Electric Sheep

When I first learned how to read I had very little idea of how to write. I learned like many others in my generation: by having my parents read to me. They would read the same thing to me several times over. As I started to really pay attention, I would realize the correlation between what they were saying and the symbols and weird signs on the paper in front of us.

Later, I think, I would have supplemental experience in reading added to me by Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and other awesome educational shows made available by the Public Broadcast System. I also started school at age 4, which helped immensely with learning how to communicate not only via text, but also to other human beings in a live setting.

Learning to write is a funny thing. Handwriting is something so personalized and unique that sometimes it can be used as identification. However, it is also something that has to be universal enough so that other people can actually read what is written, to glean the things you have passed along in written form. Early on, writing is typically just clerical copy work, and depending on who teaches the writer, what is written could pass as chicken scratch, or it may be circa 1870 perfect print.

But I don't really want to write about writing. What I want to write about is how we need to get away from writing.

I don't mean to get away from authoring, or from sharing our ideas; what I mean is that we need a better way of passing information on. We need something better suited to where we are going as a culture other than a keyboard or a pencil.

Tablets are the latest craze, apparently. They let us drag along a clipboard sized computer with us wherever we go. Problem is, they're a consumption device, not really a creation device. Older tablets included a keyboard under the screen, or perhaps on the screen itself. This is stupid. It adds weight, adds mechanical parts that could break down, and just perpetuates the insanity of requiring a physical input medium to pass information on.

We are a lazy race.

Some people have likened tablets to the handheld computers in Star Trek:The Next Generation. Indeed, I can see similarities in many of our personal computer and accessories that we consider daily use items with what was shown in the series. However, the striking difference for me is how they put information in.

You didn't see any of the characters typing away on a keyboard, or swiping a single finger around a keyboard on a screen. You saw them talking to the computer. You saw them directly connecting to the computer (in the case of Data, the android). Hell, you even saw them physically interacting with the computer in the Holodeck at times. No keyboards, no weird archaic gestures. It was intuitive, it was rugged, and it was lightweight.

This last point is key. Business people now, as always, are very concerned with weight. They need to get on airplanes, they need to carry stuff around. The last thing they need is an additional few ounces made up by peripherals. They don't need extra cords (or god forbid batteries for wireless peripherals) bogging them down. What they need is a lightweight, small sized, familiar shaped product that will let them gaze into the crystal ball that is the internet and get shit done.

They need to be able to speak to the computer, and have the computer speak back to them. They need to be able to gesture to a whole wall and have the information they're after come to life and show them what is important. They need to be able to pinpoint where and when and all that in very little time, and with very little weight added to their carry-on.

Gamers need this too. Why compress all our being into thumbs and index fingers? Why not give us the awesomeness of the Kinect in every game? And extend that to every application? When it doesn't make sense to have a whole body be the controller, just code the thing to watch for my facial expressions, or hand gestures (like ASL).

I may be an old grey-beard in the corner. I may remember what it was to set up message netting between BBSs that would send emails out at scheduled times really late in the night. I may even scoff at things that sales and marketing dream up (you mean you can't get this done in an hour? I'm just asking for the whole world's data to be cross indexed with the whole galaxy's data). But I think that in order for things to really move to the next level, we need to drop some of this old-timey crap and move forward.

Either that, or destroy civilization as we know it so I can farm and live out my post-apocalyptic dreams for real real.

These Look Like Big, Strong Hands, Don't They?

I had a very hard decision to make. The car was not moving. The car was old, rusted, rotted, and just generally falling apart at the seams. More than 200k miles, the tires were falling apart, the sunroof leaked rain, the seats were uncomfy, and the whole thing just screamed shoot me.

But I still owe some money against it on a loan.

So I could let it sit out on the street until it was paid off. I could ride the bus a little longer. I could even buy another cheap car that would probably break down in a year or two but get me through.

But I decided to let the local shop take a look-see just to see, you know, if it could be brought back out of retirement for a little while longer.

So I had the beast towed to the shop. I waited patiently for a day to let them have at it. Open her up, figure out what was broken and how much it would cost me to fix.

But after day one, they hadn't gotten to it. "No problem," I stated, "I've been taking the bus this long, I can wait another day or so."

Day two, today, I waited until the tail end of the day to call for some sort of status.

It still hasn't gone up on the lift.

