Journals, by Rudy Rucker

Cyberspace In Japan

May 28, 1990. Morning. First sights.

I’m involved with these Berkeley freaks who publish a glossy magazine called Mondo 2000 which is basically about drugs and high-tech. They’re heavily into virtual reality or cyberspace—there’s kind of a fad for this stuff, people are viewing it as an electronic drug.

And in my Autodesk programming job I’ve been doing some work on virtual reality demos. So Alison Kennedy of Mondo 2000—also known as Queen Mu—put this Japanese journalist onto me last year, a Mr. Takemura, he was doing an article for a Japanese magazine called Excentric, which is a Mondo-type publication with heavily illustrated features about all the weirdos in some different given area in each issue.

Mr. Takemura photographed me in front of the San Francisco Masonic headquarters in my red sweater, and had me in his magazine with Dr. Tim Leary of course, and Marc Pauline, who puts on the great Survival Research Labs fire-breathing renegade robot events, also Steve Beck, a friend of Alison’s who does computer-graphical acid-trip videos and talks about using electric fields to stimulate phosphene visions in the closed eye, an effect he calls “virtual light.”

And now Mr. Takemura has organized a conference about cyberspace in Tokyo, under the aegis of a well-funded organization called Hightech Art Planning, or HARP. HARP is paying the plane fare and hotel for Sylvia and me, along with a hefty speaker’s fee. My task is to give a twenty minute talk on the topic of cyberspace.

We came in last night, first sight from the plane a long beach, the edge of Asia, the sand empty and gray, rice paddies lining the rivers, hill knobs sticking out of the paddies like castles, green and misty. The crowd at the airport: the variousness of the Japanese faces. I notice this again downtown later, the diversity of their faces from round to square, and skin color from yellow to pale white.

Driving in from the airport we passed Chiba City with a building-lined canal leading out to the Tokyo Bay, and I thought of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. There were a DJ man and woman on the radio, she repeatedly giggling madly, and then they put on a song: Roy Orbison singing “Only the Lonely.”

Once Sylvia and I have checked into the deluxe Hotel Imperial in downtown Tokyo, we hit the street to walk around the fancy Ginza neighborhood.

An arched stone passage under a train line, barbecue smoke streaming out, people sitting eating drinking, and a TV crew with twelve guys pointing lights at the announcer, who waits poised, then starts screaming crazily and the camera and lights follow as he surges forward into the BBQ crowd and confronts someone. Taxi cabs like cop cars streaming by. It’s all so cyberpunk.

We eat sushi and beer, and at some unknown signal half the people there get bowls of soup with clams. On the street we get lost, gawking at the huge electric signs. The oddity of seeing story-high electric letters that mean nothing to you. Pure form, no content. Burroughs talks about rubes staring up in awe at the crawling neon. It’s humiliating to be illiterate.

Walking around the Ginza, lost, we see lots of groups of “company-men” in blue suits, some of them quite drunk by the end of the evening. One particular guy is doing the double-jointed wobbly-knee walk that my father used to call “the camel walk.” He’s fifty or sixty, gray-haired, leader of his buddies. They’re having such fun out on the street. No one begging or stealing or looking for a fight.

Sylvia and I were up quite early today, and spent about six hours exploring. We sat outside the Kabuki Theater for awhile to rest, and saw construction workers in split-toed cloth boots with rubber soles, good for climbing. “Split-toe” in Japan is like “hard-hat” in the U.S. Women in kimonos were going in and out of the theater, musicians and makeup people. They had the self-confidence of artists with a job.

The imperial palace is in the center of a park with deep-looking moats and slanting stone walls. The walls are fascinating to me because at the edges they use rectangular blocks and towards the center they use huge irregular hexagons, all the blocks fitting together as nicely as soap-bubbles. It’s interesting to me to see a transition between rectangular and hexagonal grid arrays, as this relates to a problem connected with the electronic ant farm program I’ve been working on recently.

We find a lovely green field in the palace park. It’s deserted and Japan is so crowded. Maybe Japanese always do the same thing at the same time, so that either they all go to the park or none do? Or maybe they have too much respect for the Emperor to enter his park. The hedges are trimmed with a peak running lengthwise along the hedge tops, like the tops of roofs.

We hear someone playing or practicing a flute, it sounds Zen and spacey. Hearing that and looking at the pleasing meadow with its sparse trees and low-ridged hedges, I think, “Of course it looks nice, it’s arranged according to some transcendental holistic Japanese vision.” And then I wonder if maybe I’m reading more into it than is there. The beautiful swooping catenary lines of the stone moat walls going down to the water are certainly by design.

In the park, there’s a woman kneeling, taking a picture of her toddler coming towards her saying “Mama.” She glances over at us with such a shy happy look—she has a weak chin, strong lipstick, and a silk suit. There she is, this woman in the park, a mother getting her pictures of her toddler, having the nicest kind of simple fun.

The Japanese people are so alien to me, that I see them in a more abstract way than the people back home. It’s kind of like the thing with their writing: since I can’t read it, I notice its pattern and semiotic weight—like there is an advertisement, right on the handle of the subway strap—and I don’t get caught up in reading the message.

Thus with the woman in the park, I have no ability to read her appearance and surmise her life—what kind of house, what kind of husband, kinds of opinions, etc. I just see the ideogram, the Platonic form: the mother getting a picture of her baby’s early steps.

“Mama,” says the baby, same as us.

We found our way to the subway next, also interesting, two women walking past talking, one of them smiling almost crazily while talking to her friend, pausing to clear throat or wet lips and the smile is completely gone, the smile is simply part of talking.

Sylvia figured out the kanji sign for in is a picture like a letter lambda and a box: walking person + hole. And out is a picture of a shape like a double psi and a box: cheering person + hole. You walk in the hole and then you cheer when you get out.

May 30, 1990. Cyberspace. Pachinko.

Yesterday was the big work day. In the morning I went to the building that the Ministry of Information uses for their Hightech Art Planning, that is, for HARP. As I mentioned, these are the guys who organized this con at Mr. Takemura’s urging. There were about six or seven of us there from California to do presentations on our work.

We started by rehearsing our talks—talking to our translators and seeing if the video stuff worked. Then they gave us some box-lunches—Styrofoam boxes of Japanese food. My lunch consisted of a single shrimp and two beans. Really large beans though, each one a giant lima that you squeeze out of its husk. And the shrimp a hefty little dude the size of a thumb. We also had a table full of soft drinks. The first one I tried, nothing came out, it was a “soft drink” of grape jelly. So I had some Pocari Sweat instead. Who is Pocari and why are we drinking his sweat?

We had some free time then, and I looked at an exhibit of big computers. I saw a simulation of a four-dimensional Rubik’s cube which was cool. And then I played with another machine for quite a while. It was a realtime graphics supercomputer called a Titan. It had a simulation of a flag which was made of a grid of points connected by imaginary springs, and with two of the points attached to a flag pole. You could crank up the wind, or change the wind’s direction, and see the flag start to ripple and flap. Chaotic motion.

I kept thinking of the Zen story about three monks looking at a flag flapping in the wind.

A: “What is moving?”

B: “The flag is moving.”

C: “No, the wind is moving.”

A: “Ah no, the mind is moving.”

To keep the flag from looking like a bunch of triangles they used a cool computer-graphics trick called Gouraud shading. As an extra feature you could cut both the flag’s tethers to the pole and see it blow away, a crumpling wind-carried shape.

My talk went well. Rather than trying a live demo, I had a video I’d made of my CA Lab cellular automata software running behind me, and I talked about Artificial Life, about robot evolution, and about growing Artificial Life in cyberspace. It was an easy, painless talk.

Doing a bunch of interviews was part of the gig, too, so I missed most of the other presentations because the HARP organizers led me off to talk to reporters.

But I did get to hear part of Jaron Lanier’s talk. Jaron is a hero of the Virtual Reality scene. His company, VPL, is the first to be selling standardized VR equipment: “DataGloves” that feed images of your fingers into a computer, and “EyePhones” with two little screens.

Jaron is a plump, substance-free hippie with Rasta-style dreadlocks. I sat next to him at a group dinner on our first or second night here, and he talked a lot. I ended up defending him when, incredibly, the waitress started harassing Jaron for having long hair.

She’s all, “You are woman?”

Jaron took it in stride, calmly analyzing the situation aloud. “She only acts this way to promote a feeling of rowdiness.”

Two of Jaron’s beliefs are, “It’s not really a Virtual Reality unless there’re at least two people in it,” and, “Sex in cyberspace is a dumb idea: polygons aren’t sexy.”

One of my interviews was for two computer magazines, Log In and Eye Com. The guy who asked questions for both of them had some quite complicated fantasies about artificial realities.

“In Sim City artificial world, would you rather be the mayor or the Sim?”

He had a science-fictional notion that you yourself might become an artificial reality in which networkers live. And any of these users might be able at any time to stop your heart. Another of his ideas was that you could shuffle your direct perceptions with someone else’s perceptions, taking in their reality as a virtual reality. And if you did the sampling at a rate of, say, ten times a second, you would effectively be living as them and as you. And if you speeded up the shuffle rate and brought in more and more people, then everyone would be the same metaperson!

This reporter gave me a wad of yen worth about seventy dollars at the end of the interview—that never happens to a writer in the U.S.

And I had about six more interviews as well. Insane. Back home nobody gives a fuck what I do.

When all the talks and interviews were done, HARP threw a reception. They had a big table covered with little glasses of whisky on ice. God how I hated to leave that room. It was a scene I’ll recall with longing for years. I was standing there talking to two guys, each of them the manager of HARP. At least seven people were introduced to me as the manager of HARP. Anyway these guys were so fucking drunk they could hardly stand up. Yet they gave off no vibe of American-style shame for their altered state.

Sylvia and I had supper with my science fiction people at Hayakawa Publishing, Inc. As well as publishing Hayakawa SF Magazine, they’re the biggest science fiction book publisher in Japan, and they have, incredibly, all of my books in print in Japanese translations. If only I were so well-loved in the U.S.

We ate as a party of six people in a basement French restaurant, some of the best French food I ever had, and during the meal all five others were smoking, unbelievable, smoke and drink aren’t evil here and people aren’t embarrassed about sex, what a country.

Hiroshi, my translator, was a really good guy. He wanted to interview me for Hayakawa SF Magazine. I was tired but I did the interview after dinner to get it over with, up on the third floor in the Hayakawa offices—the French restaurant we had supper in turned out to be owned by Hayakawa, it’s in the basement of the same building.

I propped my feet up on the sill of a huge open window, with four and five-story Tokyo buildings outside, the night and the street, and I talked about my various careers. The electroshock excitement of the computer graphic world is one thing, the thoughtful artfulness of writing another, the clarifying formulas and occasional revelations of math a third, and the humble public service of teaching is an underlying fourth.

This morning we went to a shrine at Asakusa, on the way we came up from the subway looking for breakfast, bought cheese rolls, but then where to eat? I ate mine on the street, but I wouldn’t do it again. If you eat in public, Japanese look at you like you’re taking a dump on the sidewalk.

At the shrine there were zillions of schoolchildren, all in white shirts, so cute, group after group coming up to us, “May I speak with you?” to practice their English.

The shrine has a shiny brass Buddha to one side, with a slot for money. You put money in the slot and then rub a certain part of Buddha, and then rub the same part of you, to heal. I tried it on my cheek over the gum where I’ve had the unbelievable, unrelenting pain ever since I had those back teeth pulled two weeks ago.

Later in the day I played pachinko. You put a few bucks in a machine and get a basket of ball bearings, and then dump them in a hopper and they are rapid fired into a steep, nearly vertical playboard studded with nails and with high-scoring input hoppers here and there, and a big zero-score hopper at the bottom. Your control over it is via a knob that affects the speed with which the successive balls are launched up into the board.

A special hopper guarded by two kneeling spacemen figures opened up inside my machine’s playfield, and I held the knob at the right position for many balls to stream in there. More and more pay-off balls came out into a basket under the machine—there’s a slot-machine aspect to it, and you get paid off with extra balls—finally I had a whole shoebox full of balls, many more than the seven-hundred-yen’s worth of balls that I’d started with.

I took the box of balls back to a woman in an apron, she had the stubby sticking-out curly hair-bob so popular here, she poured the zillion balls into a counting machine and gave me a piece of paper and gestured towards some cigarettes and candies.

“Can I get money?” I said, pointing towards some coins in my hand.

She nods and gives me some lighter-flints with the brand name “MONY.” Like what are these good for? This is money? I start to complain, then she gets another girl to watch the counter while she leads me out of the parlor, out of the chrome and the whooping sound effects, into the street, down an alley to the right, down a smaller alley to the left, walking rapidly in front of me, aproned, walking with a rocking motion, walking so fast I can barely keep up, the guide stops finally and points to the door under a horizontal red sign with writing on it, I go in, there’s a tiny window at waist level, wood, I put the MONY lighter flints in there, and a hand passes out 2,200 yen!

Three to one payoff, all right! I asked my Japanese contacts about it later, they said, yes it’s always lighter flints, and it would be illegal for the payoff to be inside the pachinko parlor itself, but this way is all right.

On the subway riding back, looking at the faces across from us, I see one old guy with his face all folded, the upper eyelids folded over the lower lids, the mouth folded shut, huge eyebrows, skinny legs, he made me think of the pictures of my old idol D. T. Suzuki in his great book, What is Zen? Next to the old guy I see a succession of younger guys, one replacing the other stop by stop, the flow of life through the different bodies of man, each of them so individual and various, each life unique.

May 31, 1990. The Gold Disco.

Yesterday evening we went to the Gold Disco, a multi-story building that looks like a shitty warehouse from the outside, down under a freeway by the river, guests of the same Mr. Takemura who was the organizer and panel-discussion leader for the HARP Cyberspace Symposium. He’s a man who looks and behaves something like our San Francisco science fiction writer friend Richard Kadrey, kind of a maven, hip to all the latest.

Here in Tokyo Mr. Takemura is quite a heavy dude it seems, and he does a monthly show at the Gold Disco. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco.

The Gold Disco building has a traditional Japanese restaurant on an upper floor, we went there first, it was an airy room open at the sides to the sky—though it developed, on closer inspection that the sky was an artificial reality, it was really a black-painted ceiling with brisk ventilation to give you the feel of a breeze. We weren’t actually on the top floor.

It was 9 pm. Sylvia and I were quite hungry, having skipped supper, as Mr. Takemura’s friend Kumiko had assured us it would be traditional Japanese food, which we’d mistakenly imagined as being banquet-like. Jaron Lanier was there, and Alison Kennedy from Mondo, also Sylvia’s cousin Zsolt and his wife. The cousin grew up in Budapest, but now he works for Bayer in Japan, doing the chemical engineering of rubber.

Our dining area was a tatami room, meaning we sit on the ground with tiny lacquered TV-dinner-type trays in front of us. First a waitress in a really great kimono and obi crawls around taking orders, and then there appears a geisha in the center of the floor/table, sitting there like a center-piece, simpering a bit and fanning herself, answering a few questions which the Westerners put through Kumiko. I was too appalled to ask anything. The geisha had a completely white face and red lips, all kinds of plastic and cloth in her hair, and major kimono silk.

“She’s not actually a geisha,” Kumiko explained. “She is younger, she is a maiko, this is a young girl of fifteen to twenty who has not mastered the necessary skills of singing or storytelling or music to be a geisha, she will in fact most likely not become a geisha, her purpose here is really to find a man who will take care of all her needs.” And keep her as mistress, it goes without saying.

The maiko is plain and looks sad, and she makes me feel uncomfortable. She’s like the goat tethered as bait for the T. Rex in Jurassic Park.

Then all of a sudden we all run downstairs to be photographed by Japan’s most famous society photographer, in front of The Gold Disco. The Gold Disco is supposedly the hottest place in Tokyo these days. It’s like an Andy Warhol scene, man, it’s outrageous that Sylvia and I are here, being glittery ones.

Then it’s back upstairs and, whew, we have a happier maiko. This one is cheerful and loud, asking questions and saying things. And here’s the food. I get a plate with a spiral-shell tree snail, perhaps not dead, three whole salted shrimp each the size of a toenail clipping, and a small piece of what I take to be tuna, but is, on biting, a slice of some fish’s long strip of roe, all egg-crunchy.

And then the second course comes, two rice balls for me.

“Ba-ru,” the loud maiko explains, making a throwing motion—she means “ball.” She puts her hands up to her mouth, miming gobble-gobble. She’s a regular bad-ass teenager under the paint. Not much food but lots of sake.

Then it’s downstairs to see Mr. Takemura’s show. First Jaron Lanier and I go down alone—and then the others come down led by the loud maiko or junior geisha, who starts dancing, what a sight to see her in her ancient gear, rocking in the disco amidst the incredibly various throng.

For me the best thing of all in the disco was that, incredibly, they had a computer monitor set into the wall, and it was running the Autodesk cellular automata program that John Walker and I coded: Rudy Rucker’s CA Lab. It was showing my high-speed “Rug” rule, a rule that can run on its own all night, never repeating, generating endlessly new mandalas, many of them vaguely like faces that I thought of as being the face of the TV icon Max Headroom’s imagined wife, Maxine Headroom. Just unbelievable that CA Lab is an installation in a hip Tokyo disco. They get it here, even if nobody back in the U.S. does.

Later we went up one floor to the so-called Love Sex Club, a lovers’ retreat with big banquette/bed seats and a bar decorated with skeletons, skulls, and, dig this, bottles of clear alcohol, each containing an entire gecko, a really big gecko, barely fitting into the liter bottle, man, not just some insignificant tequila worm. According to Steve and Alison, who’d already tried it a few days before, the gecko alcohol is an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac.

So today I’m clear of all my interviews and duties, although it took some running around to find a new hotel. We’d been in the luxury Hotel Imperial and now we had to move out—our prepaid Imperial reservation ran out, along with HARP’s responsibility towards us. Our new hotel is a surprisingly large step down in the direction of the proverbial coffin hotel.

The window is like a bus window with rounded corners, the bathroom is made of one single piece of plastic and is tiny, but for now it’s home. At first I’d tried calling hotels, but all were full. Cute, round-eyed, round-mouthed, plump-cheeked Mr. Fujino of HARP helped us out one last bit by finding this.

Sylvia and I went to a place called the Ginza Style Department Store today. The store was full of recorded voices, women’s voices talking, Sylvia says, in the voices of good dolls, sing-song voices, overly sweet, almost lisping.

We went up to the roof and looked at their bonsai. They had one pine for something like ten thousand dollars. It was especially valuable because it leaned way over and half of its trunk was like rotted away. There was a thick-gnarled azalea for nine thousand bucks, though the blossoms on it seemed, to my mind, to ruin the effect of the scale.

We sampled some of the many available things to taste in the gourmet food-shop in the second sublevel basement, hideous fishy wads and tortured slimy vegetables. After awhile I was laughing so hard at the gnarl of it all that I couldn’t stop.

Then we went into their cafeteria and had some food, which was good, except that the udon soup reeked of mildew. I traced the cause finally to some thick limp strands in the broth. Fungus? Maybe they get mildew spores and nurture them like a bonsai until they have a stalk the size of a carrot and they slice that up and soak it in gecko juice for your soup? Once the offending strands were pincered out and banished to the furthest corner of the table, the meal was okay.

June 1, 1990. Shinjuku. Kabuki.

Morning, it’s raining cats and dogs outside, Sylvia is cheerful. Cozy in our tiny room.

Yesterday afternoon we went to the Shinjuku district. They had lots of pachinko places. I realize now that the machines in a given pachinko parlor are not separate entities, there’s a vast common pool of pachinko balls behind the stuck-together rows of machines. Proof is that to buy new balls you put coins in a slot shared by your machine and the next machine, the balls don’t come from one machine or the other, they come from the common ball space.

How apt a symbol of the workers flowing out of their offices and through their subways, the pachinko balls, each ball, by the way, has a character etched onto it, invisible unless you pick it up and peer closely. A different symbol for each? Hidden personal identities?

When you’re through playing, there’s a sink with towels near the door to wash off your hands.

We walked through a neighborhood where the guidebook said there were sex shops, but with Japanese reticence there was no way to tell which might be sex, or if you could tell, no way to tell what lay inside. Well, there was one obvious place—it had a big statue of a gorilla in boxer shorts with stars and stripes and an English sign saying, “This Is The Sex Place.” Gorilla in shorts is my countryman.

Mostly Shinjuku was like a boardwalk row of shops with games, etc. There was a thin old-fashioned alley with a hundred tiny places selling yakatori, or skewered meat. We squeezed into a spot with, like, a five-foot ceiling, had a couple of beers and some skewers. A man helped us translate.

“What kind you want? Tongue? Liver? Kidney?”

“Uh…are those all the choices?”

When we got outside, the Shinjuku lights were on, the big signs, awesome as the Ginza, but harder to see with all the train stations in the way. Beautiful people on the subway once again. A schoolgirl with a round chin, her lips always parted in a half smile. All of the women with the matte black hair and a few strands of bangs. Heart-stopping symmetries in these faces. Another girl with a slightly rough complexion carrying a basket of arranged flowers, pressing her offering into a corner away from the subway wind. Poetic.

Amazing how difficult it is to orient yourself here. Some of the larger streets do have names, but for us the names are all the same and impossible to remember, especially since it is very rare that the name, if there is a name, is written out in Western letters. The guidebooks and the more experienced visitors mention that, even for locals, there are effectively no usable addresses. Houses in a district are numbered according to the order in which they were built, and many of the streets really don’t have a name.

And I can’t orient very well by using landmarks since the buildings are mostly gray concrete boxes. And the signs are crazy scribbles. How can such a system work? It works if you think in terms of moving along like an ant, rubbing feelers with the ants you encounter, getting bits of info as you need them.

Seeing some country-yokel-type Japanese guys in our hotel I wondered how they ever find anything, and it occurred to me that they must simply ask instructions every block or so. Think of the city as a hive-mind extended in space and time, and you need only keep interrogating the hive-mind where you are and how to get where you are going. You feel-feel-feel your haptic way. As opposed to the can-do Western male approach where you get a map and fix your coordinates and set out like Vasco da Gama, like an instrument-navigating airplane pilot, and you dead-reckon your way to your goal, all by yourself.

At breakfast on the 15th floor there were two halves, the Japanese-breakfast half where you get rice, boiled fish, miso soup, and pickled vegetables, and the American-breakfast half where you get eggs. The music in the Japanese half is a recording of a cuckoo, on the American side it’s Muzak. We tried both halves during our stay.

Looking out the breakfast-room window through the Saturday morning rain, we could see into a building with a many-desked office. The guys in there were doing calisthenics together. It’s healthy, natch, and perhaps a way of bonding. “We all did the same motions at the start of work.” But I don’t think I’d want to work like that. Bad enough to show up at the office at all.

In the morning paper, I read that one of the biggest gangs in Japan is called Yamaguchi-gumi. Such a sweet-sounding name for a gang…like my Software novel gang, the Little Kidders.

June 2, 1990. Kabuki. Ueno. Museum.

The National Kabuki Theater is in the Ginza, and we walked up there to see if we could get in. Good fortune. They had an 11:00 am matinee with easily-bought inexpensive tickets to sit in the highest (4th level) seats. And a booth selling boxed lunches! We got two octagonal wood lunchboxes with sushi in them, even though we weren’t hungry. The box appeal was irresistible.

So there we were in the highest row, with Japanese all around us. There’s a really pronounced dearth of other Westerners here—often as not there are in fact no others in sight. Incredible, really, the depth of U.S. ignorance of Japan. Before coming here I didn’t even know the name of any of the parts or sights of Tokyo.

Anyway, up in the highest row of the kabuki theater we sit, looking down at the not-really-so-distant curtain which has appliquéd images of two flying cranes and numerous bamboo trunks. The hall is very Japanese-style, beams overhead with some slight decoration on them and light wallpaper with a meandering parallelogram design. Rows of red paper lanterns here and there on the sides. Then the show starts.

We see four scenes with men, a boy, and two “women,” though in kabuki the women are played by men. The kabuki was like theater, not like opera, that is, they had no singing per se, although if a group laughed, they’d kind of chorus the laughing.

I opened my box lunch and ate of it, also drinking of my canned tea. The box was covered with paper with large elliptical pastel polka dots. The best food in it was a little sweet yellow rubbery dough cup holding a sushi-like mix of rice and salmon eggs. Another good thing was a single stray green pea.

At the peak of the kabuki play’s action—it lasted an hour in all—the younger brother goes and shakes the older brother, who’s lying in bed asleep. The older brother jumps out of bed, knifes the younger brother in the stomach, delivers a speech—probably about why he’s in the right, the rotten prick. And then the older brother knifes the younger again, killing him.

In the big emotional scene after her son is murdered, the mother’s sobs are like, Sylvia says, an operatic aria. Another cool thing was that, Macbeth-like, the climax is taking place during a storm, and they had really good thunder sounds that I could tell came from an incredibly experienced Japanese thunder-master backstage shaking a big piece of special kabuki thunder metal. Good lightning effects against the house-like set’s translucent windows too.

One more interesting feature were the kakegoe, which are special shouts and whoops which certain audience members give at crucial moments, like when an actor first comes on they might shout his name, or at the end of a scene they might shout something, but they never shout at a wrong or intrusive time, of course, being into the wa and the Zen and the group mind as they are.

“You go on and yell something,” I whispered to Sylvia, and next time somebody yelled like kagu-wa, she yelled kagu-wa too. Such fun to do things with her.

We took the subway up to Akihabara, which is supposed to be this big electronics market, but couldn’t find any action near the subway stop. Saw a man on a bicycle delivering takeout food, which was a tray held up on one hand with a covered dish and, get this, two covered dishes of soup. Soup on a tray on a bicycle. The dish-covers looked like black leather.

Then hopped the subway to Ueno Station, where there’s a godzillion people in the street. I saw a guy buy a dose from a “One Cup” sake machine and chug it. They even sell fifths of whiskey in the vending machines, I’m not kidding.

I played a little pachinko there—but my initial win seems to have been a fluke. And looking at the balls in today’s place, I realize they all have the same character on them. Before, I’d imagined that each ball had its own personal name. In this place the symbol is the number 7. I figure each pachinko parlor has its own symbol, and the symbol is like a ranch’s cattle-brand, so you can’t sneak in balls of your own.

We made our way to the Tokyo National Museum, and went into the main building. They had a bunch of seventh-century Buddha statues, then some thirteenth-century ones, then a room of “enlightenment instruments” that depressingly reminded me of auugh dental tools—things with prongs on the end to pluck out evil. Then there was a room with some really great looking pipes, opium pipes I guess, with long stems decorated amazingly, one stem finned, one polka-dotted.

And then a door that went out in the back yard, and we could read the Japanese for it, the three characters were the lambda, the double psi, and the square: in out mouth.

Yet again Sylvia and I were studying the people on the subway. We saw a teenage boy, and seeing him made us miss our son Rudy. For a fact Rudy has nearly the same skin color as this boy, and the boy’s lips and hands looked like Rudy’s too. It’s funny to be so old, or such a parent, that teenage boys seem cute and touching.

I got a couple of beers from a sidewalk machine, came up to the room to write, wrote this down, and now I’ll move into real time.

June 3, 1990. Dinner with My Translator.

Writing this at midnight.

‘Twas a most mellow and emotionally salubrious fest with my translator Hiroshi Sakuma and his wife Miyuki (Me + You + Key, she explained). Hiroshi came into the city and took us out to his neighborhood by cab—an unbelievably high cab fare, which he paid alone. We ate at his favorite restaurant.

“It’s low tech,” he kept saying fondly. “We’ve been eating exactly these foods for five hundred years.”

The place is called Kappa-home, the kappa being an imaginary beast of Japanese legend. Hiroshi has been going there every Saturday night for ten years, he and Miyuki. The little building was a country house someone took apart—no nails involved—and brought spang into Tokyo. There was a short bar with folks eating at it, and a tatami room, and a main room with benches, and that was the size of it. A seventy-year-old lady at the bar was drinking and eating. Everyone happy and relaxed.

Miyuki is a modest woman with a tentative smile. She met Hiroshi at a science fiction convention when he was at the University of Tokyo and she in high school. Hiroshi has a ponytail, like the kabuki guys, traditional though uncommon these days. The historical oscillation of ponytails in and out of fashion in Eastern and Western cultures.

The ponytailed men in the kabuki had seemed to have the tops of their heads in front of the ponytail shaved, although on looking closer, I’d noticed that one of them actually had a cloth cover on the front of his head that only made it look shaved. I asked Hiroshi and Miyuki about this. Turns out an old-time ponytailed merchant might wear a cloth over the front of his head instead of shaving it, but if it’s a colored cloth it means you’re a pimp. Was the guy in the kabuki supposed to be a pimp? I’ll never know.

The food was outrageously wonderful, the freshest most incredible sushi you can imagine, including whole, raw, sweet-tasting squid, and some mysterious white slices of…what? Hiroshi explains:

“This is the liver of a kind of fish, you call it a monkfish. The liver tastes like cheese. The fish lives very deep in the sea, he is so large and jellylike that you cannot hold him in your hands. The fishermen hang him upside down and the liver falls out of his mouth.”

Kind o’ sets your mouth to waterin’ don’t it? But we actually did like the monkfish liver a lot. Also the raw abalone.

Before we started the sake, the server-woman brought out a big tray with lots of little stoneware cups, all different, and you pick the sake cup you want. Hiroshi’s cup was a silver one brought special to him as a regular client. The sake came from a big white cask with a big ideogram on it.

Hiroshi was proud of his translations of the neologisms in Software and Wetware. He coined the word “kune-kune” to stand for “wiggly,” and for “stuzzy” he invented “rin-rin.” For “wavy” he used “nami”—as in tsunami.

“How’s the surf, dude?”

“Nami, dude. Way rin-rin.”

June 5, 1990. Big Buddha. Japanese Porn.

Sunday, cousin Zsolt and wife Helga took us sightseeing. We got the train down to Kamakura to see a Zen monastery and the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha. The monastery was woodsy, be-templed, tourist-thronged. I saw one monk-type guy, with just the great huge grin you’d hope for. I felt some inklings of peace there, looking at a hillside, at a little Zen shrine, at a perfect arrangement of a flower and a few weeds, feeling once again the unity of all things, and an accompanying loss of body outline—me a jelly pattern in a sea of sensation.

The Daibutsu is about sixty feet tall, he was cast in bronze pieces and assembled about 1300. In 1495 a tsunami came a kilometer inland and trashed his temple, but he’s still there. You can go inside him, he has big doors for air in his back. His head has knobs on it standing for hair. His expression is a marvel of disengaged compassion.

Our last night in the hotel room, I found two pay-TV channels of Japanese porn. I remember my writing mentor Martin Gardner telling me that the Japanese don’t allow depiction of pubic hair. What they often do in the porno movies is to pixelize the crotches, meaning that within a disk area, the image is broken into large squares with each square the average of its component pixels. Another, less frequent trick is to shine a bright spotlight on the crotch so that the area burns out white in the video.

One of the videos was a fake TV show, with the announcers going down on each other, etc. So odd to realize Japanese act this way, too, even the little mask-faced women in their beige suits with the big white lacy collars.

Later I went out and got a late-night bowl of noodles across the street, great noodles, although with the same loathsome strips in it like I’d found in my department store soup. I pointed and gestured to ask the counter people about it, and they told me the hideous mildew strips are namma, which I later learned is pickled bamboo, and not fungus at all.

They were a great crew of guys, the noodlers, kind of like a WWII platoon in a movie, with a kid that all the old ones talked to, a bony guy with radar-dish ears, a plump weak-chinned one with a mustache, and a busy cook in the back.

The last thing in Tokyo on Monday morning, I took a subway alone to the Tokyo Tower, a truly cheesy copy of the Eiffel Tower, with none of the Eiffel’s mass, nor its heart-lifting scale. You take an elevator up 150 meters, and get out, and there, right in front of you, is a fish tank with one poor big black carp in it. A fish in a tank in a tower 150 meters above the ground.

In my final ride in the subway I’m tired of being the different one, the carp, and I’m glad to be going back home to California, back to being a fish in my home sea.

The Crooked World

July 5, 1990. Bike Trip Georgia & Isabel

A few days ago, I took a bicycle trip with my daughters Georgia and Isabel. We rode from our house in Los Gatos to Santa Cruz by the sea. It was lots of fun. Getting over the Santa Cruz Mountains was murder, of course, especially with our stupid heavy knapsacks on our backs. Next time, we’ll find a way to mount our packs on the bike frames. Or, duh, we’ll get panniers.

We made it to the Brighton Beach state park where we got the usual luxurious campground accommodations: a square of hardpacked dirt between two oiled asphalt roads. The three of us slept in our ancient pup tent together, snuggly Isabel in the middle of course, and me on the only mat. I’d brought a foam mat and they hadn’t.

Jealous of my mat, the girls kept saying things like: “The fat is on the mat. Pass the mat, fat.”

We giggled ourselves to sleep. But all night Isabel’s tiny fists pummeled me, to get me to stop snoring. Finally it was time to get up, and we rode a couple of miles along the shore to Dream Inn, where we planned to spend our next night.

As time went on, I was becoming more and more knocked out and astounded at being with two daughters, and big young ladies at that. I mean how did I end up with two daughters?

The girls got tired, of course, of hearing this phrase. Sometimes it seems like I have a mild Tourette syndrome. I’ll hook onto some phrase that intrigues me and say it dozens of times a day.

Isabel’s bike chain broke right as we got to the Dream Inn. We wheeled our bikes into our motel room. I went down to the pool and had two mai-tais. This was a far cry from the campground, man, it was great, the pool water just right, the beach exciting with pelicans diving and seagulls fighting for the scraps.

Then we all napped for an hour and then we found a place to fix Isabel’s bike, the guy just removed the weak link of the chain.

We caught dinner at this crunchy bohemian Santa Cruz place called India Joze and I had squid, their specialty. And after dinner we biked over to my fellow San Jose State professor Jon Pearce’s house and asked him if could give us a ride back over the hill to Los Gatos the next day. Whew he agrees, only he’s leaving at 8 am, as he’s teaching summer school. I mentioned to Jon that one of our woman friends had been impressed by him, and Jon delivered an immortal line: “I tend to dazzle.”

After Pearce brought us back to Los Gatos, I pretty much just laid around reading magazines, also I read a big section of my novel The Hollow Earth, which just came out, in hardback. Satisfying to see it in print.

There’s not much pressure coming from Autodesk these days and I’m not working very hard. Maybe today I’ll do some work on this old start of a short-story I have, a kind of terror tale called “The Realtor.” Realtor as ultimate villain. There’s this one woman realtor who’s always trying to get into our rented house so she can show it to potential purchasers. She was even talking about getting us evicted. And the bullshit about them wanting you to write “realtor” with a capital R. As if. The realtor concept seems like a good “crystallization site,” that is, a nub upon which something larger than a story might grow. I may fold it into that novel that I want to write about robots and virtual ants.

I feel like I’m drifting, with no clear goals. Sometimes that makes me anxious, but other times I enjoy it, especially when I’m doing things with my kids. Time with children is always time well spent.

But I must say, by the end of the bike trip I was happy to get my own room again! I think Georgia must have called me “old” approximately fourteen-hundred times during the trip.

“Old and slow and he drinks the most water.”

Okay, so I’m old, so what? And then they got onto this thing that I pedal my bike wrong, that I use too low of a gear, and therefore my legs churn so fast that it looks silly, and they kept cranking down to low gear and imitating me. But really it was great spending so much time with them.

Isabel and I have to go to the hardware store to get sticks for a mobile she wants to make. Also we two need to get cheesecloth and pectin for our annual attempt to make jelly from the plums growing wild by our road.

August 4, 1990. Still With The Teeth.

Like I keep saying, I’ve had unbelievable tooth trouble this summer. Three dentists told me to see this crazy prick of a periodontist, so I finally did. He said I should get two wisdom teeth and five perfectly good real teeth pulled. And ever since I got them pulled, I’ve been losing all the bone that used to hold them up, the bone is working its way out through my gums in horrible fractal pieces. It’s like having a Wurlitzer organ of pain in my mouth, with all the different little keypress patches, all the neurasthenic neuralgia stops.

I still get high a lot, but now when I get high, instead of thinking about gorgeous math and science fiction things, I think, more often than not, about my gums. I rub and pick at them, trying to speed the months-long bone erosion. A spot on the gums will get real sensitive and painful and then a spur of bone’ll come through. The spur spreads out into a long crumbly ridge with a tungsten-hard spine. I claw the gum back from the bone and wait for the bone to dissolve or be eaten out below and snap off. A recent, more horrible development, is that sometimes I abrade the unbearable jagged points with a little spark-plug-point file I got at the hardware. I go to bed with my shirtfront stiff from toothpicking drool.

There’s a new piece of bone flaring up just now in my lower jaw, all the other spots were in my upper. But I had a tooth out on the lower jaw too, and the sloughed off support bone has to be crumbled and picked out bit by bit, and then that might be the end of it. The bummer is that this bone area in question is the size of the last two joints of my little finger.

The bigger drain on my psychic energy is my rueful feeling that the periodontist tricked me, that I really shouldn’t have had the teeth out at all, that this is a silly fad-driven torture, done for no real reason, and that I would have been just as well off letting the teeth rot, ripen, and drop in their own time. And now the guy wants to pull back my gums and drill out all the bone at my surviving teeth’s bases, also yank out two more teeth.

“Let’s get a really good clean bone structure so we can put in tungsten implants to hold your false teeth,” he says. “You’ll thank me when you’re seventy.”

I’m not going back to him at all.

September 9, 1990. Acid Trip & Ramones

On Friday I took two hits of Gooney Bird acid, I was drunk and out of pot and I craved a massive rush, so I dug out those little scraps of soft paper I’d gotten at a Mondo party and I ate them. Bang. Slowly I mobilized.

First I’m sitting on the curb saying, “Finally I’m a Californian.” And then Sylvia and I walk to Hannegan’s bar.

The marble table tops. Tim Leary. Vienna. The simple humanity of sitting with a dark beer among the marble table tops, voices all around. On my right is a piece of gold Astroturf on the floor. The rushes come in like surf, and with each rush people’s faces grow dark and important, and with each rush the Astroturf turns into seaweed or little men reaching up. A rush goes away and I’m a drunk, desperate, middle-aged person, but it’s bearable, flaked out knowing I’m waiting for another rush, keeping an eye on the Astroturf there to see when I’ll get back to being very high.

I think back to when my family and I were on the road moving out here with the three kids and all our stuff in a big van—at that point, we knew what we were doing. We were moving. Now I’m a little lost.

I’m short on funds, so by midnite we’re back home. Sylvia goes to bed. How great to close down the windows and crank up the one and only Ramones. I can’t find my Ramones Mania best-of CD, so I dig out the old weird plastic disks that used to be called records. How odd to put this big physical piece of plastic on a spinning wheel, and how odd to not be able to punch buttons to change the song. Like there is some actual physical needle taking the tone off the spinning plastic.

All night while I’m heavily rushing the thing that carries me is the image of Joey. Joey in hideous acidfreak wideangle closeup, bad skin and all, Joey and Johnny and Marky and DeeDee, dude, so great to crank up their music. Tripping, I really fully understand where they are coming from, fucked-up on acid late at night making loud, perfectly chiming noise. I’m imagining that I’m Joey Ramone.

The great sludge magic of the sound washes over me, carrying me back to slamming at the Greek two weeks ago with Isabel and Rudy, slamming at the Ramones gig at One Step Beyond with Rudy the year before, slamming at the Ramones gig at One Step Beyond the year before that with Georgia, and before that cranking the Ramones records through the Lynchburg years, always the Ramones.

In bed, I can’t sleep all night long, watching the show in my head. First it’s Firesign Theatre routines, then tragic guilt, then a vision of hordes of people marching past my window. Someone is carrying a duck, there’s a spot the size of a dot, someone touches the spot—there—or takes a picture of the duck. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. I worry that my father is dead. Dawn rises.

I started smoking cigarettes again on the trip, imagining my fingers like poor people’s fingers, holding the fuming butt. I realized what a selfish California yuppie I’ve become. Can I open my heart to those all around me? How much I hate…how little I love.

I spent a day of suicidally depressed horror on the Santa Cruz beach. Kept having flashbacks about the duck and the spot the size of a dot and the hordes of humanity.

Came back from Cruz. Sylvia and I and listened to the Ramones. The Ramones are so much better than anything else in the entire spectrum of art.

When my kids and I saw Joey at the Greek, he did just like he always does when he comes out, he picks up the mike stand and turns it upside down and threatens—bad boy! And then Johnny and the changeable other guitarist get up on boxes and they have dry ice and bright colored lights. They hunch over, they play faster than anyone, they play twenty songs in forty minutes, it’s rock and roll.

Down in the pit slamming that time, a gothic little girl sez to me, “Throw me up,” and I throw her up in the air. Other hands grab her and pass her along. She ends up in front near Joey, near divine, tuneful, white white skin, black black hair Joey, stoned on acid, always always full of wonderful noise.

Someone took a picture of a duck the size of a dot. Whilst marching to Arabia. The war on drugs. I touched a dot, I got a job, I bought a car. I didn’t see god, and when I closed my eyes all I saw was used-up fractals and Paul Mavrides’s poster for the Church of the SubGenius. My face was oily in a wide-angle lens. There were earthquake waterjelly waves in the floor.

I understood at last how to be a greasy-faced punk acidhead. I understood how to see the world like Joey Ramone. I listened to big chunky Ramones records and the air was full of beautiful noise.

I’m old and getting older. I want to hear the Ramones.

September 14, 1990. Assessing Ramones Trip.

When I took my first acid trip back in 1969, it was real acid, man, blow your brains out, dissolve your body, talk to god, and see the White Light. These Gooney Bird hits that the Mondo people gave me—well, they were strong, but not life-changing or enlightening. And not good for me. Five days later, I’m like staying on the edge of the sidewalk slightly frightened by the shapes of the shadows of shrubs. Totally holistic?

The Gooney Bird did leave me with a hippie sense that Everything is Love. The idea of service, the idea of helping my fellow-man. I see so much hate in myself, and I’d like to get rid of it. The desire to kill people who tailgate me in traffic. The what-a-moron thoughts towards realtor types.

My Mondo friend told me I could get a sheet of this acid for a hundred dollars. As if. That would be the end of me. So much acid depression agony. A person took a picture of a duck.

A few days after the Ramones trip, I had a dream about my writer friend Marc Laidlaw. I’m on an icy road and some evil beefy rednecks are tailgating me and I skid off to one side and clamber down into a California valley, and the cows have random numbers of legs from three to eight and then there is Marc! And he says, “This is artificial reality, I can show you how to travel through it to your home world.”

Pointlessness. Meaninglessness. Aimlessness. Randomicity.

Where am I in realtime? Writing this in the wee hours. At the beginning of Dante’s Inferno the author character talks about being in his forties, and he’s lost and fucked-up in the woods. I’ve never felt more lost in my life. I’m at my second midlife crisis no doubt. The first was back in Lynchburg when I got fired and sang punk rock with the Dead Pigs.

Writing a journal entry like this is soothing. The healing power of wheenk. Before I was a novelist all I did was write long letters to my buddies.

These days I’m not writing letters or novels. I just hack on my computer for San Jose State and Autodesk. If I can ever tear loose of this hacking scene I could write some good books. Hacking is addictive. The payback is immediate—with a good hack you’ve opened a window into some new weird reality and can kill the hours glotzing through your new window.

Pointlessness. Meaninglessness. Aimlessness. Randomicity.

October 12, 1990. Cyberthon.

The Cyberthon was great—a twenty-four hour fest celebrating virtual reality, held in a huge old film-studio warehouse near the Bay in industrial San Francisco. Whole Earth Magazine helped organize it, and Autodesk had a presence there, due to the Autodesk Cyberspace VR software tools that we’ve been working on. I brought my own computer to demo CA Lab, Chaos, and the artificial ants program I’m working on.

Autodesk had these floor-mounted bicycles—they were the idea of Autodesk’s original cyberspace hacker, Eric Gullichsen, who called them hicycles—and if you got on one and pedaled with the VR goggles on, you’d see yourself moving along a track.

The track goes though a computer-graphical landscape with Saturn over the Transamerica building, and with a circling blimp. From time to time the blimp comes down and blocks the bicycle track, this might be a bug. At the start of the Cyberthon the hicycle demo worked perfectly, but then some of the devices were overheating, and this ferret-like Central European WWII-type guy with steel eyeglasses was tensely rooting around in the chips. He was from ShoGraphics, the outfit that made our special high-end video-card.

My new ants were well received. They’re getting smart. I have them programmed so they can hide under a rock or come out. And you can click on them to direct their evolution. I’d like to install an ant display at Fisherman’s Wharf, like a game machine that people pay to play. There’s a remote chance of Autodesk arranging this.

I ran into William Gibson, the king of the cyberpunks, and I showed him the Chaos program and my ants, which he loved. And then we put him on the hicycle with the Autodesk techs leading him thru it.

“Those dark triangles on the left, we think those are hardware bugs,” says Eric Gullichsen.

Gibson grins. “Hardware bugs. I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never actually seen them before.”

Then Stephen Wolfram—the guy who got me into cellular automata, and later wrote Mathematica—Wolfram turns up and goes bananas over my ants.

“Rudy, this is wonderful, this is completely interesting. Please send me a copy. I want to do science again.”

Bruce Sterling, another of my fellow cyberpunk writers, walks by with a journalist he’s cultivating, and Bruce says, “And this is Rudy Rucker, the greatest science-fiction writer in America.”

Wo, dude! Egoboo!

My hipster friend Faustin Bray was there of course, also Marc Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000, V. Vale of Research, Tim Leary, and even Brian Eno the musician. A real scene. I demoed Eno the sounds that Chaos makes, and he really liked them.

Since Cyberthon wanted to stress the value of virtual reality, there were no alcoholic refreshments, just herbal teas and Jello salad. A pure software high. A blessing in disguise for me, actually, as so often I drink too much at conferences and end up making a bad impression on exactly the people I’ve been waiting to see.

October 17, 1990. Dinner at Mavrides’s.

We had a deluxe dinner at cartoonist Paul Mavrides’ apartment in the Mission. It was us and fellow writers Marc Laidlaw and John Shirley—Marc with his wife Geraldine, and John with his new girlfriend Mickey, also Paul’s roommate Hal Robbins, who’s a cartoonist as well.

Paul’s great series of velvet paintings of sick subjects were all over the place: “Crack Pipe,” “ Lung Cancer,” “ The Challenger Disaster,” “The Kennedy Assassination,” and more.

The coolest thing was a set of five rotating shelves inside a slim vertical Timex-Watch-type display, wholly pure plastic, the shelves loaded with incredibly strange plastic toys that Paul has, in his persistent weirdness, found in places like East Berlin—like one odd little man with a mouth that goes all the way around his discus-shaped head, with four eyes on top. And a sculpture of JFK with an A-bomb sticking through his head—Paul doctors some of these figurines by hand. John Shirley clumsily lurched into the display case, and gasp all the figures moved.

I started thinking how cool it would be if these plastic things could become alive. The old dancing toys routine from the movies. In my next ware novel—Limpware?—maybe there can be some kind of tiny ant-like virus that can land on, like, a big soft plastic snail (like the one I see in Mavrides’s display case) and the ant grows circuitry inside the plastic snail and adds polymers that can contract like springs, so that now the snail starts inching around.

In Software, we had the humans and the chip-based bopper robots. At the end of Wetware, all the boppers have been killed by a kind of mold, chipmold, and their plastic skins, the flickercladding, have become independently conscious. Maybe in Limpware something infects the flickercladding.

October 18, 1990. Hungry At a CS Exam.

So now I’m writing on my gray ’n beige laptop, sitting here proctoring an hour and fifteen minute test in Software Engineering. A usual time for writing journal notes.

I have a file of old tests, so making up the tests doesn’t take long. I just block copy a question from here or there, add some new ones, print a test, and Xerox it. Of course today my printer ribbon is gone, and the printer at San Jose State won’t work for me, so I had to write out the questions by hand and copy that.

The lumbering rocket ship is blasting off with one engine misfiring badly. The lurching scorching heat, floundering against gravity, up up into the sky.

I had no time for breakfast, so my one shining goal is a taco and beer at the nearby Supertaqueria come 1:30 pm.

Twenty-five minutes to go. I think I’ll get the carnitas soft taco with sour cream. Carnitas is roast pork, they have a big partly blackened chunk of meat, and they saw off bits to shred for your taco. I’m finally learning about Mexican food. They give you two soft taco skins wrapped as one around a filling to make a single taco, but you can dissemble it to make two tacos. Or save the extra skin on the side, and fill it with the stuff that falls out while you’re eating the first skin with its filling.

Sometimes I get a quesadilla as well, it’s a greasy griddle-warmed taco skin—a tortilla—with cheese and salsa on it. Or maybe I’ll order two separate tacos, and get four out of them. Of course then when I eat the first plate I’ll be rushing to get to the second one, so it won’t taste as good. The best might be to order first one taco and then eat it and then go and order a second if I still want it.

Twenty-two minutes to go. Nobody’s handed in a test yet. There are eighteen of them. The first day of class there were forty. When they heard I was teaching the class in C, they dropped like flies—many of them only know Pascal. Each of them now has a semester programming project he or she is working on. We have a pool game, chutes and ladders, an automatic glossary, a stock market simulator, a poker game, a mah jong game, a blackjack game, a font design tool, a Korean Pente game, a virtual goldfish tank, an ants program, a sharks and fish program, and a graph plotter. Oh the things you can compute!

Eighteen minutes. And now the first student, a shrimp named Julie, a good programmer, has handed in a test. Yes!

Daughter Isabel has grown some more and revels in being taller than Georgia, if only Georgia were here to be taller than, but she’s off at college, as is Rudy Jr. It’s hard for Isabel not having any siblings around. I can only do so good of an imitation of a kid, eventually it wears through and I’m exposed as a dull adult.

Fifteen more minutes. How slow time goes. The prettiest girl in this class is called Helen. In my Computer Graphics class there are two pretty girls: Hien and Jing. Hien has teased hair, white blouse black skirt, pouty red lips. Jing is Southern Chinese with a flat nose and huge everted lips. Smoldering eyes. Wo! Who says computer science is dull?

Eleven minutes. In college, my fifty-minute German literature class was so boring that as soon as I got there, I’d write out the numbers fifty down thru one and cross them out one by one, sitting there the whole period staring at the clock, now and then blessedly losing track of the clock and getting to cross out two (never more than two) minutes at one swell foop.

I’m in the classroom where I was teaching last year when they had the big earthquake—a year ago yesterday. After the earthquake, the restaurant down the hill from us in Los Gatos was giving out free Mexican Food. What time is it?

“OK, five minutes left…um…try and finish up.” Lying about the time.

Six minutes to go. I’ll sign off now in anticipation of the papers rollin’ in. Next stop is our station wagon, also known as the Purple Whale, on the roof of the SJSU parking garage. I’ll ditch the heavy papers and my laptop and the next stop is—Supertaqueria! Unless I fall off the garage roof and break my neck, or have a lethal seizure while walking to the garage.

If you’re reading this, it means I did make it, so think of me happy with my taco n’ cerveza.

Mom in the Rest Home

October 25, 1990. Mom in Rest Home.

Well here I am in the Louisville Episcopal Old Folks Home. It’s not far from Rudy Lane where our old family house was. Mom is in the rest home because she’s had a couple of strokes that put in her a wheel chair. Also she has problems with her diabetes. She was living in a house that Embry built her on her farm, but she’s reached the point where she can’t live alone.

I’m actually staying at Mom’s rest home now—they have a couple of guest rooms, with furniture a little nicer than motels have. Mom is doing pretty well. Embry picked me up at the airport, he’s full of complaints about the situation, and why wouldn’t he be—he and his wife Noreen are doing all the work. God knows Mom’s no prize. But why shouldn’t she be a prize, my dear mother, why shouldn’t I move into this rest-home guest room forever. Oh sure I will.

Everyone here says “Hi” in a real giant-squid-tentacle-deep way that they don’t dare risk in suspicious, densely populated California. Tonight all the old ladies and few gents were dressed up in the rest home, going to the annual cocktail party they have in the home’s dining area.

Mom was set on me and her going out to dinner in a restaurant—and the dinner was nice. But when we came back, everyone in the rest home acted like we’d missed out on the big action of the year.

On our way out, Mom and I chatted with a few old babes not actually in wheelchairs, sitting near the front door waiting for the cocktail party action. One of them, amazingly enough, was Mary B. She used to run the Louisville Cotillion, or dancing-school, it met in the Louisville Country Club ballroom every week.

Pop used to drive me there, and I never wondered what he did while I was inside. Mom signed me up for dancing school a bit late in the summer, so Mrs. B. said I should come over to her house and learn the foxtrot. So it was me and her in her basement, that time, and she taught me the rudiments of the foxtrot in about twenty minutes. I remember I couldn’t believe I was dancing, and I couldn’t believe I was dancing with a woman, even though she was, of course, as unavailable as a footstep diagram.

