!Eunuchs
An ordinary guy lying in a cold sweat in a dirtbag motel room
in Crosby, North Dakota.
I'm not a stranger to fear. I've bounced bars in Northern Canada
where, any night of the week, you might see forty bodies lose
a quart of blood over a dollar pool game. I've been in the middle
of a gang of raging Mexican bull-dikes bent on revenge and destruction
in Austin, Texas. I've sat at the Canadian border with a horde
of rabid customs agents swarming over my car screaming unintelligible
utterances about guns and drugs.
I've felt the cold, hard fear that dries your mouth, tightens
your throat and heightens your senses when you face the man with
the knife, the man with the half-crazed look, who smiles and says,
"Come and get it."
But I've never before felt the hot fear. The fear that terrorizes
your soul, burns your mind until you can't reason, the fear that
tears at your gut like a pack of bloodthirsty hyenas chased by
the Hounds of Hell.
The fear you feel when you know that
Gomez is coming.
/u
A dirtbag lying in an ordinary sweat in a cold motel room in Crosby,
North Dakota.
No more Mr. Nice Guy. How many times do you have to learn something
before it finally sinks in? Lean and mean, ugly and bad. Kick
their babies and rape their dogs. I'm copping a whole new attitude.
Anybody who has ever picked themselves up out of the gutter and
tried to make something of themselves can tell you what happens.
The whole universe, and everyone in it, declares you Public Enemy
#1.
The Netherworld opens up to reveal the Xenix rising from the
ashes, Daemons and Zombies screaming for the blood of the Righteous.
Gomez is released with the 'Watch of Eternal Damnation', unleashing
torrents of Orphan Zombies to break your brain against the rocks
on the shores of Reason.
Tommy James and the Shondells meet Neil Sedaka
I think I'm awake, now. There doesn't seem to be anyone around.
Gomez says, "If it wasn't for the word 'baby', there wouldn't
be no rock & roll.
Gomez doesn't seem to be so frightening as I wake up.
But waking up is hard to do.
Time to roll out of bed and hit the bricks. I need to jump on
the computer and pump out some serious production for a change.
A nice, hot shower will wash away the night sweat, both the physical
and the mental. Finish up with a blast of ice-cold water to cool
away the last of the night daemons, and I might even feel human
again.
I don't know why Denny gave me the damn watch, maybe he thought
he was doing me a favor. Or maybe he's just like any other junkie
who has some unquenchable need to bring anyone close to them into
the magic circle. Initiate them into the cycle of addiction, the
ever tightening swirl that separates you more and more from the
outside world until, eventually, those outside the circle seem
to be just ghosts passing through.
Whoa! Don't go back to sleep, dude! Sit up and get up. Now
is not the time to digress, but to backup.
It's easier to go into the Xenix source code to make changes to
get my Archive backup tape drive to work with their 'supported'
controller than it is to make sense of their instructions for
file restoring. And I'm supposed to train computer novices to
understand this gobbledy-gook?
"Yes, folks, just follow the instructions explained there
on the screen in plain English, translated from the Japanese by
Koreans raised in Bangladesh by parents who spoke only a rare
dialect of Swahili, used mostly by an obscure tribe in southern
Uganda."
"And if you can't follow the instructions, it's your own
damn fault for that summer of love you spent in Berkeley, eating
Deadhead Acid and trying to get into the hot-pants of that Porsche-driving
frosh that threw you over for the dude driving the BMW, claiming
to be in pre-pre-med." (which translates loosely into
three classes in Music Appreciation and one class in Downhill
Jogging)
Actually, backing up the hard disk to a tape drive is quite a
simple procedure with Xenix. Let me explain how it's done.
First, you take the $900.00 System Administrator's class from
SCO (Santa Cruz Operations). Then you log in as 'root' (the
boss daddy of all users), invoke the SysAdmin shell, select
"File Restore," and choose your backup medium (they
just had to make my tape drive option #13, didn't they?).
After that, it's just a simple matter of selecting the files you
want to restore and the directory that you wish to restore them
to. But you have to make sure, if you're restoring the files to
a different directory than they were backed up on, that you follow
the procedure exactly. First, you don't use the name of the directory
that you are restoring from (or is that to?), unless it's
the first or third Friday of the month (except in leap years,
and then it's the second and fourth Tuesdays). And you can't
eat fish on Friday (or is that something to do with Catholicism?).
Anyway, next you take the square root of the sum of the "ASCII
values" that represent the directory where you wish the files
to be restored (even though it's not likely to happen),
double it, and add it to the sinking feeling you're getting that
the files you selected (along with two or three hundred others)
are going to go to that bad place that your mother warned you
about (but would never tell you where it was, so that you could
find it), and Gomez is going to unleash the Ravaging Hounds
of Hell into your 'root' directory just as your boss is showing
the system to those guys from Cost Management that the Board of
Directors sent down to find out just what the hell they are spending
all that money on in the Computer Department.
Maybe now isn't a good time to do my backup. I haven't even had
my morning beer yet, and I probably should take some time to think
about just what it was that I put in the 'Informix' database directory
last night.
Mike Denny, my friend and mentor, drinks Wild Turkey to get his
mind straight, but the poor bugger has to deal with "Oracle,"
so you can't really hold it against him. I should have figured
out what was going on long before I finally did manage to clue
in to the reality of the situation. Oracle had sent a salesman
around to demo their database products and he not only screwed
up the demonstration, he couldn't even seem to answer the simplest
questions about the products. I thought it funny at the time,
but I didn't realize that it was the fear eating at his brain
that was destroying any hope he had of getting out alive. It wasn't
until I was trying to sell their products, and called them for
support, that it all started to become crystal clear in my mind.
I called Oracle for three or four days in a row, sometimes several
times a day. I kept getting recordings.
"You've reached Oracle Software, Inc. If you are calling
for sales information, please press 1. If you are calling for
technical support, press 2. If you wish to speak to an operator,
please press 0. If you've had your finger up your ass for the
last twenty minutes while waiting for an operator and you're worried
because it's starting to feel good, please hang up and call our
San Franciso office. Ask for Bruce."
Nobody ever got back to me. I was leaving messages telling them
that I had Arab Sheiks, with big, green garbage bags full of cash,
desperately trying to buy tremendous quantities of Oracle products
to give to the homeless as a tax write-off. Still, nobody ever
answered or called me back.
It was on the fifth day, as I was working out "Mary Had A
Little Lamb" on their 800 Hotline, that I realized that there
were no longer any humans at Oracle. The Orphan Zombies had nailed
the bastards. The computers had finally taken over. I felt a quivering
chill go down my spine as I realized that the previous day I had
actually left my home phone number on their message machine. As
my hand replace the receiver, I felt the need for a stiff shot
of Wild Turkey.
But, what the hell. I hadn't actually sold any of their products
and I didn't have to worry about support, so I popped a beer and
called Informix.
I still feel bad about that crack I made to Mike. I laughingly
suggested that instead of calling 1-800-ORACLE1, that he call
1-800-ZOMBIES. He turned as white as a sheet and reached for the
Wild Turkey. It was twenty minutes before I could get him to talk,
and I could sense from his terror-filled eyes that he could feel
Gomez coming.
As he comes for us all.
I felt bad for Denny, but piss on him. He never should have given
me the damn watch.
That's when this whole nightmare started. With the goddamn
watch.
tick-tock-tick-tock
Jesus! It's four in the goddamn morning and I've got to get up
early to call MiniScribe, Inc. about that hard drive. Just a simple
question. The answer is probably obvious, but I can't quite get
a handle on it.
"Could you please explain to me just how I, in turn, should
explain to my customer that the $1,500 hard drive he purchased,
which worked for all of an hour and a half, has been replaced
by your company with a two year-old hard drive that has been rebuilt
four times?"
I believe the phrase is "third time lucky," not "fourth"
time. Even the old lady has enough sense to tell me, after the
third attempt, to just go back to sleep and we'll try again in
the morning.
Denny...you bastard, I should have shoved that watch up your lily-white
ass!
I wasn't rich in the old days, and I slept under a bridge or two
during my musical career, but I was the "King of Country
Porno" and anytime I had an itch that needed scratching all
I had to do was tune up the old guitar and make a little magic.
Whiskey, money and women...all awaiting the appearance of the
Muse.
Steve Hendrix could have given you a tie for Christmas, or a briefcase,
but he had to give you the damn Seiko. Gomez whispered in your
ear, and you give it to me. What a wonderful watch. Time, alarm,
four-level stopwatch, message modes A and B, and a cute little
keyboard to program your schedule into it. And the son-of-a-bitch
even prints your schedule and messages out onto it's own little
roll of paper.
It was a Christmas gift, from you to me, and it had all those
neat little toys built in, but you didn't warn me about "the
catch," did you? "The catch" was that you could
do "Basic" programming with it, using the cute little
keyboard, the cute little screen on the watch, and the cute little
"How To Program In Basic" book.
You didn't tell me how easy it would be to get started in the
wonderful world of computers, or warn me about the desolate path
it would lead me willingly down.
It's just a toy, you can handle it. Just inject a few bytes
and see how it feels. Whoa, look what you did there. Nice little
rush, isn't it, son? Pick it up and play a little, then put it
down. Now do it again, but go just a little further this time.
Look what you've got that puppy doing now!
I spent the next three or four days, solid, playing with the frigg'in
thing. I made messages for, and memos to myself, to mom, dad,
my sister and brother---everyone I knew---and last, but not least,
to people that I might meet in the future. I printed them out.
I put in phone numbers, reminders, birthdays, events, non-events,
schedules, every fact, every detail having anything even remotely
to do with my life---and more. And I printed it all out---several
times a day!
I began programming in "Basic." Mr. Math, that's me.
Mr. Logic, that's me, too. Mr. Boy-I'm-Sure-Impressed-With-Myself-Momma-Would-Be-Proud-Of-Me-Now.
Mr. Goddamn SmaryPants, that's me.
For men...it's like sex. You get half-decent at it, and you think
you goddamn invented it. You look at those poor fools passing
by on the street below and wonder what they would think if they
knew you could make the variable 'i' count to a hundred, in increments
of two, nonetheless, (or four, or ten, or whatever I
decide---I have the power, the watch will do my
bidding). But you could never explain it to them, they wouldn't
understand. They don't have your knowledge.
Or Power. It's a Secret that mere mortals
can't fathom
Then you see the "arrays" and you don't quite comprehend
them, but you're intrigued because you sense that you have reached
the esoteric level of computer programming. The level that separates
real computer people from the pretenders and fakers. You know
that, when you break open the arrays' hidden secrets, you will
gain your first entrance to the Inner Sanctum, and there will
be no turning back on the Path.
You will be initiated into the Post-Ancient rites of the
Computer Age...and as your mind, your body, and your soul feel
the rush of the Spirit and the Power of the MegaGods filling the
very center of your being, you won't hear the distant Thunder
of Laughter that fills the Void and shakes the core of your new
Universe.
The laughter of the Beast that Devours.
The Beast that will strike at the Root of your Being...and slash
you.
The Beast that laughs because he knows
that nobody told you...
Gomez is coming!
/u2
Why is it nobody ever wants to do business with anything that
I know something about? Is it that way for everybody in the computer
business?
"You say you've never heard of it? You have no idea what
it does or how it works? Good! I'll take four of them babies,
and I want them up and running by noon tomorrow." And they
damn straight better keep the hogs fed and get those stains out
of my shorts, or there'll be hell to pay. I can get it cheaper
by mail, but I'm getting it from you for the support. Those bastards
always blame everything on Gomez.
"Oh, yeah. I'm going to need some software with that,
too. Better make it something you don't know anything about."
Things were a lot simpler when I ran the "Foxy Lady,"
a nude dance club, in Austin, Texas. When the girls got done dancing,
the Senators, relaxing from a hard day on Capitol Hill, would
buy them a $200 bottle of "Champagnette" (non-alcoholic
sparkling grape beverage) and take them into one of the back rooms
to socialize. The only problem I had to worry about was if some
fool actually drank the "Champagnette." Well, that and
having to listen to all the lame jokes about business being "up
and down," customers "coming and going."
Anyway, I've been working with "Informix" as a database.
It may be a bitch to learn, but I get to work with major businesses,
and it beats the hell out of piddling around with some drunk who
want to use "PeachTree" to run his aluminum can business,
but who doesn't want to learn how to spell, let alone learn how
to operate a computer.
Things either work smoothly or they don't. Kind of an addendum
to the rule I mentioned earlier. The one that says that if you're
in the gutter you might as well stay there because when you try
to crawl out life will be waiting for you with a pair of steel-toed
boots.
It didn't take long to find out that Informix and I were going
to have a somewhat stormy relationship.
It seemed to be okay when I first registered for the SQL (Structured
Query Language) class. Sure, they had just had a devastating earthquake
in the Bay area (Watsonville and Santa Cruz got totally crushed,
but San Francisco got all the press), but Informix's offices were
in Menlo Park, and I was sure that it was on the mainland. You
know---the mainland---where they have things like dirt and rocks
underneath the buildings.
No Way, San Jose. It turned out that Menlo Park was part of that
glob of Jell-On-A-Stick sitting out there, with water on both
sides, the 'Big One' patiently waiting for me to get there before
it hit, since it needed just one more mortal in order to get a
good body count.
The class was a lot like the SCO Xenix class. The instructor doesn't
actually talk, he just mouths the words as the script is played
out on a 33-rpm record played at 78-rpm. (For you younger folk
out there, this is an ancient concept having to do with an antique
device called a 'turntable.' Ask your parents or your grandparents
about it.)
They basically attempt to cram as much material, knowledge, and
logic as inhumanely possible into your brain during a four-day
session.
It's kind of like trying to get six changes of clothing, the Uzi,
and nine bottles of Scotch into your carry-on bag. But, as you
get ready to head to the airport, you at least have some space
in your pockets to stuff in some condoms, as well as a little
extra ammo for the trip. In the Informix class, when your brain
fills up around the end of the third day and the soft-drive between
your ears crashes, all that information just starts oozing out
of your ears and runs down your neck, making your shirt all sticky
and wet.
When you have dinner at the Howard Johnson's at the end of the
third day, you have to steal a spoon and get some plastic doggie-bags.
At $200 per day, you damn sure don't want the cleaning crew mopping
up all that information you left behind on the floor.
Informix doesn't have enough consideration to provide you with
an ugly, surly instructor to make your morning completely miserable.
Instead, you get up at six a.m. in order to try to find some breakfast
and still have time to spend the obligatory hour and a half in
traffic to get to class. Then you stumble in and meet your instructor...Dennis.
Dennis is smiling. Dennis is a morning person. Dennis needs someone
to smack him a good one right up the side of his goddamn head
and wipe that cheerful smile off his face. But when you've got
eight hundred 'big ones' riding on this class you're not about
to spend the next four days in jail. So you make a mental note
to yourself to drop by a biker bar for a beer after class and
find some speed-freak who needs to pick up an easy fifty bucks.
Informix makes the instructors wear spiffy suits and project a
friendly, positive personality. A nice, business-like attitude
and decorum. I saw through that right away. The people in this
class were not computer novices, they were pros. Their faces carried
the scars of programs that became ugly and turned on their masters.
Their bodies were impaled with fragments of files that exploded
like a Bouncing-Betty, blowing away not only egos, but sometimes
even whole careers. Put your average candy-ass computer geek up
there to tell fairy tales about the "Wonderful World of Informix"
and they would tear the sorry bastard to shreds.
But Dennis was a pro, too, and seemed to genuinely wish to help
everyone get the most they could out of the class. Kind of like
the lion tamer who has learned that it pays to be nice to the
big cats, lest they tear you to pieces.
I immediately sensed that there was something funny about the
boys and girls of Informix. They were just a little too 'Middle
Class America' to be totally real. Too nice, too genuinely helpful,
too overbearingly sincere. I knew that, underneath it all, there
had to be something weird going on.
Halfway through the second day I finally figured out what was
going on. Dennis began explaining the "sample database."
It seems there's this guy Sam. He runs a sporting goods store.
Sam doesn't seem to have a last name. And it turns out that since
this is a "simple database," that Sam doesn't deal with
credit, only cold, hard cash. It started to sound like a guy I
knew in Oakland who wore a beeper and rode a bicycle. You could
hit the ATM at three a.m., give him a call, and he always had
the goodies (he told people he ran an 'art' gallery, but I
never considered 'shooting' an art). I wasn't surprised when
Dennis explained that good old Sam kept track of his inventory
by manufacturers 'code names.'
The clincher was exactly what I had expected. It seems that, since
this is a 'simple' database, that Sam doesn't pay any taxes.
(Just what I needed. It's not enough that I've got Gomez on
my ass, but I go to a simple goddamn computer class and stumble
onto a drug ring. If I get to meet 'Sam,' I'll have to be careful
not to refer to him as 'Mr. Gambino.' In the computer world it's
dangerous to know too little. In the drug world it's dangerous
to know too much.)
Informix has to keep things cheerful and upbeat at the class in
order to keep the shadow of Gomez away from the door. It's kind
of like a vacation retreat for computer experts...or maybe more
like a cross between a rehabilitation center and Fantasy Island.
