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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 7 18:46:54 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-43
GAMBLING, GADGETS, AND GOD
#43 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Louisville, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Columbus, Dayton, Atlanta, etc.
May 19, 1988
copyright 1988, Steven K. Roberts
IN THE AIR, WESTBOUND:
An unreal sense of detachment strikes me now, after a half-decade of
visceral struggle against wind, gravity, motivation, and (most recently)
bus-mechanics. It's confusing, oddly serene: the sweat on my forehead is an
abstract brew of managerial stress and poor ventilation, not the healthy
coolant of a bio-engine at cruising speed. The air, touched with pre-ban
cigarette stench, whistles down at me through a nozzle. I need nitrous... or
perhaps a martini. Flying is at once a celebration of technology and a descent
into madness.
What else? Cars, like a queue of orderly comets, follow their own
incandescent tails. Dallas, jewel-like, is incomprehensibly lovely despite the
frenzy of its reality. An old man beside me mutters about airline food,
psychiatry, dog-eat-dog, attorneys, and San Diego. I pass, data-like, through
a giant multiplexer- demultiplexer, otherwise known as DFW. Odd commentary
crackles through the PA system: "Please don't leave carrion baggage in the
aisles... please remain seated while we prepare for a rival."
Much has changed since the advent of the mother ship. The business
structure -- the very notion of a "universe interface" under remote
network/laptop control -- has given way to a communications- concentrator near
Louisville (CAABASE online, Ric Manning in person) and a busload of business
trappings. And the Wondrous Winnebiko -- once the very infrastructure of my
dreams -- is now the showpiece of our act... trucked from show to show, ramped
out the rusty old emergency exit at the whim of reporters, wheeled a few miles
a week (if that) through crowds, before cameras, and across floodlit stages. A
sellout? Moi?
Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually... the nomadic life exhausts,
torments, teases with delights just out of reach and comforts unrealized. Yet
always I default to a life of change, dreading commitments to place, person,
style, culture, career. I have wandered, inhaled the vapors of beginnings, and
frolicked in a world of technology and magic, sweat and ecstasy -- knowing that
always, somewhere ahead, has been THE BOOK, a seeming fantasy when viewed from
the dimly understood trenches of the publishing wars.
Well, now it's real. Suddenly, "Computing Across America" is not just an
adventure -- it's a job. It takes many forms: Marketing. Hustling for PR (and
PR agents). Restructuring a business flawed by skewed expectations.
Consulting. Flirting with joint-venture opportunities. Flying to Vegas to
share a trade show with a client -- only to fly back in day, write two
articles, dash to the Dayton Hamfest for a speech and a display, drive to
Louisville to address a computer club, share a booth at Spring COMDEX in
Atlanta... well, you get the idea. It's been crazy like this since my last
update, with a whole new kind of overload the norm and the cycling life a sort
of gauzy Harlequin memory of new romances and sunsets.
In a sense, especially compared to the American Dream, this bus life
(complete with bus-cat Venus Biscuit Snow) is still a wild life of
nomadness.... of strange excesses and uncertain futures. Yet it now has the
tame flavor of stability -- a regimented diet of freeway foods after years of
eccentric back-roads cuisine. This is as close to settling down as I can get
without recoiling in panic and hitting the road all over again. But I feel on
the edge nevertheless... the bike looks more and more inviting... and change is
in the air.
* * *
Culture shock. I wake, too early, stretch and reach for the phone in my
14th-floor Las Vegas suite, larger than many houses. Maggie's 2,500 miles away,
on an Ohio farm. Stumbling to the window, I gaze over a city already teeming
at 6:30 -- and beyond it, snow- dusted peaks ablaze in morning sun. The
mountains... I stare at them in shock, recalling in a sudden rush the violent
speed, the granny grades, the kind of experiences that led me to comment in the
book: "This is bicycle touring at its best. Sweat your ass off for hours in
rugged alpine beauty, then give it all back in one glorious, insane orgasm of
speed and ecstasy." There's a tear in my eye.
But not today. Today I'm in a renegade variant of yuppie-garb, not a
sweat-soaked T-shirt. I WUSSSEL, lift downstairs, and blink bedazzled through
a gaudy forest of slot machines toward the coffee shop. I stop, obbligato, and
discard my pocket change; I pause to marvel at the hopefuls already encamped
with bins of clinking quarters while most of the world commutes.
