Good to be back.  I spent all day Friday in airports and on airplanes, immersed in the world of roller suitcases and $9 bottles of water in newsstands filled with every single tabloid featuring pictures of a recently-adultified Miley Cyrus and rumors of tattoos and nipple slips and not a single piece of readable material outside of maybe a moldy Baseball Insider hot stove report with 48 pages of circle-jerking over Jeter’s next big payday, and maybe a 4-point type mention of Tulo’s big $160-million dollar deal somewhere under the mandatory required notice of circulation numbers and where to contact the publisher on page 96.

Actually, Friday was a marathon day, mostly because I could not sleep at all in New York, even with the help of all of the various pharmacological cures my Doctor Feelgoods give me.  (One advantage to a full-bore PPO plan in the hot potato days of plausible deniability-seeking doctors who pass you off to every specialist known to the medical profession any time you have a complaint even slightly off from their knowledge core is that opportunities abound for you to drug-seek elsewhere.  Not that I doctor-surf for Oxy like a right-wing hillbilly talk show host with an itch to scratch, but every time I go to see a new specialist, he or she will immediately rattle off a script to some new wonder-drug that may or may not help my ails but will surely get them another step closer to that Aruba junket with their pharmacy sales rep.)  I forgot that sleep in New York is a careful balancing act of drugs, white noise generators, and the learned ability to tune out the sounds of a garbage truck’s BEEP BEEP BEEP backup alarm at three in the morning, punctuated with the occasional siren bouncing off the buildings.  A decade of guidos, gunshots, and garbage trucks outside my first-floor window always made sleeping an annoyance, but when I’d leave and end up in the middle of nowhere, in a hotel where there wasn’t a shouting match ten feet from my head every hour, I found myself tossing and turning like it was the day before some big event (audit, wedding, presentation, sale on some Apple product I didn’t need, etc.)

My hotel suite cost roughly what I paid for a car back in college, per night, and had the two-bed setup, each bed just big enough for me to roll over once before I fell on the floor.  I remember decades of having a twin bed like this, even on occasion sharing it with someone for various acts of fun, and I never had issues.  Now, even a queen bed is a tight fit for the mountain of pillows and blankets I encase myself in every night.  Was this trip damned to be one of those “the more that things change” reminders?  I don’t know, but I did enjoy the iPod/iPhone dock built into the clock radio.  I had some fears because most of our team was on the same floor, and I didn’t want everyone to hear me at three in the morning, singing along to some Venom song about Satanic sacrifice at top volume while playing Angry Birds in a fit of insomnia and checking my facebook hourly on my $34.95 per day WiFi connection.  The room was barely bigger than the two beds, and when I got there, I thought it didn’t even have a bathroom like one of those cold-water shooting pads you’d rent out in Spanish Harlem in the 70s when you needed to kill a prostitute, but then I saw it hidden around a corner, a low-flow den of sample-sized soaps and a toilet that took around 45 minutes to flush each time.  At least the place had a standard bible AND a Mormon bible, which made it that much easier to smash allergy pills into snortable chunks of powder.  (I took the copy of the Mormon bible, with some vague idea to either read it and write a parody, or use it in some sort of art project, although I’m sure I will forget all about this and in two years, when I’m digging around for books to dump on Amazon (probably every “get over writer’s block in 56 seconds or less” book I bought in a tirade in the last year) and wonder why the hell I had a copy of the LDS book in my collection.)

So yes, New York.  I didn’t do as much walking around as I wanted, mostly because it was December, which meant the time of year I usually spent every waking moment trying to find a heated astronaut suit on some Russian eBay ripoff so I could make the ten-block walk to the subway every day without further aggravating my constant upper respiratory infection with that wind that whipped through every seam and zipper of every coat I ever owned.  I wondered if the city grew or my memory of the city shrunk, but then I realized as I wandered up and down Lexington in the middle of the night, I realized that I never looked UP when I lived in the big smear.

That sounds stupid, but it’s true - when it’s your daily penance to hustle up and down the sidewalk from subway to work to lunch to work to subway, you keep your head down and barrel forward at top speed, cursing every mouth-breather and inbred from a flyover state that stops on the sidewalk to look at a massive foldout map and see how far they are from the statue of liberty or ground zero or whatever the hell tourist spot they are ambling toward.  Even zen pacifists that never step on ants will, within fifteen minutes on a New York sidewalk with stuff to do and places to be, turn into a bloodthirsty offensive tackle of NFL caliber and look to plow down every single person not sprinting at top speed in front of them.  This aptitude came back to me quickly, as I knocked over nuns and old ladies on the way to the subway, but I noticed this look up/look down thing when I pulled out my camera for a quick picture to prove I actually was in the city and not on some Vegas strip club junket (you need as much evidence as possible with these new expense report systems - receipts are never enough; I’ve been bringing a pro HDV broadcast camera and taking video of waiters and hotel desk clerks holding up a copy of that day’s newspaper just to make sure I don’t get burned on reimbursement checks.)

