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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Tue Jan 8 09:50:04 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: Part 50 of CAA #2
UH, FAIRS OF THE HEART?
(#50 in the second online CAA series)
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Milpitas, CA
May 6, 1989 (Maggie's birthday)
Copyright 1989, Steven K. Roberts. All rights reserved.
Somebody on the net recently asked me what my days are like. The popular
image, I'm sure, is of a bustling Winnebiko lab with scurrying white-coated
technicians fitting glittering surface-mount subassemblies onto a frame of
high-tech composites and tightly laced bundles of optical fiber and coax.
Surrounded by Sun workstations, I coordinate the efforts of teams worldwide,
each pouring thousands of man-hours into modules of plug-compatible perfection
while a software team readies the mega-code that will make it all work. The
rollout date is circled on the calendar and we're all feverish, for the eyes of
the world are upon us......
Heh. I languish amid the clutter of a household, my back sore from
schlepping, my gut swollen from gluttony, my butt blazing red from the Basking
Raw-buns syndrome after a day visiting a nudist camp. I whimper, taking in the
enormity of the tasks ahead. The Winnebiko II is a showpiece hauled to
speaking gigs; the Winnebiko III is a gleam in my tired eye, an abstract
vision. Sponsors ship unspeakably beautiful components, and they collect on
particle-board shelves and makeshift tables in my lab... each a reminder of a
trick unturned, a bit of magic undone. The TO-DO-DO document, 13 pages and
swelling, mocks me: I browse it, looking for a clearly defined task. I seldom
find one.
Morning, sunny, a perfect riding day in California. I stare out the
window and sigh, for the road torments me like a curtainless houseful of
playful young women next door to a lonely old man. They breeze about in bits
of silk, model new bikinis for each other, oil perfect flesh in noonday sun,
wake tousled and touch themselves, linger in the perfumed bath, fiercely love
their men with cries soft and kisses wet... while he watches, dying inside,
desperate moans catching in his throat, the ache as strong as ever but now an
agony of frustration. He's obsessed; he can't turn away from the window;
frozen dinners burn and telephone solicitors go unanswered when Beauty is
afoot. He's in love, in lust, in pain. He knows they're killing him with
every reminder of the perfection he touched so long ago, but he can't pull the
curtain and hide: the brain is hardwired for SEX, by God, and his eyes are
wide and staring.
The road is like that, damn her. For six years I have loved her, riding
on wave after wave of passion, every turn the kiss of a new friend, every town
a seduction, every campsite a tryst, every downhill an orgasm. The cassettes I
carried all have the flavor of "our song" -- I even stop what I'm doing when I
hear the old road music and gaze misty-eyed into the past, my memory an overlay
of a dozen scenes linked forever by one musical moment. And the THINGS! Packs,
tools, spare parts, toys, even that goddamn shampoo bottle from the Austin
hotel... all carry a patina of heartwrenching memory like the detritus of a
deeply-missed marriage.
So with all this clutter in my head, I surround myself with everything I
fled so long ago -- house, furniture, all the complex baggage of a life frought
with too many projects and dreams. I stand in the window and watch the road
wind sensuously up the mountain, loving other wheels, going on just fine
without me, and I'm suddenly that lonely old man, condemned to a life of
heartache.
!!NO!! I recoil, turning enraged from the window. No, no. Not yet, not
yet, you bitch, there's still some life in these old wheels. Desperate, I grab
the phone and call a potential sponsor, leap onto OrCAD and draw a schematic,
wipe clean a section of bench and shove a few parts together. But the energy
begins to fade... the project is too big. The monitor array can't be finished
because the I/O structure is not defined; that can't be done until the 68000 is
running; that won't happen until I build the simulator; that won't work without
the monitor array. Aggghhh, hell with it. Another circular problem.
