Microserfs Read online

  I'm long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you

  d.b.

  Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you're gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then . . . cheap!

  * * *

  At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell's soup flavors:

  Creamy Dolphin

  Lagoon

  Beak

  Pond

  Crack

  * * *

  Note: I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212° Fahrenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot! It takes hours to cool off - it's so hot it's undrinkable - and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed. At least Starbucks doesn't stink like sweet coffee-flavoring chemicals . . . like the way you'd expect a Barbie doll's house to smell.

  * * *

  Saw a documentary about the commodities market. Read some books that were lying around. Watched some old 1970s TV shows later. I remembered an old Nova episode in which German hackers published a secret document, and some Ph.D. hippie geek from UC Berkeley tracked them down with a baited document. Was this hippie geek tricked into trapping one of his own kind by the NSA or some other such organization? Ethics.

  Then I started to think about those old Time-Life books with such all-embracing names like, "The Elements," and "The Ocean," and of how the information in them never really goes out of date, whereas the computer series books date within minutes: "Most 'personal computers' now contain devices called 'hard drives' capable of storing the equivalent, in some cases, of up to three college textbooks."

  Felt a bit random.

  * * *

  Capture

  specific

  functions

  Microsoft

  Navajo

  NASA

  Flesh-eating bacteria

  Arthur Miller

  Kristy McNichol

  Lance Kerwin

  skateboard

  trail mix

  PERL

  Job description

  toner cartridge

  very

  really

  a lot

  ummm . . .

  Martin-Marietta

  FRIDAY

  Susan and Karla came into the living room when I was reading the Handbook of Highway Engineering, and they both flipped out. They totally grokked on it. We kept on oohing and ahhhing over the book's beautiful, car-free on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses - "So clean and pure and undriven."

  Karla noted that freeway engineers had their own techie code words, just as dull and impenetrable as geek talk. "Examples: subgrades, partial clover-leaf interchanges, cutslopes, and TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) . . ."

  "They even abused three-letter acronyms," said Karla, who also decreed that Rhoda Morgenstern would have dated a freeway engineer back in the 1970s. "His name would have been Rex and he would have looked like Jackson Browne and would have known the compressive strength range of Shale, Dolomite, and Quartzite to the nearest p.s.i. x 10^3."

  * * *

  I am really terrible at remembering three-letter acronyms. It's a real dead zone in my brain. I still barely can tell you what RAM is. Wherever this part of the brain is located, it's the same place where I misfile the names and faces of people I meet at parties. I'm so bad at names. I'm realizing that three-letter acronyms are actually words now, and no longer simply acronyms: ram, rom, scuzzy, gooey, see-pee-you. . . . Words have to start somewhere.

  * * *

  Karla told me about when she was young. About how she remembered trying to make - no, not make, engineer - Campbell's Vegetable Soup from scratch - chopping up the carrots and potatoes to resemble machine-cut cubes - getting the exact number of lima beans per can (4).

  "I grew up with assembly lines, remember. My favorite cartoon was always the one with the little chipmunks stuck inside the vegetable canning factory. I used to guess at the spices, too. But in the end it never worked because I didn't use beef stock or MSG."

  * * *

  Random day. Fed on magazines for a while. Radio. Phone call from Mom, and she talked about traffic.

  * * *

  Industrial Light & Magic

  jump

  hit

  We're just friends

  run

  multi-user dungeon

  Ziggy Stardust

  Sky Tel paging

  FORTRAN

  IKEA

  Wells Fargo

  Safeway

  hummingbird

  I am an empath

  4x4

  Kung Fu

  Death Star

  platform

  oligarchy

  Highway 92

  Deuteronomy

  Staples

  Pearle Express

  Kraft singles

  cordless

  brain ded

  Silo

  an executive lifestyle

  Maybelline

  implicator

  Insert

  Font

  Format

  Tools

  SATURDAY

  Oh God.

  I knew I'd do something. Karla's on the warpath because I forgot our one-month anniversary. Doh! She gave me until bedtime tonight to remember, but I still forgot, so now she's not speaking to me. I tried to tell her that time isn't necessarily linear, that it flows in odd clumps and bundles and clots. "Well, err, um - what exactly is a month, Karla? Ha ha ha."

  "I don't know about you, Dan," she interrupted, "but I programmed my desktop calendar to remind me. Good night." [Insert one frosty glare here. A bored yawn; a bedroom door nudged closed with little baby toes.]

  It's nice to see this romantic side to Karla's personality - an unexpected bonus - but still, nobody likes THE COUCH. And so now after weeks of blissful insomnia-free sleep, I'm yet again PowerBooking my daily diaries here on the acid green couch in a big big way.

