The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Eversion and the mass-hallucination we call life

    So Facebook recently fucked over its entire interface.  That’s big news and not big news; I mean, it’s been beaten to death in various memes, even though it just happened a matter of hours ago.  It’s big news in the sense that a somewhat-usable product has been made into a much less usable product.  It’s not big news in the sense that we’re all marching to our graves at a rate of an hour every hour, some a bit faster than that, and nobody really gives a shit about various wars and economic disasters as much as they care about the order and sorting of various updates from their friends describing their bowel movements.

    What’s interesting to me is how social media sites have changed our abilities to disseminate information.  I’m almost convinced you could film an entire movie backwards, or edit it together so the events happened in reverse-chronological order, because people are so used to following feeds of information like blogs and twitter backwards.  Everyone complains about how twitter and texting is killing the letter or the long-form prose entry, how people used to write long letters, which were replaced by long emails, which were replaced by blog posts, which were replaced by 140-character bursts of information.  And I suppose that’s true.  But I also wonder about people’s ability to glue together narratives from disparate entries of text, and how that will change our perception of reality.

    William Gibson, the guy who invented cyberspace, later claimed that we are already in cyberspace.  (He called it everting.) He didn’t mean that we had stupid goggles glued to our head or were immersed into some Tron wet dream.  I think back in 1995, those Lawnmower Man days, I thought there would be a sudden tipping point where computers would get enough horsepower and the right neural tap so that we’d be able to spend time in a simulated reality.  What happened instead is a parallel reality was created, and it slowly became woven into our daily lives, until we reached the point where more of this cyber-reality existed than our actual lives, and I don’t think anybody really realizes it.

    Maybe I’m a bad example of this, but the bulk of my social interaction now takes place over TCP/IP.  I work from home, and aside from two meetings a week, I conduct all of my work through emails and chat rooms and bug tracking software and wikis.  And technically, my phones run through VOIP, so those are also funneled through the ether.  I talk to friends in email; I post on this blog; I write twitter updates and reply to Facebook posts; I do pretty much everything online.  I shop online; I sell books online; I post the high scores of my video games online, and prior to cutting my copy of Call of Duty in half because it was consuming all of my free time, I played against and with other people solely through my network connection, in a virtual reality where we blew each other up in deathmatches.

    Look at all of the stuff that has been replaced by a digital counterpart: you download songs in iTunes instead of buying a physical CD; you get your software in binary form from an app store instead of a shrink-wrapped box.  All of your photos are JPEGs and TIFFs instead of printed on Kodak paper.  Maybe you haven’t moved to e-books yet, but a lot of people have.  Films?  Tax forms?  TV shows?  Calendars?  Maps?  It’s all another subdivision of cyberspace.  Sure, you aren’t sitting at a digital desk in the Matrix and whipping your hands around in the air to manipulate these objects.  But instead of having this completely separate world you enter by jumping in a holodeck or a VR isolation tank, you’ve got an infestation of these objects peppered throughout your regular blood-and-guts reality.

    All of this works, until part of it radically changes.  In the real world, you don’t wake up and suddenly find that every house in your subdivision, instead of being arranged on streets in numerical house-number order, were sorted by their frequency of use or color.  But in a virtual world, you’re at the whim of its maker.  When you get used to consuming those status updates in chronological order and they’re suddenly sorted by some piss-poor AI that thinks it knows what’s most important, you obviously throw a fit.   Another example of this — also this week — was when Netflix suddenly decided it would be a great idea to take their existing service and split it into two parts, which completely upends the decade-old experience of putting stuff in a queue and expecting the discs to come in the mail, by complicating the situation with two entirely incompatible queues, one of them having a bafflingly stupid name.

    I don’t know anything about human factors (I’m sure A’s dad could give me a lesson on it) but there’s gotta be a term or a threshold on how people react to sudden changes like that.  But is it something learned?  Will the kids born in 2011 who live a lifetime of CEOs with completely stupid UX ideas making dumb adjustments on the fly instantly adapt when their reality is suddenly shifted?  And how will a generation of people like this change the way companies work?  I grew up in a generation that, for the most part, always had email and always knew how to get on a computer and enter in a URL.  So companies started saying “fuck it – don’t ship a manual; just put the URL on the box and let them figure it out” or “we don’t need to staff a toll-free hotline, just have them email when they need to order new checks/change their password/whatever”.  And I’m fine with that, but the generation before me freaked the fuck out, and every Andy Rooney type started in with the “REMEMBER WHEN YOU COULD GO TO THE BANK AND GET THE TELLER TO HELP YOU” crap.  In twenty years, will I be saying “REMEMBER WHEN EVERYTHING WAS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER?”

  • Dot Matrix and Word Processors

    I was writing about something completely different the other day, and went on this side diversion about dot-matrix printers, and thought about how a giant subset of the population (like everyone born after about 1985) never had to deal with them, while I spent far too many hours fighting them in computer labs, pulling apart the intricate pieces to pry loose jammed scraps of paper that got worked into the machinery.

    There’s so many distinctive features of this whole era of printing that are long forgotten.  Dot matrix printers usually used eight little pins to stamp a ribbon as the print head jumped across the page.  My friend Matt had one of these, the Commodore 801, and the thing I remember most about it was that it was unidirectional; the little print head would zip across the page at a breakneck 50 characters per second, then the page would move up a line, and the head would return to the left.  But it didn’t print on the sweep back to the left, which meant it was half as fast as the expensive printers that would print on both passes.

    The printers were also tractor-feed back then.  The paper had those little perforated runners hanging off of each end, little strips with holes in them, and the box of paper was fan-fold, so you could feed in the sheet and it would continuously chew through the giant thousand-page sheet of paper in a carton.  Then, after you spent 20 minutes staring at the printer, hoping the thing got through your term paper in one pass, you then had to fold and tear apart each page, then tear off the feed strips on either side.

    And, of course, that never worked right.  If you didn’t line up the paper exactly, turning the little knob on the side of the printer, the end of the physical page would not match up with what the computer thought was the end of the page, and you’d get this mangled mess with a blank strip of what was supposed to be the top and bottom margins in the middle of the printed page.  The whole operation of aligning and feeding and advancing paper was a precision thing, and if the paper got folded or creased or otherwise fucked up, the printer would have no mercy and create an origami disaster out of your precious schoolwork.

    The output of a dot-matrix looked like shit, and they did a lot of little tricks to get it to resemble actual type.  Like some printers had this “near letter quality” feature, where they’d do multiple passes on the same line to get a higher resolution, and they started adding more pins.  When I was at IUSB, we had armies of these Panasonic KPX-1124 printers, which had 24 pins instead of 8.  These pieces of shit were the bane of my existence back in 1991, and I spent untold hours tearing jammed paper out of these while some dumpy housewife screamed at me about her Psych 101 paper getting trashed.  (If you ever did time around one of these, watch this video and tell me if the clunking sound of that print head slamming into the left margin over and over doesn’t make you go full postal.)

    It seems like everyone forgets the other bastard child of that era that made perfect typewritten letters, at the sake of glacial speeds and 120-decibel print runs.  The daisy wheel printer had a hub with a bunch of little spokes coming off of it, each one carrying a little type letter.  It could spin the wheel with a servo motor and then hammer it against the ribbon with a solenoid, making an ink impression that looked exactly like a typewritten page.  These were a big deal if you were printing out things like college admission letters, or you had an English teacher that had a hair up their ass about dot-matrix printers and wanted you to hunt down a selectric and hammer out the damn thing the old fashioned way.  Daisy wheel printers were louder than fuck, and a low-end model typically cost more than your entire computer.