Grumbling, I fire up Autocad and stare at it, but can't nail down the console
layout until I'm sure to have a CMOS VGA LCD driver that can live on the bus
and I'm still early in the CAD learning curve anyway... oh, to hell with that
too. I furtively play a game of computer solitaire, feebly scan the TO-DO-DO
list, then wander the house, avoiding the window, plopping at last on the bed
to stare at the ceiling and hope the phone will ring to jar me from ennui.
(The old man tried to get it up and failed; he now stares numbly at the TV with
one eye alert to those damn, damn windows next door.)
Maggie wanders in, checks the mirror, then joins me, eyes full of
concern. "Having a bad day, dear?" I try to explain that I am, as Dave Wright
pointed out, staggered by my own imagination. But I avoid the central issue
and concentrate on the critical-path problems, usually coming around to the
fundamental truth that I've bitten off too many projects for one undermotivated
tired guy with a bad back. Working on any one of them by definition means I'm
ignoring the others, so I do none of them, seeking instead the quick fix, the
easy lay, the Clearly Defined Task. She shakes her head, for this is an old
story. She snuggles atop me, long fragrant hair flowing into all my senses,
the softness a drug, the love a tonic. Time goes away; I murmur sweetness and
doze, problems forgotten until later, always later... but then the house fills
with housemates and it's dinner, talk, distraction, and a few more stabs at the
lab before the evening's drinks fuzz the brain and I give up on one more day.
And as the weeks pass, I watch the calendar, moans catching in my throat.
The atlas is a photograph album from an idealized past; I cling to it
foolishly and feel a bit embarrassed when Maggie catches me taking it into the
bathroom. "Trip planning," I mumble, but we both know the truth: I'm just
standing in the window with a sore heart, watching the road go on without me.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Unfamiliar sight, this screen. Or, more accurately, it's in an
unfamiliar mode: text. Normally I see outlines, online sessions, schematics,
database records... everything except that which supposedly drives this whole
affair. Text. Ah, I remember text...
The delicious transcendance of the well-turned phrase. The mysterious
re-creation of moments through an almost automatic sequence of keystrokes:
knives twisting, body parts throbbing, icons falling, concepts crystallizing,
snapshots of a life snatched from the hurricane and crumpled into a pocket...
Snapshots are the most appropriate medium during this layover, for the
continuum, while peppered with transient delights, is itself a numbing routine
of gigs and meetings, seduction packages and deadlines, project outlines and
piles of hardware. You don't want to hear about it, believe me: running a
high-tech nomad business is much like running any other business, even if the
company charter IS frought with crazy terminology like "weirdness quotient" and
"prowling the global neighborhood."
No, it's the snapshots you want right now... the liquid, sensual flow of
nonstop adventure will return when I flee this cluttered house and return to
the sweet routine of change. Until then, we live for the surprises...
* * *
"Uh-oh... I think they spotted you." Pink-miniskirted Maggie bent
prettily to peer through a crack in the bus curtains -- the ones hastily
installed in the dope-infested alley behind the office of a sleazy West Palm
Beach chiropractor so many adventures ago. She turned to me with a worried
look. "A bunch of them are headed this way."
I straightened from the bike's trailer hitch and looked across the
street. Sure enough, from the motley encampment on the San Francisco
courthouse lawn -- a wasteland of forgotten humanity -- came a few eager
homeless guys too young to be obsessed with 24-hour scrabbling for sustenance.
"Whoa!" cried a rag-clad dirty blond. "What IS this shit, man?" He
shuffled around my bike with a broad gap-toothed grin as others arrived to
examine me, the bike, Maggie, and the old school bus that, given the looseness
of interpretation and the contrasting character of others arriving for the same
computer show, clearly labeled us one of theirs. "You guys travelin', man?
What all these switches do?"