And when I looked up, I saw this massive city, buildings climbing in every direction, and not a hint of economic downturn.  I mean, you look in almost every other American city, and it’s nothing but boarded up stores, closed restaurants, vacant lots for sale that will always remain barren.  The last time I went to Elkhart, I started playing this game while driving around where I would take a shot of tequila every time I passed some retail location of my youth that was either shuttered or turned into a Mexican grocery, and within fifteen minutes, I was blackout drunk.  But in New York, there’s stores opening inside stores, every corner of office building lobbies and subway tunnel filled with people selling wares.  The only thing I saw closed were the subway token booths, which were apparently shut down so they could afford to raise prices again.  (Wait, what?)

I went back to my old office for a half-day; most of my work stuff involved training-type meetings in the hotel convention center, but on Thursday, I had a morning of open time, so I got on the 6 and headed down to NoHo to work at the old digs.  First, taking the subway brought back so many strange memories.  Just the feel of that yellow plastic card going through the stainless steel slider on the turnstile (and of course, 1 in 2 times saying “please swipe your card again at this turnstile” at the exact point you push your entire body weight against the still-locked metal bar preventing you from advancing in the rat race) - that reminded me so much of my daily trip in the germ tube to the office.  I did remember to grab onto something when the car started so I didn’t get launched across the car, but I did keep forgetting which side the doors opened on and how you needed to get the fuck out of people’s way when they needed to exit at their stop.  When I got to 632 Broadway, I was too early and locked out of the elevator, so I got to hang out in the lobby and talk to the doorman about how many tens of millions Jeter would need to get.  I also went to the deli across the street for a Diet Coke and balance bar, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the mass of office workers getting their caffeine and bagel fix.  I always forget how personal space is a premium in the low-10000 ZIP codes.  In most other cities, you’d end up in a domestic partnership if you stood this close to other people for this long.  Here, it was standard operating procedure.

Stepping into the old office felt so — weird.  I mean, I spent every weekday of 2001 to 2007 in this place, hunched in a cube in the back corner, typing away at user manuals consuming mass amounts of Coke while downing heavy doses of DayQuil during the cold season.  (This was, thankfully, before the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 stifled everyone’s creative juices and prevented us true artists from buying Sudafed by the case.)  My old cube was still open, so I crashed there with my laptop and entered this strange time travel vortex, my muscle memory relaxing straight into the position I assumed for so many years.  And then I opened the filing cabinet under the desk, and found damn near every printout I made in those six years, carefully filed in my haphazard organizational system (files like “MIR space junk,” “fake celebrity porn,” “government conspiracies,” “failed Microsoft projects attempting to topple Java,” “standards documents I will never use,” etc.)  Talk about a mindfuck - it was like that insane recurring dream where you’re back in high school, except there’s no chance of hooking up with that cheerleader you may have secretly been into back in the eighties, before she had nine kids.

But yeah, that lack of sleep really killed me.  Thursday night, after a trip up to the Bronx to visit a guy who used to machine lower receivers for M-16s at his cousin’s bowling alley (he’s making a lot more cash now turning out bootleg $60 iPad stands), I think I went to bed around 2

and woke up at 4, unable to sleep but unable to stay awake, doing nothing but cruising various photo sites on the iPad, looking for some good Kim Jong Il snaps for an art project in the event that the shit does indeed go down in Han-Bando.  I went outside early, hoping to scare up a danish cart or cold bagel, and ran into a contingent of EMEA sales and service guys, who informed me that there were no good diners in all of the UK, so we went to one of these gastro-hipster places that probably used to be a Thai-French fusion restaurant three years ago but was now a fake greasy spoon with some of the appeal but none of the grime of its 80s counterparts you used to find littered all over the city.  We bitched about work and ordered rich food that promised diabetic comas in short order; I got 5000 calories of corned beef hash that must have contained an entire pound of butter (i.e. perfect) and got all nice and lethargic for a morning of training.