  Comely superstar Cher hawks cosmetics on late-nite TV. Mishka is also spending tonight in the living room and she is making foul smells indeed. At least it's raining out - buckets - and the weird too-hot summer is over.

  Tomorrow I will program my desktop computer to remind me of every one of our anniversaries, monthly or otherwise, until the year 2050.

  * * *

  Actually, we all have so much free time now. Karla, Todd, Bug, and I sit around awaiting our next product group assignment, feeling deflated and just plain exhausted. We forget about clock- and calendar-type time completely.

  Today, while raking the front lawn, Todd said, "Wouldn't it be scary if our internal clocks weren't set to the rhythms of waves and sunrise - or even the industrial whistle toot - but to product cycles, instead?"

  We got nostalgic about the old days, back when September meant the unveiling of new car models and TV shows. Now, carmakers and TV people put them out whenever. Not the same.

  * * *

  Yes, Karla moved in a month ago. We're an item.

  Todd, Abe, and I lugged her "ownables" from her geek house down the street up to our own geek house at the top of the cul-de-sac: futon and frame . . . cluster o' computers . . . U-Frame-It Ansel Adams print. . . and dumped it all into Michael's empty room. And then, once she installed herself in our house ("Think of me as a software application ") she announced that she was an expert in (thank you, Lord . . .) shiatsu massage!

  * * *

  Mom phoned this afternoon. Out of the proverbial blue she said to me, "The house! The soil up in the hills is settling and the roof's rotting. The door and windows need replacing. I just stand here and feel the money being s
ucked out of my body. At least we had the foresight to buy it when we did. But all my librarian's salary goes into the house. The rest goes to Price-Costco."

  Money.

  I changed the subject. "What did you have for dinner?"

  "Those pre-formed pork by-product patties. And ramen noodles. Like the food you kids eat when you do your coding all-nighters."

  It was a "Listening-Only" call.

  "I know, Mom. How's Dad doing?"

  "Prozac. Well . . . something like Prozac. At least he doesn't obsess on the garage anymore. He goes out in the morning I-don't-know-where looking for work. Let's not get into it. God, I wish I drank."

  Life is stressful in Palo Alto. I send Dad $500 every month. It's all I can spare on the 26K I make here ([$26,000 / 12] - taxes = $1,500).

  It was a really bad phone call, but Mom just needed to vent - she has so few ears in her life who will listen. Who really ever does, I guess?

  * * *

  Michael never did return from Cupertino.

  Rumor had it Bill had Michael secretly working on a project called Pink, but nothing ever came of the rumor.

  A delivery firm specializing in high-tech moves carted Michael's things to Silicon Valley. His pyramid of empty diet Coke cans - his suitcase-worth of Habitrail gerbil mazes - his collection of C. S. Lewis novels. Gone.

  * * *

  Fun fact: We found about 40 empty cough syrup bottles in the cupboard - Michael is a Robitussin addict! (Actually, he bulk-buys knockoff house brands-he's a "PayLess Tussin" addict.) The world never ceases to amaze.

  * * *

  It’s late at night. Basketball on TV; computer and fitness mags everywhere. Let me talk about love.

  Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart! You remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everybody keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.

  Let me try again. I'm not good at this.

  Karla and I fell in love somewhere out there - I think that's the way it happens - out there. The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.

  Karla and I would talk about computing and coding. Our minds met out in the crystal lattice galaxy of ideas and codes and when we came out of our reverie, we realized we were in a special place - out there.

  And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them, "Will you take my heart - stains and all?" and they say, "I will," and they ask you the same question, and you say, "I will," too.

  * * *

  There are other reasons Karla's lovable, too, reasons not so poetic, but just as real. She's like a friend to me, and we have all of these common interests - "mind meld" - whatever. I can discuss computers and Microsoft and that part of our lives - but we also have esoteric conversations that have nothing to do with tech life. I've never really had a friend this close before.

  And there's the nonlinear stuff: Karla's intuitive and I'm not, yet she's still on my frequency. She understands why yaki soba noodles in a plastic UFO-shaped container from Japan are intrinsically glorious. She scrunches up her forehead when she knows she's not explaining an idea as clearly as she knows she can, and she gets frustrated.

  Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

  As I type this in, I feel small arms around my neck and a kiss on my jugular and I don't know, but I think I may be forgiven. I hope so because my forgetting the anniversary thing was an honest mistake. I'm new at this love thing.

