I asked her: She said it was to get away from her parents and having to visit either of them because they were both trying to rip apart her loyalties in some nasty custody war.
"I wanted to go to a place where loyalty wasn't an issue. Ha! I wanted to not have a life because life back East sucked big time. So I made the choice to come here-we all made the choice to come here. Nobody was holding a carbine up to our temples. So us crabbing about our zero-life factors isn't up for debate, really. Yet do you remember, Dan-do you remember ever having a life? Ever? What is a life? I think I once had one-or at least dreamed of having one-and now with going to Oop!, I kind of feel like I have a hope of life again."
I said I remembered having a life, back with Jed and being a kid, and Susan said being a kid counted as life only sort of. "It's what you do after you're a kid when life counts for real."
I said, "I think I have a life now. With Karla, I mean. "
She said, "You guys really like each other, don't you?"
And I said-no, I whispered-"I love her."
I've never told anyone that yet- except Karla. It felt like I jumped off a steep cliff into deep blue water. And then I wanted to tell everybody.
More body talk: Karla believes that human beings remember everything. "All stimulation generates a memory-and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes," she says. "You were right."
"Lucky for me" I reply," my own memories tend to get stored in my neck and shoulder blades. My body has never felt so ... alive-I wasn't even aware I had one until you woke it up today. Life's too good."
Sometimes I think my subconscious has bad days, and I can't believe how mundane the stuff that I write into the file is. But isn't that the deal with a person's subconscious ... that it stores all the things you aren't noticing visibly?
I'm driving up Interstate 5. It is raining and I remember I have to pick up paper towels and decaffeinated coffee at
Costco.
And how did you feel about that?
Mom... Dad...
I'm okay. I am not being starved, or beaten, or unnecessarily frightened.
Dropshadow lettering
Granite backgrounds
Hand
Held
Game
This is the end of the Age of Authenticity.
Oracle NeXT
Ampex Electronic Arts
SATURDAY
Garage sale day.
It was a real "Zen-o-thon"-we decided the time had arrived to shake ourselves of all our worldly crap and become minimalists-or at least try starting from scratch again-more psychic pioneering.
"This is so 'Zenny,'" Bug said happily, as some poor cretin purchased his used electric razor (ugh!) as well as his collection of Elle MacPherson merchandise.
Also for sale:
Japan Airlines inflatable 747
official Hulk Hogan WWF focus-free 110 signature camera
antique Ghostbuster squeeze toys
Nick the Greek professional gambling home board game
Ping-Pong table
shoe box full of squirt guns
blenders (2)
vegetable juicer
dehumidifier
unopened cans of aerosolized cheese food products
M. C. Escher pop-up books
far too many Dilophosaurus figurines
huge Sony box full of collected Styrofoam packing peanuts and packing chunks from untold assorted consumer electronics
The big surprise? Everyone sold everything-everything-even the box of Styrofoam. Bug's right: We're one sick species.
And my car sold, too-in a flash, to the first person who came around to look at it. Wayne's World did wonders for the secondary market of AMC products.
Actually, the Hornet was such a bucket I was surprised it sold at all. I was worried I'd have to drive it south. Or abandon it somewhere.
Now I am virtually possessionless. Having nothing feels liberating.
National Enquirer:
"Loni's Diary Rips Burt Apart"
He threatened her with a gun in jealous rage He locked her out of her honeymoon suite He hid vodka in water bottles
PLUS: Burt: "I wanted to ditch her at the altar." Exclusive interview on his tell-all book
I do not want this to be me.
SUNDAY
Today we left for California and Karla did her first major flip-out on me. I suppose I was being insensitive, but I think she overreacted by far. In packing her Microbus, she buried all of the cassettes we were going to be using for the trip deep inside the bowels of luggage. I said, "God, how could you be so stupid!"
Then she went crazy and threw a toaster oven at me and said things like, "Don't you ever call me stupid," and "I am not stupid," and she piled into the van and drove off. Todd was standing nearby and just shrugged and went back to bungeeing his Soloflex on top of his Supra. I had to take off in the Acura and catch up with her down by the Safeway, and we made up.
Karla said good-bye to her old geek house's cat, Lentil, named as such because that's how big its brain is. Nerds tend to have cats, not dogs. I think this is because if you have to go to Boston or to a COMDEX or something, cats can take care of themselves for a few days, and when you return, they'll probably remember you. Low maintenance.,
Bug was like a little kid, all excited about our "convoy" down to California and was romanticizing the trip already, before we'd even left. The worst part was, he had his ghetto blaster on and was playing that old '70s song, "Convoy," and so the song was stuck in our heads all day.
Cars for the trip:
Me: Michael's Acura
Karla: her Microbus
Todd: his Supra
Susan and Bug: their Tauri with U-Haul trailers
Todd said that our "car architecture" for our journey is "scalable and integrated-and fully modular-just like Apple products!"
Somewhere near Olympia, Bug's car rounded a bend and it was so weird- gravity pulled me into an exit off-ramp. And then everyone else trickled in, too. Served him right for lodging the virus of that dopey song in our heads. It was like in third grade, when you ditch someone. It just happens. Humans are horrible.
Then we all felt really horrible for ditching Bug, and we went out chasing him, but we couldn't find him and I got a speeding ticket. Karma.
1-5 is a radar hell.
During a roadside break I asked Karla why she didn't want to go visit her parents in McMinnville, but she said it was because they were psychotic, and so I didn't press the matter.
The Microbus is covered in gray bondo with orange bondo spots all over it. We call it The Carp.
We found Bug south of Eugene. He didn't even know about the ditch, so now all of us have a dark secret between us.
Along 1-5, just outside a suburb of Eugene, Oregon, there were all of these houses for sale next to the freeway, and they were putting these desperate signs up to flog them: if you lived here, you would be home right now. Karla honked the horn, waved out the window of the Microbus and pointed at the sign. Convoy humor.
We made this rule that we had to honk every time we spotted road kill, and we nearly burned out our horns.
On a diner TV set we saw that in Arizona, the eight men and women of Biosphere 2 emerged into the real world after spending two years in a hermetically sealed, self-referential, self-sufficient environment. I certainly empathized with them. And their uniforms were like Star Trek.
We switched vehicles and I drove Karla's Microbus for a while, but the Panasonic rice cooker in the rear filled with rattling cassette tapes drove me nuts. It was buried too deeply inside the mounds o' stuff to move, so around Klamath Falls we switched vehicles again.
We crossed the California border and had dinner in a cafe. We talked about society's accelerating rate of change. Karla said, "We live in an era of no historical precedents-this is to say, history is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes. You can't look at, say, the War of 1709 (I made this date up, although no doubt there probably was a War of 1709) and draw parallels between then and now. They didn't have Federal Express, SkyTel paging, 1-800 numbers, or hip replacement surgery in 1709-or a picture of the entire planet inside their heads."