I move on. The trade show that drew me here is the annual Expo of the
land mobile radio industry, including everything from pocket cellular phones to
radio tower flashers. Footpounding, arms leaden with literature, I trudge the
exhibits, probing for clues to the components of a client's future product.
Where's my bike? I fight to keep it out of conversation as I interview
manufacturers about radio interfacing and battery characteristics.
Vegas night. The colors on all levels are dazzling, from a cream-blazing
sky of backlit thunderheads and complex reflections to the frenetic madness of
the casinos. My companions and I find our way to Caesar's Palace, buy rolls of
quarters, and begin the statistically inevitable slide to zero, punctuated by
moments of anomalous fortune recognized as peaks only in depressed retrospect.
Expensive dinner. The heart-pounding sight of an elevator-borne miniskirt.
Opulence to the point of absurdity. The humbling presence of hundred-dollar
slot machines, roped-off from us penny-ante riffraff. Smoky tables of green
felt, hundreds of them, fortunes riding on roulette wheels, cards, and the
random fall of dice. A vast room of sports video screens and
computer-generated displays where you can bet your net worth (and then some) on
anything from tennis to dog races. And strangest of all, the serious faces of
those who aren't, like us, just dropping in for a night of weirdness: a man,
unsmiling, raking in $800 in chips only to slide them back onto the table a
moment later; another, unperturbed, losing $300 at a turn of a card only to
light another cigarette and hand over his credit card for more chances. At the
slots, the SERIOUS players show no emotion at a triple-bar -- they just pause
while coins cascade noisily into a stainless-steel bin, ignore the stares of
the tourists, and resume their rhythm in the hope that tonight will be the
night of the million-dollar jackpot.
Three A.M. Street life has thinned, but in the casinos the din continues.
I walk into a smut store -- all garbage, quarter admission, a seedy employee
swabbing down the movie booths with antiseptic. I gag, turn down a side
street, and sense the change in clientele by the ratio of nickel, quarter, and
dollar slots. My $16 investment in Lady Luck, at one point hitting over $40,
is now down to a single quarter. I save it for a phone call and trudge to the
hotel.
From my 14th-floor window, the desert night seems poignant -- silent and
vast above the stragglers stumbling home in numb drunken regret, the megawatts
of animated signage, the 24-hour "adult" book store inviting the sleazy from
the shadows. Heavy-lidded, I stare out the window till 5 -- staying up far too
late for a jet-lagged 35-year- old with a 7 A.M. flight...
* * *
...which they oversold. I sit jammed in the American Airlines waiting
lounge and watch the ticket agent grow more and more stressed by the reactions
of would-be passengers (you know the scene: grumbles, moans, pleas, rolled
eyes, threats, righteous indignation, confusion, curses, protestations about
stupid goddam airline policies, and the slumped shoulders of total defeat). I
have a confirmed seat, but catch her eye. "Hey, I'm on a flexible schedule
today. Need a volunteer?"
"Oh yes, yes!" she cries -- and within a half hour I find myself with a
first-class ticket to Ohio as well as a $300 "travel voucher" good for any
American flight in the next year. Feeling lucky and tired at the same time, I
take my leftover quarter over to a slot machine and receive 24 in return. Ah.
I wander to the airport coffee shop for an overpriced, hyper- sweet
cinnamon roll and a liter of coffee... and feel a chin on my shoulder and
breath in my ear as I try to write. "Hey, what kind of laptop is that?" The
guy wants to carry a searchable 11-megabyte concordance of the Bible for easy
reference, so I put him in touch with some vendors and sell him a copy of
Computing Across America as an antidote to theology.
But now I have both time and caffiene to kill. I haul the 24 quarters
back over to the bandits and lose them all so quickly that I hardly feel the
pain... but the very last one gets stuck in the slot. I almost write it off,
but welcoming the excuse to talk to Kathy the adorable attendant I casually
mention the problem. She hands me a quarter. "This is lucky," she says with a
wink.
"Then I'll let you tell me where to insert it," I reply with a smile,
looking her up and down with obvious appreciation. "Here?"
"No! Not this one... that one over there. I think it's ready to pay off
-- a woman just lost about $50 in it."
I drop the lucky coin into the indicated machine and immediately receive
20 in return. "Should I quit now?"
"I wouldn't. It's READY..." (This in a sort of cooing voice that has me
doing lightning calculations about departure times.)