I'm not terribly pressed, you know, it's not like I have anywhere to go or anything. It isn't like my job pretty much demands me to drive all over the city when stuff breaks.

But it would be nice to have someone extend the same amount of controlled urgency surrounding something I have entrusted them with.

It would also be different if they worked on the weekends.

Plague

The plague has infected the whole office. It started with our dispatch lady, she was out for two days this week. She tried to warn us that she felt like shit, but she still came in anyway. Probably out of fear that she'd get reprimanded for missing too much time. Or maybe she didn't want to waste all her PTO time on just being sick.

So now everyone's sick. It's a horrible little flu/cold thing. Muscle aches, lymph nodes all tight, and the drips. My god, the drips. Feels like my nose is a leaky faucet with no actual method of valving the flow off at all.

I've decided that sometimes it's alright to have a short blog entry. Not everyday can feature a best-seller, right?

Stand Deftly

After having made the call to the bank and getting the automatic lock off of my bank account removed (long story, but as it was negative $1.80USD at the end of last month, I didn't have access to any of my recently deposited money), I took out enough money to eat on and to ride the bus for a few more days. This had to happen at our local market, which is just two miles from the house, as I don't have an ATM on my front porch.

So armed with a fresh pack of smokes and twenty minutes to spare, I walked to the closest bus stop, which is at the rear of the shopping center that contains said ATM. Not wanting to stand in the wet grass for long, I instead took up residence standing on the firm cool concrete that makes up the parking lot.

This lot has cars in it constantly; I think some of them have been there longer than both my children have been alive. There are age-old black gunks splattered in various assymetrical patterns, broken glass, and varicose cracks splintering the entire concourse. It sits in a nice neighborhood, but unfortunately neglect has worked its magic over the past fifty years.

Anyway, I'm standing there smoking almost religiously. I'm trying to wake up, trying to ignore the fact that I'm utterly dependent upon public transit to get me to the place that gives me the stuff to pay for the things to survive. I'm standing there, smoking, and suddenly I realize I'm being illuminated. I can clearly see my nose in my periphery, very bright, shiny with sweat and nose oils, in the otherwise dark September morning. I'm standing there smoking because I didn't want to stand in the wet dewy morning grass and because my car is, once again, not moving of its own accord. I'm standing in the parking lot, the nasty, grimy parking lot smoking because I clearly have nowhere else I can go.

I look for the source of this new light, not sure if I'm about to cease breathing, or if aliens decided right then and there was the best time to make contact, or if some kid was playing with a flashlight two hours before he had to be at school. I look to my left, and realize a car is sitting in the parking lot. The lights are on. The engine is on. The car is sitting in the nasty parking lot, everything on, and it is sitting at an angle blocking a car that has been there for centuries. This new car is aimed right at me, but it isn't moving.

I turn away, thinking that someone is just dropping someone off for the bus. Some people have a hard time walking, you know, and they have someone who loves them enough to drive them to the local bus stop. Not to drive them to their place of employment downtown, or wherever they may be going, but enough to at least get them to where they may procure easy transit.

I stand there for a good thirty seconds, waiting for the familiar whine and gust of whatever it is that city buses shoot out into the air as they drive, all the while the light is still on my nose, brightening each exhale of smoke from my lips.

Then something changes.

The lights dim very briefly, then get brighter: the car must have started moving. Maybe the driver saw the bus? Maybe they're going to extend the love for their passenger and take them closer to the hell they must endure for eight future hours today?

Then somehow the car is beside me, it's sitting there next to me and I can't tell if all the doors are going to open and a team of mobsters are going to convince me to get in the trunk, or if the dark tinted window is going to roll down and some nun is going to, in full nun regalia and habit, ask me for directions, or if the car is just waiting for the bus and felt lonely and wanted to be closer to a human.

The reverse lights flash on and the car begins a slow parking maneuver. I continue smoking.

The car is almost dangerously close to me at this point, and I move away to the curb of the nasty parking lot.

Suddenly, and without warning, the car lurches ahead at an angle, then pops back into reverse and slides back into the area which I was just standing.

Aha! Clearly I was standing in this person's spot. I should have realized that the nasty black gunk stains and broken glass fragments spelled out b-i-t-c-h, and the spot was called.

Of course, I'm being facetious. There was no sign, no name scrawled anywhere. This parking lot contains enough spaces for probably six hundred cars, all told, and more could fit if you double parked them in emergency, you know, like a festival or swim meet or something.