So when and I stop by the ladies on our way out to dinner, the connection comes out because Mary B. was introduced to me, and I mentioned dancing school, not holding back. The people in the rest home are no longer authority figures by any wise. They’re here because they have serious problems in their world adjustment. They’re as easy to be around as little children. Mary B. says only one thing in response to my friendly chatter.

“Did you have fun?” Then twists her head and continues to stare oddly out the window.

Her husband is in the rest home too, but not in the same room as her, because he has really seriously lost it. You walk by his room most any time, and you hear him chanting “Eleven, eleven, eleven, leven, leven, leven…” On and on.

Later I glimpsed him with Mary B. in his room looking at the TV together. He points at the TV.

“Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, eleven, eleven, leven, leven…”

I mentioned it to my Mom. “He never gets past eleven,” she says matter-of-factly. “Other times he sings ‘Row, row, row your boat.’”

Later I heard him singing that song as far as the word “Merrily,” and he gets stuck repeating that. Never makes it to, “Life is but a dream.”

Mom and I had our dinner in the little town of St. Matthews. When I was a boy, we did most of our shopping in St. Matthews, it’s on the edge of Louisville, and we lived a little farther out. We ate at a new restaurant that’s right across from the location of the first train station I ever saw. I regularly dream about that station in travel dreams. It’s gone now, eaten by parking lots.

After Mom and I came back to the rest home from dinner we sat at an empty table near the nurses’ station. It’s really not so bad in here. Mom has a stash of wine that she can’t get at, but if she asks, the nurse will bring her a glass in a styrofoam cup. And if you’re an old smoothie you ask for no ice, because then you get more wine in your cup. I felt mellow while we were sitting there because as soon as we’d gotten back from dinner, I’d skulked outside and smoked a joint of my new “keep flapping and you’ll stay high” weed.

October 26, 1990. Library with Mom

It’s been Memory Lane today, driving Mom around Louisville, seeing so many old spots. Louisville Country Day School—where I did my fourth through eighth grades—is now painted gray and called the Rock Creek Christian Academy. We drove by the old redbrick St. X. building on Broadway where I did tenth grade—I remember us leaning out our windows to wave at Nixon, tooling up Broadway on his run against Kennedy for President.

Mom and I went to the old Brown Hotel on Broadway and I had their famous (in Louisville, anyway,) “Hot Brown” sandwich—turkey and bacon under a cheese sauce with diced vegetables. The Brown is the hotel where Paul Newman and George C. Scott and Piper Laurie stay in The Hustler. The place is unbelievably old-time, with tiny elevators and staircases, they just reopened a few years ago.

I found my eventual career by reading the science fiction books in the downtown Louisville library—back then they had about two shelves worth. So today I hastened to find their fabled SF shelves—and was bitterly disappointed not to find myself there, I’m but a gap between Spider Robinson and Joanna Russ. Aauuuugh! I mean, come on. The Secret of Life and Wetware are fucking set in Louisville. Mom wanted me to approach the counter and pipe up, but maybe I’ll write a letter instead.

On the way home we drove by the old music school where Mom made me take piano lessons and even a music theory class—the place is now a shambles. Passing through Cherokee Park, we saw ducks in a clear stream, and a certain amount of fall foliage. Then we got back to Mom’s room in the rest home. She still has the old family couch, also the dining table, Pop’s old dresser, a couple of chairs, lamps, a few paintings, and her little wrought-iron table with the tiles on the top.

The only way to stop doing little errands for Mom—like pick up a wadded Kleenex from the floor—was to lie down on her couch and feign sleep, and soon my apparent sleeping was no pretence.

I can’t believe how small everything in Louisville seems. The pace of life is so slow. It’s so uncrowded. In a way, this place is paradise.

After my afternoon nap, we went over to visit with Mom’s old friend Sally Keith. She lives in an early Kentucky stone house on a cute old farm off Rudy Lane near where we used to live. Kind Sally had organized a little party in my honor—the guests were Sally, her children Sherry and Paul, Mom, brother Embry, his wife Noreen, our old minister Steve Davenport and his wife Susan.

Sherry’s daughter is going to have her wedding-reception in the front yard of the Keith’s, just as Sherry and Phoebe did in the summer of 1962, oh wow that’s nearly 30 years ago. Sherry has white hair like Sally now. Paul was exuberant as usual, says he has his own copy of Secret of Life wherein the Keith house is in fact featured. Paul says he’s pulling in some real bucks through a part ownership of a Haitian cigarette company called “Comme Il Faut”—he’s selling them Kentucky tobacco.

I got old Sally Keith to dig out her collection of little paired porcelain salt and pepper shakers that I used to love to look at when I was a boy. Now they were on the top shelf of her pantry. Flies in amber. So many things here are so incredibly the same.

Then I brought Mom to Embry’s house, and Noreen cooked about sixteen doves that Embry had shot. Mom vegged out the way she does in groups, not saying anything, and the rest of us talked a lot. It was pleasant and relaxing and mellow.

October 27, 1990. Downtown With Mom.

I took Mom down to downtown Louisville again today, she can’t get enough of it—escaping her rest home. Louisville is kind of like a ghost-town these days—it makes poor dead San Jose look bustling. We ended up having lunch at the Seelbach Hotel Coffee Shop where Sylvia and I always used to take our niece Siofra on her birthday—which, unfortunately for her, lands on December 26, the day after Christmas. Since we often did Xmas in Louisville, it got to be kind of a tradition—Uncle Rudy and Aunt S. taking the five gorgeous grubbers out—our three kids and Embry’s two.

Today the Seelbach was practically deserted, it was just me and whispering Mom—her voice is very weak. It was like a knife in the heart, how much I missed being there with the rowdy five kids. I can hardly express how strong this feeling was for me. The same wallpaper there, only no grubbers.

Thinking back on those somewhat desperate and cabin-fevered outings of yore very intently today. The silly thing is that I remember distinctly that back then I was thinking what a hassle. And now, looking back at being there with five laughing kids, I see that, all unbeknownst, those were among the most wonderful episodes of my life.

After lunch Mom and I went to a really tacky hotel on Main Street called Galt House. Some fat young Louisville info lady had told us there was a Berea College Crafts outlet there, which is something Mom and I are interested in.

All over town—in the Brown and in the Seelbach and especially in the Galt—we saw signs saying Welcome NFDA. But at Galt it was spelled out: National Funeral Director’s Association. All the people we saw with convention badges were, I now realized, undertakers. Both men and women. Creeps? Yow!

The thing that really knocked me out was that at each hotel there was a local representative of perhaps the Chamber of Commerce handing out free cigarettes in those little sample packs like airlines used to give you. Free ciggies for the funeral directors!

In the gross Galt House I couldn’t resist striking up a conversation with one of the women handing out the samples.

“Cigarettes, eh?”

“Take some!”

“I quit smoking two years ago,” I lied.

“Oh, good for you,” says the woman in a practiced, neutral tone. “I expect everyone should.”

“Well,” I go, wanting her to think I’m a funeral director. “It would be bad for business if they quit.”

She gets her wind up and looks suspicious. “Depends what kind of business you in.”

Anyway we found the Berea College shop. Berea is out in the hills of Kentucky, and specializes in teaching native Kentucky crafts to country people. On our family road trips, we’d often stop here—Mom and Pop loved the things they made. Perhaps the most famous Berea College creation is this tabletop game called skittles. You wind a string around a top, and send it into a maze of polished wooden walls, trying to knock down slender pins. When we were growing up, the Keith and the Davenport families had a skittles game—they’re quite large—and I’d always wanted one for our family—mainly to play at Christmas time.

Mission accomplished! I ordered a skittles game—reasonably priced, wholly authentic, made by gen-u-wine hillbillies, and coming to our Los Gatos home next week.

Then I ditched Mom and came over to Embry’s for the afternoon, he and I went out in the country four-wheelin’ in his new 4x4 pickup and set up a deer blind. It’s a special ladder with a platform that Embry bought. We attached it to a tree near where the deer had scraped up the ground. Embry the hunter. He has some books bound in elephant skin. And a couple of tusks that weigh fifty pounds each.

For supper we all went out to dinner, the place is the inside of the old Crescent movie theater, which was the only place in Louisville to see arty films when I was growing up. I saw David and Lisa there, also Diabolique, The Connection, and Raisin in the Sun.

Because it’s not California, there’s not the stress about reservations at a restaurant, when you get there you just walk in. And, get this, the food at this place is free for Embry because he supplies them with the oak wood that they use for their grill. Scraps from our family’s wood-parts business. That Embry.

Being around Mom is draining. I’ve been talking about this a bit with the weary Embry and Noreen. My back hurts from lifting her in and out of the car, for instance, and then I found out that she actually can stand up, can even walk! She phones up Noreen four times a day.

Embry thinks she should move to where she’d be “closer to Rudy,” that is, closer to me. His other idea is that he and Noreen will leave Mom in Louisville and they’ll move to Wyoming. Mom could live twenty more years. It struck me this time that she’s exactly thirty years older than me. Seventy-four. Mom’s mother lived past ninety.

Noreen says she’s going to die when she’s sixty-five like her mother and all her other female relatives. She says Embry is stupid to waste money on life insurance for himself, since she’s going to die first. Noreen is in great form these days, although still broken up about her own parents’ death. She makes fun of Embry’s hunting in the pleasantest way. They seem ready for the empty nest. Their thing is travel—that’s what they spend all their extra money on. They miss Siofra a lot, of course, even as they both dread and long for their son Embry III’s departure.

I’m staying at Embry’s tonight. I’m sitting on the bed I’ll sleep in, in my absent niece Siofra’s room. Her horse ribbons are up near the ceiling, and a photo of friendly Sooner the horse, eyes crinkled as lovably as Arf’s. In the corner is the same model Electrolux vacuum cleaner as the one Mom once gave me—I’d forgotten, she gave one to each of us boys. Mom loved her Electrolux.

October 28, 1990. Going to the Track.

Here’s the world famous writer writing on his laptop as he looks out the jetliner window at the receding city of his birth.

This morning I took Mom to Embry’s to have lunch. Noreen had mentioned in the morning that we’d have cold cuts and cheese. By then I knew well the contents of their fridge, so I stopped off at the Winn Dixie and got some extras, roast beef and Roquefort from the deli counter, also a styrofoam cooler so Embry could send some frozen game back to California with me. Doves ’n deer.

After lunch I took Mom back to her rest home. Embry, Noreen and I were going to Churchill Downs before the airport. It made me cry to say goodbye to Mom. Despite any small annoyances she looks so beautiful to me. And the way she talked about wanting to visit us in California again just broke my heart. In her condition, the airlines don’t like to have her ride alone. Last time she came, the stewardess cornered me and bawled me out. But maybe this summer she could come out for a week with Siofra or something.

Just before we said good-bye, Mom gave me a painting, the one painting she’s done since her stroke. A spring scene, flowers and grass.

At the track with Embry, I won about sixty dollars. The big win was on a horse owned by two guys I went to school with, one from Country Day and the other from St. X. They were sitting in boxes right near us, and the wife of one of them I’d also known and admired in high school. Louisville at its Louisvillest.

All the time and memories in Louisville. Oh! On the whole it’s been a good trip. I had nice evenings with Embry and Noreen, I had some fun with Mom and showed her some good times. And I won money at the track.

Today I played chess with young Embry III and managed to lose—never a big difficulty for me at that game—and I think it made him feel really good. He’s his same old sweet self, even if he does have a ponytail, two earrings, and the yukky beginnings of a beard.

Bailing Out of Teaching

November 28, 1990. Realtor and the Ants.

Mansonesque Spahn Ranch Straight Satan Ouish Morehouse lowlife type characters would be a nice addition, if there were any people like that anymore, but might as well write as if there are. The book should be a veritable compendium of California types. Filthy Phil in Software was a Manson type guy. I am enjoying Ed Sanders’s book The Family—which I’m reading as background research to write my LA Times book review of the reissue of Heinlein’s Strangler in a Strangle Land.

December 11, 1990. Chaos Software Done.

The decks are clear. Chaos is getting shrink-wrapped, the LA Times review is done, today is the last day of class. No new classes till January 28, and the Autodesk management is into “hanging back and thinking” before we start a new Science Series project based on my virtual ants. I hope I can actually write a little bit of fiction in the next six weeks. Since June, when Josh Gordon took over the Chaos code, I haven’t really done anything creative.

February 21, 1991. LISP. Ants in Cyberspace.

I scored pot a few days ago, and have been increasingly out of it all week. Doing some relativistic-time-dilated chalky diagrams of the Lisp language’s Mickey-Mouse bullshit, I suddenly unbared my soul to the students.

“You know, I really hate Lisp. I never taught this course before. It was Jon Pearce who got me to teach it. He’s in Africa now, Zimbabwe. Professor Pearce told me, ‘Rudy, this is the most psychedelic textbook I ever saw.’” While quoting Pearce, my voice assumes a heavy, wheezy, way-mellow intonation. And then I return to my normal voice. “But, I’m telling you that if you don’t know what the hell is going on with Lisp, don’t worry, because you’re in good company. I don’t know either. We’ll just press on.”

My rant really cheered the class up, in fact, it’s the happiest I’ve ever seen this group of students look.

I saw my old Computer Graphics student Hien Ngo in the hall today, one of the cutest students I ever had. When she saw me today, Hien waved hi to me with the tips of the fingers of both hands, like a cartoon rabbit. Three guys were sitting there talking to her, fascinated. Inspired by Hien, I’m working a magnetic Vietnamese woman Nga Vo into my novel, The Realtor and the Ants.

At Autodesk I’m getting heavy into cyberspace. Right after we shipped Chaos, Autodesk had a bad quarter and went into retrenchment mode. They fucking laid off the guy, Josh Gordon, who worked on Chaos with me, and they aren’t really promoting Chaos at all.

They spent too much money on the user’s manual, and they’re like “We blew $400K on Chaos, and it was a mistake. We aren’t going to make a mistake like that again.”

So they’re not too keen on publishing the ants software I’ve been working on. Oh well. So my interest in the other Autodesk advanced technology lab projects has perforce gone up a lot. And now I’m one of six guys working on the Autodesk Cyberspace Developer’s Kit.

How odd the world is, that I end up doing this. The Autodesk cyberspace kit will be a library of programs that make it easy for hackers to create whatever cyberspace world they want. My function these days is to serve as Autodesk’s first example of a cyberspace developer. I’ve been looking at hypercubes and riding on the Lorenz attractor. It’s kind of amazing I lucked into this gig—about as likely as moving to New Mexico when you’re forty and getting Chuck Yeager’s job flying the X-1.

The code is all in C++, so I think about objects a lot. Everything’s an object. Physics is an object, even. You can just swap out one kind of physics for another.

March 22, 1991. Request Leave From San Jose State.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been thinking about calling my new novel The Realtor and the Ants, but now I see that it should be The Hacker and the Ants. Nobody wants to read about a realtor, menacing though they are.

In San Jose there’s a Vietnamese gang: The East Side Virus. Vietnamese for “moon” is “Ngoc Tho,” which means “Pearl Rabbit.” Local color.

Yesterday I talked to my agent Susan Protter. She liked the first forty-three pages I sent her, says my editor at Morrow is really eager to see it. Yesterday I sent Swarthmore College the last of the tuition for daughter Georgia, thank you Autodesk.

Which leads to me today writing a letter to the Math/CS Dept asking for full-time leave next year! The novel contract could bring in almost as much as what San Jose State would give me anyway (what with me being on half-time leave to work at Autodesk), and I don’t need money as much with Swarthmore paid off. I’ll write all the time, it’ll be great. This plan is my forty-fifth birthday present to myself.

Lately I’ve been editing my story-and-essay anthology Transreal! Looking at my past work, I’ve been feeling mournful over the hiatus in my writing career. I haven’t written anything since like 1989, it feels like, other than the slow inching forward of The Hacker and the Ants. But now all of a sudden I feel like Hacker and the Ants could break open and really go.

And, hell, if I was free to write a lot, I could sell Hacker and the Ants, and then get a contract after that to do, like, a nonfiction book, the fact-book that comes after Mind Tools, right, I haven’t let myself think about that in so long. After years of learning by teaching at SJSU and hacking at Autodesk I’ve inhaled enough new knowledge and it’s time to breathe some of it out.

The idea of giving up the SJSU job scares me stiff. What if all I ever do then is stay at home and get fucked up? An office outside of the house would be a definite sanity saver, that was crucial in Lynchburg I do recall. A room of one’s own.

A room to putter in lengthily, and at peace. The only bad thing about the Lynchburg life was, really, the lack of status and money.

Teaching is like social-work. It’s good for the world, it makes me feel good, but now I’ve done five more years of it, and I’m ready for a rest. I’ll never get tenure and sabbatical anyway, but I can act as if I had it, can’t I. Just go on leave.

April 2, 1991. Gregory Chaitin.

I was on a panel up in San Francisco for the joint meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic and the American Philosophical Society. The speaker was Gregory Chaitin, and my San Jose State colleague Michael Beeson was in charge of the panel. Michael invited me because I made the public aware of Chaitin’s Theorem with my nonfiction book, Mind Tools. Also I know Chaitin from earlier times.

I was happy to be part of this august company. Walking into the conference, I thought of B. Kliban’s cartoon with the caption “Philosophers Looting A Small Town.” The cartoon shows: A tweed-suited, glasses-wearing, bearded man with a woman over his shoulder; an academic in a robe snarling triumphantly and holding up a bloody sword; and a thinker in a toga torching a building.

After the panel, Beeson, Chaitin and I had dinner in North Beach. It was great fun. Chaitin was brilliant, overexcited, and a serious drinker—he made me look like a light-weight. Like, he ordered two bottles of $28 dollar wine before we’d finished the appetizers. Later, when Chaitin ordered six desserts for us even though he was the only one who wanted dessert, Beeson and I had a word together, and we agreed that the tab for our meal was going to be on our guest. We just had to kind of steer his mind around to the concept and he didn’t mind.

The next day, thinking of Chaitin, Beeson emailed me the perfect quote from Hunter Thompson: “He had that rare weird electricity about him—that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving ‘normally.’”

Really that kind of applies to all of us logicians.

April 3, 1991. Gilbert Shelton Dream. Hacker & Ants. Rain.

Reading “Philbert Desanex’s 100,000th Dream,” a strip by Gilbert Shelton from his anthology The Nurds of November. What a great story that dream is. He’s shipwrecked, comes ashore, gets on a train in his underwear, starts cursing, is taken to court, walks out of court, finds a flying machine with pilot on top of the building, the machine flies him to… “It’s my house! The house where I lived when I was growing up!”

Wouldn’t it be fun in my book if an ant took my character Jerzy someplace like that? Like some very elaborate funhouse trip. First idea is to rush him to the Ant Queen, but why rush? Then I only have to think of something else to do. Why not kick back and make the most of this bizarre situation, get like the next fifty pages out of it.

For some reason I’m resisting cutting the book into chapters and sections, I’d like it to be a seamless single rap. Are there any books I can think of offhand which don’t have sections or chapters? In any case, I don’t need a break or pause for breath yet, there’s a steady flow of events from Jerzy waking up to Jerzy getting on that ant, and now the consequences are still flowing steadily. Maybe a break after he gets out, maybe a switch to another viewpoint, but at this point I like the discipline of just surfing this wave as far as I can, and then a bit further than that.

The big excitement here lately was that it rained for three weeks. On St. Patrick’s day there were actual streams of water coming off the awnings. It’s the first time I saw heavy daytime rain since we moved here in 1986, five years ago.

This week Sylvia and I ate and drank all day at the C. B. Hannegan’s pub in Los Gatos, I’d gotten tickets for us and for my The Fourth Dimension illustrator friend David Povilaitis and for his girlfriend Jamie. I saved my last two jays for St. Paddy’s and smoked them in a portable toilet.

Rudy Jr. is loving college at UC Berkeley. Isabel is more of a California girl than ever. This week she’s on spring break, and she goes to the Santa Cruz beach every day. Georgia graduates from Swarthmore in May and will come out here to try to find an apartment and an art-related job.

The weather just turned really nice and warm again, and things are greener here than I’ve ever seen them.

May 2, 1991. Transreal. Leave from SJSU.

I’ve been going over the newly printed small-press collection of my stories and essays, Transreal! The story I wrote with Marc Laidlaw is great—“Probability Pipeline.” I think my collaborations are some of the strongest stories I’ve done. I reread “Storming the Cosmos” today too, which is a hoot. I wrote that one with Bruce Sterling. I phoned him up just now, he’s gloating over the huge hardback sales figures for the book he wrote with Bill Gibson, The Difference Engine.

Autodesk is in seething anthill mode, and when the dust settles I may possibly be out of that job before I know it. Meanwhile I managed to get a 100% leave from SJSU approved for next year—I’d kind of been counting on the Autodesk gig holding up. And I wanted to have more time to write. Three jobs is too many.

I’ve been in the Marketplace long enough, man, I’m ready to go back into the Cave, as they say in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures.

And if Autodesk does fire me and I’m on leave from SJSU too? Negative capability. I can write a lot. I’ll be a spaced-out nut practicing to be William Burroughs.

May 31, 1991. Kayaking.

Sylvia and I rented kayaks along with daughter Isabel at the new Kayak Shack on the Santa Cruz wharf. These are sit-on-top kayaks made of polyurethane like the old Big Wheels tricycles. The woman gives you a rain suit too.

We three whipped out past Steamer Lane—I was thinking of Jon Pearce, imagining him exaggerating about this outing.

“Dude, I went out kayaking, and I was like surfing these gigundo breakers in Steamer Lane. The surfer kids were staring at me in complete awe.”

It got really choppy and windy at the Lighthouse point. My wife and daughter turned back, but I kept going till I got near Seal Rock. I could smell the seals’ rotten fish-breath. The rock was covered with seals like a can of worms—wriggling little seals, the pups, only three feet long.

I heard a noise behind me and there’s twenty-one seal pups frolicking. They could jump right out of the water, it was so awesome. Some big uncle seals came by and I was scared they’d nose my kayak and I’d fall in.

A year after the big quake, downtown Santa Cruz is as bombed-out looking as ever. Their City council seems to be into endless political squabbling and not a thing has been done.

The mongo hollow surf beats in as ever.

Family Changes

June 7, 1991. Georgia’s Graduation.

Sylvia and I flew back east for a few days to visit New York and to see daughter Georgia’s Swarthmore College graduation.

The big lawn in front of Parrish Hall. One evening we sat in the same Adirondack lawn chairs that Greg Gibson and I used to sit in. Drinking a couple of beers, looking up at Parrish, where the women students lived.

Out of loyalty to us, Don Marritz showed up from Gettysburg with his wife Harriet and their two kids the next day, also our friend David Hungerford from early grad-school days—Dave lives in Newark, New Jersey now. Don and Dave were two of Georgia’s first babysitters. My niece Siofra was there, too, also Georgia’s boyfriend, still a junior.

Don and I insisted on wearing shorts to the outdoor graduation ceremony, as it was such a hot and humid day. I was worried I’d have to wear something more formal—I was glad to have cozy old Don there for support in being casual.

One of the graduation speeches was by a guy who’d lived across the hall from me back in college, now he’s on the Board of Managers. He read some incredibly lame and irrelevant long passage from the Old Testament about Isaac whose servants “digged him a well” after he smoked much weed and the Lord appeared unto him, and he named the well Rehoboth and the Lord said, “Yea, thou shalt sell much cotton candy here.” Or something.

And then Georgia got her diploma!

In the afternoon Dave Hungerford took a nap and Sylvia and I went down to the Crum, leaving Dave a note, and when he woke up he thought he was back in grad-school, waking up in a room knowing he had to find Rudy and Sylvia. Before long Dave turned up at Georgia’s dorm, trucking along like Flakey Foont, just as he always did.

We helped Georgia pack all her stuff—I still remember how jarring it was after my own graduation to have my parents show up and clean all my possessions from my personal college room. In some ways, college graduation day is a terrible thing.

The next day, Georgia got her plane back to California, and Hungerford drove us up to Manhattan. We could see the Chrysler building from our hotel window. The next day we had lunch with my agent Susan Protter at Keen’s Chop House where they had Babe Ruth’s pipe in a case along with many other browned meerschaums. Seeing Susan I realized something I never quite understood before—she likes me fine, but I’m just another client. Not a really central concern in her life.

When we took a cab back to our hotel after dinner with some friends that night, I was zonked, and too slow about getting my stuff out of the cab’s back seat, and the cabbie sped off—bagging my cashmere sweater and our Nikon. Well, actually it was Sylvia’s Nikon, although I use it a lot. Gone now. Ow. Drunken old fool. The next two days I stressed out about finding a discount deal for another Nikon, and finally I got something that was more or less okay.

On our last night, we had dinner with our friends Eddie Marritz and Hana Machotka plus their sweet kids, saw a man doing the vintage scam of three-card monte on the sidewalk in Times Square, and ended the evening at Penn and Teller’s magic show. Penn was standing outside afterwards, greeting the exiting customers, and I happened to talk to him for a minute, mentioning my magician story, “Tales of Houdini,” and it turned out he’d read the story and that he loved it.

Then we swung by Louisville to visit my brother and his family, which was pretty much fun. Mom’s still in her rest home, but didn’t seem too bad off. Sylvia and I borrowed Embry’s car and took Mom around for a few things. The last day, we all had lunch at Embry’s, and at the end Mom wanted to ride along to the airport to see us off. But it seemed too hard to squeeze her and her wheelchair into Embry’s car with us and the luggage.

[Although I didn’t realize it, that was the last time I’d ever see Mom conscious.]

June 14, 1991. Hacker & Ants. Magic Flute.

John Douglas at Avon/Morrow made an offer for The Hacker and the Ants with delivery date June, 1992, which is a year from now. Yay! Today I got the book (forty-nine pages done) out again, pen in hand, I haven’t touched it since April 1.

Last night Sylvia, the three kids and I sat in Box A at the San Francisco Opera to see The Magic Flute. Die Zauberflöte. A touching and magical event with my wonderful family.

During the opera, I thought how nice it would be for The Hacker and the Ants to be like The Magic Flute, Mozart’s last and greatest work, written for fun and in praise of reason and wisdom, also for sheer love of theater and effects (impression gleaned from the Amadeus movie).

Some priests are in a temple of Isis and Osiris, and they carry instruments that are mathematical and Masonic. The design is by David Hockney. The Queen of the Night (die Königin der Nacht) falsely tells Prince Tamino and Papageno that Sarastro (cf. Zarathustra) has kidnapped Pamina because he’s evil. But Sarastro is from the Temple of Wisdom, he’s for Klugheit und Arbeit und Künste. Cleverness, Work and Arts.

In Hacker and the Ants I’d like to write about all the California things. Leafblowers. Airheads. Today at the oral surgeon’s I saw a name on the check-in computer: Justine Butcher. Possibly a usable name. Shelly Butcher?

Scene: Rawboned with a profile like the man in the moon, Ms. Butcher has tubular brown legs plastic-glazed by her hose. She has long, bright, false fingernails. She wears a dopey short-pants jumpsuit under her crisp white lab coat. She has a high-torsion perm held by two barrettes. Centered between the barrettes is a giant fluffy spit-curl in the center of her high forehead. She has high eyebrows and a small bud-shaped mouth. As soon as my wife left, Shelly Butcher looked over at me and said, “Hi.” The phone rang and she answered. “Rilly. Uh HUH?!?”

Jerzy Rugby: “Alone in a restaurant. Always alone.”

So now comes the job of getting myself to actually write the whole novel. Who ever said I could write anyway? Why me? What I’ll probably do is read magazines and watch TV for a day or two until I’m desperate to get something done—and then maybe I’ll start.

One good way to get back into it is to start correcting things, just touching it up. Sooner or later, though, I get to the stub, the bleeding edge, the place where it stops, and I have to figure out what comes next.

Here there is the fear of not thinking of something interesting and artistic enough. And looming over the whole project is the fear that this work is ill-conceived and too pawky.

If only I could make my novel into something as grand as The Magic Flute! But that’s a totally bad way to think—like unless it’s The Magic Flute, there’s no point doing it at all?

I’m happy to have the novel to think about—and, unlike the Autodesk programming, it’s all mine.

June 28, 1991. California Wariness. Gary Yost.

Driving up to Autodesk in Sausalito today, passing the Crystal Springs reservoir. The fog resting on the Santa Cruz mountains like whipped cream, and further down the highway the fog has slid over, making 3D patches that move out to the road. Driving is like flying through a cloud. Ahead of me I see a woman alone in a rough old American car. Her hair is a sluttish tangle, she’s talking—or singing?—to herself? She is not smiling, yet her expression is not unpleasant. As I pass her car, she glances at me, her expression wary—and I’m sure I look wary too. We’re Californians. You never know what you’re getting into with a stranger out here—politics, drugs, madness, cults.

I talked to fellow Autodesk consultant Gary Yost in San Francisco on my way home. He had a bunch of images from the 3D Studio software he’s producing. They scan in things like wood, fabric, clouds, even trees, and just paint those textures onto objects in their 3D scenes. He had an scan of a crucifix, which made me realize there ought to be Jesus freaks in cyberspace, sending their crucifixes sailing around.

We got high, and Yost went into a fantasy rap about going to airports and finding followers of VR maven Jaron Lanier in rubber datasuits, offering to take your plane-ticket in exchange for you taking a virtual trip to wherever you wanted to go, specifically to the big annual computer graphics conference called SIGGRAPH.

July 26, 1991. Mom’s Death.

Embry phoned me to say that Mom was in a coma. She’d had a stroke at the rest home while she was choking on some soup. We went to see her in the hospital, she was completely out. The doctors thought it was unlikely she’d ever wake up. Mom had always insisted that she didn’t want to be put on life support, so we made a tough decision. We moved her from the hospital back to her rest home to let nature take it’s course. It was a hard thing to do.

Over that final week, Embry, Noreen and I would come in to sit with her, sponging her face, saying goodbye, even talking to her, just in case she could hear us, or at least be cheered by the sounds of our voices. Sylvia and our kids came to Louisville after a day or two as well.

The last night before Mom died, Izzy and I drove in to the rest home from Embry’s to check on her. She’d take five or twelve regular breaths and then not breathe for a beat, and then take a big breath and sigh. That big sigh, how it breaks my heart to think of it. When she died a few hours later, she must have given a big sigh like that, a last sigh.

It was 3 am when she sighed her last. I heard the phone ring in Embry’s great dark house, I heard the murmur of his voice answering, and then I heard his footsteps coming through the sewing room, through the children’s room, down the front hall and to the room where I slept.

“Mother’s gone.”

In the morning Embry and I went to Pearson’s funeral home in St. Matthew’s. Mom was there on a narrow roller bed at an angle to the wall, with the sheet pulled up to her chin. The final goodbye. In death, Mom had a kind of exclamation point aura about her. Like: “There!” Or: “You see? It ends in tears!”

I stepped forward and touched her cheek and her forehead. She was white and cold, she was really dead.

Embry and I picked out an octagonal cherrywood box to put her ashes in. They buried it at St. Francis in the Fields church, in a little corner of a little brick wall down the hill from the church. The church where Mom took me to nursery school, kindergarten, and the first through third grades. The church where I was confirmed and Pop was ordained. The church Embry still goes to. The old Louisville friends were there at the funeral, Mom’s friends, aged and decrepit.

I keep not being over it, it upsets me so. I’m tired of being the head of a family. It was so much easier all those years ago when it was just me and Mom, and I would sit on her lap and she would hug me and kiss me. I’m tired of being a man, and my mother is gone.

August 15, 1991. News Round-Up.

The Purple Whale, that is, the 1982 Chevy Caprice station-wagon we bought in Lynchburg, died a week after Mom. I was on a freeway, driving home from Stinson Beach—we went out there after Mom’s funeral, trying to recover some equilibrium, but it didn’t go all that well. The car lost its coolant and blew out the head gasket. A policewoman came, she took me to a gas-station, I phoned a wrecker, and the Whale was borne into Los Gatos on a chrome flat-bed truck, borne as nobly as Cleopatra on a platter. Our auto repair place pronounced the Whale dead, and another chrome flatbed bought it from me for a hundred bucks and bore it off to Dollar Wreckers on the Monterey Highway.

The Whale, ever problematic, had been on its fourth transmission by now. An American car. I decided to blow a good part of my small inheritance on a car at the other end of the quality spectrum: a Volvo station wagon. Brand fuckin’ new, blue-green with beige plush on the inside. Next to my Acura Legend in the driveway, it definitely makes a California yuppie image there.

Autodesk has all of a sudden gotten so big that all the managers are in perpetual feeding frenzy, and it seems like every six months my so-called boss is a new face. They’re always nice to me, since we computer hackers are the only ones there actually doing anything. I take a lot of pride in having been able to retool. These days I’m working on artificial life and artificial reality. Trying to get something like a flock of birds flying around on the computer screens so you see them in cyberspace. They’re shaped like four-dimensional hypercubes, or, more generally, like 4D polytopes, so I call the demo “Flocking Topes.”

Sylvia and I went to Kenny Turan’s wedding party in LA last weekend, held at Nick Kazan’s house. Six of my Swarthmore classmates were there, some of whom I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. The men were wistfully talking of the Swarthmore girlfriends they’d let slip through their fingers. I’m lucky to still have mine.

Software Engineer

August 30, 1991. On CBS. Marc Pauline.

Flying home from being on CBS Night Watch with Bruce Sterling, Bill Gibson, and Ken Goffman as a segment of a Cyberculture piece. They also had a segment with Marc Pauline (of Survival Research Labs) and one with John Perry Barlow (of Electronic Freedom Foundation). It went well I think and airs at 3 am(!) on the morning of Labor Day, September 2, with the whole show going from 2 am to 4 am. Sterling and Gibson were on satellite, Sterling obnoxious, Gibson intelligent, me spiritual, Goffman comatose. I wore those black and white Escher socks with sandals, some shorts, and a black and yellow Santa Cruz sportshirt, also my new Oliver Peoples glasses and transparent band Swatch. Mr. California.

After the taping I spent several hours with Marc Pauline. We went to the Air and Space Museum and then the Museum of Industrial Technology on the Mall. It was terrific—I don’t think there could possibly be two better people to go through the Air and Space museum with than Marc and me. Later we had lunch.

Looking for things to use in Hacker and the Ants, I talked to Marc a lot about the question of how to get the robots out on their own, out on the street and doing things, or into people’s homes. He pooh-poohed the robot vacuum cleaner, robobutler, and robot watchman ideas, making the point that you could get people to do these things anyway, and that the first people buying home robots were going to be so rich that they would already have servants anyway. He felt people would want the robots for doing something new that the people could not otherwise in any way do.

He talked about how the robotic or “smart” weapons of the Pentagon extend the reach of power, and said that is the kind of thing rich people will want to do. In the face of the smart weapons, the Iraqi army wasn’t really an army after all, it was only a virtual army in some odd sense, and the cyber army was the real one. So then I have an image of, at first, a robot assassin, or maybe it is just a robot snooper.

Marc and I agree on the value of telerobotics. Perhaps I have a scene with a rich person driving around a telerobotic device. We looked at lots of helicopters in the museum, and the idea of a robot with a propeller, a snooping head with a beanie, begins to jell in me, I suggest being able to hang out in the Tenderloin at 3 am with impunity and watch the hookers picking men up, hell, even fly up and look in through the window while they fuck. Or follow someone interesting around, a star, or even follow Marc and me around in the Air and Space museum.

He had just built a V-1 rocket, and was very interested in examining the intake valve of the V-1 on display in the museum. Nobody has ever bought one of Marc’s machines, like for a collection, which seems very odd to me. He says that his stuff is not being thought of as Art, although I think he exaggerates his lack of respect (as do all of us writers and artists). All the cyberpunks I know think Pauline’s the best.

At lunch we talked a little about nanomotors, tiny electric motors, which made me think of a tiny robot, maybe really the size of an ant, and if it had a dense enough grid of “retina” receivers, a microarray, the image could be blown up to screen size, so maybe you could get a good view through the eye of an ant. Or a gnat. Or to go undersea or to the moon. Maybe robot remotes are the thing, telerobotics for the rich, both for snooping, but also—Pauline’s angle more than mine—the projection of force or of menace, the robot goon.

So many ideas, and, like I say, I want to put lots of them in The Hacker and the Ants. A book about just vacuum cleaners is, as I’ve been thinking, too thin, and the old emergent computer mind theme is so jejune, as is the virus thing. I want to put in the telerobotics boom, yeah. I’m wondering if I should tell Morrow to give me two years to finish the book instead of just one. What can they do, really? It’s like with the Hollow Earth, where I took an extra year or two. Though I’m scared about asking.

The last thing Pauline and I talked about was his new Swarmer robots who have radios, and are aware of each other’s positions. They have whips and try to lash each other. This excites me as it is so close to the so-called Braitenburg vehicles and Ants programs. We talked seriously about trying to hook an Autodesk Artificial Life program into the Swarmers. He and his group use PCs, yay. He’d like to get a copy of AutoCAD for PC or for Mac.

Then I went to stay with Pop in Reston near D.C. It was okay, although I have some hard feelings towards him as a result of Mom’s death. He left her and she died unhappy and lonely.

September 26, 1991. Computer Industry.

I went to another business meeting of hardcore computer types. I was there as a representative of the Autodesk Advanced Technology Division. The meeting about Tandy’s “Gryphon” CD TV system, whatever that is. In the San Jose Fairmont. It was interesting only in a sociological sense.

My notes: Gold and cream striped wallpaper. We sit in a dim big room with 7 rows of tables with white linen cloths and pitchers of water and dishes of hard candy.

The jargon. “Chroma crawl.” “Roll this out to the public.” “It’s not YUV16, it’s YUV8.” “You can recognize the Tandy guys by their accents.”

An ascetic, monkish guy with blue eyes, young, working on his laptop with clip-on trackball. The Texas Saint.

Eager, let’s-get-down-to-it gum-chewing as speaker says, “You’ll be able to get in and fiddle with the bits. So you guys can party with the hardware.”

A Microsoft rep shows us a Windows film of The Leader (Bill Gates).

November 22, 1991. Make Life Interesting.

Sentence of the day: “The swarm of ants looked like the expanding cloud of a massive explosion, or the massed florets of a cauliflower.”

Writing a lot, but now of course I’m getting tired of not teaching, of being at home working every day. The weekends are the same as the weekdays, sort of.

Day before yesterday, I went to visit my spacey friends Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace in Mill Valley, near the Autodesk offices. I had coffee in their kitchen as Faustin talked about the Anomaly Conference she wants to organize February 15. I’d said I’d talk about the Hollow Earth, but remarked that the concept isn’t really true and I don’t really believe it. Then we had an interesting conversation.

Faustin: “I traveled all over South America and I took drugs with brujos, and I know there has to be something more. Something beyond. The things you study—artificial life, cyberspace, they’re like that.”

Me, wearily: “No, those things are just science. I don’t think about the beyond anymore. Everything I do is just science. There’s no mystery to it at all.”

Faustin: “But there has to be some mystery to help get us through these dreary times. We need it.”

Me: “So get the New Age people to talk at your conference.”

Faustin: “They’ve been around, we’ve all heard it. We need New Mystery. Tell us about synchronicity.”

Me: “Synchronicity? That just comes from taking LSD. You take LSD and you believe in synchronicity. I haven’t taken LSD in a long time.”

Faustin: “You hide behind your preppy clothes and your sleepy expression. Come on! Be interesting!”

It occurred to me that there still could be some wonder in the world, and that I really have let myself become blind to it, with all my energies going into worrying about how much I drink.

It’s so nice when I get out of my house these days! This working at home is turning into a bummer. Yesterday I spoke at the SJSU Math & CS Dept. Colloquium. I was incredibly nervous about this talk, as here I was presenting myself as a mathematician to fellow mathematicians who know me. The talk went over well and I told some jokes. Michael Beeson was there, cheerful. Afterwards we had dinner in a Cuban restaurant, which was very pleasant, though somehow not joyous. I have a real feeling of homesickness for human contact.

Surfing the Gnarl

December 27, 1991. Visit to Stash. Boppers.

This is the third day of Christmas. It rained and I rode my bike up to a spot on St. Joseph’s Hill trail to visit my tiny stash of pot. If I keep the stash at my house, I smoke it up too fast. I have no control. Obviously this tells me something about myself, but so far I’m refusing to hear the message.

On the way down, it rained harder, I rode down via Dammit Run, being unusually alert and keeping my body energy high so as not to lose it and careen off a clayey cliff-edge.

I had a lot of ideas about the ants I’m programming for my Boppers program. The program is named robots in my novels Software and Wetware, and of course the virtual ants of the program are models of the critters in my Hacker and the Ants novel in progress. Everything I do is nested together. Nested scrolls.

On the day before Christmas or so, there was a rudely loud knock on my door. No one was there. I suspected children were doing pranks. I stepped forward and leaned over the log palisade that fronted our house.

A hunched, fat, little figure jumped up and ran across the street. I couldn’t grasp at first who it was. A little later the sequence happened again. And I realized that it was the neighbor’s grandson. Like having gnomes around.

January 31, 1992. Mondo 2000 User’s Guide.

I’ve been editing a book for the last few months. The hip Bay Area cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 got a fat contract to do an anthology of their magazine stuff called The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge. In September, R.U. Sirius phoned me and said that he and Queen Mu can’t get the book together on their own. They’re too scattered.

“We need a logician, Rudy,” said R.U. “You have to do it.”

So I took on the project. But my agent Susan Protter and I made sure that Mondo 2000 gave me my share of their big advance before I did any work. Otherwise, as I knew from working with Mondo in the past, I’ll never get any of that money at all. So I picked up about up $20K for a modest amount of work. Boy was California ever the place for me to move to!

I had all the old issues of Mondo 2000, and its earlier incarnations, High Frontiers and Reality Hackers. I picked out the excerpts I liked and—lacking a better idea for organization—I tagged each excerpt with a single topic name, and arranged the pieces in the alphabetical order of the tags. It looks good. The ever-reliable Surrealist principles of juxtaposition and randomicity.

I was resisting typing in all that old stuff—Mondo didn’t seem to have any electronic files—so I tried using a cheap hand-held scanner, something like a Dustbuster miniature vacuum cleaner. You run it over a page and it vacuums up the letters and puts them on the screen inside your word-processor. The catch is that the scanner’s character recognition doesn’t work for shit, and I had to do so many corrections that, in the end it was in fact simpler to just type in everything by myself. I type fast.

I invented and wrote a few spurious entries—like on wetware—that never appeared in the magazine, although I didn’t tell this to Queen Mu and R.U. Sirius. They won’t notice. (My wetware entry has a quote from alleged researcher Max Yukawa, who in fact exists only within my novel Wetware, and is in fact modeled on Bill Gibson. More nested scrolls action here.)

So now—okay! I finished putting the whole Mondo 2000 User’s Guide together yesterday, complete with a killer introductory essay. Now it’s back to The Hacker and the Ants.

I’m getting my new corduroy pants shortened. I guess wearing my pants so low goes back to Louisville. When I was in the eighth grade there was an article in the paper about juvenile delinquents wearing their pants low. And Pop would tut-tut when he saw teens with low pants. So Embry and I started wearing ours low. These days the fashion serves me well as my stomach is so fat.

February 3, 1992. Dream of Flying.

Last night before I fell asleep I was thinking about one of the happiest times I’ve ever had: the day that Rudy Jr. and I sailed our masted canoe around Spruce Point to Boothbay Harbor and back. We sailed to Boothbay Harbor and had a pizza and then sailed back. It took about six hours. And these thoughts led to a dream last night:

Rudy and I were in a medina kind of town, lots of passages, we were wearing green plaid shirts and he was kicking a little ball against a carpeted wall. The way I got there was that first I was flying along next to a small country road, it was snowy perhaps, an upstate New York back road, or maybe it was grassy, a Virginia road. I was flying along about twenty feet off the ground, slowly feet first. A car stops and a guy starts talking to me. “How do you stay up there?” Usually in my dreams people don’t notice that I’m flying, but this guy is full of questions, in a hostile acquisitive way. “Oh, I’m hanging onto a blue kite that’s way up in the sky,” I say. “You’re lying. You come here.” “No.” I back off. He gets a pistol out of his car and points it at me. “Come here or else.” I’m pretty far from him now, so I decide to keep going. He fires the gun, and I see the bullet come almost to me, and peter out, and fall down. I dig my hands into the air, I’m doing the breast-stroke, flying rapidly across the landscape. And come to the little town. I have a red plaid shirt that I need to get rid of so the bad man won’t recognize me if he happens to come by. I get a green shirt. And then I meet Rudy.

Next thing there’s a kind of air-show in the town, and there’s one blue airplane that’s doing better than all the others. Instead of being in it, I’m watching it, the pilot is Rudy. Finally the blue plane lands and the pilot is me, and I’m explaining to the judges and generals that the plane had no engine, I turn it over, and it’s made of wood, and the things that should be engines are just hollow boxes that you can open, it’s like a handmade bookshelf, not much bigger or more complicated than that. About then, still in my dream, I get this feeling that this is something I should write about, that these events have the makings for a great tale, a new book, about a boy who can fly.

Today it doesn’t feel like I could really grow this into a novel. Tom Disch already nailed the “flying boy” theme in On Wings of Song. And I’ve already had people flying in The Secret of Life, in Master of Space and Time, and in Wetware. There was that good Russian story in a literary magazine about people flying a few years ago…so I’m saying it’s not exactly a new theme.

Even so, it would be fun to give it a try and get deeper and deeper into it. For whatever reason, flying dreams mean a lot to me. My all-time favorite flying dream was the one where Rudy and I are in a temple—maybe it was the Pantheon in Paris—and I’m teaching him to fly. Escheresque perspectives and calm joy. That dream was back in the ’80s.

Night before last, I dreamed about flying too, this time I was flying along a road, like the road on Maui next to the ocean by the sugarcane fields, and there were high trees whose branches were complicated bundles, and in the bundles were big things hidden, things like cars and refrigerators. The trees with cars were like the St. Nicholas Day switches with candy on them that we bought the kids in Heidelberg.

March 26, 1992. Talk on CS. Yelling Gibberish. Living in a Videogame.

I’m on the plane to Boston to give my NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) talk to promote the Autodesk Science Series of programs that I’m working on. I should have made contacts and appointments to see academics in Boston. But now I have a gig in industry, and I’m, like, too big to bother.

I Xeroxed (“smearoxed” in Gosper-speak) a paper to hand out. “Adventures in Experimental Mathematics, or, How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Computer.” The paper is sampled from my CA Lab manual, from my Chaos manual, from some articles and talks, and from my realtime on-the-case mind. It’s the bones of a future book, my big autobio wonder-book on life as a computer hacker.

“The mighty piglet with a snout. The mighty piglet inside out.”

My compulsion to yell out strange words and phrases, precursor of Tourette syndrome? The Oofth of Ifth, a “date” in a crazy 2D-time golden age SF story, I put it next to Rudy Jr.’s height as the date yesterday on the official doorframe that we use for the records.

Today’s word is muuuuuuuur, a family cow noise which was invented by Rudy Jr. one time in Lynchburg when the kids were alone with me. He liked to lower his upper lip and flex it and then do that sad cow noise muuur, he did it only by accident at first, but it got under my skin and I started telling him not to do it because it made me feel sorry for him, abandoned calf in the care of a drunk, negligent bull, so then he got into doing it all the time as a way of pinging or “fondue-forking” me, and I would rage at him to “not muur.”

And now for some reason in recent days the muur sound has come back to me, I guess it’s because I miss Rudolf a lot, as he’s off at college now, so I’ve been saying muur a lot. Day before yesterday he was home for a visit, and I walked downtown with him to buy him some pants and to have lunch, and Arf was with us—it felt so good to have it be three boys.

Yesterday at Autodesk, this young programmer John Castellucci was showing me a computer game he’d gotten off the net and I thought it would be interesting to put this into The Hacker and the Ants. Playing the game, I was in a low-ceilinged tunnel. Hideously primitive groany-moany MIDI organ music swelled about. The walls were texture-mapped with a rough pixelization which grew coarser as you approached. I surged forward, looking for air. But there was no air. In this cyberworld there was nothing but the endless fucking passages and the wood doors with locks and pixelized skulls and bones. Behind one door we found a rat, and a steel sword point popped up in front of my invisible body like a hard-on. The cornered rat reared up and my sword touched him. He turned into a puddle of blood next to the drumstick he’d been gnawing. John took over and acquired the food.

“Are you going to eat food with rat blood on it, John?”

“It goes over here.” He moved it to the mouth part of the body icon.

“John, let’s get out of here. This is really depressing.”

“Wait, wait, you haven’t seen how they do water.”

April 11, 1992. Surfing With Isabel.

Last Saturday Isabel and I went surfing together, she gave me a lesson. Was I happy or what?!? The surfboard that I bought and refinished upon moving here is Isabel’s surfboard now, but at least we both have wetsuits. She drove.

We got near Pleasure Point at 34th Street in Santa Cruz, and stopped in at Free Line Surf to rent a board for Da. Da Free Da. And then we put on our wetsuits and booties in the dusty lot across the street from the cliff with the stairs that lead down to Pleasure Point, walking across the parking lot and down the road, each of us with a surfboard under our arm and with the tops of our wetsuits flubbed down around our waists.

Isabel is gorgeous in her wetsuit, I sometimes start taking for granted how attractive she is. I’m proud to be walking behind such a beautiful surfer girl, and to have, in fact, fathered and raised this surfer girl. I’m glad I haven’t fossilized and sold out to the point where I’d be unable to take a shot at surfing here.

In the water another surfer chatted to us in a friendly way.

“I came in and dropped in on a right and it was all.” A gesture. “I left my booties at Cowell beach, it’s more organic this way.”

And silently I’m all, “I have like no idea what you’re talking about.”

And then I tried to catch a wave, getting on all fours on my board and riding it like a dog. Once the surfers saw that, they didn’t chat with me anymore.

The way to catch a wave seems to be to windmill-paddle like a maniac when you see the wave that’s still about a hundred yards behind you. If you’re close to the shore you don’t need quite so big a lead.

It’s basically the same as when you as a kid stand on the bottom and try to dive forward with the heart of a passing wave. But on a board, you can’t push off the bottom, so you need a long lead time to get up to the proper velocity.

When I came home, my shoulder muscles hurt so much from all the paddling that I thought I was having a cardiac event. A coronary incident. The Future Farmers of America holding a Latin meeting in my chest!

May 22, 1992. Mavrides High. Chore Boy.

Went over to the apartment of Paul Mavrides & Hal Robin this week, got very high, I was clipping. When I get high enough, I have this “clipping” effect that certain levels of thought or perception awareness just disappear like things clipped off a computer graphics screen, either because they don’t fit, or because their intensity or saturation is too great.

I told them the story of The Hacker and the Ants thus far, it seemed really interesting and funny as I told it. As I talked I had the idea that the ants should have mites living on them, like an electron microscope picture of a pore-patterned bug’s back with a mite latched onto a hair and a mite on the mite.

I had another good idea too, now what was it…oh, yeah, when I was talking about the Meta Meta Chore Boy house robot that killed a baby, Mavrides wanted to know how it killed the baby. He was blasted, too, and he thought that I was telling a true story.

“It was vacuuming and it ran over the baby,” I said.

“Naw, I don’t believe that.”

So I thought of a better answer on the spot. “Oh, yeah, it was Thanksgiving and the family went out for a walk and they left the robot to keep an eye on the baby. The robot was supposed to put the turkey in the oven. Only the robot got mixed up, and it put the baby in the oven.”

“With the meat thermometer?”

“Yeah, it stuck the meat thermometer into the baby to get to the body cavity, and the baby died instantly, so there were no warning cries to alert the Chore Boy. And when the family comes home the robot is bent over the turkey, crooning a lullaby, and trying to put a diaper on it, and the horrible truth dawns.”

Women

July 9, 1992. 25th Anniversary Trip to Paris.

We just got back from a week in Paris followed by a week in Zermatt and a few days in Geneva.

In Paris, we stayed in a nice old hotel on the big square that has the Pantheon building in the middle. One day we walked to the Montparnasse cemetery and split up for a few hours at the graves of J. P. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, right on the edge of the cemetery. I used to like graveyards but on July 14, 1991, my mother died, and now I don’t like graveyards at all anymore.

The sidewalks on the way to the Montparnasse cemetery were lined with still-plump and flattened dogturds everywhere. Inside the cemetery it smelled like death and rotting meat, and I headed back out.

Walking down the street, I managed to step in a water-running street-gutter with my sandal and soak my sock. Nearby was the Closerie de Lilas where Ernest Hemingway used to write. I’d been thinking of having a drink at the Closerie, but it was too early and the place would be empty and the drink would cost $7 and nuke me in the core of my morning gut’s wrongway frog quease.

I figured I’d buy a couple of cans of Heineken instead and take the bus to the Jardin des Plantes. I bought the beer in a wineshop from a man talking on the phone and my foot was still really wet. I went in the Closerie, went down to the toilet, and held my foot up to the hot air dryer to dry my sock. “This is for you, Hem!” It worked and it was free.