You play with a Disney World database program that's set up to
run as smooth as a baby's bottom (I've got to hold my train
of thought, here, and not get off on some sick, twisted tangent
that will blow any hope of a book deal with a publisher that doesn't
sell off of the back of a pickup truck in the sleazy part of town)
and, if you screw up and blow your database out into Never-Never
Land, you laugh and ask Dennis to help you rebuild it. You don't
have to worry about your next key-stroke resulting in a fight
with the "bag lady" over who gets to sleep on top of
the grate, or explaining to the children that Santa couldn't make
it this year because his mummy was really, really sick.
If you feel like it, you can enter your boss into the database,
give him a hefty cut in salary, a demotion (it seems he'll be
working for you, now that you've been promoted), and give the
racist prick a home address in the heart of the barrio. Don't
bother giving him a home phone number, the deadbeat never pays
his bills and 'Ma Bell' cut him off long ago.
By the end of the second day I had Ronald Reagan and Col. Oliver
North working for Sam. They turned out to be his best sales people,
next to General Noriega, of course. George Bush wasn't on the
payroll, but there was this unexplained check going every month
to a Post Office box in Washington, D.C., to some guy known only
as 'Skippy.' I had some discrepancies in the stock tables and
I couldn't fix them, so I just assumed that Ronnie had been stealing
from the company and I canned his sorry ass. I told him, "Ron,
that ex-presidential image crap doesn't cut any cheese with me
when I catch a guy with his hand in the till." I've always
wanted to do that.
One thing Dennis and I did agree on, totally, was that Informix
has some of best looking babes on the planet hanging around the
old job-site. They didn't seem to care much for being called 'babes.'
California girls tend to be that way for some strange reason.
One sweet young thing asked me why I was taking the class in the
Bay Area. I told her that I'd read an article in the San Francisco
Chronicle about the 'man shortage', and I was there to answer
the need. She told me, "Honey, there's no shortage of
your kind."
I wonder what she meant by that?
As the party broke up, on the final day of class, I sat back in
the corner watching everybody prepare to leave. Happy chatter,
bright eyes, three nights of sleep without Gomez haunting their
dreams, and all of a sudden they were ready to go out and kick
some butt in the Wonderful World of Computers.
The fools. How quickly they forget.
C-64
Why are the Commodores singing at the foot of my bed? And why
are there so many of them, fifty or sixty of them?
The music is sweet and beautiful, but I can't make out what they're
singing. And there seems to be some strange in the corner of the
room. A couple of people, actually, maybe more.
They seem to be arguing over 'sum' and 'null.' It doesn't make
any sense to me. The Commodores are singing louder now, I can
almost make out what they're saying. But the people in the corner
seem are arguing louder, too. "Sum---Null. Sum---Null."
Everybody keeps getting louder. "Sum---Null. Sum---Null."
No, that's not it, it's "Some---No. Some---No."
What's the difference...what the hell is the difference?
The Commodores are getting weird and starting to mutate. I can
hear what they're singing now. Oh no, please No! The beasts in
the corner are starting to tear at each other.
Sweet Jesus, there's blood and gore everywhere and they keep screaming.
Stop! STOP!! NO! NO......AAHHH!!!!
Jesus, I'm sweating. What a dream. Jesus, sweet Jesus. My whole
goddamn body's shaking like a leaf. The Commodores were singing
"I Know I'll Never Find Another Slash You." But '/u'
is the default user system for SCO Xenix, and it doesn't make
any sense because Xenix doesn't run on a Commodore 64 computer.
And the Great Beast who did all the slashing and bloodletting
was named 'Cron.' I've got to quit thinking about it, before I
go crazy. I've got to wake up.
I'm not awake yet...I've got to wake up.
More cold water...the colder the better. I look like shit. I feel
like shit. I wish that silly bitch hadn't told me her story yesterday
about learning the difference between some-body and no-body
on her computer system. It seems her Supervisor caught her about
to make a "simple little mistake that anyone could make,"
on her first day with authorization to actually, god forbid, change
things in the company database. And just because of that "silly
little asterix" being in the wrong place, instead of some-body
not getting a paycheck, she almost fixed it so that no-body
got one.
You can bet your sweet little ass (or hers, I've seen it)
that she didn't have a nightmare about it last night. Hell,
she didn't even have time to think about it since she had a big
date last night and had to do some shopping after work. She thought
it rather rude of her Supervisor to waste her time going over
some of the more bothersome intricacies of "that stupid software."
So why am I getting the night sweats over someone else's
mistake? And why was Gomez lying in the shadows of my dreams and
not hers, giving me nightmares over her problem?
Maybe it has something to do with the difference between being
a programmer and being a daata errntry oporator. Maybe the difference
is in whether or not you care. Maybe the difference is whether
or not you're living on the edge of disaster...and know it. Maybe
it has to do with the fact that there are only two types of computer
experts; those who know they are faking it, and those who don't
know they are faking it.
The dreams can get weird, but sometimes the things I think during
the day are even weirder. It's getting harder every day to forget
about the strange things, the strange forces...harder to keep
a firm grip on reality, on the real world.
I imagine that there is a giant clearing-house for keeping track
of computer knowledge. And every time someone finally thinks that
they know something for certain about anything, however minuscule,
to do with computers, the unseen beings in the clearing-house
immediately begin the work necessary to change it.
You go to bed knowing how to spell 'computer' and, when you wake
up in the morning, it's suddenly spelled with two R's.
I keep having this recurring dream that starts out so wonderfully.
I am graduating from the "World Institute of Computer Sciences."
It was founded by the major nations of the world to promote a
universal approach to computer technology. It is the most advanced
and prestigious organization ever to be formed by mankind.
It is graduation day and I am the last in line to receive my degree.
I am last because I have graduated at the top of the class and,
after the others have received their degrees, I will have bestowed
upon me the title of "The World's Foremost Computer Expert."
The world leaders are handing the graduation scroll to the next-to-last
person, and I will soon be called to receive my honors, but before
my turn comes I receive word that there is a new class on the
64-bit microprocessor that has just come out. I tell the Master
of Ceremonies that I must rush off, but I will be right back.
When I get to the room where the class is being held, the sign
on the door says "128-bit Microprocessor Lab." I enter
and talk to the professor teaching the class, who tells me that
the 64-bit microprocessor is now passé, and they have moved
on to the 128-bit microprocessor class. He tells me that I cannot
take the class because I have not had the 64-bit microprocessor,
which is no longer offered. I plead with him to allow me an exception,
since I missed the class to attend the graduation ceremony and
must hurry back in order to get my degree.
He decides to make an exception in my case but, before he can
begin the class, he is replaced by the professor teaching the
256-bit class. I plead with the new professor to let me take the
256-bit class. He tells me that if I had taken the 128-bit class
he might allow it, but since I had not even had the 64-bit class
he could not allow me to take the 512-bit microprocessor class.
"I thought you were teaching the 256-bit class,"
I cried out.
"While we were talking," he replied, "the
256-bit microprocessor became obsolete."
Is it my imagination, or are things getting just a little bit
out of control?
me and gomez
I'm watching an HBO movie called "They Live." It's all
about this guy who has these special glasses that allow him to
see the aliens who have secretly taken over the better part of
our world. While most people in the world walk around blissfully
unaware of their presence, he can just put on his groovy-and-cool
shades and see them for the scum-sucking, Savage Destroyers that
they really are.
It kind of reminds me of myself and Gomez.
I bought an external modem from Microware Distributors in Phoenix
last week, and got to meet their 'Xenix representative.' His name
is Daemon. Anyone with half a brain (and there's no shortage)
can figure out that there's something going on beneath the surface
here. And still, nobody sees, nobody cares. They shrug it off,
and mark it up to coincidence.
The average computer user never finds out about Gomez. It's a
well kept industry secret, (kind of like the Commodore 64---scratch
the surface of a lot of upper-level computer executives, and you're
likely to find a person who started out on a Commodore, it's just
that nobody will admit it).
Can you imagine the mass panic that would break out if people
knew what was going on behind the scenes of the computer industry...about
the strange, demonic forces lurking in the Nether world of hi-tech?
Even most computer salesmen don't know about Gomez and the Dark
Allies. If they did, they'd never be able to look a customer in
the eye and tell them how great their life is going to be once
they enter the Wonderful World of Computers. After the product
is sold, it's the job of the technicians, programmers, and systems
analysts to deal with the dark forces that are unleashed every
time a computer is booted.
They're the ones who wake up screaming and shaking in the middle
of the night when Gomez comes to haunt their dreams (with the
Dark Allies supplying the chorus of bone-chilling laughter that
cuts deep into their soul, to haunt them, even when they awaken).
Big business spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year
on the cover-up, fearing the public terror and resulting backlash
that would come if the general public ever became aware of the
full extent of the problem. A lot of the cover-up is just little
things, public relations type of bullshit, kind of like the military
naming a nuclear missile the "PeaceKeeper" instead of
the "Angel of Death." So when the average Joe has a
computer problem, it's the result of 'bugs' instead of "Daemons,'
or 'hardware failure' rather than the 'Hounds of Hell.'
There have been a few attempts over the years by well-meaning
individuals to enlighten the public, but the major corporations
keep an eye out for that sort of thing and manage, for the most
part, to keep a pretty tight lid on loose lips. The people involved
in bucking the system usually end up mysteriously disappearing,
or broken and destitute upon some street corner in a large metropolis,
babbling incoherently to passing strangers only to be brushed
aside or, at best, handed a few paltry coins and then ignored.
The closest the secret has ever come to becoming public knowledge
was when Bell Labs developed the 'C' programming language, which
spawned UNIX, and Xenix, and BSD, a form of UNIX which came out
of the University of California at Berkeley (a minimum security
prison for the politically correct). It was a major mistake
to have the young, malleable minds of university kids involved
in the development of a high-level computer programming language,
a mistake that Bell Labs was soon to regret.
Little did Bell Labs know that, in working with UNIX, the students
would stumble upon the underlying Netherworld of the computer
world which had been successfully hidden for so many years from
even most of the high-level technicians and programmers.
. After the students had opened a few doors better left unopened,
they found themselves beset upon by Gomez and the Dark Allies.
When they brought these matters to the attention of their superiors,
they were met only by denial and a conspiracy of silence. The
few who pressed the matter further or spoke openly about the strange
forces they were encountering either disappeared without a trace
or found themselves whisked away for 'treatment' at a distant
psychiatric medical facility from which few returned.
As more and more students began to crack under the stress and
strain of dealing with the strange, Daemonic forces of their hi-tech
Netherworld, they began to meet in small groups to discuss their
plight and possible solutions to their dilemma. When it became
apparent that they were indeed dealing with ethereal, savage beings
from a higher plane, they decided to begin meeting as a whole,
to form a Magic Circle for their own protection.
Those of us today who work in the Wonderful World of Computers
owe a deep debt of gratitude to the people who risked their professional
careers and their sanity in order to attempt to break the conspiracy
of silence that is enforced by big business with their power and
their mega-bucks.
We owe an even bigger debt to those students at Bell Labs and
UC Berkeley who didn't knuckle under, who organized a group to
secretly develop an operating system that would leave clues for
others to follow---for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear---revealing
the reality of the savagery and viciousness underlying the sleek
facade of the hi-tech world which is spreading swiftly across
the face of the Earth.
We owe much to the group who met one night in a cold and lonely
room in the basement of Bell Labs to form what later was to become
known as the 'Circle of Eunuchs.''
bubba and spot...asleep at the wheel
As the students met on that fateful eve they were surprised to
see in attendance a broken old derelict who was noted for wandering
the streets of the hi-tech areas of the city, refusing handouts
and pleading with passers-by only to allow him a few precious
moments of their time to explain to them about the mysterious
forces at work around them.
Unkempt, unshaven, he would babble incoherently, to all who would
listen, about God, the Devil, and the Everlasting Fires of Computer
Hell.
Almost everyone there that night had seen him at one time or another.
Some had even worked with him at Bell Labs years ago.
He was a native-born Texan, a University of Texas graduate in
political philosophy who had gotten involved with computers and
moved to the Silicon Valley. He had been involved in Sufi and
Gurdjieffian groups in Berkeley and, at one time, had a reputation
as a rather bizarre character in computer circles. There were
rumors that on his trips to places like India, Jerusalem, and
Tibet, that he had participated in various extraordinary rituals
of secret cults.
Shortly after going to work as a consultant for Bell Labs he was
spirited away by the 'nice men in the white suits' for treatment
of a 'nervous disorder,' and next appeared on the streets of Berkeley...a
babbling, broken derelict.
He became a somewhat comical, but beloved, fixture in the hi-tech
areas of town, and was tolerated and treated kindly, though not
particularly listened to. The locals had dubbed him "Bubba
Rom Dos."
As everyone settled into their seats at the meeting he took the
podium and began to speak. His words had a rambling, babbling
quality to them, but no one made a move to interfere with him
because, after the strange experiences they had recently been
through, some of what he said seemed to make a lot of sense. As
he spoke the room became increasingly silent, until everyone present
was listening intently and nodding in quiet agreement with each
pronouncement from the throne he had assumed.
He talked of the forces that have been with us from the beginning
of creation which, too esoteric for direct human understanding,
had been brought to the physical plane through rituals and symbols
so that mankind could work with them at a level that he or she
could understand.
"In primitive times religious rituals were more individualized
and scattered, as men worshipped the sun, the moon, wind and fire.
Then, as man organized civilizations, the various priesthoods
developed to 'intercede' on behalf of the individual to Ra, and
Jaweh, and Allah.
Then came Jesus and Buddha, Lao Tzu and others, and religious
beliefs and observances began to enter the realm of the common
man. No longer did we need high-priests, graven images, and animal
sacrifices to intercede between us and our gods. We no longer
prayed to
Angels, but to Saints---mere mortals like ourselves, albeit
'special' ones. And our priests became merely the cheerleaders
and bookkeepers along our spiritual path.
When religion entered the domain of the common man, then religion
and religious beliefs became common, susceptible to interpretation
by the average man or woman. All of a sudden, the Devil was no
longer real, he was a symbol. There were no Demons, only troubles
and woes.
Mankind lost its feel for the real forces at work in the world
until, eventually, we all fell asleep at the spiritual wheel."
Now, Bubba explained, the Evil Forces were regrouping to once
again take control of the world, and they had been working through
our new, hi-tech gods, the Gods of Communication, television and
computers.
"There were those who tried to warn us," he said.
"Marshal McLuhan was our hi-tech 'John the Baptist,' "The
Medium Is The Message" became our new Bible, but he, too,
was just a "voice crying in the wilderness." Others,
like the "Android Sisters," we relegated to the status
of clowns and entertainers as the 'Media' lulled us to sleep and
became our 'Waking Dream,' our new reality."
"Where once we sacrificed sheep, offering up the
blood of the innocent to appease our gods," Bubba railed,
with ever mounting conviction, "now we have become
the sheep to be led to the slaughter by our 'Gods of Communication.'
"And the shadow of Gomez falls ever
more frequently across our door, like a pestilence upon
the land and its people."
Bubba Rom Dos, derelict and philosopher, surveyed the crowd, which
had now gone totally silent, and proceeded to explain some of
the things he claimed to have learned in the Far East from a group
which was, according to him, actively working to counter the new
'Angels of Darkness' which had already begun launching their assault
upon mankind, using our own new hi-tech environment.
"Demons," he explained, "have always
worked their will through our own physical reality in order to
accomplish their ends. Television has lulled our minds into a
deep slumber, and now they are free to attack through the mechanisms
of the physical instrument which is becoming a part of, and controlling
force over, the whole of our lives---the computer."
"Our lives are tracked and controlled by numbers---our
address, our phone number, our social security number, our driver's
license and passport numbers. And now all these numbers are being
controlled by computers---computers that can communicate all around
the world, at the touch of a button. Computers that can, in an
instant, separate us into categories according to our names, our
race, our political beliefs, or by the names of our children.
Computers that know all, and see all."
Bubba explained how the Evil One is making his bid, once again,
to write his own happy ending in the Final Chapter of the war
between the 'forces of good and evil.' He told of how Gomez and
the Dark Allies (Daemons, Zombies, and Orphan Zombies) have been
unleashed to wreak their havoc in the Final Battle, with the Hounds
of Hell nipping at our heels and the dreaded Cron orchestrating
this whole savage 'Dance of Armageddon.'
By now the crowd had grown deathly silent and Bubba, sensing that
they were, individually and collectively, on the edge of despair,
began talking about what could be done to alleviate, and perhaps
even remedy, the present desperate situation.
He explained that the reason that many of the best computer hackers
around were teenagers was that they are in the hot, throbbing
throes of puberty, and were thus very conscious of the yin-yang
aspects of computers, which basically consist of just hardware
and software. The hardware, he said, is the yang, or male aspect,
of computers, while the software is the yin, or female, component.