And yeah, a day of airports and airplanes.  I didn’t get the TSA Operation Grab-Ass everyone’s been talking about, but then again, I didn’t get Ebola when every 24-hour news alarmist said all five billion of us were going to get it back in the 90s, either.  I did enjoy the new (newly redone) terminal at JFK, and spent an hour perusing the used DVDs at some electronics store and almost considered dropping $60 on some super ultra 3-disc Apocalypse Now box set before I realized that the only machine I had with me with a DVD drive was my work Windows laptop, and I wasn’t even sure if Windows 7 plays DVDs out of the box without 200 hours of studying every aspect of DVD authoring and toggling a million registry settings and downloading several $100 versions of all of the crippled “lite” drivers and programs bundled with the computer.  Instead, I stuck to the kindle and got cover-to-cover on another fine book during my trip west.  I then bailed out the Toyota from its short stay at the long-term parking lot, and bumbled home the ten miles on the 880, driving like you’d expect someone to drive after being awake for 24 hours with only the good parts of a CPK Cobb salad (i.e. the meat, bacon and cheese and not the lettuce) from the Phoenix airport and two rolls of Certs to eat in the last ten hours.  I then gave the missus a $25 box of chocolates from the airport gift shop, said my hellos to the four-legged terrors, and slept a solid eight in the confines of my queen-sized cocoon.  Good to be back.

I’m in a hotel at 49th and Lex in the Big Smear, the island I could not escape for eight years but finally did. And now I’m back, for the first time since I bolted Westward to Denver and points beyond in 2007, holed up in a way-too-much-to mention-per-night suite with all the amenities except square footage. And in the city that never sleeps, I arrived an hour after everything shut down, and went to a nearby bodega to buy some days-old sushi shrink-wrapped by Chinese forced labor in a work camp in some shitbag Queens neighborhood that has smelled like rotting fish since 1927. Mahalo!

Today was quite the travel day, starting with the double-strike of the usual klaxons sounding at five AM, plus two feline monsters desperate for their morning carnage delivered in their bowls chop chop. Shave, shit, shower, pack, and into the Yaris for the quick zip to the Oakland airport, where the fun started. I got to the OAK with time to spare, fired up the iPad, and found the free wifi functioning without a hitch. You never can trust these free networks, not because of the hacker script kiddies stealing your packets and transcribing your Bank of America PIN numbers, but the more insidious corporate entities that hype of “free” wireless either as a bait-and-switch for some $29 a minute access plan that only works in 7 of the 9000 worldwide airports, and is fully incompatible with the other hucksters offering the same deal. Either that, or they have some horrid web portal that pumps ads at you at a rate causing seizure in most epileptics, in pop-ups and pop-overs and pop-unders and roll-overs and frames and banners and trays, all of them only working if you’re running Windows ME and a copy of Internet Explorer 6, otherwise it fails with some horrible Engrish error message and forever damages two dozen registry keys on your system, requiring three successive clean installs and the purchase of two new Windows full licenses. But it all magically worked on the iPad, and it even skipped the stupid Flash commercial you are required to watch, probably for some nameless corporate monster that offers business-to-business integration solutions in this modern world - you know, the kind of stuff nobody can buy or name or explain, but it’s damn important for the company to shell out six or seven figures’ worth of ad imprints so we can identify their logo in a lineup.

So I get on the plane and get headed to Phoenix, fully aware of the fact that Amelia Earhart took off from this same airfield however many years before, never to be seen again. And of course there’s some deaf-mute aging fucker spilling over halfway into my seat. He’s covered in liver spots and technically died five years ago, but he’s still alive because he’s gotta eat twelve thousand-calorie meals a day or he won’t be able to roll into High-Fructose Heaven. He’s downing homemade lard and white bread sandwiches the whole flight, Just Like Mom Used To Make, and I’m trying to read, or trying to scribble into notebooks my various ideas on how I can build my serial killer themed putt-putt course on my fortified compound in Colorado.

Here’s where the fun begins, in Phoenix. Unbeknownst to me, there was a slight drizzle off of Long Island, but it’s enough that all of the flights are stacked up and pushed out, and air traffic control is giving vague and irrational estimates to the droids at the front counter. They come online every fifteen minutes to tell everyone the flight to Newark is five minutes late, or pushed back four hours, or wait - no, an hour, and so on. It’s in that indecipherable, scratchy, and somewhat demeaning tone, the kind of announcements they play at Abu Ghraib to sleep-deprived prisoners to break their will. Only those prisoners didn’t pay $1047 for a one-way non-refundable ticket that they’ll have to eat if the plane doesn’t show, because that common perception that “oh, the airlines will put you in a hotel and feed you and give you free tickets and get you on another flight, because they HAVE TO - it’s A LAW” is of course just as big of an urban legend as the various rodentia that Richard Gere and/or John Wayne had impacted in their colons. The only legally binding clause in the ticket agreement these days is that they can charge you for any damn thing they want with nothing in return, and Never Forget 9/11, or the terrorists win. Read the fine print, although you now have to print it out yourself on your own dime with your inkjet at home, or they charge you an extra $75 documentation fee, so be careful.

