Really, all I want is to live someplace nice, to be able to work at a job I don’t hate and can leave at the office when I go home, and to have Beautiful Girlfriend (in theory, by that time, Beautiful Wife) with me. That’s really it. Anything else is lily-gilding. This date used to carry a great deal of significance for me. Now? I can’t even remember what it felt like to be that person thirteen years ago. Funny old world, innit?
Author: Ridley
8 September, 2013
Lord I’m boring when I’m not feeling well. I can’t taste anything, I don’t have any energy, and I can’t think about more than one thing at a time (and that’s the best case scenario). It’s gray outside, the cashflow isn’t great, and I’m already dreading work. Great way to spend a weekend, huh? I need a vacation. It’s been…I don’t know how long. I went to Florida with Beautiful Girlfriend last year, and we did a quick trip to the beach. Neither of those were particularly relaxing. I guess, for the most part, vacations aren’t. I’m doing a quick inventory of all vacations going back to childhood and the moment they get stuck with expectations, it’s over. I need to sit down with a Calvin and Hobbes anthology for a few hours.
7 September, 2013
My beautiful girlfriend queued up “Bored To Death” for us to watch tonight. This is going to sound snarky, but I really don’t mean it that way: There ought to be a genre of comedy shows that you enjoy even though they never make you laugh. I enjoy “Bored To Death;” I even find it amusing. I just almost never actually laugh. I do enjoy the fact that Zach Galifanakis’ character is a comic artist and the work he draws is actually quite good. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I found that his art is actually drawn by Dean Haspiel. That’s all kinds of cool. The show has a strange rhythm, but I definitely recommend it.
In media res
I’m not a big believer in “signs.” I don’t think that, if on a first date, you see two doves together, it’s sign that you two are “meant to be.” I don’t think that, if you’re thinking of cheating on your significant other, that it’s a sign that you two shouldn’t be together. Doves are just doves and cheating is just cheating; anything else is just trying to impose meaning on something that is ultimately meaningless. That said, when you spend your entire day at work composing your own eulogy, well, that can’t be good, can it? I’ve been working for thirty-one years now, which is roughly sixty-five percent of my life. I do “restaurant information technology” and have for roughly as long as “restaurant information technology” has existed. I never really chose this field. I majored in philosophy for the brief period I was in college and waited tables when I wasn’t in school. The money was pretty good but it dawned on me that the money would literally never get better. So, I decided to figure out the computer in the office. It was an old IBM 286 with a four color monitor. It ran DOS 3.3 and featured a custom word processor and spreadsheet because Lotus and WordPerfect were too expensive. Please understand that it was a very different time. Thus, the extent of my plan was: “Hey, this seems to be a way to get out of waiting tables that doesn’t require a degree!” Obviously, a degree would have helped, but good fortune makes a fine substitute for matriculation. This was the dawn of the personal computer era, so knowing how to navigate a command line was a relatively rare skill. “I’m not good with computers” was still a good excuse for not using one. Plus, this was an era in which men, by and large, did not know how to type. It sounds strange now, but back then, typing was woman’s work. Because of this, I had a leg up. My handwriting had always been poor, even in grade school. Because of this, they put me in a special education class to teach me typing. So, when computers first started popping up in the workplace, I was several laps ahead of most of the gents I was competing with. Needless to say, many of my early computer-based jobs involved more women than men. My career arc went something like this: Waiter–>Waiter-who-does-office-paperwork–>Help Desk for Restaurant Company–>Developer for Restaurant Company–>All Kinds of Restaurant IT Stuff. If, in retrospect, it seems like more a matter of inertia than planning, that’s a pretty apt take on it. I just kept moving where the opportunities were rather than seeking anything in particular. I learned a lot about what I didn’t want. I have never had any interest in management and my brief experiences in that role were painful. Firing people is the worst. Anyone who enjoys it probably ought to seek help. Back at work today, it’s all kinds of strange. It’s the first day back after a three day weekend, so the rhythm is already syncopated. Add to that the fact that the song stuck in my head is an old Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd tune and it’s a wonder I can concentrate at all. Oh, and there are going to be layoffs today. I guess that fact that I’ve been told means that I’m safe, but you’re never really safe. I learned that twelve years and one month ago. I do know, however, that the person