    But not everyone had computers.  When I was in high school, I had this “word processor” which was a glorified typewriter, except it had a single line of an LCD display, and it used a thermal print head.  It took these cartridges of some kind of crap that it could transfer to a page with a set of heated pins.  If you have one of those label maker machines, it was a similar deal, but masquerading as a desktop machine.  I think you could only type in one line at a time, and then hit return and wait a minute for it to etch onto the paper.  This wasn’t the best machine for stream-of-consciousness writing, but it was way faster than hunt-pecking on the K-Mart manual typewriter I got at a garage sale as a kid, where you’d type any faster than three characters a minute and all of the little hammers would get wrapped around each other and jam.

    I somehow lucked into finding this girl in my freshman year of college that thought I was some kind of writing genius, and got her to type my papers for a semester.  I guess that sounds sort of chauvinistic, but that’s an arrangement that I feel sorry the current generation won’t find themselves in.  The “can you help me type my W131 paper?” pickup line has gone the way of the dodo.

    After I wasn’t able to fully seal that deal, I dated someone who bought one of those Brother word processors, which were a very brief halfway-house between a typewriter and a computer.  It was this huge microwave oven-sized thing that was a fusion of a printer, a tiny CRT monitor, a keyboard, and the Notepad.exe program in ROM.  You could type a few pages at a time and then save them to a floppy disk (which was totally incompatible with any other computer) and then when you got it all situated and edited, you pressed a key and it would spit out the creation on actual paper.  My roommate Kirk later had one of these beasts, and I think I remember Larry working off of one for a while.  Here is a nice video of one in action.

    Now, computers are cheap as hell, something it seems that most people forget, and laser printers or nice inkjets are everywhere, and we don’t really think about stuff like this.  But I remember the smell of the fine paper dust inside of a monster line printer on campus, one of these washing machine sized beasts that would mass-print thousands of pages off of VAX computers, so long as one of us consultants hooked it up with the occasional corrugated cardboard box of 17″ wide tractor feed paper, that cream and light green-lined stuff.  Every now and again, some idiot would send an ASCII-art dragon to the printer, a giant picture rendered in letters that would print banner-style across three dozen pages of paper, over the course of an hour.  (Even better, when you’re sitting in a public lab and someone in a dorm sends through a picture of a Penthouse Pet done up ASCII-style.)  That was all infinitely better than when someone would accidentally dump a binary file to the DEC LG06 in the library, and it would spit out page after page of random junk until you could get an operator in the machine room to kill the queue.

    My last hurrah with dot matrix was about five years ago, when I bought a Tandy 100 off of eBay.  The guy threw in a bunch of other random crap, including a Radio Shack printer from circa 1985, with some bizarro serial cable and no chance in hell of ever working with a machine produced this century.  It went straight to the dumpster, but I probably should have videotaped it going off of a four-story building, or getting it Office Space style with a baseball bat.

  • The Replay

    I’ve been dreading this post for years, but it’s a band-aid I need to rip off.

    I was at this acupuncturist in Berkeley a year ago, in some stupid last-ditch attempt at getting rid of my allergies.  (It did not work.)  And I remember laying on his table, with a dozen needles in my arms and feet and face, thinking, “I really should post something today, but I don’t want to regurgitate the same old shit, and it’s only the nine year anniversary.  I’ll wait for an even ten.”  And it’s now ten years, and everyone is either waving their flags and beating their chest and ringin’ them bells, or they’re talking about the folly of spending two billion dollars a day to catch a man that’s already dead.  And every show on TV this weekend is trying to get their spin on it, about how the world of cooking shows or pet rescue or hillbilly alligator hunting was forever changed on this day.

    Seriously, fuck all of that.

    It all makes me replay the day, and I do that a lot, but I don’t really think about who I was on September 10th, 2001, and what really did change.  And I play this game a lot, with a lot of other arbitrary dates.  I pull up old pictures or dig through old emails, wondering what person I was on 9/11/01 or 7/4/92 or 1/20/97 or any other date.  And I try to reconstruct it, and I always find information I’d totally forgotten.

    Here’s how it ended:  I’d been sober a year, more or less.  No meetings, no steps; I just quit drinking.  But that night, my power was out, not because I lived in lower Manhattan, but because my stupid landlord had my entire apartment on two 15-watt breakers, and I was watching the news coverage on NY1 as I was running my computer and cooking in the microwave, and I blew a fuse.  And the fuse box was in a locked box in the basement, and my landlord was in Italy for a month.  So I had no power, in half my apartment, and ConEd had bigger problems on their hands, so I walked to Rob’s and he offered me a beer, and I started slamming them away.  It wasn’t because, like usual, I needed to be the life of the party and get blotto and do stupid things to make everyone else laugh.  It was because I thought if there’s ever a time to fall off the wagon, watching thousands of people die and two skyscrapers collapse was probably that day.

    —

    What I know about the weekend before: I just switched jobs, and I thought it was a huge mistake.  I was in way over my head, working as a lone writer surrounded by people who were 18 steps ahead of me.  I think I was the only person in my section of the cube sea that didn’t have a PhD.  I’d moved to New York to be in a relationship, and that ended; I’d found this job at Juno, which started out pretty awesome, and that ended.  I forgot all about this, but I’d emailed Frankov that weekend and asked him if there was anything going on out in SF, if I should pack it in and move out there.  This was post-NASDAQ crash, and he said don’t do it unless you can line something up, and that he lost his job and his apartment, and was now couch-surfing and stringing together a bunch of scraps of contract work to keep alive.  I don’t remember why I wanted to move to San Francisco, except that I wanted to leave New York, and I wanted a lot of different things, depending on the time of day.

    I finished my first book the year before, and it didn’t really sell.  I was struggling with finishing my second book, and in this weird funk where I didn’t know how it would ever end.  I was constantly printing drafts and editing them on the train and putting the pieces on index cards and rearranging them on the floor of my apartment and dumping the whole thing into spreadsheets to try and untangle this mess of a book into a cohesive 200 pages.  I’d start with a fresh printout, and read the first page, and think it was perfect, then move to the second, and by the 3rd or 7th or 12th page, I would get sick of the whole thing.  So the first page was damn near perfect, and pages 150-200 were unbearable.

    The first page, the first section of the book starts with a scene where all of lower Manhattan was accidentally blown up by a nuclear bomb.

    —

    So on the 10th, it was a Monday.  I spent all weekend trying to buy a car on eBay.  I had a good lead on a 1980 Z-28 that some kid in Queens was trying to unload.  It had no exhaust, and there was no way it would pass a NYS emissions test.  He would reply to my emails in all caps, but not answer my questions.  I bid on an AMC Gremlin in Staten Island, but got outbid.  I also looked at a 1982 VW Rabbit convertible.  I owned one in ’92, the one in Summer Rain.  I bought a second one in ’98, when I was writing said book.  Why not a third?  But I figured Ray and Larry would give me unending shit if I bought a sorority chick car.  And I didn’t have a place to park a vehicle, and had no need for one, except for that desire to do what I did as a kid and hit the road when I got depressed, drive for one side of the tape, flip it over, drive back.

    I wanted to go to Iceland.  No passport, too expensive.  I spent two weeks in Florida that summer, doing nothing in a motel room, trying to write, sleeping all day, taking long walks at night.  It just barely scratched the itch, and I needed more.  I talked to A about coming back to Bloomington to do a book reading, but I couldn’t get away with coming back to Indiana and not visiting my family, which I really didn’t want to do.  I thought about taking a flight to Nebraska, finding a Motel 6, locking myself in with no internet and nothing but the laptop, and finishing this damn book.

    That afternoon, it poured rain.  I bought a lunch at this crap Chinese place downstairs, and it was inedible, so I went to Wendy’s, and it wasn’t much better.  I gave up on lunch, and went to the JetBlue web site, trying to find a vacation for October. For some reason, I bought a plane ticket to New Orleans.  I didn’t know where I would stay or what I would do, so I emailed Suzanne and Chuck, the two people who I knew who spent some time down there.  (I don’t know why I didn’t email Bart, who later became the face of Katrina for a lot of us.)

    Chuck’s dead now.  I dug through all of his old emails when he died in 2007, and saw that he was one of the many people that emailed me on the 11th and 12th asking if I was still alive.

