Microserfs (30 page)

I went to Price-Costco. My weekly job is to purchase in-office snacks, all set up in an IKEA shelf unit in the kitchen. Everything costs 75¢.

Mr. Noodles (for Dusty)

Pop-Tarts

hot chocolate mix

Cup•A•Soup

granola bars

Chee•tos

Famous Amos cookies

Fig Newtons

microwave popcorn

BBQ potato chips

Karla, Bug, and I went on a tour of "Multi-Media Gulch" later in the afternoon. What a joke. There's nothing there! Or rather, there's lots of stuff around the north end of the Bay Bridge, in around the warehousey neighborhood - many companies doing cool things - but there's no public interface, so you might as well be in any warehouse district anywhere. No T-shirt stands.

We met up with Jeremy, who, as it turns out, is highly into body manipulation: tattoos, piercings, and (scary) branding. He's really political and he talks about queer-this and queer-that and the whole thing reminds me of our office's recent fling with Marxism, and I try and pretend it's fascinating, but my mind does wander off. Like when someone starts describing their stereo.

I couldn't help thinking, though, that it was a good thing Bug moved to San Francisco - being gay is such a nonissue here. You could be an ultrapolitical gay activist or a gay Republican; there's no overriding clique dominating. And fortunately for Bug, there seems to be a bigger dating pool to draw from than in Coeur d'Alene or Seattle.

Anyway, Bug, Jeremy, Karla, and I stopped by Body Manipulations on Fillmore Street. The guy in front of us was waiting to get a "Gigue" - a pierce inserted onto the strip of skin between the scrotum and the anus.

"But your body is your hard drive!" said Karla, to embarrassing withering stares of everybody in the store.

Karla, Bug, and I blanched and Bug asked Jeremy if his earring could wait. Jeremy was furious and stormed out. So the piercing's on hold, at least temporarily, and Bug is in the doghouse with Jeremy. Bug said, "I think there's a lot about this new culture I don't quite understand yet. I'm coming to it pretty late."

Whenever Abe e-mails me, he uses a fast-food-related tag line. I've compiled a list. Herewith:

Ample Parking

Ask Your Manager about Unionizing . . . No, Don't

Batter-fried Batter: Yum

Backlit Plexiglas Signs: Excellent BB Gun Targets

Cat Food: The Next Level

Customers Are Taking too Many Free Napkins

e coli. 157 Bacteria Colonizes Undercooked Patties

Elderly Employees Easier to Bully

Everybody Fears Clowns

Fishwich . . . Real Word . . . Yes or No?

Focus Grouping Deems Lamb-burgers Unpopular

Garish Color Schemes Discourage Loitering

Gift Certificates Make Shitty Presents

Hairnets

Hard to Envision Ronald McDonald Dating

More Orange Drink Machines at Birthday Parties

Muzak Discourages Loitering Teen Thugs

Pictures Instead of Words on Cash Register Buttons

Pseudo-randomly Shaped Beef Patties

Shamrock Burgers Unlikely

Swan Nuggets Tempt Yuppies

28 Dead in Random Sniping Bloodbath

Unhappy Meals - And That's Okay

Uniforms Must Affirm Asexuality

Younger Staff Exhibiting Insolence

Susan and Emmett have made up, but Karla says that it’s going to be tempestuous between them. Susan likes bullying, and Emmett likes to be bullied. They were down in the parking lot earlier on filling up partially rotted green bell peppers with red marine alkyd enamel paint which they will then hurl at sexually exploitative billboards later tonight. Emmett wears the same expression on his face that Misty wears whenever Dusty twirls her around like a Maypole. He's just frighteningly in love. I mean, I love Karla, but Emmett seems, what is the word . . . enslaved.

*UH OH*.

But then, Susan's the obsessive type, too. So they're a pair.

Mom and I took Misty for a morning walk today and Mom was chattier than usual. Her work at the seniors home has her thinking quite a bit, it seems. Between the seniors home, swimming, the library, and Dad, she's so busy nowadays.

