Microserfs

“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 Orlon 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.”