So one of the effects Orkut has had on me is to think a lot about the past.

One of the favorite games (at least for those of us who’ve been on the net since god was still in his diapers) is to locate people we have no t seen or talked to in many many years. I’ve found a few, some who I’ve friended (and it’s funny that “friend” is suddenly a verb), others whom I’ve noticed but not yet friended.

And while I’m on that, let me digress for a second. Ever have those words you can’t ever seen to type correctly? ‘Teh‘ is my old standby, but suddenly it’s ‘frined‘. I even say it out loud as I type it (a habit I picked up from a dyslexic friend), ‘F-R-I-E-N-D’, and then as I say it, still type ‘frined‘. It’s like my hands have an auxiliary spelling engine which just does not agree with my brain.

But anyway…

There are a lot of old friends that I’ve not found yet. I keep checking, seeing if they turn up. If I had email addresses for some of them I’d send ’em an invite, for some, but for others it’s just a question of “Whatever happened to…”

So with all this thought of old friends must come, I suppose, internal review.

Now, by nature I turn the microscope inwards almost constantly, so it’s not like there are vast expanses (I wanted to sage “huge tracts but don’t start me on that) of my psyche unexplored. I know where the bodies are buried and which corners hold the cobwebs and who’s living in that dungeon under the secret trap door (No wait, that’s my house, not my head, forget I said that).

But this is more about the measurements taken over time.

I recently looked up a name I’ve had in my head for a long time, and got a hit on it. Someone I was really good friends with a LONG time ago (universe far far away, as they say), when I worked at Sun and socializing by email was a new and thrilling concept. Person I’ve not talked to in a lot of years.

So you wonder, when this happens, how said person has changed. Did they get old? Did they get boring? Settled down? Wilder than ever? Did they dreams they talked about when they were young ever pan out?

And then this flips. How have I changed since then?

I’m trying to put a time frame on this. I’m finding that I started work at Sun – um – *cough*nineteen*cough* years ago. And left there six years later. So I’m talking somewhere in that time frame. Say fifteen years.

So. Wow. I’m the same, right? Fifteen years?

I was 27 then. I was childless. I was still working on the business side of high tech, hadn’t made my great leap over to engineering (Net? We don’t need no steeenking’ net!). Hadn’t yet taken up diving. Was writing, but didn’t yet know what I was doing. I had only a few tattoos, but was known far and wide as father of bodyart on the net (I actually had fans).

I was still mean. I still looked for people to fight with on a daily basis. I still felt I needed to prove I was SMARTER THAN YOU. Chip on my shoulder? No, not so much. More a slab.

I had a mullet.

I was hanging out with bands, roadie and bouncer and sound guy and driver and whatever I needed to do to be a part of the scene, not just a guy on the scene. I drank like a fish, often starting the party after midnight and getting home after dawn.

It’s been a long time.

But am I different? Or do I just do different things?

Having children changes a person. Or it should, I guess it doesn’t always. It changed me. I sold the fastest motorcycle I’ve ever owned just before my first kid was born. I had a moment of clarity after two possibly fatal near-crashes in one week, and traded that bike on something big and slow and heavily chromed. There are a million other changes but that one is a good metaphor. I had to give away part of being a child in exchange for having to be parent and protector and anchor for a family.

But there’s more. Time and life experience, financial responsibility, business successes and failures. Friendships. Relationships. Loves and heart-breaks (ok, a dozen of these a day, what can I say?). Emotional breakdowns and rebirths.

I’m tempted to say something about finding one’s self, but that implies I was missing. And while I can’t find my car-keys and – oh, there are my glasses, up on top of my head – I don’t think it’s really that. Not finding myself, but maybe getting to a point of comfort with who I am. What I can do, what I want, what I need.

So then the question, thinking back on then, and fast-forwarding to now, is always one of “will we connect”?

I spoke to an old friend a month or two ago. My childhood “best friend”, David. I could write a long piece on David, he’s a character. He introduced me to comics (First comic? ‘Kamadi, the last boy on earth’. Silly, but hell, it was Jack King Kirby, so that’s allright, baby!), he introduced me to Zappa. I introduced him to pot, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Tolkien. We drifted a apart in highschool, he moved away. I have not talked to him since my last trip back east, 18 years or so ago. Wonder of the internet, though, I tracked him down recently and we found, in a strange conversation where he was wired on too much coffee and maybe booze and I was feverish with flu and it was 2am here, that we still connect, as ever. Music and books and likes and opinions, politics and a shared experience growing up with 60’s radical parents. It was a beautiful moment for both of us, finding that, with all our divergent parts, we are still friends and still like each other and feel that soul connection you can’t really forge when you’re older that 20 or so without love being involved.

So – are we different? or are we just old?

Read more “Different or just old?”

So is a blog different when you know people are reading?