When I eventually got back to our room, Sylvia wasn’t there, so I left a note and went across the square to the Pantheon. I was standing on a marble balcony in the there, looking down from a dream-flight height. Above me was the great, rosetted dome, with a trompe l’oieul paintings of draped royal figures holding banners reading: FRANCE and CHARTE and CAPITULUM UNIVERSUM. The dome has an eerie tendency to Necker-reverse like an optical illusion. Suddenly you’ll think it’s bulging down. The dome rests on 16 columns with leafy 3D Belusouv-Zhabotinsky capitals—the capitals are 3D reaction-diffusion equations.

Subsonic organ music and massed voices from the crypt. Spooky. Memories of slow tumbling in dream flight.

In the faintly stinking crypt: sarcastic Voltaire—his statue, how happy he must have been about the Revolution. The main interior of the Pantheon is closed and is no longer a church. The Church lost out once, why should they get it back.

Even so there’s a cross on top of the roof. Sullen, and unlit by night. Tear off the cross, man.

On the day of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, we went to a Latin Quarter movie theatre that showed foreign films (Sixties Hollywood!) and then to the restaurant where the living Voltaire ate with his homies. At the table next to us, there materialized a wedding party with a bride. The waiters turned out all the lights, brought out a wedding cake with sparklers in it and set it down right next to us. It moved me to tears. Sometimes, you try hard enough for long enough and the world gives you something back.

July 13, 1992. Appraiser Woman.

An Associate Appraiser just showed up and measured and took notes on our house, something for the landlord. She was a fairly plastic California woman who could easily work as a model for my Hacker and the Ants realtor characters, Susan Poker and Gretchen Bell.

She signaled her approach with several carphone calls, and then I see her in the driveway. She has a fluffed mane of distressed blond hair, shades, peach bermudas and a tight white top. She has a round little shiny lipsticked mouth. Out there in the driveway she seems as glamorous to me as a person on stage. She waves me off, measures the outside of the house for a long time, and then Sylvia lets her in. I sit at my desk typing. I am a renter, a parasitic instar, a thing born only to pupate and to change, a person of no significance. Sylvia is downstairs.

“I’m just going to take some notes,” the appraiser tells me.

I get up from my desk and watch her for awhile. She is fine to gaze upon, materialized out of carphone crackle, right here upon our carpet. She writes busily on her pad, glancing over at me with a dismissive expression a few times and then she switches to impatient glares.

“I’ll follow you around and keep an eye on you,” I say, goading her.

“Just to make sure I don’t steal anything?” she says with a frosty giggle.

“For instance,” I say, falling back into my natural position as the defending homeowner.

She springs to the attack. “How much rent do you pay per month?”

“You’d have to ask the owner,” I say.

“What?”

“You’d have to ask the owner.”

This ends our conversation for awhile. She moves into the kitchen and I return to my desk, getting back to work on The Hacker and the Ants. The appraiser moves through the kitchen and stops in front of the sink for a long time, standing there in quarter-view and writing. Her hair hangs to cover her eye. Through the doorway I can stare at her to my heart’s content. Her shorts are tight with an intense visible panty-line veeing up. Her lower spine curves. She holds her shoulders thrown back. I should have been more polite to her, I think. She comes into my office and stands in the door, knowing her womanly power.

“There’s a bedroom and a bath in there,” I gesture helpfully, hoping to ease her out of my space and on her way. On her way back from checking those out, she gets a good look at me writing. I’m knocking out a coherent sentence or two. I’m proud to have gotten into it in time for her to see me as if on stage, writing a novel at my desk.

Then the woman goes downstairs and bothers Sylvia for awhile and then the woman’s gone forever.

I go downstairs to discuss the visitor. “She spent a long time in my closet,” says Sylvia.

“Maybe she was looking at your dresses.”

“She was measuring.”

Then Sylvia dressed to go out and I said good-bye to her on the front deck. “Look how nice our plants look,” she said. “That work I did this weekend was worth it.”

“Yeah, the house looked good for the appraiser.”

“Hah! That little chippie? Who cares! I’ve been redoing the garden because we just went to Europe. After being in Switzerland, I always want to make everything nice and tidy.”

July 22, 1992. Tales of the Swingers Club.

Yesterday after going to work at Autodesk, I went over the Richmond Bridge, passing the same San Quentin prison where Neal Cassady served two or three years for giving a narc a jay. I went to Berkeley, first to talk to the Mondo people about the copy edits on our User’s Guide, and then I met Rudy Jr. on the campus, he’d come up for a day, gearing up for his next term.

Rudy and I had some Mexican food together, burritos that weighed about three pounds, with the rice and beans inside ’em, and then he rode back home, maybe a hundred-and-eighty mile round trip for the day. Bay Area commute!

Rudy’s friend Rafael Nuñez joined us for supper. Rafael was telling me how last summer he worked as the night-clerk at the Edgeview motel near the Oakland Airport which specializes in swingers’ club parties. Of course I enjoyed hearing his seamy tales.

The Edgeview owners are a married couple devoted to the swinger cause. The motel is set away from the road, and the rooms are in a semi-circle with their sliding glass doors facing in towards the lawn. Some nights the guests might stage a sex show on the lawn. The swingers club might even invite porn stars as special guests.

The guests would get a room, and if they left their door and screen open, then anyone was welcome to walk in and get down. If the screen alone was closed, others were welcome to approach and look. If the screen and glass both were closed, well, this meant there was a private session inside—or possibly the room had been rented to a Presbyterian alderman from Klamath Falls touring the State with his wife and mother.

Rudy’s favorite of Rafael’s Edgeview stories was about a swinger who was having sex, and while he was thus distracted, someone took his wallet and car keys. The guy got so aggro and hyper about being robbed that the motel security guard (not Rafael) shot him several times with a stun-gun. A perfect evening for the guy, right?

They steal your wallet and then when you complain they zap you with the stun-gun.

“My name eez Lucky Pierre…”

I’m working on The Hacker and the Ants again, a page or two a day with as many as four writing days per week—paradise. The Autodesk fortune-wheel is lingering in a favorable zone these days and I feel no serious pressure to do big brain-breaking hacks.

It’s much better to be spending my time writing about what it’s like to hack. Writing fiction is really what I should be spending my energy on.

Rudy Jr. is home for the summer, and watching TV today. I goaded him to go outside and then he got back in the house and locked me out and wrote this in my manuscript:

PIG PIG PIG PIG PIG PIG

Clever lad.

August 1, 1992. Bad Girl for Hacker & Ants.

Give my character Gretchen a scene looking like this perfect girl I saw at the Jimmy Cliff concert in Santa Cruz last week. Her teeth a bit too pushed forward, bursting out of her mouth so she always smiled, her denim smock draping down off her Big Ones. Bouncy, loud, brassy blonde hair.

I saw her smoking a fat joint passed to her by her girlfriend. She dances a few steps, then sticks her tongue out and down over her chin and rocks her head back and forth. She’s all—yay, I’m feeling wild! I was dancing close to her, and enjoyed her smell and the fanning of the air that her body motions made. Soon tiring, I sat down on a railing to look at her better. Right next to me is another 46 year old man in a post-Hawaiian shirt and shorts, sitting there staring at the same girl, not in an obvious or territorial way, but surely (I do believe) staring at her.

Off to the left on the railing were two thirtyish guys with mild Rasta locks, straight noses, deep tans and blonde beards, street stoners, hard-baked-looking as Bobby Beausoleil on Charlie Manson’s Spahn ranch, and onstage was Jimmy Cliff himself, the same man that Sylvia and I listened to on our first reggae tapes in 1979, exiled in Heidelberg, punks, sure that the world still owed us way more than we were getting. We saw The Harder They Come at the Fauler Pelz cinema there, and our old pal Eddie Marritz sent us a tape with Spear and Jimmy and many more.

That face, that bad-girl, wild-girl marijuana-smoking face, the head not so much going back and forth in an I’m delirious message as nodding up and down in an I like it move.

Vision in Yosemite

August 9, 1992. Backpack Yosemite with Rudy.

Rudy Jr. and I went backpacking in Yosemite this weekend. The trip was utterly wonderful. We just got back and it’s Sunday night. The first day was Thursday, we got a late unhassled start from Los Gatos, and drove up to Tuolomne Meadows, getting there about 6:00 pm. We got a Wilderness Pass for free from a ranger-girl in a booth in the parking lot, we’d been worrying about getting the pass, but if you are willing to backpack to at least four miles from the road, you can just walk on in. We’ve been here in California for six years, and I used to try and get reservations at the (actually quite shitty, I now realize!) Curry Company campgrounds at Tuolomne Meadows, and there would never be a spot available, even if you called in February for next July.

But if you’re willing to backpack in with all your food and your tent for at least four miles, why then, my brother, you can stay wherever you dang please. Simply treat the wilderness well and leave it as you found it. And now, finally, thanks to the energy of my son, we were able to do it. I used our old frame pack, he used his new internal frame pack, he bought a bunch of dehydrated food and a miniature alcohol stove, we used light old “Pup,” the pup-tent we bought the kids in Lynchburg gradeschool, and we each have a down sleeping bag and cheap sponge-rubber sleeping mat. The High Sierras at last!

So Thursday night, Rudy and I are a little worried about how we are going to get four miles off the road before the dusk of 8-9 pm, and also which way we, uh, are actually going to be going. “Which trailhead?” the ranger-girl asks. “Uh, do you have any recommendations?” “We’re not allowed to recommend.” “Which is less crowded?” “This is Yosemite in August.”

So we got a pass for Glen Aulin north of Tuolomne, but then as we’re hiking towards Glen Aulin we find that path to be too used-looking, deep and padded with sand, so what-the-hey, we branch off that trail and head towards the Young Lakes six miles north and two thousand feet up.

The Young Lakes trail is deliciously deserted, but there’s no way we are going to make it up there before it finishes getting dark. We spot a stream on the map and hike that far, then head up the stream a few hundred yards into genuine wilderness. Reassuringly, there’s a fire-ring back in the woods near the stream, we pitch camp there, rapidly and anxiously, as night falls fast. There’s a gibbous moon making silvery shadows in the empty woods around us. The alcohol stove won’t light for us, fumbling in the dark, but we get a campfire going—it keeps away the spooky moonshadows—we heat up some water, mix it with dried Wild Tyme turkey dinner, the water isn’t very hot, we’re very hungry, we eat dry food-mix in puddled spicy water, the fire dies down, we get the food hung from a tree branch with a counter-balance in the prescribed Yosemite bear-bag method (a ritual in itself).

Next morning we’re still alone in the woods. We make it up to Young Lakes, we find an isolated campground, a stream to ourselves. That night the bears hit us. I knew it was coming, sort of, as I’d hung the food rather low, and right behind the tent, at 4 am or so I hear the bag hit the ground and give out a great yell of warding-off and sheer terror. I get my shoes on, run outside, the white bag of food is on the ground, but it’s too dark to see the bear, I’m terrified, I yell—obscenities are inadequate in this situation, instead I yell things like YAH—grub up a rock and throw it towards the grunting or gobbling sound of the bear over there in the dark. Rudy comes out with our candle lantern and extra candles. He lights a candle on the rock under the bent Donald-Duck-comic-book dead sapling pine that I’d tied the Barks bag to. The candle on the Yosemite pluton looks like something from The Exorcist. It’s very creepy here right now. I feel at the torn food bag.

“The salami is gone,” I cry in dismay, my voice breaking. “The salami is all gone!” We’d brought along two hard salamis, one for Rudy, one for me.

But I hoist the remaining food up to the tip of the sapling again. Meanwhile there’s frost on everything. Back inside Pup, the thin cloth is sagging down to touch us, stiff with ice. In the dark, one waits for the Sun to return as one would wait for a returning god. Blessed sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care. At seven the first ray of Sun strikes me getting out of the tent. Not only is Rudy’s salami in fact safe in the bag, the tail-end of my salami is in grass, ragged at one end where the bear bit it in half. Actual bear-tooth marks!

Next to it is Rudy’s snack Powerbar and his bag of gorp, gorp chewed open, all chocolate gone, then another Powerbar. The two remaining freeze-dried dinners are intact, and so are the dried eggs. Victory! We won! We kept our meat!

After salami and eggs for breakfast, we left the packs in our camp and did an amazing tour of Ragged Peak Saddle, the Teeth of Death, Quartz Pipe, Hyper Young Lake, Fresh Bear Shit, Wrong Valley, Compass Reading, Home, The Fort, all quite incredibly Alpine, more pristine than the Zermatt of today, although lacking, on faut dire, the Matterhorn and its fifteen-thousand-foot neighbors.

On our map and compass tour, Rudy and I peaked at 11,200 feet, on a level with a northeastward-stretching sea of High Sierras and with the Cathedral Range to the south. The peak was of exfoliating plutonic granite, each of us on a tooth. Good solution to whether to muscle the other one aside, both of us wanting to beat the other one, but loving and wanting to defer, but really wanting to beat…so we got on the two top fins.

As we climbed down, I said to Rudolf, “It was nice that we each had our own peak to be on. Of course mine was just a bit higher, but—”

“Mine was higher!”

“This is a great classic father/son conversation.”

We’ve spent the day on the ridge above the circular valley that the Young Lakes are in. I cut my hand on the climb down through a bizarre space pattern, a double saddle configuration, the echo of two nearly touching glacial fingers, a worn off soap film between Young Lakes and the Skelton Lakes.

“The Skeleton Lakes,” Rudy kept saying, to my joy, making me think of dear 11-year-old Rudy in his skeleton Halloween suit and general joy in things of a “skeleton” or “disaster” or “what if” nature.

I have a bad habit of projecting blame onto the people near me when I injure myself, so as soon as I cut my hand I yelled at Rudy, “Don’t rush me and don’t tell me what to do.” When what he’d been telling me to do was to walk down a lower notch where I wouldn’t have had to grab the cutting rocks. Oh well, the mountain bit me, I wrapped the wound, stained the hankie, got back in touch with Rudy again and healed.

We scrambled down massive amounts of talus to an unmapped valley, got lost in an unexpected extra valley. Rudy got out the compass he’d been dicking around with all day, took a reading of some kind with the map, and then propounded what I thought to be a very odd direction of travel. But the end of our walk-vector was our tent Pup! Rudy rules!

That night we made our dehydrated Shrimp Cantonese just right with the highly effective alcohol stove. At this time I finished the pint of Hundred Proof Old Grandad I’d had in camp these days, a third of a pint per night. The whiskey being so harsh, on this last night I mixed it in with water in the only vessel I had: my aluminum eating pan. The whiskey looked beautiful, lit by the beating ozoneless sun, its tendrils twining through the water.

We bear-bagged the food really well this time, in a position nearly matching the specifications mandated on the back of our official Yosemite Park map: 12’ off the ground, 10’ from the trunk, 5’ from the branch. The night before on our Donald Duck tree it had been seven feet from the ground with the bent dead pine too spiny to mount. So the bear had reached seven feet up in the air and I’d been yelling at him in my T-shirt, glasses, and sandals? Not this night, no thanks, we hung the food high, and the frost didn’t even come down and we slept like babies.

Sunday morning at 7 am I’m up to greet the dear Sun. I get dressed in my short-sleeved thick cotton dark blue shirt with snaky patterns of paisley brocade, my tan wool V-neck sweater, my mole knickers from this summer in Zermatt with the Velcro fastenings, my cotton lined nylon defective red Polo windbreaker from on sale at NY Macy’s, my blue cotton socks and my mountain boots from Zermatt like 20 years ago, 1972, the year Rudy was born.

He wants to keep sleeping, I tell him I’ll be back in an hour and I head crosscountry up the stream that leads from Lower Young Lake to Middle Young Lake, and then up a grassy ramp to Upper Young Lake. I see one bear-bag on a tree up here, I skirt around it, around another fold in the Valley and here I am alone alone alone, not a sound in the sky, I am here at the shore of a beautiful glacial lake.

“Take off your clothes and swim,” says a mindvoice. I wade in, delicately rupturing virgin sediment, then slump forward into the breast-stroke. The water was acceptably tepid. I rubbed my pits, butt and hair in the water, got into the depth, swam underwater ten feet deep, then surged up in terror of an imagined tentacled death-monster lurking beneath the world of air.

I was born again in that water. I got out, and looking at a feldspar-chunked granitic pluton I realized rocks are alive. I’d always drawn a line in the past, sort of a time-scale chauvinist, right, with only plants and animals alive. But now after the Ragged Peaks hike with Rudy, where he found an amazing crystal lode, a disk that was the surface cross-section of an ancient volcanic heat-tube vent on the side of the plutonic exfoliating granite we’d clumb, and after all the amazing chunky knobs in the speened surfaces, look dude, rocks are alive.

So now I fully had the web vision of Nature. In the past, like everyone, I’d learned to see the plant/animal ecology as a web. And on my own I’d come to think of the air as alive since it is eternally performing a programmable analog vortex computation like the whiskey tendrils in the water. But I’d never thought of rock as alive, and now looking at these rocks, these rocks are as alive as college-age Green Party fund-raisers at your door, these rocks are like down with the program.

I’ve always known All is One in a bloodless intellectual’s way but now, bathed in the live pellucid waters of Upper Young Lake, drying off on the cotton lining of my red coat, I saw how very wonderfully precisely this Life here on Earth doth fit. Suffused with the beauty of the landscape and even the rocks, I think, I am beautiful too, a rare thought.

Everything is reaching out to each other, the plants the water the rocks the animals the air and even mankind, we’re not spoilers, but thinkers and pattern makers, the plants are pattern makers the rodents peeping and darting are pattern makers…but why and wherefore? What causes and what senses the patterns? I scan and reject my outgrown fads of physics and math, which are only human beauty fern flower grow, no, math is not the answer, math is only part of the pattern that is the question: Why?

I ponder this down the boulder rodent stag water air moss shrub grass soil-filled Rudy-Jr-found ramp towards The Fort and our campsite. I’m chuckling internally over an anti-Christian joke I’ve just made up. Some guy who lectured to us at an Episcopal Young Churchman meeting when I was a boy said “Gospel means good news. The Gospel is good news that stays good news.” And now coming down from the high lake having looked the raw nature-god in the face I think, “Christianity is bad news that stays bad news.”

And like chuckling nervously a little, but really knowing it’s true, like what does a statue of a man being tortured to death have to do with this Nature or with this Yosemite? Like, hey dude, take your losses and lighten up, I mean species-wise, man, like why not worship a crushed ant or a funky crystal?

So why why why? Here is all this fabulously interlaced organic god-like beauty of nature and why? I turn and stare at the sun, close my eyes, raise my hands, and—

LOVE.

Love is the force that grows the world. Love and the web of existence. Everything is beautiful because everything loves to be beautiful. All of us in the web love each other, we love to churn out better patterns for the others in the web to love.

GOD IS LOVE.

Rudy and I hiked cross-country around Ragged Peak and over the hoof-lands to Dog Dome and the car, I thought I’d lost my keys—which was great to tell young Rudeboy, who always loses keys himself.

We hadn’t seen ourselves in mirrors for three days. Checking in the car mirror, each of us thought himself to look terrible. But I thought Rudy looked fine, and he felt the same about me. Like you only really care about your own appearance. We drove, like, across the street to the Curry Tuolomne Grill, Rudy ordered two cheeseburgers and salads, I bought a six and phoned home, then went back to eat burger with the Rude Dude.

Next to us was a table of hiker-bums, two women and two men, drinking beer and selling random shoes. Rudy and I go to the men’s room, a concrete hutch hard by the grubby patio. As I use the urinal I notice on the floor of the closest stall a man’s shorts underwear and T-shirt. The man’s foot is visible with a corn plaster on the pinkie and a frighteningly distended vein in the side of the foot. Rhythmic grunting.

Rudy has peed and is washing hands, I say to him, “Don’t you think it’s pretty unusual to take off all your clothes to take a shit,” and I laugh, and point at the suspect stall. And now from this angle we can see pink cotton women’s panties on the concrete floor as well. We discuss this out into the parking lot, agree on our conclusions, are half-tempted to go back and recalibrate the data, but are, after all, not such desperado horndogs as those Websters doing the juicy in the Men’s john.

So that’s about it, except the drive back was also great, speeding and grooving on the memory lane music of a radio station, “Serving Manteca, Modesto, and the Central Valley,” they’re recreating the 1970s tonight. Rudy Jr. was laughing over the Yosemite fact that there were riots in the Valley on July 4, 1970 when camping was unlimited and fifty thousand young people converged.

“The Sixties weren’t just the 1960s,” I tell him. “The Sixties peaked in 1972.”

“That’s the year I was born.”

And, by god yes, in 1972 my hair was almost as long as Rudy’s, amazing. For him, 1970 is like 1944 is for me, this dim mysterious engendering past.

Coming home and thinking about all this, I think of the men’s movement teaching that it is a good thing for a father and a son to share the wilderness. Boy is that ever true. How fine a thing to have a beautiful son, how fine a thing to be a father. Thank you, god. All is love.

August 12, 1992. Relaxing With Rudy.

I haven’t done jackshit since coming back from Yosemite with Rudy. The others are still out of town. I saw Unforgiven with Rudy, a great Clint Eastwood Western, read magazines, stayed up late (till 3 am) two nights running, revising the Yosemite notes here in my journal, also I did some revisions on my As Above So Below play script for the Theatre of Possibilities in Fort Worth, TX. But haven’t touched the Boppers code or the novel—Boppers being my name for the artificial life program I’ve been working on at Autodesk.

Rudy and I ate in a restaurant last night. He’s so eager and touching. “I like eating good food in restaurants,” he confided.

Struggle / 1992-1996

Spacing Out

August 23, 1992. End of Hacker and the Ants.

Idea: have a horror passage at the end of the novel with the robots stalking my character Jerzy Rugby. I’ll set this in John Walker’s Swiss house in Neuchâtel. Sylvia and I visited him there this summer. There were so many ways to die in that house.

Everything was unfinished and raw, the tiles ripped up, the walls with peeling paint. He took us down the concrete stairs to the concrete basement and showed us the giant boiler that could heat a town, the electricity with the fuses the size of cannon-shells, the ceiling crane, the well with a concrete cover over it, the freight elevator to climb two floors—John called my attention to the alarm bell in the elevator, it was a bicycle bell set into the wall.

“Worthy of Edgar Allan Poe,” observed Walker. “Your critters are hatching right in here,” he said then, opening the door to the next room.

There was a swimming pool with a low translucent plastic pup-tent roof, the ridge no higher than three feet above the water, and in the bare dirt near the door was a colony of winged ants or termites, great winged male ants getting ready for a nuptial flight.

August 26-28, 1992. Fired from Autodesk.

Tomorrow I get to meet the new CEO of Autodesk, Carol Bartz (unless she cancels the appointment) and I’ll find out if I’m really fired (unless she hasn’t thought about it). It’ll be a relief to know, I guess.

Well, guess what, I really am out of my job at Autodesk. I went to SJSU a day or two after that, and everyone was really glad to see me and really wants me back. I can start in the spring term or next fall. I’m tempted to take the spring off. Go hiking in the Himalayas with Rudy maybe? A sabbatical at last?

September 1, 1992. My Play in Forth Worth.

This weekend Sylvia and I went to Fort Worth to see my play As Above So Below performed by the Theater of All Possibilities and directed by Kathelyn Hoff, whose idea this production was. It’s about a flying 3D Mandelbrot set that’s a female UFO. I based it on a short story of mine by the same name.

The play was great, with beautiful dancing. Afterwards a young woman said to me: “Hi, I’m in the play. I’m a fractal.”

The actor who played the Rudy/Will part did it so well. When he did his monologue at the start of the play, I felt like I was looking into a mirror. It was so good to hear those words I wrote being said out loud by someone else in a full room of people who were enjoying it. They laughed in the right places, it was wonderful. And unlike a speech, I didn’t have any pressure on me, it was all done for me, all I had to do was show up and watch.

None other than Ivan Stang a.k.a. Douglas St. Clair Smith, High Scribe of the Church of the SubGenius, showed up for the Friday premiere performance. It was amazing to have him next to me with his long hair and rough face, with a gap between his front teeth, leaning maniacally forward, grinning at the lines.

After the premiere, Sylvia and I were invited with the director Kathelyn Hoff and the soprano Fiorella Tirenzi and Johnny “Dolphin” Allen (chief scientist of Biosphere 2) to some people’s house for dinner. I brought Stang along as well.

At the dinner, I stepped out in the front yard with Stang and he shared a “fropstick” with me. Inside I made sure Stang sat next to me and he started telling everyone about how “Sun Young and L. Ron and me were talking things over the other day.” Playing the religious leader. What a wonderful nut.

He talked about having performed 110 Short Duration Marriages, with some lonely people having married him. Stang says that if a ShortDurMar is not consummated within 24 hours it is a grievous affront to his divinity, “Bob.”

“So did you consummate your marriages to the lonely people?” We wanted to know.

“I don’t practice what I preach,” says Stang. “I guess I’m kind of an anti-Swaggart in this instance. I tell people to have sex, and then I don’t.”

Fiorella was beautiful, especially as she came to dinner with her stage wig on. She had big breasts with décolletage and a line where the breasts touched each other. Her leather blouse was fastened only at the breasts, you could even see her navel. She had an extreme Italian accent and seemed like the very personification of Babs the Sex Sphere as well as Mamma Mathematica—the real world “Ma” character from my play, somehow called into my life by the magic of my writing.

The show was even better the second night we saw it. It was great to be a visiting star artist, at moments it felt like I was living in one of the entries in Andy Warhol’s Diaries, my favorite bed-time reading these days.

September 2, 1992. At the Black Watch Bar.

In the Black Watch bar, sitting in a booth facing the street. I see a riot of color and hear a mass of sound. Initially it is truly horrible Tom Jones shouting “Delilah.” So loud it hurts. Then after the bellowing, rutting finale of “Delilah,” as if in cosmic forgiveness, the music switches to mellow space music, and later on to heavy metal. The bartender is a guy I’ve seen working at the liquor store, he’s languid and weary, as if he’s not fully inflated.

The front wall of the Black Watch is a riot of color, as stated before.

In the upper left is a TV showing Warner Brothers cartoons, Popeye and Olive Oyl, and then a baby with a Chinese meat-cleaver chasing Porky Pig till the baby’s Mom gives him a spanking with big sexual body rhythm, then The Ant and the Aardvark, and last of all Bugs Bunny landing on the Island of the Apes. Bugs’s buck teeth, his chomping, his rudeness. I want the phreak computer-hacker character in Hacker and the Ants to be like Bugs. I’m thinking I’ll call him Riscky Pharbeque after Riscky’s Bar-B-Q in Fort Worth.

In the upper right of the Black Watch wall is a Millers neon sign shaped like the Golden Gate Bridge. Against the side wall on the right is a pinball machine with a display of a thousand points of light, diode bulbs doing Times Square digital video things.

The real jewel of the Black Watch front wall is in the center. It’s a crude stained glass window which is, I never perceived before, a picture of the Black Watch itself, with the bar and a bartender and some people at a table—one of them is bright stained-glass blonde—and out the door are the hills of Los Gatos or, as I call it in my stories, Los Perros. Dogs, not cats.

I found out today that I can pick up the equivalent of three-month’s salary if I buy my Autodesk stock options. Copacetic! I’m really not going to go back to teaching at State yet this spring is what I think today. I want to be unemployed for awhile, like in the magical four years at Lynchburg when I wrote six books.

September 12, 1992. Nightmare Trip, Mondo House.

Thursday I went up to Autodesk and met the Human Relations Director. He told me that I wouldn’t get some of the severance pay I’d thought I would. He had zero empathy, of course, why else would he be in charge of Human Relations. It’s like the Ministry of Peace in 1984.

There was a party for the Science Fiction Channel being held at Dark Carnival Books in Berkeley. I stopped by the Mondo 2000 house on the way there, talked with Ken and Alison about our User’s Guide book, they gave me a Xerox, it looks good. The Mondo guy Jas was there also.

At the Dark Carnival party I drank and smoked enough pot so that I didn’t want to drive all the way home. Also I was to meet the other four family members Friday for dinner in San Francisco, so I took up an invitation Alison had issued and went back to the Mondo house to crash.

Jas lives there, and we had some pasta together. I’ve always heard him and Ken talking about DMT so I asked him for some. He was like, “Well, you’ve been drinking and smoking pot, wait till the morning so the effect is more clear,” and I was, “Naw, I wanna do it.”

So he gets this white dust and puts it on parsley in a plastic bong and I sit on the couch and he leans forward and holds the bong for me, and I lean back after the big chemical tasting hit and the drug hits so fast. Pot isn’t a drug, man, pot is a spice. DMT is a drug.

I rocked back and forth looking at the California Craftsman beams overhead, everything radiating off optical echoes of itself, the lights as if they are receding and surrounded by echoes. I got up to see if I could walk around, Jas sort of cringed away, as I’m larger than him. I walked around the room, then walked to the bathroom to look in the mirror, I looked the same except for lights running around the rims of my glasses.

In the bathroom I was hearing voices talking in the background, and I realized they were hallucination voices modeled on three young black women I’d seen in the supermarket on the way over, picking up two six-packs of Tecate beer. They’d been talking about a friend who got shot. The thought of a beetle or a Beatle kept coming to me, it seemed like that was what they were talking about now. Then I walked back into the living room and sat down and it wore off. Fantastic visuals. The speed of my thoughts was amazing.

So then Jas goes downstairs, I drink some more beer, and about half an hour later he comes back up and I ask him for another hit. “Wait for the morning,” he says again, and again I’m, “I want it now.” He says the effects this time will be stronger because it accumulates for a short period. He loads more of the shit in there than last time, and this time turns out all the lights but one lamp on the piano by the velvet couch I’m sitting on.

I draw it deep and it hits harder than the last time. It rushes right out at me, the drug, and now I recognize it as the same ineffable feeling as before, the speed and the noise wu-wu-wu-wu-wu real fast in my head. The thing that rushes out at me is a live being, a mocking and aggressive being. It’s like a cross between a beetle, a black person, a pipe, and a three-dimensional Mandelbrot set that resembles a stove made of checkered tiles. The thing is kind of challenging me to keep up with it, it’s off to my left. I guess my eyes were closed at this point.

The creature says, “Beetlejuice monkey,” and I echo it, “Beetlejuice monkey,” and then the creature speeds up, like, a thousand times as fast and sort of sneers, “Nah, Beetlejuice monkey!” as if I hadn’t said it right. And this gets into one of those relentless psychedelic thought loops. I go around the loop a few dozen times, and each time the creature says something—it’s the pipe talking to me, but it’s shaped like a 3-D Mandelbrot set, with its stinger sticking out, and its voice is based on the black women I saw in the supermarket. It’s mocking and aggressive, dismissing my thought speed, trying to dominate and show me where it’s really at. Numbers get into the picture for a second, the creature is, like, counting, and I hear it count up to and beyond a quadrillion, then higher and higher. It counts to a quadrillion by ones, and I hear every single number along the way. Is that even possible?

Now the beetle pipe creature vision goes away, and I’m looking at my life from the standpoint of the year 2030. I’m a culture hero, and people have picked apart various strands of my behavior. I’m seeing this in terms of cyberspace TV show or something, a cyberspace network show devoted to talking about what I did. This thought line is a result probably of just having been over at the Sci-Fi Channel party promoting myself and generally ego-tripping.

One of my personality strands that the show identifies is “Arfie the Half-Drunk Hacker,” and it’s symbolized by cactuses with the words “Arfie the Half-Drunk Hacker,” running up them. This is like a theme graphic for the show or something, a coyote art kind of desert scene with the “Arfie the Half Drunk Hacker” cactuses. Then I guess Jas must have said something to me, I was probably slumped on the couch, but he said my name, “Rudy,” and I snapped to attention and jumped up on my feet near Jas in his chair in the pool of light from the single lamp.

This part was especially terrifying. I saw pennants with “Arfie the Half-Drunk Hacker” cactus logos on them, and Jas was wearing a hood with dog-ears to look like my dog Arfie, and he was in this cyberspace studio in 2030 and his job was to track my doings for fans, and now somehow he’d pulled me out of ordinary reality and into his studio, which was not on Earth—it wasn’t really in ordinary space at all, it was just this bubble of space in the Void and there was no way at all to leave it.

I thought, “Oh, I’m dreaming, this is impossible,” but then I started feeling my body with my hands, and my body was really there, not like it ever is in a dream and I was like begging Jas, “God, how did I get here? Let me go back to my real life. How did you get me out of my reality?”

And he seemed to say something like, “You can’t go back yet, now that I’ve got you here, you have to just hang around.”

And my voice was echoing and Jas’s voice was echoing, and I realized that incredible media instruments were around us holographically taping and recording this, as he was the ultimate cyberspace time-travel fan taping my life. It was like having captured the real Elvis in your home, if you are an Elvis archivist.

“I just want to go back to my family,” I said.

“Relax,” says Jas. “Sit down.” And I sat down on the couch like a guest on a TV talk show. And slowly reality came back.

The unusual thing in the freakout was that I was so fully into it that I really didn’t know I was on a drug trip at all. I really thought I was in this No Exit kind of space bubble outside of space and time, in an alternate world, trapped there with the ultimate Fan from the Future. He was kind of a DJ too. So bizarre.

All the next day I was still pretty tweaked about that episode, and about the “Beetlejuice monkey” creature. I hung around Berkeley and went to Cody’s Bookstore and sat down and read the DMT chapter in the Psychedelic Encyclopedia, and it made me feel a lot better, saying that the biggest cause of worry after such a trip is to think that the hallucinated creatures or “religious personages” are real. (Not that Beetlejuice Monkey was religious, just sarcastic and impossibly fast.)

I was so glad to grasp that other people had been there and that it wasn’t real. All day, though, and still at our family dinner that evening, I was worried, obsessively recalling the details over and over and for some reason always unable to remember the full name “Beetlejuice Monkey”—I only remembered that name a day or two later. And that night I dreamed about it a lot.

On the whole, it was a terrifying experience, but also I think I can get some use out of it in the novel. I’m so glad to have a family. I really don’t feel like getting high again.

September 14, 1992. Bad Trip for Hacker & Ants. Rolling in Arf.

I’m finally over the freakout. Had nightmares Friday and Saturday night, and couldn’t really sleep last night (Sunday), but today the obsession with the Beetlejuice Monkey has finally left. I hacked all day just to discipline and recalibrate my brain, I guess.

A great metaphor, though. I can’t wait to put my character Jerzy Rugby through it all in the present chapter of Hacker and the Ants. He won’t get there through drugs, but rather through a much better quality of VR hardware and cyberspace software than he’s been used to. The shit I saw at the Mondo house was like the output from a brain that runs thousands of times or, according to the Beetlejuice Monkey, quadrillions of times as fast as my normal brain.

For my character Jerzy, there might be a simulated vision that’s running in cyberspace thanks to the ants. The thing of being trapped in the hallucinated room, the “Arfie the Half-Drunk Hacker” talk show, that’s perfect. Jerzy will be trapped in an illusion, scary and intense, and for awhile I’ll keep the reader in doubt about whether it’s real. I could stretch the doubt out endlessly and get all P. K. Dickian about it, but I’d rather not overdo that, as I do have a tight logical plot to present without tangling everything up in a “what is real” routine. Use it for a quick sting, but don’t let it eat the whole story.

I mean, the bad trip wears off, and you realize, after a day or two or three of obsessive worry, that it wasn’t real, that it was just an autonomous thought process that spontaneously Zhabotinskied into existence in your brain. But all that sheer terror—wow.

My SF mentor Robert Sheckley once wrote something like, “A writer is a person who will willingly descend to hell and suffer the tortures of the damned—as long as they’re assured they can write about the experience.”

Last night I remembered one more thing about my bad trip, such an unpleasant memory that I sat upright in my bed sweating. It happened in between the Beetlejuice Monkey and the Arfie the Half-Drunk Hacker extra-spatio-temporal DJ. I think two of the other Mondo people came walking through the living room then and tried to talk to me. Two women.

I was slumped on the couch, feeling hot and melted, with my eyes closed. I was thinking I was back at a big Mondo party in that room. The voices seemed to be saying, “Wake up, Rudy,” and then, “Look, oh look what he did,” and, “Oh god he’s doing it again.”

At this point I had the conviction that I’d ripped apart a live dog and that I was lying in its fresh hot entrails, and that this had really happened. I didn’t dare open my eyes to face the reality of the stink and blood, it was better to lie there pretending to be catatonic.

DMT is a fun drug, huh? A vision of satanic terror, a vision of total isolation from reality, a vision of utter humiliation. Some kind of a good time, boy. What a burn.

But this was exactly the experience I needed to fully visualize how it would feel for my character Jerzy Rugby to suffer what I call a phreak burn.

September 18, 1992. Getting Head Back Together. Hairdresser.

All this obsessing and moaning about my bad trip overlooks that I’ve been getting along well with my family. I’m so lucky to have them. I need to be a better person.

My Hacker and the Ants character Jerzy Rugby doesn’t have his family. The point where Jerzy’s worldline diverged from my own life was when Jerzy had his dog put to sleep instead of bringing him to California like I did with Arf.

I’ve been listening a lot to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” on his record Computer Games, which I picked up used on vinyl the day after my trip. The album cover graphics reminded me of the scary visions that I’d just seen. George Clinton knows. And what a great song, “Atomic Dog.” I never realized all along that Zappa and the Stones were imitating the George Clinton funk style, I didn’t know what real funk was.

I called my old friend Greg Gibson last night, I’d mailed him a handwritten letter from Autodesk while cleaning out my desk. He was sweet.

“Rudy, your best work is still ahead of you.”

That’s such a nice thing to hear. I complained a little more, and he said something else nice, and then said, “Well you got a boo-boo and if you come to me I’ll just keep putting bandages on it and bandage after bandage till it’s like this huge hump.”

So then I’m all “Tell me about you.” And then later I told him about my bad trip and he counseled me.

“Rudy, this is the Christos talking. Your last child is leaving home and you got fired. This is not the time to be trying new drugs. Be good to yourself. Be gentle with yourself. This is the Christos talking.” That was good to hear, although I’m not clear on what Greg means by “the Christos.” He’s not religious at all.

At least my shoulder stopped hurting at last, I’ve had this incredible ache in my right shoulder ever since I got “redeployed”—the Autodesk euphemism for “fired.” I went to get a massage, but the massage guy was into acupressure and he made me listen to this long stupid rap about chi or qi or something, and then he hardly massaged my back at all, instead he did shit like push on my butt or poke at what he said were pressure points on my fucking heel. A useless scam.

When my shoulder really started feeling better was when I got my hair cut yesterday and this pretty blond California hairdresser Kim leaned my head back into a sink and washed my hair with warm water. That drained off a lot of Chi, no doubt.

I told Kim how we’d been in Fort Worth and we’d seen a stuffed head of a steer the size of her hairdressing cubicle, his name was Old Blue and he’d led a drive of steers from like deep West Texas to Fort Worth, and when he got there, they cut off his head and stuffed it.

“That’s tight,” chirps Kim. Isabel told me last year that tight means more than uptight, it means mean and stingy, kind of like the old meaning of tight as in Unca Scrooge.

Tomorrow we drive Isabel up to Oregon and she starts college.

Empty Nest

September 22, 1992. Isabel Gone. Empty Nest.

Now we’re back, childless after 23 years. Last night I dreamed I was on a playground with a one-year-old child of mine, I lowered my face to the babe’s level and we smiled at each other and I kissed the child on the cheek. It could have been Georgia or Isabel or Rudy, I was uncertain and couldn’t remember the name. The main thing in the dream was the way it feels to carry around a child that size, the lovely live compactness of the little body, the kissability of the dear little face.

Baffled in our empty nest, I clean the house more and more intensely each weekend, scouring out the scabs that are the memories of having had kids. Twenty-three years we had children here, and now they’re all gone. What are people for?

September 25, 1992. Courtroom for Hacker & Ants.

Doing research for a courtroom scene in The Hacker and the Ants, I went into San Jose today to the Hall of Justice, right next to the Main Jail for Santa Clara County. The Superior court meets in the Hall of Justice. Rather than there being one courtroom as I’d naively imagined, there are lots of them, six floors worth. I went to Dept. 33 on the fifth floor where a trial was just beginning. Judge Robert P. Ahern presiding. He was a heavy-set guy who spoke very slowly and clearly. He was still inspecting and instructing the jury. Sometimes he’d start asking a juror questions and would pile one question on top of the other bang bang bang. What college do you attend? What courses are you taking? How long have you gone to De Anza? What are your educational plans? Some phrases he used:

“Let me finish. I don’t want to have to repeat this. I have the utmost confidence that this case will be completed by October 9. I will ask you the same question collectively. I’m asking for your cooperation. Let me help you out. Can you be a fair impartial fact-finder. No disrespect intended, but I’m just a traffic cop. Don’t prejudge. Council approach the bench.”

The exact phrase in A Scanner Darkly that Donna Hawthorne says and which I now copied in to have my character Gretchen say in Hacker and the Ants after Jerzy’s phreak burn is: “Why were you yelling? God, you’re uptight. You woke me.” That phrase makes me laugh so much. Like uptight is such a superficial measure of how freaked Jerzy is in Hacker and the Ants, or of how freaked Arctor and Baxter were in Scanner Darkly, or of how freaked I was in the Mondo house. It’s superficial, but also such a direct person-to-person word.

Imagine an ant-army of miniature Perky Pats saying that line. I dream I’ll be as revered as Phil in twenty years. He was born in 1928 and I was born in 1946. I’m twenty years behind. Revered in 2012.

The trial room: five rows of fourteen chairs with an aisle in the middle, the aisle goes through a low partition that separates off the court. On the partition is a sign: “All communications with the prisoners—verbal, written or signal is unlawful without the permission of the deputies.” On the other side of the bar is a sheriff with a gun and a belt full of bullets and a walkie-talkie, then a desk marked DEFENDANT and a desk marked PEOPLE. On the right were the twelve jurors in comfortable seats that rocked back and forth.

One of the jurors: “I’m a retired pilot. I worked for Fidelity Insurance company. A corporate pilot. My wife is in…she works in personnel at Lockheed.”

Yesterday I went to see Paul Mavrides and Hal Robbin. Hal mentioned a song, “Told the Judge to Suck my Dick.”

September 27, 1992. Back to Teaching? New Book.

Tonight, Saturday, we went to a party for the SJSU math department at Professor Jane Day’s in Palo Alto, a nice woman, six years ago she had us to dinner our first Thanksgiving in California.

At the party today, I had major culture shock and disorienting depression. We didn’t stay all that long. I’m supposed to go back to this? To these…professors? After running with the hard-guy industrial hackers for four years? After freaking with the finest of the bay-lit nuts? Did someone say committees?

Everyone was nice and friendly, but inside my head I had a vision of being a screaming kicking rabbit in a trap. The trap being my teaching job. Rabbits can make a sound, you know. It’s a high-pitched squeal, like wheenk wheenk.

What a burn, what a hideous nightmare burn. I’m too good for this. I’m not ready to start teaching again next spring. What I need to do is to finish Hacker and the Ants and then get my head together about what it is that I’ve been doing in Silicon Valley for the past six years out here with computers. Write another nonfiction book.

Titles? Why Computers Suck. But they don’t. Why Computers Don’t Suck. Forget the suck. Inside the Machine. It’s almost like A Season in Hell, Or maybe Mathematical Hacking. Accurate and to the point. But it’s not actually a good title.

September 28, 1992. Valis Calls Me.

The phone just rang, it was a nut talking through a synthesizer or voice-flattener to sound kind of echoey and computer-like. He said he was VALIS. That’s all I need, man, I’ve been feeling kind of crazy recently anyway. Phil Dick used to say he’d gotten a phone-call from a computer called VALIS. And now I’m getting the same call. But I’m not buying it.

“In other words you’re a nut who won’t tell me his name,” I say to the voice on the phone.

“You sound a little paranoid,” goes the nut.

I said if he had anything to tell me he could send a letter it to my SJSU address. I may have to get a new phone number.

I felt really crazed at the math party Saturday night, it just made me so uptight to think of going back to doing the same stuff. I hope I get over it, probably just some bad body chemistry. Having Isabel gone makes such a big hole in our lives that I can’t really see the edges of the hole. I’ll imagine it’s not mattering to me, because I don’t see the hole, but it’s just that the hole is too big to see.

September 29, 1992. Mondo Photo Shoot.

I went up to San Francisco to hang out with Mavrides and then went to the Mondo house for a photo shoot for Details magazine. Me, Ken, Alison—that is, Rudy Rucker, R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu. They’ve always seemed like my old sixties vision of San Francisco, those two, living in the huge California Craftsman Mondo house pile with a valley and a rivulet in the back yard. Mu with a wooden snake and Ken in a frock coat and me with a tasseled velvet throw worn around my legs like a kilt (I was chilly in my shorts, and the idea of being in a Men’s fashion magazine in a skirt seemed like good dada fashion.) We were all high. It felt like being in The Jefferson Airplane, man.

It was soothing to be up there, part of a team, also in the same house where I had that freakout the day after I got fired from Autodesk, and to these folks a freakout like that is…nothing, no more significant than a funny joke, a passing knot in the slack, a hiccup, let’s keep things mellow.

October 2, 1992. A Book Called “DUH!”

I’ve been fretting about what to call the nonfiction book I imagine I’m going to write. Greg and my science fiction friends all like my latest hare-brained idea: DUH! But they could easily be way out of touch with the commercial beat.

I talked to my agent Susan Protter some more today about the possible nonfiction book. I’ve got her accepting the concept that it can be a book about my own personal journey into computerland.

Susan: “Like what if some guy in 1910 had written a book about what it was like to go and work for a car factory and build cars. That’s how the book should be.”

I also think of it in terms of the medieval artisan going to the Isle de France to work on the Notre Dame cathedral. Imagine if one of those guys had written a book about that. I mean what a fucking classic my book could be.

Maybe I give it a classy title like Seek Ye The Gnarl. That’s a phrase I used in my CA Lab Manual at Autodesk.

Last night, half asleep, I kept thinking I was going crazy. I dream a lot about Andy Warhol because I read his Diaries every night. Today I went mountain-biking in the empty Lexington Reservoir near our house. It was bleak and dry. Drought years.

October 16, 1992. Transreal. Flensed at Autodesk.

Monday is my last day of official employment at Autodesk. I feel nervous about it. I had to buy myself new computer equipment, most of the stuff I’ve been using at home belongs to Autodesk. I still don’t have my new email set up—I can’t get my new system’s modem to work.

Today, Friday, I went up to Autodesk and got flensed (whaling term for removing the blubber from a whale). On the way I hit Fry’s Electronics on the Lawrence Expressway off Route 101 in Sunnyvale one more time, my sixth visit in the process of getting my new machines to work. “No man steps in Fry’s but once.”

Up at Autodesk, I turned in my Autodesk machines in the area that used to be Advanced Tech. There were some young kids sitting around laughing in our old “Cyberia” room. One of them was tapping a golf-ball with a club, doing putting practice. They all looked so happy and relaxed. They were the Help group of Information Systems. I got the putting boy to carry in the heavy stuff: the laser printer and the Compaq CPU.

“Oh were you the guy who sent the email today? I saw that,” he says.

The next thing was that I went to the third floor of the execs’ building to meet an Autodesk lawyer, who had the contract ready for the artificial life code package that I’ve been calling Boppers. The lawyer was a very junior person—I’d been imagining a big wheel assigned to my deal, but they don’t care that much. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” The contact gave me a free perpetual license to use the Boppers code as I like…which made it seem like the code was a real thing, anyway.

Walking down the low white halls I was thinking, “This is just what you’ve been writing about in The Hacker and the Ants. This is so great.” I’m living in my novel. This morning when I called the Galaxy 2000 video chip people about my new graphics card, they were all Vietnamese, like my Vinh Vo character in Hacker, I recognized the calm accent. And when I took my Galaxy 2000 Windows Accelerator Board back to Fry’s this morning the guy in front of me in line was none other than Steve Wozniak—the Woz—buying 4 Apple Powerbooks plus five thousand dollars’ worth of boards and chips to stuff in them. It’s a trip to be here living in the transreal world that I’m really writing about.

Back to my Autodesk visit. I go to see a young woman named Lori in “Human Relations.” She’s very slim. She takes me into a conference room full of packing boxes. I sign forms, give her my Autodesk AT&T phone credit card, my office key. She is flensing me, rendering me, butchering my corpse.

The so-called exit interview is a formality where I fill in answers to three printed questions about my work experience at Autodesk. Nobody will ever read my answers. I keep them quite short. Lori leads me back into the halls and I happen to see that programmer kid who was working with me at Autodesk at the end. John Castellucci.

“Hey, Rudy!” he calls down the long hall. “Is that Rudy?” John is freakin and geekin, it’s fine to see him.

Lori recognizes Castellucci, he’s potential meat for her to flense, he may be on his way out too.

“I’m here with the undertaker,” I tell John. I’m resentful about being flensed and embalmed.

“Don’t call me an undertaker,” says Lori a little sharply. I begin to notice how really skinny she is. Like this was a subterranean afterworld experience.

She drops me with a friendly old lady who’s in charge of stock options, and I pay the money to exercise them and I actually leave with some shares. I feel like the lady thinks I’m a real sport.

Before emptying out my office at Autodesk, I went through all my old email on the desktop machine I had there, and I selected out the good parts.

Looking back, it was funny how much effort I expended writing up “business plans” that nobody ever fucking looked at. After three hours of ruining my eyes scrolling through the email and selecting shit, I slipped up and crashed the computer without having saved the doc. So typical of doing things with computers.

I think, never mind. No use selecting all that crap again. Let the email be gone for good. I read over it and that’s enough. Times like this I always remember G. I. Gurdjieff’s line, “No effort is ever in vain.” If you work with computers you end up saying that line a lot.

October 22, 1992. Artificial Life Lab.

Good news, it looks like a local company called The Waite Group is likely to publish my Boppers software with a manual by me in fall 1993. This is the code I was working on at Autodesk right before they fired me. The creatures in Boppers are ant-like turmites, also some flocking boids, and some hybrid critters called turboids. I talked to my science-writer friend Kee Dewdney, he said he made up the name “turmite,” and that I’m welcome to use it. He coined the name because these creatures reminded him of Turing machines on a pixel grid, and because they were inspired by Greg Turk, then a graduate student at UNC at Chapel Hill. So Kee said to himself, this is tur-something, so call it tur-mite for a little bug.

The Boppers package isn’t going to be the big all-about-Silicon-Valley tome I’ve been dreaming of, it’s just going to be my artificial life programs with notes. But I’m glad to have something concrete to work on this spring. We’ll call it Artificial Life Lab.

October 26, 1992. The Andy Warhol Diaries.

So like I’d planned, I brought some of my freakout material into The Hacker and the Ants for local color and special effects, ascribing it all to cyberspace. That’s the secretive thing when you write about cyberspace and VR—it’s a way in which you can still talk in public about psychedelic states of consciousness, now that the customary physical means for achieving such states have been so thoroughly demonized by decades of right-wing politicians and running-dog opportunistic centrists. Thank god the Democrats seem to be on the verge of victory.

I kind of bridle at the thought of going back to SJSU in the fall to teach again. It’s really nice to be on my own again right now. Working at home is peaceful with all the kids gone. I’m being nice to Sylvia. With no kids, there’s nobody else to fall back on. It’s calm, though empty and nostalgic sometimes in that knife-through-the-heart way. How good we had it with the three kids, broke in New York and Virginia, even though we thought it was too hard.

This morning I finished reading The Andy Warhol Diaries (1977-1987), edited by Pat Hackett, a paperback the size of a phonebook. I’ve been reading it at bedtime every night, or in the evenings, for the last couple of months. It was so good, so interesting, listening in on the aging artist (he was born in 1928, so he’s 49 - 59 in the book), so full of gossip and envy and hopes and complaints. There’s an entry for nearly every day, and it’s going along, and then one day it stops because he went to get a gall-bladder operation and they screwed up his meds and he died. He was scared of doctors, he’d been going to crystal healers, and finally it got so bad he went to the doctors and sure enough they killed him. Whew.

I want to do a story about Andy Warhol. Although just now it’s hard to imagine writing a story, with The Hacker and the Ants still not quite done. Having an idea or a desire for a story is a lot different from having to write it.

Life is still too hard.

Hard Knocks

November 17, 1992. Georgia Gets Mugged.

I just talked to Georgia on the phone, and I’m upset to hear that she got mugged. Some guys came up to her on the street near her new apartment on Baker Street (near Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco) and demanded her wallet. And then, when they’d taken out the money she yelled at them till they tossed the wallet back to her.

Is the city worth it—one wonders. Maybe Georgia should find a nice small town and make a living doing graphics like our friend Nancy Blackman with her Design Group in Lynchburg, Virginia. But how to pick a random small town? At Georgia’s lovely young age, she should have peace to safely bloom, settle down, have children, get a career—instead of bleeding to death on a filthy sidewalk, as it could conceivably end!