    —

    Everyone worked at this new place until 6, 7 at night.  Startup mode.  I stayed until 7, then walked in the rain, and took some pictures of people on the street, up by the Tower Records at Astor Place.  One of those pictures ended up being the first cover for Rumored to Exist.  I walked to Kiev, the Ukrainian greasy spoon diner, one of my favorite places to eat, and red-penned a draft of Rumored.  I got through the entire draft while eating pierogies, then set off to catch the N back to Astoria.

    Right outside of Kiev, I ran into John, this guy I used to work with at Juno.  He said he was on the way to see a play, because he got a job reviewing theater for some random newspaper, and asked me to tag along.  We walked through the East Village to get to this Alphabet City theater, one of those hundred-seaters that’s probably a cupcake bakery now.  On the way, it poured rain, the standing-in-the-shower-fully-dressed kind of rain.  When we got to the theater, I took off my new dress shoes and literally poured out a half-liter of water.

    The play was insanely boring, and I left after the first act.  When I got to the train, I realized that my draft of the book, filled with comments, had turned into a chunk of runny pulp, all of the precious corrections now a smear of pink nothingness.  I got home and took everything out of the bag: my digital camera, the minidisc player, all of my books and papers, and decided to straighten it all out in the morning.

    For the record: Kiev is gone.  The Tower Records is gone.  The company I worked for is moving out of their office this month.

    —

    Digging through the old emails, I had a couple of online dating prospects going on.  One was a theater actress who would later go on to be Neighbor #2 in a Law and Order episode.  The other, who I really liked, was an artist and trained dogs.  We met up once, and I really did like her, but we never connected, and in all of our later emails, she kept talking about how she was trying to leave town because we were going to get hit with another attack any second now, which was always awkward.

    —

    Tuesday morning: my dress shoes were warped and damp and completely unwearable, but I put them on anyway.  I only needed to walk to the train station, then I could take them off and let them dry.  My bag was still wet. I threw out the pulpy Rumored draft, and decided to leave behind my digital camera.  I always brought it to snap pictures of New York streets, but I figured I wouldn’t miss anything if I left it home for a day.

    I got on the N train.  I hated the N, and they just changed the schedule, adding this W train that skipped stops and ran express and made it more difficult to get to work.  The N crept into the city, and once we got past Lex, it kept getting held up at each station.  I figured it was this god damned schedule change, that the MTA had fucked it all over, and my commute would be forever filled with these delays.  It’s maybe ten till 9:00, and I was hoping to get to work by 9:00, but it’s obvious that’s not going to happen.

    It’s about 9:00, and the train is being held at Union Square.  Someone gets on the train, a hispanic guy, and starts talking to me, but I have my headphones on.  Nobody ever talks to anybody on the train; it’s like using a urinal: you don’t talk to the person next to you.  I realized this was not a panhandling attempt, and took off my headphones.

    “Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center,” he said.  “They stole a plane and crashed it.”

    The train was full of murmurs and misinformation.  I remember once reading about how a B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building during World War 2.  It took out a whole floor, killed a couple of people.  I figured someone stole a little Cessna or something, broke out a bunch of windows and started a big fire. I think this happened a few years before, a kid stole a Bonanza prop plane in Florida or something and flew it into his work building in the suburbs.  I wonder how they get a plane out of a building when it’s a hundred stories up?  They can’t use a crane.  I started playing engineering scenarios in my head, how to disassemble a plane with cutting torches, when the subway doors closed and the train slowly ambled south.

    The N train, the train I was on, went to the WTC.  It stopped at Cortlandt Street, and you could take a tunnel into the lower concourse, and end up at the big underground mall.  When it was cold in the winter, I used to take the train there and go to the Borders at the WTC all the time.  Rob worked there, and would get me his employee discount, so I bought many a Bukowski book in that store.  That Borders is obviously gone.  And now all Borders are gone.

    —

    Just after 9:00, the train stopped again at 8th.  I anticipated another long wait, so I got out and started walking south on Broadway, to the office.  Gary, the company’s CPA, is outside of the office frantic, red-faced, looking like he’s about ten seconds from a massive heart attack.  He tells me that a bunch of people from the company are at a meeting on the 106th floor of the North tower.  The office is just north of Houston and Broadway, and I see a huge plume of smoke in the air.

    The office is chaos.  Nobody has a TV; someone is trying to find a radio; our phones are alternating between working and a fast busy signal.  Nobody knows who’s at the meeting and who is en route and who hasn’t left home yet.  Nobody knows if tower 1 is the north tower or tower 2.  Someone reports that a second plane hit the other tower.  Some people are outside watching; some are trying to get their computers to work to pull up a news page.  CNN, MSNBC, and every other news site is completely unreachable. Google still worked, and they put a one-paragraph note on their minimalist index screen. (This would end up being the birth of the Google News page.)

    —

    I realize I don’t have my camera.  I walk across the street to one of those film developing/passport photo/lotto ticket places, and buy two disposable cameras.  I start walking south on Broadway, taking pictures.  I’m still thinking, “How do they put out a fire that high up? How are they going to repair this?”  For some reason, the WTC on fire reminds me of the image of King Kong on top of the towers in that horrible 1976 remake.

    I see an unmarked cop car, black tinted windows, speed up Broadway the wrong way, sirens blazing, lights on.  It’s covered in about three inches of powdery grey dust.  It looks like the dust you used to see in Mt. St. Helen’s footage in the 80s.

    I walked south, took pictures.  Some people were walking away from the scene, walking north.  Some police were trying to block roads, but there was so much disorganization, nobody knew what was happening.  I saw an F-15 fly over the Hudson river, at a ridiculously low altitude, maybe a few hundred feet, on its side, probably approaching Mach.  I’d never seen a fighter jet fly that low, that fast, even at air shows.

    Almost ten years later, I’d see that same exact jet, same serial number, same markings, now retired and at an air museum here in California.  I touched its grey camouflage paint, the metal skin on the side by the cockpit, and instantly remembered all of this.

    —

    I went south, past Canal, snaking down West Broadway, and reached Finn Square.  By that time, the cops had completely blocked off the streets.  The towers had just collapsed.  I didn’t actually see it happen; I just saw this giant grey cloud where the towers used to be.  I walked back to the office, and I remember sitting in my cube for about an hour, trying to send off emails.  This is the email I sent to a bunch of people:

    I’m OK.  The World Trade Center isn’t.  I think two or three hijacked planes hit it, and it’s gone.  The WTC is maybe a mile? south of where I work.  I was in the subway when the planes hit.
    The news makes it look like it’s mt st helens with all of the raining ash, but it’s not that bad unless you are right on wall street.  I just bought two disposable cameras and walked to maybe 10 blocks north.  I saw the second tower on fire, and it was one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in my life.  Right after I took pictures, it collapsed, but I didn’t see it happen because of the smoke.
    The subways are closed, and I think the bridges are too.  I will probably sit here at work for a while, or maybe just fill my backpack with bottled water and walk home.  (it’s only like 3 miles, so it’s not horrific).
    As far as the people from work, it wasn’t the CEO, but it was three others.  They had a meeting on the 106th floor of the second tower that went, so nobody knows what happened.  To say that things are freaked out here in the office would be a major understatement.
    The phones are sporadic so calls are timing out or getting a fast busy.  You can try me at 212 842 8848 but don’t be alarmed if that doesn’t work.  Pass on the word that I’m OK, and I’ll let you know more when I know more.
    -Jon

    There was nothing anyone could do, so I started walking home.  I realized my feet were completely mangled from walking a few miles in these wet dress shoes, and I hadn’t eaten anything since that Kiev the night before.  I walked to the Astor Place K-Mart, dropped off the film at the one-hour counter to get it developed, then went to the second floor to buy a cheap pair of tennis shoes.  Fifty women in dress clothes were doing the same exact thing.  I sat in the Big K Cafe with a couple of corn dogs and fries, and tried to get my cell phone to work.  Then I realized the closest cell tower was probably on the roof of one of the two buildings.