I had been standing there, smoking, waiting for a bus I didn't want to ride at a time of day I did not want to be standing in a nasty gunky parking lot, smoking cigarettes purchased with money that a financial institution did not want me to have access to, and I had the nerve to be standing in someone's spot.

How dare I.

Singularity

Sometimes I stop what I'm doing long enough to examine exactly where I am. Who I'm with. What we're doing. Sometimes I try to do a reverse of the age-old interview question in my head: "Where did you think you would be now five years ago? Fifteen? Thirty?"

Sometimes I think about why people tolerate me in their general vicinity. Why I'm invited to things, why I'm sometimes included with others that have no apparent connection to me other than that we may both know the same person.

The idea of "Cool" is very strange to me. I've been labelled before, third person of course, as being both pro and con "Cool"; as if the beholder had some sort of power over whether I could be allowed or denied access to whatever the topic of conversation reveals. My completely bat-shit crazy taste in music has been considered cool for a short time period, then shifted to meh, then to uncool without any variance or addition of new terms. My kids think of me uncool when they don't side with a decision I've made, but cool when I let them get away with something other parents ban from their own children.

I've sat with famous people before. Well, famous meaning that they can claim that more people know them than they know themselves, I suppose. Or maybe it's that they have some sort of physical proof that they were there, they did that thing, you know? that _thing_ whether it's a song or an album or a canvas with ink and mud scraped all over it, or a set of words imprinted semi-permenantly in a book of papers. They're famous because in a hundred or a thousand years someone will be able to find their book or their song and know without a doubt that someone with that name did that thing. Anyway, I've sat with famous people, not knowing the thing they did, and didn't really bat an eye when the thing was presented, either in the present or at some future time, hushed in whispers or proudly shouted and proclaimed. I guess some famous people like that sort of apathy, as I have sat with them since, and was considered cool.

Some people, though, some people don't need cool. Some people just are, and I secretly love these people. They do their own thing, they write things without needing a book with paper, they sing songs without needing a wax with grooves to be pressed. Even if they don't do anything at all, sometimes, they get my adoration without having to do anything at all. Sometimes those people are better than all the others, truly, and I don't know if I would be the same person I am today without those silent towers of awesomesauce.

Maybe that's why people sometimes let me hang out with people they consider cool?

Loss

Last week my dad died.

I heard the news from a cell phone call in the night. Around 9pm. My phone buzzed, I looked down from my cigarette and noticed that the call was coming from "Dad". I answered in a cheerful manner, thinking on the other side a voice would say what he always said, "Hel-lo John Mar-tin!" but instead, my sister said something like, "Hi, what are you doing?"

She called me just a week or so earlier. Actually, she texted my wife saying that something was wrong and that she had gotten a new phone and wanted to talk to me. She had forgotten to export her contacts, so she lost all the numbers. I had rage-quit all social networking sites, so it wasn't like she could look at my Facebook profile to get my digits.

That call was to relay the horrible news that our mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer. They think it started as breast cancer, but they found a bunch that had migrated to some bones.

I was devastated. My mom was too young.

My mom had surely gotten more and more frail over the years. At one point, she was lean and mean; she was able to put up with two fighting teenage kids. But my parents moved pretty far away, and the visits became fewer and far between. Each time I noticed her skin was thinner, her hugs were not as bone-crushing, her eyes seemed less alive.

And yet, still my mom was too young to die.

The doctor assigned to her case was on a week long vacation in Europe somewhere. Being a head-surgeon must have advantages. The second in command was running some tests and had a few ideas, but there wouldn't be much real progress until the vacation was over.

All the little petty bullshit issues of my life suddenly went away. That I didn't have much food in the fridge or that I had taken a verbal beating from a particularly nasty customer that day didn't really matter any more. I got cold. I drained a two week old beer in three gulps. I relayed the message around to a few close friends--partially because they also knew my mom as "Mom", but also looking for some sort of comfort. I cried. I talked with my wife. We cried.

But there was hope, ya know? My mom was still alive, she was even pretty cheerful. Apparently she thanked all her doctors for their hard work, and was pretty sure she was gonna get through this with barely a scratch.

A few days passed before I was able to talk to my dad. I kept trying to think of ways I could call him and talk to him about everything.

Three days after my sister called he called me. We had just driven over to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner. I stayed outside and smoked a half pack while my wife and kids went shopping.