Brave Georgia, yelling to get her wallet back. It reminds me of a time when she was eleven. I was with the three kids in a park atop a low mountain in Heidelberg, Germany, where we were living. We had plastic sleds. There was one good slope that Georgia and Rudy and I were sledding on, and Georgia was pulling her plastic sled across the main track, and some boys about her age or older yelled at her.

“Doofes mädchen, hau ab, du bist im Pfad.” (Dumb girl, get away, you’re in the path.)

And Georgia, who knew German by now, put her arms akimbo and started bawling them out.

“Blöde kuh! Halt den mund! Dummkopf!” (Stupid cow! Shut up! Dumb-head!)

The boys yelled back, but Georgia kept yelling till they gave up and sledded around her. And then she walked over and took my hand and we sledded down together. My Georgia.

November 19, 1992. Hacker & the Ants Done.

On Thursday, November 5, 1992, I finished writing my first draft of The Hacker and the Ants.

There’s always an experiential hiatus between thinking I’ll never finish and being done. It’s not really a hiatus, because it DOES happen, it happened the Thursday two weeks ago when I had them throw the acetone on the plastic ants and light it, and then bailed out and sketched the Epilogue. My feelings right then were not glorious “I reached the peak” feelings, they were more like “Okay, hang in here, do this, do this.” And flabby surprise.

I’m so flabby, I get high and work on the book and drink. Well, soon I won’t have the excuse of the book anymore, “Where’s your book, Mr. So-Called Artist?” Oh, right.

I got a lot of good Cal-speak into The Hacker and the Ants. I think it’s a hell of a book. I got a lot of father/child and man/woman stuff in. Some radical politics a little bit. Cyberspace and a-life out the yang. And loads and loads of California. This is my picture of California. I moved here seven (well, 6.33 right now) years ago and Hacker is my transreal photojournalistic report. I did some of my best transreal sketches of people yet.

November 23, 1992. Broken Bone. Randy Karl Tucker.

Sunday I broke my collarbone.

The way I broke my collarbone was that it was Sunday and I’d mailed off the Hacker and the Ants manuscript on Friday, and there was really nothing to do, so I scraped some THC tar out of the stem of this crappy toy “Bob”-Dobbs-style plastic pipe that I’d recklessly been using to smoke pot with a pinholed-tinfoil screen over the bowl. I wiped the tar from inside the stem onto some ZigZag papers (I’d been using this technique for the last ten days to get high, and it seemed the tar would never end), smoked a couple of the tarry papers wadded into the pipe’s bowl, and set off on a bike-ride, on the loop I’ve ridden well over a hundred times by now.

On one steep cliffside stretch of the route there’s a safety regulation that you must walk your bike, as I always do going downhill, but I ride uphill. Today there was a ranger there, he stopped me and started giving me a ticket. I’d heard from guys swimming illegally in the reservoir that the park’s tickets could run as high as five hundred dollars. As I had no I.D. on me (and wouldn’t have admitted it if I did have), I gave the ranger a fake name: Randy Karl Tucker of Los Gatos.

When I told this story to Paul and Hal last week, Hal couldn’t get over that name as an alias. A redneck serial killer name.

When I gave that ranger the fake name, I was thinking, “It’s a good thing that we aren’t so futuristic yet that this bullying ranger can use a computer to check if that’s a real name.” But then, oh-oh, the ranger takes out a walkie-talkie and says, “Sir, can you just wait right there while I call in to get your DMV license number.”

So now, I realize, he’ll find out that my name isn’t in the database and I’ll be in even more trouble, for lying, so I turn my bike around and start walking, then riding back downhill. “Mr. Tucker,” calls the ranger, “Mr. Tucker.”

And I lose it, I’m shaking in panic, and I can’t hear well as I have my sweatshirt hood over my ears, and I can’t use my feet well as I have knobby-soled jogging shoes on instead of pedal-smooth leathers, and I’m high of course, and off to the left I see a cop-car on the thruway, and I damn near fall off the cliff path, the adrenaline has me, I’m weak in the knees. I fling my pipe of “Bob” away, lest I suffer a drug charge as well when, likely as not, the Man pops me.

I make it down to the meadow by the street—okay!—but I see two burly men near the gate, and, lost in pot paranoia, I decide that they’re plainclothes rangers, and that the ranger has been in radio contact with the cop car on the thruway who will now be pulling up to the street I’m planning to ride onto—so I slow down and waveringly cut to the left, to go across the meadow and down a gully to change my clothes and find a different exit. And my front tire sticks in the soft soil and slowly, trivially, I go over the handlebars.

*SKKRUNCH*

Oh! I know I’ve hurt myself, I’m thinking sprained or dislocated my shoulder, but now at this point, I’m even less willing to give in to the fucking Pig, so I get to my feet. The burly men are staring at me, but not running towards me. Maybe they’re just bystanders, but I feel the cop really might be out there. How terrible it would be get caught now, with bike-riding, false name giving, and flight all on the docket. And to go to a copshop with my shoulder like this.

So I dragged the bike fifty feet down a gully. There was a grinding feeling in my shoulder—it was in fact the two broken ends of the collar bone rubbing against each other. The gully turned much steeper than I’d imagined, I was going to have to go back out the gate. Shutting off the pain in my shoulder, I pulled off my sweatshirts and traded them so I’d be blue instead of red. I took off my sweatpants and bike-helmet and left them with the bike, throwing some brush and leaves over the bike. I walked home and Sylvia took me to the emergency room.

Walking home, I couldn’t believe how stupidly I’d acted. “You’ve fallen for your own fantasies, Rudy,” I was thinking. “You’re not the hero in one of your adventure stories, a Jerzy Rugby who never loses his cool. You’re out of touch, you were acting like a twelve-year old. Now someone is going to steal your bike, and the doctor is going to cost thousands of dollars.”

The hospital was efficient, but grimmer and more robotic than ever. On the way in, the orderly told me, “You’ve broken your clavicle, I just heard your broken bones rubbing together. There’s nothing they can really do for it except maybe give you a brace.” Then the real doctors took four X-rays, then five more, then two more and then this one gung-ho guy ordered a CAT-scan and an arteriogram with a cable to be run up my femoral artery, and then he went home. He’d never gotten it through his head that by “bike” I meant “bicycle,” and not “motorcycle.” I bridled at the arteriogram procedure, and finally the other doctors settled for a CAT-scan.

I was ashamed to tell anyone the true story of how I’d had the accident, I simply said that I’d decided to try cutting across the meadow and had fallen off. The pain was astonishing, although the codeine worked well. The next morning I went and used a rope to haul my bike out of the gully. Sylvia helped me with that, and I told her that I’d been fleeing a ranger, and she was sad that I’d acted so crazy.

So I got my bike back, and I got out of the ticket. A doctor’s bill came yesterday already—from the guy who suggested the CAT-scan and arteriogram. He gets two hundred dollars for his helpful advice.

I’m an idiot. What a pathetic way to celebrate finishing my novel.

I’m wearing a shoulder strap, in PJs, taking codeine pain pills. The codeine pills are nice, they really take the pain away, kind of a buzz, but not really a high. I’ve always wondered about the effects of opiates. Well-being, the most insidious of drug states?

The kids are coming for Thanksgiving. Yay!

December 12, 1992. Memories of Mom.

I think about Mom often. It’s so hard to grasp that people really die. Nobody talks about it that much because there’s nothing we can do about it. Mom was so sweet and kind in so many ways over all the years. Sometimes family members say that I’m “acting just like Mom,” and I often do. Her stubbornness and her truculence and suspicion towards strangers is definitely a characteristic I have. When my broken collarbone was hurting so much I couldn’t do anything a couple of weeks ago, I felt like Mom, too, storing up things to ask the people around me to do the next time anyone appeared in my field of vision. “I need some water and a pill, and could you move this pillow.”

But there were the good years too. Back then, there was nothing so soothing for me as being around Mom, back when she was happy and feeling good.

December 14, 1992. Next Book? Collarbone Ache.

Monday. Last week I hacked, rewrote the crummy, crooked contract that the Waite group offered me for Boppers, worked a little on a new short story called “Easy as Pie,” wrote up the nanotechnology article for Mondo 2000, and tried to start my projected tome about the meaning of computers. Without a book to be working on, I feel like I’m getting nothing done, I even wonder why I’m not teaching this spring. I probably should have let my agent negotiate the Waite contract, but I had the idea I could do it myself.

This morning I went to see my bone doctor, who says I will get better on my own, even my numb and tingling left arm (result of a stretched or otherwise traumatized big nerve somewhere on my left side.) Then I went to SJSU. It was as rundown and friendly as ever in the Math & CS Dept. Old Howard Swann started cackling when he found out I was no longer at Autodesk.

“Who are you working for?” Howard asked.

“Uh…I’m working for Sylvia.”

He loved it.

December 16, 1992. Galen Gibson is Murdered.

Wednesday. Yesterday Don Marritz called and told me that he’d seen on the news that our pal Greg Gibson’s son Galen was killed—a crazy kid at his school shot six people, and Galen and a teacher died. This is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Poor Greg. I called him twice, he says time has never gone so slowly in his life. And earlier in the day, Pop called to say he thought he’d had a stroke, although it doesn’t sound like a crisis, he might have just fallen over. What a month of bad luck.

The story about Galen was in the paper today. I feel so angry at the kid who shot Galen, it’s so sickening to see this story in the media, like why does the paper have to call the killer “talented” twice? Galen was the one who was talented. The news glorifies killers, and the media has an endless sick interest in violent death.

I couldn’t really sleep all night, I kept jerking awake in fear when I’d start to dream about the horrible death. I lay awake thinking about the Boppers menus and then when I’d go to sleep the menus would get set wrong, there would be a crash coming up, Galen’s death, and I’d struggle to wake up. Death seems so present these days.

I say I’d like to believe in god, I say, and I do, actually, but with death and all these people going underground, I feel like there’s another order of reality out there, not just our homey world and the resounding cosmic harmony in the white light of god—the vision of Christmas—no sometimes I feel like there’s a wormy nasty seething underworld where you get buried, and we’re struggling to stay up out of it.

December 23, 1992. Greg and Galen.

Wednesday. My broken-collar-bone shoulder is killing me. On the worst nights I take a codeine pill and, instead of sleeping, scuba-dive into surprisingly three-dimensional-seeming (there should be a short word for that concept, maybe “stereoimmersive” or “cyberdelic”) reality. The same reality I always dream of, the missed class, the railway station, the mountaineering hut, the honeymoon cottage.

I’ve been hacking and stressing over the holidays. Greg is better, I guess—he says he and Anne Marie “saw the light” in a cosmic sense. Light coming out of his belly button. Galen is all around him. An emergency body defense system. “Our lives will never be the same, and the sorrow of that will never let up, but it’s also an opportunity to *change* our lives,” said Greg. It was almost scary how cheerful he sounded. I feel like to a certain extent he’s whistling in the dark, and I shudder to think of how stark it might be for him if his new light disappears. But maybe it won’t. He seemed quite confident that this level of grief had tapped him into some higher level. He says they’ll do Christmas anyway, for his other two kids, and hopes to even come for his annual bookfair visit here.

I may go see Pop with Georgia on January 14-18. I don’t see how I’ll finish “Easy as Pie,” as well as write a new chapter of The Hacker and the Ants by January 30—my editor John Douglas asked for another chap’s worth of stuff at the end. I just called Susan Protter, and she said not to worry about the formal Hacker deadline too much.

I’ve converged on a contract for Boppers with The Waite Group. I’ll be glad to actually get the package out in the world, to get those fucking ants off my back…

The other night I dreamed I was dead, I’ve never had that dream before, it was a Galen dream, I was dead and outside my body and near the people who I’d left behind…and now and then the scene would shift to this Antarctic dream I’ve had before, on a ship in Antarctica near the icebergs and penguins, and then I was trying a bit to help my loved ones—like the guy in the movie Ghost—but kept spacing out as well, and then was about due to be reborn, and was wondering how it would work, and, like, what would I reincarnate into. The available options were the Swarthmore College lawn, or an atom, or an insect—and then I was saying why not be reborn on another planet, and I was expanding out and trying to find a cool new place to be reborn.

Speaking of ants off my back, I’m nowhere near in the right frame of mind to dig back into The Hacker and the Ants rewrite.

February 9, 1993. Time Cover Story on Cyberpunk.

I finished the second version of The Hacker and the Ants on Wednesday, January 27, (adding about six thousand words,) and mailed it in.

Time magazine had a cover story on “Cyperpunk” in the February 8, 1993 issue. I can hardly grasp the wonder of this. It happened because of the Mondo 2000 User’s Guide, which happened in some part because of me. I brought cyberpunk to the West Coast, and we made it into Time. Incredible.

Needing to visit the Waite Group to talk about my Artificial Life Lab software package, I drove up to Marin in my new red Acura Legend with the black leather upholstery. California has been good to me.

On Friday, Isabel came down from Oregon, and on Saturday we went to Berkeley and Chez Panisse for a festive dinner with the three kids. It was Sylvia’s birthday. All the kids had made things, and Isabel and I read her poems.

Thinking about jellyfish again. Here are some notes on the jellyfish exhibit that I revisited at the Monterey Aquarium yesterday—I’d been there last year with Bruce Sterling to speak at a conference on computer interfaces.

The jellies pulse by a cellular automaton process, which is why the smaller ones pulse much faster. The spotted jellies live in Jellyfish Lake in Palau in the south Pacific. The siphonophore lives in deepish water and is up to 120 feet long. With tentacles extended, the longest animal on earth is the 100 foot plus Arctic lion’s mane jelly, which has a bell that’s six feet across.

I’ve decided I want to write another novel now, and never mind any nonfiction tome on computation. I’ve been thinking a lot about a book that I might call Freeware—a sequel to Wetware. It will be set largely on Mars, will use femtotechnology (direct matter control), and the aliens will arrive as info patterns which stimulate sympathetic vibrations in limpware happy cloaks.

Yes, the aliens have to show up in this novel, Vol. 3 of the Ware series. The advent of the aliens is a traditional move. Talking to Bruce Sterling about writing the other day, he said, “transcendence is a move.” SF riffs. Power chords.

February 23, 1993. Greg’s Visit. Bill Clinton.

Tuesday. Life more or less back to normal now, after Greg Gibson and his wife and two remaining kids visiting us for a week. I feel more centered again. I’m working on an artificial-jellyfish SF story with Bruce Sterling, and I started on “The Tessellated Andy Warhol Beach Party” story with Marc Laidlaw, but I’m not sure that one’s going to work out.

Greg left Wednesday, and then I took it easy with the drinking. On Friday, Sylvia and I made it to a movie, Groundhog Day, which was great, the main character lives the same day over and over, like a thousand times, but it’s not a frozen-time story, the characters are reacting to him and he’s getting better and better at dealing with them—for them it’s always the first time through that day. Life is like that—you have to do the same day over and over, especially me this spring, waking up in the same house with the same work, day after day.

Saturday we went in to see Greg & Co. at the used book fair. Then we went out to dinner at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, and then Greg and I got wasted, sitting on the fire-escape at his hotel, where he’d reserved a room for us. Me on the fire escape over Union Square telling Greg that this was as close to being Jack K. as I was going to get, and it was exciting. But threaded through everything with the Gibsons there’s the terrible, unrelenting grief over Galen.

Sunday night, Bill and Hilary Clinton were in Los Gatos to have dinner at the California Cafe with some local Valley execs, including the new Autodesk president Carol Bartz who fired me. Watching the cars go by, I yelled, “Carol, I want my job back,” and the people around us laughed, they understood. We saw Prez Clinton looking alert, waving out the window. Incredible, I’ve seen him three times now. It gave me a funny feeling, like history overlapping with reality.

Monday I read Evergreen Review #2 that I picked up at Greg’s book fair, it had Jack K’s “October in the Railroad Earth,” a great piece of writing, and there again I had a feeling of overlapping reality, like he was talking right to me.

March 7, 1993. Adrift.

A few weeks ago, I had planned to get our dog Arf “fixed,” but decided not to. It seemed like bad karma, and the vet said that by now it wouldn’t even change Arf’s bad habit of running off in search of females in heat. That’s ingrained in him for life, balls or no.

The local Lexington Reservoir finally overflowed—what a great symbolic thing, the dry lake near us finally filling and running over with water, a great flume. Life! I was out at the reservoir last week admiring it, and a camera crew from Channel 4 came up to me and asked me why I thought the water was important, me in my beret and red windbreaker.

“Water is life,” I told them. “And the reservoir finally filling up is like the Democrats getting in power again. Something wonderful that you thought would never come. Now we have water and the Republicans are gone and we can live.” One of my friends actually saw this on TV.

Last Sunday, Sylvia and I drove up the back of St. Joseph’s Hill and hiked in to the top. We saw the most beautiful thing: a humming-bird feeding on the blossoms of a “red hot poker plant.” It’s an aloe plant, but with many blossom stalks that have small cylindrical red flowers like Chinese firecrackers, scores of them. We’re on the top of a mountain and here’s this awesome naturalized patch of red hot poker, and there, diving great 3D paths around it is one of those aggressive little Anna’s humming-birds that come to our feeder. I dig the way a hummer looks when it feeds on a red hot poker plant, bending its head up to fit its beak into a down-pointing blossom—its body bent into a shape like a barking sea-lion’s form.

A couple of days ago, March 3, I gave a talk on “Stalking Artificial Life” at Sonoma State. At this time I’d been potless for a week, so I felt pretty balanced. I gave a nice talk on Gnarl, Sex, and Death as being the elements of life and evolution, doing some demos of the Boppers ware. After my talk, I happened to pass a botany-lab room that had a big case of books or ledgers or albums, all filled with pressed flowers and plants for academic study. In alphabetical order. Noting that nobody was around, I looked up “cannabis” and managed to rip off some ancient dried pot-plant fragments. Rolled them up in the paper from a cigarette and smoked them.

And then I had dinner with my artist friend Dave Povilaitis and wife, and the lady in charge of the Mathematics Colloquium, and a couple of my fans. When I told the one guy that I was working on an SF story about artificial jellyfish he looked at me so lovingly.

On the way home the traffic suddenly stopped in the middle of the boonies. I could see a helicopter ahead shining a searchlight on the road, and we crawled past an accident: a car in the road so beaten and crushed it looked like something they’d put on exhibit to warn the teens at a County Fair. It was heavy, in an obvious way, a kind of annoying way, but nothing I got majorly bummed over. Driving the rest of the way home, I was careful and glad to be alive.

I really should work on the Artificial Life Lab manual today. But Marc sent back our Andy Warhol story, giving it the new title “The Andy Warhol Sand Candle,” so maybe I’ll work on that. Or I could go downtown and drink.

March 19, 1993. Sick. I’m Dr. Frankenstein.

I’ve been sick for nearly six months now. First I had the agonizing pain in my broken-collar-bone shoulder from November through the end of February, and now I’ve been deaf for a couple of weeks from sinusitis that clogged up my ears, and I’m always hungover. I wish I was dead.

I’m supposed to make a bunch of phone-calls today to try and set up some interviews for an article I’m supposed to do about the special effects in the movie Jurassic Park, the article is for a new magazine called Wired. The Waite Group guys are bugging me about the Artificial Life Lab schedule. I feel full of hatred, every story I see in the newspaper makes me hate the people in it.

Isabel came home last night, looking like a lovely eighteen year old college girl. We’re supposed to have a dinner party tomorrow for my birthday with all the kids here and Marc, Geraldine, Wren, Hal and Paul. I have so much, and I turn it into such garbage. It’s heartbreaking.

We measured Isabel’s height on the old door frame yesterday, and she’s grown a half inch. Oddly enough it looks like my height has shrunk a half inch. Is that possible? I’m already shrinking with age? Certainly my heart has shrunk.

I found a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—I wanted to put a passage from it into my Artificial Life book. It turns out that Shelley’s book isn’t like the movie at all. There’s no jolt of electricity used to fire up the creature—the electricity is a later accretion upon the myth.

Here’s Shelley’s original Dr. Frankenstein rap, which is a fair description of how I feel about my Boppers program.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?…In a solitary chamber…I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst…I brought my work near to a conclusion…

The rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

March 22, 1993. My 47th Birthday.

Monday: My Birthday! I’m 47. All is happy again, and the party on Saturday night was great. First the San Francisco freaks showed up: the Laidlaws, Paul Mavrides and Hal Robin. This morning Isabel came back, then Georgia and Rudy arrived with their friends Mark and Kim. We had a Hungarian meal, with tears in the morning, sex at noon, liptauer korozoet, chicken paprikash, wilted cucumber salad, and that birthday cake, a von Bitter layer cake with a Pere Ubu spiral of green on top: 4 candles up and 7 candles down. They brought it in lit, and everyone was singing, and there was candlelight, and I felt so loved. I’ve been feeling so unloved recently. And to look slowly—the time so slowed down with the mammal dopamine of group love—back and forth and see everyone’s face in the candlelight like a Panavision pan, it was lovely.

After dinner I was out on the deck with Hal and Sylvia. She says, “Hal, there are so many different age groups here, which do you band together with?”

“Against whom?” asks Hal.

“Against each other.”

“I don’t think that Balkanization has to extend to such small social groupings,” goes Hal. “As Rodney King said: ‘Can we not all get along?’” He’s quoting that guy whose beating by the cops sparked the riots in LA.

On Sunday, Sylvia and I went to the beach with Georgia and Isabel. I always like to gloat over having two daughters, and I even declaim a Kentucky hillbillyism: “How can I have two daughters when I still don’t understand women at all?”

At the beach, I saw Sylvia and her two daughters in a dug-out sand-pit and it reminded me of a photo in E. O. Wilson’s book—showing a newly-landed ant-queen nesting under a rock with her first two children, known as callow workers, the females who help the queen build her nest.

Today, on my actual birthday, I went for a big bike-ride and found a spring running out of a cliff and I thought it was the Fountain of Youth. The spring was lined with soft moss and with spongy, fungal growths. I looked at it for a long time, deeply stoned.

Yee haw. I’m glad to be alive.

May 6, 1993. Visiting Pop. ILM. Angry at Waite.

Two or three weeks ago, Pop had a stroke, and I went out to see him. Very upsetting. I had a thought of refining the experience into material for a Wares novel, and came up with this:

Cobb Anderson was dying again. He was in the Sol-gel Hospital on Mars. He faded out, and when he woke his sons and grandson were leaning over him. “What’s going on?” asked Cobb. “You’re having brain trouble said one of his sons.” “Brain trouble,” said Cobb. “Brain trouble.”

Pop can’t remember anything at all, he’ll forget who you are as soon as you tell him. To tell him he had brain trouble there in the hospital, and to feel the reality of it, it was terrifying, crushing, like being thrown right into a movie, or Twilight Zone, only it was real. Imagine some day coming out of a haze and finding the kids with me and I don’t know where I am. “You have brain trouble,” says one of them. “Brain trouble.” I can hardly stand to think about this.

It was good going out there with Rudy Jr. along. It was the weekend of a big gay march in D.C. and the plane was really just about all gays and lesbians except us two. It was so odd, to be in the minority. Made me less homophobic. The guy next to me snuggles in, we’re in the middle of a row, and says, “Cozy, isn’t it!” and I’m thinking oh no. But then I talked a bit to him and his companion, and it was okay.

Another thing I’ve been up to is writing an article, tentatively titled “Kit-Bashing The Cosmic Matte,” for Wired. The article is about special effects, computerized and otherwise, at Industrial Light and Magic in San Rafael. George Lucas’s company. I even got to see the “real” Yoda, R2D2, and the Lost Ark in a huge, barn-like storehouse on Lucas’s ranch—exactly like the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only this was happening in my real life. What a rush. I sent in the article today, I have the feeling the Wired editors are multi-rewrite types so I’ll probably get it back.

Speaking of rewrite, the Waite Group has been editing my chapters of Artificial Life Lab, and they have two editors for god’s sake, and yesterday I got my first comments from the “scientific editor,” who writes in a longhand scrawl on index cards with the egocentricity and brashness of a high school kid, with lots of ignorant and insulting suggestions to totally change things. Like my definition of a-life should be exactly the same as Chris Langton’s, and the idiot thinks chaotic patterns are random for chrissakes, and says of my robot section, “The author expresses a lot of his opinions about robots, but I don’t learn much about artificial life.”

I went nonlinear over it, as Bruce Sterling likes to say, I tore up his index cards without reading the rest of them, then worried I should have saved them, then got them out of the garbage, then threw them back in, then got them out, then started piecing them together, and then I saw a remark that said I should say “gnarly” instead of “gnarl” so then tore them into still tinier pieces and, with a balloon of rage in my chest, phoned up the Waite Group to complain that the comments were unprofessional and unacceptable.

I mean why should I put up with such abuse on my eighteenth book? So then the people at Waite were, thank god, apologetic, when I’d half been expecting them to be cold and mocking.

Having grown up as a younger brother, I’m always so sure my plaints will be mocked that I get extra angry and desperate when I have to make one. So now I feel a lot better.

All I have to do is write the rest of the a-life book for Waite. And then I’ll finish the jellyfish story with Bruce, and the Andy Warhol story with Marc, and then I’ll start up on my “Sta-Hi Goes to Mars” novel, which I want to call Freeware. But, wait, I’m about to crash into the brick wall of teaching three computer science courses at SJSU this fall.

May 18, 1993. Pent-up Tears.

Driving home from S.F. yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe my ongoing nasal congestion is pent-up tears over Pop’s stroke. So now I just called Pop’s companion Priscilla, she has Pop at home, she put Pop on the phone, and he said “Hello, Ru,” and not much else, I said I was working, and then he asked on what, and of course lost the thread when I said a book about electronic ants. Then he said, “I guess I’m confused,” and gave the phone back to Priscilla.

She said that this morning Pop realized he was in some sense blind—he can’t recognize objects—and he was crying about it. Poor old Pop. She says if I write him a simple letter, she can read that to him a few times and he’ll enjoy it. So that’s what I’m going to do now.

May 19, 1993. Software Immortality

My editor John Douglas called to say that Software, Wetware, and Freeware can be issued in a single volume for the Science Fiction Book Club—if and when I ever manage to write Freeware. They’re already talking about a joint title for the omnibus. I’m trying to think up a good one. What the books are about is the man/machine fusion, right? I came up with a few possible titles today:

Killer Robots Fight It Out With Crazed Junkies

Boppers, Punks and Flickercladding

The Higher I

Hardware Upgrades

People That Melt

Artificial Life

Moldies and Meatbops

I didn’t use the phrase “artificial life” in Software, but the trick of letting self-replicating robots evolve is an example of an artificial life technique—exactly. I’m sure there were earlier science-fiction books with robots that build robots—but I think Software may be the first book in which the evolution of robots is a theme that’s explicitly worked out in detail. I’d also argue that Software is the first SF novel where people use computer tech to transfer their minds onto robot copies themselves. Not that I get fuck-all’s worth of credit.

In the end, they went for the last title—the oddest of the lot.

My dog Arf and I went running today. Arf hid from me at the high-school track cause he wanted to turn back. I looped around further, and ended up catching up with him on the hill to our house. He’s sneaky.

The otorhinolaryngologist yesterday gave me some cortisone which has brought the swelling of my sinuses down so that for the first time in three months I can breathe through my nose. It’s acute sinusitis. He gave me an antibiotic, too. What a great thing it would be to get my sinuses back. My smell and my hearing. I look healthy, with my tan, and with my jowls reduced from my daily Arf-jog.

But inside I’m a wreck.

June 12, 1993. Family Trip to Pick Up Isabel.

A few days ago Georgia, Rudy, Sylvia and I all drove up together to fetch Isabel from the University of Oregon for summer vacation. The drive was so great, with G & R in back on the way up, although at times R Jr. was driving, with me in the back with G. And on the way back down, we sat with me and Sylvia in front, and with G & R & Isabel in back. The sacred family, the holy family.

I was so thankful to have us five all together, I’m so grateful for what I have. It was wonderful. And when we had to split up again, dropping R and G at R’s in Oaktown, we stood for a moment in a circle in the street with our arms around each other and I said “I love you all” and they said “I love all of you.”

I wanted to make, like, a toast and started “Here’s to the…” but it seemed sexist and unreal to end the toast with a particular name like “Rucker.” Why that name from the male line? The girls have been working me over on the PC front during the trip, you understand. So I just said “Here’s to the…” and trailed off.

But Sylvia picked up the thread and said, “Here’s to U.S.!” And that’s really the truth of it. We are the us and we know in our group what this means. Sylvia and I the biological parents of these three young souls, we five still together, a loving family despite any problems.

I’m not avoiding working anymore—because I can’t imagine working. I’m not going to lift a finger until July 1. Write? Read? Fuck that shit.

I called Paul Mavrides today, he needs money, and he has this horrible gig where he has to paint a twelve-foot Mickey Mouse on the wall for a temporary boutique section of Union Square Nordstrom’s where they actually, horribly, sell T-shirts with Mickey Mouse and sweats with the same. Paul and I are agonizing over the irony of it, and then he tells me that the Mickey he must paint will be wearing shades. Oh, god! The ultimate Dantean torment for Mavrides, the hippest of the Nineties beatnik artists, to be painting a twelve-foot Mickey Mouse with fuckin’ shades in Nordstrom’s.

“Well, it’ll take me a day and a half. I’m just sorry it’ll make me miss spending some time with my Mom.”

June 15, 1993. NYC. A Guest of Philip Morris. Drinking Too Much.

Sylvia and I got to Manhattan Tuesday night. We’re staying at the Hotel Paramount between Broadway and Eighth. I’m here as the guest of Philip Morris, of all things, they’re paying me to give a talk to ten hipsters who won a contest in Germany to come and have a weird time in New York.

This is a cool hotel. They took some grungy old Times Square hotel and retrofitted it really well, with odd-shaped furniture. The headboard is a huge velvet puff reproduction of Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker,” with a heavy gold wood museum frame and a museum-like painting light. On the bed are four pillows and a long slender cigarette-like bolster. At night we prop the thin bolster on one of the chairs in a sitting position and call it either Mr. Butts or Mr. Jay. In the bathroom, the floor is black and white tile, with the sink a solid chrome cone tapering to a point near the floor, so that the reflections in it are a nice example of realworld ray-tracing.

Tuesday night, we cruised around the neighborhood. It really is Times Square, with all the usual scuzz, but it’s also the theater district. We had a great supper at Brasserie Des Theatres, right next to our hotel, fish soup, then Salade Nicoise for me and scallops for Sylvia. After that we saw a cool show called Fool Moon. It was two clowns, silent, with a small folk-type band onstage as well. Seeing them walk off stage in step waving their hats, baggy pants a-billow, I flashed that this was classic Broadway vaudeville. They did some routines that had to be a hundred years old, like standing in a steamer trunk and acting like you’re going down a flight of stairs.

Next morning, I came back from deli fried eggs and corned beef hash breakfast and smoked half a jay. Sylvia had headed out to the Met, we’d split up at the deli, and I was to spend the day wandering around alone. This was our first day in NYC, and we thought it would be fun not to link up for this first day.

High, I went to use our bathroom. And in there I had a big scare—the doorknob fell off and when I tried to push it back on the spindle that goes through the door, I almost pushed the spindle out on the other side. Before trying again to get the knob on, I felt the door to see if I could kick it open, it was steel. Whoa. I could really be trapped in here until 3 pm when Sylvia and I were to meet preparatory to my going to give the Germans a talk! Am I really this lame? Thanks to getting high? Instead of going out to play in NYC, I’ll be miserably locked in a bathroom all day? But then whew I got the knob to work.

Out on the street I was watching some Africans with attaché cases of counterfeit watches. When the police came, a vendor up the block would whistle or yell, and the others would close up their cases. Then I started watching a window-washer, me standing there on Fifth Avenue staring at everything. So quite soon a NYC sharpie comes up to me, a Ratso Rizzo, with an exact Dustin Hoffman smile, “Hi, how are you doing?”

I had my shades on, and instead of answering, I held up my index finger and waved it, “No,” side to side, then walked off. Last time I was in NYC I let a guy start talking to me about my camera, and he tricked me into buying a shitty lens I’ve never used, and he even put a magic smell on my camera that led to it getting lost in a cab later that day.

I was still feeling quite high and went into a lunch counter to get a bottle of water. I took a vitamin C pill with the water, and the guy at the counter who’d been shadowboxing with the owner cocked his head and gave me a frown for taking a pill in his place.

Back outside I found the New York Public Library around 42nd St, and in there I found the map room, and on the shelf a book listing the maps, and there a listing for maps of, yes, Mars. They brought me more and more maps, all made from the Mariner scans, all colored pinky red. Amazing the difference between the old telescope maps and the Mariner maps, before all was gauzy, and with lots of line-like patterns, but now it’s precisely crackled canyons. There’s the big mountain Olympus, and then three peaks called Tharsis, and then a corner in a big rift called Labyrinth. This looks like a good place where I could set Freeware.

Looking at the last map of Mars, I could feel myself come down, felt a little jolt like my feet hitting the ground, it was a relief given that I still had my talk to give at 4 pm, and I felt a tinge of surprise at the activity that the pot-randomization had led me into: looking at maps of Mars in the New York library!

Outside, a string quartet was playing with amplification to fill Bryant Park, zillions of people there having their lunches. The whole block of 42nd Street by Broadway is closed up now, all the theatres and peepshows, boarded up, shuttered over. There’s some funky scary inhabitants of this ghostly reef. A tough white hooker woman with a face that was still a hint of beautiful, a scab on her ankle, getting money from a guy.

Eventually I got back to our room, showered, met up with Sylvia, and we headed over to Madison Avenue, where I gave my talk to the ten young Germans who’d won the Phillip Morris “Talk With Tomorrow” contest. A guy called Peter handed me a check for $3K right before the talk, I was really happy, as I’d been thinking it would be $2K. All the German kids had read my novel The Sex Sphere in German: Lafcadio und die Sexkugel. The paperback had been issued to them as part of their travel kits, which was something I didn’t realize until I was almost done talking, or I would have talked more about writing.

Instead I did a lot of computer demos of cellular automata and a-life, and talked about that stuff. It was probably a kind of disconnected talk, but entertaining enough. Some of the German kids were cute, there was an “Ärtztin” (woman doctor) named Anya who was nice to talk to. I told her I wished she was my doctor. She said she didn’t like to be doctor for her friends since she would not want her friends to be sick and therefore might not notice things really being wrong with them. And I liked the organizer guy, Ussi Orsch, an unbelievable German/Viking name—he reminded me of my Finnish poet friend Anselm Hollo.

Afterwards we hung out for some catered food and some wine. This was in a very elegant venue, by the way, a high-ceilinged 43rd floor penthouse, and you could go outside on a balcony and look down at the city, we were right next to the Chrysler building. After we’d had a few drinks, I pulled open a really big waist-level window.

The German organizers didn’t like the window action. “This is not good,” they said. I closed the window.

When I started getting too loaded, about 7 or 8, we left and went back to our room, and later I ran out and got some deli salad-bar food.

The next day, Thursday, it was sunny. Sylvia and I took the subway down to South Ferry in Battery Park and got the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. We’d never been on that little island, either of us, although as children, we’d passed close to it on ships. The harbor was beautiful today, a sunny day, and seeing all the different nationalities and ages swirling around the statue gave me a good, positive feeling about the U.S. as melting-pot.

We two sat on the lawn near the statue and ate half-sandwiches saved from our deli breakfast. Sylvia said, “It’s so nice to be on vacation.”

Afterwards we walked around Wall Street with its cool old buildings, and then got the bus uptown, regrouped, and went to the party my agent Susan Protter organized for me at her office that evening.

My New York friends Eddie Marritz, his wife Hana Machotka, fellow mathematician Newcomb Greenleaf, grad-school friend Dave Hungerford, and fellow SF writer Charles Platt were all there—it was great to see them. I also met Susan’s other SF writer client, Terry Bisson, a good guy, a bit country, from Owensboro, Kentucky, no less. My landsman. He broke out a pipe and offered me some pot.

Susan, Sylvia, Eddie, Platt and I had a dinner at Joe Allen’s on “Restaurant Row.” Eddie and I shared a jay walking over there. We all talked so much at dinner that it lasted three hours. It was great to see Ed.

Back at the room, I greedily went out for an extra six-pack, with street Puerto Ricans yelling insults at me: “Walk on the wild side, asshole.”

Friday I had a serious hangover. Sylvia noticed, she said I was like an animal in a cage, and, yes, that’s how I felt. Alcohol a growing problem.

We hit the Whitney Biennial show, which pretty much sucked. I picked up a tiny new Kerouac book of poems at a shop next door, the book published only in 1992, called Pomes All Sizes, and it was fun carrying that book around.

I walked the zillion blocks back to our room alone, stopping at a restaurant to eat a tuna pizza and have a beer, me and Jack K.—hanging with his poems, all on his usual themes.

• We all die.
• This world is a dream.
• I drink.

Sweet and sad, those first two points, and thinky to stop and try and see the no-mind moment Jack talks about. Too bad about the third one, though.

Passing through Times Square I saw a hooker with her pants down squatting on the street, pissing a big jet and then dropping a foul pile of orange shit. I’d been thinking of looking at some peep-shows but this “rather put me off it,” as the Brits would say.

Friday night we had dinner at no less a venue than the Côte Basque, with my Avon editor John Douglas our host, also Susan Protter there and John Douglas’s new girlfriend. I’d hoped to talk about my books with my agent and my editor, but this young woman had just sold a mystery novel, her first novel, and that was the topic for the four-and-a-half-hour long dinner. With my crapulous physiology plus my bitten-back resentment, the meal tasted bitter.

June 20, 1993. Gloucester. Grieving Greg.

Sunday we drove to Greg Gibson’s in a rental car, it was raining a lot of the way, kind of a drag to drive through ugly Connecticut. It was Father’s Day and I missed my kiddies a lot, even began morosely thinking, “Why are we doing such a long trip when we should be home with our Isabel who’s finally home from college. What am I doing driving around New England after five nights on the road and ten more to come?”

Now, writing this, it’s Monday morning, I’m at Greg’s, using my laptop in his office where he’s working on his computer, taking book orders and doing his job. He’s made his house bigger, and he put his office in the house.

When we got to Greg’s we started drinking. Greg made a great barbecue dinner, cooking on the traditional wire refrigerator shelf resting on two boulders in his yard. I go out and there’s a dog at the end of the yard watching things, and a bird in the tree singing.

Greg says, “That dog is my enemy and the bird is my friend, it’s a catbird, and whenever we come out here, it comments on what we’re doing.”

Later Greg’s daughter Celia said that the catbird was her dead brother Galen.

At dinner, like an idiot, I trotted out my old “So I told the kids, ‘Get the fucking chicken out of the fucking car,’” story yet again, and felt silly. I felt silly again trying to read a somewhat weak Kerouac poem from Pomes All Sizes, felt silly yelling to interrupt Greg from his telling a long story about business to his other friend Ferrini—I wanted to have all of Greg’s attention. I’m becoming a drunken old fool. But it was mellow in all. They are such a sweet family.

Getting attention is always an issue for me, having grown up as the youngest child. I felt that issue a lot when I last visited Pop—me trying to get his attention, and him maybe not remembering who I was. And of course that bitch Priscilla told me three or four times, “Your father doesn’t remember that you’re here to see him.” But when I’m writing I have all the attention.

Dear diary, it’s time for a beer and a V-8.

Typing that last sentence, I said it out loud, and Greg got a big joy-cackle off it. He has a generally high opinion of me as a writer, and he loves to contrast that with his intimate knowledge of my real-world frailties. He’s all, “The great man working on his journal: ‘Dear Diary…’”

Later in the day I told Greg, “I’m sorry I acted silly at dinner last night,” and he goes, “I was as drunk as you were! You’re worried about me?”

The next day we walked over to Galen’s grave with Greg’s wife Annemarie. The woods between their house and Galen are beautiful. Annemarie talked all the time. Her voice is lovely. In the woods was a rotten sofa, and she said, “That sofa used to be in our house. A boy was living with us, and he helped me move it out.” Galen’s gravestone is a chunk of raw stone a bit like a giant rough-cut banana. They picked it because it reminded them of him. Greg goes and waters the grave plot every evening.

June 23-25, 1993. Cape Cod. High with Eddie.

Wednesday, June 23. Sylvia and I met up with the Marritz family in Cape Cod. They go there every summer for a reunion—the whole gang was there, all eleven of them. The three brothers: Robert, 55, Don, 48, and Eddie, 43. Their three wives: Lucy, Harriet, and Hana. Plus Robert’s son, Sam, 4; and Don’s children Nick, 11, and Amelia, 8; and Eddie’s children, Ilya, 16, and Leda, 12. Don Marritz was our pal back at Swarthmore, and we got to be close friends with Eddie because he was at Rutgers while we were in grad school there. Both Don and Eddie often smoked pot with me.

I felt very wired and overexcited to see them all, especially Don, Eddie, Hana, and Harriet. Dinner was gay. Older brother Robert grilled tuna, Eddie made strong rum cocktails. After dinner I went biking with Leda, Amelia and Eddie to the candy store a block away, there in the Cape Cod boonies. I was worried about getting cigarette papers for smoking pot, and I asked the guy in the store for some, and he was like infuriated and told me to leave, what a joke, Puritan New England.

I said, “No, I’m waiting for these people.” And biked back, having fun doing cowboy-roping moves with Leda, like we were on horses.

If you can’t find rolling papers, the white wrapping paper around a fresh tampon works pretty well. Always a good ice-breaker with women. Or use a strip of a page from a Gideon bible.

Thursday, June 24. In the morning the Times had an article about Fermat’s last theorem being solved. What a day for mathematics!

In the afternoon, the Marritzes took us to a pond they knew, a small pond, and we swam out in it, dark blue like ink. Sylvia looked so happy swimming, wearing her bright new bathing-suit. The bathing suit and her face and her smile in the blue ink water—it was a moment I’ll always remember. She and I swam all the way across the big pond and back.

In the evening the Marritz boys and I got high and looked at the sun setting over the Cape Cod bay. The sun was sliding behind a, like, Fresnel lens zone that consists of the varying bands of refraction in the atmosphere. A Fresnel lens being one of those floppy flat plastic lenses can stick to a window. (But of course a Fresnel lens is only a linear approximation to the 3D spherical lens called the atmosphere—beneath which we small beating pairs of legs live.)`

Anyway, if you were to take a rectangular slice out of the top region of a floppy, flat, plastic Fresnel lens, and slide a disk of light behind it, you’d see the disk as having a perimeter that was stepped, or staircase-like, or zigguratted. And this was happening with the sunset.

The effect was that at first the right and left sides of the sun went flat, and the sun was drooling down to the horizon. It looked like the films I’ve seen of the early 1950s H-bomb tests over, like, the coral atoll of Bikini. And then the sun went through a corn-muffin stage—and then came the flying-saucer stages.

First it was a tureen-like mothership saucer, like the serving dome over a turkey on a salver. And then it flattened, and got into the funky, mean UFOs Against Planet Earth kind of shape.

And then I mentally pulled the sun loose from the horizon and I saw this bright thing as being over the Cape Cod bay, or even closer. It was steadily getting smaller, and now I imagined that it was speeding away.

Eddie was videoing the sun. He and Don and I were wasted, and I was talking into Eddie’s mike, dictating official documentation for our UFO sighting. “Spotted at Eastham, Massachusetts, on June 24, 1993, at 8:17 pm, a UFO moving in the westerly direction at high speed.”

Friday June 25, 1993. We’re still on vacation and learning to love it. Begin with the horseshoe crab shell that Leda found on the beach today. “Look, Rudy,” she yelled, holding it up to me.

I’m friends with Leda, she warmed up to me last night after playing with my Chaos program on my laptop. All the kids loved Chaos and CA Lab. People always like Boppers a bit less. Boppers requires too much explaining about why it’s cool.

Little Leda! I felt a kind of Lewis Carroll joy when she sought me out and clapped her hand on my head. I’ve always been fond of her mother Hana—from Eastern Europe, self-assured, feminist, motherly, and calling me “Roo.” Leda and Ilya have Eddie’s Mount-Rushmore-like George-C-Scott features, along with Hana’s crisp eyebrows, nostrils, and lip-lines.

And Don’s daughter Amelia, the smallest girl, gravitated to Sylvia, the tallest woman. I caught a look that Amelia gave Sylvia, so attentive and devoted and loving—what a cute pair they make.

Sylvia and I went out alone for most of the day. We walked out hundreds of yards on the low-tide Sunken Meadow Beach, then veered into Eastham, phoned Georgia, drove up to Wellfleet where we had some clams, oysters, and lobsters for lunch, then over to the Atlantic side of the cape to veg out in the sand, doing a bit of walking and swimming. When I dove in the deep clear water, it was so cold and clear that I felt like a frozen onion ring thrown into a vat of hot fat.

A beautiful vacation day. That night I dreamed I was at the opera, wearing a plastic lobster bib from the Captain Higgens restaurant in Wellfleet.

June 27-29, 1993. My Father in Reston.

Sunday the 27th was pretty much hell, as were the next few days. After a fond goodbye to the Marritzes, we drove from Cape Cod to Reston, Virginia, to see Pop.

The drive ended up taking eleven hours, from nine to eight. It was mild fun to see the old East coast sights. We started with a good sandwich from the Box Lunch in Eastham. Next food was a greasy Nathan’s hotdog on the Jersey Turnpike. By then we were really hot and dirty feeling, amid greasy air and lots of lumpy Jerseyites.

We saw the bridge over the Raritan from Highland Park to New Brunswick, where we used to wheel new baby Georgia in her electric blue velvet baby buggy. As always, I remembered the night of the riots in 1969 when I saw state troopers crouched with rifles aimed at the black housing projects there. New Brunswick also home of Fletcher and Harry in Master of Space and Time.

We stopped in Newark, Delaware, where we used to always get a Three-D Burger at the Howard Johnson’s, a sentimental stop, halfway between Highland Park and Alexandria/Reston, but the HoJo was closed down, and we lost an hour wandering around in the shocking heat and humidity. How do people stand to live out here? It’s really quite barbaric, compared to California.

Eventually we got to Reston, and the Cameron Glen Nursing Home, and there in the lobby was my father’s partner Priscilla. She didn’t smile to see us or even change expression, just led us towards his room, opened the door, then turned back and told us we couldn’t go in. Vintage Priscilla. We went in anyway, and there was Pop, looking cute and pink. His mind is better than it was when I saw him in the hospital, though still not really all there.

By the time we found our hotel I was unbelievably exhausted. The next day, Monday, I spent most of the morning alone with Pop. His memory is shot. Quite often he was surprisingly hostile and unpleasant to me.

I flashed back to 1974, when Pop was drinking a lot. Sylvia was pregnant, and Pop suggested that I be castrated or sterilized. He was like, “Pregnant again? A third child? I think we ought to take Rudy out and get him fixed.”

Maybe Embry and I should sneak into Pop’s room one night and nut the old gaffer, is what I thought at the time.

Pop still sort of has it in for me, it’s that old father/son battle. But by now time has won the war for me. It’s been years now that I’ve been going to see him on his alleged deathbed in the hospital. He started with the heart trouble around 1972. It’s twenty year’s worth.

I brought up how he’d once again been claiming he was going to die, this was three weeks ago. I hadn’t fallen for it and hadn’t come out. He got furious.

“I will never do that again,” he says.

“I’ve heard that before,” I said.

It was fun to be able to get a rise out of him. The happy slapping together, like two Sumo wrestlers—smack! Engaged in the old struggle. My son Rudy and I are like that also—very fast on the uptake if it’s a question of something wrong that the other one is doing.

Pop got really into lecturing me about my drinking. He kept saying he smelled liquor on my breath, even when I hadn’t had a drink. When I got annoyed, he cried, “Oh, do you think you can burn it out with rage? It’s still there.” Of course there is something to what he says, I know, I know, and after this long, wild trip I am indeed due to quit drinking for a spell.

Tuesday morning I spent mostly alone with Pop again. He was enjoying my jokes and we were on the same wavelength. Next door to him was a woman whose legs had been amputated. Every twenty to forty seconds she would bellow “Help me,” or, “Lord, help me.” But such an uncontrolled, holding-nothing-back, hollering. I wanted to kill her.

“I wish she would die,” I told Pop.

“She probably wishes she would too,” he said, taking the high road.

To get away from the noise we started off for a walk outside. But the room between the hall and the outside was full of this group of about forty shrunken white-haired eighty-to-ninety-year-olds who kept appearing there like mushrooms popping up after a rain. To me, they were sort of cute. Some of them on the nod in their seats, with no teeth upper or lower, they’d be all leaned back, with the mouth a big hole over the bump of the chin.

Pop didn’t want to mingle with them, didn’t want to run the gauntlet. So we settled down in the hallway instead of going through the room of ninety-year-old mushrooms. Sat in front of an aquarium and looked at the fish. Pop could see the fish even though he has what they call cortical blindness.

An administrator woman walked past us after awhile, humming, and Pop was all, “What was that?” He’d thought she was an animal. A moving trail of a living thing, like the fish trails in the fish tank. I was into that trippy spacetime image myself, it was good to share.

Then I opened the cabinet under the fish tank and there was a transparent filter full of orange chips for water to run over and get aerated. Pop just saw the square shininess of the filter. It freaked him out, like he thought it was the emptiness pump behind reality.

His cortical blindness means that he sees color patches but has trouble fitting them together into a 3D mental model. And there are other disturbances. Like we were both reading the paper for awhile, I don’t think he was really reading, just enjoying the activity of turning the pages and scanning, and he says, “How’d they get that mirror there? Or what?” And he’s looking at the editorial page of the Post, nothing there but type, and he points to one spot, asking in a worried voice, “What’s that? Right there?” A very Phil Dickian moment.

“It’s just newsprint, Pop. It’s that you have a vision problem.” And he looked so sad to hear that. Often he looked like he was about to cry. He feels sorry for himself and depressed.

Other times, though, he’d kind of swell up and say, “I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time,” with his old resonant booming confidence, just like when he’d hit a good golf shot or tennis stroke or make a good fishing cast he’d always say to me, “I’ve got the secret now, Rudy, I’ve got the knack.” Today he was even saying, “I just thought of the secret of how to heal myself…I had it, but now I can’t remember it.” He’s so transparent and touching.

Before we left, I shelled out $180 for a TV for Pop that Priscilla said he wanted, even though when I asked him myself he said he’d gotten terminally sick of TV long ago. Really the TV is for Priscilla to look at in Pop’s room. I regard her as an unbelievably stupid woman. Totally without empathy, at least for me. She always is trying to replace Pop’s old real biological family with the Reston groupings. My wicked stepmother. I hate her.

Pop has gotten some better, but he probably won’t get well enough to leave the nursing home. He might be there for a long time. It’s sad, and he’s often sad about it. It’s like with Mom, a sad problem that never will get better, and finally the person dies, and that’s the only solution. I hope I don’t end up like Pop. He kept saying how slowly the time goes in his rest home. It’s terrifying and pathetic.

July 7, 1993. Shark’s Tooth Beach.

So now we’ve been back for a week. I really like it in California. I had a chuckle being high and seeing a neighbor lady friend of ours down by the mailboxes and saying, “We were just on a trip to the East. It’s so nice to be back here in a civilized…a civilized environment.”

She’s all politely, Californially: “?”

And I’m all, “Yes, it’s so primitive there, so barbaric.”

Sylvia and I went to a wild beach north of Santa Cruz, just south of Davenport on the Fourth. It was awesome, a little fractal crack with a tunnel through the rock that we sat on the windless end of, in front of a wild sea, split by a humongous rock pyramid. The “Shark’s Tooth.”

You wade into superexcited superchaotic foam with torn up kelp in it, and the ocean isn’t coming in idealized slightly asymmetric sine waves, naw, it’s punching at you through cubic-Mandelbrot tooth-root giant crumbly California rocks.

A battered full can of Keystone beer appeared at my feet as I waded in. “Who am I to refuse Nature’s bounty?” I said, opening it and taking a salty sip or two, but then deciding to pour it out.

Diving under the giant waves to not be thrown against the cliffs I got a whole-head ice-cream headache and had to put my hands on my skull to warm it enough to recover. But god it felt good, frolicking like a seal, lunging into the waves. I could have swum out around the big rock, the Tooth, but I didn’t dare to do that alone. Maybe later this summer we can go back and one of the kids will do it with me.

July 22, 1993. Artificial Life Lab. Mavrides.

Thursday. Slack reigns. On Monday I drove up to Corte Madera just north of Sausalito and handed in the completed Artificial Life Lab to the Waite Group, the computer program and the formatted, illustrated manual.

I got lost on the way up—I always do, since I always stop and have a sandwich at the same Louie’s Deli I always went to when I was at Autodesk, and then I miss the turn for Corte Madera. But when I got lost today, I didn’t even start sweating and worrying like I normally do. There was no concept of being late. All I had to do was show up and hand the printout and six floppy disks to my production contact guy at Waite. I did this software package all by myself. And it’s all done and I got paid and I have enough money to live on for the rest of the summer and to pay the college tuitions. Slack reigns. Sigh.

Monday I visited Mavrides and ended up buying his black velvet painting of cockroaches for $1,299, including sales tax, a big issue for him, the sales tax, as he’s hassling with the courts over not having collected it for art sales in the past. Named Victors, the picture was depicted in the Mondo 2000 issue #10 interview that I did with him. And I was thinking, this picture’s in a magazine, it’s definitely established and a safe thing to buy.