"Hardware is very ego-centered, it wants everything it's
own way. In order to operate correctly, it wants everything to
be very structured, in the place it wants it to be in, and meeting
its own narrow criterion. When you turn the hardware on it gives
itself a little diagnostic 'hitch in the crotch' to check its
equipment, and says, 'let's get at it'---it's ready for some action."
"Software is more flexible and malleable. It is more willing
to go with the flow and change to meet the requirements for the
job at hand, rather than forcing things to be done in a certain
way. Good software will do anything you want it to do---it just
wants to be coaxed with the right words and syntax, so that you
don't think of it as being too 'easy.'
Bubba explained that programmers are what Gurdjieff referred to
as the 'third,' or 'unifying,' force in the universe, capable
of bringing the yin and yang aspects of the cosmos into union
with one another to produce a third, unique force.
"Programmers are the unifying force that supply the energy
enabling two separate and unique components, hardware and software,
to have a relationship that is capable of productivity and growth.
A marriage of matter that could spawn and produce a multitude
of children to go forth and do many new things in the world, for
better or worse, for good or for evil."
"You are society's last hope for thwarting
the Forces of Evil gearing up for the final battle, readying themselves
to wreak grievous havoc upon the world, such that it has never
known. It is up to you to 'raise the torch,' and let the 'light
of knowledge' spread throughout the civilized world, in the thread
of 'clues' scattered throughout the UNIX operating system, and
throughout your programming and your instructions."
"You must band together, man and woman, young and old,
into a 'Magic Circle' for your own protection from the Forces
of Darkness! You must develop your own secret codes and rituals
to deal with the Evil Forces which will beset you daily once you
set foot on the Path of Righteousness."
At this point Bubba, who had been sucking rather liberally on
a bottle of Wild Turkey during this rousing and inspiring 'spiritual
soliloquy,' started to lose his train of thought and began to
babble randomly about young boys' hardware and young girls' software,
making statements that downright smacked of pedophilia, and it
turned into quite a nasty scene before the students finally threw
him out of the meeting.
But a spark had been ignited before the old geezer finally lost
control of his mind, as well as some of his bodily functions,
and the evening marked the initial development of the 'Post-Ancient
Rites' of the Computer Age---and the beginning of an underground
Secret Society later to become known by those within the 'Magic
Circle' as the "Circle of Eunuchs."
the quick red fox meets rompin' ronnie hawkins
It's 2 a.m., Tucson time, and here I am sitting in my mini-motorhome,
in butt-fuck California, still banging away at the keyboard.
It's not bad enough that the old lady finally came to her senses
and threw me out, not to mention the fact that the rest of my
personal life has totally gone to shit, but now Gomez has decided
that I've been getting too much sleep lately, and has set the
Hounds of Hell on my ass again.
"Gomez," I sez, "the reason I'm getting
all this sleep is because it's so tiring crying your eyes out
for two and three hours at a time. Give me a goddamn break."
I never saw the bastard coming this time. I'd forgotten all about
him. That's the way he likes it, I guess. He waits until you're
not looking and gives you a quick, stiff one in the gonads---with
steel-toed boots.
It was getting late, but, I thought I'd check out the FourGen
Accounting database disks I had gotten from Distribupro in San
Jose. Something simple and easy, real basic. Quick and clean,
and then off to bed for a refreshing night of slumber.
(Right. And I have this ocean-front property outside of Tucson
I can let you have dirt-cheap.)
OK, so Distribupro sent me $3,000.00 worth of the wrong software.
They sent the accounting package for a 386 instead of a 286. No
problem. I just call them up and they send out the correct version,
right? But when I call Jeff, their technician, he tells me that
FourGen told him that the package runs slower than piss on a 286
and nobody in their right mind would use it on one.
I like Jeff, but the man has obviously lost his cookies, so I
call FourGen. They proceed to tell me that they indeed developed,
packaged and marketed a product that they do not recommend. "Runs
slower than piss on a 286."
No problem. I just told my customer---Shelter Industries---that
it's goddamn time they stopped screwing around on that little
'shit-banger' 286 (that I sold them), and pop a 386 Hawk motherboard
under the hood that'll make them tires smoke like a bitch in heat.
So now that they've spent $900.00 on a motherboard and another
$600.00 to upgrade their SCO Xenix to the 386 version, all I have
to do is to make this stuff work.
(Sure. And if you act now on that ocean-front property I have
in Tucson, I'll throw in a 1990 DeLorean with steel-belted radials
(they only come with snow-tires---the type with spikes).)
I tried copying the Informix 4GL-RDS (Fourth Generation Language-Runtime
Development System) disks to my hard drive and all hell broke
loose. I'm getting filenames with the little happy-face guy in
them and things on my screen that look like a broken coil-spring
from a '68 Chevy. And the rest of the screen looks like it does
when I go to the kitchen for a beer and come back to find the
cat has walked across my keyboard and set in motion forces akin
to the outbreak of World War III.
When I try running a utility program, to see if anything else
is screwed up, the Hounds of Hell start screaming through my disk
like 'jalapenos through a rat's asshole.'
I spent sixteen hours cursing, pleading, and crying, until there
was a serious chance that the resulting perspiration and tears
would ruin the disks forever, and then I broke down and called
Mike Denny. Rather than cop to the fact that I was trying to weasel
him into spending light-years of his time helping me try to make
chicken-salad out of chicken-shit, I invited him and his old-lady
out to dinner. After we had chowed down about fifty bucks worth
of seafood and steak, we headed back to their place and I casually
mentioned that I had my computer in the motorhome and I'd like
him to take a look at something for me.
Mike knows I only hang out with him because he's the last smoker
in Berkeley, but I'd just dropped my whole wad on dinner without
once making a pass at his hot-bod old lady (for all you feminists
out there, yes, she does have a name, 'Marian'), so he agreed
to have a look at my problem.
So after I'd spent sixteen hours of my time beating my head against
the wall, and the best advice Informix's support line could come
up with was, "It ought to work," Mike has to be a wise
guy and figure it out in twenty minutes flat (with a five minute
cigarette break). And while I'm sitting here moping over the fact
that I could have taken Mike and Marian out to McDonalds---if
I'd known it would take him a lousy twenty minutes worth of work---he
explained that they had copied the programs to the disks with
an entirely different utility than the one they had instructed
me to use to copy the disks onto my hard-drive, and that the two
different utilities had a serious problem with sibling rivalry.
He also explained that the First Rule of the computer business
is that if you make things that just simply work as directed,
then customers won't view it as particularly exotic and, as a
result, won't want to pay a lot of money for it. The Second Rule
of the computer business, it seems, is that there's a lot of money
to be make in customer support.
("Having a little problem, are we? We offer Support Level
1, Support Level 2, and Support Level 'Send-Us-Your-First-Born-Child-And-We'll-Make-Sure-You-Don't-Look-Totally-Incompetent-In-Front-Of-Your-Customers'")
It's like WordPerfect. They make their word-processing program
so complicated that you have to take a two-day class in order
to learn how to type "the quick, red fox, etc.," so
they can justify charging you $500.00 for the software, $200.00
for the class and, in return, you get the privilege of turning
your nose up slightly in the air when you announce to the world
that you 'know' WordPerfect.
Now that I've gotten the Informix runtime disks installed, I've
had a chance to install the FourGen disks. Nine goddamn times,
as a matter of fact. Four modules, installed every possible way
known to mankind, and some that aren't. And it still doesn't work.
After a half-hour conference call between Distribupro, FourGen
and myself, it seems that some of the modules I have are Version
2, others are Version 3, and, once again, sibling rivalry being
what it is, they're dumping all over each other like little brats
in the process of self-creating the troubled childhood they will
later complain about.
No problem. Distribupro says that they'll just exchange the disks
I have for the new version that they have in stock if I just drive
down from Berkeley and pick them up. But after I risk life and
limb on Hwy 580, the Freeway of Death, in order to get to Distribupro
in San Jose, it turns out that they don't have the new version.
No problem. They'll have it shipped in 'Red' from FourGen---first
thing in the morning.
It's four a.m. I'm sitting in a motel room in San Jose, pounding
the keyboards, cleaning my guns, and counting my ammo. I've got
two boxes of long-rifle hollow-points for my .22 Berretta; eight
Destructor bullets for my .38 two-shot derringer; twenty shells
for my 12-gauge Winchester Defender (00 Buckshot, 00 Magnum Buckshot,
and 1-ounce slugs that I use when I want to shoot a bear in California
and clean him in Arizona).
I'm going to spend tomorrow morning at the hardware store---checking
out the chainsaws---while I'm
waiting for the new software to get here.
The shit better work!
rest never sleeps
I can't believe it! I can't stinking, goddamn believe it!
It's midnight, it's a long-weekend, and I'm sitting here in a
dirt-bag motel room in San Jose with my finger up my butt, whistling
Dixie, staring at another set of disks that are good only for
putting under the little single-serving microwave pizzas I picked
up at the convenience store to give me sustenance during the heroic
hours I knew I would be putting in to finally get this software
installed.
I was worried about the tons of Info-Garbage I might have left
lying around my computer system, what with all the screwing around
I did to try to get the previous crap to work, so I decided to
take the machine down to scratch and reinstall everything, including
the Xenix software. I also decided to swap out the 4 MB of memory
from my 286 and put it in the 386 in order to make things go a
little faster. After I swapped out the memory I discovered that
the chips were too slow so I started to swap back the faster 1Meg
of memory, which was now in my 286.
Naturally, while pulling out the RAM chips, I sent one sailing
over my head, behind the desk, and onto the floor. When I finally
got the 1Meg back into the 386, sure enough, I had blown the chip.
Like an idiot, I hadn't kept track of where I had placed the questionable
chip, so I had to go out and buy a few new chips and start replacing
them one at a time.
Four hours later, 'Mr. Stupidity of 1990' had the machine running
again.
I spent another three hours reinstalling Xenix and adding my device
drivers and such, and now I am ready to install the new, improved
version of FourGen. Except that my new, improved Version 3.11.10
requires a disk (Menueze) that Version 2.11.10 didn't need. And
I don't have it. And I can't get it at midnight on a long weekend.
And there's nobody to MUTILATE
and to KILL because they've all gone to Vail, Colorado---to
ski---over the long weekend, while you sit in this dirtbag
motel room, eating crummy
little pizzas and playing with Little Peter.
I'm sitting here re-oiling the guns, sharpening the teeth on my
shiny new chainsaw and making lists of the hostages I can take
at Distribupro until they get me ALL THE GODDAMN DISKS!!!
I won't take Jeff, the tech, because he's really busted his
butt to try to take care of me. Anne Aliodi, my sales rep, is
out, because she gave me a super deal on some software because
of all the problems I've been having. That good-looking black
lady at the reception desk is a good prospect, but I think she
had on a wedding ring and her husband is probably an ex-Vietnam
Commando who isn't ever really very happy unless he's cutting
the nuts off of someone who has fucked with him or his wife.
I guess it'll have to be that tall, sexy, strawberry-blonde.
A woman who has learned to walk the way she does probably plays
a mean game of hide-the-salami. I'll take her to a nice Italian
restaurant first---to get her in the mood. (I've found, from experience,
that hostages seldom try to escape before the food arrives because
they feel that they deserve a good meal, for all their trauma,
and that after the meal they're too full and relaxed to make a
serious run for it.)
I can grab that brunette that sometimes works the reception
desk, too, so that Rob Lowe has a date. I hope she knows how to
work a video camera.
I can stop by Basis, Inc., in Emmeryville and invite Pat and
Vivi along. I'll tell them that Rob and I are doing a feature
for Playboy on women in the computer industry, called "The
Girls Who Love To Byte A Bit."
We can get a suite and a conference room at the Holiday Inn,
hire the Grateful Dead and a caterer, and have a party-down hostage
situation that will have people flying in from Europe, just to
get in on it. It'll probably become a goddamn Annual Event, the
"Hostage Hootenanny."
I think I'd better crack another beer and wash down a few reality-pills.
That was actually starting to sound like a good idea.
This shit is driving me crazy, and I think people are starting
to notice. My nephew, Noah, tells people that I'm a dyslexic,
agnostic insomniac, and that I stay up all night wondering if
there really is a dog. When I order a steak at Spatz there's
whispering among the staff as they glance nervously in my direction,
and then they remove my steak-knife and serve my steak already
sliced. In Berkeley they kicked me out of my herpes support-group
because they found out that I don't really have it---I was just
there to meet women.
I just flew in from L.A., and boy, are my arms tired.
Shit. I think I'm losing it. I've been up so long that I can't
get down. I need to get some sleep...rest my mind and try to get
back to something approaching normality. I can't let Gomez get
to me. I need to sleep...sleep......sleep.
But if you sleep, then Gomez will come, and you really can't
handle that kind of pressure anymore. So why not just give up?
No...I've got to stay awake! The bastard's winning! He wants me
out of the way so that I can't warn the others. I won't sleep,
I'll just close my eyes and rest for a few minutes. I'll just
close my eyes, but I won't go to sleep. I'll just rest......rest...
this little piggy went to market
The Chainsaw is my friend. We sleep together. We sleep
together and we dream.
We dream of going to Washington and getting ready for the FourGen
Food Fair. FourGen steaks. FourGen ribs. FourGen huevos. All rendered
from those wonderful people at FourGen Software, Inc., who will
not live to see FiveGen.
Jesus...I almost drifted off there for a moment. I've got to face
up to the fact that I'm sitting here going crazy because I've
forgotten my own First Rule of the computer industry---that great
Pearl of Wisdom that I've passed on to the many people I have
encountered in my business dealings.
"Never be at the forefront of technology. Always stay
a step back and slightly to the left."
Never buy a new product. Never buy Version X.0, wait for Version
X.1, after they've exorcised the Daemons (what they laughingly
call 'bug-fixing'). Let other people go ahead to block
for you. Let them deal with the headaches. Let them
suffer in pain and writhe in agony in order to find the problems
for the makers of the software, the ones who were so eager to
get it to market.
Beware of the words, 'New and Improved'---'Breathtaking New Capabilities'---New,
Enhanced Version.'
I was reading in Fortune Magazine how it takes some ungodly amount
of time to develop good software---something like ten thousand
or so man-years of work to develop a program like Lotus 1-2-3.
What they didn't mention was that the programs are released after
about six or eight man-hours of development (counting lunch and
coffee-breaks). It is then turned over to the Marketing Department
who proceed to announce it as "A Major Breakthrough in
Software Technology." Then they release it for sale after
spending millions of dollars convincing the computer-addicted
masses that they've got to have it and, by God, have it now.
I'm basically a pretty sick puppy, especially when I don't get
my 'meds,' but next to software developers, I'm a goddamn Saint.
Software developers are generally sadistic bastards who can't
have sex without whips, chains, three hundred nails, and a half-gallon
of SuperGlue. If they see someone smiling while using their program
they have a fit.
It their software seems to work, they come out with an 'enhanced,'
updated version. If it still seems to work, they go to the end-users
houses late at night and murder them in their sleep.
Personally, I get my cheap thrills in other ways. "Hey
kids. Here's some matches. See the fire? Pretty, pretty fire."
And one of my favorites, "Here's a gun, just like on TV.
Don't worry, it's not loaded. Now go play!"
I talked to Jeff Hooper today, at Distribupro. He's in no better
position than I am. I've spent a hundred hours trying to get this
shit to work, and he's spent a hundred hours trying to help me
get it to work.
And FourGen spent six hours developing the software.
I wonder if Jeff knows how to handle a chainsaw, or a shotgun?
We could split travel expenses to Washington.
Damn, I'm tired! I think I'll try to get a little sleep. I finally
broke down and called Bubba Rom Dos. The night they threw him
out of that meeting of the Circle of Eunuchs he and I went out
and got totally shit-faced on 'Dirty Mothers.' After I woke up
on the bathroom floor I dug a piece of paper out of the blood
and the vomit and it had his phone number on it, with a note telling
me I could call him any time, night or day if Gomez was closing
in a little too hard and fast on me.
At the time, I didn't really take all of this Forces of Darkness
stuff too seriously. But I kept the number. And tonight...I called.
We talked for several hours. In the end, he told me to go ahead
and get some sleep, but to try to think of the things he had told
me before letting myself drift off to sleep.
He said that holding on to an awareness of the reality of the
forces at work in our world was half the battle in retaining one's
balance...and sanity.
I don't know that I believe everything he said but---for right
now---it beats the hell out of not knowing what to believe.
One more beer...and then it's bedtime for Bonzo.
the council of darkness
In the distant past, Gomez and the Dark Forces worked their will
through direct human contact,---religions and cults who worshipped
the Evil One and who fought for Empires, and Souls. There were
times when they gave the Forces of Good a serious run for their
money. They gave strength and power to the rulers of World Empires
who would, in turn, enforce the worship of the Evil One's idols
by their subjects and offer them up for sacrifice to the Dark
Ones.
Unfortunately, for them, they had a serious run of bad luck when
the likes of Buddha, Jesus, Socrates and Confucius would get a
grass-roots thing going that would lead to large pockets of mankind
becoming more civilized and goody-two-shoes than the Evil One
was happy with.
