SATURDAY New Year's Day, 1994
Abe left for SFO Airport and then we all went for a drive in the Carp- Karla, Ethan, Todd, Bug, and I.
We drove past the home of Thomas Watson Jr., 99 Notre Dame Avenue, San Jose, California. Watson steered IBM into the computer age-and was made prez of the company in 1952. In 1953 he developed the first commercial storage device for computers. He died on a New Year's Eve.
On the radio we heard that Bill got married, on Lanai in Hawaii, and we all screamed so loudly that the Carp nearly went off the road. And apparently Alice Cooper was there. So to celebrate we played old Alice Cooper tapes and purchased a "Joey Heatherton" fondue kit in a secondhand store and later on boxed it up to mail to Microsoft. They'll probably think it's a bomb.
"Ooh, Bill-please, please feed me another bite of hot, bubbly cheese cube," Susan whispered in a little girl voice in the backseat.
"I feel as though we're in a witness relocation program," said Todd. "You can leave Bill, but Bill will never leave you."
We also went to "The Garage," the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. We were expecting a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of exhibit, with bioanimatronic Deadheads hacking an Altair inside a re-created 1976 Sunnyvale Garage.
Instead there was a mock clean room, a Silicon Graphics 3D protein simulator, and a chromosome map in the biotechnology section:
Goiter: bottom of gene pair no. 8
Epilepsy: lower half of gene pair 20
Red hair color: middle of pair 4
Albinism: lower llth pair
Karla said that a quarter of all pure white cats are deaf-that the trait of whiteness and the trait for deafness are entwined together, so that you can't have one without a possibility of the other.
This segued into a discussion of algorithm breeding that lasted well until we arrived in Berkeley where we went to a yuppie-style party at a college friend of Karla's. Ethan drank too much and told loud jokes, and the yuppies weren't happy. We had to take him into the backyard and cool him off. He said, "What's a bar bill but a surtax on reality." We're not sure if he has a drinking problem.
The music was Herb Alpert and Brazil 66. It could easily be your own parents' party, circa Apollo 9. Later, even though we all agreed not to, we ended up surrounding a
Mac and oohing and aahing over a too-tantalizing piece of shareware.
Anecdote: We talked with Pablo and Christine, Karla's "we-have-a-life" friends who were having the party. I asked them, "Are you married?"
"Well," said Pablo, "we went down to Thailand and a guy in a yellow silk robe waved his hands around our bodies and . . ." Pablo paused. "You know, I suppose we don't really know if we're married or not."
"It was sort of Mick-and-Jerry," said Christine.
Later on, Pablo was telling this deep intimate story about how he found religion in the hinterlands of Thailand, and just at the most intense, quietest moment in the storytelling, Ethan walked into the kitchen, overheard a snatch of conversation, and said, "Thailand? I love Thailand! I'm dying to build a chain of resorts all over Thailand and Bali, kind of like Club Meds but a little more nineties. I'm gonna call them 'Club Zens,' right? 'Cause of the Buddhism thing. There's all kinds of statues and monuments over there I could use to make it look authentic- like you're in a monastery, but with booze and bikinis. Now that's nirvana! As soon as I make my next million . .."
It was a very "Ethan" moment.
Oh-at the Museum in San Jose there was a pile of this stuff called aerogel-solid, yet almost entirely air. It seemed like thoughts made solid. It was so lovely.
Another "Oh"-Susan complains that Bug stays up all night shredding paper and the whirring of the rotors is driving her nuts.
NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS
Me: to penetrate the Apple complex
Karla: undisclosed (doesn’t' t want to jinx)
Ethan: to slow down time
Todd: visit junkyards more often, to bench 420, and to have a relationship Susan: to hack into the DMV and to have a relationship
Bug: to overhaul his image and to have a relationship
a burning Lego Los Angeles
880 Nimitz Freeway
Control and the feeling of mastery
680X0
moon
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I Robot
The Apollo rocket designers and the NASA engineers of Houston and Sunnyvale grew up in the 1930s and 1940s dreaming of Buck Rogers and the exoterrestrial meanderings of Amazing Stories. When this aerospace generation grew old enough, they chose to make those dreams
in metal.
TUESDAY January 4,1994
Woke up sick this morning-finally got the flu. I thought it might be a hangover, but no. In spite of the fact that I think I feel like death-on-a-stick, I want to write down what happened today.
First, Michael bounced through the sliding doors around noon in a shiny happy mood, and invited us all out to see our (game show tone of voice) . . . new office! Ethan sold his Ferrari to do the lease. "Farewell 1980s!" he said. (He drives a 1987 Honda Civic now. "I feel like I'm in high school.")
Uncharacteristically brash, he yelled, "Convoy! Everybody . . . down to our new office. You, too, Mrs. Underwood . . . we've been liberated from the Habitrail."
We stuffed ourselves into two cars and drove through the vine-covered suburbs and carefully mowed, Frisbee-free lawns of Palo Alto's tech parks, to Hamilton Street, a block south of University Street downtown. And it was there that we learned what Dad has actually been doing all this time.
As Michael opened a second-floor oak door, he said to me, in a voice intended to be heard by everybody, "I figured your father's talents as a model railroader might have translatable applications into our world here . . ."
The wet paint smelled like cucumbers and sour cream and made me a bit pukey, but the feeling passed as I saw what lay before us ... the most sculptured environment I've ever seen-an entire world of Lego- hundreds of 50 x 50-stud gray pads on the floors and on the walls, all held in place with tiny brass screws. Onto these pads were built skyscrapers and animals and mazes and Lego railroads, sticking out of the walls, rounding corners, passing through holes. The colors were shocking; Lego-pure. A skeleton lay down beside a platoon of robots; cubic flowers grew beside boxcars loaded with nickels that rounded the blue railroad bends. There was a Palo Alto City Hall-a '70s Wilshire modernist box-and there was a 747 and a smoking pipe . . . and . . . everything in the world! Pylons and towers of color, and dogs and chalets . . .
"I think your father should take a bow, don't you, Daniel?"
Dad, who was in the back tinkering with a castle, looked flustered but proud, and fidgeted with a stack of two-stud yellow bricks. This universe he had built was a Guggenheim and a Toys-R-Us squished into one. We were having seizures, all of us. Susan was livid. She said, "You spent my vested stock money on ... Lego?" She was purple.
Ethan looked at me: "Michael's addiction."
I, too, was flubbered. In the magic of the moment I looked up into the corner-and I caught Mom looking, too-at a small white house in the far back corner, sprouting from a wall, with a little white picket fence around it, the occupant inside no doubt surveying all that transpired beneath its windows, and I said, "Oh, Dad, this is-the most real thing I've ever seen."
And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?
What follows I will write only because it's what happened, and I'm sick, and I don't want to lose it-I might accidentally erase the memory. I want a backup.