    I got my film, and the woman working at the counter was all pissed off that they were in a mad rush of film processing, and everyone had tried to get pictures of the people jumping off the towers.  I hadn’t heard about that until then.  They were saying 6,000 people probably died.

    —

    I walked to 34th Street, and the trains started running out of the city.  I got home, contemplated taking a nap.  I went to register.com and checked if kill-binladen.com was taken, and it wasn’t.  I don’t know how I knew already that it was him, if the news was saying it or if I made the connection myself, or what.

    I had to get rubbing alcohol to clean my scanner to scan the pictures.  The closest drug store was in this part of Astoria that’s basically an Arab neighborhood.  There’s a mosque there, all of the hookah places, and a bunch of Pakistani and Egyptian restaurants.  I remember looking at all of the people, and seeing the nervousness on their faces, that this white guy was going to show up and start shit.  I imagined all of the store windows broken within 24 hours, people beaten up by local kids wearing American flag muscle shirts.  I thought there’s probably going to be a lot more of this in the near future.

    Inside the drug store, they had on an AM radio to the news.  They were interviewing some guy at a flight school in Florida, who was saying a bunch of Saudis took classes that summer, wanting to learn how to take off and not land.  I realized that this flight school was almost exactly where I was staying that summer.  It was the same exact time.  I even looked at taking some flight lessons when I was there.  I probably ate lunch at the same Denny’s as one of the hijackers and didn’t know it.

    —

    I scanned the pictures, fielded some frantic phone calls, but could not call anyone because my phone was all messed up.  I couldn’t make outgoing calls, but sometimes a random incoming call would make it. Every time I started to take a nap, another call would come in from a worried relative.  I stayed glued to CNN.  I blew out the fuse and lost my power.  I went to Rob’s, drank beer, came home.  I wrote a lot of emails, including an email to someone I dated earlier that summer that probably said a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have said, and was pretty much akin to playing a game of poker and laying every card you had face-up.  The next day, my DSL internet went out, because of course the closest colo was in the Verizon building in lower Manhattan, which had no power, and all of their generators ran out of gas.

    I didn’t go back to work for a week.  Four people died.  I didn’t know how to feel about any of this, because I just started the job, and didn’t really know anybody at the company.  We had to go to grief counseling, but it was a joke. I became this weird conduit for all of these people in the Midwest, because I was their link to the tragedies.  New York became a ghost town; the city I wanted to leave really became a place to abandon.  I cancelled my trip to New Orleans, because I didn’t even know if there was going to be an airline industry anymore.  I went to a shrink and told him to give me whatever he could, and I started taking Effexor.  That gave me something else to focus on: crippling headaches and nausea.  Within a few weeks, that went away, the drugs took over, and I got back to work, back to writing, back to bitching about my lack of a dating situation.  I’d survive.

    —

    I just realized I started by saying I didn’t want to write about this, and I’ve now written about 3500 words about it.  I have no nice ending or message to wrap this up with, except the uneasy feeling that there will never be any real closure on this, because the event will forever be fetishized.  I’m constantly told what I should think about this, and it never is what I think.  I guess that’s the big takeaway, that it’s not something that can be pigeonholed into a nice, succinct bumper sticker-sized motto or slogan.

    Okay, time to turn off the TV for the weekend and go on with life.

  • Answering stupid meme questions because I don’t feel like writing

    Somebody sent me this on facebook.  Any time I try to write more than 38 characters on facebook, it usually crashes or tries to sell me auto insurance, so I will answer it here.  Also, I am so bored of the book I am trying to write that I almost went and googled “writing prompts” which is always a waste of my time, like googling “android vs. iOS” and expecting something concrete.  So here’s a bunch of answers to a bunch of dumb questions.

    1. What time did you get up this morning?
    4:40 AM, but then I reset my alarm to 5:59.  In a perfect world, I would have written for those 74 minutes, but having a dream about selling a moped to Spiro Agnew in an alternate reality where Hulk Hogan was killed on the cross and every church had an effigy of Hulk on a cross was preferable to staring at a blank screen for 74 minutes.

    2. How do you like your steak?
    I like it the way the chef prepares it.  I.e. I don’t like it with spit on it, so I leave him or her to decide how to cook it.  Paying $75 for a steak and then requesting that it be overcooked is like buying a Prius and then bolting a giant fucking bike carrier on the roof that doubles the amount of wind drag.

    3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
    The Debt.  It wasn’t bad.  Any movie set in East Berlin has got my attention until it no longer deserves it.

    4. What is your favorite TV show?
    TV is dead, and the only thing I watch with any regularity are stupid reality TV shows about cooking, and I’m usually reading the web at the same time.  The last show I really liked was this alternate history show that was on, although it was a pilot shot on like $37 and probably won’t get picked up.

    5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
    What is that saying about LA being nine different cities?  There are at least two or three of them I would like.  One of the ridiculously huge and esoteric beach houses in Playa Del Rey or one of those weird things on the canal in Venice.

    6. What did you have for breakfast?
    A bowl of fiber one raisin bran and a thing of fat-free yogurt.

    7. What is your favorite ice cream?
    That fake Mexican restaurant Chi-Chi’s used to have fried ice cream, and I always liked that.  I went to a Mexican restaurant a couple of years ago in Daly City and ordered it, and they forgot to fry it, so it was a block of impossibly hard ice cream with the breaded coating on the outside.

    8. What foods do you dislike?
    Mushrooms, cauliflower, cilantro.  Mushrooms because my childhood was filled with slimy, canned, Kroger mushrooms that taste like fermented rubber tire pieces; cauliflower because I have a memory of my aunt pressure-cooking a huge amount of it until the house smelled like fried ass; cilantro, I have a weird reaction to it and even the smell of it tastes like soap to me.  I’ve heard this is genetic.  It means eating Mexican food in northern California can be very hit-or-miss for me.

    9. Favorite Place to Eat?
    How many of these god damned questions are about food?  Jesus christ, no wonder 114% of our population is obese.

    10. Favorite dressing?
    Field.

    11. What kind of vehicle do you drive?
    A Toyota Yaris.

    12. What are your favorite clothes?
    Jeans, t-shirt.

    13. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
    Mars.  Antarctica.

    14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full?
    If you answer half full to this, either you are a goddamn liar, or you live in some rural part of Africa where there is no water.

    15. Where would you want to retire?
    I thought I answered this in #5.  Or do people retire where they don’t want to live?  That would explain Florida and Arizona.

    16. Favorite time of day?
    Right after work, right before this west-facing house turns into an oven.

    17. Where were you born?
    I should probably stop answering this question online before someone identity thieves themselves into my mortgage account.

    18. What is your favorite sport to watch?
    Baseball, although demolition derby is a close second.

    19. Who do you think will not tag you back?
    I am not tagging anyone.

    20. Person you expect to tag you back first?
    See #19

    21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this?
    Ibid.

    22. Bird watcher?
    What?

    23. Are you a morning person or a night person?
    I used to be a night person, but I’ve become more of a morning person.

    24. Do you have any pets?
    Two cats, plus by proxy eleventy billion pets because of all of the animal shelters were dump money into.

    25. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share?
    I fucked your mother.

    26. What did you want to be when you were little?
    A person who answers lists of questions.

    27. What is your best childhood memory?
    Best as in what I remember the most, or the best thing that happened that I remember?  I remember all of childhood pretty well, and I don’t really want to.  My best memory is probably when I turned 18 and childhood ended.

    28. Are you a cat or dog person?
    Cat.  Dogs are followers, but cats do not give a fuck, which I can appreciate.

    29. Are you married?
    Yes.

    30. Always wear your seat belt?
    Only when I’m in a car.

    31. Been in a car accident?
    Yes.

    32. Any pet peeves?
    See also the last thousand entries in this blog.

    33. Favorite Pizza Toppings?
    Chunks of gold.

    34. favorite flower?
    What is the one they make opium out of?

