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Oh—we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don’t mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He’s a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He’s a real turtlenecker—one of those French guys who’d be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.
“You mean you can turn your dreams off, just like that?” Susan asked. I said, “A little bit. A nightmare doesn’t count as sleep, so I don’t get any real rest. I wake up even more tired.”
Michael overheard this and said, “But that’s so inefficient!”
He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. “I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It’s more like I’m running ‘test scenarios’ in my head at night—like RAND Corporation military simulations.”
Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping.
Fast food for thought: Do you know that if you feed catfish (America’s fauorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-ouer grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flauor (marine or otherwise) of their own? Thus they beocome whatever coating you apply to them (i.e. Cajun, xesty Cheddar, tangy ranch) They’re the most postmodern creatiures on earth … metaphores for characters on Merlrose Place … or for coders with NO LIFE.
kinda funny
I have noticed that on TV, all of these “moments” are sponsored by corporations, as in, “This touchdown was brought to you by the brewers of Bud Lite,” or “This nostalgia flashback was brought to you by the proud makers of Kraft’s family of fine foods.”
I told Karla, “I’m no sci-fi buff, but doesn’t this seem like a dangerous way to be messing with the structure of time—allowing the corporate realm to invade the private?
Karla told me about how the city of Atlanta was tampering with the idea of naming streets after corporations in return for paying for the maintenance of infrastructure: “Folgers Avenue; Royal Jordanian Airlines Boulevard; Tru-Valu Road.”
“Well,” I said, “streets have to get names somehow. The surnames Smith, Brown, and Johnson probably looked pretty weird when they first started, too.”
Karla said, “I think that in the future, clocks won’t say three o’clock anymore. They’ll just get right to the point and call three o’clock, ‘Pepsi.’”
Went out for a drink with Ethan at the Empire Tap Room on Emerson Street. He said, “There is no center to the Valley in any real sense of the word. There is no one watching; it’s pretty, but it’s a vacuum; a kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings.”
I know what he’s talking about—the deficit of visionaries—the center-less boredom of Valley life. I mean, if I really think about it, Valley people work and sleep—work and sleep and work and sleep and somewhere along the line the dream border is blurred. It’s as if there is a collective decision to disfavor a Godhead. It’s not despair; they just want the Real Thing. The Beast.
Random moment earlier tonight: out of the blue Todd asked everyone in the Habitrail 2, “When they make processed cheese slices that are only 80 percent milk, what’s the remaining 20 percent made from?”
Michael replied instantly, “Why, nonmilk additives, of course.”
lol
Abe has a friend in research who’s working on “metaphor-backwards” development of software products. That is, thinking of a real-world object with no cyber equivalent, and then figuring out what that cyber equivalent should be. Abe’s worried because at the moment he’s working on “gun.”
“Michael’s not like other people,” I said. “He goes off into his own world—for days at a time sometime. A few months ago he locked himself into his office and we had to slide food under his door. And so he stopped eating any food that couldn’t be slipped underneath a door.”
“Oh, so that explains the Kraft cheese slices. Carton-loads.”
I pointed out that his copy of Binary File Transfer Monthly was possibly the most boring document I’d ever seen in my life. He said, “Well, what if it were actually a copy of Penthouse Forum letters encrypted as something so dull and opaque, that nobody would realize that it was something else. Imagine an encryption system that could reconfigure the words, I am a sophomore at a small midwestern college‘ into ‘Does not conform to ITCU Convention specifications for frequency ranges.“’ It’d be the biggest stroke of encryption genius since the U.S. military used Navajo Indians to speak freely over the radio about top secret operations.”
lol
“There’s nobody else who’ll do it for me. You know that, Dan?”
“There’s nobody?”
“Nobody.”
I looked some more and he said, “Doc hacked ‘em out of me like they were divots on the thirteenth fairway a week ago. And not one of you dumb bastards ever even bothered to ask why I was going to the dermatologist. Nobody asked and I had nobody to tell.”
“Jesus, Ethan—we thought you were going to the dermatologist about your dandruff.”
“I have dandruff?”
“It’s, ummm, nothing out of the ordinary.” I touched the bandages and they felt crackly, like Corn Flakes.
lmao