Half-Life

Took a job in Fremont, an hour away, in a sterile, unpeopled high-tech office park at the end of the Bay. The office is an open cube farm. The routine: asborb flourescence in Cubicle 76. Don't move a muscle.

Having been a happy, if spottily engaged, home-based contract worker, it is interesting, in the most detached, clinical, observational sense, to measure the effect of full-time employment in that sort of environment. It's a kind of semi-life, a bit like being on life support. Or perhaps in suspended animation (like movies about space travelers to far galaxies who are kept alive but unconscious [and unaging] for 50 years until they arrive at the Antares 12 system and all wake up unchanged and rub their eyes and have coffee and go out and get eaten by an unsightly alien): there are always plenty of tasks, so one doesn't think about one's personal life, or about anything much at all, in fact, except for the matter at hand. An operation, of course, in which one has no personal, moral, or aesthetic stake. And so one's brain is slowly emptied of all inherently interesting, individuating content, while the body is weaned off of its prior dependence on sunlight, oxygen, and physical movement.

The irony here is that, even though this is a patently unhealthy way to live, a hospital-like, environmental simulacrum that limits the body to 5% or 10% of input/output capacity, I believe it is in fact possible to remain alive in this manner for 400 or 500 years. I mean, consider a tree. What has the tree got to do but just, you know, be? It doesn't get to run around and engage; one can put a cubicle around it, and it will likely live to be 300+ years old. All right, trees do get sun and oxygen, but still, I think, being part of your life, by definition impossible in a career like this (particularly with the cyborg-friendly 10-hour days start-ups run on) is what is fun and evolutionary, even if it is also what triggers the aging process and eventually kills you.

On the other hand, perhaps this kind of employment is more like being frozen. Cryogenics. A Ted Williams thing. Or is it more like being freeze-dried?

Which begs the question: in 3-5 years, can I just add water?

The Gorney Party Platform

This may be the arena in which to launch the Gorney Party.

The Gorney Party answers the crying needs of the day: peace and quiet in the cities, and orthodoxy in professional sports.

Here, then, is an outline of our platform:

I. America is entirely too noisy. Let's keep it quiet. Here's how:

A. Leaf blowers will be banned.
1. Those employed using them will be given rakes.

B. Car speakers over 5" in diameter will be strictly prohibited.

C. Car alarms also will be forbidden.
1. Those cars found to be in violation of this statute will
be promptly flattened.

D. The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle company will be given six weeks to
adopt contemporary muffler technology.

E. Convene a House committee to investigate the implementation of
laser technology as a means of eliminating -- and eventually
banning -- jackhammers.

II. Professional Sports in America have gone astray. Here's how to fix them:

A. General
1. The use and manufacture of Astroturf will be prohibited.
2. All dome stadiums will be reconfigured either to open-air
structures or simply destroyed.

B. Baseball
1. The designated hitter rule will be eliminated.
2. Aluminum bats will be prohibited.
3. The playing of music from sources other than the stadium
organ will be expressly forbidden.
4. Baseball will be federalized.
a. A Commissioner will be appointed by the president at
the Cabinet level.

C. Football
1. All helmet facemask bars shall be gray.

D. Basketball
1. NBA Teams which consistently underperform --
the Golden State Warriors, for instance -- will be
relegated to the CBA or other minor, pro-am, or neighborhood
leagues until such time as their record and quality of
play are deemed adequate to justify their fans' attention.

E. Hockey
1. Why the fighting?
a. Convene a Senate subcommittee to investigate.

F. NASCAR
1. State education budgets in the Southeastern states shall
be federally supplemented.

What I Want

I want to write a rambling book that touches on many topics, something which lets me really set down my world view and cause people to say, "what is it with this guy?" Something that causes them to reach back deep in their gullets and spew forth a jetlike stream of...well, let's be frank, a most vile, bilious liquid -- a physiological reaction even a trained health professional would turn away from.

The book could be titled "The Book I Want to Write". It will be a 347-page proposal, or rather conjecture, of a book that could not, in and of itself, be written, or at least marketed, but of course in attempting to describe the book's confusing, diffuse, wholly unconnected subject matter, to say nothing of the shocking array of regurgitative, excretory, and conniptive physical reactions its author wishes to elicit, enough pages will accrue to make up a book.

It will get a great Staff Review at Green Apple Books. It will sell two copies.

My father will ask me to reimburse him for 16 years of tuition.

After Dark on the 31 Balboa

Worked a day of temp-proofreading at a design firm in Oakland. Wrapped up at 7:30. back on BART, stopped for a meal as expensive as it was mediocre, took a long MUNI ride through the underside of SF back to my building.

SF has a precious, rent-inflated, chi-chi, candy-coated image, but it's still crunchy in the middle. Large swathes of the city remain untouched by yuppification. The bus stop was a bit dicey -- Market, Jones & McCallister -- but the interesting stuff happened once I got on the bus. Lots to see out the windows, like a Disneyland ride. Passing the corner of Buchanan and McCallister there was a cluster of five police cars, a large man in handcuffs, an officer rummaging through the trunk of a Honda. An ugly crowd was advancing on the policemen, and at least one
person was brandishing a baseball bat. It was a post-apocalyptic film, a world of eternal night where all order has broken down.

"Yo, that's my boy's car!," a passenger said to the bus driver as we pulled away. "Damn! Don't have to be doin' my boy like that!" The passenger then told the driver the story of a recent fight he had been in, one that ended with three policemen bringing him to the ground and hitting him on the head. "Shit...tried to take my dome off...but I popped they domes right back! That's right!" It was already just a pleasant memory...he was relaxed, contented. He might have been telling a fishing story.