    36. Favorite fast food restaurant?
    Subway.

    37. How many times did you fail your driver’s test?
    None.

    38. From whom did you get your last email?
    printroom_support@printroom.com.

    39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card?
    The blank credit card store.

    40. Have you done anything spontaneous lately?
    Combusted.

    41. Like your job?
    It doesn’t involve food.

    42. Broccoli?
    I think broccoli was one of the first vegetables I really liked, although that was only because in Indiana, you can only get broccoli with two and a half pounds of cheese whiz on it.

    43. What was your favorite vacation?
    Hawaii is always good.

    44. Last person you went out to dinner with?
    My wife, to this Thai restaurant called Summer Summer.

    45. What are you listening to right now?
    The Naked Lunch soundtrack.

    46. What is your favorite color?
    #FF3300

    47. How many tattoos do you have?
    Zero

    48. How many are you tagging for this quiz?
    Zero

    49. What time did you finish this quiz?
    4:43

    50. Coffee Drinker?
    No.

  • 20 Facts You Didn’t Know About Muammar Gaddafi

    Yesterday marked the 42nd anniversary of when Muammar Gaddafi assumed the title of Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of Libya by ousting Prince Hasan as-Senussi. It’s disputed whether or not he’s currently in Libya or if he still rules the country.  And if he does show up, he’ll probably end up prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

    Even though he’s been in the news constantly for the last year, there’s a lot we don’t know about the Libyan leader. Here are some amazing facts about Muammar Gaddafi:

    1. He shares a birthday (June 7) with Dean Martin, Tom Jones, Prince, Bill Hader, and Allen Iverson.
    2. His first car was a 1958 Ford Thunderbird hardtop.  He now owns a large collection of classic Thunderbirds, including a 1960 hardtop/sunroof model with the 430 engine, of which only 377 were produced.
    3. As per his decree, Libyan TV has a channel that repeatedly plays only his favorite movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
    4. Prior to the US Embargo, his favorite town to vacation in was Rochester, New York, largely because Gaddafi is a great admirer of Millard Fillmore.
    5. Every year on September 1, he celebrates the anniversary of his coup by eating an entire squid for lunch and drinking a cup of Turkish coffee for each year he has been in office. These lunches are broadcast nationwide on the Al Nadi Sports Channel.
    6. Gaddafi often uses the various spellings of his name to his advantage.  For example, he has been known to join the Columbia House record club up to 32 times at once.
    7. In addition to Arabic, French, and English, Gaddafi was at one time studying Klingon, and announced in 1991 his eventual plan to translate the Green Book into the constructed language.
    8. His favorite WWE wrestler is Joanie “Chyna” Laurer.
    9. His parents made him play the alto saxophone in junior high school.  As a result, he has banned music programs in all Libyan public schools.
    10. He applied and was accepted to a graduate program in atmospheric sciences at Howard University in Washington, DC, but did not attend.
    11. A long-time fan of Lionel Richie, he admitted during an interview with Larry King that he listened to the album Can’t Slow Down daily for almost two years after its release in 1983, but was initially disappointed with Dancing on the Ceiling, because he preferred the album’s original proposed title, Say You, Say Me.
    12. His score on the GRE in 1967 was 505 verbal / 485 math.
    13. Aside from the Green Book, his favorite books include The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer, and You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again by Julia Phillips.
    14. He often bought and sold collector beanie babies on eBay with the username “gandalf69” until the US State Department discovered it and shut down his account.  He is rumored to have amassed a collection of over 500,000 of them in a storage facility on the outskirts of Tripoli.  Beanie babies purchased from him that can be verified are exceedingly rare and have sold for four and five figures on the secondary market.
    15. There is a Libyan law that prohibits anyone but Gaddafi from playing as Colonel Mustard in the Parker Brothers board game Clue.  In Arabic translations of the game, Colonel Mustard’s turn is first instead of second.
    16. His favorite classic video game is Q-Bert.  He owns a restored coin-op version and his high score is 492,000.
    17. His customized Airbus A340 jet, which was captured last month in Tripoli, contained a collection of all 41 Steven Seagal movies.
    18. Gaddafi refuses to fly over any country with exactly two vowels in its name that ends in a consonant.  He also avoids flying on Tuesdays, never eats fish when traveling on ship, and will always travel with an even number of bags.
    19. He was long-time friends with Gary Coleman, and was devastated after his death.  He is still convinced that Coleman was murdered by Mossad agents.
    20. He bowled a perfect 300 on the night of his birthday in 1976.  It was during official IBA league play, and he is often seen wearing his official 300 ring.

  • Prying Light Bulbs Out of Cold, Dead Hands

    Wired did a cover story on the light bulb, which is fascinating to me, for many of the same reasons two freight trains containing rocket fuel and napalm colliding at full speed is fascinating to most people. Wired never has more than four god damned things a year even worth reading, unless you’re always in the mood to buyer’s guides for $700 headphones, or twelve-page ad spreads for crap Toshiba laptops, the glossy layouts disguised to look like actual articles. (I got a free subscription by trading in some about-to-expire miles on an airline I never fly, something that looked like a borderline identity theft request. Wired was by far the best magazine offered, with the second and third place choices being Vibe For Pregnant Teens and Country Shitkicker Kitchen.)  What fascinated me was the fact that Lightbulb-Gate has reached the level of fury where you can get guaranteed linkbait with a title like “Five things you need to know before Congress takes all of the light bulbs out of your house and rapes your children in the dark”, and we’re an election cycle away from adding a Constitutional amendment prohibiting any legislation regarding incandescent lighting.

    It amazes me that people can get so bent out of shape about manufactured swing issues. I think all it takes is convincing side A that their mortal enemies on side B hates something, and side A will suddenly champion their complete opposite. If I could find the magic place to leak a story that the President is trying to criminalize the consumption of dog shit sandwiches, you’d see within three days a photo-op of some far-right nutbag with a foot-long hoagie of Doberman links, lettuce, and tomato, screaming “TAKE THIS ONE AWAY YOU GODLESS COMMIE BASTARDS!”  Sarah Palin would be working part-time as a night cashier at an Arco gas station, collecting food stamps, and living paycheck-to-paycheck in a studio apartment if the left wouldn’t keep blathering about how much they hate her.  And yeah, both sides are guilty; I’m sure that NASCAR does not implicitly endorse slavery, chaining women in kitchens, or impregnating first cousins, although that’s generally the opinion held by most people with an extensive secondary education.  I’m not saying I’m ready to tattoo a giant number 3 on my face, but I’ve never watched more than two seconds of a race, so I’m not about to condemn it.

    News isn’t news. People argue that the news is the reporting of fact, and that the reporting of “incorrect” news is “bias”. We don’t read news to find out facts as much as we read it to validate our worldview.  You could replace the root page of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and all of the other media sites with a single story that says “Your beliefs have been validated, and that makes you the center of the universe”, and 90% of the function of the media would be functionally replaced.  News stopped being news when the media realized that the most important part of journalism is pumping up your number of page impressions to increase ad revenue.

    Here’s a cheat sheet on the “light bulb ban”:

    • It doesn’t “ban” anything; it sets new standards for efficiency that will eventually make the use of incandescent light bulbs impractical.
    • It was signed by law by George W. Bush.
    • The whole issue with Chinese workers getting mercury poisoning while making CFL bulbs would probably be irrelevant if people stopped buying so much Chinese-made shit at Wal-Mart.
    • Mercury thermometers contain way more mercury than CFLs, and you put those in your kids’ mouths and asses. (They are also banned in many countries but not the US.  If you’re looking to manufacture next year’s fake crisis, maybe something involving Nancy Grace screaming about how our babies are going to die of fever because Congress is takin’ away our thermometers.)
    • Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb.  It’s not an American invention.  Joseph Swan patented it a year before Edison, and Edison avoided litigation by eventually merging with Swan’s company.
    • CFLs are not condemned, condoned, or even mentioned in the Holy Bible, at least not in the version I stole from a Las Vegas hotel room to use as a coaster.
    • The focus of all of the fury is currently on the CFL bulb, but LED bulbs are coming down in price, don’t have the weird flicker/refresh effect, can be dimmed, are more efficient, and produce a more natural looking light.  I expect that once the LED bulbs break the $10 price point for an equivalent 100-watt incandescent, we’ll start hearing stories about how they’re really produced by homosexual Muslim terrorist splinter cells that abuse children.

