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anada "Comma Eight #
250 Comma One" +### +### +#### +###
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28 Infernal # .# ## # # .# # .# # .#
dec *### * # * *### * *### * *### *
2000 .+#################################################################.net
Dorks on Jolt, blistered thumbs throbbing from vice grip on the Wico
Command Controller, the Slik Stik, the Epyx 500XJ. An introduction to
the all-nighter, when seeing the sun rise through a dozy film of Dorito
dust and screen burn was a cause for celebration, not an inward groan
and the reluctant setting of two alarm clocks to get us back into the
commerce stream on time. Masters of high scores, keepers of arcane
passwords and forgotten dot-paths, two-word commands, and Zorkian
minutae. Fuck a week's paid vacation, gimme one weekend sleepover at
Dave's with a Commodore 64 in 1987.
I'm not sugar-coating it. I remember the zits, the mood swings, the
isolation and depression, the eggshell dance of the volatile parent and
the blind panic of an onrushing future. I fucking hated being a
teenager, and I still hate having to have slogged through that. What
was great about the all-nighters with the 64 was that it removed you
from your shit life, made you transparent in a world of dank, solid
adolescent misery. You knew you were a nerd, and you knew it was a fix
as temporary as a Pac-Man energizer. Perceptions were never clearer
than in those days before drinking binges, failed expectations and past
due rents. We knew we'd hit an air pocket, an oasis -- and we were
grateful.
Dad wouldn't let me get one, because it was a waste of time (to him),
and I couldn't afford one, because I never had any damn money. So it
was off to Dave's, fortified with an armload of Dairy Mart's finest
carbohydrates, to dick around, blow stuff up, solve the mysteries of the
universe. We took our first coltish, wobbly steps into the world of
BBS's and modeming, ruining a couple of long distance bills in the name
of exploration, marveling at the ability to post messages to people
clear around the whole world! We tried (and failed) to learn to make
games, and the dazzling showoff demos made by "pirate groups" -- elite
geniuses (so we thought) who'd crack the protection schemes on software
and zip it around the world, complete with a colorful intro boasting of
just who it was that brought you this new game for the cost of a blank
disk. (The fact that, by copying all our games, we were choking off the
very flow of software we enjoyed, didn't quite register with us, or
perhaps we just didn't let it.)
Now that the last traces of the exotic have been sucked out of
computers, and everyone's got one, it's hard to remember when they were
relatively unique, and when most people didn't use one on a daily
basis. I remember trying to explain the concept of email to people in
the late '80s and getting blank looks in return. A "chat room" used to
be a rare and thrilling thing -- we had exactly one BBS in our area code
sporting more than one incoming phone line, and we'd sit there all night
sometimes, watching "Headbanger's Ball" on MTV with one eye, and keeping
the other glued to the screen, on the off chance that someone would drop
in, some ghostly stranger from God knows where, another lonesome, homely
dweeb burping Pepsi and pizza, trying to make a connection.
People get so caught up in what they're told they want, even when
they're trying to get away from being told anything. Who's to tell me
that going to Disneyworld, or traveling to a spit of Americanized
tourist traps and theme bars in Cancun, is how I should take my respite
from the harrowing plight of being a grownup in America? Would it be
any less valid of me to simply lock the door, disconnect the phone, lay
in a week's supply of Mountain Dew, frozen pizzas and chip dip, fire up
my very own Commodore 64 (salvaged from the cruel melee of yard-sale-dom
and snatched from under the nose of a family who didn't realize the
treasure laid out on their card table), and say hello to the me of
1987? Escape is what, and where, you make it. I'm booking my next
flight out of here on a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, and if you knock on my
door that week, you'd damn well better have a pillow, a case of pop,
some Queensryche tapes, your contact-lens solution, and a 9-pin joystick
with you.
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anada250 by Infernal (c) 2000
###################################################################anada.net