That’s my question to ask of myself. “Self,” I ask…

So I just had my first ‘I found your blog via your web page from…‘ feedback, which startled me. I mean, I know a couple people read this, but it’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to send people here. I do this for me, mostly. Actually I was sort of waiting to see if anyone actually found it by accident, which, to my surprise, happened.

So suddenly today – yesterday – I felt like I suddeny had to write somehing more important because, y’know, people are paying attention.

Blog Fright?

Something.

But it could be something else. I still have a a brain that’s made mostly from wood (cue ‘Little Wooden Head‘) from last week’s attack of bio-engineered-respiritory-system-dwelling-crab-people or whatever was in there. I can’t say I’m operating at anything like 100% capacity (hell, I’m lucky most days if I can reach a solid 50%, so I think ‘m down in single digits right now). So maybe my creativity has gone off to hide where lost socks go and it will turn up in a few days, static-clung to my hipster-coolguy-lucky13 shirt or my black-ninja-BDU-swat-team pants.

Crackle! Ah! Here it is! Now can I re-attach this with soap? Wendy? Can you sew this on please?

And think happy thoughts.

And I’d like to point out, I’m already over quota (over-quota? Somebody stop me) for hyphens in this entry, and have yet to say anything. Quick, send more hyphens!

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And so endeth an era.

I gave up my SF 49ers season tickets yesterday.

After staying with the team through the firing of a good coach (George Siefert), hiring an unknown (Mooch), rebuilding and then more rebuilding, and sucking and then not sucking and then kind of sucking, firing of a great coach (Mooch) for an insane reason, and various and sundry mis-management, after staying for all that and proving I’m a fan by watching when the games sucked, and paying for a seat is a stadium that is a fucking pig sty…

It feels weird.

There’s a history. A friend-of-a-friend-of-a-(wait while I open another pack of hyphens)-friend sort of story. These tickets belong to this guy, but his kids stopped going (one moved away, the other moved farther away). But my friend James (and let’s just say right here, James fucking rules, but we’ll get to that later) sort of inherited one of these tickets, and my friend Chad inherited the other (Wait, I need a whole entry for Friends who Rule). So I got the extra stray ticket over the years, a game or two, then more. Finally the owner of said tickets gave up on going to every game, and the other two offered me control of that seat since I’d proved fandom. And so it’s been for several years now. Another friend, Eric (my best-dive-buddy-and-brother-I-never-had-but-with-questionable-politics) picked up the adjacent seat when it became available.

These seats have been in the family, so to speak, since ’81. I’ve been going for – I dunno. A lotta years now. James and Chad for a lot more. And it’s been good, good when the team won, good when the team lost, even good when we left early for what turned out to be the biggest come-from-behind win in playoff history vs the NY Giants.

But now. Now, with new families, busier jobs, tighter finances, and more interests taking our time and money; now, with the team’s management in a tailspin, and our top players being released, and our stadium ever more a pig-sty (And later, I shall tell the story of the hanging pigeon, a story with no end now, it seems, or no end I shall ever know).

And a brief aside – in a chat window, just now, I typed:

Here’s a concept:
Teletubby phone sex.
Think on that.

And so I suggest to you – yes, think on that.

But anyway (This is bloging for the short-attention-span), with all this, we came to the conclusion, collectively, that the money and the commitment were too much given our growing level of frustration with the team and the facilities and our own shrinking time availabilities.

It was a strange and emotional moment. Like giving up on a team I’ve been supporting since the early 80’s. I know it’s not quite like that, and I’m still a fan and will still go to games when possible, but it did feel strange.

Now remind me about the pigeon story later…

Read more “Shhh! They’re listening!”

First, wefunkradio.com. Listen at work. Listen at home. I wish I could listen in the car.

This shit is The Funk, y’all.

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It’s spring here in northern California, or close to it.

How can you tell?

Well, there are some signs. The cherry trees are in bloom. We’re having freak storms and torrential downpours, or were yesterday.

And my allergies just turned into a sinus infection and bronchitis. Weee.

My regular doctor – who I could talk about for a while, the man’s a character – is out of town with no warning again. So I’m forced to go to the local auxiliary doctor at the walk-in joint.

Now, this man’s an ok doctor. And he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the sorts of strange infections one can get in the tropics from his time as an army doctor. Only, we’re not in the tropics, we’re in northern California. So I’m forced to tell HIM what my diagnosis is, and tell him what to prescribe for it. Which makes sense considering my years of medical training – wait, months – wait, wee… Oh, wait, my fuck-all medical training. But doctor-baby, I know bronchitis and sinusitis when I have it. Trust me.

So then while he’s prescribing some cocktail of new allergy meds (Hell, I’m the illegitimate child of Raoul Duke, I’m not afraid to try untested chemicals. Can I have some ether and amyls with that?), I wind up giving *him* advice on his home central heating. Hello? Not a contractor! Not a heating expert! Software engineer here. What the *fuck* do I know about central heating, other than that my heater was, until recently, Chock Full o’ Rats.

