Microserfs

Bug sulks in his room all day, listening to Chet Baker, restoring his antique Radio Shack Science Fair 65-In-One electronic project kit, and memorizing C++ syntax. Susan house hunts. Todd lives at the Pro Club gym. Abe has been reassigned to a subgroup in charge of designing a toolbar interface. Whooo-ee!

I think Abe's being punished for going sailing that day with his friends during the week we were all in crunch mode. We don't see him much - he's back in Microsoft time/space again. He gets home late, feeds his neon tetras sprinkles of ground-up, freeze-dried poor people, chides us all for not exhibiting more enterprise, and then sleeps.

* * *

2:45 A.M. Drove into Seattle tonight with Todd in separate cars. Todd scored at The Crocodile and at the moment he and his "date," Tabitha from Tukwilla, are in his room getting acquainted.

Bug is here in the living room watching "Casper the Friendly Ghost" cartoons on the VCR, "looking for subtext." I can't believe it, but I'm getting into it, too. ("Wait, Bug - rewind that back a few seconds - wasn't that a Masonic compass?") Karla was asleep ages ago. She stayed home and watched The Thornbirds on the VCR with Susan. ("It's a girl thing. Scram.") Karla has an unsuspected fathomless capacity for sleep of which I am most envious.

* * *

Continued adding to my computer's subconscious files.

Welcome to Macintosh

Carl's Jr.

Gore-Tex®

gray metallic Saabs

Barry Diller

KISS

mini-bars

ads for pearls

outer space

frequent flyer points

Oscar de la Renta

minimum wage

manufacture

dungeons

magazine scent strips

Bell Atlantic

phone jacks

F-16

Calvin Klein

bourgeois decay images

Upload

Sparkletts

flame broiled

switchbox

the DMV

MiG-29

Han Solo

Download

Drive

Tori Spelling

Advil

Kotex

Rosslyn

You jerk

Langley

Lee Press-ons

THURSDAY

I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction - the asphalt and cement kind - Dewey Decimal number 625.79 - and there haven't been any published on the subject for two decades! It's bizarre - like a murder mystery. It's as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in 1975. Sizzler titles include:

Bituminous Materials in Road Construction

Surface Texture Versus Skidding

Engineering Study: Alaska Highway

Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability

Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Median Berms and Circles

Actually, there weren't all too many books on freeways ever published in the first place. You'd think we'd have whole stadiums devoted to the worship of freeways for the amount of importance they play in our culture, but no. Zip. I guess we're overcompensating for this past shortcoming by our current overhyping of the InfoBahn - the I-way. It's emerged from nowhere into this big important thing we Have to Know About.

I have borrowed, among others, the seminal work on the subject: Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), by Robert F. Baker, editor; Van Nostrand and Reinhold Company. It'll help melt away my lax days before I join a new product group.

* * *

We ripped away some wallpaper in the kitchen by the fridge and found that underneath the various stratum of paper (daisies; Peel n' Stick pepper-mills), in condition just as fresh as the day they were written, the words:

one mellow day

June 6, 1974

I'm long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you

d.b.

Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you're gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then . . . cheap!

* * *

At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell's soup flavors:

Creamy Dolphin

Lagoon

Beak

Pond

Crack

* * *

Note: I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212° Fahrenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot! It takes hours to cool off - it's so hot it's undrinkable - and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed. At least Starbucks doesn't stink like sweet coffee-flavoring chemicals . . . like the way you'd expect a Barbie doll's house to smell.

* * *

Saw a documentary about the commodities market. Read some books that were lying around. Watched some old 1970s TV shows later. I remembered an old Nova episode in which German hackers published a secret document, and some Ph.D. hippie geek from UC Berkeley tracked them down with a baited document. Was this hippie geek tricked into trapping one of his own kind by the NSA or some other such organization? Ethics.