TRON!

I have suddenly found myself to be haunted by, of all things, TRON. Yes, TRON. The Disney computer-effects bonanza from 1982 has suddenly decided to invade my life, in a myriad of ways. The custom icons I stumbled across just as I decided that the standard OSX icons just weren't doing it for me any more. The Strokes video that I came across while looking online for the new single. And, deadliest of all, the TRON Light-Cycle game that I found, weirdly enough, through TRON star Jeff Bridges' website, which is as fascinatingly odd as the Dude himself. The TRON game has sucked me in so abruptly, so completely, that I've got light-cycles zooming behind my eyes, and that, as I type this entry in a window, I find myself trying to find some way to dodge the right edge of the window as the letters approach it, less they run into the barrier and explode.

Is this the revival of TRON? Has the movie suddenly decided to violently thrust itself back into the forefront of popular culture? Are the machines truly rising? I don't know. All I know is that if, on Friday night, I open the door to find a bunch of kids trick-or-treating in neon red and blue outfits holding glowing frisbees, I will totally freak the hell out.

Papa was a Rodeo

And now it's 55 years later,
We've had the romance of the century.
After all these years wrestling gators
I still feel like crying when I think of what you said to me...

"Papa was a rodeo, Mama was a rock'n'roll band,
I could play guitar and rope a steer before I learned to stand,
Home was anywhere with diesel gas, love was a trucker's hand,
Never stuck around long enough for a one night stand.
Before you kiss me you should know
Papa was a rodeo."

Gramercy in Fall

Note to self: since a large part of the reason you're doing this weblog is to have a journal of sorts that you can use to fill the holes in your frustratingly poor memory, you should record that last night, on a perfect fall evening, you took your new wife to one of your two favorite restaurants in New York, Gramercy Tavern (the other being Peter Luger's) and, there, in the warmth of the soft lights and polished wood, had an excellent dinner of filet mignon followed by a fine scotch and a chocolate torte that could inspire poets. Then the two of you walked to Gramercy Park Hotel and had a Guinness and, in the velvet comfort of the lounge (another favorite place of yours), talked about things both important and inconsequential. All in all, you had a wonderful time enjoying your favorite season, and you're incredibly happy to be married to that lovely wife of yours.

Web

In addition to theforeignembassy.com, I also currently own the domain names ithoughtyouweredead.com and postapocalyptic.org...don't bother checking them out, 'cause there's currently nothing there. Both were spur-of-the-moment purchases that seemed like a good idea at the time. Of the two, only one still seems like a good idea, and who knows? If I ever get some free time, I might even follow up on it.

Zen and the Art of iBook Repair

It's tough, I know.

You use it every day. You get to know it. And as you get to know it, you want to have more of it to know, so you create a personality for it. Embed an aspect of your personality IN it...a particular picture on your desktop. Custom icons. You change the font, change the startup screen, change the sounds. You give your hard drive a name, one that makes you laugh, or think, or remember. Maybe you even put stickers on the case, or tattoo it with a Sharpie. You make it yours, and as ridiculous as it sounds, as unbelievably TACKY as it sounds, you begin to love it. And in its own way, in its reliability and its consistency, in that neat desktop and that cleverly-named hard drive with its cool little icon, it loves you back. Love is in the little things.

And then one day, it doesn't love you. You press the button, and you don't get that sound, that sound you can recognize instantly and that thrills you just a little bit, every time. Or you get that sound, but you don't get that familiar flash of the LCD screen coming to life. You don't get that smiley face, or if you're up-to-date and with-it, that oh-so-modern discreet grey fruit silhouette. Just black. Or, the screen comes to life, but it just flashes a question mark, an innocent little symbol that has suddenly come to represent everything that's wrong with your life: this thing that you love is asking you a question, and you don't know the answer. And since you don't know the answer, it just keeps asking, and it asks until it fades, and eventually, dies, confused and unfulfilled to the end.

Or there are other things. Loud, harsh clicking emanating from a smooth case which only hummed and beeped before: clearly, this thing you love is angry with you. Or a screen that abruptly begins to aspire to modern art, letting its colors ebb and flow and coalesce and break apart again, before fading into darkness. An unending field of squares, alternating black and white. Hypnotic flashes of multi-colored lines. Or just darkness that seems to grow darker the more you stare, the deeper your spirits descend.

Maybe, if things have gotten REALLY bad, you even begin to SMELL something. You've used this thing for years, but you never knew it could SMELL. And it's not a good smell, not at all: it's faint but sharp, and you wrinkle your nose and wince and know, deep in your heart, that this is a bad, bad thing. This thing you love has begun an assault on your senses.

Maybe you even get smoke.

Ladies and gentlemen, your computer is toast.

So you bring it in, cradling it in your hands, your fear and pain and loss all over your face, and you set it down, and you ask the questions:

What happened?

What did I do?

