Microserfs

Ethan came into the office shortly afterward trying to lug Misty out, but instead Misty barraged him with dirty fur and mouth goo, and I know Ethan enjoyed it. He said to her, "Quite often I feel like pawing and slobbering over people I like, too, but I never, of course, actually do it."

I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals - things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty . . . that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

Misty really would have made a terrible seeing-eye dog. She'd bound into traffic to greet truck drivers. Ethan lured Misty outside with a Cocoa Puffs promotional Frisbee, and then stood, wearing his sunglasses, beneath the balcony's shade and played with her a while. He didn't seem to mind the muck all over his Dolce & Gabbana three-piece.

Ethan just wants some company. He's spending far more time around the Habitrail these days since The Hug. We all hug Ethan a lot now because suddenly he's human and Karla held a small meeting the day after the bandage-removal episode and told us all we had to be extra kind to Ethan. I haven't mentioned it at all to Ethan though - too weird. Susan was in shock.

After a while Ethan and I went down to look at the rubble of the house below. Gone. Fwoosh!

* * *

Ethan said something provocative and left me dangling. He muttered something about "Michael's expensive little addiction," and I said "Robitussin? It's cheap," and

Ethan said "Robitussin?" so I said, "Well, what did you mean then?" and he said, "Nothing." I hate it when people only open the floodgates a little bit, and then close it up again.

* * *

Oh - Ethan is trying to wean himself off cel phones. Good luck!

* * *

I heard a lovely expression today about brains - an ad for smart drugs touting thicker, bushier dendrites.

Moist little tumbleweeds blooming inside one's skull.

* * *

Susan was doing her biannual hard-drive cleanup, which is half chore/half fun - going on a deleting frenzy, removing all those letters that once seemed so urgent, that now seem pointless, the shareware that infected your files with mystery viruses and those applications that seemed groovy at the time.

Susan's own efforts did get me to do a brief cleanup of my own hard drive. I thought of Karla's equation of the body with the computer and memory storage and all of that, and I realized that human beings are loaded with germs and viruses, just like a highly packed Quadra - each of us are bipedal terrariums containing untold millions of organisms in various states of symbiosis, pathogenesis, mutualism, commensualism, opportunism, dormancy, and parasitism. We're like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, enclosed in a perpetual probabilistic muzz of biology.

I posted a question on the Net, asking bioheads out there what lurks inside the human hard drive.

* * *

Michael and Dad were out in the backyard later on watching R2D2 clean out the pool. There was a fair amount of soot because of the fire.

* * *

Around midnight I was in the reflective mode and walked around the streets by myself. I felt as though I was walking around the neighborhood on Bewitched. "Look - it's Larry Tate driving a big, ugly mattress of a car! One great big honking machine."

I thought about the word "machine." Funny, but the word itself seems almost quaint, now. Say it over a few times: machine, machine, machine - it's so . . . so . . . ten-years-ago. Obsolete. Replaced by post-machines. A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

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[Formatter's note: Pages 180 - 181 have nothing but the word "machine" on them.]

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WEDNESDAY

This morning I was sitting by the pool with Michael, watching him watch the R2D2 pool cleaner. I mentioned last night's machine/progress notion. He was eating a Snickers leftover from Halloween trick-or-treating, and said, "If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than their own, then BINGO, you believe in progress whether or not you even think so."

So I guess I believe in progress.

Michael was staring into the clean blue fluid, an anti-Narcissus, and he twiddled his index finger in it. He said, "You know, Daniel, I wonder if, after all these years, I have been subliminally modeling my personality after machines - because machines never have to worry about human things - because if they don't get touched or feel things, then they don't know the difference. I think this is a common thing. What do you think?"