Microserfs

All day Michael kept on humming a refrain from the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere.” I asked him to sing something a bit more uplifting. The flu epidemic has left us all at low ebb. Or does Michael know something about E&M Software that we don’t? I dare not ask.

Pi fight! Late afternoon:

It turns out that Ethan knows pi up to 10,000 digits, just like Michael, so the two of them sat there in the Habitrail and banged off strands of numbers, like a Gregorian chant. In stereo — it felt religious. Work stopped dead and we sat there listening.

“Four.”“Four.” “Seven.”“Seven.” “Zero.”“Zero.“ “One.”“One “ “Eight.”“Eight.” “Three.”“Three.” “Eight.”“Eight.” “Nine.”“Nine.” “Zero.”“Zero.” “Three.”“Three.” “Four.”“Four.” “One.”“One.

Ethan has risen in our collective estimation considerably as a result.

I must add that Dad visits the Habitrail every single night, recharging Michael’s Tang and bringing him serial volleys of snacks. “Some fruit leather, Michael?—oh look — there’s one blueberry strip remaining. “ I’ll say, “Hi, Dad,” and he sort of turns around and stumbles for words and grunts, “Hi, Dan.”

But then I suppose I ought to be grateful. Dad looks 1,000 percent better than he did up in Redmond — so long ago, it now seems. His hair’s going white, though.

Also, Michael is using Jed’s desk and lamp in his bedroom down the hall from my room. Mom and Dad moved all of Jed’s things to Palo Alto when they moved, as though he was just away at school. I’m not even using my old lamp. Everyone else uses IKEA and lawn furniture.

I recognize that I’m avoiding something here: Michael using Jed’s lamp. Dad hasn’t mentioned Jed once since Michael moved in. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. I’m in denial.

TUESDAY

The house down the hill from us burned down around two in the afternoon. Fwoosh! We all went out on the verandah and watched, drinking coffee and sitting on an old pool slide turned onto its side. Mom was loading up the car, but Dad said it was no big deal because the vegetation wasn’t dry enough for “you know, another open-hills thing.”

A pair of hawks nesting nearby were diving into the smoke plume. I guess there were mice and things running away. Like a buffet table for birds.

The first time I ever saw a house burn down was the first time I heard the English Beat version of “Tears of a Clown” on the radio, and the two memories are toasted onto each other in my head like an EPROM.

Memory!

Later, Michael and Dad and I were buying AAA batteries at the Lucky Mart down on Alma Street, a main corridor through Palo Alto, and then out in the parking lot Michael and Dad began waving at the CalTrain that was screaming northward up the tracks, headed into the Palo Alto station. Once it had passed I asked Michael, just by way of conversation, why it is that people wave at trains.

He said, “We wave at people in trains because their lives — their cores — are so intensely and powerfully reflected in the inexorable, unstoppable roaring dreams of motion and voyage and discovery, which trains embody. One can’t help but admire the power and brutality and singularity of decision a moving train implies. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Underwood?”

Does Michael practice these things? Where does he get them from? And wouldn’t you just know Michael’s a train nut like my dad.

I say “Ummm …” a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. “It means you’re assembling data in your head — spooling.”

I also say the word “like” too much, and Karla said there was no useful explanation for people saying this word. Her best guess was that saying “like” is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known. Not too flattering.

I think I’m going to try and do mental Find-and-Replace on myself to eliminate these two pesky words altogether. I’m trying to debug myself.

Karla is cindent herself, too. She’s becoming a womanly woman. She’s growing her hair and trying to look like an adult. Right now she looks in between, as do most techies. Her skin certainly looks better. Actually, we all have better skin … except maybe for Ethan. California sunshine and an attempt to at least slightly cut the crap food seems to have positive epidermal results.

Smoother skin in seven days.

Karla drinks Ovaltine instead of coffee. She drinks it from her high school reunion mug. Her reunion actually had custom mugs, and this is so weird. Susan looked at the mug last week and asked, “Your high school reunion had horizontally cross-marketed merchandise tie-ins? Where’d you go to high school … Starbucks?”

Apparently there’s some company in Texas that helps you market your reunion.

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

Misty busted into my work space after all the fire engines and everything left, and pawed and slobbered all over me. She smelled like roses and top-soil, so I guess she was down in her special grotto in the lower yard.

Ethan came into the office shortly afterward trying to lug Misty out, but instead Misty barraged him with dirty fur and mouth goo, and I know Ethan enjoyed it. He said to her, “Quite often I feel like pawing and slobbering over people I like, too, but I never, of course, actually do it.”

I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals — things like, aren’t you just the cutest little kitty … that kind of thing, which I wouldn’t dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

Misty really would have made a terrible seeing-eye dog. She’d bound into traffic to greet truck drivers. Ethan lured Misty outside with a Cocoa Puffs promotional Frisbee, and then stood, wearing his sunglasses, beneath the balcony’s shade and played with her a while. He didn’t seem to mind the muck all over his Dolce & Gabbana three-piece.

Ethan just wants some company. He’s spending far more time around the Habitrail these days since The Hug. We all hug Ethan a lot now because suddenly he’s human and Karla held a small meeting the day after the bandage-removal episode and told us all we had to be extra kind to Ethan. I haven’t mentioned it at all to Ethan though — too weird. Susan was in shock.

After a while Ethan and I went down to look at the rubble of the house below. Gone. Fwoosh!

Ethan said something provocative and left me dangling. He muttered something about “Michael’s expensive little addiction,” and I said “Robitussin? It’s cheap,” and Ethan said “Robitussin?” so I said, “Well, what did you mean then?” and he said, “Nothing.” I hate it when people only open the floodgates a little bit, and then close it up again.

Oh — Ethan is trying to wean himself off eel phones. Good luck!

I heard a lovely expression today about brains — an ad for smart drugs touting thicker, bushier dendrites.

Moist little tumbleweeds blooming inside one’s skull.

Susan was doing her biannual hard-drive cleanup, which is half chore/half fun — going on a deleting frenzy, removing all those letters that once seemed so urgent, that now seem pointless, the shareware that infected your files with mystery viruses and those applications that seemed groovy at the time.