Microserfs

I paused and tried to be honest and the answer blurted out: “Jealous.” Susan overheard and started singing “Cars,” by Gary Numan, and we all started singing it. Here in my car, I can only receive, I can lock up my doors …

And then the moment passed. I e-mailed Abe on the subject, and he was online, so the response came back immediately:

I come from one of those “zero-kidney” families … we all made this agreement once … that if anybody else in the family needed a kidney it was going to be, “Well, sorry … Been nice knowing you.”

I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to understand my body. Becauze our family was so zero- touch.

As I type, I’m bouncing my 11 pound ball of rubber bands contructed form my daily wall Street Journal. It grows.

I learned a great new word today: “deletia.” When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write:

[deletia]

It stands for everything that’s been lost.

Dad bought a P/S2 Model 70 computer just before he got fired. He stores it out in the garage with the train world. Locked deep inside the P/S2’s brains memory are WordPerfect, a golf application, and some genealogical data he tried to assemble about our family, but which he abandoned after he finally realized that our family erased itself as it moved across the country.

FRIDAY

Dad mouthed a Michaelism today: “If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than the human brain at some point, then, BINGO, you’re a de facto believer in Progress.”

My ears were burning when I heard him say this, and it was all I could do to not say, “That’s Michael’s quote.” My ears were red.

E-mail from Abe:

lm re-reading all my old TinTin books, amd I’m noticing that there are all of these things absent in the Boy Detectiue’s life … religion, parents, politics, relationship, communion with nature, class, love, death, birth … it’s a long list. And I find that while I still love TinTin, I’m getting currious about all of its invisible content.

The Valley is so career-o-centric. So much career energy! There must be a 65-ton crystal of osmium hexachloride buried 220 feet below the surface of Menlo Park, sucking in all of the career energy in the Bay Area and shooting it back down the Peninsula at twice light speed. It’s science fiction here.

Mom’s signed up for a ladies 50-to-60 swim meet. It’s next week.

Susan bought a case load of premoistened towelettes at Price-Costco. She’s mad at the rest of the Habitrail because it’s such a pigsty. She daintily wipes off her keyboard and screen and as she does so she says, “Man, I need a date, bad.”

Karla’s hair is down past her shoulders now. And she bought a dress with pink wildflowers on it, and it’s funny, the way she’s the same as ever, yet also reformatted, and it makes me look at her with a new fascination.

She’s eating all sorts of food like a total person now and I’ve noticed that when I work on her body, she’s just not as tense anymore. Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I’m on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

Daydream: today the traffic was locked on the 101. I saw visions of the Valley and snapped out of my daydream jealous of the future. I saw germanium in the groundwater and dead careers. I saw venture capitalists with their eyes burned out in their sockets by visions of money, crashing their Nissans on the 101 — past the big blue cube of NASA’s Onizuka Air Force Base, their windows spurting fluorescent orange blood.

SATURDAY

Bug’s dream came true today. He got to visit Xerox PARC with a friend of a friend from Seattle. Back with us in the Habitrail, while arranging a handful of purple iceplant flowers nipped from the PARC’s groundcover, he filled us in on details: “It’s set in a purposefully blank location — they cover up all outside traces of civilization with berms and landscaping devices so you feel as if you’re nowhere. Feeling like you’re somewhere must be bad for ideas.

“Anyway, there’s nothing but chaparral and oak trees on the hill to the west, and you feel like you’re on a virgin planet, like the planets they visit on Star Trek. It feels really ‘outposty.’ But not scary, like you’re in Antarctica. And the lobby — it’s like a really successful orthodontist’s waiting room in the year 2004. And guess what … I got to sit in the Bean Bag Chairs!”

An hour later we were all back at work, when apropos of nothing, Bug said, “Ahem, “ called our attention, and announced that he’s gay. How random!

“I’ve been inning’ myself for too long,” he said, “and now it’s time to out myself. It’s something you’ll all have to deal with, but believe me, I’ve been dealing with it a lot longer than you.”

It never even entered our heads to think Bug was anything except a sexually frustrated, bitter crank, which is not unusual up at Microsoft, or in tech in general. I think we all felt guilty because we don’t think about Bug enough, and he does work hard, and his ideas really are good. But we’re just so used to him being cranky it never occurred to us he had an interior life, too.

I asked him, “But what about the Elle MacPherson shrine, Bug?”

“Replaced. Marky Mark for the time being, but he’s only a phase.”

“Oh, Bug …” said Karla, “how long have you been deciding this?”

“Always.”

“Why now!” I asked. “So late.”

“Because now is when we all explode. We’re like those seeds you used to plant on top of sterile goop in petri dishes in third grade, waiting to sprout or explode. Susan’s exploding. Todd’s going to explode. Karla’s germinating gently. Michael’s altering, too. It’s like we’re all seeds just waiting to grow into trees or orchids or houseplants. You never know. It was too sterile up north. I didn’t sprout. Aren’t you curious to know what you really are, Dan?” I thought about it. It’s not really something you think about. “Now I can be me—I think,” Bug said. “This is not easy for me. Let me repeat that — this is not easy for me.”

“Does this mean you’ll start dressing better? “ asked Ethan. “Yes, Ethan. Probably.” So that was that.

Maybe he’ll be less cranky now. Karla and Susan said they were proud of Bug. I guess it did take guts. He’s a late bloomer — that’s for sure. And me? Am I curious to know what I really am? Or am I just so grateful to not be a full-scale, zero-life loser that it doesn’t matter?

Bean bag chairs: how odd it is that they’re still … I don’t know … a part of the world.

Dad signed up for a night course in C++. He’s going to make himself relevant.

Susan’s sister sent her a bag of pot via FedEx. She wrapped it in magazine scent strips to foil FedEx dope dogs. What a good way to make those things do something useful.

Bug’s right. We are all starting to unravel. Or sprout. Or whatever. I remember back in grade school, VCR documentaries on embryology, and the way all mammals look the same up until a certain point in their embryological development, and then they start to differentiate and become what they’re going to become. I think we’re at that point now.