I drop in three quarters and am rewarded with a shower of silver,
clattering into the stainless steel bin with an industrial din. Short-lived,
but sweet: I cash in $16 worth, realizing that with the exception of odd bits
of pocket change I am exactly where I started the night before.
I hand her a book, suitably inscribed, and sit back with my $300 airline
winnings to await first-class passage on the great silver slot machine in the
sky. I feel better already.
* * *
Back east. The Las Vegas trip stands out as a sort of mini- adventure
against a uniform backdrop of bus travel. We've fallen into the rhythm now,
hassling with places to park, dealing with mechanics of varying skill,
acquiring far too much junk and spending hours figuring out where in the bus to
cram it. If anything, 3,000 miles of motorized movement has convinced me that
this is not the way to do it -- despite the smooth allure of that seductive
$225,000 Custom Coach I test-drove a few weeks ago in Ohio...
Yes, it's been over 3,000 miles since my last GEnie update. This is
embarrassing. From Key West we returned to Orlando for the "Hamcation" and
some visiting -- then drove to Tallahassee to demo the bike for the capitol
press corps and flirt with a PBS crew. In Valdosta, we slept in SAFT's
backyard and toured their NiCad battery plant -- then a hard drive landed us in
Charlotte for another hamfest, as well as a consulting gig. Then off to
Greensboro and Raleigh, up to Richmond, across hilly West Virginia to
Louisville -- doing shows, media, visits at every stop. Frenzy! We camped in
my parents' field for a while, then rolled up to Columbus to dismantle the
incompetent accounting office and relax on a farm east of Marion. Then a big
one: the Dayton Hamvention. After that: Louisville again for a computer club
talk... then Atlanta for a week of hardcore COMDEX burnout (exhausting, but
worth it). You get the idea. At this moment, we're taking a deep breath in
Norcross and getting ready, after new kingpins and a front-end alignment, to
hit the road to Charlotte, then to Richmond for a month of consulting, down to
New Orleans for a library conference, then out to the west coast to find a
Winnebiko III staging area...
But you see the problem. On the bike, all this mileage would have spawned
a dozen spirited chapters -- not to mention a convoluted trail of new friends
and old tires. We have traded adventure for business, passion for frenzy,
hearth for fire. As such, I've opened a new subdirectory and a notebook
entitled "CAA-3."
Yup, I think it was the back-to-back combination of Dayton and COMDEX that
triggered it. New technology... new sponsors... new ideas... it all leads
inevitably to a serious lust for the road.
* * *
Norcross nights. Vibrant Magneplanars and games of rotation atop scarred
green felt, white cat-walks and Aquavit-lubed strategizing, new friends Jim and
Irish Ellie. What's the restlessness all about? With the myriad temptations of
professional lucrativity confronting me in every upscale American suburb, why
this continuing obsession with huffing a fragile, expensive contraption along
glass-strewn concrete in the company of drunks and myopic Olds ladies?
Must be a blend of technoid addiction, love of change, and the pure
selfish desire to enjoy life. Think about it: how much human energy is really
dedicated to happiness? How many decisions are guided by intuition... and how
many are driven by obligation, rationalization, and the countless "shoulds" and
"shouldn'ts" that accompany everything from family birthdays to religion?
Living selfishly is not a bad thing, of course, and if you cringe at the
thought, note that doing something special for someone you love can be just as
much of a healthy selfish act as curling up pseudo-sick with a book and a
brandy when the rest of your family is involved in some kind of ghastly
smoke-filled obbligato social event. The point is that YOU are the bottom
line... it's YOUR life... it's YOUR happiness at stake. If you don't make it
work, nobody will! If adventure calls, go do it; if you lust for a darkroom,
clear out the guest room and get busy.
The hard part is sorting out all the choices, for there are a lot of
things that make us technoid Americans happy. A killer stereo system or a new
motorcycle? A state-of-the art laboratory or a TVRO- equipped cabin in the
mountains? A serious library or a starlight- aided Celestron in a leased Ft.
Lauderdale high-rise? A Mac II or a closet full of Uzis and FNs? A high-tech
big-bucks career... or life on a computerized bicycle?
The emotional choices are even more subtle: Do you do what you want, or
sublimate the whole panoply of sweet expensive lusts by dedicating your passing
life to a set of commitments... some foisted upon you by circumstance, some
expected by society, others made decades before you knew better?