  * * *

  Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

  Cedars Sinai

  starburst explosion

  Gak

  UNDO

  Ctrl Z

  CtrI Z

  CtrI Z

  Phoenix

  Cleveland

  Luis Vuitton

  Kalashnikov

  Waxahachie

  LA Lakers

  San Antonio

  bubble economy

  Creamsicles

  Livermore

  the place for ribs

  Taylor Sequences

  frog

  Bleeding eyeliner

  Colossal

  SUNDAY

  Todd's obsessing on his body big-time these days. This afternoon he came in late from the gym and sat on the living room Orion carpet flexing his arm and staring at his muscles as they bulged - buff and bored. His biggest project at the moment is making pyramids out of his empty tubs of protein supplements with their gold labels that resemble van art from the 1970s. Why do nerds make pyramids out of everything? Imagine Egypt!

  The Cablevision was out for some reason, and Todd was just lying there, flexing his arms on the floor in front of the snowy screen. He said to me, "There has to be more to existence than this. 'Dominating as many broad areas of automated consumerism as possible' - that doesn't seem to cut it anymore." Todd?

  This speech was utterly unlike him - thinking about life beyond his triceps or his Supra. Maybe, like his parents, he has a deep-seated need to believe in something, anything. For now it's his bod . . . I think.

  He said, "What we do at Microsoft is just as repetitive and dreary as any other job, and the pay's the same as any other job if you're not in the stock loop, so what's the deal . . . why do we get so into it? What's the engine that pulls us through the repetition? Don't you ever feel like a cog, Dan? . . . wait - the term 'cog' is outdated - a cross-platform highly transportable binary object!"

  I said, "Well, Todd, work isn't, and was never meant to be a person's whole life."

  "Yeah, I know that, but aside from the geek-badge-of-honor stuff about doing cool products first and shipping them on time and money, what else is there?"

  I thought about this. "So what is it you're really asking me?"

  "Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity? Microsoft is no Bosnia."

  Religious upbringing.

  Karla came into the room at this point. She turned off the TV set and looked at Todd square in the eyes and said, "Todd: you exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species - you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthly paradise - the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear."

  She sat down on the couch, and there was rain drumming on the roof, and I realized that there weren't enough lights on in the room and we were all quiet.

  Karla said, "We all had good lives. None of us were ever victimized as far as I know. We have never wanted for anything, nor have we ever lusted for anything. Our parents are all together, except for Susan's. We've been dealt good hands, but the real morality here, Todd, is whether these good hands are squandered on uncreative lives, or whether these hands are applied to continuing humanity's dream."

  The rain continued.

  "It's no coincidence that as a species we invented the middle classes. Without the middle classes, we couldn't have had the special type of mindset that consistently spits out computati
onal systems, and our species could never have made it to the next level, whatever that level's going to be. Chances are, the middle classes aren't even a part of the next level. But that's neither here nor there. Whether you like it or not, Todd, you, me, Dan, Abe, Bug, and Susan - we're all of us the fabricators of the human dream's next REM cycle. We are building the center from which all else will be held. Don't question it, Todd, and don't dwell on it, but never ever let yourself forget it."

  Karla looked at me. "Dan, let's go out and get a Grand Slam Breakfast. I have $1.99 and it's burning a hole in my pocket."

  * * *

  Susan taped the following clipping from the Wall Street Journal to her door (which won't be hers much longer - she's moving soon): Sept. 3, 1993, a littie while ago. The clipping was about the Japanese rainy season that started this year in June, and never ended:

  A typhoon flooded the moats of Japan's imperial palace in downtown Tokyo. Imperial carp fled their home for the first time and flopped in knee-deep waters covering one of Japan's busiest intersections.

  Susan's "totally right-lobe" now.

  I tried to find her and ask her what she meant with the article, but she was out on Capitol Hill getting pixelated with her no-doubt right-lobed grunge buddies.

  Susan quit the day after she vested and began "running with the wolves" - or so she announced to all of us the morning after her Vest Fest. She unveiled her new image as we were sitting in front of our Mitsubishi home entertainment totem, eating our last few boxes of Kellogg's Snak-Paks with plastic spoons, deconstructing old Samson and Goliath cartoons, and trying to figure out how/if to wake up my Dad, who was still passed out on Michael's bed.

  Susan's previous image - Patagonia-wearing Northwest good girl - had been shed away for a radicalized look: bent shades, striped Fortrel too-tight top, Angela Bowie hairdo, dirty suede vest, flares, and Adidases.

  "Wow," said Bug. "What a stud."

  She stormed past us, stopped at the top of the stairs, said, ''Fuck it. I'm tired of being Mary Richards. I'm off to hold up a 7-Eleven," and then clomped down to the driveway.

  I think she expected us to be a bit shocked, but you know, it's actually really great when a person reinvents themself. We finished our Froot Loops and soy milk.