I walk over to CPK and order a pizza for roughly twice the cost of a ballpark mini-pizza (I hope I can expense this crap) and wait for #32 to get magically called. A bright blonde woman who first looked twenty and then looked forty smiled at me, while juggling a small child. I noticed a lot of this phenomenon - these women who were 19 going on 37, or maybe the other way around. It could be all of the various strains of high-test melanoma from the two-barreled punch of higher altitude and unrelenting sunshine. Maybe all of the people under eighty in Arizona who weren’t trucked in by the burros to mow lawns and build crappy tract houses by the dozen are this same sort of creature, the down-and-out woman who either has their looks to go on, or knows how to brew up a mean batch of speed in her bathtub, because there’s no other way to make money out in these parts unless you’ve got fifty years of 401K and pension sending you annuity checks out of your fixed income every month. Arizona’s a place you end up, not a place you aspire to, and aside from the obviously out-of-place strangers transferring from one plane to another, you could tell on the faces of these people what the deal was. It was like looking into the eyes of a South Vietnamese mother who is trying cling to the skids of your Huey helicopter as you leave the Saigon embassy rooftop in 1975. There is no noble escape from this hellhole.

And on that day, my escape was not guaranteed, regardless of the prepaid papers e-given to me by the corporate travel agency. As I sat in the concourse, tapping away at this iPad, the flight to JFK right in front of mine boarded, got ready to push out, and then the flight crew railroaded everyone back off the flight, like the eleventh hijacker was in the back row waving a pair of mini-Uzis with extended clips and praising Allah. After everyone poured back out of the AirBus, they cancelled the flight, and I got to listen to a full load of human intolerance bitch out the ticket agents, each one blue in the face screaming about what they were going to do, every one doubting the legitimacy of any pretense that said agent’s parents were legally married at the time of their conception.

And here’s the deal: everyone’s heard an endless tirade on how the TSA is groping and prodding and touching and juggling and scanning and detaining this holiday season. But the only hostility I saw were the passengers, taking down the airline employees like a late-eighties Mike Tyson in some tune-up fight against a no-name amateur that owed their booking agent too many favors. I cleared the security area in record time, probably faster than I’d get in and out of the average Taco Bell during a light lunch hour. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t trying to carry on a fully decorated christmas tree, a 14-piece ginsu knife set, and a completely stocked 500-gallon saltwater aquarium without taking off my shoes first. People need to own up to the fact that they may be the broken gear in this machine that fails them.

But yes, I panicked a bit, wondering if my flight would likewise get shafted. And the worst of it was not the vague attempts at clarifying the situation, or the inaccuracy of the weather channel’s maps, which are generally good with a +/- 50 degree tolerance. It was the CNN loop playing above my head. I could not pop in the earbuds and launch some Slayer at max volume to drown out the propaganda channel, so I got something like this every five minutes:

“THEIR HOMES DESTROYED BY A TORNADO! A VISIBLY SHAKEN ELIZABETH SMART LEFT THE COURTROOM AFTER HER ACCUSED TORTURER AND RAPIST HAS A SEIZURE! WE’VE GOT SOME VIDEO OF A TEENAGER THAT RAN INTO A BURGER KING LAST YEAR BEGGING FOR HELP, A BICYCLE LOCK AROUND ONE ANKLE AND HIS ABDUCTOR CHASING AFTER HIM WITH A KISS THE CHEF APRON AND A FOURTEEN-INCH LONG STRAP-ON MARITAL AID! ONE IN FOUR CHILDREN ARE ABDUCTED BY AGE SEVEN! WE’VE GOT SOME SWIMSUIT PHOTOS OF THE OCTO-MOM! BACK TO YOU CHUCK!”