Gomez and the Dark Forces constantly found themselves losing ground
to these upstarts---relegated, time and again, to fighting local
battles around the world, stirring up wars in small countries,
working behind the scenes through various secret societies and
diverse cults. Sure, they got a few World Wars going, had some
bad-asses like the Pharaohs, and Hitler, who got their symbols
out front for all to see, and got some serious death and destruction
happening at times over a major portion of the earth.
But it kept turning out that the Forces Of Light had the better
hand, and each attempt to achieve the Final Armageddon faltered,
then fizzled.
Then, shortly after the turn of the Twentieth Century, the Evil
One called a Council of Darkness, and Gomez had his ass on the
line. But as he stood in Judgment before the Council he envisioned
a plan, which he immediately put before the Evil One, that not
only pleased the Him immensely but also set in motion the most
serious threat in the history of mankind to the Master Scheme
to turn human beings into the crowning gem of Creation.
Gomez and the Dark Forces had always worked their will through
the humans who ruled the earth, the men and women of power who
controlled the lives of the people they had brought into subjection
to them. They utilized the King, the Pharaoh, the High Priest
and High Priestess---the wealthy, the powerful---but something
had always gone wrong.
There was always some missing element, a key ingredient they lacked,
that would make the difference between a 'leaner' and a 'ringer'
in the Cosmic Horseshoe Match between the Master of the Universe
and the Evil One.
As Gomez awaited his fate before the Council of Darkness, he thought
about what had always seemed to go wrong with his plans; in particular,
the serious beatings they had taken in the Ages of Buddha, Jesus,
and the others. He realized that, although he had gotten good
results by working with the rich and powerful, he always ended
up "close, but no cigar."
And he thought about the grass-roots goody-two-shoes religions
and philosophies that had spread like wildfire and kicked his
ass around the face of the globe.
Then, in a flash, it came to him. The realization of what the
missing ingredient was, and how he could use it as the potent
weapon he needed to lead mankind by the nose into the final, blazing
orgy of death and destruction that would bring us all to our knees
in submission to the Evil One, bringing his Reign to fruition
over the entire face of the earth.
Gomez realized that the Evil One had always enforced his edicts
by the use of force and power, controlling humans by keeping them
in bondage to the rich and the powerful. The Kings and leaders
kept the rank and file in line with weapons and by controlling
their physical survival and livelihood. The Priests kept them
docile, resigned to their fate, by controlling their values and
beliefs, their education and religious convictions.
But it was never quite enough. Gomez recognized that the Mighty
One and his Forces of Light had always parried his thrusts by
working through the ingredient he had put in humans that he had
planned to be the tool for their eventual development into the
crowning achievement of his physical creation.
The ability to think...and to reason.
Gomez could now clearly see that the Evil One's plan to rule through
sheer force and power would never work without taking advantage
of that magic ingredient that was responsible for the continued
resistance of these mere mortals who dared to oppose Him time
and time again.
Each time the masses were beaten into submission, brought into
subjection to the will of the Evil One, a spark had ignited in
some distant corner of the world and spread like smoldering coal
under the surface of the earth until it leapt from the ground,
becoming a blazing flame that destroyed the hard-fought gains
of Gomez and the Dark Forces.
The God of Light had given human beings a mere taste of the lifeblood
of the Gods and Spiritual Beings. A small gift that separated
them from the rocks and the animals; a gift that let them see
beyond life and death, and let them peer into the realm of the
Gods. The realm of Thought and Reason.
With thought came the ability to look around them and contemplate
reality. With reason came the capacity to develop and shape their
own reality. With thought and reason, mankind had an opportunity
to go beyond being mere pawns in the game of Creation and to control
their own destiny.
When Gomez explained his new-found thoughts to the Council of
Darkness, it was as if a lightning bolt had exploded the chambers
into an orgy of ecstasy. They instinctively realized the import
of this amazing new train of thought. They had come close to victory
so many times, only to have the ultimate goal of their power and
blood-lust dashed against the rocks and now, finally, the decisive
weapon in their battle for mankind was in their grasp. They would
combine their use of force and power with the insidious invasion
of man's thought and reason, destroying his capacity for free
thinking and rational thought process, leaving him defenseless
for the onslaught of their preparation for the Final Battle.
The plan that Gomez proposed to the Council of Darkness has been
proceeding at a pace that was beyond their wildest dreams, putting
mankind in the greatest peril we have ever faced. And perhaps
the greatest danger of all is that the average person walks around
blissfully unaware of the dark and insidious undercurrents that
envelops mankind on every side, in every facet of our lives.
Once again the Forces of Good have been forced underground, faced
with incredulity and disbelief when they try to reveal to mankind
that the Evil One is once again afoot in the land, making His
plans for the Final Battle. The 'Circle of Eunuchs' find themselves
working feverishly to rebuild a silent underground dedicated to
enlightening those few that are willing to listen to the Whisper
of Light that is being overwhelmed by the Roar of Darkness.
Striving to ignite in the world, one last time, that Spark of
Thought and Reason that is the only hope for the Salvation of
mankind---our last chance to avoid the Holocaust that will lead
to the Final Annihilation of mankind's Destiny as the Crown Jewel
of Physical Creation.
After the death of Jesus, when his Disciples and neophytes were
persecuted by the rulers of the Roman Empire, the movement went
underground, meeting in clandestine places, using secret signs,
throwing a veil over the light of their activities, and a shroud
over their words, so that their cryptic message would be seen
and heard only by those who had eyes to see, and ears to hear.
When Hitler's dreaded SS roamed Europe wearing the Swastika, a
dark reversal of the life-affirming Sun Sign of the Ancients,
rounding up and massacring those who dared to keep the faith as
God's Chosen, men of Thought and Reason went underground to help
save and protect the persecuted, often sacrificing their own lives
for the lives of others.
Now the Circle of Eunuchs discover themselves locked in a covert
battle with Forces that have railed against mankind for Millenniums,
facing the disbelief and terror of others in their efforts to
enlighten mankind about the Evil Forces once again massing throughout
the world in a chilling endeavor to bring us to our ultimate destruction.
While we sleep our way through our daily lives, in unawareness,
the Movement is spreading through Secret Circles spanning the
face of the globe, helping to prepare mankind for the Final Battle.
fourgen lives!
I had a conference call with Tony at FourGen and Jeff at Distribupro
and we figured out that the latest problem was exactly what I
had figured out two weeks ago---there is no problem. All the error
messages I've been getting in the 'error log' file were referring
to items that didn't apply to the 'Retail' version of FourGen
software.
It seems that no one else installing the Retail version has bothered
checking the error logs to see if there were any problems---so
they never noticed any. And all the error messages I kept receiving
were from things that applied to the Source-Code package, not
to the Retail package.
So now all I have to do is to set up the program for Shelter Industries,
send it up to them, and convince the Canadian Consulate that I
should be allowed in the country in order to help Shelter fine-tune
the program.
The last time I tried to cross the Canadian border the Customs
and Immigration agents got a little bent out of shape over an
obviously sick and twisted low-life such as myself attempting
to infiltrate their nice, clean, middle-class country. It was
December, half-way through a ravaging winter, and they were in
the throes of the early stages of Cabin Fever.
Canadians, particularly in the prairie Provinces, tend to get
a little weird about midway through their annual 'Attack Of The
Killer Glaciers.' Lily-white skin, glazed expressions, their minds
totally shot from months of staring at the flat, great-white expanse
stretching out before them, mile after unforgiving mile.
I was born in the U.S., but grew up in Canada, in a quiet little
Saskatchewan border town, and I've had troubles at the border,
off and on, pretty much all my life. When I was fourteen I used
to get drunk down in the States, miss my ride home, and walk the
sixteen miles back home, sometimes pausing in my drunken stupor
to pilfer the flags at both the American and Canadian checkpoints
before continuing on my way. As I got older, dating the Customs
Officer's daughters proved to be a major source of tribulation,
since bringing daddy's little girl home too late could result
in two-hour searches and having one's car impounded as a gentle
reminder that when daddy says "ten o'clock,"
he means "ten o'clock, or die, you little weasel."
Then when I was nineteen I got busted in Yorkton, Sask., for half
a joint of a green, leafy substance made by God, which at the
time was considered to be a major scourge of youth (though seemingly
not so major that it was felt necessary to list God as an accessory
in the indictment). Since half a joint was considered quite a
large quantity in a small town, farm-belt community, this event
made major headlines and resulted in certain of the Customs people
taking the view that I was the 'Mr. Big' they'd been looking for
all these years, probably supplying a major portion of the country
with every kind of narcotic known to mankind. The upside of this
situation was that I would never again have to pay good money
for a simple prostrate examination---all I had to do was cross
the border.
A few years later, when I became the "King of Country Porno,"
I began having major difficulties with American Customs and Immigration
on my trips back from the Great White North. I took a band laden
with Texas misfits up to Western Canada on a major tour of universities
and beer halls. When we came back through the U.S. border we were
wearing T-shirts that said "The Blowing Snow Tour" on
the front, and "CJ Parker In the Great White Snort"
on the back. We had posters on the side of the trailer that said
"The 'Trouble Boys'---We're 'Coming' For Your Daughters."
As if that wasn't bad enough, the bass player and drummer had
been hustling some young, Socialist coeds during the tour and
we had tons of Socialist literature and hand-outs laying everywhere
around the vehicles---printed, naturally, in bright, red ink.
The total effect was kind of like waving a hammer and sickle and
screaming, "We're drug-addicted communists coming back
to overthrow the government and destroy everything that decent,
God-fearing Americans hold Sacred." And it probably didn't
help that we had copies of my latest album on the dash---the name
of my backup band on the album was "Probable Cause."
Anyway, on my last trip to the Land Of Blue Feet, it was obvious
from the minute I hit the border crossing at North Portal that
Canadian Customs had already decided I wasn't coming into their
country, come hell or high water. They kept me sitting in a back
room for four hours while they put the dogs on my car and sent
an agent down from Regina, a hundred and fifty miles away, to
work me over the coals. It gave me time to try to figure out why
they had finally come to their senses and decided that I was 'persona
non grata.
'There was a tall border guard who worked the Estevan crossing
who had a hard-on for me ever since I answered the knock at his
girlfriend's door---buck naked, of course. And there were the
six North Portal agents I challenged to a piss-test (for substance,
not distance), after my last strip search. Perhaps it wasn't wise
to be standing up on the bar in their home town with my dick out,
screaming in front of all their friends and family that I
could pass a piss-test, but I seriously doubted that all of them
could.
At any rate, they pulled a nasty trick on me and sent a female
agent to interrogate me. I found myself sitting at a table across
from an outstanding set of hooters, struggling like crazy to keep
my mental faculties located at a point higher than belt-level.
It's an old but reliable interrogation trick. They figure the
more blood that's in your dick, the less you have left over for
your brain functions.
It works every time.
In the end, it turned out they took offense to a small incident
in Killeen, Texas, where I was charged with pulling a knife on
five armed police officers. I thought it was a fair fight, but
I guess they know my history and thought I should have waited
for more police officers to arrive before making any trouble,
just to make it even on both sides. I explained to Ms. Hooters
that I got the charges reduced to a misdemeanor by threatening
the judge's life, but that didn't seem to cut much ice with her.
I thought they would just cut me loose and send me back South,
but then the search team came in screaming about how they had
reason to believe that I had bombs and weapons in the car, and
sent the dogs back out to check it over again, and sent the agents
out to rip my car to shreds. Then they put me back in the room
and proceeded to question me about my plan to bomb Jack Furrier's.
I explained that the note they found in my belongings referred
to a joke I tell on stage about how I got kicked out of my Animal
Rights Activist Group for bombing the Jack Furrier Tire Center
in Tucson.
There's no law against bad jokes, so they finally kicked my ass
back to the States.
When I got to American Customs, they deemed it necessary to shake
me down for an hour or so themselves. They put their dogs and
agents on the car and took me into their 'little back room' and
asked me innocuous questions about everything under the sun. Then
the agent leaned across the table with a menacing look and said,
"How long have you known John Hinkley?" I realized
that they had come across another stage note I'd written, to the
effect of John Hinkley getting a weekend pass to go Quail hunting,
so naturally I replied, "We had dinner last week."
It didn't go over real big, but eventually they turned me loose,
as well.
So I decided to spend a couple of days in Crosby, North Dakota,
and have Shelter's computer person, Kathy, drive down from Estevan
for training. I used to joke that the best way to train her would
be for us to take the computer and shack up in a sleazy motel
room next to a liquor store for a few days. And now we were doing
it.
Well, not exactly shacking up. She had a padlock on the zipper
of her parka and made me leave the motel room door open so that
she could make a clean break for it if I got out of hand. Dreams
just never seem to be the same in real life.
So, a couple of days in Crosby, suffering the pangs and arrows
of outrageous temperatures, and I'm in the car and headed south,
right? Wrong. I took my car into the local Cenex/Farmers Union
service station to have a block heater put in, and when I picked
it up there was anti-freeze pouring out of my tailpipe like my
engine was just one big goddamn water pump built specifically
for that purpose. Instead of copping to the fact that maybe they
have made a slight boo-boo somewhere along the line, they told
me my car was a piece of shit and to go away and stop bothering
them.
I took the car to another mechanic who took three days to find
the problem---the Cenex boys had accidentally drilled a hole in
my engine block---and now I'm waiting three weeks for a rebuilt
engine coming by canoe from Oregon. And I have three weeks to
stew over the fact that the Farmers Union Insurance Company is
going to give me a stiff, hard one up the butt on this because
they know that I'll have to drive two thousand miles in order
to take them to court.
So I spent Christmas and New Years in a goddamn scum-bag motel
room in Crosby, North Dakota, where the locals' idea of fine cuisine
is getting an extra slice of cheese on your burger and the highlight
of the weekend is on Saturday night when they drive by someone
taking a leak by the side of the road, and they get to 'hoot'
and honk their horn.
And I'm sitting here wondering why I'm so goddamn anxious to return
up north that I'm phoning the Canadian Consulate every day, asking
for an entrance exception on the grounds of permanent insanity.
Maybe it has something to do with that Swedish aerobics instructor
in Estevan. Her eyes lit up when I told her I could help her stretch
some muscles in places that are really hard to get at for most
people, myself excluded.
Anyway, anyone named Gomez can't have much love for the cold country,
so maybe I'd have fewer problems up there. He's been screwing
with me big-time in Tucson, and I need a bloody rest.
trashbags
I think Gomez wants me down for the count. He's wrecked my computer,
my programs, my social life and my bank account.
I finally sent off my Archive backup tape-drive to be fixed. For
the last couple of months it hasn't had the decency to totally
crap out on me---instead, it 'almost' works. It takes me four
hours, instead of fifteen minutes, to restore my hard drive, which
Gomez has been crashing on me every two or three days.
My programs, which have worked fine for the last month, have now
decided, out of the blue, to give me all kinds of strange 'error
messages.'
"DATA FILES CORRUPTED! REBOOT YOUR HARD DRIVE AND CHANGE
YOUR ATTITUDE AND LIFE-STYLE!!!"
My social life has been even worse. Wendy threw me out again.
It seems she's been screwing this married guy at work and needs
the extra bed space, since his wife and kids pretty much fill
up his beds.
It seems his wife "doesn't understand him." Apparently,
sometime during the process of washing his clothes, cooking his
dinner, and wiping the snot off the noses of the 'fruits of his
manhood,' she turned into a pretty boring individual. He managed
to stave off the boredom by screwing around on her for ten years
or so, but now that the kids are pretty much grown and able to
take care of themselves, there's no reason not to just throw her
out with the trash and carry on with his life.
So 'Mr. Right' is getting the first 'white meat' he's ever had,
and I'm sitting around wondering why I never got any 'Thank You'
cards from my friends for all the entertainment the situation
provided them until it was deemed time to inform 'yours truly'
what was going on. My only consolation is the fact that she's
hooked up with a guy whose 'modus operandi' is to shit on a woman
and move on once he's done with her.
I needed a date for a Black/Jewish wedding last week and I couldn't
find a Black Jew to go with, so I did the next best thing and
phoned up some numbers listed in the Personals Ads of the Tucson
Weekly.
I weeded out the ones that seemed to be too much like a grocery
list. The ones looking for a "Sensitive, caring, self-sufficient,
professional, educated, spiritual, romantic, communicative, emotionally
stable, polite, protective, tall, blonde, independent, financially
secure, doctor-lawyer-policeman-fireman-jogger-rugby player, who
likes kids, dancing, opera, fine wines, movies, sunsets, long
walks, holding hands, talking until dawn, cultural events, fine
dining, cycling, hiking, body-building and travel to exotic places."
I'm sorry dear, but that sounds like the guy that's screwing
your under-age daughter.
There was a decided shortage of ladies advertising for someone
who likes to turn on the 'tube, drink beer and screw, but I narrowed
it down the best I could. I phoned a few of the numbers in the
ads and left a message basically saying, "Hey, I'm a pot-bellied,
bald-headed old fart who needs a date for a wedding."
I got a dozen calls. There's something about inviting a woman
to a wedding that seems to work; it probably has something to
do with catching the bouquet.