    I keep hearing that this is a libertarian issue, that we need to keep Big Government off of our backs, that we’ll spend some ridiculous amount of money on the light bulb police to kick down doors and send felon soft-white-light lovers off to maximum security prison.  And all of these laws and regulations will stifle the growth of business and kill jobs (even though all of the biggest industries in this country — pharma, telecom, aerospace, finance — are all heavily regulated.)  People keep talking about a return to “simpler times”, when we could dump raw sewage in drinking water, cut the mufflers off of our giant V-8 engines, and buy a table saw with absolutely no warning labels, guards, or any other pussy communist safety features that would prevent one from cutting off their fingers or launching a piece of wood at 800 miles an hour into your abdomen.  (Those lightweights in Europe only sell table saws with riving knives to prevent kickback when ripping lumber, but where’s the sport in that?  If I want to risk fatality and save $3 on a $947 table saw purchase, god damn it, that’s my right as an American!)  I wish we would return to simpler times – like the ones where idiots were too afraid of computers to use them.

    And none of this is about the math, or the savings, or the efficiency.  It isn’t about mercury poisoning or the color of light produced by CFLs or the up-front cost of bulbs.  It’s because one side said “don’t do this,” the other side had to say “well FUCK YOU I am totally doing this.”  It’s about people who have been told to be angry by a for-profit news source that they feel validates their lives.  It’s about millionaires becoming billionaires by telling the poor that they should be pissed off at someone trying to save them a dollar.  It’s a non-issue.  Let it go.  There are more important things to fight about.

  • Small Fish Big Pond

    I was listening to Mark Maron’s podcast the other day – specifically, an interview with Aubrey Plaza – and they started talking about how they both used to live in Queens.  But then Maron said where he lived, which was at 37th Street and 30th Avenue, and it completely blew my mind, because I lived about a block from there, at 36th and 28th.  And we both lived there at the same time, which means we shared the same subway stop, and the same restaurants and bodegas and fruit stands and drunken assholes sitting outside of cafes, blocking the god damned sidewalk.  And I’m sure my day job and his life as a late-night comedian probably didn’t place us on the platform for the N train at the same times, but I’m sure there must have been at least a couple of occasions when we were up there, looking down the tracks and wondering where the hell the next train was.

    That’s a reminder that the world is much bigger than I imagine.  Or maybe I mean more dense.  I came from a life where you knew every single person in your neighborhood.  Our subdivision had a homeowner’s association – not like a condo HOA where you were required to be a member, but rather a group of do-gooder PTA motherfuckers that liked to be overbearing and have a Christmas decoration contest and post crimestopper signs that did no good and that sort of crap.  And they used to put out an annual directory, a photocopied thing that listed every damn person in the subdivision, along with their kids’ names and if any of them did chores like babysitting or snow plowing or whatever.  I think the whole purpose of the thing was to shame people into giving twenty bucks to the group, or maybe because people were so god damned proud of their kids, they needed to show everyone how many of them they had.  I don’t know, but I know in my infinite boredom stemming from a life of only five TV channels, I pretty much memorized that book and knew the names of every person in every house of our neighborhood.

    The entire city of Elkhart – not just my little subdivision – had a population just under what Astoria’s population was, except Elkhart is about 25 square miles, where the 11103 is maybe three-quarters of a square mile.  So you’re talking about a serious number of people piled on top of each other; nobody’s got a giant ranch house or a backyard or even a place to park a car, let alone a collection of cars, like pretty much everyone in Elkhart has on their front lawn.  And at first, this was overwhelming to me.  When I first visited New York, I was amazed that it wasn’t just one single main arterial street had clusters of stores and shops, like every town in the Midwest.  Every time you turned off of one street and onto another, that would be a main drag too, with wall-to-wall storefronts.

    But at some point, I got desensitized to all of this, and had this mental picture of my neighborhood as having vast amounts of nothing.  I mean, I’d have this internal diagram that would say “my house, five blocks of nothing, the Key Foods, two blocks of nothing, the subway stop, and then ten blocks of nothing until the tunnel and the city.”  In reality, every one of those blocks of nothing had thousands of people living there.  And even though half of the storefronts in Astoria are abandoned and boarded up and probably used as illegal gambling halls, and of the other 50%, a certain plurality were these stores with maybe $17 of merchandise on all of the shelves, probably because the place was a mafia front. But there were all of these places where you could get lost forever, that were their own worlds within one street address.  I’d duck into that horrible Rite-Aid on 30th, and it was not the world’s biggest drug store, but it was its own universe, once you got in there and got stuck waiting an hour while the only cashier finished her cell phone call and rang up your purchases.

    I still feel like that now.  I mean, there really is nothing in my neighborhood – we’re like on the edge of the ghetto, patiently waiting for gentrification to happen, maybe the next big earthquake to suck under a mass of old Victorian crackhouses and leave room for a new Trader Joe’s. But then when I go back to Indiana, everything truly looks abandoned.  It always amazes me when I go back there, because it looks like some post-apocalyptic movie, where the whole population has vanished.  And when I did go back to New York, I felt overwhelmed again, which means my sense of scale has reset itself.  But the moral of the story is I should be taking a closer look at what’s around me.

    Anyway.  I spent far too long looking at the picture above, then looking at Google Maps, to see if that is indeed 37th Street and 30th Ave, and I think it is, but you can’t tell because so much of the stuff has changed hands.  Someone said you’re officially a New Yorker when you say “do you remember when this used to be a ______”?  Yeah, something like that.

  • Review: Lost in America by Colby Buzzell

    It appears that someone over at HarperCollins saw my previous review of Colby Buzzell’s first book, My War, that I wrote last March, because they sent me an advance copy of his latest, Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey, which is coming out in September.  I remember looking for more info on him after reading My War, and not finding much, except for an article at Esquire, and some blog posts about how he got called back up for IRR duty, but got discharged before going back to Iraq because of PTSD or alcohol abuse or whatever they call it these days.  So I was happy to hear he had another book coming out, and I was curious to see how it went.

    I mentioned in my other review that I’m always skeptical of people who do a successful blog and then turn it into a book, which was all the rage a few years back.  It’s not that I think this is good or bad; it’s just that when people blog about their life and the biggest moment in their life and turn it into a good project, when you ask them to do a second book, it’s almost always garbage.  I mean, Citizen Kane might be the best movie in the world, but if it came out in 2011 and made bank, you know they’d do a CK2 with reporter Jerry Thompson played by Ted McGinley or some shit, and they’d do it in 3D, so there would be all these scenes of Chuck Kane throwing glasses of water or shoving spears into the audience.  (“Wow, that sled was coming right at me!”)  And half the time, the second book by a blog-to-book author is this whiny tome talking about the huge letdown of having to do talk shows and meet famous people and go to dinner parties and get their URL plastered on the sides of busses.  So I was seriously curious what would happen in this book.

    Buzzell’s assignment was to take the great American road trip, to retrace Kerouac’s footsteps and head across the country and report what was going on in that big space between New York and LA.  He was told to “write a love letter to Kerouac”, and fortunately, he didn’t really do that.  I was hoping this would not turn into some overly academic circle-jerk that treated the Kerouac journey as authentically as Olive Garden turns out Italian food.  In fact, very little time’s spent talking about Kerouac, finding parallels between his work and the world today, or pondering why Jack looked for kicks.  That was all quickly brushed aside as Buzzell set out in his ’64 Mercury Comet, driving east and looking for his own version of kicks.