[Tip: if you pair a bluetooth keyboard to your iPad, either unpair it or shut off the bluetooth before you pack it all back in your bag. I locked the machine and stuffed everything in my messenger bag, and ten seconds later, the buttons on the keyboard depressed and launched the iPad. Of course the first track in my iTunes listing is an Anal Cunt song that’s about eight minutes of feedback and verbal destruction, and of course it started playing at maximum volume. Good stuff, unless the idea of being marched off by TSA air marshals and thrown into some kind of military tribunal as a terror suspect isn’t your idea of good, in which it’s not good stuff. End of tip.]

The flight times vacillated endlessly, and finally two hours after our original departure, they told everyone to cut the shit and line up and act like human beings so they could get all passengers on the damn plane and get in the air before ATC changed their minds again, which was 100% likely. I was, of course, in group 5, the last group to board. And all of my gear was in a carry-on, which meant that right before I boarded, the flight attendants announced all overhead bins were filled and “anyone with track boards would have to check them at the gate”. At that point, me and the 47 people behind me all said “what the fuck is a track board?”, except it was a completely asynchronous event, with one person asking, no clear answer, the same thing repeated, another person asking, etc. Then a woman with a roller bag (track board, whatever) zipped past me, at which point I said “there’s no more room overhead”, at which point she snapped and said “THIS IS GOING UNDER MY SEAT” with the same level of contempt a Rockefellar heir would give a Pakistani street urchin attempting to shoot homemade crank into his unwashed scrotum.

I checked my bag, fought my way to 15C, and of course there was an empty space in the overhead above my seat. Not only that, but my winter coat, my various medications I use to sleep or not sleep at any given point of the day, four Armani suits, and a small deep-sea diving harpoon pistol were in the roller bag/track board (unloaded, of course - I read their stupid web site before leaving) and I almost knew I would never see it again, or this would doom us all into being loaded and then unloaded, to be forced to sleep in the airport for days until we got routed to Ann Arbor, Michigan on propellor planes like the ones used to kill Buddy Holly and so on. This seat was next to a somewhat less morbidly obese woman and husband, both flipping through the Sky Sausage catalog of extruded meat products and gifts, not a single one containing less than fifty grams of fat per serving. After taking off, they ordered two reubens and two cheese plates each, which were the last edible items on the “you now have to pay for your damn meal, and we’re talking Yankee Stadium prices” food cart. I managed to pay $16 for two packs of saltines and a small can of what appeared to be a cranberry/tuna flavored cat food.

Not much to report on this five hour jump, except that I have been obsessed with this Catan game on the iPad, and I finally figured out why I’ve been having the piss beaten out of me by the robot players on a regular basis. I had no understanding how harbors worked, and building a good harbor is like being an arms salesman who happens to also have been in a college fraternity with the State Department employees responsible for handing out no-bid contracts. I crushed the robot players twice, and finished my paperback book with time to spare. I did get some shit for spending too long in the head, trying to put in some new eyedrops my opthomologist gave me. (She promised me they were way better than the stepped-on codeine pills I bought in the Bahamas, from a recreational point of view. I’m sure my insurance won’t pay for a script, but what the hell.) Another tip for today: never try to put in eyedrops while on a plane that’s plummeting through high-turbulence wind updrafts on a choppy December day.

I got to JFK in record time (plus three hours), my bag was the first one off the conveyor, and I got a cabbie that realized that a flat-rate fare to Manhattan is essentially a license to speed and dodge through traffic like you’re on one of those stupid level-up missions in Grand Theft Auto and you need to get the AK and kill the Hatians in 60 seconds or it’s game over. He dropped me off at the hotel, I checked in, then I promptly ran into an old coworker I hadn’t seen in years, who was drunk off his ass and adamant to explain to some newer members of the team that I was the REAL Konrath and not that other Konrath on Amazon, and that all the real tech writing at our gig ceased when I left for the Rockies back in 07. So as much as I hate the “energy” (read: noise pollution) of the big city, in many ways, it’s good to be back.

In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had the insane desire to buy a MiniDisc recorder.  So I rushed over to The Good Guys, this old Best Buy-esuqe electronics store, and bought a Sony MZ-R50 and rushed home and recorded Joe Satriani’s Crystal Planet onto a blank disc.

(Reasons significant: 1) Joe Satriani recorded his first album after receiving a credit card in the mail; 2) He was signed to Sony, and I think a song of his was in a MiniDisc commercial, not that there were tons of those in the US; 3) I had recently broken up with a girlfriend, and the reason I broke up with her, or the catalyst at least, was driving two hours to Portland with Ryan in his Miata to see Joe Satriani, listening to CP the whole way there, and both of us bitching about our respective girlfriends and vowing to somehow escape the situations, only I did and he did not.)