I started to offer a quick, interest-squelching reply, but another
denizen of San Francisco streets, young but badly burned out, was fingering my
cellular phone beam. His voice rasped slow and slurred from decades of serious
drugs and bad booze, and he kept flicking sullen eyes furtively up Maggie's
legs while mumbling... "I got me a radio, man, a fine radio, but I can't pick
up shit in this fuckin' city, man. What if I get me one o' these aerials and
hook it up, man? Wow... I bet that sucker REALLY pulls 'em in... I could plug
that black wire there right into my radio, man... think that'd pull waves in
through all these buildings?" He kept stroking the antenna and looking at
Maggie, craning his neck with mouth agape to peer into the mysterious magic bus
from somewhere Out There, dreaming of freedom and food and sex and money and
the myriad joys of gleaming technology symbolized by the Winnebiko.
"Well, it's not cut for the right frequency," I began, realizing the
futility of explanation. The first guy was still waiting for a reply, and I
turned to him: "Ah, the computers let me write while riding... I travel full
time."
His eyes brightened. So I was a street person too! "Right, on,
brother!" He extended a filthy hand, giving me a crazed grin and staring a bit
too hard with eyes bloodshot and exophthalmic. "You hangin' out here, man?"
"Uh no, I'm in town for the West Coast Computer Faire." I gestured
vaguely at Brooks Hall. "I've gotta get this thing inside."
Thus began an interlude of mad contrasts, exactly what we don't see very
often in our tame suburban layover. I maneuvered the bike through streets
crowded with tattered beggars and three-piece-suited conventioneers, beautiful
women and weathered colorful characters with whole books in their eyes -- down
a ramp in the earth past convention center personnel who hurried to accost me
only to stop short at the incongruous sight. "Now what the hell am I supposed
to do about THAT?" shouted one armed security guard as he reached for the
walkie talkie on his belt and ran a few steps after me.
"I'm an exhibit!" I shouted back, refusing to stop. I'd answer enough
questions in the next three days -- for now I just wanted to lock up the
machine and find the hotel. In moments I was rolling through rows of
exhibits-in-the-making, computers flickering to life on all sides, the GEnie
booth looming huge in the distance with a crown of flashing neon and a giant
Air Warrior screen ablaze with simulated flak.
"N4RVE, this is KA8ZYW. Did you make it?" The voice in my ear was a
puddle of thin static with a girl in the middle. Somewhere above, she was
waiting in the locked bus, the focus of unwelcome street attention.
"I'll be there in a few minutes... gotta find a place to park this
contraption." Sysops and GEnie-folk greeted me, and before long familiar names
were turning into faces in that classic online-culture blend of introduction
and reunion.
But the show itself ain't what it used to be: the bright-eyed tinkerers
who once gathered here to pass the pipe of technoid passions have, for the most
part, been swallowed by corporate culture. The wizardry-intensive
entrepreneurial firms are elsewhere, and the show, though a success in purely
numerical terms, was more a small-town COMDEX clone than a gathering of
wizards. GEnie's booth was the largest of all, packed for three days by
visitors eager to sip freely from online terminals and ask the standard suite
of bike questions (the most remarkable of which was: "What are the handbrakes
way back here for? So if the guy in the back don't like what the guy up
front's doin'?")
But what gave the visit true color, for us trade-show-jaded nomads, was
the close-up and frightening look at this city. San Francisco has always been
a mecca of street culture -- an intense tangle of human genotypes covering the
full range of every spectrum from the moral to the monetary. We would
transition with an abrupt shock from hotel to street, staggering a bit through
the revolving door as opulence gave way to squalor, as the sparkling spacious
gracious guts of the Regency Hyatt were replaced by dirt, honks, extended
palms, and a coarse melange of street language. From luxury to paranoia in an
instant.
Of course, any big-city hotel gives that feeling: you can step out onto
the 42nd RushMarket maelstrom from some of the ritziest places in the world.
San Francisco is laced with beauty and tragedy unlike any other... from the
dazzling romantic skyline, sparkling in our sunset view from the 18th floor
corner suite, to the quick- stepping unease of rough street life where you grip
your 2-meter handheld transceiver like a weapon, hoping they hear the crackle
and think you're a cop...