More and more, we are being taught that personal gratification is wrong --
that learning exotic ways to satisfy human desires amounts to a renunciation of
Faith, an affront against the Lord, and is antisocial to boot. Ignorance has
been canonized, formalized, and packaged with marketing brilliance worthy of
Madison Ave, with the result that few people in this otherwise advanced culture
can deny the existence of an external God without a twinge of guilt and fear.
This is effective programming, for it's not just a product they're selling,
it's a world-view -- a set of protocols, a firmware package designed for
involuntary implantation PRIOR to the development of self- awareness. By the
time a human reaches some measure of sentience, perception has been thoroughly
colored by Christian myth and guilt- motivation. Intelligence (which should
flourish as naturally as a healthy jungle) appears in neat cultivated rows --
shaped, pruned, protected from reality, monitored too closely, weeded
mercilessly, and rendered quite incapable of brilliance and surprise.
If this sort of behavior were part of a commercial enterprise (like
selling a brand of beer subliminally), the lawsuits would fly. But it is our
very CONTEXT that is being manipulated, the frame of reference with with we
view the world. This is below the level of choice. If you feel guilty about
not attending Sunday rituals, close your eyes when others pray over dinner, or
feel that sex outside the sacred rite of marriage is fundamentally wrong, then
your kernel and BIOS have been corrupted by a cultural virus -- a
self-replicating piece of code that defends itself with GUILT and propagates
itself via the most innocent of psychological downloading sessions
(conversation, TV, Reader's Digest, school, church, etcetera).
So what's it all about, anyway? Why this universal hunger for an
obsessive-compulsive neurosis (easily misread as a demonstration of its truth)?
There are three simple reasons:
First, we DON'T know it all, the universe is incomprehensibly complex, and
it's very comforting to believe that Someone Is In Charge and It All Means
Something. Science chips away at ignorance, but it has a long way to go.
Second, there's a strong need for a behavioral code -- for there are still
many in this society too primitive to notice that such things are self-evident.
Most of the Ten Commandments make perfect sense, of course, as do the golden
rule and various other tenets of good, moral behavior. Easterners add a neat
twist with the notion of "karma," which -- unlike the sin-and-do-penance
approach of Christianity -- implies that if you're nasty to someone, it's going
to come around and whack you up 'side the head someday. (My karma ran over my
dogma.)
Third, we social humans thrive on mutual support. We like clubs, and we
like to feel more advanced than beginners (hence the popularity of ranking and
scoring systems). Churches offer a powerful sense of belonging with no demands
on skill or intelligence, yielding a stronger community force than anything
else in America. They even have a built-in advantage over family, since there
is the implication of being nearer to Him... a vague objective which is never
seriously questioned.
Given all this, we have a staggering task ahead of us if we're to work on
evolving ourselves into an aware, intuitive post-Christian society.
* * *
None of which has much to do with a bicycle trip, except for this: it has
everything to do with a bicycle trip. Back when I designed industrial control
systems, I worked just as hard for creative solutions but only communicated
with one client and a few local friends at a time. Over 16,000 pedaling miles,
however, the greatest reward of all has been the dazzling variety of human
brains with whom I've come in contact. I have no CHOICE but to be in constant
learn-and-teach mode, for you can't roll into town on a blinking Winnebiko and
act like an antisocial sonofabitch when almost everyone looks, smiles, waves,
asks questions, shares their dreams, and invites you home for dinner. What
better way to stay open to the pulse of humanity -- to learn about the world
and do what we can to nudge it along? Sure beats the hell out of working in a
lab all day and then turning on the evening news...
And besides, it's fun. COMDEX and the Dayton hamfest gave me that old
excited kid-in-a-candy-store feeling, and I now lie awake nights fantasizing
about the Geovision CDROM disk, the bike-borne LAN of robust processors, the
Oscar satellite station, the Oki cellular phone with fax and voicemail links,
the computer-controlled automatic transmission... ah, the toys, the tools, the
tales.
And so the point of this whole convoluted story, from Las Vegas to
Paradise, is that despite the sluggishness of these recent stories, our travels
shall resume. Bear with me a few months as I kick-start the marketing of the
Computing Across America book (SOMEBODY's gotta do it -- and it sure ain't the
publisher), finish my consulting gig in the east, and build the Winnebiko III.
There's a long, long road ahead.
-- Steve
NOTE: Our office has moved! "Computing Across America" book orders ($9.95 +
$2 for shipping) and other matter-transfer communication should now be directed
to:
Computing Across America
1306 Ridgeway Ave
New Albany, IN 47150
812-945-1435