Dad said that Mom was doing well, but he was a wreck. He was going to take twelve weeks of FMLA time to stay with her. My sister was in late pregnancy and would probably be staying home full time, but then she would have two kids and wouldn't be able to stay with Mom full time, too. So, he would take a slight hit to his monthly income to essentially stay at home and take care of everybody.

His tone was pretty grave, but my dad was always positive, ever hopeful even when the shit had hit the fan and then kept coming. He talked about how much he wanted me to move out to where everyone else was, that I would love it out there. He always did this, even though he knew my eventual plan was to go south and start a farm. He asked about the kids, knowing that I would tell him they were fine. For some reason we talked at length about the school system here and how everything seems to be in a constant rebuilding phase, how the schools are so horrible and yet instead of calling them bad, they're "In Development" or some such bullshit.

My good friend had called me the day before, saying that he flew for work pretty much constantly, and that he wanted to help out and could not think of a better way to spend his frequent flyer miles than to buy tickets for me and my bunch to go visit my parents. I thought this would lift my dad's spirits so I told him and tried to schedule a time to come out.

He said that my sister's baby would be born in the beginning of October, so to make everything cool and whatnot that I should plan around the end of October. That would give time for the mother-baby bond to all happen, for sleep to become a real thing, and for my mom to have a few treatments of whatever it was they wanted to give her.

We got off the phone in decent spirits, considering the events surrounding the talk, and I went home and made dinner. I think. Maybe we just ordered delivery or something.

A few more days passed and everything was set. Four round trip tickets were secured, and all that was left was to figure out where we were to sleep. My car died, as it was, after helping a friend move. The clutch, the six month old or younger clutch, had given up, and now the car just sits idly no matter how hard the gas is pressed.

So I went back to the thing I hate most: the bus.

My dad shared this hatred with me. He had a car break down at the same time I had one break down a year or so ago. We'd share stories about the stupid drivers, the weird politics, and all the other things that go along with inside jokes.

So I'm juggling a few things a this point, trying to make sure everything is cool. I talk with my dad again just to make sure everything is still a go when he finally realizes that all of us are coming to visit, not just me.

He got really excited knowing that he would get to see his grandkids. I think he even started to cry a little.

So when my phone rang on Thursday night, September 1, 2011... I thought it was going to be my dad with more news on our visit. Maybe his friend came through with some free nights in a hotel? Maybe his other friend is willing to let us all use his beach house that week for some much needed R&R? Maybe Mom's cancer is in remission and she's gonna live another fifty years?

No, it was my sister.

She said she was sad. She started saying weird things and I didn't understand. She asked me when the doctors called me? I told her I didn't know what she was talking about. I thought something happened with Mom.

In hindsight, I don't think it could have been delivered any better or kinder. She told me that Dad was found on a golf course, that he was rushed to an emergency room and that there was nothing they could do.

She knows me. Even though we haven't really talked in years, she knows me. She knows how I may be patient and calm on the surface, but I hate how some people drag out painful or unnecessary disclosures.

She gave me the news, told me all the right things about how much Dad loved me, and how he always talked about me. How proud he was of me.

I lost it. I couldn't talk on the phone anymore. I handed the phone to my wife and just cried.

Before the shock totally set in, I called my boss and left a voicemail telling him I wasn't coming to work the next day. Then the weekend went by in a blur.

And now, here I sit at work, typing out the events of the past few weeks. I don't really know what to do. I feel very helpless. I feel like I should be doing more to help my sister and mother. That I should be clearing up all the loose ends, getting death certificates and closing down accounts and being a shoulder to cry on...

But instead I'm just sitting here at work. I'm helping people get into their email. I'm repairing backup jobs for servers. I'm teaching people new ways to do mail merge documents. I'm sitting here.

Last week my dad died, and I don't know who will give me advice, who will tell me everything will be okay, who will joke about how terrible the world is while still saying there's still hope.

My first memory of my dad is his hands. I remember holding his hands and marveling at how big they were. How large his fingers seemed. How his left ring finger was cut short by a stupid lawnmower accident when he was a stupid teenager. His hands were big, firm, weathered, and yet so soft.

My dad was ever the hopeful, ever the guy who loved the Beatles' song "Here Comes The Sun." My dad was never really the smartest guy around, but he tried to learn from his mistakes.

I miss you, Dad.