I ended up going to the wedding with a short, skinny vegetarian
(in the ads they use the word 'petite'). I tried to talk her into
chowing down on some roadkill from the buffet table, but she seemed
adverse to putting a little meat (pun intended) on her bones.
We had a good time, even though I lost track of her before the
evening was over.
I'd had my hair cut by Karen (the lady getting married) a couple
days before the wedding and I looked like one of the Hounds of
the Baskervilles. A word of advice: never get your hair cut by
a woman about to be married, they seem to lack focus.
Being of a generation where we had dances where the boys were
all on one side of the dance hall, with the girls on the other
side, I guess I'm a little over-sensitive about the concept of
rejection, having experienced, many times, that immeasurable walk
back to the boy's side of the dance hall once the girl on the
other side of the great expanse had laughed in my face. So I dated
a few of the ladies who returned my calls---out of empathy, if
not courtesy. Most of them were ex-housewives whose husbands had
thrown them out with the bath water once the kids were raised.
Their ex-husbands seemed to be running around with young working
girls who were pretty goddamn impressed with how sensitive, caring,
romantic, self-sufficient, communicative and mature they seem
to be.
After I'd dated a few of my 'ad ladies' I realized that I seemed
to be a little too rough and uncivilized (and used the word 'broad'
too much) for there to be any hope of reciprocal maintenance in
a relationship with them. It appeared that they were looking for
someone more---how shall I put it?---more sensitive, caring, communicative,
romantic, self-sufficient, and more spiritual than I am. Someone
more like the guy who shit on them and left them standing by the
side of the road. They seemed to be nice ladies and I wish them
luck in their quest, but I think I'm going to pass on the Princesses
who are looking for Mr. Wonderful and stick with the barflies
who may not be able to choose the proper wine to go with the fish
but can damn-straight spot a snake when they're walking in the
jungle.
I don't know why I'm continually surprised in this 'age of advertising'
and era of 'ten second sound-bytes' that people are more interested
in image than in substance. Cheat on your wife, steal from your
employer, beat your children---it's ok---but please have the decency
to keep up a proper public image, and use politically correct
language. Wendy gave me hell one time, saying "Why do
you have to call women broads? It's so embarrassing in front of
my friends." I told her, "Because they'd go ape-shit
if I used the word cunts." Women...go figure.
I remember seeing a movie where this man was asking a lady friend
what a woman really wants in a man. She replied, "Sincerity."
He thought for a moment, and said, "I can fake sincerity!"
Men...
I met a barfly a couple months after the wedding, at the Red Dog
Saloon in Tucson (it's more or less a 'shooter bar' with guns
instead of shot glasses---a little on the rough side), and I took
her home with me. Once we got in the car she started getting a
little weird, but when we got to my place it turned out that she
was just getting better drugs than me. I soon realized that I
had a woman on my hands who would fuck me for a pack of cigarettes,
so I bought her a whole carton and took her to L.A. for a few
days in the motorhome (I tell women that anyone who shows up for
a date with a vehicle without a bed in it is obviously not taking
the relationship seriously).
She told me she was living on the 'couch circuit,' had a kid in
Minnesota, and used to have a life. I took her ocean fishing,
we ate good, we fucked our brains out, and then we came back to
Tucson and I dropped her off. I wasn't the answer to her problems
and she wasn't the answer to mine, but we both got a break from
cold, hard reality, and I got another verse for a tune I wrote
called "Burnt Roses."
I was going to put my own ad in the Personals section of the Tucson
Weekly. It was going to say, "Pot-bellied, bald-headed
old fart wants a woman to wash his clothes, clean the house, bear
and raise his children, and then just fuck off out of his life."
I decided that wasn't going to cut it, and toned it down to read,
"Sensitive, caring, self-sufficient and financially secure,
romantic SWM, looking for a Princess to carry home to his Castle
and lavish love and expensive gifts upon." Then I shook
myself out of my drunken stupor, threw it in the trash, and played
a few bars of an old Skeet Anglin song, called "Pissing
On An Old Flame." Play that song in any bar in the country,
and I guaran-goddamn-tee you that most everyone in the place will
get a far-away look in their eye and start thinking of somebody.
Nevertheless, a man who has nothing to lose is a dangerous beast---and
I think I just may be one. I got to thinking about my 'ex,' and
about the time that I couldn't decide whether to kill myself or
go bowling. Something snapped inside of me, and I decided to give
Gomez a run for his money.
It's going to be head-to-head, heart-to-heart, and toe-to-toe.
As Sonny King used to say, "It's not going to be very
pretty, folks, and there may be a little blood running in the
gutter before all is said and done, but hey...this is Rock &
Roll!"
"Rock & Roll is not just music.
You're selling an attitude, too.
Take away the attitude and you're just like everyone else."
Malcolm McLaren
"So I took out my hatchet and chopped the Holiday Inn
room to bits. The television.
The chairs. The cupboard doors. The bed.
It happens all the time."
Keith Moon
"Those who will not dance will have to be shot."
Tuli Kupferberg
"I go to bed all right. I wake up twisted."
Ray Davies
"If I seem free, it's because I'm always running."
Jimi Hendrix
"If it wasn't for the word 'baby,'
there wouldn't be no Rock & Roll."
Gomez
dominos...dominos...who's got the dominos?
I don't blame them. Those damn little wafers they gave everybody
just kind of made them hungry without filling them up. Like Chinese
food.
There are a lot of Chinese people in Canada. I had a buddy who
was an undercover Mountie in Toronto, Ontario. He shot and killed
a Chinese guy one night, and later in the evening we were talking
about the sad event. He told me, "CJ, the problem with
killing a Chinese guy is that, an hour later...you want to kill
again."
I don't make it up, I just make it better.
Anyway, I've been giving Xenix/Unix lessons to the General Manager
of the local 'Dominos Pizza' chain. His name is Jay, and I find
him to be a kindred spirit; put him on a computer and he becomes
a psychotic sociopath. I started him out on my home computer so
that we could screw up and blow it out into never-never land with
no harm done. Now we've moved the lessons onto the AT&T machine
at his office, and his employees are terrified. They've seen the
mad gleam in his eye whenever he gets close to the computer.
A couple of his office staff begged me several times not to teach
him anything dangerous but it was already too late. The boy has
the 'fever' and, until Gomez and the Dark Allies are defeated,
there is no place of safety for databases anywhere in the world
as long as Jay is out there running loose.
I told Jay about Gomez, right off the bat. He's a sharp cookie,
and he would have known that there was something strange going
on the moment I started teaching him about Daemons, Zombies, and
Orphan Zombies. These are internal Unix processes named by various
members of the Circle of Eunuchs during the development of the
'C' Programming Language, and it still amazes me that many Unix
users can learn about them and use these processes daily without
ever giving a second thought as to the reasoning behind their
names.
Daemons are the processes which run in the background from the
first moment that Xenix or Unix are booted up. They are constantly
checking hardware and software, looking for the things that need
to be done, passing messages back and forth, and making sure that
everything is taken care of quickly and silently, without having
to bother the average user about details. Their value to Gomez,
however, is that they have a hand in everything being done on
the computer, while remaining silent and unseen, appearing to
be our own private little leprechauns until Gomez calls upon them
to wreak some particular form of havoc upon our lives.
The dreaded Cron, an ugly troll-like creature who lives under
the CPU (Central Processing Unit), is the Daemon that most systems
analysts get to work with. He is the most dangerous of the Daemons,
quite simply because he masquerades as the user's confidant and
helper. They can use him to perform regularly occurring tasks,
automatically, just by telling him to take care of a given task
at a specific time in the future. His real purpose, in Gomez's
scheme of things, is to report back to Gomez about the particular
wants and needs of the users, exposing what is most important
to them so that, when the time comes, Gomez knows where to strike
to rip through their soft under-belly and shred the entrails of
the system all over the floor.
Xenix and Unix work by using one process, the 'parent,' to spawn
another process, the 'child,' which, when it grows up, can spawn
its own processes and become the parent of other child processes
of its own. Often the parent process sends the child away, to
be ignored until the 'parent' needs it, and it becomes a 'Zombie,'
roaming the Netherworld of RAM, until the parent calls it back
to do its bidding. It's bad enough for the child, being ignored,
but sometimes the parent process dies before the child is called
back and the poor little bastard is cut permanently loose into
the Netherworld, with no purpose in life except to roam endlessly
throughout the system. It has now become an 'Orphan Zombie'...and
it's really pissed!
When an Orphan Zombie is wreaking havoc in your RAM you have no
recourse except to meet violence with violence and issue UNIX's
KILL command. It is one of the few tools that the Circle of Eunuchs
was able to slip into the system software that allow the user
to defend his or her self from Gomez's assault on their system.
Sometimes, though, you just wound the little bastard and have
to reach further into your arsenal for a 'sure kill' with the
Big Gun, the KILL -9 command. If that doesn't ice the bugger,
then you've got a major problem on your hands.
Jay and I decided to have some fun with Jan, the System Administrator,
so we put a few lines in the 'Message Of The Day' file, which
all of the users see when they boot the machine each morning.
It read,
I believe that it was this nasty little episode that basically
confirmed Jan's suspicions that her beloved computer system was
in the hands of a couple of genuine lunatics, and that the general
peace and tranquillity of their office world had now come to an
abrupt end. God help them on April Fool's day.
Several days later Jay and I were working on the system at four
in the morning, and about ready to give it up for the night, when
Jay blew out the 'root' password. 'Root' is the Boss-Man/Woman
of the system, the SuperUser login that allows access to everything
on the system and can do anything, anywhere, anytime it pleases.
You can't run the system without 'root.' And Jay had blown out
the password for the 'root' login just slicker'n snot running
down a baby's nose.
We knew right off that we were in deep doo-doo. We tried everything
known to mankind to access the system---to no avail. It looked
like we were going to have to rebuild the system with the latest
backup tape and hope like hell that we didn't lose anything in
the process. We finally tried booting the system with the installation
disk, but we still couldn't access the files we needed. By luck,
more than by design, I figured out that we could use the 'find'
command to access the 'passwd' file, and Jay figured out that
the 'find' command could be piped to an editor in order to change
the password back to the what it originally.
It was a harrowing experience, realizing how close we had come
to disaster, but it only served to inflate our sense of power
and feed our metallic blood-lust. We put the system to bed for
the night, and went home to dream of new and exciting ways to
pump up the adrenaline and cold sweat that you feel surging through
your body, mind, and soul, when you know that you're riding the
Big Wave on the Edge of Disaster.
burnt roses
Tucson has homeless people, like any major city, but we also have
a shitload of transients. The difference between them is that
the transients follow the weather. They're kind of like penniless
'Snowbirds.'
The Northerners follow the sun from Canada and Minnesota, et al---retirees
in motorhomes, or retirees who own Mobile Homes and Condos, and
who flock down towards Tucson in the wintertime for the express
purpose of giving the local economy a lift. The Tucson newspapers
call them 'Snowbirds,' the local kids call them 'Raisins.'
Aside from "Spending Our Children's Inheritance," as
the bumper-stickers on their motorhomes proudly proclaim, their
main gift to the local community seems to be enlightening the
local drivers to the fact that physical prowess does not diminish
with age but, rather, actually increases---to the point where
it becomes possible to make a left-hand turn from the right-hand
lane, even without signaling any intention to do so.
You can always tell native Tucsonans; when they 'say grace' before
dinner they always include Brake Masters in their prayers.
The Snowbirds come to Tucson not just for the weather, but also
for the multitude of wonderful golf courses that are native to
the area. Well, not actually native. The desert is a piss-poor
place to put a golf course. Mile upon mile of arid sand, native
plants and trees struggling to survive, and we pump out all of
the ground water so that old people can chase a little ball around
on freshly watered grass. So the hundred year-old trees in Tanque
Verde Wash are going to dry up and die, and the local have to
pay fifty dollars a gallon for water but...no problem. I've dusted
off my golf clubs and I'm going to golf while Rome burns.
Like I was saying, the transients work the weather circuit, just
like the Snowbirds do, and receive a welcome on a level comparable
to a pork roast at a Muslim feast. I went to a local gun range
to do a little practice shooting and asked the guy behind the
counter for a couple of practice targets. He asked me what kind
of targets I preferred, and I replied, "Transients."
He gave me the 'Tucson native' discount.
I was driving to the Post Office the other day when a transient
began crossing the street, using the crosswalk. Transients have
an odd habit of dawdling in the crosswalks, walking as slowly
as humanly possible, pretending not to notice the cars eagerly
awaiting to continue upon their busy way. It appears to be the
exercising of the last vestige of power that they have as human
beings.
Transients are the faceless ones. The only notice that society
seems to take of them is when they need to be rousted from the
places where decent folk hang out in order to do the things that
real people do. Society's rules and regulations don't apply to
them, for the most part. Nothing is expected of them, as little
attention as possible is given to them, and they have few opportunities
to exercise any kind of power that lets the world know that they
are, indeed, a unique individual to be reckoned with by the rest
of society.
Except in crosswalks.
Transients are society's Burnt Roes. They used to be somebody.
Somebody's son or daughter. Somebody's best friend in High School.
Somebody's wife, or husband. Somebody's father or mother. Someone
who had a history, a future...a life. They started out like the
rest of us; a tiny bundle of somebody's joy; a Rose bud that would
someday blossom and take its place in the beautiful bouquet of
life. But somewhere along life's path things took a wrong turn.
The soil was too sandy, there were too many weeds, or they got
too much heat and not enough water...and they got burned. And
they had to be tossed aside, because nobody wants a bouquet with
a burnt rose in it.
In the mad dash of rush hour---important people who need to get
somewhere to do important things---they enter the crosswalk. Slowly,
nonchalantly---knowing that this is one of the few situations
in their life where the mad hordes of busy, self-important people
must pay attention to them---they become real.
I'm in a crosswalk. I desperately need to get across the
street. But when I look at the signs they don't tell me to 'Walk'
or 'Don't Walk.' They say 'Gomez' and 'Bubba.'
They change---first one lighting up, then the other---but
I don't know what to do. I don't know why, but I am desperate
to get across the street, and I can't tell when it's safe to cross.
Then, thank God, I see that when 'Bubba' is lit, it is green---I
can cross! When I get to the other side, Bubba Rom Dos is waiting
for me, and he begins to speak...
After Gomez and the Dark Forces left the chambers of the Council
of Darkness, they sat down and devised a plan to take control
of human consciousness...to gain dominion over the thought processes
and reasoning power of every human on the face of the earth.
Gomez had seen the media bringing the far-flung reaches of
the world and its people closer and closer together with each
new technological development. Prehistoric man lived and died,
for the most part, within a matter of miles from the place of
his birth.
With the invention of the wheel he began to travel a little
further...into new and foreign lands. In the days of sailing ships
it took man the better part of his lifetime to cross the oceans,
navigate the world, and return home. Then came faster ships, then
airplanes and jets.
Communications technology made the world smaller, but only
at the limits of its current level of development. Mail brought
news over a period of years, then months, then weeks and days.
Newspapers brought news of the outside world to the average citizen.
Then suddenly, with the advent of the telegraph, the wireless,
radio and television, the world became an extension of ourselves---and
we became an extension of the world.
Now, when it happens in Paris, in Vietnam, in Russia, it happens
here---in our living room---nightly. Fashion trends, opinions,
world views---these are no longer our own private enclaves of
individuality. What we do, and espouse, belongs to the world,
and what they adopt and embrace belongs to us. All of mankind
now shares, in an interactive experience, the reverberation of
all that we do, individually and collectively,---spanning the
oceans and continents until it has finally become a truism that,
"no man is an island."
Gomez and the Dark Allies began their two-pronged attack on
mankind through the Wonderful World of Television. They had seen
the hypnotizing power of television, how it made us 'comfortably
numb,' how it shaped our world-views, our opinions, and our reality...eventually
becoming our reality.
Zappa tried to warn us.
"Watch me and I'll bleed you, 'cause you eat the shit
I feed you."
Fogerty just gave in, and accepted it.
"I know it's true. Oh, so true. I saw it on TV."
Gomez worked, as always, through the rich and powerful; secret
societies at Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, the Bohemia Club, the
back room at the League of Nations, and later at the United Nations.
But now he increasingly revealed to his human compatriots how
to manipulate and use the media to control the average person's
concept of reality until it conformed to what best suited the
desires of the Evil One.
We now live in an age where, in between the slumber of the
soap operas and the bewitchment of 'prime time,' we are fed our
opinions and world-views in catch-phrases and ten second sound-bytes.
At the same time, Gomez sees to it that there is enough trouble
and turmoil in the world that the World Leaders, even in democracies,
can chip away at human and individual rights under the guise of
dealing with various 'threats' that they, themselves, have concocted
as a means of retaining power over the masses.
Even as the governments of the world strive to bring everyone
and everything, however minute, under tight control and regulation,
Gomez and the Dark Allies are behind the scenes, helping to guide
the development of a technology that will, along with television,
be the ultimate weapon in their struggle for the domination of
all mankind---the Computer.