I did not have a good way to record digital to digital for a long time, and the MiniDisc required you to record stuff in real-time - you didn’t just download a bunch of MP3s and dump them to the disc.  You also had to carry around however many discs with you, and if you brought three and went to work, you were guaranteed to be sick of all of them by the time you got to the train station.  I vividly remember going on an awful first date with a lowtalker who produced feminist programming for cable access and still lived with her mom and wanted to go to dinner at a soup restaurant and then go to see this movie about white supremacists, and then I really fucked things up because the movie interviewed all of these white supremacists in Bloomington, Indiana, and while they’re talking to these guys about the evils of Jews, they’re all drinking out of Pizza Express cups and I’m like HOLY SHIT THOSE ARE PIZZA EXPRESS CUPS I HAVE LIKE 90 OF THOSE IN MY APARTMENT.  She was still somehow interested and kept calling and I eventually told her I was in love with someone who lived in LA, which was partially true anyway.  So after this first date, I had to walk her to her car at the cable access thing, and it was like eleventy billion blocks from the train station.  And the only MD I had with me was a best-of from Millions of Dead Cops, which is like 27 songs, a dozen of them being “John Wayne Was a Nazi” and the rest being entirely unintelligible 22-second long songs.  And I think I listened to it nine times on the walk back to the train.  And that’s why I got an iPod.

I have an 80GB iPod and it’s almost full, and it’s also lasted longer than any other, which means it will fail soon.  It is my damn lifeline for morning traffic though.  Is there something that will hold more music that I need to get?  Maybe I need to get a bunch of iPods and put them on a bandolier like Chewbacca.  If they made an iPhone that could fit 80 GB I would just do that.  Maybe when the drive dies in this (inevitable) I will find a way to hack it into a socket that I can hot-swap a bunch of different drives.  Maybe I will just wise up and say “why the fuck do I have all of these Charlie Parker albums and I only listen to two of the songs, so fuck it” and get the collection down so it will fit on my iPhone.

I’ve still got all of this MiniDisc crap in my storage locker.  I think if I had infinite time I would make some kind of art project out of it, like make a MiniDisc-based mellotron keyboard. Someone did a movie about the mellotron, a documentary, which I guess is a lot better than my last attempt at a documentary.  I got blindingly drunk in Laguardia airport, then had to fly to Pittsburg via Cincinnati Ohio (which is really in Kentucky, the airport I mean) and so I got to OH/KY and had a few more beers and decided I was going to make a concept movie about the moving walkways in the airport and started filming The Walkway is about to end, which is basically me sitting on the floor by the end of the walkway, and every ten seconds, a robot voice says “the walkway is about to end!” and every single person that walks past ignores it and stumbles when the moving ground becomes non-moving ground, and the whole thing is an important metaphor for something, but then I started to sober up and had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh and that’s the end of the story.  (The footage for that is in my storage locker, too.)

Yesterday was my last day at my job at Samsung.  As per my usual policy here, I guess I haven’t mentioned that I actually worked at Samsung for the last year and a half, although a simple google search or look at LinkedIn would have told you that.  But I’ve been looking for new work since the start of the year or so, and got an offer at a new place two weeks ago.  So I gave notice, did two weeks of short-timer duty, and finished yesterday.

The big joke with some of my former coworkers is the length of the statute of limitations before I write a book about all of the crazy antics that ensued at the place.  I think everyone at every one of my jobs says this, and I have yet to write a sort of tell-all book about any one given workplace.  I guess Summer Rain hinted at that with my days at UCS.  But I never did the whole “working at a startup in Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley/Silicon Prairie” thing, and who knows if I will.  But it’s true that I do have conflicted feelings about cutting loose on my former workplace.  I mean, there’s some choice material there, but there’s also the issue that I would feel bad about striking out and getting catty about it.  And there’s also the fact that it might not be that interesting to people who weren’t there with me.

I thought I would have no second thoughts about leaving the place.  The truth is, when I got this job back in October of 08, I jumped in quick, and backed out of a potential offer situation with another tech company.  And after a week or two of the new job, I had serious reservations about continuing, because of the work and the culture and the hours and the commute.  And every day, about halfway through the hour-some drive down 101 to the office in San Jose, I’d pass the office of this other company, and kick myself that I could be working at a much more sane place and have half the commute every day.  And maybe the other place would have had its own brand of crazy, but it’s one of those grass is always greener things.

