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fun with an AlphaSmart
Friday, May 28 1999
It's funny how people act in my workplace at the onset of a three-day-weekend. The last day of the work week, they're sure to be slacking and even leaving early. Consequently, the weekly motivational ritual of Energy was held early. For a change, I decided to attend.
I didn't stay for the whole thing, but during the time I was there, I was sure to assert myself against the dismal fog of corporate yesmanship. For starters, I grabbed a Sam Adams from the company fridge and poured it into a plastic cup and drank from this as I sat in the heart of the Energy cluster, on the couches in the middle of the mainspace. Then, after I'd heard the phrase, "Really take ____ to the next level" for the umpteenth time, I decided to mock the phrase ruthlessly when my turn came to give energy, even as I sat two-people-away from the COO, Grand Pooh Bah II himself, who, with characteristically condescending head-nods and shit-eating grin, had just gotten through saying "to the next level" more than any other single person in the room.
(Reflecting on this scene somewhat later, while stoned on marijuana and reading of the paranoid conformity of the Nazi high command, I thought I'd gone maybe a bit too far. I'm sure Adam, the surprisingly-hip second VP of Marketing, wasn't the only one picking up on my disdainful mockery.)
For dinner, Kim and I ate pizza, as we've been doing on and off for the past several days. Last time she'd ordered pizza from Little Sicily, you see, there'd been some sort of bureaucratic snafu and she'd ended up with two when she'd only ordered one. When the people at Little Sicily had realized their mistake, they'd given her a call, but she'd successfully convinced them that she was owed both pizza, considering how doughy both turned out to have been [Grammar meta-comment: what tense was that verb?]. Regarding her own Sicilian ancestors, Kim claims to have told them, "You call yourself Little Sicily. I am Little Sicily."
When we'd finished with eating our pizza, our house suddenly became a cheery center of socializing.
Firstly, Kim saw our neighbor Joe's co-worker Caddy looking for Joe, and and invited him. Shortly thereafter we were joined by Joe himself along with Joe's tall blond girlfriend Jeananananananaette. Finally, Lisa the next door neighbor came over. She started out sort of just lingering in the doorway, saying she had to do something with the boyfriend, but then she ended up hanging out. She said she'd recently joined a book club that had solicited me at the address that is now hers. From this book club she'd bought a disturbingly engrossing book with the unfortunately pretentious title An Underground Education by Richard Zacks. It was a lot like crack cocaine. It was nose candy for the eye. You could open it to any page and immediately be sucked in. For five minutes of reading, you were rewarded with some sort of mind-blowing revelation about reality, a revelation that your teachers, parents and the The Media successfully concealed. Suddenly you were aware that, for example, the Nazis had to enforce a ban on shrunken head souvenirs lest the World discover the Third Reich was carrying out unprecedented genocide. Or that the great Spanish painter Goya was almost a victim of the still-functioning Inquisition during his late, spiritual-political phase of the 1800s, but was saved by none other than the King of Spain. The writing is excellent and often sardonic. An example:
In effect, doctors in the Middle Ages often knew as much about the insides of the body as they did about the insides of a Ford Taurus.
We were smoking plenty of pot, so much in fact that at one point Kim went to the cordless phone cradle and pushed the "page" button to find out where the handset had gone. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! You know, you just might be stoned if you page your cordless phone with your right hand while it's in your left hand.
As I've mentioned already, the other day Kim finally took delivery of her new AlphaSmart 2000. It's a small, lightweight, ergonomically acceptable keyboard with a small, primitive 40 character by four line unlit LCD screen. It stores 128 K of data divided between a series of eight fixed-length files. Everything about it is simple. You turn it on and it opens to exactly where you left off, whatever file or character position that was. You type for awhile and turn it off, there's no saving or file operations that extend beyond a simple, obvious keystroke. When you finally want to transfer your data to your computer, you plug the AlphaSmart into the keyboard jack and fire up whatever application where you want the data to end up. Then you press the "send" button on the AlphaSmart. The device simply types your text into the application at high speed. There's no issues with data format conversions or hardware compatibility. It's low tech, simple, and it works. If you bust out a Phillips screwdriver and open the AlphaSmart up, you can quickly see that none of it is any more advanced than the state of the art from 1988. Yet, given its long battery life, small lightweight size and effortless use, it can substitute for a $3000 laptop for a good 80% of what anyone actually does with a laptop. For example, I could easily use an AlphaSmart to compose Randomly Ever After entries, since, in my editing process, simple straight forward typing is 95% of what I do. There's even a spell checker, the only unnecessary puffery in its design.
The only improvement I can imagine for this device would be a slot for a PCMCIA card and a FIND function. An AlphaSmart with a PCMCIA card slot and a FIND function would be a force to be reckoned with.
In an intensively pot-smoking, vino-swigging party environment such as we had going tonight, the AlphaSmart was perfect for allowing me to capture the fleeting ideas as they came up, the kind of ideas I'd normally like to discuss in written form here (but all too often forget by the time I get to this keyboard).