In order to keep up with "us kids," Mom's been reading (and clipping) yet more articles about this @$&*%!! Information Superhighway. The enormity of her clipping enthusiasm seems to have made the issue penetrate her consciousness. She was asking me about brains and memories.

I wasn't about to go into Karla's theories of the body and memory storage because discussing my body with my mother is something I'm simply unable to do. But I did say, "There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what's important."

"What about if you don't use a memory often enough, then. If a memory isn't used enough, does it become irretrievable?"

"Well - aside from proton decay and cosmic rays eliminating connections, I think memories are always there. They just get . . . unfindable. Think of memory loss as a forest fire. It's natural. You shouldn't really be afraid. Think of the flowers that grow where the land had just been

destroyed."

"Your grandfather had Alzheimer's. Did you know that? Maybe I

shouldn't be telling you this."

"I already knew. Dad told me about it years ago. Was it fast?"

"Worse - slow."

Misty became instant friends with a passing jogger who had been taking

her pulse. Dogs have it so easy.

Mom said, "I've been wondering if maybe our time here on earth has been protracted out for too long - by science - and wondering if maybe it's not a bad thing to expire before our government-waranteed 71.5 years have elapsed."

"Mom, this isn't one of those 'I-have-cancer' talks, is it?"

"God, no. It's just that seeing all those old people at work, so lonely and forgetful and all - it makes me have some dark thoughts. That's all. Oh listen to me natter. How selfish."

Mom was always taught that other people's problems were more important than her own.

"Anything else . . . ?" I asked.

"And now I'm wondering. That's all."

"Wondering what?"

"I seem to feel myself losing . . . myself. This sounds so bored-housewife. But I'm not bored. But I have problems, too." I asked her what they were, but she said that problems were best not spoken of, and this is, perhaps, my family's main problem. "I'm joining a metaphysical discussion group."

"That's it?"

"You don't think I'm nutty?" (I have never heard anybody use the word "nutty" unironically before, and there was a satellite-link pause before I could say, "God no!" Karla and I have a metaphysical discussion group between ourselves almost every night.)

"Of course not."

Spent the latter part of the day set on "WANDER," cruising this glorious Bay with Karla. The freeways - they're so gorgeous - the 280 cresting the big hill going north, past all the Pacifica and Daly City exits; the Highway 92 cloverleaf to Hayward and Half Moon Bay off the 101. So sensual, so infinite, so full of promise.

Walking through the paddocks - we did the running-across-the-field-in-slow-motion-toward-each-other thing; we toyed with the bioanimatronic singing vegetable booth at Molly Stone's on California Street. Then we looked for an Italian restaurant so we could reenact the classic Lady and the Tramp spaghetti noodle/kiss scene.

During dinner we discussed encryption. I got to wondering what a paragraph with no vowels would look like, remembering that when Ethan first met Michael, at the Chili's restaurant, Michael was busy deleting vowels on the menu. So later on I'm going to experiment with this.

Abe:

It stopped raining today, so I wnet out and bounced around on the trampoline. But it wansn't the same without Bug standing on the sidelines outlining quadripoligeia in exquisite detail.

I wonder if maybe I don't talk to enough humans in a given day . . . I have a few casual interactions, but nothing really. And people I'm technically close with, like my family . . . I don't discuss deep things with them, either.

Anyways, it seeems okay for us to talk abuout things. I've never really done this before. And sometimes I feel kind of lost. There - I've revealed too much. I'm going to send you this before I can stop myself.

Barbecue dinner tonight chez Mom and Dad.

We were discussing the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held every January in Las Vegas and every July in Chicago, and Mom asked us why CES is so important, and Ethan, disdaining food, plucking a grapefruit from a tree beside the wisteria vine, replied pronto. He's so nice to my mother. They get along so well. But he's not Eddie Haskell nice. He's just nice nice. He's also an information leaf blower:

"The CES began as an annual Las Vegas car speaker and pornography trade show. It only incidentally began showcasing video games in the early 1980s. Games were considered a sideline novelty and have only recently been revealed as the passageway for the future of the human race. Editorials aside, in Las Vegas at CES you have what's called the 'Demo Derby.' Companies like us have to have a working demo of our products to show the outlets - Toys-R-Us, Blockbuster, and Target - as well as business plans and market research. As well you have what are called 'product sneaks' - you show the press your product so you can attract potential licensee software developers as well as drum up new business. I've been to eighteen CES shows. They make or break you."

