Karla doesn't like my being friends with Ethan. She says it's corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I'll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.
Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into "Marvins" and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.
Oh-earlier today, driving up Arastradero from Starbucks, the sunset was literally almost killer.
It was all we could do not to crash the car looking at the pinks and oranges. And the view from Mom and Dad's house on La Cresta Drive was staggering: from the San Mateo bridge to the north, practically down to Gilroy in the south. The Contra Costa Mountains were seemingly lit from the inside, like beef-colored patio lanterns, and we even saw a glint from the observatory atop Mount Hamilton. And the dirigible hangar at Moffatt Naval Airfield looked as if the Stay-Puft marshmallow giant was lying down to die. It was so grand.
We sat there on the sagging cedar balcony to watch the floor show. The balcony sags because the sugary brown soil underneath all these older ranch houses is settling; floors bump; doors don't quite close true. We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom's golden retriever that she bought two years ago second-hand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she's too affectionate. It's a flaw we don't mind. It was just a nice moment. I felt like I was home.
Karla also keeps a diary, but her entries are so brief. For example, she showed me a sample entry for the entire trip to California, all she wrote was: Drove down to California. Dan drew a robot on my place mat at lunch in south Oregon and I put it in my purse. That was it. No mention of anything we talked about. I call it Reduced Instruction Set Computation diaries.
MONDAY
Karla and I took an R&R break and drove 40 miles up to one of the Simpsons bars in the City-the Toronado, where they play The Simpsons every Thursday night. Except I realized it was Monday, so no Simpsons. I can never get the dates right anymore. But soon enough they'll be syndicated on the junky stations every night until the end of the universe, so I suppose I'll survive.
We took the wrong off-ramp (a deadly mistake in San Francisco- they STILL haven't rebuilt after the 1989 quake; the 101/280 connector links are so unbelievably big and empty and unfinished) and we got lost. We ended up driving through Noe Valley by accident-so pretty. Such a VISION, this city is. I suppose the City is putting all its highway-building energy into building the mention-it-one-more-time-and-I'll-scream information superhighway.
Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We're so sick of it!
On the mountain coming in from the airport they have what has to be the world's ugliest sign saying, south san francisco, the industrial city, in huge white letters up on the mountainside. You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a trade convention.
"If they changed it to postindustrial city, it might be meaningful," said Karla.
Anyway, we couldn't find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District.
San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and
listen to the Germs' first album. Everyone here is so young-it's like Microsoft that way-a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there's an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places. It's a big town that feels like neighborhoods: a municipal expression of Local Area Networks.
And I must admit I'm impressed by the level of techiness-people here are fully jacked in. Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF coffee bar circa The Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:
thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers
a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner's old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)
used mismatched furniture
bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)
a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)
sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads
multi-pierced bodies
a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair
nightclub flyers
Parking in San Francisco is a nightmare. There are no spots. We decided that the next time we came we'd bring our own spots with us. We decided to invent portable, roll-up spots, like those portable holes they use in cartoons. Or maybe a can of spray-on parking spot remover to get rid of other cars. It's crazy there, that way. Just crazy. In the end we said a prayer to Rita, the pagan goddess of parking spots and meters. We shot out beams of parking karma into the hills ahead of us. We were rewarded with fourteen luxurious feet of car space. Rita, you kooky goddess you!
Learned a new word today: "interiority"-it means, being inside somebody 's head.
Michael has a new obsession: he sits on the patio beside the pool and watches the automated Polaris pool-sweeper scrape decomposed eucalyptus leaves off the pool's bottom. The pool sweeper looks like R2D2 as it hobbles about its duties, and I think they're becoming best friends.
Oh-we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don't mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He's a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He's a real turtlenecker-one of those French guys who'd be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.
He said that it was at Clinton's congressional speech when John Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton that everybody realized Apple was way out of control. Personally, I thought it was glamorous. Then he hit us with a bombshell, which was that Apple never had a contingency plan in the event that they lost the Look & Feel suit. They totally believed they were going to win. Maybe the PowerPC will save them. We warned Anatole not to discuss Look & Feel with Bug, but he said they'd already discussed it and that Bug had seemed bored by it. Bug's forgetting his roots! California's turned him mellow.
Also, Anatole says nobody's simply at Apple; they're still at Apple. It would appear that none of what we hear matches the One-Point-Oh, Gods-in-the-Clouds mental pictures we have of the company. But like most gossip, it merely makes us want to be closer to the core of the gossip itself. We're all drooling for a chance to visit Apple, except a chance never seems to appear. Anatole is useless in this regard. We think he burned some bridges before he left-expense report fudging?
And of course Anatole is a genius. In the Silicon Valley the IQ baseline (as at Microsoft) starts at 130, and bell-curves quickly, plateauing near 155, and only then does it decrease. But the Valley is a whole multi-city complex of persnickety eggheads, not just one single Orwellian technoplex, like Microsoft. As I said-it's sci-fi.
Bug accidentally used the term information superhighway, and so we were able to administer a beating.
TUESDAY
Our money situation is tight.
Trying to find money through venture capital is a long, evil, conflictual process full of hype and hope. If I have learned anything here, it's that snagging loot is the key struggle and obsession of any start-up. Fortunately for us, Michael and Ethan have agreed that the best thing to do is to be an R&D company (research and development) and get another company to "publish" our products. That way we don't have to hire our own sales and marketing people, or shell out the enormous amounts of money it takes to market software. We still need funding to build the product, though.