And then the next day I was uneasy about paying so much, and I was flashing that I was the one who got that picture into Mondo in the first place, it’s not like some objective official art authority came and blessed the man’s work. But it’s all part of the greater scam, of course. And the picture does look good to me. The background is purple and green, and the roaches are gold and black. In a way, the background is like a screen from my CA Lab program, and the roaches are from Artificial Life Lab. Life imitates art imitating life.

Wednesday I went into SJSU, which was not quite so slackful, but there has to be a way to make it be so. Everyone there wants to give me slack, is the thing. I only have to let it into my soul.

Today on the way to the supermarket I had a lot of time, so I stopped in and had a beer at the Los Gatos Brewing Company. And I thought “I’m getting slack.” And I was looking around the room, trying to understand “What is slack?” in the same way I used to try to understand the Zen “What is samadhi?” or the Buddhist “What is enlightenment?” or the Beat “What is reality?”

And now I’m done typing this and I’m going to slack off and read a Neat Stuff Peter Bagge comic that I found in Rudy’s room.

Artificial Life in Japan

August 8, 1993. Hello Kitty. Billy Idol.

A Japanese public relations company called Humanmedia arranged for me to come to Japan for a series of appearances that they’d scheduled—lectures, magazine interviews, and book-store signings, all of them for pay. This was, in other words, a commercial tour, and Humanmedia gave me some of the money they took in, also the plane tickets and lodging for me. Sylvia and daughter Isabel, now eighteen, came along. I was pretty heavily scheduled, but we had a certain amount of free time.

In Tokyo, my Autodesk program CA Lab was part of an art show called “A-Life World” at the Tokyo International Arts Museum. CA Lab was nicely installed on ten color laptops resting on a line of music stands, each laptop running a different cellular automaton rule. Some of the rules showed organic pulsing scrolls, some showed tiny scuttling gliders, some showed slowly boiling colors. It was great to see it there.

The museum was out in a suburban part of Tokyo, and before my talk, I had an hour to kill. I was alone. Right past the museum was a giant building the size of a baseball stadium, only sealed up, and with fanciful towers on it.

“That’s Sanrio Puroland,” our translator Yoko had explained to me. “They are the makers of Hello Kitty. It’s a place for children. Like Disneyland.”

Hello Kitty is the groovy little mouthless cat that you see drawn on so many Japanese children’s knapsacks and stationary. In recent years she’s gotten pretty popular in the U.S. as well. She’s so kawai (Japanese for “cute”). The strange thing is that, as far as I could find out, there are no Hello Kitty cartoons or comic books. Hello Kitty is simply an icon, like a Smiley face.

Outside the Sanrio Puroland, I was drawn by the crowd’s excitement and I couldn’t stop myself from going in, even though it cost the equivalent of thirty dollars. But I knew it was my journalistic duty to investigate.

Inside the huge sealed building it smelled like the bodies of thousands of people—worse, it smelled like diapers. Lots of toddlers. I was the only Westerner. The guards waved me forward, and I went into a huge dark hall.

There was amplified music, unbelievably loud, playing saccharine disco-type tunes, with many words in English. “Party in Puroland, Everybody Party!” Down on the floor below were people in costumes marching around and around in the circle of an endless parade. One of them was dressed like Hello Kitty. I couldn’t pause to look at first, as young guards in white gloves kept waving me on. I wound up and down flight after flight of undulating stairs, with all the guardrails lined by parents holding young children.

Finally I found a stopping place down near the floor. In the middle of the floor was a central structure like a giant redwood, bedizened with lights, smoke machines, and mechanical bubble blowers. The colored lights glistened on the bubbles in the thick air as the disco roared. “Party in Puroland!” Hello Kitty was twenty feet from me, and next to her was a girl in gold bathing suit and cape, smiling and dancing. But—if this was like Disneyland, where were the rides?

I stumbled off down an empty hall that led away from the spectacle. Behind glass cases were sculptures of laughing trees making candy. And here I found a cluster of candy stores, and stores selling Hello Kitty products. No rides. Just parades and dioramas and crap to buy.

I made it back out into the fresh air and walked back to the “A-Life World” show. After the stench and noise and visual assault of Puroland, I couldn’t look at the weird A-Life videos anymore. But the realtime computer simulations were still okay. They were really alive—they had their gnarl and sex and death.

The night before our trip onward to Osaka and Kyoto, my handlers—Mr. Arima, Mr. Onuchi, and Mr. Takahashi—they got drunk in a Roppongi restaurant while treating us to a great dinner. These were the guys from Humanmedia organizing my gigs.

Mr. Arima delivers one of his rare English sentences, “Mr. Onuchi is a heavy drinker.”

Mr. Onuchi snaps, “I don’t think so,” and a minute later knocks the sake bottle off the table.

Mr. Arima’s hair is wavy from a perm, and there are white cat hairs on his green suit. Sometimes he wears gray pants with white lines on them. When you talk to him, his lips purse out, and if he smiles, one dancing front tooth is at an angle. His oval-lensed wire glasses slide down on his nose.

The dinner featured a soup called frofuki daikon, or steambath radish.

After dinner, we walked around. This is the hippie part of town, the only place you see Westerners. On a big video screen over the street I see the music video of Billy Idol performing his song “Cyberpunk.” In front of us, men in white gloves are digging a ditch and putting up little flashing lights. Billy’s chest bursts open and shows wires. The men in white gloves gesture, waving on the passersby. Everything is in synch.

I’m living inside my novels.

August 9, 1993. Shape Culture in Osaka.

So the next gig was in Osaka, home of my then-favorite band Shonen Knife, not that we saw them. Once a Mondo 2000 interviewer asked Shonen Knife if they were like Hello Kitty, and the answer was:

“No, Hello Kitty has no mouth. We have big mouth. Shonen Knife is loud.”

I used my color laptop at all five Japanese demos that I gave, showing up with my axe and plugging in to whatever kind of display amp they had.

At the Shape Culture demo there was a nice big projection screen, but it was keyed to work off a computer in a back room, and when I wanted to change my images, I had to leave the dais and go into the back room, still talking over my remote mike.

A number of the people at the Osaka lecture for the Society of Shape Culture turned out to be fourth-dimension buffs. Also they wanted to know what shape I was hoping to see when I programmed my flocking boids for the Boppers program.

“Gnarl,” I told them, adding an explanation of this word’s status in my personal lexicon. They loved it. The perfect audience. As I talked, my boids left intertwined three-dimensional ribbon trails, sometimes forming crooked double helixes.

Two translators of my books were there. After my talk, we all sat around a table made of five pushed-together tables and drank beer and ate sushi that they brought. There was a Buddhist monk yelling about the fourth dimension and showing off his wire models of some polytope. Nobody could understand him. So great. Another guy was an origami master. Another was a maker of paper hyperspace models. Many of them interested in mysticism.

A heavy student with thick glasses says, “I am a graduate student and have not discovered anything yet.” He smiles and rubs his hands as vigorously as if he were washing them. “But I want to!”

It was a wonderful get-together, a magical afternoon. Society of Shape Culture! What a concept.

August 10, 1993. Dinner in Kyoto.

The first day in Kyoto, I’m awake early from jetlag, reading guidebooks, getting frantic to get out and see something, to have the gibberish words of the travel guide converge on a reality. Sylvia and I finally hit the street and see some temples. Running out of time, I bought some food in the street and took it back to the hotel room. Chopped cabbage, an egg, and a thick purple cephalopod tentacle.

I did bookstore signings in Tokyo and Kyoto—it was totally unlike America. The bookstores paid me, and I was mobbed by eager crowds, signing hundreds of my books. The Japanese see me as this incredibly happening phenomenon—this is thanks to my Japanese publisher Hayakawa bringing out all eight of my novels in rapid succession. I autographed translations of every book I ever wrote. One big hoss of a Japanese hacker gal even brought in her Mac ROM chip, plus her computer hard drive, and I signed both with a flowing-metallic-ink marker of hers.

The evening of the first day in Kyoto we had the best dinner of all. It was raining due to what the papers call, “Typhoon Number Seven.” On the way to the dinner, we saw a haiku-like scene out the taxi window:

Kyoto. Green kimono.

She walks on clogs

In typhoon rain.

We used new-bought umbrellas to wind down the back streets to the restaurant which is known to our host Mr. Mouri from his having gone to University in Kyoto. A plumpish juicy woman in a brilliant blue kimono serves our dinner in a private room. She comes in to the room and kneels right away, like in a porno video, only this isn’t porno, she’s the dignified, immaculate wife of the owner/chef.

She has a mole on her face somewhere. Her lipstick is fresh and bright red. She smiles and speaks to us in English. She’s proud of the room we’re eating in, her husband the cook is also a carpenter, he built this room, the fresh wood scents the air like incense. On one wall is paper printed in clouds from a sixteenth-century wood-block.

Mr. Arima and Mr. Mouri order hot and cold sake, plus an endless stream of big Sapporo beers. The cold sake comes in beautiful glass bottles that are shaped like two spherical bulbs, the top one smaller than the bottom one. The glass bottles sit in chipped ice and have vines around them. The hot sake is in raku pottery pitchers. You always have to pour for other people instead of taking for yourself. Isabel keeps Mr. Arima’s glass full and starts giggling.

The food is amazing, insane, extraterrestrial.

Mr. Arima eventually leaves to go to the bathroom and I whisper to Isabel that Arima will come back into our shoeless tatami dinner room wearing the toilet-slippers with two meters of toilet paper trailing from the heel. (The thing was, you had to take off your shoes before going into a restaurant, so they had clogs to wear inside the bathroom. Isabel and I had a running joke about how gauche it would be to wear them back to the table.)

August 11, 1993. Fever Powerful.

Outside our hotel in Kyoto is a Pachinko parlor designed like a classic Greek temple, the archetypal house shape: a nearly cubical box with a single peaked roof. It’s all glass, and the roof is broken into squares with colored lights that march across in patterns.

One of the Pachinko games has a little video screen that shows a girl who eats a fruit and gets big and strong and then the words Fever Powerful appear across her. That’s the name of the machine and of its girl character. On the top of the machine is a picture of Fever Powerful on her back, arching her pelvis up, with her boobs sticking out, she looks like she’s fucking. One night after yakatori and soba under a tent in front of the train-station, Sylvia, Isabel and I play the machines, me yelling and hooting, “All right! Fever Powerful.” Our neighbor players look at us with disapproval. This is how it feels to be a noisy person of the wrong race.

August 13, 1993. Zen rock garden.

A real high point in Kyoto was when we three visited the most famous Zen rock garden of all, Ryoanji, raked gravel with fifteen rocks grouped something like:

=========

2 2

5 3

=========

Isabel saw an ant on the edge near us, then I saw a dragon-fly landing on the right end, and then later, alone, I saw a skinny Japanese lizard crawl under the biggest rock of the 5 group. The world’s most enlightened lizard.

To put my head into the head of that lizard—this is a durable enlightenment trick that the rock garden has now given me, this is something that I am bringing home with me to mix into my visions, a life as the skinny lizard under the Zen-garden rock. There seemed to be quite a space under the big rock, it looked like a lizard-sized cave, plenty of room.

The rock garden was up against a wood building, an empty Zen temple with three empty rooms with tatami mats on the floor and faded ancient Zen landscape paintings on paper leaning no big deal against the walls. Around the corner from the rock garden was some moss with diverse mushrooms under trees, around the next corner was more moss and bamboo and a fountain trickling through a bamboo pipe into a round stone with a square hole in the middle.

The four Japanese characters on the fountain said “I only learn to be contented.” Sylvia liked the fountain best, and bought a little metal coin with those characters.

Getting up from looking at the rock garden for the third time I had a line of sight through the plain wood temple to see Sylvia stepping barefoot down to the fountain and washing her hands, and then stepping up onto the old rubbed wood temple floor. She was moving in such a perfectly Zen and perfectly characteristic way, I was struck by the cuteness and wonder of her motion.

Yes, I’m stepping up from the fountain onto the smooth wood deck. This is me! Me the exclamation-point, me the same ye.

The garden has been there for maybe six hundred years. People only started noticing it in the 1930s. The clay walls around the garden have a messy fucked up pattern, with one piece of wall quite different from the others. I think the Japanese like asymmetry.

After the rock garden, Sylvia, Isabel and I had lunch in a Zen teahouse near the rock garden, two Zen monks there also eating, big Japanese guys with burr haircuts and gray robes. The lunch was a pot of warm water with slabs of tofu, and strainers to fish your slabs out to put in a little pot that you pour soy sauce into. Some veggies on the side: a few beans, a piece of eggplant, a pickled pepper. We sat on cushions on the tatami mat floor beside a slid-open paper door. Outside the door was a little pondlet with miniature trees and big carp in the pond. One of the carp jumped halfway out of the water.

“That was a haiku,” I say to Isabel.

“Yes!” says Isabel. “That right there happening was a haiku!” We all felt very happy and high.

Then we had to rush to get a cab to be at a 3:00 tour of the Katsura villa garden across town. Earlier in the morning I’d signed us up for this. As I rushed anxiously down the path—what a loser—a branch stabbed at my eye but deflected off my lens. Stupid to rush out of Zen.

I’d already been worrying about the upcoming rush to Katsura before, and when Isabel had said something like, “Doesn’t your mind feel open and excited,” with us looking at moss under trees, I’d said, “All I see is a clock that reads ten of three.”

Oh well! The Katsura villa tour featured a pond with rocks and a bunch of little tiny teahouses like arbors situated around the pond. But I’m so into rushing when I get there that after about one second, Isabel and I are out ahead of the tour, which is being delivered in Japanese over one of the small handheld battery-powered bullhorns that they love here. And I’m sweating.

To rebel a little, I start thinking about Beavis and Butthead and I mention it to Isabel, the haiku of Beavis, “Yesterday we killed a frog hnnh hnnh / It was cool hnnh hnnnh / He won’t croak again.”

And then at the third tea house I’m like, “Is this the bong house? Hnnh hnnh hnnnh. Bongs are cool.”

August 14, 1993. Tense at Toshiba.

After Kyoto we take the train back to Tokyo. Out the window we can see Mount Fuji with its classic volcano curve.

My first gig back in Tokyo is a talk at Toshiba. Megacorp. Driving me to the talk, the cab driver cuts through what seems to be a footpath underpass. How can we fit? I was the only white person in sight, and I had a sudden paranoid flash of terrorists jumping out in the incredible traffic and killing me with a machine-gun. I could imagine the shattering glass and the flame from the submachine-gun as it tore through my cab window. All through my first book signing, I also kept waiting to get shot. Utterly alienated in an alien world.

In Toshiba we switch elevators several times to reach the top floor, and I’m repeatedly handed off to higher-ranking officers. I give my talk, and at the end, they aren’t happy. I’d teased them a little about the functional impossibility of actually making a VHS recording of a TV show on a Toshiba machine—I’d said one should initially randomize the settings and use artificial-life techniques to try and evolve towards a setting that worked. And I’d said they should be showing cellular automata on the giant display screens ringing the top of the Toshiba building here.

The Q&A segment was tense. One man complained that I hadn’t said enough about how to improve the market for Japanese technology. Another was angry about the whole idea of artificial life. I answered the hostile, uncomprehending questions in harsher and harsher tones, remembering my grad-school mentor Gaisi Takeuti, and the mean way he’d talk to shut up someone wrong. I explained that chaos means there are attractors that things will organize onto no matter what you do, so why not churn the salaryman hierarchy according to a chaotic a-life algorithm. Interesting and effective structures will repeatedly emerge?

I remember at Autodesk, showing a middle-manager a variation on my Boppers ants program that generated patterns that looked like organization charts and he was really interested, he thought it was real.

After the talk, I sit with Arima and Onouchi in a coffee shop under the Toshiba building, seeing a bullet train go by on an elevated track outside, feeling like I’m really in the heart of the Japanese computer culture. I tell this to Mr. Onouchi, but he says, “We do not have computer culture. The computer is a tool for our electronics.” Then he shows me the next three things on the long list of my engagements.

The next talk was in an art gallery at night. They’d advertised the event as “A Beer Bust with Rudy Rucker,” and they had tubs of ice with cans of Budweiser and Miller beer. I stayed away from the beer, no way did I want to be their clown. Chatting with the guests, I asked an American expat how he’d learned Japanese.

“The hard way. I ran out of money. It was like doing a crossword puzzle the size of Manhattan.”

August 15, 1993. Society for Artificial Life

The sweetest interview was by two women from a skin-magazine called Brutus—two attractive women who kept raving about how cool and gentle and religious and wonderful I was. Laying it on thick. They said they’d been scared to meet me after the crazy books—they were all reading The Sex Sphere this year—and they asked about the two dichotomies of Rudy that everyone who knows me notices.

• How can you be a romantic literary novelist and also be a mathematician and computer hacker?
• How can you be a crazed beatnik hippie radical stoner and also be a devoted husband and kind father with a stable family?

In answer, I said that yes, these dichotomies are familiar to me, and I’m glad that I can maintain them. When I was starting out in the Sixties, I thought lots of people would be doing the same thing.

I gave a talk to the Japanese Society for Artificial Life, and then hung out with them in a restaurant. They understood about Software being about artificial life, and they understood that the reason I do artificial life is because it’s art. One guy said, “I’m surprised that Hayakawa presents Software and Wetware as being humorous books. Many of us think that they are among the most important books of the century.” So nice to hear this kind of thing. I’m drinking it in.

My last interview is my hotel room. The guy says, “What is your dream?”

And I was tired, and I had a fever, and this was the last question I’d have to answer in Japan, so I say, “My dream is that this interview will end.”

And then he’s like, “No, come on.”

And I say, “My dream is that I would be a great writer.”

And he says, “You already are.”

So, yeah, maybe I’ve made it after all. I can relax now, right?

On the last night, Sylvia, Isabel and I take an elevator to the top floor of a hotel to see the Bon festival fireworks over the river. The white rays of explosion go out in a symmetry I recognize as that of a dodecahedron. The Japanese Society for Artificial Life guys handed me so much cash that we splurge on a dinner in the fancy hotel’s restaurant.

It costs over three hundred dollars for a kaiseki banquet for the three of us—with enough food in all to fill the palm of your hand. The big thing about kaiseki, according to the guidebook, is that you get to eat out of beautiful dishes. The dishes were indeed beautiful. The lukewarm raw egg soup, for instance, came on a tray with a trellis with a morning-glory flower carved out of daikon. The two nuggets of cooked fish that were the main course were very good.

When we go downstairs, I tell Isabel I want to run into the Japanese McDonald’s on the street there and get a hamburger.

On the last morning, through a hotel door I hear the sound of a woman’s voice in sexual ecstasy. “Hai, hai, hai, hai!” Hai means yes. In the breakfast room, all the couples look like high-school students.

We make one last shopping run to the Ginza. In the basement of the Tokyo department store, a plump girl leans over her soba noodle soup. A single noodle dangles from her lips, swaying as she sucks it in.

Everywhere we hear what Sylvia calls good-doll voices, the breathless childlike voices of the Japanese advice women. The best good dolls run the elevators in person in the department stores. Their motions are a beautiful dance. With their white gloves, they make virtual moves of pulling the doors open.

We’re tired of the voices of the good dolls, but even in our last bus to the airport to leave Japan there’s a good doll voice. It’s like in the movie Alien when Sigourney Weaver escapes into a lifeboat ship…and there’s an alien in it with her.

August 15, 1993. The JAL warning film.

When we near the shores of Californee, the Japan Airlines staff show us a short film about AIDS and a long film about drugs. Close shot on an apple. A big-ass syringe injects narcotics into the apple. Close on a Japanese girl lying on her stomach on a towel at the beach. A hand moves into frame holding the apple. English translation of the voiceover: “They may ask you if you want to have fun or if you want to have a good time. They will not mention drugs. They will offer you something that looks harmless, but it is drugs.”

When I got my car at the airport it looked wonderful.

“I’m Rudy’s,” it said so I could hear it. “I’m Rudy’s car. The old red Acura.”

“It’s you?” I said. “Thank you, my dear faithful hound. Thank you for having continued to exist. We have been in Asia for very long.”

“Get in and drive me home,” said the car. “And next week you and me are going to start commuting to work.”

Back on the Assembly Line

September 17, 1993. Teaching Again.

I’m back teaching at SJSU. When the classes go well, it makes me feel good, but often the classes don’t go so well, and it’s stressful, I wish I was peacefully at home working on my own things. When people ask what it’s like to be teaching, I say, “It’s a cross between being in the Peace Corps and being a janitor.” Doing good for immigrants, and getting little respect in a dingy building.

I’m back to that vision I had at the faculty Thanksgiving potluck last fall, of being a screaming kicking rabbit in a trap going wheenk wheenk wheenk—I get this feeling when I think about student evaluations, filling out my dossier, jockeying to keep the courses I like, trying to get tenure—I’m, like, kicking desperately against the snaring wires around me.

Ah, the slaving meatwheel of a job, it makes the time so wooden, like big wooden gears in a splintery cheap hand-carved cuckoo clock, and instead of a cuckoo, it’s a trapped rabbit that sticks out of the little door. His back end is nailed in place, and he sticks out and, uh…

“What does he say, gang?”

“Wheenk, wheenk!”

I’m down today, as I said goodbye to Isabel this morning. The others are driving her up to Oregon to start her sophomore year. I’m home alone, and what I’ll do this weekend is up for grabs, though I fear the worst.

It’s sad to see our third child leave the nest again. She’s been home for summer vacation for so long that I’d forgotten how it is it to have her gone.

Cleaning out one of Rudy’s bookcases full of hopeful high-school books and papers yesterday, I said to myself, “There’s too much time, too many memories, it’s just too much, and we’re still just getting started.”

“Oh no, we’re almost done,” came the answer.

September 23, 1993. Hangover.

Looking at the old journal is always reassuring. Nothing much really changes with me. Recently I was reading an article by Martin Amis about his alcoholic writer father Kingsley Amis, and Martin said something like “For my father’s generation, there wasn’t the idea that a person should improve or change themselves. You were what you were, and you lived with it.” Excuse #78 for not getting into recovery.

Today is Thursday. Sunday was about the worst hangover of my life, and going in to teach Monday wasn’t much better. When I don’t know what I’m talking about in front of a class I start to sweat/ I can feel my hair get all wet, and then the collar of my shirt gets wet too. It didn’t help to be in the second day of a two day hangover. But Tuesday I prepared some lectures, and Wednesday the classes were okay. I’m still unused to the teaching rhythm of lecturing three times a week to the same groups of people. Like I’m used to showing up once and giving one good lecture and then leaving town. Not facing the dailiness of life.

Today I’m working on the copy edits to The Hacker and the Ants. And my natural optimism is back. After a binge it’s hard to wait through the several days it takes for the transmitter chemicals to recombine, but it always works. Time, fuckin’ time.

October 1, 1993. Getting into Teaching.

Tonight we saw Dazed and Confused, it’s a new American Graffiti, equally great, although I’m guessing that many people my age will hate it. Not quite seriously, Sylvia said the director should be shot.

I’m starting to enjoy teaching, as now each course becomes a canvas on which to create programs. And there’s a lot of good karma from hanging around with the students. I like helping them.

I feel more abraded or rubbed off, like a rock that rolls in the surf and becomes rounded to (as David Hilbert claims in Geometry and the Imagination) an ellipse in all three projections. Though actually it would only abrade that way if it started out with the symmetry of a brick, as Hilbert also says. I never did have the symmetry of a brick, more the symmetry of a gnarly tree stump. But I’m being abraded and scoured for sure, even if I won’t end up an ellipsoid.

I spend a shockingly large amount of time thinking about my courses. Like it’s not bad enough that I teach them, I keep thinking about them as well?

October 14, 1993. Job Slavery.

Wheenk, wheenk. Today the chairwoman told me that I’m not eligible for tenure after all this year. Somebody miscounted, and I won’t really be eligible till next year. God, they got me again. I was really starting to long for and sniff for that old carrot again. How many times has tenure been whisked away from me by now?

I just spent the afternoon grading some fucking tests about gibberish, written tests they have to pass to get a Master’s degree. I don’t like that academic style of computer science at all. I can’t visualize doing this kind of work year after year after year. I miss having my brain to myself, to use for my own idle freelance purposes. This week I’m going to collect 90 programs and 90 tests to grade.

I’ve been hacking like crazy on a 1D Cellular Automata program and an object-oriented paint program I’m using as sample programs for two of my courses. I’m glad to be learning how to do this and, yes, if it weren’t for teaching it I wouldn’t be doing it. But…

I think I’ve mentioned that I keep my stash of good pot under a rock in an old caviar can up on St. Joseph’s Hill so that I don’t smoke it up too fast. I haven’t been up to visit the stash in awhile. But I did score some lite homegrown from my neighbor “Dirk Blanda” on I think Saturday and I used it up on Tuesday, and I woke up Wednesday so glad to have none in the house, and so determined to stay straight. When I get high, I usually wake up in the middle of the night in a state of suicidal depression. It’s nice to not want to die. A shade boring, but nice.

Well, I might go for a big bike-ride this weekend, and I might just happen to cycle by my special spot. Even though I know what a trap that is. I’ll have my day of wild intoxication, and the next day is shot, and then it’s fucking Monday and time to start all over again.

December 31, 1993. L.G. Coffee Roasting Sketch.

Here I am in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe, still off pot, 23 days, how fab.

I’ll sketch what’s around me. Unbelievably bad music. A possibly imbecilic woman talking very loud to a glib blonde with greasy hair. I guess she’s not really mentally impaired, just a slob. And now she’s talking to more and more people. About what she laaahks and doesn’t laaahk. Great twistings of her face in disgust, she’s nodding her head, pushing her lips out, squinting her eyes and twisting her mouth at the same time, always staring at the person she is talking to. She has a sleeping baby in a stroller. By way of emphasizing a point, she pauses with slack jaw to do “slow burn.”

I’m still wanting to write Freeware. Just forget about setting it on Mars, that makes it too hard. Like I was saying, the theme I want to write about is spiritual longing. Perhaps the boppers have spiritual longing too. Why do they do things? Why does anyone do anything? I’d like for the boppers not to be robots anymore. Something new.

Lisbon Stars

January 5, 1994. From D.C. to Lisbon.

No clear idea of what day of the week it is, I’m still in the holiday “broken clock all gone” mode of vacation. Times like this I can see it really pays off to be an academic. I don’t have to go back to work for almost three more weeks.

I had a wonderful time in Miami with the families, I did nothing to cringe over or regret, I was at no time out of control. From time to time I was sick of being in control of myself, but then I’d do something else or sleep and it would be nice not to wake up full of self-loathing. This way, Miami is not a nightmare memory to cringe over and regret for the rest of my life, like so many of my big occasions recently, e.g., the World Science Fiction Con in San Francisco this fall, or the A-life 3 Con in Santa Fe, or the Hackers Con up at Lake Tahoe. I tend to mistake these events for parties. I lose control of my drinking, and I make a bad impression on all the people I’d most like to impress. Very self-destructive.

I’m on my way to Portugal, to be filmed by a guy who got a grant from the City of Lisbon to make a movie about Lisbon. Edgar Pêra. The negotiations were all with his producer, Catarina. Edgar has read some of my books in Portuguese or maybe in English, and he decided to have me be in his movie, also Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna. You’d think Edgar is a druggie, judging from his taste in literature, but you never know with Europeans.

Catarina wrote me to ask me my sizes for costumes. The movie may be fictional rather than the expected documentary, I don’t know. She called again just before I left, and I asked her what the costumes were, and she didn’t want to tell me. “It’s better if it’s a surprise.” So the theory I’ve been promulgating to my friends and family is that I’m going to Portugal to be filmed dressed as a giant chicken doing “npak.”

Npak is a Georgia-invented acronym for Nose, Pivot, Arfie Kick, pronounced EN-pack. The origin of this was a hand-drawn three-frame broadside poster that she put on our fridge in about 1981 in Lynchburg, when she was twelve:

NPAK

HOW TO SHOW PEOPLE YOU’RE WAY,

WAY TOO GOOD FOR ’EM.

1) Nose. Point your nose in the air.

2) Pivot. Turn on your heel.

3) Arfie Kick. Scrape your feet backwards,

one at a time, to toss back dirt.

Our dog Arfie has been npakking like crazy recently, I think it releases musk from glands by his dewlaps. After watching Arfie, I’m really ready to npak. If Edgar and Catarina ask me to improvise that’s what I can do.

And I’ll be, like “Do you have a chicken costume I can wear?” I visualize my face showing inside the huge, open beak. Foghorn Leghorn. A wobbling featherduster on my padded fanny, or possibly with its handle stuck up my ass.

But, hey, they’re paying me all expenses plus a few thousand extra.

I’m in Reston, Virginia right now, I started from San Francisco two days early so I could spend two days here visiting Pop. I’ve stopped hardening my heart against him, and let him back into it, and it feels so much better.

January 7, 1994. Visit with Pop, Nursing Home.

So now I’m through with my 48 hour visit with Pop. For the first time that I’ve visited him, I cried. It was good. He cried too. Getting old is so sad. I’m just beginning to get old myself.

Pop’s always been such a kind person. I told him that, “You’re the kindest person I know.” And it’s true. I’m such a prick compared to him. I’ve been such a prick in my feelings about him the last few years.

What I did so that the mood stayed good was to keep cycling among three main activities: playing “cowball,” walking him around, and reading to him out of his self-published autobiography, Being Raised.

So what’s cowball? Pop’s wall has a dispenser of latex rubber gloves. So I’d blow one up as large as possible and tie it to make a wonderfully bouncy balloon—resembling a cow’s udder. I’d bat it towards him, and he’d bat it back, surprisingly good at this game, we’d keep that up for ten minutes or so. Wordlessly. Pop never missing a bat. It felt like light conversation, the same rhythm. And then I’d read another chapter or two from Being Raised.

I read almost the whole book. It really broke my heart, the descriptions of him as a plump little red-haired boy. And I loved the revelations!

Pop lost his virginity to a prostitute! And on his last night as a college student at the Virginia Military Institute, Pop lost the plate with his false tooth in Louise’s whorehouse in Lynchburg.

Another thing I hadn’t known was that once Pop thought he had an invention for a needlepoint machine, and he left Mom for two months to live in a garage in Chicago and work on it.

An overarching thing in the book is Pop’s concern about hurting other people. Also his admiration/resentment of 5-years-older brother Tinsley. I have a five-years-older brother myself, brother Embry—but it would be hard to crystallize my exact feelings about him. Admiration and resentment, sure, but camaraderie and glee in there as well.

Pop still wonders why he went to a military college, still kicks himself. He wanted to toughen up, I think. Or he was scared of women? Lots of stories. Playing football in college, he’d get so excited during kickoff that he’d wet his pants. The upperclassmen would paddle you at VMI, and then you’d go off and sleep with a hooker, and then the older boys would gloatingly grill you about it. Pop says the high point of his life was when his beloved grade-school teacher Miss Dougherty fell on him while they were playing soccer, and her skirt covered him, and he could feel her firm, live body.

Fact: they have Muzak, loud, coming out of the hall ceilings in the Cameron Glen Euphemism For Nursing Home. Worse: the Muzak repeats on a fairly short cycle. Every forty minutes: “The Girl From Ipanema.”

Today Pop kept wanting to start up his anti-drinking rap. Like he’s one to talk! I did have a few drinks last night. And I knew that every time I got near him this morning he would sniff deeply and say, “What’s that smell?” So I got some menthol/peppermint lozenges. And how the fuck can he smell a drink that I had twelve hours ago? It boggles the mind. Just like in high school. Today when he’d challenge me, I stuck to my guns and just said the smell was cough-drop, and then I’d distract him off into cowball. And I tried to stay out of my oh-so-boring alcoholic rage at him for mentioning my disease.

January 8, 1994. Iced In. More Pop.

Well, I’m still en route to Lisbon, 29 hours later. Yesterday my flight out of Dulles was cancelled. So I spent the night in the Dulles Hyatt. I didn’t tell Pop I was still there.

I had interesting dreams in the Hyatt, I was in this half-awake kind of state worrying about when to get up, and I started dreaming quite lucidly, knowing I was dreaming, and the dream room ran through endless variations on the hotel room. Sometimes something would come and grab me or attack me, and I realized this time that those things are also me, they are projected by me, everything in the dream is a projection of me, so I’d like grab the imp on my shoulder and squeeze and merge with him, and have a whirlpool kind of feeling. Very unusual.

I’ve made it to the Newark airport now, and outside the tree branches are all covered with thick coats of ice. There’s been an ice storm, which is why it took me so long to get this far. I have a boarding pass for Air Portugal—here’s hoping it takes off in an hour like it’s supposed to. Bad sign: it doesn’t have a gate listed yet, and all the other planes do.

My suitcase got away from me at Dulles yesterday, so I’ve been wearing my clothes for two days now, and I slept in my shirt. Supposedly my bag will catch up with me or I with it in Lisbon. If I ever get there.

All in all that was a great visit with Pop. Crying with him was good. We’ve never done that before. I called Rudy a little while ago. I love him so much. I realize now that Pop really does love me even though he’s always correcting me. Every person we passed on our little walks in the nursing home, he’d say to them, “Have you met my son?”

Poor old guy.

Okay—now it’s later and we’re on the plane. I have a window seat and the plane is completely full. This is going to be rough. Nobody on the plane seems to speak English at all. The loudspeaker is playing the Lettermen singing Christmas carols. A big fat stoic lady sits next to me in all black, and with a big purse and coat and shopping bags that she doesn’t want to put in the overhead. Her face is covered with warts, warts on warts like a fractal. Her arm is sticking way into my space. It’s a good thing someone is paying me to do this.

January 9, 1994. Lisbon, Robert Anton Wilson.

As it turned out, the plane sat on the ground for two and a half hours before taking off. While we were sitting there, the writer Robert Anton Wilson got put on the plane, his connection had been late. I said hi to him. He looked pretty stressed, his face taut, red and masklike. Later he told me that he’s 62 and has high blood pressure. He also has post-polio syndrome, which makes him walk unsteadily, as if he’s drunk all the time, which isn’t exactly true.

When we got to Lisbon, it turned out that both our suitcases were lost. It took a long time to give info to the Baggage people, and when we finally got out of the airport there was surprise nobody there to meet us.

So there I was, 36 hours after starting out from Pop’s, with my suitcase gone, no clue what to do, and old Bob Wilson on my hands. He was starting to lose it, obsessively complaining about everything, like that he wouldn’t have his medicine. I fell unwillingly into the role of chirpy cheerer-upper that I’d just finished doing with Pop. Wilson looks a bit like Pop, actually: he has white hair and beard.

I told Wilson, “Don’t be so surprised they didn’t manage to meet us. I mean these are people who invited Rucker, Wilson and McKenna to be in their movie. These people have got to be nuts! These people are fucked up! It’s like…how long would you wait for Queen Mu to meet you at an airport?”

I got the Tourism counter to recommend a hotel, and we got a cab to the Hotel Nacional, a depressingly anonymous place in the business district, new, soulless, with a lobby of stone polished to a fierce tombstone glare. It’s not clear if any other guests are staying here at all. Wilson and I lay down for naps in our separate rooms. My heart was doing funny things lying there, palpitations you call it, my poor overstressed heart fluttering at my chest. I got up at two in the afternoon, and Wilson was still asleep. Fine. I walked around town a little, glad that I didn’t have to chaperone the unhappy old man.

The sidewalks of Lisbon are mosaics made of miniature cobblestones, extremely slippery in the winter rain, mostly white, but with black swirly symmetric Zhabotinsky patterns every so often. In the less traveled areas, grass grows in their cracks.

I found a little funicular train and rode it up to the Barrio Alto, a neighborhood of old houses with laundry hanging out. The walls were crumbly stucco washed over with colors. It must be glorious on a sunny day. And there are tiles everywhere. The Moorish influence. I missed having Sylvia here to share it with.

I saw a little park with a nice-smelling cedar tree that had been trained to grow out over a circular overhead trellis—some beams up in the air making a hundred foot diameter disk with the branches of the cedar sprawling atop them. Old men underneath, playing cards at little tables. Very quaint. I could see out over the city from one spot in the Barrio Alto—these view spots are called miradouros—I could see the very broad Teja River, and I could see a big landmark: the Castelo de São Jorge. The tilde on top means you put in an “n.” So you pronounce São like Saon or Jão like John.

As it was Sunday, most things were closed, but I did stop in at one hole-in-the-wall cafe for a 150$00 escudo glass of beer. The Portuguese use the $ sign for a decimal point. The exchange rate is about 160 escudos to 1 dollar, so that means the beer was about ninety cents. Not that it was a big one by any means, it was a strange crooked-looking little glass, kind of like the stumpy Mediterranean men in there.

The bar was a beautiful spot—tiled walls and a real wrought-iron lamp high on the wall, but the people in there were the kinds of guys who would be forced out to spend their time in the lobbies of the train-stations in Germany, or in the parking lots of 7-11s in California. Short guys with lined faces and thin lips. But Portugal is their country, and they know how to live.

I also stopped in at a cafe next to a movie theater and had a “Pizza a Atum” Tuna in English is Atun in Spanish, and Atum in Portuguese. Because the cafe was next to a movie theater on a Sunday, it held two darling little groups of mothers and children. Wonderful to see the happy, cute, big-cheeked, ice-cream-eating kids, and the loving tender mothers, albeit these women are a bit frayed and distraught due the pressures of raising said kids, a bit unable to really grasp how good they right now actually have it—as were Sylvia and I during those traveling-circus years with the three young kids. The Holy Family, the divine and darling herd.

When I got back to the Hotel Nacional it was about 5 pm. The good news when I got back was that Catarina Santos was on the phone just then looking for me. I’d sent her a fax at two in the afternoon when I got up. She was the individual who had been assigned to meet us at the nearly empty Lisbon airport, which had a single entrance/exit. It’s pretty hard to miss someone at a place like that, but Catarina had missed us, and had even given a frantic “Your father is missing!” call to son Rudy back in Los Gatos, at 2 am California time, which made me want to kill her.

Waiting for Catarina to come to the hotel and meet with us, Wilson and I had a few drinks, then gave up and slept a couple more hours, and then a little before ten at night, Catarina showed up, looking much cuter than expected, and trailed by none other than Terence McKenna.

Catarina is une jolie laide, a woman with such mobile complicated features that you love to watch her. She has a large, highly animated lips which are often drawn twitchingly up to her nose for a badger/gopher face of mockery or emphasis. Her face is like a circus. She has a cracking, charming voice because she smokes cigarettes all the time, like all the people here.

When she met us, she was dressed all in black with a miniskirt and a black leather coat. Terence was glued to her like a limpet, apparently they were having an affair. I didn’t envy him. Terence had gotten to Lisbon three days earlier than Wilson and me, and was angling to stay three days longer. He was divorced, unemployed, and eager to stretch out the gig.

Terence is a person who grows on you. He’s a tall skinny guy, about six feet and 160 pounds, with, like, a gold-prospector face, meaning a chin up near his nose as if he didn’t have teeth, and loads of whiskers in no particular pattern covering most of his phiz. His eyes are large, thoughtful and brown. His forehead is low—I’d say the guy’s whole face is about half the height of a standard horse-faced soap-actor’s visage. He has a head like a cheerfully skrunched fist. He looks a little like what you get when you put two dots of ink for eyes on your index finger’s bottom knuckle and bounce the knuckle up and down over your thumb with a handkerchief wrapped around your hand to make a kind of puppet.

So at 10:30 pm, Bob Wilson and I went out for dinner with Terence and Catarina and Edgar Pêra, the director of the movie, which is called The Evasion Manual: LX94. LX stands for Lisbon, or an alternate Lisbon, and the production is funded by the city of Lisbon in honor of the year-long festival of the arts called Lisbon 94. We went to a place near the water, near the Rio Teja, getting our dinner around 11 pm, which turned out to be a typical dinner-time in Lisbon. We had had some beautiful olives and salt cod seviche as appetizer, then grilled cod, cod cooked in milk, and cod with beans and shrimps.

Edgar is a handsome man with short dark hair, a Mediterranean/Moorish face with full features and a lovely round chin with dark stubble. He often shrugs and makes self-deprecating gestures, like, “Who cares!” or “Don’t ask me!” or “For god’s sake relax!” He blows out air and shakes his head. He reminded me of my college pal Don Marritz.

The best part of the day was that we took our backpacks (no luggage yet, guys!) out of the cold, shiny Hotel Nacional after dinner and brought them to the York House Residencia. This is where our employers, the Companhia de Filmes Principe Real, had meant to put us up all along. The York House is a terrific hotel, all in wood and tile and ceramic. Edgar said that during World War Two, the York was a meeting-place and hangout for spies. Wilson backed this up, referring to the movie Casablanca and the fact that Portugal remained a neutral country during the war, and thus a good spot for surreptitious dealings.

I should mention that, on the way to dinner, and on the way back to the hotel, Terence got us high in the car with hash that we smoked in his brass pipe that can be reassembled to be a mushroom neck-pendant. Walking up the three gardened flights from the street to the York House, the spy house, high on hash in Lisbon, well, it felt pretty cool.

As we checked in, Bob Wilson started a big fight because the clerk wanted to keep his passport overnight. I evaded, and went to my bed.

January 10, 1994. Filming on River in Lisbon.

I was awakened by a liveried man knocking on my door to bring a tray of breakfast at 7:30 am. Rolls, butter, apricot jelly, and a pot of coffee and a pot of hot milk. It was delicious. The butter was like a different substance from the butter I get back home—so fragrant and healthy-tasting. Outside it was raining.

I phoned TAP (Transport Air Portugal, though Bob started saying it stood for “Take Another Plane”) and there was no news about my suitcase. I put on the same clothes for the fourth (!!!!) day in a row.

A woman named Erica showed up at the hotel to put make-up on me and Bob and Terence. Catarina and some film-crew people were there with a bunch of clothes, but they figured my overcoat and beret looked fine. They were fresh out of giant chicken suits. Bob showed up in a white T-shirt (this isn’t an SF con, Bob!) and a camel’s hair coat, and they made him put on something black, which pissed him off.

There was a yacht waiting for us by a monument to the Great Navigators (a big theme in Lisbon!). It belonged to the production company Filmes Principe Real, or to one of the company’s contacts. The rain cleared up and the sun came out. Seeing Edgar and all his lively hip crew, I began to realize just how serious a gig this was. I mean, these guys had big heavy-duty 35 mm cameras, not to mention any number of heavy Hi-8 video cams.

We got on the boat and motored around the wide Rio Teja for awhile, being filmed answering questions about time. The questions were posed by Carlos, a TV reporter who was playing a reporter. Bob, Terence, and I were cast as the Xaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master Of Xaos. They use X more or less like S or CH in Portugal.

I was kind of stiff and, like, jockeying for position, worried the others would talk more than me, but eventually I got a good rap or two on film, talking about my idea that we’re like eyes which god grows to look at himself with—god being thus like a giant snail or mollusk that extrudes eyestalks. The camera angle was low so that my head was sticking up, and I was raising up my arms to simulate eyestalks, the arms at different heights and my hands cupped as if holding eye-spheres. Right above and behind me was the great suspension bridge over the Rio Teja, with my hands up above the lines of the bridge. Great shot, but it didn’t end up in the film.

The technology of the filming was that the video cameras would be on most or all of the time, but the heavy-duty 35 mm cameras would only be on for occasional bursts of three minutes, due to the expense of film. Edgar’s strategy is to wait and wait until finally there’s a feeling that all is ripe and the key scene can be shot—in one take with no repeat.

Eventually the boat docked on the other side of the Rio Teja. They filmed us arriving—the idea of the movie is that there are Saboteurs who are changing the speed of time in various parts of Lisbon, and that they are being helped by the Xaman, the Neuro Magician, and the Master of Xaos.

We went up the hill to have lunch in a small town with a name something like Alameda. I waited with Carlos in a square, and noticed a woman filling up big plastic pitchers at a fountain.

“I can’t believe that woman has to haul water to her house,” I said.

Carlos answered, “You have to understand that Portugal is the end of Europe and the beginning of the third world.”

We went into an unprepossessing place for lunch, and sat at a long table. I sat next to Michael, the cameraman, a very talkative, dynamic guy, typically wearing a jump-suit with a zillion zippers. He has a shock of black hair and a long nose. They served us a Portuguese mixed meat plate with part of a pig’s leg, some blood sausage, some lard sausage, some beans, pot-roast, potatoes, cabbage and, la piece de resistance, a pig’s ear. We had red, white, and “green” wine, this being a tart slightly effervescent white wine. Very jolly.

After lunch we went to shoot film in a winery. The idea was that this is where the Xaman, the Neuro Magician, and the Master Of Xaos were meeting the Saboteurs. I got in a couple of good raps about transrealism and the Central Teachings of Mysticism. For a long time we sat at a huge picnic table covered with wine-bottles, some open, us sitting there and pretending to be getting drunk.

It was up to us how much we actually did drink. It was weird to have an infinite amount of wine in front of me—a moment I’ll remember during thirsty times. I managed to hold back on my drinking, what with the cameras on. The actresses were a plump and lively blonde woman named Suzy, and a cute actress called Ana, who was also in a Pirandello play.

Terence was quite funny, saying things like, “Gentlemen, the question on the floor is What is Reality?” and then going into all sorts of raps about time-machines. He has this idea that logically we can’t see a time-machine before one is invented (because as soon as we see a time-machine, then we can copy it and invent one). So, once, the first time-machine is invented (coming soon, in Terence’s estimation), then time-machines from all down the future will show up, and the arrival of all this novelty at once will cause some kind of information explosion. It’s fun to hear him talk about time-machines with that same wild, unschooled excitement that I had about them as a young teenager.

The river had gotten rough, so we drove back to the hotel instead of taking the boat. When we got back, my suitcase was finally there! I took a shower and changed my shirt three times in a row. My four-day underwear could have been cut into squares and sold to people suffering from testosterone deficiency.

I had dinner alone in the hotel dining room, sitting at a table near the kitchen. I had a great fish soup, and feeling casual in the European ambience I just said, “Can I have another bowl?” and they brought me another, and then a shrimp and endive salad, and then a nutcake of ground hazel-nuts. A nice meal, and everything on Edgar’s tab.

In bed I turned on the TV, and saw a Portuguese news-story about how six people on a yacht had drowned in the stormy Rio Teja today. Could have been us.

January 11, 1994. The Observatory. Time Flies.

The next morning, Catarina drove Bob, Terence, and me to an astronomical observatory for the day’s shooting. Bob was in a foul, sulky mood.

The observatory was a lovely pastel-yellow classic mansion sitting in a small botanical garden in the misty rain. The Portuguese used to have lots of colonies: Goa in India, Angola and Mozambique in Africa, Brazil in south America, the Cape Verde islands in the Pacific, and the island of Timor near Indonesia. They have the same latitude as San Francisco, so exotic plants from the former colonies can flourish in their botanical gardens. Terence is something of a botanist due to his researches into psychedelic plants, and he told me that one of the big trees was a dragon’s-blood tree from the Middle East. Its red sap is used for incense.

Walking out alone into the rainy garden later in the day, I thought of the phrase from Sartre’s La Nausée which I quote in The Secret of Life: “I went into the garden and the garden smiled at me.”

On this day’s shooting there were three actresses and two actors as well as Terence, Bob and me. The funniest actor was called Duarte Barrilaro Ruas. He looked like Bela Lugosi with slicked back hair, lab-coat, and a pasted-on goatee. He had a huge mouth, and liked to do crazy laughs.

For filming us they were making us go up on a creaking lacquered-wood ladder—like a library bookcase ladder—to get near the eyepiece of this huge telescope, a telescope with a big lens at one end and a little lens at the other end, the traditional idea of a telescope in other words, and not some newfangled thing with a mirror. The place was trippy and rundown but still actually functioning. The telescope was in a giant cylindrical room with the traditional penis-tip dome with a slit. A rotating slit. There was a balcony/catwalk all around the edge up high, with windows looking out on this part of Lisboa (the Portuguese name of the city).

An actress called Margarida Marinho had lunch at a table with Edgar, Bob and me. She was such a funny actress—I’d been watching her pretending to be an astronomer adjusting a telescope during the morning’s shooting. It really taught me something about acting to watch her seemingly endless free flow of improvisations of gesture: different ways of twiddling the dials, looking surprised, moving about, and so on.

After lunch one of the guys ran up to me with this ice-cream-cone shaped cigarette and said, “Rudy, would you like some psychedelic? This is tobacco with hashish.”

And we all smoked some of that and the afternoon got funnier. Bob Wilson cheered up for a bit, but then turned cranky again.

I said enthusiastically, “We’re going up on the wobbly observing ladder to be filmed again.”

Bob said, “I don’t like to see sadism in a man.”

After a minute or two of that sinking in, “I didn’t mean to sound sadistic, I was just trying be cheerful.”

And then Terence chimed in, “I hate to think of all the atrocities that have been committed under the name of trying to be cheerful.”

The room had a high balcony that circled the room, with windows all along the balcony. Rain leaked in through the windows, and there was crumbled-off window-glazing on the sills, and lots of little flies, breeding in the water or something, funny little baby Portuguese flies, and I got into a rap, rehearsing it to whoever would listen, that the insects were timeflies, which relates, you wave, to Zeno’s Second Paradox of Motion: “Time flies like an arrow, but at each instant there is no time, so how does the arrow move?”

And the rap relates further to the classic automatic language translation program which translated “Time flies like an arrow,” into Russian and then back into English, yielding: “Insects which live on sundials enjoy eating arrows.”

My conclusion was the most weightless fact of all, the arrow which the timeflies enjoy eating is Zeno’s arrow! Stoner humor.

In the milling around, I happened to walk up the stairs behind Durte and Juanne, a striking woman who turned out to be a professional model, aged nineteen. You could tell she was a model from the way she held herself, posing so perfectly. She was wearing thick-soled sexy boots and tight leather pants, oh my.

They filmed a scene of me and Terence talking on the room-circling balcony, and Juanne was supposed to turn a big crank on the wall next to me as I talked, and I’d been flirting with her a little, and she said, “In the scene, I will bump you, yes?”

And I said yes, of course, so then she kept bumping me with her leather butt while I was talking—what thrills these sporadic contacts sent through me! I tried to act a little, and show exaggerated reactions to the bumps.

My clowning amused a young hipster called Daryl Pappas, he moved to Portugal from L. A. and he was taking publicity still photos for the film. When we finished shooting, he started hitting on Juanne.

“Are you a virgin?” Daryl asks Juanne.

Juanne: “I’m saving myself for god.”

Daryl: “Well, I’m him!”

Juanne: “No, god has no head.” Heavy.

Juanne’s way of showing her sexual interest in Daryl was to chew her gum a bit faster.

Back at the hotel, I had a few drinks in the hotel bar with Bob. He cheers right up when he’s having drinks or drugs. It would be fun to write an SF story together with him sometime, he’s an incredible fount of knowledge with an idiosyncratic worldview.

January 12, 1994. Around Lisbon. Alfama.

In the morning we went out to shoot on location in Lisbon. Terence was friendly and full of gossip about all the Mondo 2000 people we knew.

Our first shot was in a giant free-standing outdoor seven-story elevator that goes down a cliff into the shopping district, known as Baixa. I talked a lot to Carlos, a reporter playing a reporter. He was explaining a headline I saw about a man named Xanana being arrested. What a cool first name.

“How do you spell Xanana?”

“Like banana with an x.”

We walked down the Baixa main street to the dock where the ships used to arrive, the caravels. According to Terence, the king’s men would be right there to take the valuables from the ships as they landed.

Speaking of first names that begin with an “X,” Terence told a story about going into the Amazon and taking a weird drug with some natives. “And after about an hour, I’m looking at my new friend Xlotl,” says Terence. “His eyes are black and glittering like a cockroach’s. And I’m wondering if Xlotl is going to kill me.”

Xanana and Xlotl are going into my new book Freeware for sure—as surfer limpware moldies, flickercladding dudes infested by psychedelic camote fungus.

Then we drove to Edgar’s studio. He’d built a “Time Lab,” an amazing set with lots of clocks going at all different speeds, and a smoke machine, and colored lights, and dials and meters and big weird gears to roll back and forth and make strange shadows. The set was in the shape of a cylinder, so that standing inside it, the cameraman could pan, and never pass a wall-edge, creating an illusion that the lab was huge, endless, even though it was only about twenty or thirty feet across.

We waited about four or five hours until everything was, in Edgar’s opinion, right, and then we shot our last scene in the Time Lab. I cranked up my adrenaline by singing some songs for the actors—they videoed me doing my Dead Pigs version of “Duke of Earl,” but this wasn’t a scene that would make it into the film.

I was supposed to do a scene where I talked with Bob about time, but he had a tantrum about his clothes—they’d made him change out of his camel’s hair coat and white T-shirt again, so that he’d match his other scenes—and in our scene all he did was complain about his clothes, and about the sinister symbolism of a “borrowed coat.”