But partying and exhibiting with GEnie was, as always, a pleasure, with
Grand Marnier souffle relaxing the mind after days of booth frenzy (where one
fellow extended $10 for a book only to pull it back and ask, "is General
Electric going to get any of this? I'm boycotting them for their involvement
in nuclear power...") The street people had no such compunctions as, much to
management's dismay, they found the discarded plastic GE literature bags to be
a stylish personal accessory...
* * *
Every show is different. WCCF, though lean by the old standards, still
presented us with a population that's reasonably literate and conscious of
computers -- people there were generally intelligent and there were many whose
demeanor bespoke true brilliance. But J. R. "Bob" Dobbs of the Church of the
SubGenius once observed: "You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by
definition, half of them are even dumber than THAT."
Corroboration of this is easy. Just exhibit a complex and exciting
machine at a show that attracts the general public, outside the mainstream of
technoid metropolis.
I'm writing from a chair in the Pleasanton sun. A woman has just
stopped, taken in the trailer behind my bike, and cried, "Oh, you have PUPPIES!
I LOVE puppies!"
Another crossed this concrete patch with an unhappy kid straggling behind
her, amusing himself by balancing on a fat electrical cable feeding the stage
area. "Get off that!" she screamed. "You wanna get electrocuted?"
This is a weekend like the old days, in a sanitized sort of way: the
general public owns my time, and thinks nothing of interrupting earnest
keytapping to mouth the standard suite of level-one questions. It can be
irritating, but I suppose I shouldn't complain: every now and then they fish in
their wallets to find a ten-spot for a copy of my book. Hell, that's why I'm
here at a fair instead of down in the valley trying to work.
Yep, it's a weekend of noise, here in Pleasanton, California. There's a
home/garden/outdoor/random-junk show going on, and I've abandoned the complex
struggles of Winnebiko III work to trade precious time for precious money. My
heart's in the lab; my brain's in this chapter; my body and bike are on display
before the general public.
And that's part of the trade-off -- the part I keep forgetting when I lay
plans for future wandering. The adventure, the technology, the change, the new
friends, the physical delights of cycling, the complexities of life in
Dataspace... those are all deep pleasures that make every sun-drenched day as
much a source of chest-tightening <pangs> as a glimpse of sweet beach flesh or
an eye-shocking Webster in a sea of 3-piece suits. The traveling urge is
potent. Yet with every weekend foray from our suburban hideout into the PUBLIC
EYE, I am reminded of the frustration that comes from trying to communicate
across an infinite gulf. As the system grows ever more complex, the task of
explaining it to the curious gets seriously overwhelming... especially when
some bozo points at the machined Lemo waterproof connector on my helmet and
asks, "now what the heck ya doin' with a dental drill up on your hat here?"
Yes, even in California. No part of America, I'm sorry to say, has the
monopoly...
But there's more to life these days than the occasional weekend ordeal.
We're in the thick of it now: we're suburbanites. You ever wonder what nomads
do for vacation? Rent houses in the 'burbs, have friends over for barbecue,
dream of the road, and try not to go mad, that's what.
Actually, it's not quite as normal as it sounds. Our household in the
southeastern fringe of the Valley is a strange place, with noises, accessories,
and usage patterns that set us apart from our commuting neighbors. At 2 A.M.,
you might find the Winnebiko parked in the middle of the street, a 10-foot
satellite antenna array clamped to the trailer and aimed skyward at OSCAR-13,
with an erstwhile nomad nearby hunkered over a pile of communications gear
destined for bike installation. "You're on a bicycle?" comes the incredulous
Tasmanian voice through the static, via a 44,000-mile round trip path. "Only
in America..."
Inside, the house is amalgam of R&D laboratory, bike shop, playground,
art studio, and party place. What once might have been a living room is now a
lab, buried under layers of technoclutter and astrewn with computers. There's
a robust H-P CAD system, four DOS laptops, two FORTH development systems, and
more random micro-based circuit boards than I can count. The space is already
proving to be inadequate, and we're looking elsewhere in Silicon Valley for a
laboratory sponsor.