So here’s my question. I did the diagnosis. And I consulted on his home environment maintenance needs. He listened to my heart and took my temperature and blood pressure (And I could have told him what he’d find).

Aren’t we even now? All he had to do was write a scrip.

So why do I owe him a c-note for this?

Mystery to me, I tell ‘ya. How do I get a gig like this?

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So if you have not already signed up for Orcut.com, tell me and I’ll send you an invite. It’s stupid, I have to warn you up front, but it’s also sort of entertaining; it’s akin to friendster. Here is an article about it. How can you not – um – have an opinion on the phrase “Social Networking Service”?

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Ok, so I just started reading this book (while I’m in between HST books). And – well – I’m rendered speechless.

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.

Two pages in, and I was left with my mouth hanging open, stunned to the point where I had to stop reading. This man is my new writing hero.

If this book goes on as great as the first five or six pages – well, let’s just hope.

I’ve read him before – his first book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was clever as hell but suffered a little bit (IMO) from having too many clever ideas fighting for space in one small book. Still, it’s a terrific read, particularly if you’re a big ‘ol freak for Disney like I am.

But this book – at least the start of it – is an order of magnitude more mature in terms of the writing. This is the sort of writer I always want to emulate.

I read a lot of great big fantasy bricks and multi-book series. And some really damned great writers turn out stuff like that; GRR Martin, GG Kay, JL Burke, Bujold, Cherryh. Lots of people. And I like their work and their skill and their craft. BUt when I read a writer and say – That’s it, that’s what I want to do, how I want to write, it’s always one of the short and tight and concise, no-words-wasted sort of writers. That’s what I aim for when I write fiction. Thus when I run across some piece of writing like the excerpt below, I am impressed and envious and inspired to go get back to those stories I have sitting unfinished.

I include an excerpt here for one reason – Cory has this available for free download from his site. If you want it, tell me, but you HAVE to follow his rules.
I’m not posting a direct link to his download site but it’s not hard to find. What I *will* post is a link to buy this thing, because if you’re going to read his work, you should pay the man his hunk o’ change IMO.

That said, here’s the excerpt. This is the beginning of the book.

(Wait – I kid you not, auxiliary doctor-man just *called me* to ask me more heating questions. I swear, he’s going to have to pay my in blanl perscription pads or a big ‘scrip for versed or something. C’mon, doc, throw down!)

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I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and Western medicine thus: “Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans.”

The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual construction of Boston that it’s merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil up my nose, thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn’t it be nice if I gave myself one.

Deep breath.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I’d escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the story was about, but never what the story was. Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they’re as naked as a nightclub in daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: “What is the theme of this story?”

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Go buy it, ok?

Read more “Here’s to modern medicine”

First, music.

I have “Detachable Penis” stuck in my head after hearing it on the radio today. I can’t find a good link, but here is a not terrible one for King Missile. To put it simply, they’re fucking weird. Everyone needs to hear “Detachable Penis” at least once, but my favorite King Missile song is Gary and Melissa. I found to my dismay I actually don’t own a single CD by them, but am resolving this as we speak.

So for anyone who cares, I’m getting that Thomas Dolby LP I whined about the other night ripped to Mp3 by a friend. If you want the original version of Radio Silence, the one that didn’t suck, the one that was the best song on Golden Age of Wireless before Dolby screwed it up, let me know and we’ll work something out.

Which leads me to the rest of this blog entry. If only I had one.

Meanwhile go read this. This is fucking awesome – an entry in TranceJen’s blog about marks and scars and self-destruction. S’fucking brilliant: Letter Re: My Heart

That’s certainly better than anything I’ve got to say.

———-

So anyway, Today is Fat Tuesday. Someone asked me today what I’m giving up for Lent.

What, I thought, The Fuck?

I dunno. I’m sort of mystified by the idea. But the tradition seems sort of entertaining. Binge on life’s pleasures, cast them away for a fortnight (or whatever), and then be cleansed spiritually and physically; start again.

I should be there (In New Orleans or other points south and east of here), reveling, drinking, dancing, carousing and flinging beads and doubloons in trade for sexual favors and glimpses of luscious flesh. Dressed as a pirate or some dashing rogue, snatching kisses and vise-versa.

Alas. Here I sit, still working late of an evening, sipping water and lamenting on the lack of carousal allowed by modern life. Where is my rapine? Where, my pillage?

I’m coming to get you. All of you. Lock your doors, or not, I do not care.

Ah. One could wish.

Instead, I shall go watch vampires fight puppets. Hey, it beats working. (And that will be a whole ‘nother blog entry)

Read more “Fat Tuesday”