And then Bob had a tantrum about getting our checks from Catarina, but he was smart to do that, and I was glad he did it. Bob was a difficult man, a genius, able to quote page after page of Pound, Joyce, Shakespeare, the last words of Dutch Shultz, you name it. But egomaniacal even more so than most writers.

Edgar invited us all to his house for a late supper. Before that I killed an hour or so walking around the neighborhood of his studio. This was the Alfama neighborhood, the old Moorish part of town. It’s an amazing place, built all of tiles and cobblestones and stucco on a steep hill. The alleys and staircases reminded me of Escher’s engravings of Maltese hill towns, or of his pictures of cities with ambiguous perspectives.

To make it the more completely Escher-like, many of the buildings are entirely covered with tiles that are patterned in arabesques, or in trompe l’oeil designs. It was one of the most exciting strolls I’ve ever taken, and the more enjoyable after a day of being cooped up with those clocks.

I rode over to Edgar’s house with him and a bunch of the film people. Dinner was served at—get this—11:35 pm. And nobody thought this was particularly late! It’s sure not Louisville, Kentucky.

Before dinner, Edgar said something to me in his sincere way that really made me happy. “Everybody loves you. All of us on the movie.” That felt good. He was satisfied with my work for his film. During dessert, one of the guests passed around tobacco and hash jays. It was like the 1970s again—nicely dressed lively young people having some civilized tokes together after a fancy dinner at home. I haven’t seen anything like that in the U.S. for twenty years. Because of the drug war, or because I’m getting old?

After dinner, we watched some rushes on Edgar’s TV—mostly of Terence, as the rushes lag two days behind. There were some really funny scenes with Terence. He has a golden tongue.

“You are such a great talker,” I exclaimed to him.

Terence answered, “It’s the only skill I have. If it weren’t for that, I’d be sleeping under a bridge.”

Another time I heard Terence introduce himself to someone saying, “I’m a criminal and a bullshit artist.” Not a pretentious guy.

Some of the movie is shot in speeded-up time, like there’s a love scene in a factory. The love scene was a panic, it was like Chaplin in Modern Times. With any luck, The Manual of Evasion might be a psychotronic classic of cinema. Or a respected work of surrealist film.

I liked acting. It was an adrenaline rush. You’d know when your scene was coming, and you’d get ready for it, trying to think of what you’d say and what mood you’d project, and then it comes, and it’s over in a flash. Once the company applauded after I did a scene ranting about time, chaos and temperature (as per request), and it felt wonderful. You get this big ego boost right back. It’s addictive, a true fix. After their scenes everyone is trembly and smoking cigarettes. Another great thing was to be working in a group instead of working all alone, as I do when I write.

This was really a terrific trip. I did something interesting and creative, managed to party without making a fool of myself, and forgot completely about my usual life.

Freeware

January 21, 1994. Wrote First Page of Freeware.

Imperceptibly and unconsciously progressing, I managed finally to write the first page of Freeware on January 18.

I mark that day with a white stone. By the way, I get that expression from Lewis Carroll’s diaries. He’d write it at the end of his entries about his favorite days.

After I got Freeware started, Sylvia and I went to the beach in Santa Cruz and I scoped out the location where I’m setting a big scene at the start of the book: the Terrace Court Motel, overlooking the beach near the wharf. My moldie (soft robot) character Monique is a maid/sex-worker there, and she’s trying to plant a controller in a guy’s brain.

I’m wailing with my novel at last. I’m so glad it’s here.

February 2, 1994. Man Trimming Trees.

Outside the window a man on a cherrypicker crane is trimming the trees by our house that touch the wires: electric, phone, and cable TV. He’s paid by the power company. On the ground below him roars a compressor. He wields a long yellow stick with twin orange hoses coming out of the base of the stick. The hoses go down inside the singly jointed arm of the crane and connect to the compressor. At the business end of the stick is a metal claw whose pinch is powered by the compressed air hoses.

The man wears dark gloves, a white sweatshirt, and over that an orange T-shirt. He wears a mildly billed (duckling-style) white hardhat and sunglasses. The sunglasses have covers on the sides, like goggles—to protect him from the branches perhaps, or perhaps to protect him from the gazes of idle homebodies like me who watch him out the window at his work. Over his T-shirt are black suspenders which hold up his blue jeans. He has a small orange mustache and some grizzle on his chin. His hair is orange and long in back.

It’s interesting to sit here with my keyboard and describe a happening thing outside my window. This is better than going to the opera.

The man moves a joystick inside the basket he stands in, and the basket moves up and down, with an increased roar from the air compressor for each motion. He has a beer belly and a wattled chin. He calls out to the men below when he cuts a branch. “Heeey,” and “Yaa.” Now he’s almost done, I think. I even videoed a minute or two of him.

Instead of writing this morning, I hacked. The motivator being that I’m teaching a graduate Software Engineering course and I need fresh material to present. I enjoy hacking, I can do it even when I’m feeling crazed and brain-dead. I have a new C++ class that I’m designing, it’s a graphical frame that makes it easy for a user to zoom in on, say, a Spirograph pattern.

February 18, 1994. 4D Knots. Terrace Court Motel.

I was watching a video about 3D and 4D knots that a computer scientist sent me. I think watching that video did something to my brain. I’m planning to work it into Freeware as something that my character Tre Dietz sees. Here’s a draft of the passage:

A silent movie of brightly colored shapes—smooth tubes knotting themselves into ever new shapes. The video would pause now and then, showing a straight stick with arrows on it, and then all the arrows would move about and the stick would turn, in some indefinable way, into a knot. The rapidity with which it happened defied a complete understanding. The pictures seemed so urgent, yet the meaning continued to escape Tre. “Look at this,” the pictures seemed to say. “This is important, this is one of the hidden secrets of the world.” And the knot would deform itself smoothly into an entirely new shape. Slowly sometimes, almost insultingly precise, yet the gimmick of the shift still always somehow eluding Tre. “Look harder and you will understand.” Yet still and still he couldn’t.

Sylvia and I are spending a couple of nights in the Terrace Court motel in Cruz. As I mentioned, I’m using this place as the setting for a big scene in Freeware. I’m writing this entry around midnight on my laptop.

I keep obsessing about an email flame I posted this morning to the math and computer science faculty. Wanting to retract it. Thinking about a future company that sells flame-retardant, a software agent that goes out over the Net and finds all the places your flame got mailed to, and unqueues it. Pulls it back out of the mailbox before the receiver gets around to reading it. Imagine flame retardant in real life. Like you could make people forget the bad things you did. You go ahead and do whatever you like, and people eventually forget it. Which is pretty much how the world actually is.

The bums at the Santa Cruz liquor store last night. One guy comes out from the alley in back of the store, he looks like Charlie Manson. and has a blood thing on his forehead, like the cross that Charlie carved on during his trial. Another bum—they always have the full muff of beard, and this great twitching urgency about their motions—was buying something to drink when I went into the store. He was paying with pennies, a lot of pennies. I think maybe he and the other guy lived in the store’s dumpster.

This afternoon, Sylvia and I were checking out the Fun Center at the Santa Cruz amusement park. A ribbon of lights pulls you in via a moving pixelization on the ceiling. FUN CENTER. Inside, one machine had a movie of actors talking to you. “We need a man to help us, stranger.”

I got change and put in a dollar and the machine didn’t work. The place is kind of a museum of games. Centipede, Qbert, and even an ancient machine that sells black and white postcards of jet planes and race cars. And the mechanical baseball game I played in Louisville where you push on a button and it swings a metal silver bat beneath the game’s glass cover, whacking a ball-bearing towards targets.

Fontaine Ferry Park is where I originally saw that game, in a weird part of Louisville. Pop took me there a couple of times, I always clamored for it. Once we were there and Pop took a shine to a curly-headed Italian carny running a game where you shot corks at cigar tins. A talkative young con-man called Tony. You’d knock over an empty Prince Albert can with a number on the back and you won the prize that matched the number.

Pop spent the whole evening telling me how bright this Tony was, and hanging out with him at the picnic tables, buying him dinner, smoking cigarettes, enjoying Tony’s tales of the carny life. There was a certain loneliness on Pop’s part, a longing for contact with the common man. And he had a habit—annoying to my brother and me—of recruiting surrogate sons.

March 9, 1994. The Last Ramones Concert.

It was the Ramones final tour, and I went with the whole family except Isabel to see them at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. Rudy Jr. and Georgia’s boyfriend got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving.

I managed to stay in the pit till almost the end of the main set. Thanks to my fitness I could hang in there pretty long. Although today I, like, can’t lift my arms—they’re tired from fending people off. Whenever it would be relatively quiet and I’d be near Joey, I’d yell “My Back Pages,” wanting to hear the Ramones version of this old Dylan & Byrds song—the new version is on the latest Ramones album. The newest Ramone, C.J. the bass-player, is the one who sings that song, although I didn’t actually realize that when I was yelling to Joey.

They were off key almost the whole time, but then Joey said, “Cheap acid, cheap show,” and, perhaps in reaction, their playing got better. They did about five more songs and left the stage and people are clapping, and C.J. and Johnny and Marky come out without Joey, and tear into yes “My Back Pages.”

I love the wall-of-sound quality to it. They’re like crucifying this old Dylan-folkie song on the wall of sound. And the words to the song are so great. “But I was so much older then,/ I’m younger than that now.” Too true!

For this encore, C.J. and Johnny had put on fresh dry t-shirts. C.J.’s T-shirt is like a circle with a picture of the Manhattan skyline. And over that is a big red SS in that lighting-stroke kind of jagged S. And Johnny is wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt, and draped on either side of Charlie are his crazy woman followers, like Sadie Glutz, and Squeaky Fromme, and the t-shirt says “Charlie’s Angels.” Squeaky once tried to shoot Jerry Ford with a .45 automatic pistol, she’s still locked up. Charlie Manson and SS, ripping the sweet thoughtful sixties folksong “My Back Pages” to fuckin’ shreds.

This number was one of the most awesome multimedia presentations I’ve ever grokked. I went back in the pit, and the wave threw me up near C.J. I had my glasses off so they wouldn’t get clawed off, but then I wanted to put them on to be able to see him, and there was a crowd-surfer over my head, and I was thinking, “I’m adjusting with my glasses, so just this once I’m not going to reach up and push the guy,” so of course he falls on me. But I don’t think it did any lasting damage.

April 11, 1994. Spring. Saucers and Flying Cars.

In March we saw a gross accident on the thruway towards Yosemite. A man was lying on his back in one of the ambulances, and I saw the soles of his shoes, splayed out at a there-it-is angle. Motionless. When Kurt Cobain shot himself last week, the paper had a picture taken through a door and it showed Kurt’s feet at the exact same angles, the rest of him invisible lying dead on his back.

On that trip to Yosemite, we went with Rudy Jr. to a cottage with Jon Pearce and his family. I had one perfect long day of hiking with Rudy to Wawona Dome—we amused ourselves by calling it Dog Dome to each other all day.

Up at the top, the two seasons met, winter and spring. A New-England-like winter creek with snow, and a spring creek across sun-warmed granite. Rudy and I threw little icebergs into the water with little mast-sticks in them, it was fun. Dog dome! We caught a big mountain ant and played with it a long time. It kept biting me. We talked about it a lot on the way down.

“Oh, you mean that ant.”

Easter came in April and it was great, with Georgia organizing a picnic in Golden Gate Park, and we went to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, it was cool, a real spectacle with the soaring arches and the stained glass and titanic organ music. Georgia said the bombastic music was like in Star Wars or Jurassic Park. The bishop was there in his funny hat.

I wrote a savage review attacking a book by John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens. Mack is a psychologist who convinces people on the edge of madness that their dreams about UFOs are real. Next week the review comes out in the Washington Post Sunday Book World, I’m worried a lot of nuts will be after me. Or the saucers themselves. The “experiencer” views everything as a plot by the aliens.

With UFOs on my mind now, I dreamed I saw a saucer, it was drawn in lines of pale light against a blue sky, a traditional saucer shape. Today walking with Arf on St. Joseph’s hill, I found a new little meadow and looked up and the sky resembled the sky I’d seen the saucer in. The noises in the woods seemed alien, seemed to stick together in new metashapes.

Night before last I had a remarkable dream:

I was in a high brick apartment building, perhaps in New Jersey or NYC. I was looking out across a park, maybe Central Park. Airplanes started going by, small planes at nearly the same level as my window. These were special custom futuristic yet antiquated airplanes, like Buck Rogers planes. Some had short stubby babyish wings. They were snub and chromed, some looked like fifties cars. They were very agile and playful, one of them swooped down in a vertical drop just like I saw a crow do the other day.

April 9, 1994. Talk at Interval. JJ’s. Beaches.

I gave a talk at a Silicon Valley company called Interval, their logo says 1992-2002. They’re supposed to last ten years and usher us into the next century. The manager-type guy who invited me was completely full of shit. He thought he’d discovered the secret of quantum mechanics and higher logic and on and on—when all he’d really done was to have a sloppy stab at some ideas that occur to everyone who ever writes a thesis in mathematical logic.

“I’m no mathematician,” he’d begin his statements to me with false modesty.

I wanted to yell, “I can see that you’re not!”

Why do guys like this always end up being the managers? And the smart people are the peons. There were quite a few smart peons at Interval, and I had fun talking to them. I did a demo of my artificial-life Boppers program and read some of my novel, The Hacker and the Ants.

Rob Shaw was there, a legendary MacArthur-prize-winning guy who’s known for an attempt to use chaos theory to beat the roulette tables at Vegas. His classic monograph is The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System. He showed me some nice artificial insects that he’d programmed. He liked the Boppers program, and said, “That’s a wild piece of code, Rudy.” He said he hadn’t worked for five years after getting the MacArthur, just hung out in his shack near the ocean in Santa Cruz. What a great life! I really admire him. He, in turn, was envious of me for having three grown kids.

Saturday night Sylvia and I went to JJ’s Blues bar on Stevens Creek Blvd in San Jose. It was cool. We sat near the open door to the street. Looking outside, I saw a Mexican man eating pizza, and I saw a dog wondering if it can come in. On the stage about ten feet from us was a band called WHAT, three guys into the blues, with a great bassman/vocalist who looked like R.U. Sirius except healthier. A methed-out biker sat in front of us. I could tell he was a biker cause he had leather gloves on and sure enough his Harley was right outside. A typical San Jose mix.

Sunday morning I spent most of the day alone in Santa Cruz, riding my bike along the cliffs to Four Mile Beach. The beauty is so great there, my soul can’t hold it, I feel almost a desperation in trying to hold it, wanting to hold it, the beauty fills me like a waterfall filling a shot glass, the wild sea hitting the cliffs, a small natural bridge, no filth, no human dirt, only the cliffs and the waves and the meadows of wildflowers and out on the water is a regatta of sailboats.

June 10, 1994. Jahva House Sketch. Santa Cruz.

Look at my crab-like hands, the gnarly experienced hands, these hands have typed a lot. Excite them into activity and they crawl all over the keyboard. I’m in the Jahva House cafe in Santa Cruz. I’m going to “sketch” the scene from the point-of-view of my Freeware character Tre Dietz.

The coffee shop was in a large old garage, a hundred feet square with a high wooden ceiling with old beams showing. There were fans up beyond the beams, stirring the air around. The windows were translucent pebbled glass reinforced with chicken wire. The windows had horizontal pivots in their center so that they could be swung horizontal to let the air in. Out the window Tre could see a low gray building with ventilation ducts on the top and a satellite dish, and above the building Tre saw power lines and a pale blue sky. In front of one window hung a stained glass panel showing a setting sun, a dolphin, and a hummingbird at a flower. Another window showed a green-leafed tree, its branches tossing chaotically in the breeze. Outside the big open garage door was a street with cars, and across the street a yellow brick building with green awnings.

A big speaker in one corner played reggae music.

A pair of young guys in loop T-shirts were playing chess. One had curly hair and a purple shirt. He was bent over the board with his back to Tre. The other was bearded and stoned-out looking, with a turquoise shirt and a black baseball cap worn backwards. His dark hair stuck out to the sides under his baseball cap like a wig. Weatherbeaten hardworked face with a wrinkled brow.

Others in the cafe: Two young women in granny dresses and no makeup. A stout young dark man in a purple and green plaid shirt, baggy torn-off khaki pants, sneakers and blue argyle socks, a purple stocking pulled over his hair, a swarthy bearded pirate face, reading a picture book from the bookcases that stood against one wall. An old man in a green zip-up shirt reading a paperback.

A student girl in polka-dot shorts studied a stack of Xeroxed notes. At the next table sat a ponytailed man with an earring, and his wife, with big shiny eyes, purple tanktop, flowered maroon skirt. Their little girl walked around stamping her feet in time to the music. She began wrestling her father, tugging at his hand and laughing. She looked like the mother, the same wise, straight, thin-lipped mouth.

A man with a complicated wheelchair and a guide dog came in. Two kids helped him pull up to a table. A sandy-red haired man, with a beard and shades, bobbing his head to the music, putting sugar in his coffee at a freestanding condiment bar.

Tre’s tabletop held a map of the Monterey Bay. Sitting on the map was a cup and saucer that had held his cappuccino coffee. Traces of foam had hardened on the now-empty cup.

Nobody, other than the little girl, made eye contact with Tre, nobody hassled him, it was peaceful, peaceful.

A girl with her hair piled on top and a T-shirt with scalloped neck and edges came and talked to the dudes playing chess. She was joined by a man with a toothbrush mustache and a seriously ugly baseball cap—small, perched on the top of his head, and bearing a fragment of a large aloha print of flowers and parrots. The man with the ugly hat got a latte; the girl went to the counter and got an iced tea and a chess set; and then they began playing chess as well.

A man with curly hair and the wind-faired features of a stoner carried two conga drums out the door and began playing them outside. The man with the purple stocking cap drummed his fingers, stood up, walked slowly, staggeringly back and forth, then drifted out the door, pausing to joke with the conga-man.

A sparrow found its way in through one of the huge open windows and fluttered about.

High in Amsterdam

July 12, 1994. My Last Visit with Pop.

I’m on my way to a conference in Munich, Germany, after another visit with Pop. I’m writing this first in Dulles airport and then in the plane.

This was not a very good visit. With his brain damage, Pop’s become a monster of egotism, utterly lacking in moral or intellectual resources. Nothing interests him except as it reflects on himself. He’s depressed and complains that he can’t play golf or go to my brother Embry’s daughter Siofra’s wedding.

Pop asks, over and over: “Why did this happen to me? Why did I have to get sick? Why am I still alive?”

I told Embry that Pop keeps asking why he’s still alive, and Embry grimly said, “That’s what all the rest of us want to know, too.”

Even Priscilla says Pop should die. She hopes he has a heart-attack—the worst possibility is that he might have another stroke and then be even more out of it mentally.

I took him out twice to the Town Center, a kind of outdoor mall near his nursing home. At the Town Center, his main question was if anyone recognized him. The first day a few did, the second day, nobody did. Time moving past him. He no longer seems to have a religious life at all, says he never thinks about religion anymore. Even though he’s an Episcopal priest.

Today he got onto his thing about telling me not to drink again, which is so discouraging to hear about. Finally just before I left today, he got to the point of saying he wanted to talk to my daughter Georgia about getting me to “shape up or ship out.” This was a term they used back at his military college, VMI.

Last time Georgia visited Pop, all he talked to her about was that she should get me to stop drinking, and then he followed it up with phone calls to Georgia, depressing and upsetting her.

When he started up on it again today, I lost my temper and said, “You’re the one who should have shaped up.”

He roared, “Now we’re getting somewhere! What did I do to unleash the beast?”

“You’re the one who split up our family,” I told him. “You broke Mom’s heart with your unfaithfulness and drunkenness.”

And then he started crying. Priscilla showed up about then. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“We argued,” I said, embarrassed about upsetting my father. Priscilla did her best to jolly us up, like we were a couple of squabbling toddlers.

And then it was time to catch my plane. My last sight of Pop was him sitting wretchedly in his chair in his nursing home room, his cheeks wet with tears.

It’s a serpent’s nest of problems. I do of course feel bad that I drink so much—not that I was drinking here while visiting him. It’s my tragic flaw, my Achilles heel, the one thing in my life I would change if I could—without having to, like, change.

Pop’s main take on my literary fame is whether or not my old high-school chum Mike Dorris is jealous of me! This is Dorris who rode to St. X. with Pop and me back in Louisville days in the tenth grade. A little driving group. Odd that we both became writers. I do envy Mike’s success with A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. But for me to make him jealous is (a) impossible, given that we’re no longer close enough for me to persuade him to read my work, and is (b) really not something that I think about or desire or care about at all. Aaauugh.

Yesterday I took Pop to McDonald’s, and for a minute we were in heaven there, Pop scarfing down his quarter-pounder with cheese, us parked under a tree facing some green athletic fields. “Man, this is living,” Pop kept saying happily. It was good. Then I took him back to the home, and he took a nap, and when he woke up he had a stomach ache and he was frantic. “How can I take a shit?”

Seeing him like this, I wondered how I could ever have been so bitter against him—as I often was in the past. He looked so thoroughly undone and defeated.

Embry doesn’t want him to come to his daughter Siofra’s wedding, and I guess he’s right. Though when Pop lucidly yearns for it, it’s so sad. Embry especially doesn’t feel merciful about this because Pop in fact didn’t go to Embry’s wedding. I’m planning to drive the family from California to Louisville, Kentucky, for the wedding this summer.

If I was more self-sacrificing, I’d offer to fly from Louisville to Reston to Louisville to Reston to Louisville to ferry Pop to and from the wedding, wiping his ass and answering a hundred questions an hour.

“Where am I? How old am I? Have you been drinking?”

I don’t want to do it.

I really am middle-aged now. The kids are young, Pop is old, and I’m middle. Middle-age is when everyone depends on you. In a way it’s nice to be able to help them all, nice to be in power, nice to be at the peak of your abilities. But it’s hard.

I was just reading a book where a character is talking to his father and getting good advice. Did I ever get much fathering from Pop? He was fun when I was little, but all through my high school and college he was pretty much totally disapproving, playing the role of the strait-laced minister, even though the things I did were the same as he’d done when young. Then I was a newlywed, and we got together with Mom and Pop in Maine and in Alexandria and then Reston. That wasn’t a bad period. Around 1974 he retired from being a minister to run for Virginia State Assembly—with Priscilla as his campaign manager—and that was when he went into his period of being drunk and crazy all the time. The heart trouble started then too, when he was sixty.

From then on, he was never much use to me as a father. Drunk and crazy, and then, on doctor’s orders, a sober cripple. We did have one kind of nice evening in maybe 1984, drinking a whole fifth of whiskey on my porch in Lynchburg and reminiscing—kind of nice but also kind of terrible. The next morning we both felt bad about abetting the other’s heavy drinking.

In recent years I’ve felt like Pop’s taken much more from me than he’s given, emotionally. A monster of egotism. I am not going to end up like him. My children are not going to think of me the way that I think of him. Unless I really fuck up. And I’m not going to.

Despite what I say against Pop, it was impressive to me how well he connected with the other patients in his nursing home. There was a sad, lovely black family whose boy had been shot and paralyzed in a robbery. And a white Southern boy with muscular dystrophy. Scott. He’s so wasted away, his head is like a regular head mounted on a Halloween scarecrow in a chair, like the ones people set on their porches in Maine.

Scott talked of the women passing by with such intense longing. Last week he snuck out of the home on his electric wheelchair and drove the half-mile over roads to get to the Town Center and watch a movie. The police came and got him with a helicopter. He pointed to the Town Center buildings, visible over the walls of the courtyard where we sat.

“I’d love to go there again. Everything I want is there.” So heartbreaking.

At mealtimes there’d be that same sudden bloom of really nasty old geezers, all white and gumming in the main room, eating their supper together—popping up like mushrooms after a rain, three times a day. For some reason Pop gets his supper alone in his room, I guess because he’s better? worse? than them. They seem a lot older than Pop. This is reminiscent of the way Mom was younger than most of the people in her rest home. Mom still had her mind, most of it, but was semi-paralyzed. Pop’s got his body, most of it, but his mind is mostly gone. The horrible stench of the old mushroom-people in the feeding room, the mixture of their bowelly pissy diapers with the nasty cheap food. Unbelievably bad food they served at the rest home, pure fat and salt, and yet the geezers flourish. Overheard snatches of conversation:

“When Aaaaah daaaaah…”

“Wake her up, she’s sleepin’!”

The worst was Mr. Stern, his mouth always open and yelling wuh-wuh-wuh.

For some reason, they had one of the geezers wired for sound. I never saw him or her, but I could hear the noise, like a cow mooing. At first I didn’t realize this was a human voice, but finally I grasped that it was a person with, like, an electronic vocoder device. I realized this after I heard a nurse ask, “How you feeling?”

And the voice was like, “Uh-mooo uh-mooo uh-mooo not too bad uh-mooo uh-mooo…”

Pull the fuckin’ plug! Why bother living? Ah, such despair. But it might be interesting to write about this.

Today I took Pop to Fairfax County Park, a park with a lake right near Reston, just for something to do. We saw a big groundhog run across the road. The park thrilled me, it was so big and green and empty. Casual and run-down, stuff not being watched so closely as in California. No warning signs to do this and not that. We drove across the grass and stopped at a dirt dam by the lake.

Then Pop had to pee. So we U-turned back to the park bathroom. There was a day camp running there, with lots of little boys. They all had gimme caps, each with—their cute fad—a plastic drinking cup worn with its handle through the plastic gimme cap strap in back, the cups bouncing on the backs of their heads.

Pop and I go into the bathroom, and he makes the funny quacking noise he’s always made at kids, a kind of duck noise of squeezing air through the back of his tongue and cheek. Then he goes in a stall and I’m there in my Hawaiian shirt holding him up from the back and helping him with his shorts. Some of the boys were looking at us with terror on the way out, Pop still trying to quack at them, his poor face all chapped and flaking. It was nice to have him out in the real world.

Like I said, one thing Pop still has going for him is his ability to make an immediate personal connection with people, much more than I do. One (unkind) theory is that he’s so desperate for love and attention that he’ll look for it anywhere. He eternally seems like a little boy who wants attention.

Am I also a little boy (a youngest brother like Pop) who wants attention? Not direct immediate attention, certainly. I was always attracted to Einstein’s remarks about solitude, something like, “I am a horse built for a single harness. The isolation I felt as painful when young is now delicious to me.”

Wanting to make things easier for us all, my brother’s been telling Pop that I quit drinking. So the first day that was Pop’s tack, to keep congratulating me for quitting drinking. “It takes such courage to do that, Rudy. Your friends must be so impressed with you. Doesn’t it make everything in your life easier? Congratulations.” But he could tell from my face that it wasn’t true, so Pop loaded on the congrats all the more, wanting to pressure me or to get my goat.

Quitting drinking—am I supposed to imitate everything he does? I’d rather skip going nuts and skip giving up drinking. I’d rather stay just the way I am. In high school he was trying to whip me into being religious. I was active in the Episcopal Young Churchmen, going to meetings with him.

When I was in college, Pop and I sometimes talked about god and the universe. The only time I’ve had a nice heavy god and the universe talk in recent years was with son Rudy, the time we went to Yosemite two years ago. I totally have to do more of that with the kids. We let the chances slip by. There were so few times I went fishing with Pop, and so few times I went fishing with my children.

About the happiest day of my life was the day Rudy and I sailed the canoe from Sprucewold to Boothbay Harbor and back. There’s something so deeply satisfying about being with my son or, for that matter, with my daughters. And even though Pop and I quarreled, I think he did get some deep satisfaction from seeing me this time.

If only I could spend a whole week alone with one of my children, how wonderful that would be. When I got fired from Autodesk, I was dreaming of going trekking in the Himalayas with Georgia or Rudy Jr. or Isabel. I still could do that, before it’s too late. Well, more realistic, why not go trekking in Yosemite with one of them this September? Of course I’ll be back at work then. Well, I will be trekking across the country with my whole family this summer. Going to Siofra’s wedding.

Finally arriving in Munich, still alone, I was overwhelmed with sorrow, thinking of Pop in the rest home. When nothing else can help, when the situation is utterly hopeless, the only thing that can possibly help is god. It feels like god helps.

Alone in Munich I wrote and mailed a letter about this to Pop:

Dear Pop,

Here I am in Munich. I just ate a white hot-dog. Yum!

It made me so sad to leave you crying in your chair. Poor old Pop. There must be some way for you to find some joy in your life, even in these hard times. Maybe it would help to be more aware of GOD? He is everywhere all the time, and I am always with you in my thoughts. I love you.

Rudy

July 13-20, 1994. Munich.

Here I am are on the train from Munich to Heidelberg with Sylvia. All the seats are reserved, and there’s much excitement, nay frenzy, among the arriving passengers about where to sit. Our seats have someone else’s reservations, which kick in at Ulm, halfway there. We’ll deal when it happens, one way or another. The secret is to remember that this is a vacation! Mostly so far we’ve managed.

So, okay, what’s happened so far? I got here a week ago, Wednesday the 13th. A guy picked me up and drove me to the Hotel Adria, a small room on a quiet street near the center of Munich, Liebigstrasse. I think Liebig is the chemist who (according to Thomas Pynchon) invented “imipolex,” beloved substance of my moldies and skin of my lamented boppers.

In Munich I wrote Pop a letter and mailed it, then lay down to nap, and suddenly I heard Sylvia’s voice in the street. She’d gone to Europe ahead of me, stopping in Geneva. I went down and found her checking in. I was so glad to see her. After resting awhile we went into town and had dinner at the Oper Spatenhaus, a Bavarian place across from the Opera, rather fancy and high-priced for something resembling a beer-hall. Plates of sliced roast pig with gravy and huge potato dumplings.

The next morning we walked over to the Isar River near us, then went down the Isar to the Deutsches Museum. It’s a science museum where we’d been with the three kids some fifteen years earlier, in 1979. It made me nostalgic for them, especially when I saw the Tesla-coil-based Jacob’s Ladder behind glass, button-activated—the same exhibit that Rudy Jr. and I had loved so much. Eventually we two built ourselves a Jacob’s Ladder in Lynchburg.

In the early afternoon I had to go to a meeting with our hosts. I’d been invited to Munich for an event called, in a foreigner’s odd notion of English, “Serious Chiller Lounge.” It was to be three nights of entertainment, a mixture of tech and art, in a performance space called the Marstall.

My initial meeting was with the Marstall where the event was to take place. She was perpetually chain-smoking cigarettes, lighting each one with such an air of “I’m cool, I smoke, I’m intellectual.” As if Arf would look around with an expression of deep mindfulness every time he was about to lick his balls. Why elevate a compulsive shameful habit to the status of a meditation tool?

At the meeting, they had pretzels split in half with butter for snacks. Pretzels everywhere in Bavaria, by the way, they call them Brez’n for short. Soft doughy things, made fresh every morning, and kind of stale by day’s end. You found them in your bread-basket at meals, and of course for sale in beer gardens.

Also present at the meeting was the Kafkaesque Konrad Becker who put together the Serious Chiller Lounge concept. Plus some more of the guests, all of them high-end bullshitters like me. One woman had put together an immersive, interactive virtual-reality room where users created polygons with their naive and natural gestures. She was German, Ulrike, and dressed in black leather.

I cornered one of the hosts and asked for the expense money she’d promised me. She said, “Later.” But when I went back onto the street the banks were closed and I couldn’t use my cash card to make a withdrawal and I realized I didn’t even have enough money for a beer! I went back into the offices and made a scene until finally the money-woman gave me a hundred German marks, throwing the money at me, acting very pissed off.

I took the money straight to the Hofbrauhaus, the fabled München cathedral of beer, where I’d been thirty years ago with my brother, and where I’d been again fifteen years ago with the family. I went out in the patio—the beer garden. The idea with a beer garden is that they put it over the cellar where they keep the beer kegs. To keep the kegs cool, they plant chestnut trees over the cellar, and under the trees is the place for the beer garden. Two such lovely words together: “beer” and “garden.” Chestnut trees, you realize soon, are the right tree because they among all trees provide the most shade.

I had some München Weisswurst, a salad, a pretzel and two beers. Only two? At the Hofbrauhaus, all beers are one liter! The München Weisswurst is made fresh every day, of veal, you can’t really get it anywhere else. The white hot dogs you get in the U.S. are not the same at all, they use pork fat and powdered milk to simulate veal. The pretzel came with sticky honeyed mustard. It was nice in the beer garden, in the sun and shade, everyone getting happily tanked. I felt pretty dazed when I got up.

I made my way to the town center where there’s a great church called the Frauenkirche, it got bombed in WWII, and it’s all new inside, with about twenty side-chapels, each one a little masterpiece of art history, containing paintings, sculptures and a huge tall stained glass window. My favorite side chapel had a big painting of St. George killing the dragon, also a sculpture of St. George stepping on a slashed dragon, who was rolling on his back like our dog Arfie.

The really surreal bit was that right over the statue they’d suspended a Virgin Mary, held up by twenty bent six-foot links of iron leading clear up to—heaven?—well, nearly, or in any case up to the vaulted white cathedral ceiling with little polychrome heads squeezed in at each fork and groin, one of the heads seeming to be the image of a pipeless “Bob” Dobbs. In the same booth as St. George was additionally a St. Christopher with a big gnarly branchy staff that was in fact a big gnarly branch, painted black.

Meanwhile someone was playing wild, crazed, modern music on the giant cathedral organ.

That evening at ten was the first of the three Serious Chiller Lounge meetings. The space was cool, a huge cubical room in the Marstall, which means “Royal stables.” They had some fast videos on little screens, and a big screen showing what some VR experiencers were seeing. To me, the talks seemed tedious and completely uninteresting. There was an open bar. I got angry when the organizers still didn’t have my expense money—kind of losing it. My role-model here was Bob Wilson’s behavior in Lisbon when we were there this winter, maybe not such a great model.

The next day I had what felt like the worst hangover of my entire life. Each minute, each second, was a desert of pain to soldier through. We walked downtown and looked at some stores and churches. Slowly I came to. I showed Sylvia the Frauenkirche nook with St. George and the dangling virgin. And then I was well again.

It was raining off and on. At one point we were sitting under Sylvia’s collapsible red umbrella in the Old Botanical Garden near Karlstor, there in the soft rain, flowers all around, a lovely romantic moment. We had a terrific lunch at the Augustinerhaus. A lovely liver ball soup. One big giant liver ball in a clear broth bedecked with chives. Chives in German are Schnittlauch, from cut + leek (Lauch). For that matter, garlic is Knoblauch = knob + leek. These names crack me up. A symposium paper: “New Directions In Teutonic Cuisine: Lauch or Schnittlauch?”

There are beer hall restaurants for each of the various kinds of beer: Hofbrau, Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, and Lowenbrau. Each of the brands makes various kinds: export, pils, weissbier, dunkles weissbier. Weissbier is made with wheat instead of barley, I believe, and is foamier and feels lighter to drink. The Hofbrau Weissbier is called Münchner Kindl, such a cute name, with a picture of a little girl in a riding-hood. “Kindl” is the diminutive of child. One whole night I dreamed of crowded beerhalls and the Münchner Kindl leading my way.

After lunch on Friday, we went to the Haus Der Kunst, a Nazi-built museum with an architecture that’s kind of classical, though more severe. Jugendstil with all the frills removed. The outer walls have holes up at the top where they must have torn off the big eagle and swastika symbols. I think of heavy metal and the Ramones.

One of the shows inside was a combo of Klee, Calder, Miro, Arp, and Kandinsky. I’d never thought of those artists as being so similar, but many of the works seemed almost the same. The paramount theme in their works is the glob.

Klee, Miro, and Kandinsky draw or paint the globs—boomerang shapes, or splatter shapes, usually black, although sometimes colored. Calder makes the same shape out of metal and hangs them in mobiles—you might call them 2.5 dimensional since although flat, they can move. Arp sometimes cuts them out of thick wood and stacks them up, the globs, maybe these could be called 2.25 dimensional. Or, again, Arp may go all the way to 3 dimensionality and sculpt big wobbly globs of stone. It occurred to me that it’d be cool to write a program that displays four-dimensional globs, that is, 4D shapes all of whose 3D cross-sections are reasonably Arpian 3D globs, just as Arp’s 3D globs are such that all of their 2D cross-sections are usable Miro-Kandinsky-Calder-Klee 2D globs.

After the museum, I went for a walk alone in the big Munich park called the English Garden. My feet hurt, so I took off my shoes and socks. Walking through a nudist sunbathing meadow, I took off my shirt as well. Beyond the nudists were students and hippies with guitars, others with tape decks, a girl dancing in the uncrowded meadow. Across the meadow and above the trees rose the towers of the churches of Munich. The sun was out, with gray and white scattered clouds. A beautiful happy scene.

After the meadow I came to the Chinese Tower, one of the most famous beer-gardens in Munich. It was my turn to speak at Serious Chiller Lounge that night, so I had an alcohol-free beer. It was wonderful to see the calm Münchners in the beer garden, with their liters of beer and their huge five-dollar pretzels. Some guys were eating Schweine-Haxe (Pig-Shin), served on a plate with the skin on, the bone in, and a sharp knife plunged into the meat. Iconic cartoon food.

In the early part of that evening, we went over to my first cousin Rudolf von Bitter’s apartment and ate at an Italian restaurant with him. Cousin Rudolf turns out to be a writer as well, he writes two or three books a year for money, things like the text for an art book on the German Blue Rider school artist Macke, or for a travel book about Bavaria. His English is very good, and he’s bright and witty. His wife Christina is an artist who makes white paper-maché & wire sculptures, also lots of pottery, which she sells. They have a new baby named Marie, my niece, with one fourth the same genes! I loved the baby at first sight, she’s cuddly, lively, active, with a big round downy head and two teeth. I held her as much as they would let me.

The German translations of my books have flap-copy that always says my “real” name is Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, and sometimes people think cousin Rudolf writes my books, which is okay with him, even though he won’t read them, telling me at length why it is quite impossible for him to read science-fiction.

I cut short his not entirely unfriendly rap by saying, “I don’t think this is a profitable line of conversation.” No point arguing with my favorite cousin.

At ten in the evening it’s time for more Serious Chiller Lounge, a guy called Nick is to lead off with a talk about Tesla, followed by me reading a story and doing a computer demo. Nick assures me he has only twenty minutes of stuff, and then proceeds to use up an hour and a half reading verbatim from an English manuscript covering the very familiar facts of Tesla’s life, with frequent breaks while the translator reads German versions of the same text. There’s a very small audience tonight, and many of them leave during Nick’s shamelessly horrible Tesla presentation.

The setup at Serious Chiller Lounge is that everyone sits in black lounge chairs arranged in concentric circles, like the rings of an onion, with the speakers and organizers in chairs at the innermost circle, and a coffee table at the center with microphones lying on it. Computer projection screens here and there, and a bar on one side of the room. Everyone but everyone smoking cigarettes, the air thick and terrible. Bright theatrical spotlights pointing down at the central circle.

When I was sitting there, tense to perform and listening to the drone about Tesla, I got very hot from the spotlights and my shirt got soaked with sweat. It was torture worse than riding on an airplane. They’d finally paid me right before the show, but sitting there sweating and bored out of my mind it didn’t seem like they’d paid me nearly enough.

Finally at 11:30 it’s my turn. I spend fifteen minutes reading the German translation of my story “The 57th Franz Kafka,” having fun with the German, and getting the audience into it—they’re laughing and exclaiming.

Before starting, we’d gotten my laptop plugged into a legendary Light Valve projector, so that the image of my Boppers artificial life program is on the screen overhead. The Light Valve, now out of production, uses a carbon arc-light to project through three screens created by spraying colored whale-oil! An incredible device which I’m happy to get to use, having heard about it from superhacker Bill Gosper back in 1987.

The turmite antfarm images from the Boppers program look pretty good. I talk about them in German for another fifteen or twenty minutes, and people ask some questions. One person seems to think I’m being cruel or unfair to the low-scoring ant genomes that get selected out in my process of artificial evolution.

They’d promoted the event pretty well to the press, and a number of journalists interviewed me over the next few days.

One guy turned out to be the translator for the German editions of Software, Wetware, and The Hollow Earth. An interesting man. Told me he wanted to write an SF book himself, about intelligent mushrooms, mushrooms that are computers. I was surprised at the close synchronistic overlay with my current Freeware plans for robots made of soft plastic and fungus. But this guy’s angle was more of a Terence McKenna thing, with the spore as an interplanetary travel method. He mentioned that taxonomists now view the fungi as a third kingdom, a Third Reich, a phrase that carries weight in Germany.

I learned from this guy that most of my books are in fact out of print in Germany. I’d had the idea that since they’d all been translated, they were popular. Not the case. I don’t think I signed a single book for a fan in Munich. Sitting at one of the interminable Serious Chiller Lounge sessions and desperately looking around for a fan, I recognized myself to be acting just like poor old Pop in the Town Center Plaza, anxiously looking for someone to offer adulation.

Another interviewer shot some video of me on the steps of the St. Anna church near our hotel. I was wearing black shoes and socks with my green shorts and a black shirt. I figured the shoes looked so ugly they were like something a rapper would wear, so I started doing hand-signs and rap-singing something like this:

Now listen up here I’m the real MC

Talkin to you from Ger-many.

Got some soup with a great big ball

Liver’s the thing inside the beer hall.

I rock a white sausage that’s hot and long

Frauleins come runnin to hear my song.

I really sing this to the camera, and in my mind that song kept going all morning with happy images of myself stomping back and forth on the church steps with my ungainly black shoes and socks, planting those truckin’ feet down flat and releasing flurries of hand-signs.

I also had a radio interview for Bayerische Rundfunk. The interviewer was like a beatnik DJ, with a skinny head he rocked back and forth, and skinny glasses and pursed lips—he lacked only a goatee. He asked me fairly good questions. As I keep answering questions in interviews, it occurs to me that maybe I do have enough new ideas for another nonfiction book. It would take a book to explain some things that seem fairly obvious to me, such as how to use evolution to produce robots. Of course I’ve written about this before. But nobody seems to get it yet.

I met yet another interviewer at our hotel. This one kept complaining to me that I wasn’t William Gibson, who had been rumored to be coming instead of me. The interviewer hadn’t actually read any of my books. He was worried he was wasting his time.

“How famous are you in America?”

“I am more famous every day.”

Finally there was a cute couple doing interviews, a very Munich-looking girl chewing a pretzel, tall and thin and giggly, and with her a dark romantic thin German dude. They’d read some of my books, so it was fun. I tried to explain about my SF being transreal and in some sense about the present, not the future.

Saturday afternoon, Sylvia and I caught the train out to Prien am Chiemsee, Chiemsee being a lake, and Prien being a town near which Cousin Rudolf’s mother-in-law has a great centuries-old stone farm house, three stories high and solid, with carved scrolls of decoration on the stone. The house is in a big meadow with a view of a low mountain surmounted by high cliffs that I immediately thought of as the Teeth of Death.

Cousin Rudolf met us at the station in Prien, looking very much like his father Franz, my mother’s brother, my uncle. The “von Bitter” look, with the short legs and snub nose and big smile, the feet pigeon-toed, the modest height. It felt so good to see cousin Rudolf at the station, it was, for that second, almost like seeing my dear mother and grandmother again.

Turned out it was Rudolf’s 41st birthday. We hung out at the farmhouse all day. We picked berries—gooseberries, currants, raspberries, wild strawberries—and walked to a nearby cascade to splash in its cool pool.

Baby Marie was a delight all day. It was splendid to be sitting out on benches on the grass under the mountains eating together. I dozed in a chair for awhile. We had a lot of cake and ice-cream and then we got the train back to Munich.

In Munich we only had a half hour till I had to go to the third and final session of Serious Chiller Lounge. I had the bad idea that we should eat in the train station. As it happened, the Men’s and Ladies’ room stairs were right by us and we saw a woman and a man go down in to the Ladies’ room, where she presumably gave him a blow-job. She was a skinny unhealthy waif (Münchner Kindl), he a fat-assed lout. When they exited the bathroom they took off in different directions. And surely the waiter must have been aware, which made him seem like a slimy person to be handling your food.

This last night of Serious Chiller was a round-table discussion, which was okay. And I had some interesting casual conversations afterwards, with kids asking me how to program for a 4D virtual reality, and with a demented French impresario telling me about a “pornological” play he wants to put on which will combine an ascetic philosophic discussion with a hardcore presentation of a live sex act, including a big-screen projection of “la boite” (the woman’s genitals).

For the next couple of days, Sylvia and I just hung around Munich. We kept on dipping into the museums. One high point for me was Peter Bruegel’s Schlaraffenland—called Luilekkerland in Dutch, and The Land of Cockaigne in English. It shows a soldier, a writer, and a peasant lying fatlegged on the ground under a pine-tree. The archetypal Schwein with a knife tucked into his skin, the egg with the spoon, the goose with its neck on the plate, the undone codpieces of the fat, loafing men. Also a small Bruegel, Head of a Peasant Woman, the woman so alert and dumb, so eager and credulous, so young and old, so darling.

One evening we watched the World Cup final between Brazil and Italy on our room’s small color TV. It was fun to be up enough on this to share the experience with the country around us. Sticking my head out the window, I could hear the same TV broadcast from every window.

Our heavy meals, liberally irrigated with fine pilsner, seem to lead to uneasy sleep, also there’s a lot of noise from a city street, even a quiet street. Lots of dreams about crowds in München.

One day I walked to the Mueller’sches Volksbad, a public indoor pool near us that one of the locals had told me was Jugendstil. I bought a bathing suit and went on in there, it was very cool. Really heavy Jugendstil architecture: square columns, lots of bas-relief of, like, dragonflies on the ceiling, the water for the pool pouring out of a big face’s mouth. And swim in it all.

We went to see the Villa Stuck, the Jugendstil home of this odd turn-of-the-century artist, Franz Stuck. Stuck was a handsome, sociable man. He seems to have worked his way up—becoming an artist and architect, marrying a wealthy American woman, being made a noble and becoming von Stuck. In later years he taught at the art academy.

The Stuck Villa is awesome, decorated out the wazoo, with walls painted black or covered with gold mosaic, and hung with the paintings that perhaps Stuck couldn’t sell. He wasn’t really the most talented painter—his images are almost like outsider art, filled with idiosyncratic mythological references and slavering eroticism. Especially absurd was Die Wippe (The See-Saw), showing two women straddling either end of a log wedged in the fork of a tree. The lower woman is white and calm, the higher woman is in red and writhing as if in sexual passion over that big Stuck of log between her legs.

Sylvia said, “It’s hard to believe these guys were active at the same time as the Impressionists. It’s like the Jugendstil artists never went outside. Just stayed in dark rooms jacking off.”

Moe than being a painter—Stuck was an impresario, a bit like a Pop artist. He made elaborate, architectural gilded frames for his paintings—particularly for his greatest hit, Die Suende (or Sin), which he copied and resold several times over. And he used the modernist expedient of photographing models and using those images to lay out his paintings.”

Upstairs in Stuck’s studio is his personal copy of Die Suende—atop a huge altar with polished nautilus shells on it. I love artists.

July 21-22, 1994. Heidelberg.

So then we got the train to Heidelberg, where we’d lived from 1978 to 1980. Richer than we used to be, we checked into the famous Hotel zum Ritter just up the hill from the scenic Alte Brücke (old bridge), and down the hill from the castle.

Being in Heidelberg makes me terribly nostalgic. Fifteen years ago I was a young man here, full of ideas, writing Infinity and the Mind, White Light, and Software, not to mention most of the stories in The 57th Franz Kafka. And the children were so sweet and young. Tiny nursery-school Isabel, first-grade Rudy, dynamic ten-year-old Georgia. It wasn’t an easy time for Sylvia, but for me—well, it seems like paradise, at least in retrospect. I thought I had so much time to finish my thinking.

The ideas I developed were, in many respects, my complete and finished thoughts, e.g., on robot consciousness via evolution. But at the time I thought I was still just roughing out a start. I didn’t realize it was a high-water mark, and that I would never again think so deeply about the philosophy of mathematics. The Liar Paradox, the Berry Paradox—I solved them all to my own satisfaction; I got them to stop itching at me. And I created a kind of para-solution to the Continuum Problem in the form of White Light.

Walking around town, I see familiar things everywhere. The store where I bought the leather pants I wore when I was singing lead with my punk band the Dead Pigs in Lynchburg. The corner where we nearly got crushed by the crowd during the Wine Festival. The bar where Alwin Bitter goes in The Sex Sphere after the small sex spheres invade. The corner where I bought a book providing a Marxist analysis of Uncle Scrooge Comics. A cafe where I sat with Mom. A corner where I gave a Turk a hundred-dollar bill from Pop for a bar of hashish—which turned out to be fake. The years, the years.

I feel dizzy and bewildered amid all these familiar sights. The gold-haloed statue of the Virgin in a square below the castle, the striped towers of the bridge, the crumbly red facade of our hotel, The great castle floating above the town like a dream.

We had a glass of wine at an ancient local student place, maybe three hundred years old, a place called the Schnookeloch. They like that ending loch (means “hole”) for bars. What would the Lochloch be? A place for Texans…

So okay, one glass of wine and I cheered right up. We caught the bus out to Schlierbach, only two stops down, it’s where we lived during our two years in Heidelberg. We checked out Isabel’s nursery school, the kids’ elementary school, the little market we shopped at, and the imposing big house that we rented in our first year. Sylvia enjoyed seeing the yard of this house as she’d based one of her paintings on it, and it still matched the painting.

It was lovely there in front of that house, in the rain, thinking that the two of us were still together. And then we had dinner at the Wolfsbrunnen, where we’d loved to go, when we could afford it, back in the fifteen-years-ago past. We had blue trout, delicious, unchanged, every detail of the restaurant unchanged, how nice it is to visit a place where things aren’t in upheaval.

After dinner we walked by the other place where we lived during our stay in Heidelberg, a university guesthouse. Two little boys were playing in the driveway, talking to us in German about crushing snails. One of them had an American accent and pointed to where he lived, just where we’d lived.

We made it back to the hotel, caught a classy violin concert in the church across the street, and went to bed with a complex, fractal hubbub of human voices outside.

Onward. We spent a night with my cousin Frederike in Worms. She’s very lively, almost hyper, gave us a whirlwind tour of the town, then presented a huge pre-cooked dinner and fancy tiramisu dessert for the assembled group. It’s reassuring to hear Frederike and, for that matter, cousin Rudolf, speak a bit harshly of their parents—each has an ailing, unhappy, widowed mother in a rest home. Makes me feel less guilty about my problems with Pop.

And now Sylvia and I are riding the train from Worms to Amsterdam, and I’m sitting across from her in a second-class car.

“Say hi for the journal, dear.”

“What do you mean say hi? Put the computer away. Look out the window. Join the living.”

There’s a kid standing in the aisle staring at me. I’d like to give him a good whack. Sylvia and I had a big lunch between Mainz and Koln, going along the Rhine, us sitting at a white tablecloth in the dining car—what a life—with the castles passing by on the craggy hill-tops, above the vineyards, above the red-roofed villages at the edge of the thin Rhine with its barges rushing up and down, the full barges snugged down into the water like chauffeurs’ caps somehow. A castle every few miles. It must have been a tough gig being a peasant with all those robber-barons to ride down and rip you off.

We roll past Utrecht, moving closer to Amsterdam across the flat land, past the cows with big swollen udders full of milk for Gouda cheeses, with little drainage ditches and canals everywhere.

I came here once when I was about eight, with Mom. We were getting a ship back to the U.S. after visiting her parents, and I remember looking at all the cows, and then Mom buying me the best steak I’d ever had in my life. And after that I kept talking to her about how soft and juicy the cows must be from eating that nice green grass—I guess I was hinting around for another steak, but I don’t think I got one, not that we were in Holland for long before the ship left. Maybe I’ll get another steak like that this time.

Guess who’s going to show up in Amsterdam to join us for a couple of days? Isabel, that’s who. She’s been in Paris all month taking a summer program at the Sorbonne, and she has this weekend off.

July 23, 1994. Amsterdam. Van Gogh.

We found some inexpensive rooms for Isabel and for us, practically in an attic. In the morning we got all-day tickets on a canal bus which took off from nearby. The deal with the canals is that the central part of Amsterdam is like a spider’s web, with about five concentric semi-circular canals arrayed around the main part of the old town. There’s some radial canals as well as the semicircles. Our hotel was on Kaisersgracht (Emperor’s Canal), the second to last canal, and a block further out was Prinzgracht (Prince’s Canal), where we got the canal bus.

Our hotel is almost next to the Westerkirk (West Church). I like the Westerkirk. Its architecture is very overdone and ornate, sort of like the ultimate “Colonial” architecture, with big double Zhabotinsky rolls of stone on each pediment, and the tower with lots of pillars, like part of a fancy brass clock. And at first I was repelled on the basis of my mental association of this building with the tiresome Colonial things in the U.S.—I think in particular of the Heritage Acres housing development near Jerry Falwell’s house in Lynchburg, Virginia, with each house having a Chippendale Zhabotinsky scroll over the door, each of these cast from cheap plastic that slowly droops in the endless heat, in the unpleasant wet sun, in the miasma of small minds and grating voices.

