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It turns out Abe has entrepreneurial aspirations. We had dinner in the downstairs cafeteria together (Indonesian Bamay with frozen yogurt and double espresso). He’s thinking of quitting and becoming a pixelation broker—going around to museums and buying the right to digitize their paintings. It’s a very “Rich Microsoft” thing to do. Microsoft’s millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.
Once Microsofters’ ships come in, they travel all over: Scotland and Patagonia and Thailand … Condé Nast Traveler-ish places. They buy Shaker furniture, Saabs, koi, Pilchuck glass, native art, and 401(k)s to the max. The ultrarichies build fantasy homes on the Sammammish Plateau loaded with electronic toys.
It’s all low-key spending, mostly, and fresh and fun. Nobody’s buying crypts, I notice—though when the time comes that they do, said crypts will no doubt be emerald and purple colored, and lined with Velcro and Gore-Tex.
Abe, like most people here, is a fiscal Republican, but otherwise, pretty empty-file in the ideology department. Vesting turns most people into fiscal Republicans, I’ve noticed.
The rain broke around 3:00 and I walked around the Campus feeling miserable. I looked at all the cars parked in the lot and got exhausted just thinking about all the energy that must have gone into these people choosing just the right car. And I also noticed something Twilight-Zoney about all the cars on Campus: None of them have bumper stickers, as though everyone is censoring themselves. I guess this indicates a fear of something.
All these little fears: fear of not producing enough; fear of not finding a little white-with-red-printing stock option envelope in the pigeonhole; fear of losing the sensation of actually making something anymore; fear about the slow erosion of perks within the company; fear that the growth years will never return again; fear that the bottom line is the only thing that really drives the process; fear of disposability … God, listen to me. What a downer. But sometimes I think it would be so much easier to be jerking espressos in Lynwood, leaving the Tupperware-sealed, Biosphere 2-like atmosphere of Microsoft behind me.
I got to thinking of my own Lego superstitions. “When I was young, if I built a house out of Lego, the house had to be all in one color. I used to play Lego with Ian Ball who lived up the street, back in Bellingham. He used to make his house out of whatever color brick he happened to grab. Can you imagine the sort of code someone like that would write?”
“I used to build with mixed colors …” said Bug.
“What do I know?” I said, pulling my foot out of it.
lmao
Abe, however, is saying no. “What—you guys want to leave a sure thing?” he keeps asking us. “You think Microsoft’s going to shrink, or are you nuts?”
“That’s not the point, Abe.”
“What is the point, then?”
“One-Point-Oh,” I said.
“What?” replied Abe.
“Being One-Point-Oh. The first to do something cool or new.”
“And so in order to be ‘One-Point-Oh’ you’d forfeit all of this—” (Abe fumbles for le mot juste, and expands arms widely to showcase a filthy living room covered with Domino’s boxes, junk mail solicitations, Apple hard hats, three Federal Express baseball caps, and Nerf Gatling guns) “—security? How do you know you’re not just trading places … coding like fuck every day except with a palm tree outside the window instead of a cedar?”
I got to thinking of my cramped, love-starved, sensationless existence at Microsoft—and I got so pissed off. And now I just want to forget the whole business and get on with living—with being alive. I want to forget the way my body was ignored, year in, year out, in the pursuit of code, in the pursuit of somebody else’s abstraction.
There’s something about a monolithic tech culture like Microsoft that makes humans seriously rethink fundamental aspects of the relationship between their brains and bodies—their souls and their ambitions; things and thoughts.
She said, “You guys really like each other, don’t you?”
And I said—no, I whispered—“I love her.”
I’ve never told anyone that yet—except Karla. It felt like I jumped off a steep cliff into deep blue water. And then I wanted to tell everybody.
cute
Sitting next to a burning Tiki torch spiked into the ground, beneath an orange tree, Karla said to me, “You know, Ethan’s been a millionaire and filed for Chapter Eleven three times already—and he’s only 33. And there are hundreds of these guys down here. They’re immune to money. They just sort of assume it’ll appear like rain.”
While decoding Ethan’s existence we were removing stray grass seeds from each other’s Clockwork Orange thug costumes. I said, “There’s something about Ethan that’s not quite oxymoronic, yet still self-contradictory—like an 18-wheeler with Neutrogena written on the side—I can’t explain it. The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic—geeky and rich and hip. I’m undecided if I even like Ethan—he’s definitely not one of us. He’s a different archetype.”
We went in the house to warm up. Ethan’s living room is painted entirely in white enamel, and lining the ceiling’s perimeter are a hundred or so 1970s Dirty Harry bank surveillance cameras whirring and rotating, all linked to a wall of blue-and-white, almost-dead TV sets. A surveillance fantasy. “I used to date an installation artist from UC Santa Cruz,” is all Ethan says about his art.
lol
Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that’s the surest way to tell which company to invest in. “If the techies aren’t grinding, the stock ain’t climbing.”
Karla doesn’t like my being friends with Ethan. She says it’s corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I’ll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.
Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into “Marvins” and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.
lol
On the mountain coming in from the airport they have what has to be the world’s ugliest sign saying, SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY, in huge white letters up on the mountainside. You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a trade convention.
“If they changed it to POSTINDUSTRIAL city, it might be meaningful,” said Karla.