The rich and powerful have managed to lull us to sleep with
the hypnotizing power of television---stealing our thoughts and
our reasoning processes in our slumber, feeding us our reality
via the airwaves...according to the 'official' party line.
The government and the media have placed us on neat little
shelves where we are numbered and labeled according to their own
wants and needs. We are allowed the illusion of freedom of thought,
and individual choice, as long as we have our 'Freedom of Thought
Permit 1136.51.709' and don't stray too far from the permitted
paths.
In the great battles of the past the Dark Forces have always
been beaten by the individuals scattered in the secret places,
living unnoticed in obscurity. Living quietly and unobtrusively,
forgotten about in the madness storming the land, they have kept
alive the spark of Thought and Reason. They were able to go quietly
about their work, making contact with the individuals who were
ready to escape the madness and work towards restoring Sanity
in the land.
This time there will be no escape. Every man, woman and child
on the face of the earth will have a dossier documenting their
life from the time of their arrival on the face of the planet.
Information gleaned from the Department of Motor Vehicles, their
Social Security Number, banks, credit cards, magazine subscriptions,
charitable and political contributions.
When Gomez removes the masks of his human allies, revealing
them as dark agents who have been rewarded with wealth and power
for doing the bidding of the Evil One, the names of the misfits
and wrong-thinkers will be spit out of the computers at the speed
of light---to be rounded up and disposed of in the opening salvo
of the new Holocaust.
Only then will the final Battle of Armageddon begin, ravaging
the face of the earth and devouring humanity; bringing total control
of humankind under the Dominion of the Evil One, with nobody but
the Waking Dead left to carry on the human race.
my madness takes its ground
I used the 'old' colors...the new colors are part of the plot
against me.
I made Christmas gifts for my friends, with scissors and paper,
like we used to do at the 'Home,' only with real scissors, not
like those crummy plastic ones Mrs. Prudence made us use. I sent
all my friends some of those cut-out dolls that you open up and
there's ten or twelve of them in a row that you can string around
your Christmas tree.
They didn't have heads. Mrs. Prudence always threw my cut-out
dolls away if they didn't have heads and made me take extra medicine...and
punished me. But now I'm not in the 'Home' anymore, and I can
make them without heads, or arms, or legs, or anyway that I want.
On New Year's day I drank beer, ate sleeping pills, sharpened
the chainsaw, oiled my guns and made lists. The lists just keep
getting longer and longer. Mr. Chainsaw is going to be very busy
this winter.
Mr. Chainsaw is becoming intensely impatient. He keeps whispering
to me, in my sleep, that the nice people at FourGen are in league
with Gomez and that they must be punished for their evilness.
He whispers that they are working with the Dark Allies to drive
me crazy---to put me back in the 'Home.'
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning Mr. Chainsaw is
running---his cold, steel blade turning gently 'round and round'
in its infinite orbit, his razor-sharp teeth glistening blood-red
from the reflection of the morning sunrise.
"I am ready. I am waiting for you
to be ready, for your madness to take its ground...and then we
will strike!"
bop 'till you drop
Management-Customer Human Relations seminars that they bombard
you with out there. The ones where there's a lot of touching,
and hugging, and they teach people to say things like, "Well,
CJ, what do you think I could do about this problem that
would make you feel ok about us and feel good about yourself,
as well?"
"YOU CAN START BY CUTTING YOUR NUTS OFF WITH A CHAINSAW,
YOU SORRY SON-OF-A-BITCH!!! AND THEN YOU CAN WALK THROUGH YOUR
GODDAMN BUILDING AND SYSTEMATICALLY MURDER, MAIM, AND MUTILATE
EVERYONE IN SIGHT, THE INNOCENT ALONG WITH THE GUILTY!
"THEN YOU CAN FLY TO THE ICE FLOES OF EASTERN CANADA
AND WHACK SOME GODDAMN BABY SEALS OVER THE HEAD WITH A FUCKING
BASEBALL BAT, FOR GOOD MEASURE! BETTER YET, USE A FUCKING PICK-AXE
ON THE LITTLE BASTARDS AND SEND ME A NICE BABY SEAL COAT, DRIPPING
WITH BLOOD, WITH 'FOURGEN DROVE ME CRAZY'
EMBROIDERED ON THE BACK!!!
I'm sorry, Brad, but that wasn't me talking. You see, I am
a Channeler for Mr. Chainsaw.
Brad, the problem is that I have sold Shelter Industries four
of your software modules for around $3,000.00 and, because of
all the screw-ups, I am sitting here a year later with an accounting
package that doesn't work and that I can't seem to get any support
for.
The problem is that the Canadian distributors you have referred
me to told me all about how they were going to solve my problems
and then disappeared off the face of the earth. The problem is
that I lead with my chin, take people at face value, and expect
them to actually do what they tell me they are going to do.
The problem is that I am sitting here waiting...and waiting...for
all of this long-promised support, and I find myself with nobody
but Little Peter to play with---and Little Peter thinks I'm such
a fool that all he does is spit at me.
The problem, Brad, is that I think FourGen is a pretty impressive
software package, on the face of it, and I would like to build
Shelter's accounting and manufacturing Bill of Materials database
around it and Informix, but I can't get any fucking support to
make this shit work like your pretty little four-page glossies
said they would work
The problem is that my sex life has gone to hell ever since
I was served with the restraining order that keeps me from hanging
out around the local High School in my free time.
The problem, Brad, is that Mr. Chainsaw
grows stronger and stronger every day, while C J grows weaker
and weaker.
no basis to believe
I called Dr. Wm. Michael Denny at Basis, Inc., the other day.
When Gomez has you on the ropes, and your only options are to
kill yourself or go bowling, then it is time to turn to a member
of the Magic Circle.
The Circle of Eunuchs has a standing policy of disbarrment for
anyone who reveals the identity of another member, but in Mike's
case the point is moot. It can't be any great secret that Gomez
has you on his most-wanted list when your bar bill exceeds your
yearly income and you're hijacking semi-trucks full of Wild Turkey
to help deal with the pressure.
I was curled up on the floor in the fetal position, sucking on
both my thumbs and dialing with my toes. Mike listened patiently,
waiting for the sobbing and dry heaves to stop, and said, "What
seems to be the problem, Big Guy?" Always the joker.
I told Mike that Gomez had been all over my ass, sending the Daemons
and Zombies to trash my computers and my programs, that I could
hear Cron and the Orphan Zombies laughing in the background, waiting
for me to let down my guard so that they could move in for the
kill. I told him that everything was closing in on me, that letting
myself slip into the comforting arms of total madness was quickly
becoming my best option, and that I had no basis to believe that
even he was not in league with Gomez to bring me to a sorry end.
Life has not been easy lately in the Wonderful World of Computers.
Gomez has sent his minions to screw up my hardware and my software.
He froze the water pipes at Shelter, dumping water all over the
computers and printers. I was up until two o'clock in the fucking
morning with Martin Bebee, the Mad Scientist, pulling all the
equipment apart and blasting the parts with a blow-drier. We lost
the Telebit modem and the Archive tape backup drive. Ever try
to back up a 300 Megabyte hard disk to floppies? It takes about
a year to do it, it takes hundreds of disks, and if just one of
the disks goes bad, then you can kiss off your whole backup when
you try to recover your information.
On top of all of this, Shelter wants their Model Budgets done
for their Standard Bill of Materials and I can't find the program
that I wrote to do it. If I could only remember what combination
of drugs and alcohol I was on when I wrote it then it would be
a simple matter of ingesting a little 'hair of the dog,' and I
could find the program in half the time it takes Little Peter
to pick out Bo Derek in a crowd at a Lakers' game.
My sex life is trash, and I have to work in an office full of
'hot stuff' whose husbands are all oil-workers with arms the size
of trees. One of the ladies told me that her husband doesn't use
a gun when he goes out hunting because he likes to run the deer
down on foot and listen to that nifty cracking sound you hear
when you snap the fucker's neck with your bare hands.
Mike seems to have pulled my ass out of the fire. I was almost
to the point of throwing the FourGen in the crapper, eating the
$3,000.00, and getting another accounting package, but Mike told
me he would talk to FourGen for me and try to work something out.
FourGen had told me that they couldn't allow a Berkeley company
to support a Canadian business---territorial licensing concerns
and all that---but Mike explained, firstly, that I was getting
jerked around by their Canadian distributors, and secondly, that
I was a genuine, certified, psychotic maniac with a fixation on
chainsaws in general, and FourGen in particular.
FourGen agreed to let Shelter get their software support and product
updates from Basis. It's going to cost another thousand dollars
or so to get it straight, but hey...this is Rock & Roll!
There seem to be two distinct archetypes in the computer business,
those who wear suits to bed and make big promises, and those who
get things done. The day that Dr. Denny starts wearing a suit
to bed I'll have to kill him. Until then he's a Rose in a sea
of thorns.
my madness takes its 'ground round, 59¢/lb'---bop shoo-bop
I'm sitting around screwing-off with Bubba Rom Dos, derelict and
philosopher extraordinaire We're getting shit-faced on Wild Turkey,
eating sleeping pills by the handful, and trying to find someone
to blame all of our problems on. And we're quoting Kid Squid,
Rock & Roll's last true defender, who used to pull his head
up out of the toilet bowl, take a hit off the bottle I offered
him, and look at me with those blood-shot, sideways eyes, saying,
"I wonder what the lousy guys are doing tonight!,"
before returning his attention to contemplating the eternal mysteries
of the human digestive system.
Bubba was forced to haul his sorry ass out of Berkeley in the
middle a dark and stormy night last week. It seems that he had
pissed of Gomez's right-wing henchmen, big time; he managed to
piss off the local left-wing radicals, big time; and he had even
managed to piss off left-handed people in general. This, I had
to hear.
Bubba told me he had realized that with all the fucking madness
going on in the Middle East once again, Desert Storm et al, that
it was a given that the Polyester People and the Thai-Die Brigade
would once again be dusting off their fill-in-the-blanks protest
signs and clashing on the streets of Berkeley.
I interrupted Bubba to inform him that I had come up with the
solution to World Peace and would probably be receiving a Nobel
Peace Prize for my amazing discovery.
My solution to the problem is to have both sides in any given
conflict bury their casualties in a Tomb somewhere in Chicago
and seal it once the conflict is over. Then, in twenty or thirty
years, we have Geraldo open the Tomb on a live, worldwide, heavily
advertised TV Special. After hours and hours of grunting, sweating,
and chiseling---laced with flash-back docu-dramas and $50,000.00
per minute commercials---the Tomb will be opened to reveal that
it is, in fact, quite empty, and that no one actually died in
the war at all.
Defacto World Peace!
Bubba told me I was full of shit. He got up and went over to the
kitchen sink to relieve his bladder and shouted over his shoulder,
"There's only one true solution to World Peace.
We have to kill all the violent people!"
"Bubba," I said, "I think that one's
already been tried."
"Fuck you," he said, and continued on with his
story.
Anyway, it seems that Bubba went down to 'Sif'' Francisco to join
in the festivities. The right-wingers were on the left side of
the street, the left-wingers were on the right side of the street
and Bubba, being in the middle and realizing the mistake, had
everybody change sides. He then fired the starting-gun, whereupon
everyone started shouting and carrying on, releasing their pent-up
rage and aggression upon the opposing faction, in a fashion remarkably
resembling the very process going on overseas that they were all
so damn worked up about.
Bubba, in the meantime, was standing quietly in the middle of
the street holding a large white sign that was totally devoid
of any message at all. Just a nice, white, entirely blank sign.
Every now and again one of the right-wingers would come over and
ask him what the sign was supposed to signify, and Bubba would
explain that his sign listed the names of all the countries with
dictators and senseless slaughter going on that were being 'liberated'
by the United States of America for 'humanitarian reasons' even
though they had no oil. The right-winger would generally whack
him a couple of times with a closed fist, call him a Commie faggot,
and go back to his own side of the street.
Then one of the left-wingers would come over and ask Bubba about
the sign. Bubba would explain that his sign listed the names of
all the people in the Thai-Die Brigade who would still be here
protesting if they had worked out their anal-emotional childhood
conflicts with their parents. The left-wingers would smack him
a couple of times with an open hand (kind of like catch-and-release
fishing, "I'm a New Age kind of guy, so I'm not going
to kill them, just fuck 'em up a little and let them go."),
call him an Imperialist tool, and head on back to their side of
the street.
It wasn't long before Bubba was a fairly pathetic sight. He kept
picking himself up off of the street, blood running out of his
nose and from the corners of his mouth, dripping off the end of
his beard and onto his shirt. He was wearing a batik T-shirt with
the American Flag on it, done in watercolors, with the words,
"These Colors Don't Run" underneath the flag. What with
the blood dripping onto the shirt and the sweat soaking through,
from the labor of constantly being knocked down and having to
get back up, the colors were, in fact, running rather profusely.
The right-wingers were glaring at him, knowing that this was an
intentional parody of a symbol that they held sacred, wishing
that he would give them an excuse, any excuse, to blow his sorry
ass away with the AK-47's they had tucked away in the car just
in case things got out of hand.
The left-wingers were looking at Bubba with a mixture of disgust
and incredulity, thinking that he was trying to mock them with
this patently Red Neck T-shirt done in batik, a sacred process
reserved for use only by the terminally-hip flower children of
the '60's.
Bubba finally grew tired of all the commotion and hostility and
began wishing he was in Tel Aviv, or Bhagdad, where all he had
to worry about was the occasional blasting of the air-raid sirens
and the odd incoming missile fucking up the local 'House of (Ours...not
Theirs) God .'
Bubba took a big, black, felt-tipped marker out of his pocket
and wrote on his nice, clean, white sign:
He held the sign up for everyone to see, and began explaining
his recently developed 'Southern Hemisphere Motor Skills' theory.
Bubba rambled on about how, in the Southern Hemisphere, water
runs out of the bathtub swirling in the opposite direction that
it would in the Northern Hemisphere. This led him to believe that
everyone in the Southern Hemisphere was, by virtue of being born
on the 'bottom' of the earth, naturally left-handed.
He pointed out that, since time immemorial, left-handedness has
been considered a mark of the Evil One and how everyone from Catholic
nuns to the local school mistress would take their ruler and smack
the living shit out of the hand of any youth who attempted to
write with his or her 'devil-hand'.
Bubba stated his belief that all the hate and conflict in the
Southern Hemisphere was merely the result of whole nations of
natural left-handers being forced to deny their true nature and,
as a result, live a lie. The resulting inner conflict, he said,
leads to the buildup of a kind of schizophrenic rage that manifests
itself in the constant bickering and wars going on in the Southern
Hemisphere. He rambled on about how the wars in the middle-east
were the result of the members of each country mistakenly assuming
that members of the other countries were composed of true right-handers
and, believing them to be the source of their oppression, vented
their pent-up frustrations on them, not realizing that the people
in the adjoining countries are indeed in the same unfortunate
situation as themselves.
Bubba was now coming to the part of his monologue where he explains
that the solution to this problem is to educate the people of
the Southern Hemisphere to the fact that they are all repressed
left-handed brothers and sisters, and that they should be working
together to help one another release the true, left-handed person
within.
He never got a chance to bring this exceptionally well researched
train of thought to its proper conclusion.
By this time, the right-wingers and left-wingers alike had been
seriously bent out of shape by his "Pedophiles For Jesus!"
sign and, once an initial blow had been struck by someone who
had launched a rock at his head, the whole crowd descended upon
him, deeming that they had finally found the individual who must
pay for the fact that they were not considered as 'handsome' as
their brother, or as 'smart' as their sister. They began beating
him ferociously, as a team, putting aside their petty differences
over a bunch of lousy sand-niggers that nobody really gave a shit
about anyway, and made Bubba pay for that little shit-hole
sibling that came into their life and took mummy and daddy's love
away from them.
Bubba hid out at Mike and Marian's house for a couple of days,
then decided he'd best get out of the Bay Area for a while and
he thought it fitting that he should bestow the blessing of his
illustrious companionship on yours truly.
So, I'm sitting here in the motorhome, getting fucked-up with
Bubba Rom Dos, renegade and social outcast, sage and savant...and
a damn fine drinking companion.
I'm laughing like hell at his insanity and his absurdity, trying
to ignore the fact that my own life is so messed up that I'm sitting
here asking a total goddamn fruitcake for advice.
"Bubba, all I really want is exactly what everyone else
wants...someone to blame for all the troubles I've had since the
day I was born. I want someone out there, in a T-shirt with a
defaced American Flag on it, holding up a 'Pedophiles For Jesus'
sign, so that I can just kick the living shit out of him and wash
my life clean with the blood of the lamb."
Bubba's reply was to the effect that lamb, to be properly prepared,
should be marinated...then he reached for the Wild Turkey.
I laid down on the bed and explained to Bubba that after Mr. Chainsaw
and I took care of the people on our list I was going to go to
Tucson on a personal mission; to murder my 'ex' and her scumbag
boyfriend with my bare hands. As I drifted off into Never-Never
Land (what some people might more ignominiously refer to as 'passing
out in a drunken stupor'), Bubba simply laughed at my rage and
emotional confusion, and proceeded to explain why, according to
the tenets of an exotic Sufi sect located in the mountains of
Afghanistan, our beloved Creator saw fit to create humankind as
man and woman, yin and yang, as opposed to creating just a single,
generic human being.