I think what I'll do is take the raw, slightly-edited AlphaSmart content and elaborate on them in red>
Window wipers for the rich
We were talking about how Jenna the German girl is angry at the landlord for washing the outsides of our windows, but not doing it carefully enough, leaving water marks. "I wash my own windows and I don't need him to do it," says the German Girl. I thought of a stupid invention for rich people in which windshield wipers would clean the outsides of their windows automatically. But since that wouldn't be sufficiently wasteful, I thought of an alternative design in which little hammers came out and smashed the windows after they'd been up for awhile, allowing new window panes to scroll up in their place.
I laid an egg and kicked a bitch
(It rhymes.)
I spied a mole upon the hill
Kim thought I should say "soul" instead, but I said that "soul" was too overused in poetry and that it had no meaning. Though Kim agreed that this was so, she thought that the rest of the poem was so chaotic that it needed "soul" to introduce some sort of unifying mystical energy. I disagree. "Soul" as a word is a little like "thee" and "thou," it is so archaic that it's been drained of the literary power necessary for successfully making solid, meaningful statements in modern English. Humans now know so much about biology and psychology that speaking of "souls" is like discussing the various "humours."
I passed a car with room to kill
I especially like my non-violent use of the word "kill" in a rhyming spot, a place a great emphasis normally reserved for words used in a non-metaphoric manner.
Double penis extra leg
This is in reference to a bizarre human freak photographed in An Underground Education
I spent a weekend in the Hague
It rhymes.
Craypah orgy is so fun
The idea of someone having a "Craypah Orgy" (using the "Craypah" artistic crayon in some sort of multi-person sexual-artistic frenzy) was Lisa's idea. Sometimes it seems as though she's trying to bust free from some sort of Puritanical youth, bullying into uncomfortable, forbidden places in the human condition. Her possession of An Underground Education is another indication of this predilection.
I wish I could get me some
That's a line from a song I light-heartedly wrote when I was in eighth grade.
Craypahs are an artist's toy
for every girl and every boy
She told me I could not persist
In using of her orifice
Wicked, wicked.
Hump me like the wolf.
Lisa went briefly back to her place to fetch a Duran-Duran album, since, like many people her age, the 80s was a time for the formation of nostalgic childhood memories, and she loves the music. But for those of us in our late 20s and early 30s, as Kim pointed out, "it's a little too soon to be going back to high school." And, for some reason, I typed this.
CADDY IS A PRICK AND IS A NO GOOD ASSHOLE
That guy Caddy got ahold of the AlphaSmart briefly and this bit of self-deprecation was all he could think to type.
Woah waw you
Show me the way
Day after day
Who was that guy who sang this song back in the late 70s? Was it Peter Frampton? Whatever happened to Peter Frampton? Motley Crue is back, though.
An Underground Education was such an effortless thrill to read that Kim eventually felt compelled to order me to stop reading it. I'd become a bore, wrapped up in the book and forgetting my social obligations. So I handed it off to Jeananananananaette and Joe. They found it every bit as good as I had, though it also spawned a rather amusing incident. Joe is a hilarious guy, but he's got a bit of that paranoid fly-over country thing going on. I wouldn't be surprised if he harboured belief in X-file-type conspiracies, fear of the Trilateral Commission, Black Helicopters and the Bildenberger Group. Regarding the Holocaust section of An Underground Education, he made the following polite-company faux pas,
"There are some people who say there weren't any Jews killed."
Jeananananananaette was obviously embarrassed by to have Joe say this and quickly responded. "But those people are sick!"
An uncomfortable silence set over the couch and spread to the others, though they hadn't heard what we'd been discussing.
So Kim asked, "Did Joe fart?"
And I said, "Yes!"
But only Jeananananananaette got the joke.
In other news, it seems that Jenna the German Girl has been reading my online journal. I've actually been aware of this for quite awhile. She's been having concerned meetings with members of the courtyard community and various Ocean Beach friends, completely scandalized and mind-blown by the whole thing, asking what to do, and, as though, in her ego-centric delusions, she's the single targeted victim. She's very upset by the things I've said about her and even claims to have consulted with attorneys. While there are those in this rather parochial beach community who are surprised and weirded-out to discover I have this means of expression, no one is nearly as freaked as the German Girl. In her narrow super-clean world view, art and self-expression is a very limited, mostly decorative enterprise, and when it pushes any sort of limit, it has already gone way too far. Anyway, Joe, who magnanimously claims not to care what I'm writing, was asking for my web address. He said, "I'm going to be all like double u double u double u and like check out your site." I get a real kick out of Joe when he talks like that. Here's another story Joe told, in something close to his own words:
Dude, who's that dude Farrell from Janes Addiction? Well, he was all like [head motions] sucking on this dildo and then he like stuck it up his ass. Then he pulled it out again and like [head motions] starts sucking on it again! Dude, there were all these guys in the audience with piercings and purple mohawks, and even they were like [showing a scandalized face].
Lisa kept having to go back to her apartment next door to talk to her boyfriend Danny about whatever it was she was supposed to be doing tonight. For her part, Kim kept trying to encourage Danny to come over and hang out with us, but he's such a shy, reticent boy that he wordlessly refused, to such an extent that Kim thought he was being rude and socially inept. Eventually some sort of argument happened between Lisa and Danny. When it came up as a subject of discussion, I tried to eavesdrop by putting a stemmed champagne glass to the wall, and though it must have looked hilarious, I couldn't hear a damn thing.
After our little impromptu party, Kim and I had yet another of our fights, but she doesn't want me telling what it was about.
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