Dad came in to the office from job hunting around sundown. We made him a Cup O'Noodles and played some crank phone call tapes to cheer him up. Dusty tried to get him to wear a pair of striped boxers but Dad politely refused. Later on I went up to the house and helped him remove an old basketball hoop above the garage that's been there since the dawn of bell-bottoms. I fell and cut myself on some of Mom's rosebushes, and I know it's corny, but I got to thinking, it's no surprise roses are the Official Flower of Love.
My hard drive accidentally trashed today's file, so I include a snippet of the trash here as a curiosity piece. Language!
All 11I 11 It the office we" live decided that instead of Friday Fll 11113636111136being jeans day, we" 11111111113636373733d have Boxoi Shorts Day instead. It" 11113838393940404141424243434444s way comfici, way sexier, lllland it"lllls funny watching Michael admonish the male stall members, ""1111451111114545464647474811114848Please guys, no units displayed if at all possible.""! 111494950505l&f&v&w&x&z&A&e&i&a&A&n&O' '4'O'S'['_'o 'Q'U**"*t*l*}+ + + L + h + v, ,?,'-9-a-}-A-6-0--*-0--A-0-fl-,,-AOU. .?.G.O.S.T.b.l.~.N.6.e.e.i.i.u.ii.B.0/ / /S/b/c/d/e/A/6oOOOf~lT'lJnLrt^^^
" " I " I A A I " " " " " U " U " " " U " " U " U " \ ] c U A V A I vUAcH]UA]c$\]cPR5151525253535454555556561111111111Dusty tried to get him to wear a pair of striped boxers but Dad politely refused.
SATURDAY
Today was the day Karla and I finally moved into our (temporarily) own place ... the Apple friend of Anatole who's going to Tasmania for eight months to study batik (she got the layoff package . . . it's like backward Microsoft) and so we're house-sitting for her. Like so many techie houses, it's big, sterile, stuffed with consumer electronics, and there's nothing on the walls and there are about six empty rooms lit by dozens of skylights. At least it's not one of these big Mediterranean 1980s stucco houses Susan calls "Drug Lord" houses-ostentatious stucco monuments with a Porsche 928-S parked out front.
Anyway, to remedy the house's sterility we're doing what Ethan did with his photo of the collapsed freeway overpass, and we're making photocopy blowups of cool images. We've made blowups of Barry Diller (inventor of the Movie of the Week back in 1973-in an office inside the ABC Entertainment Complex, Century City, Los Angeles, California) as well as a blowup of the ABC Entertainment Complex's twin towers.
I also enlarged an elegant undamaged California freeway cloverleaf from the seminal Handbook of Highway Engineering. And needless to say we did a double portrait of BILL. One right-side up-another upside down.
Ethan delivered to us a bottle of 1977 Cabernet as a housewarming present and said he felt jealous of our posters-the highest compliment, coming from him.
Todd and Dusty seem to have found soulmates in each other. They spend their precious few hours of post-code time discussing the vagaries of the New Human Body-in the office and at gym, deciding which mini-muscle needs alteration, discussing steroids as though they were Pez, and figuring out the mechanics of cosmetic surgery. They want to become "post-human"-to make their bodies like the Bionic Woman's and the Six Million Dollar Man's-to go to the next level of bodyhood.
Todd was in a chatting mode today- love's first sweep, and I know what it is-and he told me of how happy Dusty makes him feel, of how pretty he thinks she is, of how she seems to believe in something and to believe more than Todd believes. "It's as if all those one-night stands never mattered. Because all I care about is Dusty crushing my body (Have you ever done that Daniel . . . been crushed? God, is it sexy) and having her speak to me. Nobody's ever spoken to me before. I mean, not to me. I was always just a soul to be harvested or a human unit. But with Dusty I'm me, and I don't have to fake normality."
"That's how I feel with Karla," I said.
Todd said, "She pumps me. Love is just this great big pump."
Todd, on top of his coding work, is designing an Oop! Muscleman starter kit that will fold and mutate like a GoBot or a protein molecule into bulldozers, tanks, satellite stations, and Kalashnikovs. Michael thinks it'll be a big hit.
Michael is making each of us design an Oop! starter module so that we can utilize all segments of our brain aside from the cattle-blindered coding part of our brain. Michael is really such a slave driver. He squishes everything he can out of us. It's very Bill, so we can relate to it. I'm doing a space station.
Susan, among her many tasks-the main one of which is designing the Oop! user interface-is designing a dancing skeletons program. She has a burned-out Stanford medical grad student converting all human bones into Oop! bricks, which are in turn linked, like bones in the human body. But she's also having other animal skeletons digitized, and she's designing her program so that users can build new species. Flesh comes next.
Ethan is even developing a game- one where players train dolphins for the Department of Defense and he's designing Oop! weaponry and boats and submarines.
Karla's designing a vegetable factory in which small chipmunks trapped inside must run for their lives or end up diced ("God bless Warner Brothers"): Bug is designing a castle with dungeon, and I must say, it's good. He's come up with "torture nodes."
Michael wants Oop! users to be able to play Doom-like chase games throughout whatever we build, and is working to form an allegiance with a company up-Bay in San Francisco that provides a multiline server so that nerds in different area codes can game together.
Michael was on a rant, quite justified, I thought, about all of this media-hype generation nonsense going on at the moment. Apparently we're all "slackers." "Daniel, who thinks up these things?"
Michael pointed out that humans are the only animals to have generations. "Bears, for example, certainly don't have generations. Mom and Dad bears don't expect their offspring to eat different kinds of berries and hibernate to a different beat. The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species."
Michael's theory is that technology creates and molds generations. When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant. Each of us as individuals becomes our own individual diskette with our own personal "version." Much more logical.
Mom couldn't get the garage door opener to work, so I fixed it for her. We took Misty for a walk along La Cresta. The stop sign at the corner of Arastradero was completely covered with Scotch tape, pieces of ribbon, and empty balloons from where people mark off birthday parties. It was funny.
Ethan's freeway is taking far longer to build than he anticipated and it "eats bricks like crazy."
I asked Dusty if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said, "No, but indeed I rilly, rilly lusted after them in my heart. Hippie parents, you know. Rill crunchy. I had a Raggedy Ann doll made in, like, Sierra Leone. And all I rilly desired was a Barbie Corvette-more than life itself."
*sigh*
"So instead I played with numbers and equations. Some trade-off. The only store-bought toy I was ever allowed was a Spirograph, and I had to beg to receive it as a May Day present. And I had to pretend I wanted it because it was mathematical-so clean and solvable. But my parents were suspicious of mathematics because math isn't political. They're like, freaks."
Dusty's forearms resemble Popeye's. And they have pulsing veins that look like a meandering river. Ethan and I were talking, when he shouted across the room, "Jesus Christ, Dusty-I can take your pulse from over here."
I asked Karla if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said (not looking up from her keyboard), "This is so embarrassing, but not only did I play with Barbies, but I played with them up until an embarrassingly late age-ninth grade." She then looked over at me, expecting reproach.