun — sound converted to light. I felt a warm wind’s gust on the Oakland BART platform. I suddenly wanted to be home, to be with my family, my friends.

I was met by Michael, who opened the front door of the house. He told me about a story he had once seen on the news, a story about a boy with cerebral palsy who had been hooked up to a computer, and the first thing he said, when they asked him what he would like to do, was”to be a pilot.”

Michael said to me, “It got me thinking, that maybe your mother could be linked into a computer, too, and maybe the touch of her fingers could be connected to a keypad. So then she could speak to us.” And then he saw my face and said, “She could speak to you, Dan. I’ve been doing some reading on the subject.”

We entered the kitchen, where Bug and Amy were discussing an idea of Bug’s, that “humans don’t exist as actual individual ‘selves’—rather, there is only the ‘probability’ of you being you at any given moment. While you’re alive and healthy, the probability remains pretty high, but when you’re sick or when you’re old, the probability of you being yourself shrinks. The chance of your ‘being all there’ becomes less and less. When you die, the probability of being ‘you’ drops to zero.”

Amy saw me and said, “Close your eyes right now, this very instant. Try to remember the shirt you’re wearing.”

I tried, and couldn’t remember.

She said it would probably take me a lot longer than I’d think. “It’s a cruel trick of nature that personal memory seems to be the first to go. You’ll remember Alka-Seltzer long past the point where you’ve forgotten your children.”

She then said to me, “Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can’t. The brain doesn’t process negatives.”

I walked onto the back patio, and looked over Silicon Valley, clear, but vanishing into a late afternoon fog, unexpected, fanning in from the west. Karla was wearing a sweater, and her breath was like the swimming pool’s wafting heat, there in the coolness. I told her that it was always in the fall when the crops were in, that the wars were called.

She said to me, “We all fall down some day. We all fall down. You’ve fallen and we’ll all pick each other up.”

In the distance I saw the Contra Costa Mountains, and their silhouette was blurred as I confused the mountains for clouds, and Karla dried my eyes with fallen leaves and her sweater’s hem. I told Karla about a Lego TV commercial I saw twenty years ago … a yellow castle and the camera went higher and higher and higher and the castle never ended. She said she had seen it, too.

Dad came by with Misty, and we all went for a walk. Down La Cresta we went, and Dad had brought along the electric garage-door opener, and we pushed its red ridged button, randomly trying to open strangers’ doors.

When we returned to the house, my friends were gathered around Mom, in front of a monitor, their faces lit sky blue; they had forgotten to turn on the lights in the kitchen. Mom’s body was upheld by Bug and Abe inside a kitchen chair, with Michael clasping her arms. On the screen, in 36 point Helvetica on the screen of a Mac Classic were written the words:

i am here

Dad caressed Mom’s forehead and said, “We’re here, too, honey.” He said, “Michael, can she speak …”

Michael put his arms over Mom’s arms, his fingers upon her fingers and assisted her hands above the keyboard. Dad said, “Honey, can you hear us?”

yes

He said to her, “Honey, how are you? How do you feel?”

;=)

Michael broke in. He said, “Mr. Underwood, ask your wife a question that only she and you would know the answer to. Make me sure that this isn’t me doing the talking.”

Dad asked, “Honey, what was your name for me, when we went on our honeymoon on Mt. Hood. Can you remember?”

There was a pause and a word emerged:

reindeer

Dad collapsed and cried and fell to his knees at Mom’s feet and Michael said, “Let’s push the caps-lock button. Capitals make easier words; consider license plates. You’re a State of California vanity license plate now, Mrs. U.”

The caps were locked and the point size lowered. The fingers tapped:

beep beep

Dad said, “Tell us how you feel … tell us what we can do …”

The fingers tapped:

I feel U

I cut through the crowd. I said, “Mom, Mom … tell me it’s you. Tell me something I never liked in my lunch bag at school …” The fingers tapped:

PNUT BUTR

Oh, to speak with the lost! Karla broke in and said, “Mrs. U., our massage … is it okay? Is it helping you?” The fingers tapped:

GR8

I LK MY BDY

Karla looked at the words and, hesitating a second, declared, “I like my body now, too, Mrs. U.”

Mom’s assisted hands tapped out:

MY DOTTR

Karla lost it and started to cry, and then, well, I started to cry. And then Dad, and then, well, everybody, and at the center of it all was Mom, part woman/part machine, emanating blue Macintosh light.

Joy lapsed into silliness lapsed into relief and cocktails.

The kitchen lights went on. Amy said, “This is so first-contact!” Messages lost became messages found:

MIST’Z OVER ETING

DAN CT UR HAIR

GTTNG BETR

LUV U ALL

Here it is: Mom speaking like a license plate … like the lyrics to a Prince song … like a page without vowels … like encryption. All of my messing around with words last year and now, well … it’s real life.

After an hour, the message, GR8LY TIRED came onto the screen and Dad said it was time to wrap it up for now. It was dark, and the fireplace had been lit by Todd. Amy came in with a pile of old horse blankets and flashlights and a set of pen-size laser pointers from last Christmas, and said, Michael … Dan … Susan … whoever, help me move the couch out beside the pool.

She placed these things on the tired old Broyhill, and we carried it out next to the blue-green pool, and the sky above the Valley was filled with a cobalt-gray fog.

Amy turned on one of the portable lasers Abe gave us for Christmas, the ones we use to point at walls during meetings, and cut the sky with a thin red beam. Dusty carried Mom out and placed her on the couch, head skyward, and Dad lay down beside her on this couch, and wrapped her in blankets.

Amy said, “Mrs. U., you’ve probably always wondered what kids do on weekends. Well, the truth of the matter is, they smoke pot and go to Pink Floyd laser shows at the planetarium. Michael: hit the tunes …”

An art rock anthem from another era filled the air, and we turned on all of our lights and cast them into the sky, a chaotic symphony of lines and color.

The dozen of us stood out there on the patio, out in the January evening’s foggy dark: Michael and Amy, still in their clothes, diving in the brilliant blue pool, rescuing the R2D2 pool cleaner from its endless serflike toil; Dad next to Mom on her bed, cradling her head in his arms, watching our lasers, positioning her head so that she could see the beams; Ethan, pale and feisty, testing batteries with a small device, arguing with Dusty over some small matter; Lindsay nearly asleep, lying next to Mom; Abe on his trampoline bouncing into the fog with Susan, Todd, Emmett, and poor, lumbering, overweight, Misty, their four lasers cutting the heaven and joining my laser and Karla’s laser and Dad’s and Ethan’s and Dusty’s.

Karla and I lay down on the cement next to the pool atop a threadbare promotional towel for Road & Track magazine, its thin cotton insulating us from Earth’s current lack of heat. I told her I loved her. Dad heard me say this, and so I guess Mom heard these words, too.

I remembered a friend of Mom’s once told me that when you pray, and you pray honestly, you send a beam of light out into the skies as clear and as powerful as a sunbeam that breaks through the clouds at the end of a rainy day; like the lights on the sidewalk outside the Academy Awards.

And as Karla and I lay there, the two of us — the all of us — with our flashlights and lasers, cutting the weather, extending ourselves into the sky, into the end of the universe with precision technology running so fine, I looked at Karla and said out loud, “You know, its true.”

And then, I thought about us … these children who fell down life’s cartoon holes … dreamless children, alive but not living — we emerged on the other side of the cartoon holes fully awake and discovered we were whole.

I’m worried about Mom … and I’m thinking about Jed, and suddenly I look around at Bug and Susan and Michael and everybody and I realize, that what’s been missing for so long isn’t missing anymore.

hellojed