You want to know Why. And that's understandable. Your friend, your faithful companion, in whom you have invested so much effort and time (and more than a little dough), in whom you have poured some amount of your Self, has just gone tits-up and crashed and burned. It sucks. I know. We all know. And, more often than not, we've got the answer to your questions:

Your logic board, an incredibly complex maze of circuits and chips, blew a tiny but crucial diode somewhere and rendered itself impotent. Your hard drive, at heart a tiny silver disk that for the last two years has spun unerringly several thousand times a minute, rain or shine, through good times and through bad, has run smack into a collection of pesky laws of physics which state that, in a nutshell, while perpetual motion is pretty swell in theory, it tends to be kind of a bitch to put into practice. Your LCD screen, which until last night was connected to the brain of your machine through some a couple of wires slightly larger in diameter than human hairs, is connected no longer, and the couple million transistors in the liquid crystal display, relishing in their newfound freedom, have decided to let their collective hair down and act in ways their creator never intended, or just not act at all. There's reasons behind it all, you know?

But you don't want to know, not really. Your real question, Why, still hasn't been answered, because the answer you want is that God, whatever God you believe in, hates you and has taken it upon Himself to ruin your day. You want to hear it's because you cheated on your taxes. Because you were looking at porn. Because the salesperson didn't like you and decided to give you the dreaded Lemon. Because you didn't drop the extra couple hundred to get the Superdrive instead of the Combo drive...everyone knows the ones with the Superdrive don't break.

I don't know what else to tell you. This thing you love, it doesn't love you. It's just a machine. It's not not working because you pissed it off, it's not working because it broke, just like everything breaks, just like, someday, YOU'RE going to break. And yes, that Powerbook 180 that you used for ten years and worked like a charm until it melted, that faithful little grey brick, it lasted longer than this thing YOU JUST BOUGHT LAST YEAR. LAST YEAR, FOR PETE'S SAKE! Of course, that little grey brick weighed fifteen pounds and had the computational horsepower of a clock radio; your Palm Pilot was laughing at it behind its back. You don't slim a supercomputer so advanced that ten years ago they would have thought it was from space down to the size of a couple magazines without taking it in the chin in regards to durability and longevity. This one's not gonna last you to the next decade, but it'll analyze the human genome and hold enough CDs to fill the trunk of your car. And at the rate they're going, by the next decade, the computers will be about the dimensions and weight of a piece of wax paper, and they'll be able to run the fucking Space Shuttle.

Okay, your computer broke. Want it fixed?

Ahnuld and Enron

This is rather interesting, and more than a bit disturbing. The article's about two months old, but given the fact that he was just elected governor of California, the insinuation that Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the aid of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is helping Enron and other energy companies avoid paying $9 billion in reparations to the California for the massive bilking of the state that took place during the energy crisis last year is even more relevant now than when it was first published. It's also frighteningly plausible.

Stand Up

Great shots of the show on Bluejake (found through kottke)...

For a Minute There, I Lost Myself

The setlist from last night's Radiohead concert at Madison Square Garden, courtesy of ateaseweb.com:

2+2=5
Sit Down Stand Up
Where I End and You Begin
Kid A
Backdrifts
Morning Bell
My Iron Lung
I Might Be Wrong
Lurgee
Sail to the Moon
Paranoid Android
Punchup at a Wedding
Go to Sleep
The Gloaming
Idioteque
Fake Plastic Trees
There There

Second Encore
Karma Police
True Love Waits
Everything in its Right Place

I have a couple of concert performances that make my heart sing and my stomach do loops, but as of right now, I can't think of any that affected me so much as standing and listening to "Fake Plastic Trees" with my arms around my wife. Oh, my. I haven't got the words.

Highlights

So, I've added a section over there on the right called "Highlights," linking to some of the things I've written here that I'm especially fond of. People seem to particularly be enjoying Dark, my personal recounting of the night the lights went out, and I've gotten a couple questions about where it can be found on the site. So, whoop, there it is.

One of the things I like about having this here site is the ability to get my writing out there into the wild easily. You'd think that would make me write more, but the stuff I've been working on as of late is of the screenwriting variety, and that doesn't post so easily here. But I've been thinking of making some of it available for download as PDFs, if I can get over the irrational but persistent fear of somebody stealing my stuff.

In other news, recent access to cable television has caused me to become inexplicably addicted to the World Series of Poker.

Men

Yes, Men. Men in Suits:

Married

Yes, I'm back. And yes, I'm married. The honeymoon was relaxing and romantic and everything a honeymoon should be, minus about five inches of rain. And along the way, my new wife and I learned a great deal about married life...about the preconceptions, the misconceptions, the struggle, the rewards. Of course, we learned these things by watching five straight hours of NEWLYWEDS, but hey, forewarned is forearmed, isn't it? And now, as we proceed hand-in-hand through our married life faced with such struggles as temptation-filled invitations to the Playboy Mansion and nasty cellphone calls from record executives who think our new single sucks, we'll know EXACTLY what to do.

Oh, yes. I got married in a suit. Rented tuxes are for pimply-faced prom boys; suits are for Men.