After this, Susan said, "You'd think I was at Sea World and had asked Ethan about Shamu's feeding habits. How does he remember this stuff? He just reels it off."

Bug has broken up with Jeremy, who he says is too politicized and too extreme. He was fairly open about it with Karla and me.

"Jeremy wanted me to be just like him, which wouldn't be so bad, except he's just like all of his friends. It's like Coeur d'Alene all over again - except with pasta and better defined pectorals. And it doesn't annoy me that Jeremy wants me to be just like him. That's actually kind of nice. But what bothers me is that Jeremy is just essentially not like me, and we're too disparate to ever be in sync. I thought, you know, dating would be a bit easier. It's not. And what's truly freaky is realizing I'm vulnerable to identity changes because I'm so desperate to find a niche. I feel like Crystal Pepsi."

In the middle of all this, Dad was putzing around in the background. He's building my space station I'm designing in real space and real time. He asked me where the box with 8-stud beams was. ("Over there by the bowl of plastic eyeballs." "Oh right - there they are.")

Bug continued, "I know I'm sort of a nerd and I don't dress nicely and I grouch out at times, but I still want to be me. I want to find somebody else, sure, but I also don't want to end up harder at the end of all of this." He went back to work.

Ethan sauntered through. "Milestones? Are we meeting our milestones, oh content delivery system of mine?"

Susan, Emmett, Dusty, and about a dozen Chyx organized together over the Net, and decided to picket Fry's for fostering female de-intelligence by not selling tampons. The San Jose Mercury News interviewed them, took their picture, and left soon enough. Victory!

[Formatter's note: One full page with nothing but consonants, and one full page with nothing but vowels, deleted here]

Michael and Ethan broke down and told everyone the news - we have NO money. They made sure Dad wasn't around for the news, which was nice. We'd more or less suspected this all along, so in the end it came as no surprise.

Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look so bad. How could we have been so stupid to leave? Microsoft is a business first and only - not a social welfare state for 13,000 people who lucked in at the right moment.

Michael is petrified we might have to sell his Lego. "It's so pretty - it would be murder . . . a sin . . . to take it all apart. And last week ID magazine came in to take its picture."

The thing is, we agree about the Lego. It is too pretty to sell. Somewhere a few weeks ago, like a piece of DNA with just the right number of proteins added, it became alive. We can't kill it.

Suddenly it occurred to me that Ethan could sell his Patek Phillipe watch. That's 35 million yen right there. I said, "Ethan, sell your watch," and he said, "I can't believe you thought this was genuine," and dropped it into the coffee pot saying, "Six dollars. Kowloon. 1991."

We got nothing done in the afternoon. In fact we got drunk. We have no idea what we're going to do. Work some more, I suppose.

Abe looks like he's all set to go nonlinear. His e-mail is becoming telltale to an amazing degree:

At 21, you make this Faustian pact with yourself - that your company is allowed to soak up 7 to 10 years of your life - but then at 30 you have to abandon the company, or else there's something WRONG with you.

The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from diveorced backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren't really many older poeple in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence protraction.

As is common with Microsoft people I worked like a mental case throughout my 20s, and then hit this wall at thiry and went *SPLAT*.

But just think about the way high tech cultures puropose - fully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s , if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERRGES! And the way tech firms won't even call work "The office:, but instead , "the campus".

It's sick and evil. At least down in California YOU"RE not working on a campus.

With you’re 30s begins "the closing" . . . you realize that it' not going to be forever. . .the game becomes a lot more serious. People get more involved in their work.

Conundrum: I can't imagine not giving myself fully to a job . . . 100% of me . . but if I DO, I'd never "have a life" (whatever that means.) The problem is, who'd WANT to have a job that couldn't absorb you 100%??