sitting next to me is on The List. It’s so hard not to say anything, to give them some warning or advice (file your FMLA paperwork now!). I hate this. I hate business. I hate that I’ve become a business person. My mother has lived in the central part of the U.S. for most of her life, but she did a brief stint in the San Francisco area. When a thunder storm rolled in to town, her co-workers were terrified. Apparently, thunderstorms are uncommon on the west coast, but my mother didn’t flinch, as she was well accustomed to the sound of thunder. The layoffs were kind of like that. This is the seventh round of layoffs I’ve experienced, but for most of my coworkers, it was their first. You can see the fear in their eyes today, like something has fundamentally shifted in their worlds. It’s kind of depressing to think that I’m so used to layoffs that my only reaction is “well, at least it wasn’t me this time.” On an unrelated note, a friend and I were just talking about one of our high school teachers. She was, without question, my favorite teacher in high school. Unfortunately, all I can remember is how awful I was to her. I was disrespectful to a degree that the memory of it causes me to shudder to this day. And this day is a very long distance in time away from those memories. I wish I could say that I was a good, model student, or even one of those cool, rebellious types who just needed the right teacher to engage them. I wish I could, but I can’t. I was simply a jerk to her. Usually, time erodes the rough edges away from memories, but I think, in order for that to happen, you have to spend some time with the bad bits. This is the first time I’ve thought of this teacher in a long time, so while the memories aren’t fresh, they haven’t been processed so they’re still sharp and embarrassing. That’s how it feels to me. I wonder if other people process memories the same way. I’m not a big believer in “signs.” I don’t think that, if on a first date, you see two doves together, it’s sign that you two are “meant to be.” I don’t think that, if you’re thinking of cheating on your significant other, that it’s a sign that you two shouldn’t be together. Doves are just doves and cheating is just cheating; anything else is just trying to impose meaning on something that is ultimately meaningless. That said, when you spend your entire day at work composing your own eulogy, well, that can’t be good, can it?I’ve been working for thirty-one years now, which is roughly sixty-five…
Back to the front
I’ve tried to make this a place for working on stories and, to date, I haven’t been enormously consistent with it. I’ve held this space for years, but I haven’t done a lot with it. I’m in the midst of re-thinking the whole “what-goes-where” business of online writing and I’m not certain where this fits. It does fit, though. More to follow soon.
SOPA
Back tomorrow.
Crazy Little Thing
You want me to tell you what I know about love? Everything? In fifteen minutes? Well, grab a seat, then, and let’s get started. Early on, when I was just barely old enough to dress myself but not old enough to understand how badly I was doing it, “love” was just a word you mouthed to someone in response to their saying it to me. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” Ok, maybe that part hasn’t changed all that much, but back then I had no clue what concept I was belittling by ritualistically repeating the sounds. “Love” was a girl thing. My sister wanted to name her tabby kitten “Heart” or “Love.” She eventually named him “Tiger Lily” and he chased off my white tom. Go figure. I guess love must be most easily described by its absence because I can’t remember a whole lot of things that I make me think of “love” from when I was a kid, but I also don’t recall any lack of it. Does that make any sense? We lived in the same house from when I was four until I graduated high school. My folks and my sister were there for me, and no one really yelled at each other, at least not within my limited range of hearing. I had some friends whose parents split up and that seemed weird to me, but not scary, since I knew my parents had the perfect marriage and would be together forever. You can probably guess how that will end. But at the time? My parents both took an interest in my interests and I never had to beg them to spend time with me and I never questioned how they felt about me. That was love. I wouldn’t have called it that at the time, but sure, that’s what it was. Of course, my parents did split up when I was in high school and I thought I was too grown up for it to affect me. I was all kinds of wrong, of course. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t love me anymore, but they certainly had other things to deal with. My father moved out and my mother went back to work. Hey, it was a different time, you know? Anyway, my schoolwork went down the tubes and I kind of lost focus on what I was going to do with myself. On the other hand, my parents’ divorce brought me and my sister together in a way that might not have happened otherwise. It was the two of us against the world, or, at least the two of us against our parents. Instead of trying to get each other in trouble, we covered for each other. My sister’s love has been a lifesaver for me and I don’t care who knows it. About this time I started trying my hand at romantic love. What a mess. First of all, even the least-macho teenage boy is a mess of hormones. We genuinely believe that our intense desire to wrestle with that girl in the back of her ’72 Impala is “true love.” No lie. We believe it. I know I did. If you believe it with all your heart, is it love? Hell if I know, but it’s a good question. I sure thought it was at the time. Eventually, I formed an idea of love that put romance up on a pedestal. I would succeed where my parents had failed. I would find The Right Girl, romance the daylights out of her, get married, and stay together for the rest of our lives. That was my purpose in life. That was my goal. You have guessed that making another person the purpose of my life isn’t a wise thing to do and isn’t particularly fair to that person. Good catch. Wish you’d been there when I needed to hear it. Not that I would have listened, but still. Here’s how I thought love worked. There was a girl I worked with back then. Beautiful girl, smart as hell. Her mom was a professor at a university. She was nice to me, and I was kind of shy, so any girl is nice to me, I think she likes me, right? We talk a lot, I make a point of trying to hang out where she’s hanging out. I don’t ever actually ask her out, of course. No, she’s got a thing for one of the cooks. But still, I figure, if I’m nice to her, and we spend a lot of time together, she’ll start to have the same feelings I’m having. She moves overseas for a while. We write letters, back and forth, back before there’s an internet, a couple of times a week. I’m smitten. This is how it’s supposed to work, right? Courtship and all. We send care packages back and forth. Only, you know, I’ve never asked her out, or even talked about my feelings. At the time, I just thought I was being patient. Now I know better. I was afraid that, if I said anything, she’d say she didn’t feel the same way and I’d lose this marvelous romance I’d constructed. Dumb, sure, but that was me as a kid, you know? Anyway, she met a guy over there. They got married. I think she’d already met him when she came back home and I visited and finally mumbled something about how I felt about her. She didn’t have the same feelings. Go figure. Anyway, I figure I loved her. Maybe I just loved the romance and the idea I had of what we would be like together. It’s tough to tell the two apart. This was pretty typical of me through my mid-thirties. My friends were always there for me. They wouldn’t tell me how dumb I was being until the bubble had burst and we had a few beers in us. But they were there. That’s love, isn’t it? And my sister. Always there. In bad times, we’d go outside and just walk and talk for hours on end. I couldn’t tell you how many times she talked me back from a ledge of some sort. So then I met my wife. We hit it off real well and we had the same immediate goals. We…
Un jeu de fous
It isn’t every day you wake up to find Jules Verne hiding in your closet. Its one thing to run into the Father of Science fiction at, say, a wine bar or maybe Starbucks, but finding yourself face to bearded face with him when you pull the little string on the closet light bulb? Believe me, it’s jarring. Verne looked at me desperately but with no apparent surprise and raised a single finger to his lips and, just in case I hadn’t guessed his intent, whispered “shush.”I stepped back and looked around my bedroom. I couldn’t see any obvious threats, so I looked back at Verne questioningly. “S’il vous plaît restez silencieux. Wells est à la recherche pour moi!” I was too tired to react. Not to mention, I don’t speak a word of French. Verne tried it again in thickly-accented English, hissing the words below his breath. “It is Wells. He is a difficult man from whom to hide.” “Wells? H.G. Wells? Ha. Well, good luck with that. You missed him by almost 100 years.”Verne looked at me with disgust. “Idiot! Wells has his machine! How do you think I got here?”My coffee-deprived brain couldn’t think of an answer, so instead, I just asked, “Ok…then, if you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing in my closest? Why are you hiding from him?” Verne’s lowered his tone. “Wells and I, we have a rivalry. We are uncommon minds, do you see? We dream of what may be, and both take a strand of thread that is the science of our day and weave it into rich tapestries of what the future may bring! That we should come into conflict was inevitable.” He paused, grinned, and looked at his watch. “Also, I found him in three days, six hours, twenty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds. I cannot let him find me in less!”As I stood in front of him, trying to process this, he hunched down behind my winter coats, and closed the closet door. Through the door, I heard him mumble one last thing. “Aussi, mon ami, un bon hôte doivent porter un pyjama dans son lit.” Cartoon from Kate Beaton who you should check out right this very moment.
Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Hands wrapped around an imaginary cup of tea, the ghost waited patiently in the green vinyl booth seat while I set down and arranged my gear. If my laptop and smartphone were unfamiliar to him, he made no indication of it and instead stared directly to the front with a slight, nervous smile on his lips. “Even though I lost my faith at a young age, I always believed in an afterlife,” he said, quietly, shifting soundlessly in his seat. “I’ve never felt less joy about being right.” I tried to lighten things up. “Well, if you’d been wrong, we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation, right?” “Yes, well, there is that, I suppose.” He paused. “Anyway, I’m sure you didn’t seek me out to discuss my theories on the persistence of post-mortem intelligence.” “No, no, you’re right, you’re right. Heh. As it turns out, you’ve been right about a lot of things, Alan.” His smiled a little more distinctly, looking down to where his cup would be as he said softly “So I’ve noticed. I can’t properly touch anything, but I’ve seen a great deal in the last few days. You people have worked wonders with making things small,” he said as I followed his eyes towards my iPhone. “Ah, yes. Yes, I suppose this must look like magic to you.” “I supposed it must do. I suppose it couldn’t conceivably be a calculation engine, miniaturized to a great degree, as well as a wireless telecommunications device, speakers, microphones, et cetera. Storage of some sort, probably magnetic since the mechanical devices we had wouldn’t scale to that size. Oh, and a very small television screen that can’t possibly be using cathode tubes but it’s a television nonetheless. Clearly magic.” “Ah…yes, well…” I scowled. This was, after all, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. You forget that sometimes when you’re talking to a man you can see clean through. The man I could see clean through gave no indication if he was amused by throwing me off my game or disappointed that I’d underestimated him so badly. He just stared distantly out the window. Duly chastened, I started again. “Well, let me get to the point then. What brings you to the U.S.? I’ve been asking around your, um, community, and none of them have any idea.” “Community, you say? Do you mean “mathematicians” or “dead men?” Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Let me start by saying that I’m as much in the dark with respect to what brings me from place to place as you are. I have some theories, but my opportunities to test them with the proper rigor are, shall we say, limited by my condition.” “That said, there does seem to be some degree of guidance in my manifestations. More often than not, I find myself in times and places that possess some connection to me or my work. For example, I was on hand when a program of logical operations took part in a televised quiz show on your west coast.” “You mean a computer?” He waved his hand dismissively. “No, no, the computer is just the machine, the chassis in which the operations are performed. It’s the brain, perhaps, but not the mind. Anyway, I suspect I will be back in England next year. I understand there’s to be a centenary celebration of my birth.” “Oh yes! They’re calling it ‘The Alan Turing Year.’ A celebration of your contributions to computing, biology, genetics, cryptography, artificial intelligence, if I understand it correctly.” “Hmm…these things, cryptography, artificial intelligence, genetics, these are things people are interested in? My contributions are well known?” His tone suggested that, despite hoping he was wrong, he knew the answer already. “Well, no. Not widely. But the people that do care about these things are genuinely excited by the event. You were ahead of your time, you know.” “I’m afraid I don’t know. I was very much of my time. It was my time, after all, that let me study with Wittgenstein. It was my time that made Einstein’s work available to me.” “Now he was ahead of his time.” “Rubbish. He was just following up on Gauss’ work. Don’t try to romanticize it. There was nothing romantic or magical about it. I happened to exist at nexus of ideas that allowed me to piece together things that were, for the first time, possible to stitch together. If not me, then someone else.” He paused, gathering his thoughts, his intense eyes still distant. “It was my time, too, that made my life one of scandal and ridicule. I was, you know, forced to take chemicals that would cure me of my so-called ‘deviancy. Ironic that England would make a show of celebrating my life. They couldn’t wait to sweep me under the rug when I was alive and I think they were relieved when I ended their embarrassment by my own hand.” I wanted very much to ask him about the apple, but ghosts are, by nature, fleeting creatures, and not prone to overlong conversations. He seemed to be on a roll and I didn’t want to interrupt. “The madness of it still bothers me. More than that, it angers me. Sixty-some years on, and I’m still angry. Not so much for me, but for our entire species. Are we so petty, so threatened by differences, that we feel we must destroy a man who, and I won’t stoop to false humility, a man who contributed to extending the reach of mankind’s knowledge as much as I did? Where is the sense in that? How can rational beings act in such a pig-headed fashion?” His shoulders slumped slightly, only slightly and for the briefest of time, before he gathered himself again. “Still, I think I know what it is that has brought me here, now. Do you see those two gentlemen across the street? The ones looking into the shop window?” “Sure. The tall guy with the bald spot and little blond fellow with the white pants.” “Exactly. I’ve been watching them for some time. Their hands are clasped in a way that leaves no doubts. And that is, if I am not incorrect, a jewelry store they’re looking into. They are looking at rings, are they not?” “Could be. Kind of hard to tell from here.” “They…
Fade Away, Radiate
…and then I was in her laundry room, desperately looking for a way to get out. I tensed up with dread, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why. The washing machine was at least three feet deep, but there was liquid at the bottom of it and this told me that climbing into the machine would not get me out of this room. Panic. The door opened. I knew these people even though I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew them, you see? That was the important part. They never turned to face me, even though we were now in their living room, filled with smoke and dark woods and I think it smelled of whisky. They told me my parents would be mortified to see me like this and I had to agree even though I had no idea what “like this” meant. Why were the collars of their shirts so high? I was going to have to choose and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wanted both but had to chose only one and they were both women who would make good brides but I could have only one and I would probably never see the other again and neither of them ever did anything bad to me but by choosing one I was rejecting the other wasn’t I and she didn’t deserve it she had done nothing wrong so much shame. Then I looked down and saw the cats in the shelter and suddenly…