The "family room," shared by the five of us, is the place for video,
audio, music synthesizers, books, and miscellaneous toys. The fireplace is
surrounded by an eccentric array of decorations: a battered sousaphone, an
antique child's bicycle, a Bausch & Lomb stereo microscope, a bonsai tree made
of machined laboratory hardware, a bright red fireplug, and an aluminum foil
sculpture.
Elsewhere, the house varies in style. There's Chip's studio, a busy
place hung with dragons and fantasy; Dave's garage shop, filled with smelly
fiberglass projects and high-speed human-powered vehicles; our bedroom, half
office and half bike storage; and a few other places to sleep or hide. There
are the requisite cats, of course, odd artworks, and a little blue
light-activated siren that migrates from hiding place to hiding place as the
denizens of this strange retreat come up with new pranks to pull on the unwary.
It helps sometimes to think of this as just another part of the lifestyle
sampler.
* * *
Of course, there's no reason why a long layover has to rob life of
adventure; there's always enough going on to keep things on the edge of
madness. Take the last night of our Pleasanton excursion, for example...
"You guys want to run into town for dinner?" This from one of our fellow
exhibitors at the Alameda County Fairgrounds -- an ebullient Spanish gambler
with fast boats for sale and a Vegas trip to raffle off. Por que no? We piled
into his car and motored off into the night, only to be pulled over by a local
cop after breezing through a stop sign. Oops.
Bathed in the police spotlight and intermittently illuminated by flashing
blue, I waited in the front seat, squinting bemused through the passenger-side
mirror at the encounter behind us. I caught words of denial, words of outrage,
words of mollification -- then the cop appeared at my window with the
flashlight. "What's your buddy's name?"
I searched my memory, remembered a business card, told him.
He walked away, and in a flash our friend was up against the car,
handcuffed, and frisked. The cop reappeared at my window. "I don't like being
lied to. He has some warrants out and told me he was his brother, but he
couldn't seem to get the birthdate right, so I'm arresting him. He says you
can take his car and go on to dinner."
And so there we sat by the side of the road in a strange town, watching
the cop roll into the night and wondering whether to risk driving the
unregistered New Mexico car. Easy decision: back we went to the familiar tan
bus, which, oddly, still seems to feel more like home than the Milpitian villa.
* * *
It goes on. We did a filming last month for Japan's NHK television
(something like our PBS) -- two days of simulating road life for a crew of four
-- only one of whom spoke English.
"Now you must camp," said Atsuko with a smile. "And Maggie, you make the
tea." We had struggled the bikes to a hillock near the Calaveras reservoir,
and spread the tent fabric in wet grass to keep our bodies dry.
Maggie dutifully fired up the campstove while I browsed the atlas and
idly tapped on the laptop. The camera recorded every moment of our simulated
reverie, and when the tea was ready it smoothly followed the cup from her hand
to mine. Ignoring the lens, I sipped quietly, waiting for my moment.
As soon as the cameraman panned to Maggie, I pulled the string out of its
staple on the teabag, hid the bag itself under the edge of the tent, and poked
the string in my mouth with the tag hanging in my beard. I munched contentedly
as the camera panned back again to me, then slowly extracted the string and
mimed a healthy swallow. "Ahh, tea..." Japanese viewers will be scandalized
by bizarre American tastes, but if they elect to attempt the practice I do hope
they use teabags without staples.
* * *
Enough. I've delayed this update too long to have a hope of catching up
-- the Silicon Valley electronic surplus culture surrounding Halted, the
radiation detector, the ferret, the midnight feeding frenzies, the mountain
bike forays for soft adventure, the idyllic nudist park, the countless crazy
details of life here. The important stuff will emerge eventually as these
asynchronous reports continue -- and yes, despite the sense of despair that
opened this story, work IS progressing. It's going slowly, to be sure, but the
Winnie will roll again... hopefully with me perched happily upon it, all
brain-interface channels active.
In the meantime... cheers from the nomadhouse!
Steve