    There are some strange parallels that Buzzell doesn’t consciously ponder here.  Kerouac and friends set out on their travels partly as a reaction to the Iraq of their generation, which was World War 2.  Jack struggled with the death of his father, and Buzzell talks greatly about the memories of his mother, who died from cancer right before he started his trip.  And like Kerouac’s attempts to reconcile his place in humanity, Buzzell wonders about his recent marriage, his new child, and how all of those pieces are supposed to fit together.

    Probably the biggest takeaway from the book is that the middle class is dead, and the middle of America is a prime example of it.  He stumbles through various jobs at day laborer places, talks to people living on minimum wage, hangs out with guys stripping Detroit buildings of their copper pipes, and sees firsthand the abject poverty and lack of any hope in places like Cheyenne, Omaha, and the former motor city.  It’s like his own version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, except I thought her book was a pretentious slow-pitch to the NPR crowd, while his was more authentic.

    Is this pure journalism?  No.  But that’s the struggle, and one that he acknowledges: you need some kind of plot or gimmick or device to provide forward motion in a book like this, and he struggles through the 297 pages to find that.  You can’t just load up a car in San Francisco and say “go!” and write down each place you stop for gas and call it a book.  There could have been many different ideas that would have propelled the book more, that he mentions but never returns to.  Like, what if he would have taken that book advance and drove from SF to NY and stopped at every VFW in between, hoisting beers and asking the patrons what they thought about America?  What if he did try to only survive on the money he got from those shit jobs?  What if he tried to look up every army buddy in his platoon, John Rambo style, and see what they made of their lives?  What if he pulled a Hunter Thompson and searched for “the American Dream”?  He has his motives and he ends up doing the work as far as remembering his mom and his past, but it’s not a focused effort toward any one thesis.

    The writing in this book seemed a bit better than the last.  I don’t think he’s completely found his voice, and I found some clunkiness in places, but for every point where he violated the show-don’t-tell rule, there was another point with incredible detail and clarity.  Some of the best examples of this were his depictions of Detroit.  It’s easy for outsiders to simply say “Detroit == Somalia/Bosnia/Tripoli/whatever”, but there is some strange duality in the old houses versus the abandoned stores, the proud residents and the scared whiteys.  He explores a lot of the urban terrain, which is something a bit cliche now that every hipster doofus in a fedora is out wandering abandoned warehouses with their digital SLR, but it’s coming from this guy who was in the shit, who had the crazy experiences in Iraq and knows what real devastation is like.

    This book is sure to piss off some people, because Buzzell isn’t easily pigeonholed.  He’s got some strange allegiances, like his odd infatuation with Wal-Mart and views on Fox News.  He didn’t drive a hybrid, instead choosing an old dinosaur V-8, and instead of being fiscally responsible, he spent his nights blackout drinking.  It’s not like his last one, where it’s easy to pitch it and say “read this if you want to know about Iraq.”  There are a dozen other books about cross-country driving or exploring the underbelly of poverty that I’d recommend over this one.  And yeah, the message is not cheery, from an economic standpoint. But this one was a good read, and I’d love to see what he knocks out next.

  • The Death of Palm

    In a serious WTF move yesterday, HP announced they were ditching their hardware manufacturing business, and abandoning their work on WebOS devices.  HP just bought Palm a little over a year ago for 1.2 billion dollars.  Their big splash was the iPad killer tablet, the HP TouchPad, which sold roughly as well as the Edsel in the year before its demise. It’s a sad end to Palm, and evidence that doubling down doesn’t always pay off.

    I have a long history with Palm, mostly because I’ve always wanted some kind of little portable machine to store my “brain” of vital info and capture little bits of writing ideas as I’m away from my desk.  I remember first hearing about Palm back in 1996, when I was still at my first job in Seattle.  At that time, the gold standard of portables was the Apple Newton, which were nice, but cost somewhere around a grand.  US Robotics rolled out their new device for only $300 for the low-end model, and they were way smaller and lighter than the Newton.  When I first stumbled across this new product on the web, they had a little Palm Pilot simulator you could download, which let you walk through the various screens of the PDA, albeit without the touch-screen area for a pen stylus.  I was 90% sold on this initial model, but 10% of me had serious doubts.  (And 100% of me didn’t have $300 burning a hole in my pocket.)

    The thing that was most offputting to me was that the Newton was essentially a shrunk-down computer. You could put cards in it and it had its own file system that you could fill with apps and documents and whatever else.  But PalmOS was based on this alien concept that you carried a mirror of your important data, a copy, that got synced when you plugged the device back into the mothership of your home PC.  It was a sort of parasite, like one of those little helicopters on the decks of huge yachts, and wasn’t a “real” computer.  I don’t know why that bothered me, but it was new at the time, and I didn’t like it.  (It’s the same stumbling block a lot of Windows people have about the iPad, and why you see tons of people in message boards yelling “IT DOESNT HAVE A PCMCIA SLOT!  I CANT RUN VISUAL STUDIO ON IT!  HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CUT BROADCAST-QUALITY HD VIDEO ON THAT THING?”)

    So I didn’t get one. In the meantime, a bunch of people I worked with at my next job bought into a lot of bleeding-edge PDAs that have since left our collective consciousness.  Some of them were Newton or MessagePad die-hards, and a couple bought into the Magic Cap platform.  Windows CE devices also started appearing, which I thought was absolutely ridiculous at the time.  I spent my cash elsewhere, mostly on this other portable reading system better known as paper books, and patiently waited until Moore’s Law kicked in.

    After I moved to New York, though, I foresaw a future of sitting on subway trains for a good chunk of my day. So I went down to J&R’s Music World, which is like the East-coast version of Fry’s electronics stores crowded with off-brands and flashy bright pricetags. I bought a Palm IIIx, which I think set me back $200 or so, and then figured out all of the cryptic mumbo-jumbo I needed to get it to talk to a linux machine.  (It probably involved recompiling the kernel five times.)

    My use of the Palm fluctuated, and went through phases.  I’d go through periods when I downloaded a ton of ebooks, tried to keep a journal, and jotted down everything I saw or thought of, in hopes of eventually rolling it into my own writing.  I’d play dope wars forever (“you found two hits of acid on a dead dude in the subway!”) and remember reading that Bruce Sterling book The Hacker Crackdown and a good chunk of the Unabomber manifesto on that little 160×160 greenish LCD.  I never got the hang of writing in graffiti, the shorthand system of scratching on the little input area; I can barely print in Latin letters, let alone a system I haven’t been using for decades.

    Everyone had a Palm back then.  When I worked at Juno, I think every single person on my team had a Palm III or V, except for one dude that had a Handspring Visor.  (One of the Directors also had the ultra-expensive Palm VII, which had an antenna hanging off of it, and could pull down the amount of web traffic you’d consume in about 60 seconds now over the course of a month, all for $14.95.) One of the project managers on my team found a hangman game you could play wirelessly over the IR ports, and our meeting productivity suddenly dropped 100%.  I’d get on the train and see dozens of people clicking with their little styluses on the charcoal or silver boxes, all of them drowning in crazy NASDAQ money as the tech bubble continued to expand like a huge zit on a teenager’s face.

    I never fully sunk into the system, though.  Part of it was that it wasn’t 100% of what I needed to do with the damn thing.  I couldn’t really write on it; I couldn’t run totally kick-ass games with it.  There was no camera, no web browser, no way to send emails on the go.  I couldn’t write my own programs for it.  I could barely get the damn thing to sync with my PC, and would only plug it in maybe once or twice a month.  There was also the issue that I had a cell phone that could do about 23% of what I wanted, and this Palm that could do maybe 41%, and then I carried around a MiniDisc player, which totally solved the music issue, but only for the discs I remembered to shove in my pocket that morning.  I really needed some device that would do all of this and more, but that would be almost a decade away.  In the meantime, I assembled this mess of cables and adaptors to plug the Palm into the ass-end of this Samsung feature phone I had back then, so I could use the phone as a modem and dial in to a modem when I was on vacation, which almost worked.