And then right after I started, the sky fell economy-wise, and pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley got laid off, and there were absolutely no jobs available.  And my job was still paying, and still matching 401K, and still cutting bonus checks.  So I stuck with it, although I always hoped some magic startup would show up, looking for a doc wizard to head up their tech pubs department.

So a lot of things happened.  Nothing bad, I mean I wasn’t beaten and raped and left for dead in the desert.  But we weren’t changing the world or creating great things or helping society or anything like that.  And I was doing very little as far as technical writing.  And morale on my team went from bad to worse.  But the paychecks kept coming, and I paid off my land, and I paid off my car, and I bought a house, and I kept driving two or three hours a day and working on my TPS reports and hoping the dow would crack 10,000 again some day.

And it did.  And I got another job.  And I went through the ten thousand messages in my Outlook inbox, and hit the D key 10,000 times and realized that the last 18 months involved a lot of temporal bullshit and status reports on status reports reporting the status of reports that discussed what status reports we’d do next status report.  I spent most of the last two weeks deleting files and shredding paper like I was working for the Stasi in late 1989.  It’s not that I was working in a missile silo with tons of top secret blueprints; it’s just that even a doodle of a stick figure getting fucked by another stick figure drawn out of boredom in a meeting is still technically Eyes Only material at our R&D lab, and had to get cross-cut into dust.

My boss was on vacation for the first of my two weeks, and then had to miss 4 of the 5 days of the second week due to crazy scheduling and some family medical stuff.  And my boss’s boss, who used to be my boss and heads up the lab had a last-second appearance in Korea and was also gone when I had to leave.  There were a couple of lunches and goodbyes.  And I took some time to get some dental appointments squared away and get a stupid re-inspection by PG&E done on the condo (long story) and took my damn time getting to work and left at five and did a whole lot of nothing, since there wasn’t much for me to do.  At one time, I thought there was no way I could leave, I was so intertwined with so many projects, but when it came down to transitioning out, there was a lot of “well, they’ll figure it out, or they won’t.”

On my last day, the drive in was sunny and I actually made damn good time, listening to the Husker Du song “New Day Rising” a thousand times on repeat.  And then the sky turned grey and it started pouring rain.  And I walked through the halls of our R&D lab and realized I would miss the place in some strange way.  I mean, it was my first job in Silicon Valley, and I only worked there 18 months, but those were dog year months, lots of long hours, lots of late nights.  A year ago today, we had to work a 24-hour overnight shift to launch our first web site.  (And yeah, we didn’t need to be there, the same way the Egyptians could have built those pyramids a lot faster with a couple of bulldozers instead of ten million slaves.)  Our building was like this weird time capsule to late 70s/early 80s valley-chic, with this “high tech” look that resembled something you’d see on the old Apple campus circa the Apple II era, except it had never been updated.  And the rain and the gloom brought out the chipped paint and the moldy ceiling tiles and the stained carpets and the faded wood trim and made me realize I’d never work in a place that looked like this again.  I did my victory lap and said my goodbyes, handed in my laptop and gear, then went to HR to hand over my badge and get the last of my paperwork.  They asked me to sign some paper saying I wouldn’t tell anyone anything, but according to California law, you can’t be forced to sign one of those, and I didn’t.  (I won’t be spilling the beans about all of the intricacies of Windows Mobile 7, which was our biggest secret, but I don’t think anyone gives a shit.)

This place was a must-wear-badge-at-all-times place (they love their door locks), and it was strangely sad to hand over that piece of plastic that was forever tethered to my hip, with that digital snapshot of my face circa October 2008.  I guess part of it is that the picture, and in a greater sense the job, signified the end of the summer of 2008, and I’m now so nostalgic about that era: about living in Playa Del Rey; walking to Subway every day for lunch; the weight loss journey, the walks to the waterfront; the time spent bumming around Santa Monica; the days hacking away a living at home, looking at the palm trees and listening to the Rockies in their 08 freefall.  I miss Denver, and I miss LA, and when I took this job, it was one of those huge “I must set aside everything and turn and burn and get my shit straight and go whole-hog on this”.  And I did.  And now it’s done, and even if I hated many aspects of it, I’ll miss it.

But yeah, new job.  New people.  I will, as always, avoid mentioning this one here, to protect the innocent and keep that life-work barrier going strong.  But it looks good, and I’ll be getting back to my roots as a tech writer and doing some new cool stuff.  It’s still a drive, and it’s not sitting at home and listening to baseball games all day and chipping away at short stories, but it should be cool.