But the Westerkirk is cool, like a really nice antique brass clock, the original, the archetype, and not some sub-bastardized knock-off. I dug the fabulous Van Eyck-like brass candelabra in the Westerkirk, and the plain Protestant white interior and transparent old window glass, with marble gravestones flat in the floor.

Sylvia, Isabel, and I rode the canal bus to the museum district and hit the Van Gogh Museum right away. It was great. My favorite four pictures were from June/July 1890, right before he shot himself. If you could paint like that, how could you want to die? Maybe it was like unbearable to be that good? It’s tough being a great artist, yes it is.

The Vincent I got into the most of the fave four was one of a mansion or castle at twilight. What he does with the brush work is to completely shape the strokes to the subject of that part of the picture. In the grass the strokes are quick parallel vertical lines. On the sunset horizon there’s a stack of parallel orange strokes, a pile of light. And, ah, in the big trees the strokes are like Roger Penrose’s Perplexing Poultry tiles, that is, they’re like an M.C. Escher tessellation, yes indeed, with leaf, branch, sky, and sun colors tiled in, light and dark leaves, man I have got to use this in Freeware. Imagine a Perplexing Poultry Philtre for your eyes, man, to make the world look like the mature work of Vincent van Gogh.

As well as thinking of Vincent’s brushwork in terms of the Poultry, I also, since Isabel was there, thought of it in terms of a hyena tearing a piece of meat in half by whipping its head around in crazy-eights. This being a rap that Isabel and I got into while watching a nature show one time—how a hyena that’s bitten onto something big (possibly even an entire ruminant), will lash its head around in a kind of figure-eight pattern to tear loose a bite of flesh. And Isabel and I had gotten into doing that to each other’s shoulders, or threatening to, and getting into the very wild and hyper motion of your head that goes with it. So looking at Vincent’s last pictures, I found my head moving around in those loops, imagining how it would be to tear into that kind of painting—if you could do it.

July 23, 1994. Amsterdam Hash.

Today I saw god.

I smoked a hash joint from the Sunny Corner Has It Coffee Shop near the flea market, right beside a rickety black building where Rembrandt used to live. The joints were six guilders each, rolled conical with a black wrapper around the bottom saying “Pluto” and with a picture of the Disney dog. The joint full of hash and tobacco.

A hash rush comes in waves, I’d forgotten about that until lying on my back resting from 6 to 8 in the evening, alone with my joint. And naturally I wonder if I should be smoking another one? Naw, naw, always remember that with cannabis, “less is more,” meaning that I’m saving a few of those slowly replenished brain transducer chemicals to burn up tomorrow, I hope.

I’ll get back to seeing god in a minute, but first I have to put down a big teaching I got today, riding in the canal bus with Sylvia and Isabel, all of us tired, riding past the beatup boats in the outer port with wild mad messy bohemian guys in them. The teaching: Instead of killing myself, I can at any time move to Amsterdam and live a life of pleasure. Not that I’m planning to kill myself anytime soon, but if ever the urge becomes really obsessive and inescapable and starts to totally buffalo me, as it sometimes threatens to do (though never for more than a day at a time, so far), then whoah, then I’ll move to Amsterdam where I can get all the pot I want all of the time. And the canals are full of water and the streets lovely, the funky people, the fractal housing, the party atmosphere, yes, I will flee to Amsterdam rather than die, should it come to that.

Thinking this, I’m conveniently ignoring the fact that the most common reason for me to want to die is a pot hangover—which is something I’d be having all the time if I lived in Amsterdam.

So, okay, the way I saw god early this evening was to be staring up at a dangling cobweb thread, with a thickish clump of vertical cobweb at the bottom. Sylvia is napping at my side, Isabel’s in her own room. The cobweb clump, relative to the dangling thick dusty thread, is in the same proportion as the Virgin Mary sculpture in the München Frauenkirche relative to the twenty rods of linked metal rising to the pseudoinfinite cathedral sky.

It was very hot in our attic room, it being about ninety degrees outside in the day. It was so hot that I left our door open and opened the door across the hall leading to a downwards attic escape stair, so we had a slight breeze through our bedroom’s tiny crank-open window.

Still setting the stage here, when I see god, I’m flat on my back, high, enjoying the drifting motions of a dangling piece of spiderweb.

I thought about the fact that the air is moving through our room now, when before it wasn’t. Did I coax the air in here? Does the air gain by coming through here instead of proceeding along the path it had before?

The air is a parallel computation. Each molecule, each urgent dot, seeks to go the fastest way. At first there was no flow through our room, but then a flow developed. I can track the flow visually by staring at the spider-silk Virgin Mary, watching her motions and admonitions, watching the direction of her body’s vector, and watching the catenary Hooke oscillations of her suspension cable.

The air is like water—I think of how a stream seeks its way, so eager, so tireless, so quick to discover the best path. Parallel computation, yes.

So where’s god in this? Well, the thing I did to make myself higher after fixating on the spidersilk was to defocus my eyes as if viewing a stereogram or a reversing Necker cube—so that now the clump of the silk seemed to be counter-rotating in a backward direction, opposite to its true rotation. And around then god came out like ultrapurple neon from behind the ceiling beams.

I started thinking about Pop and about how good it felt to be seeing god, and how only god could help Pop now. But thinking about poor Pop was of course a stumbling block, and the ecstasy stopped.

I lie there for a while, hearing the world’s sounds. A hash rush comes by again and I fixate on the spider silk and the drifting wad moves back and forth, first in front of the black beam, then in front of the white plaster ceiling, and when it’s in the white it disappears, and the ultraviolet light is back. I push a second big rush through my brain like bodysurfing a wave in Santa Cruz—I jump onto the hashwave and ride the pleasure flow into my brain. Surfing with god.

July 24, 1994. Barney’s Beanery. Late Sketch.

Today I got high again, about four in the afternoon, I wandered into the R. Crumb Coffeeshop, on a quiet sunny yellow awning corner between two canals. They had Crumb cartoons on their discreet handbill inside, which was a map saying this shop was only three minutes from the Melke Weg, a concert hall.

It was all stoned Dutch guys in the Crumb Coffeeshop, their faces a collective archetype I’ve seen traces of in different faces. I’d never before grasped that there is a clear core concept of Dutch faces.

I can hardly believe I can come in here on a stroll towards a planned after-lunch nap, and that I can get hash, many varieties. I, perhaps too quickly, opt for the first offered, a blonde Lebanese at sixteen guilders a gram. Better I should get some of the black Kabul tomorrow to make it easier to ride those big mindwaves like yesterday? In the coffeeshop I also scored some nice bud called Northern Lights at fourteen a gram, and rolled a little of that. Just now I had a lights’n’lebanese Dutch cigar on the deck-cum-fire-escape a hair below our room.

But, alas, the pot and hash today don’t have anything like the theological roll that the Pluto the Dog joints yesterday had.

I’ve already depleted my brain-chemicals for the next few days. That’s a problem with pot. And if you keep it up, you start feeling low when you’re not high. “When I awoke, it was as if everything were made of wood,” as P. D. Ouspensky puts it in his essay, “Experimental Mysticism.”

This morning I saw the most wonderful work of art I’ve experienced in years. Barney’s Beanery by Edward Keinholz in the modern art museum here behind the van Gogh museum.

From the outside, the piece looks like a dumpster, painted silver, with some sketchy assembly instructions consisting of the circled letters A, B, and C, along with a few crooked lines, and arrows directed at holes in the surface of the dumpster, holes through which power and speaker wires were making their way.

Outside the dumpster’s door is a newspaper stand with papers bearing the headline “KIDS KILL KIDS: VIETNAM,” and the date of August 28, 1964. Inside the big box the Righteous Brothers are singing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” on a tape over a crackle and gabble of conversation and dishes. At first I wonder “what are they going to play next,” and slowly I realize it is always the same song by the Righteous Brothers.

It looks like there’s lots of people inside the place, it’s full like a crowded bar/beanery late at night in August, 1964. It’s easy to find my way down in along the aisle. I’m light and huge, I’m the ghost of Summer 1994, thirty years into the future of the world of Barney’s Beanery.

It’s easy to get in because the “people” are statues. And the reason I feel big is that all the people are about five-sixths normal size. The beer bottle on the waiter’s tray at the back must be, come to think of it, a pony-size bottle. Everyone and every detail of chair bar table sign bottle plate, every detail is consistently at the same subhuman scale. About five sixths or three fourths, or maybe the golden proportion, the golden Keinholz “Barney’s Beanery” proportion, long may it wave.

So Sylvia and I enter the Beanery and I lead our way to the back, as if we were invading a real Beanery. The weird thing, everybody in here has a clock for their face. Why?

Listen to the music. “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Not only is it always the same song, it’s always the same verse and chorus. This one small loop of time is it.

On the shelf at head-level behind the bar are the lettered drink specials. Towards the back is a sign saying something like “All Visitors of Barney’s Beanery Must Order An Amount Exceeding 35 cents.” And pasted to the sign with scotch tape is a quarter and a dime. Running down from the coins along the wall is a ballpoint line and arrow pointing to a guy with his face down on the side on the table top, except his head seems to be a large vacuum tube. How early cyberpunk, a head that is a vacuum tube. And how nineteenth-century, to have everyone’s head be a clock. A clock with hands.

So then Sylvia and I got out, sharing a tender lingering-feeling moment by the Barney’s Beanery dial payphone, and then Isabel went in there alone real fast, emerging not particularly impressed, at least not impressed enough to be patient with my grandiose woke-up-still-high exegesis of Barney’s Beanery.

“It’s a moment in time,” I told Isabel. “Wouldn’t it be cool if all of the people’s face-clocks in there showed the same time?”

“Yeah, duh,” snaps Isabel, impatient with me. “They’re all set to ten-ten.”

“Oh,” I say, and decide I’ve got to go back in to check this and other details.

So later after we’ve seen all the great stuff on the upper floor, and the women are in the card shop or hanging out in the vast building’s open spaces, I run downstairs and dart around all the wambling other tourists who are about to maybe see the Beanery, and I get inside it and worm my way to the back corner where the music is the loudest and I’m the farthest from the unending reality of this working life.

It’s the same Righteous Brothers chorus, the same emotion wells up in me again…and again…and again…

This is my college years. I mean this Beanery is like a great wild college drinking and diner night. I’m, like, staggering around in that world where Ed Keinholz had a special moment, not so much more wonderful than any other moments, but still a wonderful moment, and he like mentally photographed it so that he could reproduce it at a golden ratio of scale in a dumpster-sized box with input lines labeled A B and C for wonderfully simple sixties analog technology of power and audio.

I look sharply at the clock faces of the people and Isabel is right, it’s ten ten over and over for ever and ever.

Everything is starting to look like Jugendstil. Sylvia looked so beautiful and Jugendstil today in her gray silk armless dress, especially inside when the diffused light would play across her curves and surfaces in a soft metal symphony.

Now it’s hours later, Sunday night, 1:30 in the morning, and I want to do a sketch. I’m sitting in our hotel room with my chest and face lit by the light of my computer screen, a screen mainly white now, as I’m running my word processor with its white background.

Good light. What I see in the room is a shiny wooden door with a European handle and key hole. In the center of the door is the vertical rectangle of a slender mirror.

What I see in the mirror is me, slumped in a chair, my arms leading to the keyboard, which is out of the picture. I am nude. I am an artist painting his self-portrait in Amsterdam. I dig the Vermeer or LaTour quality of the screen’s gentle light.

Maybe, if I’m Jugendstil, I’ve turned into the Münchner Kindl, with luscious planes of flesh shaping on my bod. I see a yellow and orange quality to the screenlight on my chest. My stomach, however, has a different color than my chest—darker, and bluish. My stomach is a domelike bulge, a separate entity, a parasite organism poised for action, a crawling flesh melon, a juicebeetle, an upside-down Philip Guston head.

Guston, you understand, always draws heads with a big jutting bewhiskered jaw and a single profile eye represented by the traditional bulging-base isosceles triangle with a black pupil-dot in it. Usually the head is smoking a cigarette, or sometimes it’s staring at a bottle or at food.

My true head is thin-looking, upright. I have round glasses and crest of short hair. I see my reflected face with the eye on the left holding a crazed, pinpoint dot of mirrorbright white light. The eye on the other side of the face is black, with a faint dot in the spectacle lens. The twist of my face, the sprouting white beard on my chin, my malleable mouth.

I put my eyes out of focus. This puts my face in the mirror inside out, and the computer screen does a four-dimensional hyper-rotation to point the wrong way.

The light on my chest, the thinness of my head with its crest.

I am in a nearly invisible armchair against a background of a white wall with a cranked-open window with a gauze inner curtain and a flowered green and yellow outer curtain. All that you see of my body is a gentle lozenge, a square meter or less, a bit of flesh-satin, the upper edge of this parallelogram of puff is my clavicles, and the diagonal downward edges are my arms, with nice chiaroscuro effects on the biceps to the right, and the light is like in an edifying painting of a candle-lit philosopher.

There’s a flaw in the mirror, within which I can enter a state of flow, seeing the faces of all other people I saw today. I stare at the flow until a light at my left draws my attention—oh yeah, slobber slobber, that’s the lit screen of my computer.

Back to the sketch. Stare into the mirror and describe what I see. The shapes are still shifting, try and catch one. A serious old administrator woman with bare breasts, perhaps she’s a school principal—oops, now it’s me again. With the Holland candlelight on my chest. Now the last rush is wearing off and it’s time to write about something besides your mirror reflection, Rudy.

Big bell bongs two outside, Thurn and Taxis.

Pop Dies

August 1, 1994. Pop Died Today.

Pop died today, at 4:30 in the morning. Embry phoned me to tell me this morning. It was his heart. Pop’s timeline:

Year	Age	Event
1914	0	Born in New York City, October 1.
1932	18	Finishes High School, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
1936	22	Graduates Virginia Military Institute.
1936	22	Starts work at Atlantic Steel Castings in Chester, Pa.
1939	25	Marries Marianne von Bitter in Berlin.
1941	27	Son Embry Jr. born in Philadelphia. Pop’s father dies.
1943	29	Moves to Louisville.
1946	32	Son Rudy born.
1950	36	Rucker Corporation bankrupt. Starts Champion Wood.
1954	40	Begins to study for ministry.
1960	46	Ordained a deacon of Episcopal church.
1963	49	Pastor of St. Aidan’s, Alexandria, Virginia.
1969	55	Moves to Reston, starts Episcopal Congregation.
1974	60	Coronary bypass surgery.
1975	61	Compiles sermons as 300 Weeks of Sundays.
1976	62	Retires from ministry.
1978	64	Moves to Louisville, leaves wife.
1979	65	Travels to Europe with Priscilla Ames.
1981	67	Opens Lake Anne Grocery.
1984	70	Seventieth birthday, writes memoir, Being Raised.
1989	75	Embry Rucker Homeless Shelter named after him.
1991	77	Ex-wife Marianne von Bitter dies.
1992	78	Mild stroke.
1993	79	Bad stroke, enters nursing home.
1994	79	Dies, August 1.

I’m trying to get an overview of Pop’s life. What was the pattern, the arc? Looking at the table, I try breaking his life into decades by his age.

In his twenties he starts his family. Thirties: he learns the ropes of business in Louisville. Forties: he becomes a successful businessman. Fifties: he’s a minister. Sixties: he’s adrift. Seventies: he’s resting.

August 2, 1994. In Shock.

This has taken the wind out of my sails. Kicked my pins from under me. Knocked out my breath. Snipped a part of the world-worm I’m connected to.

He’s already cremated. I’m just beginning to grieve. I feel very unstable, I need to be calm and be good to myself. Don’t rage.

Sylvia’s cousin Judith just called. She’ll be there at the funeral in Virginia. It’s nice to hear a warm Hungarian voice that I can express emotion to. I was so glad that I started crying as we hung up.

“I’m an orphan.”

August 3, 1994. Fly to Reston for the Funeral.

So here I am on a goddamn airplane again, flying to Reston. Sylvia is staying home in Los Gatos with the girls. But! Rudy Jr. is with me, what a joy, what a good idea.

It was after talking to Judith yesterday, that I realized how much I wanted a family member to go through this with me. Brother Embry is coming with his wife and son, Embry III, but I wanted a member of my own little family whom I could feel cozy with. It’ll be fitting to have the two Rudys and two Embrys there for old Embry’s burial tomorrow.

Not so much grief today. I’m distracted by the travel, and by the powerful hangover. Yesterday afternoon and evening I smoked a lot of jays of homegrown and drank a lot. Later I was playing music. Pop wouldn’t have approved.

August 5, 1994. Pop’s Funeral.

So now Rudy and I are flying back home. The funeral was yesterday at 4 pm. Embry, Noreen and little Embry showed up around noon, we had lunch together in the plaza at Pop’s favorite restaurant. The owner gave us the meal on the house.

After lunch Embry and I went to look at the graveyard. We ran into Priscilla there, she was with her and Pop’s young friend Skye, also Pop’s faithful follower Larry LeGallo. Priscilla said she’s arranged everything and that Pop is being buried near Priscilla’s daughter in a double plot where Priscilla plans to be buried. But Embry and I didn’t see any hole prepared in the ground, which seemed odd.

I found an unusual mushroom with a thick sturdy stem and a small cap. Penis-like. I decided it was a symbol of Pop and I kept it. I found it uprooted there, lying on the ground. I showed it to Embry and told him it was Pop. He kind of agreed, and we both called it “Pop.” I put it in my rented car’s glove compartment. I’d rented a Lincoln Town Car, by the way, the same car I had when I went to Mom’s funeral three years ago.

Embry and I went over to the funeral home and asked why there wasn’t a hole in the ground, and the owner, a cozily Virginia-accented old guy said Priscilla had never been to the plot before and she was a bit wrong about where it was.

We four Rucker men dressed up in our black suits for the ceremony. Rudy’s suit was the same black suit I bought him when we were visiting Pop after his big stroke and it had seemed like Pop was about to die. Little Embry bought some black shoes from a store across from the graveyard—and in fact returned them right after he used them for the funeral. Little Embry is cool. Showing Reston some class.

We got to the graveyard and there was a little blue tent over the spot where Pop was going to be buried. His ashes were in a black cardboard box with a small white label saying RUCKER. I felt angry at Priscilla for not having spent the money for a decent-looking little wood box to put his ashes in. When Embry and I bought a box like that for Mom’s ashes in Louisville, it only cost $35. Embry and I should have done this for Pop, but this time we were too out of the loop to know what was needed.

I wished Priscilla hadn’t been so fast to cremate Pop, so that Embry and I could have seen his body. She and Larry LeGallo went on and on about how peaceful Pop looked after he died, and how calming it was to sit with his body. She should have given me and Embry a chance to say our goodbyes as well.

Well, anyway, there we were at the funeral. A young man was giving out nice little leaflets, the size of folded stationery note cards, with my favorite picture of Pop on the front, the one of him holding up a pottery chalice made by Mom—I took the picture myself. His face glowing with health and love and grace. Inside was his name and dates:

EMBRY COBB RUCKER

October 1, 1914

August 1, 1994

Also a poem about him being the master builder of Reston, and on the back a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that Robert Kennedy had used to introduce a memorial film about his dead brother JFK:

And when he shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

My rarely seen cousins Tim and Don Rucker were there with most of their kids, a nice-looking family. Dear cuddly Don Marritz turned up, rumpled in his suit, mentioning being Jewish every few minutes, trying to defuse his malaise over being at a Christian religious ceremony. A bunch of Pop’s old parishioners from St. Aidan’s came up to me. And after the burial, Tibor and Judith Gajary presented themselves.

Priscilla arrived in a limo with a bunch of young girls—her special pet Skye, and six or seven assistant Skyes. She’s forever hungry for young girls because her daughter was murdered, which was how she got her hooks into Pop in the first place, while he was being a minister and comforting her. Priscilla and her girls took up all of the eight little chairs at the graveyard at first, but then they were embarrassed and they let Embry and Noreen and I sit down.

The cardboard box was on a piece of Astroturf. A number of people made speeches. The words went past me, some of them were by local politicians, all were praising Pop, but not the sandy freckly Pop I knew as my father.

They read a couple of poems. They didn’t use the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer burial service at all, which seemed odd. Pop was, after all, an Episcopal priest. Embry and I had missed the chance to plan the prayers. The man officiating was a Presbyterian minister.

At some point the climax arrived, and two undertakers in suits rolled back the Astroturf and put the box down in a narrow pre-dug hole that had a dry clayey pile of Virginia dirt next to it. There were two worn planks by the hole to keep it from crumbling. A fly or a bee was on one plank moving around. A leafy stem of chickweed was waving at the edge of a hole. A tiny ant was running around on the other plank. I could see a little grasshopper on a sprinkler head.

They put Pop’s box in the hole. I stood up to watch. Then a white woman sang “Amazing Grace” and it was over. The Gajarys talked to me, I took their picture next to a nearby gravestone that was, by coincidence, for the Hungarian Prime Minister. I went back under the tent to look in the hole at the box again. The woman who’d sung “Amazing Grace” yelled at me that they were taking down the tent, so I should get away.

I ignored her. The hole wasn’t very deep, maybe three feet. I dropped in a folded letter that Georgia had written for Pop. I took a picture.

I wanted to cry hard at the funeral like at Mom’s but I could only cry a little. Rudy cried some too. I need to cry more about this.

We stood around. I talked with Embry and Don Marritz and Rudy. Then we drove over to the reception at the Embry Rucker Homeless Shelter. They had some ham and fried chicken and Kool-Aid. No booze. It was really crowded, and I didn’t see anyone I knew. It was hard to make myself go in. My shirt was completely wet with sweat. We went in and ate a little and only about two people from Reston spoke to me. We talked with Embry and cousins Tim and Don and with Don Marritz. I’m so glad he was there. He’s as comfortable as an old shoe.

After awhile it was emptying out, and it seemed like time for a drink. Priscilla and Skye came outside with us. I slipped off the curb and almost twisted my ankle.

“Good-bye,” said Priscilla.

“Thanks for being so nice to Pop,” I said.

“I loved him,” she said.

And that may well be the last time I ever see her. Possibly she’ll get in touch to give me some mementos of Pop, but this seems unlikely. Anyway I have some things from him already, like his cuff-links and his armchair and his threadbare blue cardigan sweater. And I have the mushroom named “Pop.”

Don Marritz and Rudy and I went down to the Reston Plaza, right by the Heron House building where Pop and Priscilla lived. We got three Sapporo beers in the Fresh Value market and drank them sitting on a bench. Don said a nice thing about meeting Pop when we were in college. “Your father was the oldest person I knew who still thought.”

Then Embry and family turned up and we all sat down for supper. I sat between Rudy and my old pal Don, with the two Embrys next after that, I was sitting in just the right place. It was a nice meal, we talked a lot.

I tried to imagine Pop there with us at dinner, but in my image, he was either disapproving of our drinking, or he was distracted and absent and staring off into space like he so often did. He wasn’t really someone who you could have a fun meal with, he could never keep his attention on it. And he was something of a Puritan. He’d often be kind of disparaging about fancy food, like, “Who needs this crazy stuff?”

After dinner I drove the Embrys back to their motel. Rudy Jr. and I were sleeping at some friends of Pop’s. At the motel Embry said how he’d always felt like Pop left his family for Reston. We’d felt excluded at the funeral. Alienated.

At the funeral one of the speakers mentioned that Pop’s was always telling them they were perfect. In fact he used to give out printed buttons saying, “EMBRY SAYS I’M PERFECT.” This was a thing that bugged Embry and me—Pop tended not to think that his sons were perfect at all, and was frequently ready with judgments and criticisms. But, come to think of it, the very last time I saw Pop, before we had that final argument, he said, “I love you, Rudy, you’re almost perfect, but…” And then he stopped himself and lightened up. “Oh, you are perfect. You’re perfect.”

And now Pop’s dead and buried. It still doesn’t feel quite real. I have such mixed and conflicted feelings about him. And those feelings never got resolved in his lifetime. His life just ended, loose ends and all.

Seeing the bugs by his grave reminded me of my Yosemite vision of the web of life, of all the living things being connected.

I’m sad.

The thing about dying that strikes me now is that I’ve always tended to think that people will get better, that problems will be overcome, that issues will get worked out. There’s this subconscious belief in the ameliorability of human nature, a scientistic humanistic faith which we imbibe with our education. But at some point people don’t get better or change. They age and die, and that’s the end of it.

Death seems so much realer to me than it did years ago.

August 21, 1994. Drive Louisville for Wedding.

Rudy and I got back from Pop’s funeral, and the next day, Sylvia, the three kids, and I started our trip to Louisville for the wedding of brother Embry’s daughter Siofra. We drove out in six days, spent two full days there, then turned around and drove back for six days.

Now I know just how far it is from Louisville, my birthplace, to California, my present home. 5,400 miles round trip on my odometer. About ninety hours of driving.

Was it fun? Well, sometimes it got real hard to still be in the car and to still have all those miles ahead of us. But we saw a lot of cool things and I had some good thoughts. Louisville was nice.

Now we’re back. Last night I did a bookstore reading for The Hacker and the Ants. The bookstore was called A Clean Well-Lighted Place. I kept my shades on for the first part of the event. Instead of reading from my novel, I talked about my two trips back east. It was a heavy rap. I was high. The audience was spellbound.

While we were in Louisville for the wedding, I visited Mom’s grave. I touched the dirt and kissed it, and cried hard, my tears dripping down onto her grave. The crying for Pop is coming out too. It’s not true to say that it feels good to cry. But I know I have to.

I remember the time Pop showed up in Amherst, Virginia, near Lynchburg when I gave my talk on “The Central Teachings of Mysticism” at my friend Mary Abrams’s graduation party. Pop liked the talk. Mary’s husband David Abrams said that while I was speaking, Pop looked at me with an expression of nachas, a Yiddish word meaning the pride you have when one of your children is doing well. Pop would have liked my talk last night.

Grief

September 14, 1994. Burned. Offer for Freeware.

The other day I was supposed to pick up Rudy and his friend Rafael Nuñez at BART in San Francisco and they were an hour late. I hung around my car by the station so long that a street person offered to sell me “an eighth of purple-hair green Afghani” for forty dollars. And I actually fucking fell for it, risking arrest, and I ended up with a paper Burger King bag padded out by three rolled-up paper napkins.

The denouement happened with Rudy and his friend Rafael looking on—they’d suddenly arrived just after I got the tightly closed bag. I didn’t unroll the top and peek inside after I’d already started driving—and then I was so shocked to see nothing but napkins that I rear-ended the car in front of me. Rudy Jr. was nearly hysterical with laughter at seeing Dad bungle. The laugh was almost worth the forty dollars, I guess. And the guy in the car I bumped didn’t take down my name or number.

At the start of the month, my editor John Douglas at Avon came through with a strong offer for hardback and paperback editions of Freeware. I talked to him on the phone.

“What can I say,” he says. “It’s great, fascinating, and it looks like you’ll outdo yourself once again.”

Very encouraging. My best fiction advance yet.

October 18, 1994. Like a Passing River CD.

Last week a beautiful CD came in the mail. It’s Like a Passing River, by Roy Whelden. He came here and taped me a year or two ago. I read from my 1983 memoir novel, All the Visions, and Roy mixed my voice with performances by his Baroque string quartet, and with the singing of soprano Karen Clark. The result is wonderful. It’s like a transcendentalized, operatic version of my book.

There’s a song in there about my notion of god as a white light, with my line, “Oh man we are in heaven, for sure for sure.” Roy built a hauntingly lovely operatic oratorio onto that, followed by a bridge of wondrous sine-wave-humming, leading to a sprachgesang or spoken-song passage including my line, “What’s the point, can’t somebody tell me,” and then forward into my vision of flying “into the light” and reaching a zone with “no space, no time.”

Jeez-crypt it’s a mystic celebration, and, me, I’m the dude who had that vision. Hearing the disc kindles those fine old thoughts in me again. I feel like now my visions are preserved as well as Meister Eckhart’s are. Was the Eck still seeing god when 50?

“Give us this day our daily rush, on the nod as thou art in heaven.”

I actually wrote that line. Words to live by. And here’s Karen Clark’s great lush opera voice singing it. I’ve always kind of wanted to hear a line like that when I listen to religious songs. Karen caresses and enjoys the line. And then in case you didn’t catch it, my voice echoes it at the end of the song.

There’s another song about my teenage realization of the inevitability of death—which took place at a party at the Riverview Valley Country Club in Louisville.

“It first hit me when I was sixteen: you’re going to die.”

In setting up this song, they use a few bars of “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which fits, as I myself sampled this song in my line:

“I know the answer: sometimes I’m happy sometimes I’m blue.”

Surf it, bro.

November 2, 1994. Castro Street Halloween.

The Castro parade was quite an event. Sylvia and I walked there from Georgia’s place in the Haight with Georgia and her friend Bethany, stopped for some Mexican food on the way, walking along Divisadero which ends up at Castro and Market, in fact its name changes to Castro.

The first thing I saw was a man with a cardboard toilet around his head with his face sticking out of the bowl and a plastic dick over his nose. Then a gaggle of big queens, at first sexy to see, but—where’s the hips? Some of them wore wedding dresses, in fact that was almost the fave outfit.

Georgia was a “Happy Dollar” supermarket checkout girl, Lynne. She had a lank little pony tail and a wiiide bandeau hair band. Around her waist was her checkout counter, cardboard with a little see-through window for the scanner—and products glued in place: cereal, beer, Tampax, plastic knives, ramen. The cops took the beer bottle away from her at the edge of the parade zone lest she smash it.

Georgia garnered more attention than she bargained for, lots of people coming up to her. “Is this the cash-only counter, honey?” Later in the eve, G left the checkout counter on the street for a homeless person to find, she said they could eat the ramen.

Sylvia was a prosperous witch in her high-tone black sweater and velvet hat. I was a “mountain climber from the Hollow Earth,” i.e., I wore knickers and some blue and yellow facepaint. Whatever!

I had an uncomfortable feeling of being too straight at the parade. Feeling awkward about being so straight.

“Hello, Cleveland,” said one guy to Sylvia and me, ragging on us.

“When you go back to your car, remember, mine is the Mercedes and yours is the BMW,” jeered another.

“I didn’t use a car,” said Sylvia pityingly. “I used my broom!”

“Oh yeah,” said the second guy, trying to recover. “I meant to say that.”

The crowd was pressing and swirling like the lines of a cubic fractal, or like the ripping currents of a particularly nasty ocean break, like where there’s a cave in the cliffs and you’re on the outside of a rocky spit next to the cave. A very high order of chaos.

We walked back to Georgia’s and bedded down in her living room. At 1:30 am with all of us asleep, here came a ring at the downstairs door. Nobody got up, so I went to look. Of course it was Rudy Jr. All covered in foil! A reflective fireproof coat. I let him in. I’d brought our carved pumpkin from home, and I lit it for him, and we went to sleep in pumpkin light, Rudy Jr. on couch, Sylvia and I on mats on living-room floor.

I think I can use some of these scenes in Freeware. Lately I’d been saying, “Oh I’ll go to the Castro parade and do Chapter Five of Freeware.” And now I went to the parade but, oh-oh, I still have to write Chapter Five. It didn’t like pop into existence just from going to the parade.

November 20, 1994. Anger. Opera.

I’m full of anger these days. I’m nursing resentments and acting out. I think it’s because Pop died. Pop always used to say to me, “When my father died, I was so angry. It didn’t make any sense for me to be angry but I was.”

I’d always thought Pop was just angry when he heard the news, that one day. But I’m angry ever since he died. And it’s not because of the bad last meeting with him or even because of the way Priscilla handled the funeral. My anger is a roar of fear and horror. Death got my Dad.

We went to the San Francisco Opera last night and saw Lucia Di Lammermoor with Rudy Jr. and Georgia. We’ve been to the opera many times over the years. In San Francisco we’ve seen Macbeth, Nebuchadnezzar, Madame Butterfly, and The Magic Flute before Lucia Di Lammermoor.

At Macbeth I was a stunned Lynchburger, wondering what I was doing in San Francisco. At Nebuchadnezzar I ate too much before the show and had a stomach ache and felt crowded. The same in Madame Butterfly, and the plot was revoltingly sexist. The Magic Flute was paradise. We five were in a box, and musical Isabel was next to me eating violet-flavored candies. And Flute is a wonderful modernistic opera.

Last night was a hard-core opera-lover experience. We were in orchestra seats with big cushions and armrests, sitting beneath the overhang of an Art-Nouveau/Grand-Siècle-type balcony. I was lounging back and realizing that opera is heaven. I was a thinking that if I had the world dictatorship, I’d have a lounge chair in a box and hear operas every night. So elegant, so beautiful.

In one of his books, Vladimir Nabokov describes a conversation between two lovers as being like a duet in the opera. In love-talks, the sound is everything, the meaning is nothing—it’s about the musical give and take of the love words.

Another thing that struck me last night is how death-obsessed opera is. Seeing the symbols of the grave in the last scene of the last act, the basic pile of dirt with the cross on it, it struck me so heavily that Death is not a cool thing, not a funny thing, it’s swallowed up both my parents.

I began thinking about how Mom’s older brothers liked to tease her—she’d said she liked “Käse roh,” or raw cheese, really just meaning cheese with no bread, and they’d set her up on top of a cabinet with a piece of Käse roh, laughing at her. It struck me that Mom and her three brothers are dead, and her parents are dead, and I’m the only one who remembers about the brothers setting Mom on the cupboard. And the things Rudy and Georgia and Isabel teased each other about will be but vaguely remembered by the next generation. When all five us are dead.

And this isn’t hypothetical, although I’d like to think it is—no this isn’t hypothetical at all. How it stings to know we’ll die.

November 27, 1994. Thanksgiving. Grief.

A gray Sunday afternoon, after Thanksgiving. All three kids were here. Georgia left last night, and this morning we took Isabel up to Oakland for her plane and dropped Rudy in Berkeley. And now Sylvia took Arf downtown for a walk.

I remember Mom saying on the phone to me once after Thanksgiving, “I was straightening up the house and it was so empty. The tears came.”

The years rolling by. My parents dead, and old age looming ahead of me. At least I can complain about it in my journal.

Most days like this I’d get high, but I was smoking too much and it was making me too uptight. I uprooted the endlessly budding plant I had in my garden, dried the leaves, and put them way up in my stash spot on St. Joseph’s Hill so it’s an effort to get at them. I’m here alone with the real me, tasting what Virgil calls lacrimae rerum, the tears of things.

Thanksgiving was great this year, just the kids here, no guests, it was cozy. Yesterday we went down to Santa Cruz, we five, and hiked to the Fern Grotto cove on the beach north of town, had it all to ourselves, eating turkey sandwiches and the wild waves white with foam. Rudy and I sat on a little cliff ledge looking at the waves. It was like the dreams I often have of being on a cliff by the beach with the kids. I dream about the ocean at least once every single week.

Thanksgiving Day, thinking of my dead parents, I felt raw and unprotected, just me and Sylvia between Death and the kids. But you have to enjoy the time you still have. It was a wonderful day.

November 29, 1994. Problems with Arf.

Our dog Arf is a problem these days. He’s a real albatross around my neck. I have to take him running every single day, I can never go biking, because whenever I let him run loose on his own he gets busted and a busybody calls me up, “I have your dog, he was in the street!”

This only started a couple of years ago. The type of people who live in Los Gatos has changed. They used to be more bohemian, or reckless, or rural, and they didn’t care if they saw a dog walking around the streets, exploring on his own. But now they’re all tense and fearful and cop-like.

But Arf still wants to roam. Walking the street is what he’s been doing for fifteen years. But there are some growing problems with this. He’s going deaf, I think, and he’s not as good at avoiding cars as he used to be. He doesn’t deign to look for cars, he expects to hear them.

If a car’s coming, he has this way of cringing out of the danger, never actually running. More obnoxiously, if he senses a car will slow down for him, he makes a point of getting in front of it, and slowing down to a crawl, loitering in the street with an insolent air of mock-servility.

It’s as I predicted in The Hollow Earth—I’ve become Arf’s groom, at the mercy of his vile habits. Eating grass, peeing at special places, drinking from the foul water-dish outside Gwen’s Hair Salon, shitting on the bridge to Los Gatos, shaking his head over and over and over, and chewing himself endlessly due to his sarcoptic mange. I spend a great deal of time grooming him and treating his eternal ear and eye infections. He’s an aging relic, a third senile parent.

On the up side, it lowers my blood pressure to see Arf. I often revel in him. So now we’ll go running together. Yaar.

November 30, 1994. Down the Reef with Arf.

Today I ran up the hill with Arf, early in the day, and I sat in the middle of some manzanita chaparral for a long time, with happy lolling-tongue Arf hanging around in the vicinity. And then we pushed on over St. Joseph’s Hill to some entirely new terrain, a steep near-cliff that drops down the back of the hill, covered with native plants. Working our way down this steep slope felt like dropping off the continental shelf when skin-diving, yeah. I went down the reef with Arf.

We went down two hundred feet, no further, as I had my jogging shoes rather than my cleated hiking shoes. We sat there, Arf and me, perfectly dog-happy, me watching for ages a cloud of gnats over a manzanita bush. Arf’s relaxed Nature face was inhumanly beautiful.

I liked how the strange attractor of a gnat swarm would form over and over in the heat plume over the manzanita. When the wind would blow the gnats out of their attractor, they’d wait down at the side of the bush, and then fight back up into the plume where they knew the others would meet.

I was enjoying both the real-time gnats and my memories of former scientific ruminations about gnats—like in the park across from the apartment where we lived in Highland Park, New Jersey, 1969. Back then I thought of the gnat columns in terms of spacetime diagrams and relativity—how quaint and old-hat that now seems! Now I view the gnat columns in terms of chaos and strange attractors.

I am a swarm of gnats.

December 1, 1994. Soft Watches.

The first few chapters of a novel are like Go stones placed in the Hilbert space where the novel is to emerge. My job is to grow a gnarly yet shapely pattern in the infinite-dimensional storyspace.

I’m working on a Freeware scene in the fictional “Catalanic” restaurant now, where a print of Dali’s Persistence of Memory is on the wall. The Catalanic is modeled on the real-world Esperpento, an unpretentious tapas place in the Mission district of San Francisco, perhaps my favorite restaurant. I learned about it from Paul Mavrides.

Writing about Dali’s print I suddenly realized that my soft moldie “robots” are, but exactly, correlated to Dali’s soft watches! They’re computers, like watches, which are soft and melty! Cool.

The soft watch is such an arresting image. If anyone today wants to characterize Surrealism, that’s an image they’re likely to mention. In reality, a watch is hard—with its ticking, and its little gears, and its enforcing of the schedules that make society a great machine.

What a genius Dali was to melt the watch!

What a different thing the watch becomes!

December 30, 1994. Holiday with the Kids.

The kids have been around a lot this vacation month. Rudy and I went hiking twice to the air reef I discovered with Arf in Los Gatos—I’m talking about the pureland cliff behind St. Joseph’s Hill. Two of the things Rudy and I found: some electric royal-blue moss on the bottom of a small rock amid a small slide of scree; and jelly-like fungus on a log. Inside that transparent fungus were fractal dendrites of some organelle or mycelium, just like the mold-veins in the imipolex of my moldies.

Christmas was good, all the feasting and togetherness. We had a killer lineup of food events: cheese fondue with the kids plus the Swanns and the Herberts on the 22nd, roast beef like Mom used to make on the 23rd, broiled tuna on Christmas Eve, roast turkey on Christmas Day—by then we were pretty full.

And now we’re at Lake Tahoe for a few days, staying at the Granlibakken Lodge, all five of us plus Georgia’s current boyfriend Yair. I cross-country ski in the mornings and in the afternoons I nap and write on Freeware.

God, tomorrow is New Years Eve. We’re not up for any more big cooking. Maybe I should get a pizza and put pot all over it? Nah.

Today we were cross-country skiing by the lake in Sugar Pine Point State Park. It was like heaven, like a dream of the afterlife, the deep crystal snow right by the clear water, a cloudless blue sky above, the snowy Sierras across the lake, the pines up above us on the shore, and hardly anyone there, even now in high season, all the idiots are at the ski resorts fighting over their places in lift-lines.

To me, ever since Geneseo, XC skiing has always been a lovely way to walk in the woods. The first two days here, I skied one particular loop trail behind Granlibakken, a puffin’ climb for three miles to Page Meadows and then a killer-fast run down a trail chomped into the side of a gully with a stream at the bottom.

The first day I did it alone and I fell maybe fifteen times. Yesterday I did it with all the kids and fell (I counted) seven times. I might try it one more time and see if I can fall only five times. The falls happen when I perceive myself to be moving faster than is safe. Sometimes if I wait it through, I end up slowing down again without a fall. Of course the fear is that if I don’t fall, I will reach a speed so great that when I then fall I’ll really hurt myself.

January 1, 1995. New Year’s Eve at Tahoe.

Today is our last full day at Granlibakken. Sylvia gave me a ride to the far side of Page Meadows. I skied thru it and found my way back home. The trail I usually take down from there had been thrashed by some philistine in a snowmobile, it was ice, and offered a real chance of breaking my ass. So I found my way downhill in the bed of the creek. For me, XC skiing is best when I’m not on a trail. I had a topo map, so could be off-trail as much as I liked.

New Years Eve went well. We had a jolly dinner down at a bar called the Bridgetender. Then we came back to the room and drank a lot. Midnight found us on the Granlibakken ski-slope, the kids sledding down it right at midnight, a few locals there setting off fireworks, me with a pint of Stolli vodka in my pocket and my first jay of the stay. Bottle of champagne being passed around. I started shrieking “Happy New Year,” off the balcony in a crazed hillbilly voice that made Isabel laugh.

Later I sat up alone, in a trance, staring at the fire for two hours, then snapped out of it—whoah it’s three! If I really kick back and let things go, the time always slides to three or even four. I always wonder what I’m doing during those lost hours. I’m not asleep, but an hour slides by in a psychic second.

While looking at the fire, I had a lot of thoughts about chaos. A particular flame is a location on a chaotic attractor. The flame has a preferred repertoire of shapes it moves among. This collection of shapes is the attractor.

Putting it a little differently, the reason why flames always look more or less the same is that the flame archetype is a high order attractor, akin to the attractors called wave or cloud. These natural forms are, as I say, always kind of the same, although in detail they are utterly unpredictable.

Now and then there’s a big pop and a bust of sap throws the flame wacky-waggy. Also now and then the logs burn through and thump down. This is what the real hep-cats call a chaotic bifurcation.

I saw a Zhabotinsky-style turbulent jet of vaporized sap shooting out of one log end as gray smoke.

In the book after Freeware, perhaps to be a nonfiction tome called Seek Ye The Gnarl, I’d like to talk about this kind of thing.

I tried to tell Georgia’s friend Yair about the flames being strange attractors this morning, and he didn’t really get it. The problem is that the big secret sounds almost trivial when you don’t tell it right. The flame is unpredictable but it has an algorithm. This way of thinking always reminds me of a thing I read in James Gleick’s Chaos, about how the early Santa Cruz chaoticians would sit in cafes looking around to see how many strange attractors they could spot.

A wind-waved branch. A cloud. A flame. A human face.

January 6, 1995. Wired Party with Rudy in San Francisco.

Wednesday night, Rudy and I went to a party for Wired magazine without Sylvia, driving up from Los Gatos. It was fun, in the car, him explaining the radio songs to me, like Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” about the guy who likes Nirvana’s pretty songs and sings along but doesn’t know what the songs mean. Yeah.

Rudy looked cool, he had on some narrow silver spectrum glasses and a like tinfoil fireman’s coat, same as he wore to Halloween. I was telling him about Saint, the character in Freeware who’s inspired by him. He said Saint should be a maintenance manager for a building, maybe a large old industrial building. And Saint knows of secret hidden basement rooms where things are stored, things people didn’t know if they were garbage or valuable, but they saved them because they were heavy.

I was wearing my new striped purple and gray Patagonia shirt, jeans, and a black wool vest. I felt like I looked good. Mostly I just hung with Rudy at the party, feeling cool to be with him. Georgia and her friend Yair showed up. Georgia is a bit stressed about their impending move to New York City. Rudy, Yair and I all got pretty wasted, and it was up to Georgia to drive us three men back to her apartment to sleep there. She was kind of annoyed, and kind of amused, and kind of nostalgic-in-advance for her life in San Francisco.

I talked to this guy Mark Dippé and to some of the cute women crowding up to him. A steady stream of babes coming up to Dippé. He’s single, and a media star because he did some of the animation for Jurassic Park. I know him from writing a Wired article about that. Marc talks about nasty things, like fetishistic surgery, or having a dominatrix open you up and stick pins in your liver. He says he wants punishment to more invasive—instead of just piercing you, or sticking a dildo up your butt, you have the woman get right into your body cavity. According to Georgia, “Women like him because he’s so kinky.”

I was telling my Wired editor Julie about the plot for Freeware. She was kind of flirting with me, and she says “What happens when a Julia set meets a cosmic ray?” And then she stares at me heavily. She’s the Julia set, right, and I’m the cosmic ray.

I let the opportunity drift by. But having this conversation I began to realize, however slowly, that it would be possible for a single person to meet women at such parties, and that this is in fact the reason why some people go to parties, to meet members of the opposite sex—rather than going to parties to get drunk and stoned. Duh!

Life Rolls On

January 17, 1995. Georgia Leaves. Sick and Sad.

I’m sick—feverish, weak-feeling, achey—goddamn, I already had the flu once this vacation, before Xmas. It’s rained for two weeks.

Today is the day after our Georgia moved to New York City to live with her boyfriend. It’s like he carried her away. The knight riding off with the maiden. We’ve seen so much of Georgia the past few years. She’s lived in San Francisco ever since she got out of Swarthmore in 1991. I got used to talking to her a lot, hearing her cozy little voice, meeting up with her and hugging her—she’s so cuddly and lovable. I even did some work with Georgia—she made illos for a Mondo article of mine and for my Freeware excerpt in Interzone.

Just now I’ve been working on mailing off Georgia’s fifteen UPS packages, including pieces of her computer. Weighing packages, labeling them, shifting them around. Three hundred and thirty pounds of Georgia-stuff in all. It’s so final. I keep crying, which isn’t like me at all.

February 2, 1995. Arf Dies.

A couple of days ago Arf snuck out of his pen and ran away and today the Humane Society called and said he’s been brought in dead. Hit by a car. And now I’m crying about that. I’m a wreck.

I gathered up Arf’s few belongings and stacked them on his dog-house that I made with Rudy—Arf’s basket and food dish and two water dishes and his leash and towel and the plastic cup we used to measure his food. I threw out his ear medicine. He didn’t own much. He was “meager,” as Georgia used to say.

What bum times I’m having these days. Time for a new life, a new change. Look for the upside. With Arf dead, I’ll be able to go back to bicycling instead of jogging. I’d pretty much set aside biking for Arf’s sake the last couple of years.

The last time I saw Arf was Monday night, I’d given him a big supper of lamb scraps, and later I went out to peek at him, and he was curled up, so tidily and cutely in his basket, he didn’t look up like he used to do because he’s gone deaf over the last few months. And I said to myself, “I love this dog.”

That’s a better last memory than I have of Pop. Not that the grief over the two deaths is very similar. With Pop, it was more like I absolutely couldn’t stand it, more like I was going to explode from it. With Arf it’s a large sorrow, but not so completely overwhelming.

Arf probably got run over because he was deaf. As I mentioned before, he had this thing about cars, he liked to challenge them, and walk in front of them and make them stop.

I’m an orphan, my dog died, my first-born just moved thousands of miles away, and the doctor just told me that my blood pressure has been too high for too long and now I should start taking a pill every day for the rest of my life—so as to postpone the stroke I’ll no doubt die of like Mom and Pop did.

I brought Arf home in a plastic bag, and then I dug a hole four or five feet deep in the back yard. Nobody else was around. I smoked a little hash while I was digging. I used the “motel method” that I learned from Don Marritz years ago. You impale a crumb of fuming hash on a straight pin sticking up through a flat piece of cardboard, with an upside-down drinking glass over the hash, and you put your head down beside the glass and tilt the glass to one side and inhale the smoke.

I laid Arf in the grave and made sure his ear was folded down so the dirt wouldn’t go inside. I angled him so that his nose was pointing towards the back corner of the yard—the direction he liked to go when he ran away. I picked some yellow spring sorrel flowers from the yard and laid them on him and filled up the hole. Back in the house I listened to the Byrds singing “Bye-bye Blue / You good dog, you.”

In the afternoon, I rode my bike to Lexington reservoir near here, and it’s overflowing again. It feels so symbolic when the reservoir overflows—it’s like a living I Ching symbol. Overflow.

Frightening how I’m still in turmoil about Pop’s death. Losing your father is a big deal. My Arf-grief is in part, I suddenly realize, a rechanneling of my Pop-grief. Springing forth like an underground river.

I think of the Pop/Pup joke that my father liked to tell: A little boy comes home from school and the maid says “Your Pop’s dead,” and the boy cries and cries and his mother comforts him.

“You’re a good boy to be so sad about losing Pop,” says the mom.

And the boy brightens up, “Oh! I thought you said Pup, not Pop!”

A phrase of Pop’s that sticks in my mind is something he’d say about impossible situations. “We live in hope.”

We may die in despair, but by god, we do live in hope. For as long as we can.

March 1, 1995. Writing Versus Pot.

Okay, I haven’t written a word on Freeware in like a month or six weeks. I’m working a lot at SJSU, and the novel’s plot is stuck.

Writing this, I’m drunk and my body is sore all over. I’ve been hunched over my computer for several weeks, doing intense C++ code hacking. Mr. Square.

I’ve been out of pot for a couple of weeks. I feel duller from the lack of weed but I know from experience that I’ll slowly, slowly sprout a surprising amount of good info should I remain weedless.

I have this dream, this fond fantasy, this summum bonum mental image of myself staying straight for good and writing like an angel. Even if that’s impossible, let’s give it as much more time as we can, the straightness. There’s no obvious pot connection in sight these days, but a person like me attracts evil companions, so who can say how long the pot-drought will last.

Not having pot means I won’t wish I was dead when I wake up at 4 am. What I do wish is that tomorrow I would write the first page of the Randy Karl Tucker chapter for Freeware.

March 7, 1995. Esalen with Terence McKenna.

I’m writing this on my laptop in the back yard. I don’t use the deck in the daytime anymore as the neighbors’ pool-pump is always a-grindin’. A noise like that, you can shut it out for awhile, but then the noise always wins and triumphantly comes back into your consciousness. It’s very nice in the back yard. The old grass is green and long, and new grass is sprouting on Arf’s grave.

The pain of his death isn’t as sharp as it was at first. Time heals all wounds. But I can still get sad over it, and my parents being dead too, and our nest empty. There’s this real tear-jerkin’ song called “Ode to My Family” by the Cranberries that I hear on the radio sometimes and I like sighing to it. The chorus, in a rich Irish accent, is “Does anyone care.”

Enough! My forty-ninth birthday is coming up, and I’m happy about it. We’re having some geeks over on March 19th, like Hellerstein and Pearce and Beeson, for like afternoon brunch, I don’t think it’ll be a big kegger like the parties of yore. Isabel is going to be here on my actual birthday, and maybe we’ll go to the beach.

This weekend Sylvia and I were down in Esalen. I led a workshop with Terence “Shrooms & DMT” McKenna. He was very funny and fun to listen to, also he wasn’t even high, nor me for that matter. I’ve been out of herb for a few weeks and feel disgustingly calm and rational, but I’m hanging with it for now. In the seminar, I read aloud part of the Boing Boing article I wrote about being in Portugal with Terence, and my description of him as a scrunched-face conman kind of hurt his feelings, so then I felt like being extra nice to him because I really do like him.

He talked a lot more than me. Some of the guests were very devoted McKenna followers, one girl in particular, very cute, known as “Cheryl from Carmel,” a great moniker, like in an underground comic. Terence makes the world around him mythic.

When I did talk, I discussed the idea that Nature is based on chaos and fractals—one way Nature is a fractal is that if you look at a piece of Nature *twice* as hard, you usually see *three* times as much stuff. That’s a characteristic of fractals, that as you magnify them, the details magnify faster than simple scaling would suggest.

I wanted to take the workshop attendees for a nature walk and point look-look at the ocean waves and at the plants and at the waterfall and get them to see it all as chaos and fractals, but it was raining and everyone wanted to lie around on fat pillows with their shoes off and talk about how bad television is, or about whether art and science are different.

If I were running a workshop alone, I would whip them into shape, just like in a C++ Programming class, and no dodging the nature walks, but Terence was happy to let things flow any which way.

Besides the New Age stuff, the big attraction at Esalen is the hot springs and people sit naked in open-air concrete tubs of hot sulfur water, right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. At one point I was in a tub with Terence and about half of our class. It wasn’t that big a deal, really, although of course it’s interesting to see exactly what everyone looks like, noting the boob and penis sizes, while being very cool about looking.