"CJ, for all the conflict and misfortunes in the world
today, for all the pain and suffering we have to bear as a result
of these delicate, diabolical creations of His, please believe
me when I say that f the Great One had created only a single,
universal form of humankind, then there would be no hope for man
to escape the fiendish plans that the Evil One has for us.
"If he had indeed created mankind as hermaphrodites, then
each human would be a complete individual, each without need of
the other. Whenever one had wants, or desires, then the logical
thing to do would be to satisfy the perceived needs at whatever
cost, regardless of the consequences. Having no need of another,
the lives of others would hold no value for us in terms of our
survival. Life would be exceedingly cheap, and relationships between
humans would be based on nothing but individual desires and personal
gain...much more so than even today.
"The Creator of All Things foresaw that if humans were
each complete within themselves, not needing one another, that
the Evil One would have no problem in getting them to individually
make their 'Deal With The Devil' at the expense of all others.
So He saw fit to divide humankind, leaving them as incomplete
human beings who would require something from another in order
to become whole.
"He did this on two levels. He created Man and Woman on
the physical level, leaving each one incomplete---physically,
mentally, and emotionally. In order to become complete, each must
seek out the Other in order to acquire what they, themselves,
are lacking. On the ethereal, spiritual level, He left humans
lacking His totality of Spiritual Being, keeping back an essential
part of spiritual essence, which he divided up and scattered among
them all. Thus, in order for humanity to become complete on a
spiritual level, they must all give to and receive from one another,
or go directly to the Creator for the missing element of their
spiritual psyche."
I woke up (or 'came to') after a rather short period of time.
I had a racehorse that needed taking care of. Bubba was still
babbling on---it's what he does best---and insisted that I sit
down and come to his aid in the termination of the great wild-bird-in-a-bottle
which was obviously in its death throes. He was delighted when
I told him that we had another 'bird in the hand,' under the refrigerator
compartment, although this 'bird' was named Jim Beam. After I
dug it out he explained why I needn't feel guilty about wanting
to murder my 'ex' because, as he said, it was all part of the
Great Plan.
Bubba said that, while we are in the womb, we and our mothers
are both complete.
Once we get our sorry asses spit out into the real world, however,
we are missing a piece of ourselves. We find ourselves incomplete
and seek to rectify this most disturbing and uncomfortable situation.
Males count on their mothers to provide the security of the womb,
where they can escape from the harshness of reality; where they
can be warm, and safe. Females count on their fathers to protect
and defend them in the barbarous world that awaits them after
parturition. Then we 'mature' and it is time to leave the womb
again; we are kicked out of home and hearth to make our own way
on the face of this celestial orb.
Being incomplete, we seek out others to complete us, to help us
feel more secure in this desolate foreign land we find ourselves
thrown into. We seek a mate to replace our father or mother and
to impart to us the wholeness we need in order to feel safe and
protected.
We are, Bubba explained, deep-down inside, really pissed off that
we got thrown out of the womb and home to fend for ourselves in
this wasteland of individuality, and few of us can face up to
the fact that we are now on our own in the proverbial cold, cruel
world. So we blame our mothers for spitting us out into our own
personal, undeniable actuality, and we blame our fathers for not
providing for our physical needs and security from cradle to grave.
And we seek out another person to take their place, or to share
the blame...or both.
Man seeks woman, woman seeks man, and we expect the other to take
care of us just like mummy and daddy did.
Sure. And that ocean-front property I have in Tucson comes
with free maid service and a safe that holds an unlimited supply
of cash---all for just $39,95, including the Amazing Ginsu knives."
To hell with my 'ex.' I could have just hired a maid to do the
cleaning, a street whore for sex, and Frenched a nun once a week
to meet my spiritual needs. If you spread out the responsibilities
for having other people take care of your needs into more specialized
areas then there's a better chance that they will be qualified
to meet your requirements.
Otherwise you just waste a lot of time and effort expecting one
person to be what you need them to be. This is the age of specialization;
just farm the work out to people who are qualified in each particular
area of your wants and needs.
You could actually try to develop a relationship where two individuals
try to grow together and develop themselves with the aim of helping
one another become more complete and fulfilled, but fuck that
shit, there's more important things to concentrate on. You've
got to keep up with the current fashions and opinions, and acquire
all the trappings for your public image so that people will be
able to recognize what a hot-shit, cool, contemporary individual
you are. Then there's the time you need to keep up the old bowling
average to an impressive level. If you don't keep up your bowling
score and the old 'image,' then the fuckers out there will rip
you to shreds.
This is the consumer society, goddamn it! Just use what you need
and throw it in the garbage when you're done with it. Fuck relationships!
Anything you can possibly desire is being made out of plastic
now, and you can just chuck it when you're done, or get another
one when the batteries run down.
Bubba thinks I'm regressing and missing the point of what he's
trying to tell me. I think I'm just drunk, snake-bit, mean and
ornery. Bubba can go fuck himself, along with my mother and father,
all my fucking friends, and my 'ex' and her coaybtete-leranous
(a pretentious way to say 'scumbag') boyfriend.
"Let me slip you my big, hard dick, while I explain how
my heartless, fiendish wife (who is, by the way, at home right
now doing my laundry and fixing my supper) doesn't 'understand'
me."
If the cunt 'understood' him, she'd be knocking on my door, asking
to borrow my chainsaw.
Fuck women...fuck people...fuck the world!
so stop with the fucking mirrors, already
I've got a hangover. Bubba is just sitting there, laughing at
me. Ok, so I got a little out of hand yesterday. Operating at
20,000 cycles per second as Stuart Wilde would say.
I don't know why I'm sitting here all alone and broken-hearted.
I guess Wendy just didn't 'understand' me. No...really! I'm practically
a goddamn Saint. Perhaps if I went down to the bar and explained
to some of the women there how I'm 'different' from other guys---sensitive,
caring, romantic, self-sufficient, etc.---and how my 'ex' really,
honest-to-god, just didn't 'understand' me, then maybe I could
get a little pussy tonight.
Hell, maybe they'd even do my laundry and wash my dishes.
Ok, already. So I'm just another male chauvinist dirtbag who expects
every woman to be his Saintly mother and a whore as well. I think
all the men and women in the world should line up across from
one another and blast each other to pieces with Uzis and M-16's.
The final score will be the Ultimate Tie; Men 0, Women 0. We can
put all the 'pixies' in the middle just to make sure that there's
nobody left over.
Bubba tells me that this train of thought is not going to go over
too well in California. Bubba doesn't have to have FourGen up
and running on Monday morning, so Bubba can just go screw himself.
I was just drunk and bent out of shape enough last night to begin
to make sense of the things he was telling me about men and women,
yin and yang, and our beloved, but Cruel, Creator, and now he's
telling me that everything he said last night was just a cover
story for the uninitiated, a nice little fairy tale he tells people
in order to help them cope with the hopelessness and despair that
overtakes us all from time to time.
Bubba told me that although, technically, I was not an initiate,
he thought that the fact that I could match him drink for drink,
all night long---and still get up in the morning and crack a beer
open---showed enough resilience that he would bend his vows slightly,
and give me the real low-down on the Battle of the Sexes, as well
as the Battle For Souls.
Master Bubba swung his PSI-Man pendant slowly back and forth,
back and forth, and fixed his unwavering gaze seemingly at a point
directly behind my own eyes, inside my head, and began to speak
in a monotone voice until I could see, as well as hear, everything
he spoke of.
In actuality, the Great One could not bring himself to do less
than perfect workmanship, to turn out an inferior product. So
we humans were created as whole, complete spiritual beings, with
all the attributes and potential of our Divine Creator of All
That Is. But He could see the inherent problems that would come
from turning a host of inexperienced god-beings loose on the planet,
with the capacity to use the powers of godhood to fuck things
up beyond belief.
He was pondering this dilemma, shortly after creating Heaven
and Earth, while he stood on the edge of the universe, skipping
stones. (His best throw skipped infinity plus 709 times)
Anyway, it seems that He happened to catch His reflection in
the Great Water of the Cosmos, and conceived a solution to His
dilemma. It seems that one of His Angels, Lucifer, had gotten
full of himself and decided to strike out on his own. Lucifer
threw all of his 'God is Good' bumper stickers in the trash, so
to speak, and decided that, since he was now free-lancing, that
he needed a catchy handle, kind of like the Amazing Hulk.
He decided to call himself the 'Evil One' and gathered around
him a group of spiritual beings he named the 'Council of Darkness.'
The Holy One gazed at his reflection and decided that he could
deal with both of His problems in one stroke. He would create
humans as man and woman on the corporeal level, so that they would
need one another for physical, mental and emotional completeness,
but make them complete beings on the spiritual level. And he would
let his Fallen Angel use the Earth as a playground for his mischievous
schemes.
He knew that the Evil One, being full of himself and his imagined
eminence, would not countenance a horde of physical beings running
around the planet with unlimited god-potential, and would thus
do his utmost to conceal from them the reality that they were,
in fact, beings of a consummate spiritual essence.
The Divine One foresaw that the Evil One would trick humankind
into believing that they were incomplete, spiritually imperfect
beings, in order to bring them into subjection to Himself and
his Merry Band of Pretenders. As long as humans felt themselves
to be incomplete they would seek out completeness through the
'reflections' of their spiritual essence---in symbology and religion.
And by the time they managed to see through the Veil that the
Evil One would throw over their eyes they would have developed
enough to take their rightful place in the spiritual realm without
fear of their inexperience causing significant, irrevocable problems.
The Great One could see where it would all lead, with Gomez's
pawns hawking bumper stickers proclaiming,
He could see the humor in Bubba Rom Dos, three sheets to the
wind, listening to the 'Son of Gomez' sitting around whining about
what a whore his 'ex' was and how, if he just had her shit together,
she could see what a goddamn Saint he really was.
And on the eighth day, He created Rock & Roll. He put
the Ram in the Rama-Rama-Ding-Dong.
Bop Shoo-Bop. Boppa-Boppa, Shoo-Bop.
my 'ground round' turns green, with envy
I almost put Mike Denny on Mr. Chainsaw's list today. The bastard
is just a little too good at what he does...he knows just a little
too much. I suspect that he may be in league with Gomez.
I was having a problem with my Informix database, so I called
their support-line. They took a look at my problem, saw what it
was that I wanted to do, and then proceeded to tell me that it
couldn't be done. They said I needed to do a 'work-around.' I
needed to do a 'lookup' in a database form, referencing two joined
columns in a separate table, in order to retrieve the data I required.
Informix told me that the 'lookup' command wouldn't handle that,
and gave me a complicated set of instructions involving adding
another reference field, as well as strange rituals like multiplying
the square root of the number of times I've had sex in the last
six months by the second power of the total number of times I've
scratched my balls in the last two hours. Or something to that
effect.
I was about to begin redesigning my tables when I remembered what
Crazy Bob used to tell me when I was running his whorehouses in
Texas. "Son," he would say, "believe
nothing of what you hear, half of what you see, and if your dick's
hard, then put of any major decisions until after you've had your
ashes hauled."
So I went out for a little trim and called Mike afterwards. The
son-of-a-bitch showed me how to solve my problem with a few simple
lines of code. It was a little too efficient, a little too clean.
Had he sold his soul to the Evil One for this kind of knowledge?
Had he formed an alliance with Gomez to lead me down the Garden
Path, where the Dark Allies lay in wait?
I had my pen in hand, prepared to add Mike to Mr. Chainsaw's list,
when I realized that in order to make a rational decision about
this matter I would have to stop and consider the basic nature
of man, as well as my own human nature.
No matter how many times a man watches Phil Donahue he is still,
above all else, a member of the male species. Sure, he can do
a fairly good imitation of Alan Alda---thoughtful, sensitive,
gentle and caring---but the bottom line is that the male ego is
what drives him. He's got to be the biggest, the smartest, the
strongest. He's got to be able to lock horns with the other Bucks,
and crush them, so that he can be the breeder for the herd,
so that it will be his genes that are carried down to the
next generation.
I spend every evening hunched over the computer, knocking my nuts
off over this stuff until the wee hours of the morning---sleepless
nights and strange combinations of alcohol and drugs to keep me
going all night---and Mike just off-handedly delivers the answer
to a question that the people who wrote the damn database can't
handle.
Rationally, one might deduce that the man is extremely intelligent
and that he has put in the same countless hours that I have, and
more, becoming a master of his chosen profession. Rationally,
one might conclude that he is either smarter than I am, or more
dedicated...or both. But that's not what the male ego wants to
hear. So I decided just to assume that he spends all his time
in bars and on the beach, and that he got his vast array of knowledge
and skill by selling his soul to the Evil One.
My intellect was rolling its eyes at me, but my currently adolescent
male ego was enamored with this train of thought, so I put him
on Mr. Chainsaw's list, subject to revision once I got some sleep
and could look further into this matter in the light of a daybreak
lying somewhat closer to reality.
is it money and sex or sex and money?
Faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, more money.
I tried the Phil Donahue-Alan Alda route I really did. All I got
was fucked over. The bikers get all the good chicks.
I used to have a guitar player, Sonny King, who had a twelve-inch
dick. I occasionally had him open the show for me with his own
band, billing them as 'Big Dick & The Bulge.' He had an attitude
about women, often telling me that they were "all whores
every last cocksucking, dick-licking one of them." All
the women I knew (including my old lady) who would say "size
doesn't matter," all the 'liberated' women I knew, all
the 'feminists' they all balled him the first chance they got.
And then they would say, "It wasn't that great. Size doesn't
matter." Right---and I'm the fucking Pope.
Crazy Bob and I used to chase a few cold ones down at the Foxy
Lady, one of the nude dance clubs I was managing for him in Austin,
and discuss pussy and the meaning of life. He told me that women
all thought through their pussies, just like men think through
their dicks. He told me that women were all " whores waiting
for the best offer, waiting for the biggest bag of gold."
Sometimes he would be in one of the clubs when the hostess was
offering a customer a special deal to spend some time in a back
room with his favorite lady and the guy would say, "I've
never paid for pussy in my life, and never will." Crazy
Bob would come over, point to his wedding ring and say, "Did
you buy her a house, a car, clothes, a big diamond, and give her
a fistful of credit cards?"
Then he'd tell the guy, "Take your dick out, took a good,
long look at it, then figure out how much it's cost you in the
course of your lifetime and you'll cut that little sucker off!"
After I got tired of being a nice guy, a decent fellow and taking
it in the ass time and time again I tried a new approach. I started
carrying $1,000.00 in my pocket all the time, and pulling out
my huge 'wad' every time I had to pay for the slightest little
thing. All of a sudden I'm the most interesting guy in the whole
bloody universe. Suddenly, bar maids no longer drop off my beer
and leave, they stop and ask me how my day's been; sales clerks
want to know my hobbies; waitresses find a way to work their days
off into the conversation; women, total strangers, suddenly seem
to be interested in my whole fucking life story, starting from
birth.
Guys aren't much better. I went into the bank the other day to
cash a third-party check and got a male teller. I'd been on a
three-day drunk, I was twisted on all kinds of foreign substances,
and reeking of the sex-scent of a night spent with nubile young
women. But I was wearing a $600.00 suit, a gold watch, and pulled
the check out of a wallet stuffed with an obscene amount of cash.
The gentleman never even asked to see my driver's license.
There was a poor working slob behind me in line wearing his work
clothes jeans worn at the knees from laboring week after week,
trying to squeak by on a workman's wages and he'd goddamn better
have nine different kinds of picture ID, as well as a letter from
his Congressman, or this same teller will hit the alarm button
and send his sorry ass to jail for trying to cash his own check
at a bank he's had an account with for the last ten years.
I'm trying not to be too cynical, I really am, but it's getting
harder every day not to be. I try to tell myself that we haven't
turned into a nation of whores and zombies, basing our attitudes
and opinions of others on what we read in USA Today and People
Magazine, that the world-view of the average citizen isn't totally
controlled by what he sees on "Hard Copy" and "LifeStyles
of the Rich and Famous." But every time I tell myself that,
I see something that proves me wrong.
Gomez has us by the nuts. If you don't have the sneakers being
pushed in the current TV commercials, then you goddamn-straight
better whack somebody over the head and get a pair. If your suit
is last week's 'power color,' then you can forget about that promotion.
If you're going through your change purse to come up with enough
pennies to pay for those groceries, then you'd better get the
hell out of the way and make room for those people with Visa's
to blast on through.
Do you wonder why the suicide rate is going up? All the decent
people are killing themselves.
thank you lord, thank you jesus...
This may be a temporary delusion, but I think I have Version 3.4.00
of FourGen up and running. Can this really be happening? Is it
a trick? I keep looking over my shoulder for the shadow of
Gomez.
I got the new tapes from Basis, Inc. I loaded them onto the hard
drive. I did weird things to them. Nothing. I screwed around with
them, I played with them. Still nothing.
