Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Im re-reading all my old TinTin books, and I'm noticing that there are all of these things absent in the Boy Detective's life ... religion, parents, politics, relationship, communion with nature, class, love, death, birth ... it's a long list. And I find that while I still love TinTin, I'm getting currious about all of its invisible content.

The Valley is so career-o-centric. So much career energy! There must be a 65-ton crystal of osmium hexachloride buried 220 feet below the surface of Menlo Park, sucking in all of the career energy in the Bay Area and shooting it back down the Peninsula at twice light speed. It's science fiction here.

Mom's signed up for a ladies 50-to-60 swim meet. It's next week.

Susan bought a case load of premoistened towelettes at Price-Costco. She's mad at the rest of the Habitrail because it's such a pigsty. She daintily wipes off her keyboard and screen and as she does so she says, "Man, I need a date, bad"

Karla's hair is down past her shoulders now. And she bought a dress with pink wildflowers on it, and it's funny, the way she's the same as ever, yet also reformatted, and it makes me look at her with a new fascination.

She's eating all sorts of food like a total person now and I've noticed that when I work on her body, she's just not as tense anymore. Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, the up-and-down muscles of her spine, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

Daydream: today the traffic was locked on the 101. I saw visions of the Valley and snapped out of my daydream jealous of the future. I saw germanium in the groundwater and dead careers. I saw venture capitalists with their eyes burned out in their sockets by visions of money, crashing their Nissans on the 101 – past the big blue cube of NASA's Onizuka Air Force Base, their windows spurting fluorescent orange blood.

Bug's dream came true today. He got to visit Xerox PARC with a friend of a friend from Seattle. Back with us in the Habitrail, while arranging a handful of purple iceplant flowers nipped from the PARC's groundcover, he filled us in on details: "It's set in a purposefully blank location – they cover up all outside traces of civilization with berms and landscaping devices so you feel as if you're nowhere. Feeling like you're somewhere must be bad for ideas.

"Anyway, there's nothing but chaparral and oak trees on the hill to the west, and you feel like you're on a virgin planet, like the planets they visit on Star Trek. It feels really 'outposty.' But not scary, like you're in Antarctica. And the lobby – it's like a really successful orthodontist's waiting room in the year 2004. And guess what ... I got to sit in the Bean Bag Chairs!"

An hour later we were all back at work, when apropos of nothing, Bug said, "Ahem," called our attention, and announced that he's gay. How random!

"I've been 'inning' myself for too long," he said, "and now it's time to out myself. It's something you'll all have to deal with, but believe me, I've been dealing with it a lot longer than you."

It never even entered our heads to think Bug was anything except a sexually frustrated, bitter crank, which is not unusual up at Microsoft, or in tech in general. I think we all felt guilty because we don't think about Bug enough, and he does work hard, and his ideas really are good. But we're just so used to him being cranky it never occurred to us he had an interior life, too.

I asked him, "But what about the Elle MacPherson shrine, Bug?"

"Replaced. Marky Mark for the time being, but he's only a phase."

"Oh, Bug ..." said Karla, "how long have you been deciding this?"

"Always."

"Why now?", I asked. "So late."

"Because now is when we all explode. We're like those seeds you used to plant on top of sterile goop in petri dishes in third grade, waiting to sprout or explode. Susan's exploding. Todd's going to explode. Karla's germinating gently. Michael's altering, too. It's like we're all seeds just waiting to grow into trees or orchids or houseplants. You never know. It was too sterile up north. I didn't sprout. Aren't you curious to know what you really are, Dan?"

I thought about it. It's not really something you think about.

"Now I can be me – I think," Bug said. "This is not easy for me. Let me repeat that – this is not easy for me."

"Does this mean you'll start dressing better? " asked Ethan.

"Yes, Ethan. Probably."

So that was that.

Maybe he'll be less cranky now. Karla and Susan said they were proud of Bug. I guess it did take guts. He's a late bloomer – that's for sure. And me? Am I curious to know what I really am? Or am I just so grateful to not be a full-scale, zero-life loser that it doesn't matter?

Bean bag chairs: how odd it is that they're still ... I don't know ... a part of the world.

Dad signed up for a night course in C++. He's going to make himself relevant.

Susan's sister sent her a bag of pot via FedEx. She wrapped it in magazine scent strips to foil FedEx dope dogs. What a good way to make those things do something useful.

Bug's right. We are all starting to unravel. Or sprout. Or whatever. I remember back in grade school, VCR documentaries on embryology, and the way all mammals look the same up until a certain point in their embryological development, and then they start to differentiate and become what they're going to become. I think we're at that point now.

My sense of time perception has gone all screwy. Sundays always do that to me. One day is so much like every other day here, and yet every day is somehow different. I designed a little program that I click into every time I get an interruption – like a phone call or someone asks me a question – or I have to change a tape in my Walkman. My average time between interruptions is 12.5 minutes. Perhaps this is part of my time schism.

I mentioned these interruptions to Todd who said, "I'm still doing 18-hour days like up at Microsoft, except instead of doing just one thing, I'm doing a hundred different things – my job is so much better. More diversity. It's the diversity of interruptions ... time becomes 'initiative driven' as opposed to passive."

He then added that in Christian eschatology ("the study of the Last Things") it is always made very clear that time and the world both end simultaneously, that there is no real difference between the two.

Then he panicked, worrying that he was doomed to turn into his parents, and roared off to the gym. He's doing upper body today. He alternates upper and lower body. He never sleeps. That's how he names his days: Upperbodyday; Lowerbodyday; Absday; Latsday ... Sometimes I admire his single-minded drive to achieve muscular perfection, and sometimes I think he's a freak.

I read about fishermen off the Gulf Coast whose net, dragging the ocean floor, snagged a sunken galleon, and when the net was raised, a shower of coins fell on the ship's deck. Talk about a story to appeal to us here in the Valley!

Sent out my Christmas cards today – I went to McDonald's and got a stack of "JOIN THE FAMILY" job application forms and filled them out for everybody. The only remotely personal question the form asks is: Sports? Activities?

Here's what I wrote for everybody: "Abe/Susan/Bug/Michael/etc ... greatly enjoys repetitive tasks."

Geek party night: it's kind of like if we were in Hollywood and going to an "industry party." That guy Susan met from General Magic had a party up at his place in the Los Altos Hills. All day at the office Susan and Karla talked about what they're going to ... wear. It was really un-Karla, but I'm glad she's getting into her body and taking pride in it.