I got escorted out after the final exchange, and got to my car and the pouring rain not long after 2

, to face a horrible sea of taillights on the 880.  I stopped at the bank, I stopped at a gas station, and I dropped in a Nordstrom’s to get Sarah’s birthday present.  And by the time I got back to Oakland, the rain stopped, the sun came out, and it was all over.  So now it’s a sunny Saturday, and here’s to whatever the next big era will bring.

I went to a minor-league game last night, the Portland Beavers versus the Las Vegas 51s. Here’s my bulleted list synopsis.

• The 51s play at Cashman Field, a 9300-seat park built in 1983. It’s located in North Las Vegas, just a few minutes north of downtown.
• I thought the park was way north, so I ended up getting there way too early, and was probably the first person there.
• It’s a nice little park, very well-kept and modern looking, and resembles a college field in size and general feel.
• I got my ticket and waited at the gate, as a group of hyperactive t-ball kids quickly drove me insane.
• The 51s are a Dodgers farm team, the Beavers a Padres team. So wearing a Rockies jersey, and even more, a Torrealba jersey, was a big mistake on my part.
• Inside the park - there’s no upper deck, other than the radio booths. There’s also no seats other than those on the first and third base line. Past the outfield wall is nothing but desert. There are no bullpens; teams warm up pitchers in a widened area where a warning track would normally be. The whole thing gives an illusion that it’s a very small park, but the field is as big as a regular MLB field.
• My seat was about four rows up, directly behind the plate. They were $12. Also, they were real seats, and the ushers brought you to your seat.
• Wandering around, I stopped at this table pimping the new Mike Myers movie, and the woman working there talked to me about the Rockies. It turned out she lived there before, and I should have been able to tell, because she had that leathery tan that made me unable to age her at 20 or 40.
• The gift store was decent, although they had a lot of Dodgers stuff and not enough 51s stuff. I picked up a t-shirt after arguing whether it would be worth it or not to get a windbreaker or warm-up jacket. Also, the store was air conditioned.
• The heat - it was a high of 108, which is a temp so hot, that even when the wind picks up, it’s more like standing in front of a blowdryer. The seats under the press box had those water-misting coolers set up, but I did not sit under there. After a while, it slowly cooled off, or maybe I just got used to it. It went from unbearable to pretty bad over the course of the evening.
• There were only a couple of places for food, so I got two hotdogs.
• The game began, and I realized I did not know or care about either team, which changes things considerably.
• I was close enough to clearly hear the umpire’s calls, and hear the ball hit the glove on each pitch, which was cool.
• Kerwin Danley, the umpire we saw get hit in the throat with a pitch in a Rockies-Dodgers game I was at, was first-base umpire, on a rehab assignment.
• I can’t even remember the play-by-play much, since I didn’t know anyone. There were some spectacular errors - if you popped it back close to the wall, in a place that any MLB player would catch it, you’d most likely drop it for a base hit, because nobody could field well. Both pitchers were also pitching an incredible number of balls, although there was some speed there.
• One player - Chip Ambres - managed to hit a home run over the left wall in his first two at-bats. Then someone in our section started yelling “COME ON CHIP! LAY A BUNT DOWN! BE A TEAM PLAYER!” What was weird to me is that this wasn’t a giant stadium, and we were like 30 feet from him, so you know he heard everything people were yelling.
• Our row won tickets to the aforementioned Mike Myers tickets in a random drawing. Actually, the row in front of us won, but nobody was sitting there.
• The guy sitting next to me was an umpire for high school and junior college baseball. He knew a lot of the other umpires, and it was also interesting to hear his commentary on “that’s a tough one to call” sorts of things.
• The mascot came out, “Cosmo”, who looked like a large Jar-Jar Binks in a uniform. When he was in our section, he gave me shit about my Rockies shirt.
• In the 6th inning, a rally started when a pitcher walked something like ten people in a row, and then they started driving in the people on base. That ultimately meant 13 runs in the inning for Las Vegas, which entitled everyone to a free shrimp cocktail at some shithole casino downtown.
• The game went downhill from there. Things started so slow, and then got fast at the end. The big thing in AAA is that teams are so mismatched, and that means uneven games.
• They put me on the “jumbotron” because of my Rockies shirt. I put that in quotes because you can buy a bigger screen than their scoreboard at your local Best Buy.
• They sold about 2000 tickets, but I think 2/3 of those people left by the 6th. By the 9th, it was absolutely quiet between pitches. At the end of the game, maybe a couple hundred people remained.
• Final score: 14-8. Playing time was a bit shy of four hours.

OK, I need to find a swimming pool.