Finally, I broke down and read the instructions. The shit seems
to work. Work...really!
Ok, guys, where's the punch line? What's the angle? Am I honestly
going to be able to look my customer in the eye and tell everyone
with a straight face that it's ok for them to put their data in?
I've taken Mike Denny off of Mr. Chainsaw's list, for the time
being, anyway. If this version really does work, I'm going to
give him a big, sloppy kiss when I get back to Berkeley. I'll
even kiss Pat, Jeff, and Vivi.
Kissing Vivi is not a decision to be taken lightly, since her
husband is a Berkeley cop, licensed to carry the firearm of his
choice. And a judge will believe anything a cop tells him. "Well,
your honor, I saw this man with a can of spray paint down on the
drag, by the University. He was writing 'Fuck the Radical Left'
on the wall of the Aids Support Center. I warned him and turned
him loose but later on I caught him writing 'Vitamins Cause Cancer'
on the wall of a health-food store and I realized he needed to
be exterminated before he wrote god-only-knows-what on the wall
of the Chocolate Shop."
I'm going to call Mike and get him to have someone who knows FourGen
upside down and backwards to call in on the modem and check to
make sure that all the "i's" are dotted and the "t's"
are crossed, and that I have a, god forbid, fully functional installation
of the new version. If it isn't right this time, then I'm going
to make copies of their programs and send winos out on the streets
of Seattle, selling FourGen Source Code to major drug dealers
for fifty bucks a module. I'll even make my own labels up,
"FourGen. The Accounting Software choice of Junkies everywhere!"
Actually, FourGen is a great software package...if you can get
it to work. Mark Selene, at FourGen, was kind enough to send me
the Technical Manuals to help me to sort through everything, and
that gives me the ability to bop through the database system and
actually figure out what makes it tick, and why.
The basic problem I had was that I got caught in FourGen's great
'RunTime' experiment, where they tried to develop a basic, unmodifiable
retail package for the average small-business user.
FourGen was written for the 'heavy hitters,'---the major corporations---companiesthat
could turn loose of some big bucks for the software, more money
for employee training, and hire some top-notch computer cowboys
to 'ride fence' and make sure that their data doesn't stray too
far from the corral.
Then they decided to tap the 'little guy' market, putting out
an unmodifiable runtime package that they could market through
"Joe's Pawnshop and Computer Emporium."
I had wanted to deal with Basis, Inc., right from the git-go,
but FourGen told me that Distribupro was the only authorized dealer
for the runtime version. Distribupro is a great company for the
little guy, but they were not about to send their technicians
for the $10,000.00 worth of training needed to support FourGen.
So FourGen dropped their "Joe's Pawnshop and Computer Emporium"
experiment and Pearl Harbor Computers and Shelter Industries got
lost in the shuffle. I was stuck with trying to get 'little guy'
support from a company that was raking in the big bucks dealing
with the heavy hitters. Fortunately, Mike Denny was able to get
across to them that they were doing business with a man who had
filed a Corporate Charter with the State of Arizona which listed
the Vice-President of the company as Mr. Chainsaw.
Mike believes it might have been his constant usage of the words
'psychotic sociopath' that may have finally brought them to the
realization that it was to their advantage to have Basis, Inc.
as a buffer between myself and them.
Of course, I myself am blameless in the whole sorry chain of events
that resulted in it taking over a year's time in getting the software
up and running, as well as being faultless for the grief and upheaval
in my personal life. It basically all boils down to FourGen being
a bunch of evil bastards in cahoots with Gomez and my 'ex' being
a fiendish hell-bitch who fucked me over...Saint that I am.
There are those who would try to tell you that I caused my own
problems by learning Basic programming on a stinking little wrist-watch,
thinking I was a big-time computer expert because I could get
a Commodore-64 to print out my files (sometimes), and then extrapolated
these minor events into delusions of grandeur sufficient to convince
myself that I was ready to con a major business into believing
that I could handle the computerization of their company. The
same lying bastards would probably tell you that I'm an emotional
goddamn cripple and that it's a wonder that my 'ex' put up with
me as long as she did before she was finally forced to write me
off as a losing cause. But you know how they lie.
And that ocean-front property in Tucson, Arizona, yours for
only $39.95, including the Amazing Ginsu knives, has been appraised
by independent experts to be worth over $2,000,000.00, not including
the rich deposits of naturally-occurring Cubic Zirconiums.
To tell the truth...I'm just trying to survive.
I love computers. I can bang on the keyboard until 4 a.m. every
night and still go to bed amazed that people will actually pay
me to do this stuff---astonished that they will give me huge sums
of money just to have fun. I loved being a musician, too, but
living in an busted Chevy station wagon gets old after a while.
So now I'm enjoying myself and my work, and I have a bank account
that I can access without being arrested for impersonating someone
who thinks he has money.
But I'm human. So, instead of counting my blessings, I'll sit
here bitching and whining about the sorry state of my life and
loves, instead of just grabbing Gomez and the Dark Allies by the
throat, ripping their heads off, and shitting down their necks.
We're all in the same boat. We're just poor, sorry bastards who
were thrown down here on God's green earth to figure it all out
for ourselves. Somewhere along the way we lost our hold on the
golden ring...we got separated from the magic circle. But we can
all remember when we lost our innocence.
For me, it was when I was nineteen years old. I used to wake up
at 7 a.m., crack open a beer, wash down a hit of acid, and crank
up Led Zepplin, full blast---damn the rafters, full speed ahead.
I'm a child of the '60's, lost in the Desolate Place
and trying to find my way back to a Rock & Roll World.
Bop Shoo-Bop. Boppa-Boppa, Shoo-Bop.
<EOF>
During an emergency Board Meeting we were forced to contemplate
a question often brought up for debate by Mr. Parker---"Is
it sex and money...or money and sex?" We decided that it
is money and sex and, accordingly, decided to go ahead with publication
of the manuscript, with an addendum written by his close friend,
confidante, and business partner, Mr. Bubba D'Shauneaux.
We have invested a considerable amount of time, money, and energy
into Mr. Parker's sincere effort to reveal to the world the dark
undercurrents running throughout the computer industry, indeed,
throughout the whole of civilized society, and do not wish to
be considered in the same light as his family members and supposed
friends, who are now engaged in a bitter conflict over his material
possessions.
Federal agents from a nameless, faceless organization showed up
at his home only minutes after his demise, confiscating all of
the notes and records he had kept to document, beyond doubt, the
existence of the diabolical conspiracy he had planned to soon
expose in an upcoming book. The rough manuscript he was working
on in this regard has disappeared, but those who were fortunate
enough to glance through it describe it as a bone-chilling masterpiece
of investigative work.
There has also been the mysterious disappearance of his extensive
pornography library which he had always claimed, jokingly we assume,
that he would donate to the "C.J. Parker Home For Deep-Fried,
Battered Women" that he often maintained he would have built
after his passing.
We are confident that Mr. D'Shauneaux will carry on, in an meritorious
and admirable fashion, the work begun by Mr. Parker, including
the running of Pearl Harbor Computers, Inc.
Upon being asked by the editors to provide an addendum to "The
Xenix Chainsaw Massacre," I acquiescenced upon the condition
that there would be no soppy, "What a fine fellow he was,
now that he's gone" type of eulogy so popular in the tick-tock
world of everyday 'soap opera' reality.
CJ and I were as close as two people can possibly be on this material
plane, and we shared many beliefs and experiences on a more metaphysical
level, as well. Our closeness, however, was probably the result
of our differences, rather than from any kind of similar outlook
on life..
CJ and I spent many a night in a no-holds-barred discussion on
the issues of ethics and morality, as well as deliberations on
spiritual and metaphysical concepts and philosophies. We held
nothing back from one another in these prolonged sessions and,
as a result, I believe we each knew more about the other's strengths
and weaknesses than we did our own, it being a general peculiarity
of mankind that it is much easier to look upon objectively upon
another's life experience than it is to do so upon one's own life
patterns.
On second thought, maybe a short eulogy would be in order. I was
always intrigued by one of CJ's espoused philosophies, regarding
the true meaning of friendship.
CJ acquainted me one evening with an experience that he had after
losing a friend of his in Fort Saint John, British Columbia. It
involved the death of a young man in his social circle that none
of the members of the group particularly liked. Upon the youth's
passing everyone attended the funeral, at which the standard "What
a fine fellow he was, now that he's gone" sentiments were
expressed by one and all, following which everybody went back
to CJ's house and mulled about, with nothing much to say.
CJ said that he could feel a disconcerting sense of discomfiture
among those gathered in the room, and he realized that it was
the result of a divine spark of human life having come to an abrupt
and early conclusion with nothing but an eulogy of lies and bullshit
to mark its passing.
So CJ stood up, raised his glass in a toast, and said, "Here's
to Pat, the sorry motherfucker who stole my 'Live At Leeds' album,
by the Who, and then had the fucking audacity to look me in the
eye and tell me it was his!" Well, it seems that somebody
else got up and started talking about how the despicable, low-life
bastard was always borrowing money from her, promising to pay
her back, but never did, and, by God, what a scum-sucking piece
of shit he was, now that she thought about it.
Apparently this went on for an hour or so, with everybody having
a go at poor, dead Pat, and then everyone grew silent for a short
while.. With all the negatives out of the way everybody was left
to contemplate just why this sorry son-of-a-bitch was a member
of their social group. They began to think of the good times and
positive things that he had added to their lives in his own weird
way, and the stories began to flow about the crazy and rotten
things he did that drove them crazy, showed a lack of respect
for others, were totally contradictory to any kind of consideration
one would expect from their friends, yet which endeared him to
them.
CJ said that he never fully understood this experience until his
sister, Alia, told him one day that she had come to the realization
that, "You don't have to like your friends."
It's true...your friends are your friends, regardless. Regardless
of whether or not you have anything at all in common. Regardless
of whether or not they drive you absolutely crazy on a regular
basis. Regardless of whether or not they show the least amount
of respect for your person, your beliefs, your values, or your
possessions. Regardless of whether you want to put your hands
around their neck and squeeze, tighter and tighter, until the
spark of life has exited their sorry physical carcass and put
an end to their miserable, useless existence, making the world
a better place for all mankind.
Bubba Rom Dos extrapolated this concept further and came up with
the theory that, "It's stupid to kill strangers...they
mean nothing to you. If murder is to have any meaning at all,
then you must kill your friends." Bubba is running 220
Volts through a 110V circuit.
Anyway, if I'm going to walk over a dead friend's body to subject
you to my own theories and philosophies of life, then the least
I can do is to put it all in a perspective that will give credit
where credit is due---complete with chapter headings and with
expletives undeleted, in the manner and style of a friend and
confidante that I was both proud and ashamed to claim as a 'brother'
on the path of life.
if you're so smart, how'cum you ain't rich?
CJ was a fucking idiot. He had everybody's love and nobody's respect.
It was largely a result of being raised in Canada, the land of
the quintessential middle-class white boy. Canadians are the dictionary-definition
of middle-class. The middle-class have middle-class values. The
rich have middle-class values. The bums going through the dumpster,
hoping to find a half-eaten cheeseburger, have middle-class values.
Canadians suffer from the curse of having a big brother, the U.S.,
that is free, wild and crazy, living next door, and yet having
to live at the same time under the influence of the stiff-upper-lip
mentality of their founding British fathers.
CJ used to describe it as the same effect you get when you eat
a bunch of 'uppers' and a bunch of 'downers' at the same time.
He said that, between them, you ended up average...but a very
strange, weird kind of average.
CJ's curse---stupidity, if you will---was that he could see beyond
the appearances and image that mankind projects but, in his everyday
life, he took people at face value.
CJ used to become furious when I would laugh at him for having
taken it in the ass---again, for the millionth time---and I would
tell him that the reason he was angry was because he knew better.
He had learned this lesson a thousand times over, yet he still
gave people the benefit of the doubt.
In our late night discussions, I often expressed the opinion that
if CJ wished to 'make it' in the 'real' world, that he had to
develop the kind of attitude towards life that will allow you
to rip the heart out of a newborn babe and never give it a second
thought.
He instinctively knew that I was right, but he used to listen
to the mad ramblings of Bubba Rom Dos and believe that there was
still some hope for mankind, that there was still something to
be gained by trying to reach out to people and attempt to enlighten
them to the world beyond the veil thrown over us by the Evil One.
Sure...and I'd be happy to write the executor of his Estate
a 'check' for that ocean-front property in Tucson...the one with
the beach that extends all the way to San Diego.
He used to call us "My two Bubba's." He was convinced,
at times that Bubba Rom Dos, a broken down old hobo, was some
pure soul working for the good of mankind, and that I was a cold-hearted
daemon in league with Gomez, trying to twist his mind and foil
his valiant attempt to warn the world of the peril posed by Gomez
and his Merry Band of Pranksters, as I would call them.
"Lighten up," I would tell him, "the
world already knows, they just don't give a fat-rat's-ass. They're
too busy turning a buck and working on their bowling average."
But he chose to throw his lot in with a vagrant old wino that
had Santa's belly and Rudolf's nose.
In the end, he ended up in worse shape than Bubba Rom Dos. CJ
exited this life a broken man, whining and bitching about the
hand that life had dealt him, shattered by the reality of the
madness and negativity surrounding him on every side, eventually
taking his own life in a bizarre and sadistic chainsaw ritual
that was so hideous and sickening that even his influential family's
efforts to have it covered up as an 'accident' were totally futile.
Gomez eats the weak for breakfast...only the strong survive. The
things that CJ used to reproach me for---my ability to kick cute
little puppy dogs, my capacity for carrying kittens the river
myself instead of 'humanely' taking them to the pound for someone
else to do the dirty work, my predilection towards viewing every
individual on the face of the earth as a scum-sucking pig to be
used for what they are worth and then cast aide---these are the
qualities that will keep the shadow of Gomez away from your doorstep.
Well, all that and a conscientiously applied plan of good dental
hygiene. (Thank you, I'm feeling much better, now.)
My point is that good intentions don't matter for shit. We can
take all the namby-pamby do-gooders in the world, line them up
against the wall and shoot them, and the world will be a better
place because of it. If you don't look out for yourself first
then how do you expect to be able to look out for anyone else?
CJ was a "hell'uva guy" as our 'other' Bubba
used to say. He was an artist and a craftsman---he could fix your
plumbing and write you a love song in the same breath. He could
work derrick on an oil rig in the dead of winter, bounce a bar
full of rednecks and cowboys, and still wear silk shirts and Giorgio
without thinking he was the least bit unusual.
He fell in love with a woman he met in a whorehouse and it took
him ten years to figure out that she was a whore. He died loving
her, and he never did understand that it was time to move on and
let someone else pay for the things that her father did to his
daughters.
He loved people, he helped people, and he gave them what he had
to offer, often at his own expense. And he ended up in a sleazy
little motel room in Davidson, Saskatchewan, whacked out on beer
and Halcion, chopping himself up into grisly little pieces with
a Stihl chainsaw.
Gomez eats the weak.
we have our exits and our entrances
So CJ checked out, leaving his baggage behind, but Shelter Industries
continues. The boys and girls of Shelter are looking excitedly
forward to the many wonders of computerization.
If they only knew...
CJ brought Shelter into the 'Wonderful World of Computers' but
he did it in Xenix, not in DOS. DOS is a nice, simple computer
operating system that will work fairly well for the uninitiated
without giving them a lot of grief. It's fairly primitive, but
one can do a tolerably decent job of conducting their affairs
in bits and bytes without having to worry about the dark side
of their new hi-tech/toy-nology.
Xenix and Unix are a whole different ball game.
Doing a backup with SCO's Xenix software is its own little
piece of hell. The book I'm currently reading, called "Xenix
At Work," says that the System Administration Shell's prompts
are "ambiguous." More like total horseshit.
For millenniums, Gomez and the Dark Forces have been charged
by the Evil One with the duty of bringing to an end the reign
of mankind upon the earth...throwing the Veil of Waking Sleep
over the Light of Life...bringing us into subjection to the Evil
One and the Forces of Darkness.
Ok, so I'm not going to kill anyone---yet. Mark Selene at
FourGen talked to me and cooled me down enough to give them another
chance to fix all the screw-ups.
I went to a Catholic high school, in a little French-Canadian
town named Gravelbourg, back when the mass was still in Latin.
At the time, I thought they were trying to find out who stole
their dominos because they were getting goddamn tired of playing
Bingo and wanted to have a friendly game of dominos after church
let out. Now, being more worldly and far more experienced, I realize
that they were probably phoning out for pizza after mass, and
were taking orders from the congregation.
I had a nice, relaxing Christmas. I drank beer. I ate sleeping
pills. I played with my crayons.
I've been talking, off and on, with Brad Miller at FourGen.
He appears to be in charge of handling customer relations and
general problem-solving. Brad sounds very sincere in his concern
for my problems but he drives me fucking crazy. I expect that,
being from the Left Coast, he has taken too many of those hip,
New Age
With the tragic, unexpected death of Mr. Parker, we
were left holding the unfinished manuscript of "The Xenix
Chainsaw Massacre."