    Around 2001 or 2002, I took a half-step in that general direction, and upgraded to a Handspring Visor Prism, and got the Visorphone. The Visors had this cartridge port on them called the Springboard port, and the Visorphone was this sick attachment that  snapped on the back and essentially turned it into a cell phone.  And the Visor could use the phone for data, so you could fire it up and get SMS messages on your phone, or send out an email.  The Visorphone sounded like the coolest thing since the Boba Fett action figure with the shooting rocket pack that some stupid fucking kid shot down his throat and got the whole thing banned, but it was a total piece of shit.  It had its own battery in it, and you had to charge it separately from the main unit.  The software was barely integrated correctly, so it almost worked as well as one of those piece of shit Jitterbug phones.  And your monthly bill of 40 or 50 bucks came with just enough minutes to download and delete about four of your spam email messages.  Plus it got me locked into a T-Mobile contract, which was absolutely craptastic.  I did use the Prism for a while, and it was a nice step up from the IIIx, but I did miss the sleekness of the old Palm, the little fliptop case that reminded me of a Star Trek communicator, and the fact that it ran forever on AAA batteries.

    I also owned Palm stock briefly.  I probably don’t need to explain how that went.

    I sold the Handspring to a coworker, and jumped to a Sidekick, which, despite the fact that it was designed for emo 14-year-olds, had its shit together as far as data integration.  It was essentially useless as a phone, but I don’t like talking on the phone, and preferred getting the data-only unlimited plan and spending all day in AIM or browsing the web.  I did briefly consider getting a Treo when everyone else got Treo fever, but talked myself out of it.  Years later, when I was at the big S, we got a couple of Palm Pre units when they came out, and I spent twenty minutes screwing with one, long enough to lock it up two or three times.  I’d already moved to the iPhone by then, and it was the perfect solution I’d waited ten years for, so I was pretty nonplussed.  The WebOS UI had some nice features, but in a world where everyone had Ataris and Commodores, I didn’t want to buy a Coleco Adam because it had a neat keyboard.

    I was thinking about all of this, and what happened to all of my old Palm files, and I remembered I used a program called jpilot on linux to sync my old devices.  It made a .jpilot directory, and it turns out I have two full backups of my old Palm’s filesystem, one from 2000 and another from 2001.  It is a total mindfuck to see what I carried on the thing back then.  I’ve got a list of DVDs I wanted to buy; a list of books to research later; and there’s an attempt at a journal that’s mostly a list sorted by date of when I was having panic attacks.  There’s an itinerary from a February 2000 trip to San Diego, and a copy of an early draft of my second book in PDB format.  I have all of the applications that were installed too, from a universal remote app to an R2D2 sound generator to some app that takes a Manhattan street address and tells you the cross streets.

    Sometimes I wish I never kept things like this, because now I’m going to spend the next two hours digging through these files.

  • Thoughts on a random picture: the N

    This is the N:

    I took this picture just over ten years ago.  I was on the way home from my second date with Kelly.  We went to Jackson Heights, and then to Target.  It doesn’t sound that exciting, but when you live in New York in 2001 and you spent a good chunk of your life in Indiana, and suddenly, there’s no Target, the idea of taking two trains and a bus to the middle of nowhere in Queens to see a real Target is pretty enticing.

    That picture was taken on Queensborough Plaza, which is the first stop in Queens after the N train goes through the Steinway tunnel and under the East River.  It’s the start of a new borough, a transition to a different land, and the point where the normally-underground subway train suddenly appears up on an elevated platform that snakes above the rooftops in Long Island City and Astoria.

    I hated the N train.  The N and R trains ran into Queens, and they stood for Never and Rarely, because you could wait forever for one of the damn things to show up.  And while you were up on that elevated platform, freezing your ass off in January as the wind tunnel effect made the extreme weather even worse, they’d run twice as slow.  And while those A trains or F trains ran every 2 minutes for the last century in “The City”, the MTA had this habit of randomly shutting down the N trains all weekend, which started roughly around two weeks after I moved to Astoria, and went on until about the time I left.  They said it was for “station work”, but I was almost certain that some Sopranos wannabe motherfuckers paid off the MTA to force all of us to spend our money in their craptastic shops and restaurants all weekend.

    Queensborough plaza was in a sketchy neighborhood, a part of Long Island City where everything around was either taxi repair shops, scrapyards, or the kind of strip clubs you go to if you have a c-section scar fetish.  There was also a “bootleg” Dunkin Donuts there; it had a sign with the same font and same colors as the real place, but it just said “fresh donuts” or “fresh coffee” or something.  I was waiting for the whole thing to get painted over after a cease/desist, but there were a lot of blatant trademark violations in Queens, and nobody gave a shit.  There was this place on 30th Ave called Pinocchio Restaurant, and I swear they had a pixel-for-pixel copy of the genuine Disney artwork on their sign.  I don’t know if a lawyer from Walt’s parent company woke up with a horse’s head in his bed one morning, but the damn thing’s still there today.  I desperately wanted the Olympics to come to New York, just to see all of those IOC lawyers try to shut down every business in Astoria with the word “Olympic” in their names, which is about 70% of them.

    Two train lines butted against each other at that station: the BMT’s N/R and the IRT’s 7.  The 7 was the line built to run up to the World’s Fair, and they ran those famous red subway cars, which have since been stripped and dumped in the Atlantic to form an artificial reef.  I’m guessing this is the train John Rocker took out to Shea Stadium described in his infamous rant that got him all kinds of love and adoration from New Yorkers.  On the day I took this picture, we returned from Target on the 7 train, and then I switched to the N to go home, while Kelly got on a different train to head back to Brooklyn.

    I spent so damn much time on the N train.  A rough order-of-magnitude guess is 2 times a day x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year x 5 years = 2500 trips.  Each trip took about 45 minutes, so that’s roughly 78 days of my life.  Yeah, I invested that time into reading, and I probably read a book or two a week, but that’s still a lot of strap-hanging.

    The whole idea of the subway seems a lifetime away for me.  I can’t even fathom any part of my existence back then: being single, living in such a big city, living in such a fucked up neighborhood.  I think about it a lot, because I’m at the same job as back then, and I’m working on docs for the same product (among others), so I often play dumb games like “what was I doing around the time I first started working on this?”  I think back to when I was struggling to get Rumored out the door, when I was trying to date, when I would take any free time I had and scrape up enough dough to get on a plane to Vegas, just so I could rent a car and drive again, and be in an open area that didn’t have a fifty thousand people per square mile.

    And I think about life now sometimes – like I was in the parking lot of Target the other day (honestly, Target isn’t paying me to mention them in every damn post I put up here) and I was just thinking “fuck, I’m living in California.”  I get so busy with the day-to-day that I don’t even think about it, about how 25 years ago, California was this far off, distant land only seen in movies, and it may as well have been the planet Vulcan.  And now I’ve lived here for three and a half years, and I still don’t even realize it until I’m outside on a nice sunny day, and I realize it’s something like -60 degrees in Elkhart and I haven’t had to dig a car out of a snowbank for decades, and I really do live within a stone’s throw of the Pacific Ocean, a body of water I never even saw until I was 26 years old.

    So looking back at pictures like this, the old rolling stock of the MTA, that look of soot and skyscrapers and brick project houses and a view of Queens so vivid, I can practically hear the car alarms and jackhammers at five in the morning and the taxis laying on their horns continually, and it’s a huge time machine for me.  It’s not that I want to go back or that I miss any of it, but it’s a huge reminder that even though I feel like the same person and the same old crap is going on every day, so much time has passed between now and then, and things have changed so radically.