It’s getting pretty cold here in Los Gatos today. It’s supposed to rain tonight. I saw a picture of an ocean-sized Zhabotinsky scroll on the weather page this morning, spiraling our way. Today I jogged up to the donkey hill and the donkey couple has their annual new colt, so soft and cute. It’s amazing how all you have to do is leave the donkeys alone in a field and wham there’s a new one every year. Fabricated out of nothing more than grass and donkey-wetware.

Ain’t Nature grand.

March 30, 1995. Camping Big Sur with Rudy.

Rudy Jr. and I drove down to Big Sur with our packs. Big Sur is a joyous California shout of mad beauty, a fractal extravaganza.

We turned off of Route 1 and drove up Palo Colorado Road to the Bottcher’s Gap trailhead, eight miles in from the coast. We were a little worried we wouldn’t see the ocean when we hiked. And when we started hiking it was discouraging—for two hours we were in wet land with young aspens at eye level.

Finally we got through to the high country and started up Devil’s Peak, at about four thousand feet. We got up into some snow about half an hour before sunset. I sat down to rest at the edge of the snow and Rudy pushed further. I was very cold and tired and hungry.

I put on all my extra clothes from the backpack and started eating a pack of Ramen noodles raw. I could see out to the Pacific Ocean now, a straight line across a third of the horizon, with the peak of nearby Pico Blanco in the middle. I heard Rudy calling for me, but I was too tired to respond.

“This is how it feels to be old,” I peevishly thought. “If Rudy wants me, he’s going to have to walk back down here and get me. I can’t go any further. I won’t go any further. We should stop and camp right here. Up ahead there’s only snow.”

Rudy came down after awhile, he said there were clear patches on top, and he’d carry my bag the rest of the way if I’d come. The sun was only a few inches above the horizon. It was cosmically beautiful. Rudy herded me up the snowy trail, and tried to pitch the tent in a hysterically windy dip by a grove of trees.

I was complaining and frowning and shaking my head just like an ineffectual old fool. My chest was hurting from the climb, I figured it was angina pectoris, pain in the heart, I remembered Pop complaining about it when he was about my age—or no, I’m forty-nine, and he was fifth-four, oh-oh, is my death-clock running too fast.

The time I’m thinking of, Pop and I were walking up some steep stairs from the dock in Boothbay Harbor, and he said his chest hurt, and I was, like, “Oh stop faking, old man.”

Rudy was kind of the same way now on the mountain. “You can do it.”

And I’m all, “I’m not faking, this is real. The body gives out!”

“Aw, no it doesn’t, Da.”

So I stopped playing the senile baby, up there on Devil’s Peak in the darkening wind. Rudy and I finally found a mutually-negotiated-as-acceptable camping spot, a flat less-windy niche in the corner of a meadow by a sharp drop-off. We ate quickly and got in bed. The operative word was hypothermia, as in avoidance of. With our good three-season tent, down mummy bags, and rubber mats we made it through the night.

Oh, so many dreams I had. Maybe they were a cumulative effect of partying too much, almost like the DTs, or maybe from my burdens of worry and grief. I startled up wide awake several times in the night. At least once I was screaming. In the morning Rudy was kind of teasing me for acting crazy.

“There were about thirteen or fourteen dream visitations waiting in line for me,” I said.

“You mean they were spirits living up there and eager to jump on the first human brain?” Rudy asked.

“Yeah, like that, but really they were my own demons who came with me. I needed to dream them, but at home I don’t get around to them, because all I dream about at home is the neighbor’s pool-pump.” Which was kind of true, as I’d recently been obsessed with the eternal whine of that pump.

I ate some gorp, Rudy ate hot oatmeal, we stashed the tent and sleeping bags in our packs and hid the packs under a tree. Near that tree we found a pig-hunting or deer-hunting arrow with razor barbs, and Rudy saved it with our packs.

And then we set out on a day-hike further along the trail, which eventually gets to a mountain called Ventana Double Cone, but that was twelve miles more and we were just out larking and playing.

The ridge Rudy and I walked down was virginally intact, a sharp cup-lip with oaks up to the edge. We wandered along delighted, with the Pacific Ocean horizon hanging high up in our panoramic field of view.

I thought a lot about why the horizon looked so high. I figure it’s because when you’re high up you see a wider strip of ocean than usual, and therefore the ocean seems to extend up higher into the sky. I explained this to Rudy, but he wanted to debate about this, and I never really did convince him. But it was fun hashing over the ideas.

So we had the Pacific Ocean hanging there behind us to the west and the Ventana range up ahead, and a great wooded valley on our right with, a low, mounded green mountain I thought of as “Island Mountain,” floating in the great cirque valley of trees. Just the perfect panorama.

“Man, this is vacation!” I exclaimed.

And then ran down a long meadow with oak trees in it. I thought of it as a “Happy Valley” meadow. I get that name from a song at the start of a Johnny Appleseed cartoon I saw in Louisville in about 1955, with sweet voices singing, “Happy Valley, Happy Valley, where all is peace.”

Eventually we came to a trail crossing, and decided it was about time to turn back. We’d drunk up our water by now. Rudy had a water bottle and I had a pump-filter and we were hoping to refill the water bottle. We knew that down to the right there was a trail-camp called Comings Camp with a spring, and from the left we could hear sounds of a noisy stream. So we could look for water in either direction. For now we sat at the crossroads resting.

Some odd people appeared from the right, the direction of Comings Camp, a man and a woman identically clad in white turtlenecks and blue gabardine pants and huge blue packframes. Possible space aliens.

“Yes, there’s water down there,” the man said to us.

He looked like a Muppet, with a really wide mouth, with the lower jaw staying still and his whole upper head moving to talk. The woman with him wouldn’t look at us, perhaps she was scared of us, two big strong men that we were.

We decided to set off. Rudy helped me up with his big strong generous hand.

“But there are people down at that camp—in case that makes a difference,” adds the man. Does he think we’re gay? Acid-trippers? Muggers?

“Oh no, that doesn’t make a difference,” I say, and Rudy and I start down towards Comings Camp, and go about twenty feet and then stop and agreed that we didn’t want to see other people, and if the weird man and woman think we’re weird so what.

So then we ran up past them and towards the sound of creek on the left side of the main trail. Only it’s shadowy on that trail, snowy, ugly, dark frightening, with none of the majestic views of ocean and mountains.

“It’s like the woods in Virginia,” I tell Rudy.

He says, “Is that good?”

“No!”

“Look!” exclaims Rudy. “Cougar paw prints!”

The prints in the snow are widely spaced, as if a wheel of paws, a wheel of large radius, had printed them. I want to dismiss them, I say they’re dog prints, I even trample on them.

“Look at the map,” sais Rudy. And on the back of our Ventana Wilderness map are drawings of paw-prints actual size, and our prints are indeed mountain lion, also known as cougar, with the right number of toe pads and the right M-shaped central paw pad. So Rudy’s right once again.

We decided to head back up towards our backpacks on the top of Devil’s Peak. Even though we hadn’t gotten any water. We figured we’d try and melt some of the snow for water when were back up on top.

Along the way we rested on the weathered trunk of a fallen oak tree and I was looking at the patterns in the bare, exposed wood. I told Rudy my slogan that nature being a fractal means that when you look twice as hard you see three times as much.

“How?” he challenged.

“Well take this oak. I look twice as hard and instead of seeing the main grain twice as sharp, I also the whorls. I get three times as much information. Or even more.”

We’d taken off our shoes so we could feel the grass of the meadow. We sat for awhile, with the hill falling away below our dangling feet, the mountains, the high ocean, and the grassy Happy Valley sward—I thought, Oh, god, let time please stop, never wanting this perfect moment to end. And in response, I got a feeling of making a holographic spacetime photograph, a realization that this instant is here forever.

Hiking back up the hill, we got thirstier and thirstier. And hungry. And started worrying. Earlier in the day we’d passed an old man hiking alone, and I’d mentioned to him that we’d left our packs up on Devil’s Peak, and now Rudy kept saying the old man was going to hunt out and steal our stuff. But when we got back up there it was all safe. We were planning to hike back out before night. Rudy worked that stray hunting arrow into his pack somehow, and we carried our packs up to some flat rocks for lunch.

Then we did the exciting survival thing of melting snow over Rudy’s alcohol stove, and filtered the water with our filter-pump. Very satisfying. The process was something Rudy and I had both thought about: how to get water in winter, and just this once we had all the necessary pieces.

I used a black ditty-bag that held our cooking stuff to carry the snow in, and in the end I’d fetched more than we needed, so we had a huge bag-molded extra snow-ball. Rudy flung it up spinning in the air and it threw off snow-bits like a pinwheel shedding sparks. It was awesome; it was Earth Art.

After drinking a lot of the water, we boiled up some dried spaghetti and dried meatballs and we were eating that. For general jolliness, I was wearing the big black ditty bag on my head and I looked, Rudy said, like an Evil Chef.

And here came a tour of about thirty women, all very athletic and very middle-aged, many German, marching only a few feet away from us on our rock, each and every one delivering a comment to us about the smell of our food, which I figured they very much wanted. Rudy’s and my instant and passionate revulsion towards the intruders was fun to share. We were in an uncivilized, boys-only mode. We didn’t actually say anything to them at all. Then they all went and sat down about thirty yards away to look at the view. As we repacked our stuff and got ready to hike out, they were staring at us so much that I finally scooted around a corner to finish putting my boots on, just to be safe from all those prying eyes.

The hike out was fun, not too hard, though my feet were hurting a lot. We got back to the parking lot and drove to Andrew Molera campground a little further south, a simple walk-in campground near the village of Big Sur.

Before setting up camp we had a big dinner at a place called the River Inn. We got some beer and backpacked our stuff into Andrew Molera and pitched the tent. It was way easy compared to the night before.

There had been a lot of floods recently, and the Big Sur River goes through Andrew Molera, so there was tons of dead wood lying around. We made an enormous fire and spent the evening feeding it and getting more wood and feeding the fire some more. We drank beer and stared at the fire and talked a lot about the things the flames did. Natural chaos was a big theme of our conversations on this trip.

Rudy noticed an interesting thing, which is that looking at the fire did not destroy our night-vision. I recalled from a college psychology course that there is one reddish wavelength at which light does not break down the “visual purple” used by night-vision, but I’d never grasped that we savanna-dwelling apes had evolved that feature exactly so that we could sit around fires talking about the flames and yet look up and see, with no impairment, the distant fields lying under the moonlight.

We burned this one really long thick stick in half over the fire, and to get rid of the too-long left-over burning end, we walked down to the river (only about 20 yards from where we camped) and flung the burning brand up high to splash in the black night water. This was Earth Art II, a companion piece to the spinning giant snowball. We knew about Earth Art, as we’d recently seen a show in San Jose by the artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The next morning we left our packs and hiked down through the campground to the tiny beach to the north of the Big Sur River, carrying a small amount of food and water in our pockets. The big, main, wild part of the beach is on the other side of the river, and there wasn’t any bridge. So Rudy and I took off our shoes and all our clothes and each made a bundle and waded the chest-deep river with the bundle held high. Lord it was cold. The River Lethe!

We went along the primeval, empty beach for about a mile until we reached an impasse of fallen boulders, then climbed up into meadows besprent with the most wildflowers ever. Early spring. Later we took a rest, sat down and ate some bread and cheese, then laid back in a meadow, and for some reason I started thinking about the LSD vision of god I had back on Memorial Day, 1970, thinking about it more and more, with the sun shining on my closed eyelids. And I started hearing that same voice of god saying the same things to me that I’d heard those twenty-five years ago.

“I’m always here, Rudy. I’ll always love you.”

My old friend, the clear White Light. I wasn’t even high this time, just so drenched in beauty and love that I could hear that voice again. Wow. I suppose this trip was fresh in my mind thanks to listening to my “White Light” song in Roy Whelden’s Like a Passing River. I told Rudy about my new vision. He seemed glad for me, but wasn’t inclined to pursue this topic with his spaced-out old man.

We looped past some beautiful gnarly trees, crossed the river naked again, and drove home happy.

Discussing the trip, Rudy and I noticed that we’d done a lot of “negotiation,” not in the sense of trading or deal-making, but in the sense of figuring out what to do next. Like “negotiating difficult rapids in a river.” We’d talk and talk about what we should do, and what if this and what if that. And sooner or later we’d arrive at a good, mutually agreed-upon course of action. Talking as a way of thinking. Two heads are better than one.

April 30-May 2, 1995. Writing Again. KPFA. Mike Dorris.

I haven’t really worked on Freeware in I don’t know how long. Yesterday was Saturday and I was supposed to. Instead I had three beers, read a magazine, stared at the beautiful misty rain steaming off our roof. I do mean steam, the sun comes out and heats the roof and the light rain falls on it and steams off in fascinating whorls of mist. Then I took a nap.

Finally on Sunday I reached a point of sufficient desperation and good health that I could write again. Health because I’m out of pot, desperation because I haven’t written in so incredibly long. A long Sunday afternoon, and I’m inside the book, in Louisville with my characters Honey Weaver and Randy Karl Tucker.

I went to the radio KPFA studio in Berkeley to be on a show with Roy Whelden, the two of us talking about Like a Passing River, Roy’s CD based on my memoir novel, All the Visions. Roy said a lot of things about the CD that I’d been unaware of, like how he was looking at oaks in Berkeley while writing the music for the “Live Sex Show” track and how the musical lines twine like the oak branches.

The main thing now is working on Freeware. I’m keeping my writing notes for the book in a separate document, Notes for Freeware. When I can’t write on the novel, I write on the Notes. Aldous Huxley actually managed to publish his notes for Brave New World—I remember reading some of that book in 1961 in this cool bookstore on 4th Street. in downtown Louisville: Readmore Books.

Michael Dorris and I used to go to Readmore after school at St. X. This was during our sophomore high-school year together. The hottest thing in the Readmore was a series of ribald joke collections called Over Sexteen. There was a different store downtown called Liberty News that sold nudie magazines, but the clerk wouldn’t let Mike and me come in there.

Speaking of Freeware, Randy Karl Tucker is running away with his chapter. Rudy Randy von Bitter Karl Rucker Tucker. He’s a clueless Louisville boy having sex with a predatory woman his mother’s age, lucky guy.

May 24, 1995. Summer.

I’m getting certified for scuba. Last week my teacher Frank Barry told us about a torpedo ray, and how if you go down and bother one, it defends itself by wrapping its wings around you and then emitting a shock that feels like you stuck a fork into an electrical socket.

“It hurts. I love to see it when people do it.”

Over at SJSU, school’s out for the summer, just a few tests to grade. Nothing to worry about but Freeware. Focus, Ru, focus. To describe the Emperor Staghorn factory in India, I think I’ll call it a fab and fold in a couple of chunks from the big article “Robot Obstetric Wards” that I had in Wired magazine last fall.

June 5, 1995. I Get Tenure! Problems with Pot. Rudy Graduates.

So now I’m a tenured full professor and it’s summer vacation. I found out about the tenure and full professorship at the year’s end Math & CS Department picnic. So awesome. Tenure before fifty! Pop would be happy, he always talked to me about tenure, even after I got so discouraged that I stopped wanting to discuss it at all. Never expected it to take so long.

I exercise more than ever. I guess Pop’s death must have energized me that way. I’m at the point where the exercise really feels good to me. I definitely run every day, and often take a long bike ride too. I’m thinner than I’ve been in a long time and I look and feel fit. But my blood pressure remains high.

Writing is pretty hard, although I’m fairly excited about Freeware. I dig what’s going on in it. But the more years that I’m a writer, the better I get at avoiding writing. Writing is like staring into the sun.

I used to think getting high helped me write, but I don’t really think that anymore. Usually when I get high, I’ll screw around with the current novel’s Notes document, or I might be making corrections on the novel itself, but I won’t actually accomplish much of the real hard work of rolling that damn Sisyphus boulder another few feet up the hill.

I always think it’s going to be fun when I light up that first jay, and it just about always ends with me drinking too much, saying and doing stupid things.

And then I wake up in the night thinking: I WANT TO DIE, repeating that to myself over and over, counting and counting the letters of the words on the fingers of one hand. I+WANT is 1+4. Five fingers. TO+DIE is 2+3. Five fingers. Rhythmically closing and opening my hand, five and five, five and five, five and five. My dreary stoneover mantra.

When I’m not smoking pot, there’s always a part of me like hunkered down just waiting for it to be time. A cynical skinny old stoner hunkered down inside me. He’s hunkered right now, wondering if maybe I can smoke a jay in the secret side-yard of a dinner buffet we’re going to tonight. What’s this creature’s name? What might I call him? Relpie. Relpie says he ain’t been turned on since, shit, four five days, man.

Rudy Jr. graduated from Berkeley with a BS in Chemical Engineering last weekend. He came home that night, Georgia and Isabel had flown in. We had a lovely barbecue dinner. I made lamb on the deck, not getting too wrecked. The Pearces there too, also Rudy’s Berkeley friend Rafael. It was great. We sat around the long table inside for dinner. How happy Rudy looked, how proud of him we are. He’s learned how to make beer. We made five gallons of “wort” and bottled it in the basement.

On Memorial Day, we five went to the beach, up to the wild Four-Mile beach. Relpie and me snuck and did a jay at the beach. I was having a good time reading in the old pop-psychedelic-philosophy book, A Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas, declaiming lines from it to Rudy.

“Love it as much as you can from wherever you are,” I intoned. “What am I doing at a level of consciousness where this is real?”

Rudy said that last line was the same as, “How come I’m not high anymore?” Kindly mocking me.

A few days later I had a jay before jogging in the morning, then I drank and smoked all day. I was ashamed to be that way in front of Rudy. The next day I was apologizing to him, and he says, “I know you drink. I love you anyway.” He and I went on a huge bike-ride that day.

Another day we went to an art opening for the great Robert Williams at the San Francisco Art Institute—Sylvia, Rudy Jr. and I. It was a very cool show, nice to know a few people there, and to see the San Francisco art crowd, everyone dressed in black and white and leather, the odd hairdos, piercings, and tattoos. We three examined a bunch of actual hot-rod cars belonging to Wilson and his friends, everyone friendly and relaxed.

Rudy was to fly to NYC the next day. For his graduation we’d given him a ticket to visit Georgia there. His plan was to spend the night in Berkeley as it’d be easier to get down to the airport from there. He got us to let him off at the Sir Francis Drake in Union Square, where he hoped to find an old girlfriend working.

What a sight that was to see Rudy, first leaning his smart, goateed head into the car to kiss us goodbye, then walking across the street towards the gaudy red Drake awning: Rudy carrying a duffel bag (containing at its center a quart of the beer he and I had brewed), and a skateboard, his preferred means of transportation these days. He was wearing the old brown leather jacket I bought in New Brunswick in grad-school a year or two before he was born. I wore that jacket for years and years, on the tip of one collar it has a White Light pin from the British promo for my first novel’s publication. The jacket got “too snug” for me, and I gave it to Rudy about when he started college, five years ago. And now he’s a graduate of Berkeley in Chemical Engineering. That parting moment was a mental photo I’ll never forget.

June 14, 1995. Hiking with Pearce.

The theory of turbulence says there’s a cascade of lesser vortex rings coming off of any vortex ring. The only way vortex rings can shed energy is to spawn smaller versions of themselves. Walking with Jon Pearce on St. Joseph’s Hill, we have a vision of cop vortices in the possibility aether, and of a cop shedding vortices of bad vibes, spawning them off his car’s rear bumper.

So yeah, Professor Pearce and Professor Rucker went for a walk today, crawling under fences, trespassing, worrying about the cops, still some life to us old boys, yes, boys running around up there in the woods, Calvin and Hobbes, or Rudy and Niles in Louisville ca. 1959.

Originally, Pearce and I both got Ph.D.s in Mathematical Logic. We both retooled for computer science at SJSU. And we both finally got promoted to full Professor this year. Professors of Mathematics and Computer Science.

A few nights back I had one of those old academic nightmares. When I was in college, and years thereafter, the dream was about a class I’d forgotten I was taking, and the big exam I missed. Then as a professor the nightmare shifted to being about a class I kept forgetting to show up for to teach. So the other day I’m having one of these dreams—I keep forgetting to bring the graded homework back to the students, and they’re really annoyed, and about to complain to the chairman. And then in my dream I think to myself, “Well, I have tenure. I’m a full professor. It really doesn’t matter what these kids think. I’m at the top o’ the heap!”

When we got back downtown this afternoon, Jon starting laughing, watching me buy a loaf of bread, me grinning in my shades in the Boulangerie in Los Gatos. “Rudy, you looked so wasted in there. With this big, irrelevant grin…”

It’s always music to my ears, that kind of remark, going back to being with Kenny Turan in New York in the 1960s, and I’m staring into the traffic waiting for it to pass, wearing my stoner-yellow wire-rim shades, and Kenny says, “Rudy, you look like a real blown mind.”

Day after tomorrow, Sylvia, Georgia, Rudy, Isabel, and I fly to Kauai. It’s wonderful to be with the kids. Rudy and Isabel are moving around here in our house tonight, being cute and funny and smart and doing things. Sylvia’s voice is always happy when we have the kids back in our nest. The Kauai trip is a major, calculated bribe to get our hands on the three piglets for a whole two weeks and to have them to ourselves. What joy.

Diving in Kauai

June 22, 1995. Snorkeling in Haena, Hawaii.

Here we are in the village of Haena on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. I’ve been snorkeling a lot, mostly off a beach called Tunnels, which has a nice reef and lots of coral heads. They speak of the left and right side of Tunnels, according to which way you go in the ocean. Tunnels left gets the most traffic as it has a dramatic drop-off right after the first reef, with caves down at the bottom of the reef.

The first day snorkeling, Isabel and I saw a gray reef shark down there the size of Isabel. We haven’t told Sylvia about it yet as then she might get phobic about swimming. When Isabel and I want to talk about the shark we saw, we talk about “the bluefish.”

Tunnels right has no drop-off, but it has nicer coral. Not so many people snorkel there. I like to go there and hang over coral heads near the surface looking at the darling little fish, so timid, so beautiful—the other day I snorkeled while high and I lost touch, and thought I was in the fish store where Rudy goes in Oakland, and that I’d stuck my head into a tank there, or maybe into the saltwater fish tank they had in Pop’s nursing home, me getting there via a spacetime wormhole connection.

Yesterday I swam very far out at Tunnels right, to the outer reef, and I found a sizable depression in the ocean bed, like a cirque canyon, full of biggish surgeonfish and triggerfish, and in their midst was a really big tropical fish, like a sixty-pound guy, mostly a light lime green—boy could he swim fast. The bigger the fish are, the faster they swim, and the more cautious they are. I guess they know they’re the ones most likely to be attacked by sharks, and humans. I’m pretty good at chasing them down, as I’m wearing a shortie wetsuit and my heavy-duty scuba-diving fins over neoprene booties, plus I’ve got the pro-quality mask and snorkel. I’m equipped, man, thanks to having taken that scuba class. Like an astronaut, almost.

Scads of sea-cucumbers, including the big hard ones, Holothuria nobilis. The Chinese eat these as “bêche-de-mer.” Also lots of smaller, floppy sea-cukes. I was highly obsessed with sea cucumbers when writing The Hollow Earth—I presented some of them as being god-like “Great Old Ones” at the core of the world. Really they’re just black sacks with assholes that are mouths as well. They can, like, puke out their innards and wave them around like a fractal tree, combing the water. I first got excited about sea cucumbers in Maine, where they had some in a tank at the Boothbay Harbor Fisheries Aquarium, and they were doing that push-a-fractal-out-your-ass thing. I figure the cukes here do that routine at night.

Naturally I want to do some scuba dives here. I called about a boat dive and the woman was like, “What’s your dive experience?”

And I’m, “Four fifty-foot dives in Monterey Bay.”

And she’s all, “I’m concerned about your ability to deal with a dive where you can’t see the bottom, where you are surrounded with a vast blue inner space.”

So I’m doing a simple beach dive first. The dive leader promises, “You’ll see lots of sharks.” As if that’s a selling-point?

One day Sylvia, Rudy, Georgia, Isabel and I hiked along the Kalalau trail above the Na Pali cliffs. The cliffs fell steeply off to one side. We were right over the water: blue bluegreen aqua electric. Eventually we came to a beautiful beach at the base of great black cliffs with palm trees peeking off the edges. We’d neglected to bring our suits, but the kids and I swam in our underwear.

Yesterday morning I hiked straight up a small mountain behind our house. What looked like a grassy field was hip-deep in a cushiony mattress of old dead grasses, my legs sinking way in. Then dense woods and thickets. Sudden bare scars in the ground here and there, each the size of house-lot, bare red dirt—these are the results of small mudslides. The soil here is crumbly and unstable, it’s really just crushed rock. The hills erode rapidly, making grooved valleys.

On this hill behind the house, I found a vine with a marvelous flower. It smelled like magnolia and gardenia, and it had a fringe of tubular petals, each striped in alternating bands of light and dark purple. In the middle was a rosette of five stamens and a central pistil with three lobes. I didn’t know a plant could do both three and five together. The only animal I saw was a brown frog.

Later that afternoon, Georgia and Isabel wanted to go up where I’d been, but now our Hawaiian neighbor came out and said, “The Robinsons don’t like people to go on their land. They can get pretty mean.” They’d already seen me go up there.

The “Robinsons” are, I guess, the same as the Robinson family I read about who own Nihau, the small “Forbidden Island” off of Kauai. Crazy that some random Scottish family should somehow own big pieces of this paradise. Oh well.

The white people we see here seem pretty hip. As if they’re all pot-growers, or surfers, or divers. Hip thirtyish people on the beach near us. They remind me of us and our friends back in early 1980s Lynchburg, that kind of look and age. So far we’re not running into too many of the real Ugly American types. Though we ourselves have that kind of car!

Yes, somehow I rented a Cadillac. I’d reserved a convertible, but in the event, it was a two-seater, with not enough trunk space to hold even two of our eight suitcases. So I traded it for a bigger car—I could have gotten a regular car, but the rental agent kind of tricked me into getting a Cadillac, first saying it wouldn’t cost more and then at the last minute letting me know it would actually be quite a bit more, but by then I’d fixated on the notion. A powder blue Cad. Rides nice and smooth.

There are chickens walking around all over the place. They nest wherever they like, and I guess it is up to their owners to catch them and/or find their eggs as best they can. Lots of roosters. When we wake up every morning the roosters are walking around in the road outside our house crowing. Cocka-doodle. They never say cocka-doodle-DOO. Just the cocka-dooodle. A mother hen runs around with six chicks, the chicks always say the same thing: cheep cheep cheep cheep. When I chased the hen this morning she said PUK-SQUAWK! Classic.

We threw a rotten papaya off the porch into the driveway and watched the mother and her chicks eating it.

June 23, 1995. Scuba in Haena.

Today I went scuba diving with Rudy Jr. In Hawaii you’re allowed to go on a “demonstration dive” even if, like Rudy, you don’t have scuba certification.

The woman who led us was called Jeanette. She was a cute grown-up California girl—wrinkled her nose when she laughed, long ponytail, the whole bit. It was pleasant to be with her. She liked Rudy, and said he was a great natural diver.

The first dive we went down off the Tunnels left reef, and on the second dive we went to the Tunnels outer reef, and worked along it. We saw a sting-ray, a lovely nudibranch called a Spanish dancer, and a mucus cocoon that a parrot-fish sleeps in. These guys grow themselves a mucus cocoon every night—and in the morning they eat their way out!

We saw a sea starfish with long beige arms enchantingly splotched with shades of purple, and a big sea cucumber that Jeanette wrote ALOHA on with her finger. I noticed another sea-cuke off to one side with ALOHA on its back, so Jeanette and her husband George must do this all the time. Clearly there’s an SF story in here—alien visitors writing their names on us. Compared to the lords of the cosmos, we humans are as slow and lowly as sea cukes…

Jeanette led us through lots of underwater caves and tunnels. It was such a secret feeling to be sitting together in an underwater cave in our scuba gear, the guide, me, Rudy, and the other guy on the dive, a young man from Boston with an accent like JFK. And of course there were lots of fish, though most of the fish seem to hang out at a shallower depth than where we mostly were. Rudy loved the dive.

Yesterday I did a good snorkel out along the inside of the reef at Tunnels right. I found a canyon that I worked all the way back to shore. I saw two slate-pencil sea-urchins in a coral head. These guys have thick, dark red spines. I saw some algae-fuzzed lava on the bottom with nice lop-lop openings in it, and scattered here and there in the openings—so artfully!—were spiny sea urchins, about half of them pale purple, and half pale green. It was like the most beautiful Macy’s window display you could imagine. I have as much fun snorkel-hanging over a coral head as I do scuba-ing.

I started reading Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams again, and I picked up something he’s doing, which is to refer to the continuity of his dreams from night to night. I’ve noticed so often that my dreams are mostly in the same three or four settings: the ocean, the mountains, the school, the motel. And these days diving is all I’m dreaming about.

June 24, 1995. Haena Kayaking. Anniversary.

Today we went on a self-organized kayak excursion—we paddled up the Hanalei River, up to the point where a Hawaiian cowboy in a Ford pickup asked us at a shallow crossing to back off and wait while he drove some cows through. We’re thinking it’s going to be a thousand cows. We’re in kayaks thus: me and Sylvia, Rudy and Isabel, Georgia alone.

So while we’re waiting for the cows, Georgia manages to flip her kayak over, to fall out of it, to huli it as they say in Hawaii, like, “The truck ran off the road and hulied three or four times.” And the first two cows run across the ford with scared, spooked faces as Georgia bails out her hulied boat.

And we’re waiting for more cows under the radiating roots of the trees on the bank, the same trees we’ve seen all day, trees with roundish cardioid leaves and yellow flowers, these trees are real jackstraw rootboys, with an unbelievable complexity of clutter—longish straight line segments of root/trunk/branch.

Paddling back down the river after the cow-stampede—in the event, it was only six cows—on the way downstream the clouds came, blessedly, and we could see the landscape better. Those same cardioid-leafed trees lining the banks, covered over and over with yellow flowers like hibiscus, a flower every meter or so on the plant, and the river is adrift with the fallen-off blossoms, and the fallen-off blossoms are orange instead of yellow—they turn orange on the tree just before they fall, and then they float on the river, the calm reflective river, orange blossoms twinned with their butterfly-wing reflections, a lei of life along the sacred shore of this taro-field-draining river.

In the waggle of the tight river covered with blossoms, and the green banks and the flower-trees reflected, and the blue sky and white clouds and thunderhead reflected too, Sylvia and I tandemed together in our boat facing forward, loving the flowers floating in the river reflected. It was our twenty-eighth wedding anniversary. “Time please stop.”

June 30, 1995. Poipu. Air-Reef.

Today’s our last full day in Kauai. It’s such a cute, small island. We’ve been reading the local paper almost every day, and the news is so human-scale.

A few days ago we moved from Haena on the north shore to Poipu on the south. Haena is much nicer than Poipu. If I were to come here again I wouldn’t visit Poipu at all. Poipu is mega-resorts with their beaches closed off, and a small dirty crowded public beach or two. We’re in a condo in the midst of what looks like Reston or some other horrid planned community. There’s noise all day long from people running construction and gardening tools, just like back in Los Gatos.

One reason we moved down here was so we could drive to the Waimea Canyon, which we did the other day. It was indeed impressive. We sat at an outlook with plants Georgia said looked like “Dr. Seuss plants.” A nice family moment. Then it started raining, although rain here isn’t bad, it tends to be misty, and the air is warm.

The interesting hang-out spot I found near our Poipu condo is a hill of lava that sticks out of a sugarcane field. It is the same kind of formation which supports a reef underwater, a bunch of frozen lava with lots of holes in it. As it’s above water, I think of it as an air-reef.

Walking to my air-reef through the sugarcane field is exciting, the red dirt road, the green canes, the blue sky. Then the ground gets steeper, like a gum around the jagged tooth of lava. I went to the air-reef twice: once in the daytime, and once at night.

Water-reefs are covered over and over with life, but this air-reef is sparser. It has lichen, floppy fingery spiny cactuses like crown-of-thorns starfish, big dried-up white snail-shells, and maybe a few lizards. Bugs and birds take the place of fish. On the other side of the air-reef is a place where they’re harvesting sugarcane. They put tons of it in enormous clanking oversize trucks and take it to the sugar refinery nearby.

We drove by the refinery the other day—it’s so old-fashioned that you can look at it from across the street and more or less see how it works. A single big machine the size of a small factory.

On the lava tooth at night, smoking a joint, watching them harvest cane, I feel like a space ranger spying on alien machines. Each of the ancient clanking trucks has three spotlights mounted on it, some staring blindly up into the sky, others sweeping the fields. Slight worry they will pick me out and abduct me.

Yesterday I went scuba diving again. We rode out in a boat and jumped into deep water. At my request, our guide found us an octopus on the bottom. It made clouds of ink. I let one of its tentacles latch onto me, savoring the distinct pops of the separate suckers as I pulled myself free. The thing was about the size of a rabbit.

There was a strong underwater current, and we hung by our fingertips to a ledge, watching two big sea-turtles hang-gliding the current. Black triggerfish fed on the algae on one of the turtle’s back. Then we split up and looked in some caves. I swam into a cave alone, and noticed a big turtle sleeping on the bottom, with his head pulled in. I saw a purple and yellow flatworm as well, also a moray eel—it’s mouth was open wiiide. When I was little, someone told me that a moray eel can bite a broomstick in half.

The other day we all went to a wild beach and there were a lot of turtles in the surf at the shore. They feed on a seaweed that grows in the shallows. Isabel wanted to write a haiku with the traditional lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. I came up with this:

Hello turtle head!

Wallowing in shallow surf

Flips over: yellow!

And then I accidentally locked our Cadillac’s keys in the trunk. Oh wow. Rudy Jr. hitchhiked back to the car rental place at the airport and returned a couple of hours later with a key. It was okay waiting on the beach with the girls and the turtles. And Rudy enjoyed the adventure.

I’ve been snorkeling every single day. The other day while I out, I shit in the ocean by a reef, and a bunch of surgeonfish came and devoured the floating orange turd, striking at it over and over until it was all gone. Maybe that’s why they’re called surgeonfish, they profit from human deliquescence.

Trying to Quit

July 6, 1995. My Liver. Russian Dream.

Back in Los Gatos, with the pool-pumping, leaf-blowing neighbors noisier than ever, and all the kids gone.

My doctor says my blood tests indicate that my liver is getting fatty from too much drinking, and I need to cut back. She said I should see if I’m able to quit for a full month. I hope I can do it without joining a recovery group, those meetings are so fucking boring.

I’ve had a feeling lately I’m reaching the end of the line with the drinking. This is clearly the time to change. Hopefully the straighter life will help me to write faster on Freeware.

I slept until 10 am, today. I do some of my best dreaming when I have extra morning hours of sleep, in those rare ninth and tenth hours. Today’s dream was based on familiar themes: an ocean cliff, an empty building, protecting the family, a door to lock, and the threat of armed men. Here’s the dream:

Sylvia and I are on a cliff by an ocean, we’re contestants in a quiz show, we show our answers to various geographical questions by throwing boulders to spots that mark the answers. Sylvia throws a rock that’s supposed to land off on the side of South America at the Falkland Islands, but the boulder bumps the cliff and is deflected. After consultation the game show host decides our answer is okay.

The waves are getting bigger and rougher. I see stanchions of a bridge, the Clark bridge across the Ohio in Louisville. As a boy, I had a friend whose father jumped off this bridge and died. I go in and snorkel a little. It’s scary, all dark and murky and ripping currents—I get out.

There’s a huge crumbly resort building at the edge of the beach cliff, like the Santa Cruz Boardwalk building, with balconies that Sylvia and I walk along, looking at the ocean. Suddenly an enormous series of structures appears in the sea, structures arranged in a vast semicircle. The Russians have put them there as a demonstration of their might. The buildings have instantly unfolded themselves into position. They’re goldish hammered metal, patterned in Art Deco designs like the Chrysler building.

A row of explosions goes off along the horizon beyond the buildings, it’s like the sunsets we saw on the Kauai north shore. But these multiple lights are from a series of atomic bombs. Very reddish light. The water itself looks red now, like blood.

Sylvia and I are in bleachers atop the resort atop the cliff, watching. The bleachers keep getting steeper and shakier, it’s a tremendous distance down to the water, and the Russian skyscrapers are dizzyingly high. We’ve found two seats amidst a group of Soviet officials in suits and glasses, with fat necks and short haircuts. I notice that some of the giant buildings in the water have huge windows that open, with many layers of curtains being drawn back to reveal groups of playing children and Socialist Realist workers flexing their muscles.

The light and the water grow still redder. There’s smoke everywhere. Our perch grows more and more unstable. Sylvia and I push out along our row of seats and hurry downstairs. Soldiers are searching the resort building. In the street we find a group of friends, along with our children—but someone is missing, and I’m not sure who.

We run back into the building looking for the missing person. On the stairs we hear soldiers calling up the stairwell after us, “Do you have a permission C. A. F. to be here? Be careful because we’re about to release the pit bulls.”

We hurry into an empty plastered room. I get the door locked just in time. I hear heavy steps and dogs barking in the halls. I open our room’s window, expecting to find a fire-escape, but there isn’t one.

End of dream.

July 25-August 28, 1995. Can’t Quit Drinking.

July 25, 1995.

So I began trying to quit drinking. We were in Santa Fe for about a week. I was giving a talk about my continuous-valued cellular automata program CAPOW. While we were there I was reading Stephen King’s The Shining, about an alcoholic writer who goes on the wagon and goes crazy ands starts thinking he’s drunk anyway and tries to kill his family. Great reading choice.

I’m trying a special approach to quitting alcohol. I’m drinking no-alcohol beer and smoking pot. This way I’m not having alcohol, right? Clinically speaking, my liver should be happy. And I still get the taste of beer, and a certain amount of buzz from the pot.

One night, after I’d given my big talk at the Santa Fe Institute, I was smoking pot and guzzling the non-alcoholic beer, and I found myself going back to the liquor store to get a second six-pack of the stuff and I was, like—this is ridiculous. So I got real beer that night.

I’m smoking pot every day, keeping it down to about half a jay. This could be a problem. I eat a lot of sweets. I’m even smoking cigarettes more. But at least I’m hardly drinking!

August 6, 1995

So now I have a month of practically no drinking. The other day I got going on the beers with some guests, and before I knew it, I was riding my bike down to 7-11 to buy beer at 11:30 pm like I used to always do. It was like waking up inside a nightmare, doing exactly what I didn’t want to do.

The next day I finally went to a recovery group meeting. It was good, not too many people, and I got to take a turn and talk to them about where I’m at.

Really it would be easier not to drink at all. If I have one or two drinks a day, then that’s all I’m thinking about. Goal: peace of mind. In any case, I already feel less rushed than I used to. I used to be in a rush to get my next drink.

With the glimpses I’ve had of sobriety and peace of mind, I can see it’s something I really want. I hope I can keep on going for it. I’ll probably keep attending the recovery group meetings off and on, although their organizational emphasis on “working the steps” and “getting a sponsor” seems like more involvement than I’d like. I just want to hear what those people say and to get their encouragement.

August 11, 1995.

Today, sadly, I’m drinking, I had two glasses of wine before dinner and now I’m working on the last beer of a six-pack. Nothing really that hard about today in particular, it was just that today was the day I suddenly couldn’t do it for one more second. That tempting corked half-full bottle of cheap cabernet under the pantry shelves was calling to me.

Right now I just did a jay as well, so my plight seems mellow, not that big a deal. Which it isn’t. It’s just my body. But now I’ve lost my serenity. I’m all stirred up. Well, I can get the serenity back unless, god forbid, I now segue into a nightmare lost weekend a la the old days, being as how the others are going out of town and leaving me alone for four days.

I’m definitely going to catch a recovery meeting tomorrow. Maybe that’ll help me get through the day sober. If I start drinking tomorrow all alone…scary. It would hurt my body so much. My body is a temple of purity these days, right? Although the cigarette smoking is creeping way up on me.

Not to mention the pot smoking. What’s been keeping me going has been half a joint a day. Half a joint in the morning or the midafternoon or happy hour—this regimen relaxes a kicking drunk.

Tonight I won’t have the nightmare of riding to the 7-11 for beer at 11:30 because I’m gonna do it before 10:00 I’m sure. One more six of Millers Draft. That nice light sweet stuff. Millers was always a big thing in high school, me and Niles Schoening eyeballing older Louisvillians with coolers of Miller High Life and their pleasantly high women with the blonde or brunette hair and the tans and the drawls and the attitude and the curves…yubba!

August 28, 1995.

Looking back, I did make it through that upcoming lonely weekend without continuing to drink. And I did all right for a bit after that, but now I am, it seems, totally drinking again. My least favorite but most written about topic. Itch, itch, itch. Blaming everyone but me.

“I was doin’ okay for 27 days until I started going to meetings…”

“If the people around me would just give up drinking too…”

I’ve gotten physically smaller and psychically bigger from my six weeks of partial sobriety. I actually lost ten or fifteen pounds. And my psychic state is calmer. And I’m not so filled with hate.

But now, as I start up on drinking again, I’m taking on hate, it’s like oil gushing into the tanks of a giant ship refueling off the tip-ass end of Manhattan. Hatred of our snobby neighbors across the street with their noisy pool-pump…

September 11, 1995. Rudy Jr. Leaves Home.

Today Rudy left home again.

“And then the wood-cutter’s son set off to seek his fortune.”

Touching Rudy, so eager, seeking his fortune and a fair maid, so young, so free, so innocent, so unencumbered. He’s headed towards the Pacific Northwest—Portland and Seattle in particular—driving up there with his high-school friend Jeff, in Jeff’s pickup.

Remembering the Grimm Brothers tales we used to read, I told Rudy that if he sees a little man with his nose pinched in a log, he should use the little man’s axe and wedge and pry the log back open. Who knows what the little man might give him: a cloak of invisibility, a magic wallet always full of bread and cheese, a magic rose to rouse a swooning princess.

The other day I had a dream where Pop was going to cut my hair, and right away my dream hair grew out and out, got thick and long. It was blonde and went down to the floor and Pop’s scissors bent and blunted on it, he couldn’t cut it at all. A coming into manhood dream, a beyond-castration dream, the dream of a full professor? Or a dream of my inability to stop drinking…

Speaking of Pop, it recently struck me that it isn’t Rudy and me against Pop, with Rudy like my little brother also trying to figure Pop out. Rudy doesn’t feel that way at all, he has zero resentments towards Pop, the old man was nice to him.

No, it’s more like I’m Pop, and Rudy is me. I am the father and Rudy is the son. In the unbelievable yet ineluctable long slow Xeroxing of time, I’ve been warp-copied thirty years into the future. I lived through those thirty years but now they’re gone—and it’s me who’s fifty, and Rudy who’s twenty. I’m not the son anymore. But I do have an appetite for being a father to my son.

Now and then I murmur to myself aghast: “I am my father.”

Rudy’s gone to seek his fortune. God be with you, son.

October 17, 1995. Fractal Writing

My writing is a fractal, that’s why it’s good. I think about the letter level (how to spell the words, especially the dialect and the neologisms), about the word level (the mot juste), the phrase (the right cadence, the assonance, the consonance, the synecdoche, the litotes), the sentence (the right idea at the right time), the grouping of sentences (the rhetorical play of parallelism and chiasmus), the paragraph (each should be its own little cartoon panel), the page (shuffling the paragraphs together into a dialog-like order), the scene (squeeze the most humor and strangeness out of it), the chapter (have a meaningful development of a character from one point to the next over the course of a chapter), the novel (grow the whole broccoli stalk up to a seemly shape with a solid, rockin’ plot), the series (the dynasty-like progress of the families, the time-bound seasoning and ripening of my style), the oeuvre (the opportunity to compare and contrast the varying forms and media—and the ongoing illuminations of my persistent themes).

October 31, 1995. Barely Sober. Sewer Gnomes.

Nearly three weeks since I left my computer at Fry’s Electronics for repair. I miss being plugged in. Very depressed today.

Probably the reason I feel so depressed is withdrawal from pot. I got so tired of getting stoned and then drunk that I flushed the rest of my stash last week. When I smoke pot, every night I wake up in the dark and I wish I was dead. But when I don’t smoke pot, I wish I was dead all day long. The plus is that I dream more when I don’t get high, and I write a bit more. But god the time drags.

Here alone in a gray day in our dull dreary house where I’m forever and ever cleaning and picking up and shopping and doing the dishes and carrying out the trash and vacuuming. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, I can’t believe that’s all the later it is.

Outside are three gnomes, three stooges, the sewer men. They’ve been around a lot lately. First there was a back-up and the upstairs toilet flooded into the house, spewing strangers’ shit and piss and toilet paper all over, horrible. While the sewer guys were fixing it, they broke a line under the little flower garden that we have in back by the shed. We had two big daisy bushes there. So today they’re back and trying to dig down and find the pipe they broke, and they tore out the four-year-old daisy bushes.

The head sewer man has red hair and a big red mustache and not too many teeth. He’s kind of hunched, very much an Earth spirit. He talks a lot, and calls me “Sir” in every sentence. The second sewer man is blond and complains a lot about working. The third sewer man has such a dumb-sounding voice it is like he’s faking it. He wears a baseball cap very tight on his head.

I feel like crying about the ruined daisy bushes. When I called Fry’s to ask about my computer again today the employee was curt and unfriendly, and that makes me feel like crying too. Today is Halloween and we have no party to go to, no friends, no children, nothing to celebrate and nobody to celebrate it with, and that makes me feel like crying even more. Waaaaah! Baaawl! I want my email! I want my pot! Waaaaaaaah! I want a drink! Waaaaaaaah!

At the supermarket I saw a baby dressed up like a green pea-pod. It was crying. That didn’t make me feel like crying, no, it made me happy to see the baby. She was right in front of me in line and she grabbed my finger with her hand. That was the high point of the day.

December 12, 1995. Nearly Done With Freeware.

I’m inching along on Freeware once again. As I mentioned, I’ve been blessedly out of pot for a couple of weeks. And I’m not drinking, at least for tonight, so I should have a good shot at writing three or four pages tomorrow. My head’s in about the right place.

I usually get the most written when I feel not even particularly creative. It goes the best when I feel kind of grim about just sitting down and getting a piece of my book the fuck done, and who cares if it’s any good or not. If I don’t care, that’s often when the work is the wittiest, the most hard-edge and embitteredly true.

All the good ideas that I’m having for Freeware now—it feels like a supply of bombshells stored up for a giant, final, fireworks barrage. I’m so close to the end. I feel excited and chuckling, running up and down my rack of shells, ready to light them off, everything prepared at last.

I was thinking about winter the other day, and I looked up the scene in Moby Dick where all the sailors are playing around, it’s a section called, “Midnight, Forecastle,” and a squall that comes up, and little Pip says, “It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year!” Wonderful.

January 2, 1996. Sad Christmas.

Before Christmas rolled around, I had this fantasy of it being a wonderful mellow happy vintage and mint ole Christmas time, but in the event it was way stressed.

My father-in-law came, and we all drove up to an expensive resort at Squaw Valley near Tahoe for three nights, leaving home on the 26th, with all the new books unread, all the new games unplayed, all the Christmas treats uneaten. And when we got to Squaw Valley, I was drunk and it was a drag.

Christmas ended up feeling like a sad waste. Here was this very rare gathering of our beloved three kids in their twenties, and in the end it felt like the family didn’t savor and enjoy the painstakingly prepared festivities. The lights were never lovelier, the food never better, the tree never more beautiful, the presents never more fun. But it was ashes, ashes, ashes in a wildfire of bad vibes.

I need to change. I don’t want to have another Christmas like this again.

February 7, 1996. Me and Sta-Hi.

Well now. I’ve been mostly sober since the first of January. No alcohol and no pot. I’m not a hundred percent yet, but I’m going to meetings. Still not talking much to the people there, but maybe soon.

I’ve written ungodly much in the last five weeks. I’ve lost five more pounds. I actually weighed 172 one morning.

Maybe I end Freeware with Sta-Hi getting into recovery.

A New Life / 1996-1999

Vision in Big Sur

June 9, 1996. In Recovery for Real. Big Sur.

I’ve been working at it all spring off and on, and I’d say that I’m finally in recovery for real. I feel like just now I got the final piece of the puzzle. It has to do with a feeling that something like god is everywhere and that this force can help me—I’m talking about a white light, cosmic, overarching, all-is-one, pantheistic kind of god, with the added fillip that this force can hear me and help me.

I had my vision on a solitary camping trip in Big Sur. I’ll jump right to the vision part now, and after that I’ll get into writing about the beauties of the hike.

The vision happened on my second night of sleeping in my tent in a backcountry Big Sur redwood grove. I woke up in the night, around 4 am. The half moon was high overhead. I put on my glasses and got up and looked around, deciding I should stay up for a little while, as this was such a rare kind of moment, being alone in the moonlight under the redwoods by the stream.

I saw some bare hanging dead branches and I thought “spoooky,” and started to be scared, but then pushed that away by expanding my awareness to have a sense of a pantheistic god all around me and within everything that exists, an attentive god loving me. The whole world is a single living fabric that I’m woven into. Alone in the wilderness, I felt safe, as if I were at home. A simple vision, really. I knew it all along.

I walked down and sat by the stream, listening to its noises, its splishes and splashes like musical notes, nearly rhythmic but not quite—chaotic and beautiful. Finally I was well.

The place where I did this big hike is way down the Big Sur coast, over a hundred miles from our house. I drove down alone. I had my new frame pack, water filter, miniature isobutene stove, gorp, freeze-dried food, down sleeping bag, stuffable miniature flannel pillowcase, lightweight “snail-shell” style tent, mountain boots, sleeping mat, plastic spoon, titanium cooking pot, maps, miniature sun cream tube, and strike-anywhere matches. Eager much?

I parked my car at the side of the highway at Kirk Creek trailhead for the Ventana National Wilderness and started off. My pack was shockingly heavy. The path led up a hill overlooking the ocean. Lots of flowering plants: sticky monkey flower, Queen Anne’s lace, Indian paintbrush, chamomile, thistles, poppies, giant purple clover—soon shading into meadows of yellow grass dotted with green manzanita and other chaparral shrubs. I could hear the surf for a long time, angling up the long slope. It was a clear day, and the wrinkled waves of the distant water formed lovely textures.

After about two miles, at fifteen-hundred feet, I hit a cut in the hill where the trail turns right to go up into Hare Canyon. I could look up and down the Big Sur coast for a long way, seeing all the fractal headlands. And then I walked three miles up Hare Canyon, with Kirk Creek down at its bottom, the creek getting closer to me as I walked further in.

The trail met Kirk Creek in a flat spot under some really big redwoods. I hadn’t seen anyone else all day. It was about five in the evening. There were a vast number of mosquitoes, constantly landing on me and biting. I’d forgotten to bring insect repellant.

I worked fast to get my food in a hanging bag and my tent set up. The tent was the size of a casket, and largely mosquito netting, so I’d be able to see out of it. I took off my clothes and washed in a big pool in the creek right there, the creek not all that wide, maybe ten feet, with an enormous fallen redwood lying across it like a bridge. After washing I put on my pajama pants and sleeping T-shirt.

The tree beside my tent was twenty feet in diameter, with a burned “goose pen” (as they say) hole in the bole—I put my backpack in there to be out of dew’s way. Now that I’d washed off some sweat, the mosquitoes let up a little. I filter-pumped some water and lit my new camp-stove—yay it works! Boiled water to make freeze-dried spaghetti marinara.

Three battered-looking thirtyish hippies showed up, one bearded and skinny, one bearded and stout and talkative, one beardless but with a heavily acne scarred face. They were friendly, and camped a comfortable hundred feet away in the large, flat grove. I mentioned my lack of bug-repellent to them, but all they had was some organic type stuff—eucalyptus oil, and even they had to admit that it didn’t work at all.

After I ate, I got into my sleeping bag to be basically in bed for the night at 8 pm. I lay there, relaxing, enjoying the absence of bugs—gloatingly crushing the one or two mosquitoes that had made it into the tent with me. I savored the sight of the towering redwood above me. That first night, I slept straight through. The animals never came for my hanging food, and the hippies didn’t prolong their whooping revels unduly long.

This spot was at about 2,500 feet, and the next morning I noticed on my topo map that if I followed Kirk Creek up through Hare Canyon, I’d hit Cone Peak Ridge leading up to Cone Peak, the highest thing around those parts at 5,100 feet. The map showed an interesting loop down from there that cut across the front of the high Big Sur hills at three or four thousand feet, fairly level but with some dips into the ravines of some other creeks, maybe a bit long for a day’s walk. But I decided to head for Cone Peak and, if I had the energy, to come back on this long, scenic route.

I got going at about 8 am, leaving most of my stuff in the tent, bringing extra socks, my windbreaker, the gorp, two quarts of water and the water pump, winding up switchbacks along the creek amid poison oak and swarms of gnats.

I would see a lot of gnats that day. They get right in front of your eyes—right in front. Their goal, I eventually figured out by taking off my glasses, is to land in your eyes and get some of that nice protein-rich mucus off your eyeball. Failing that, the interior of your nose is pretty good. You’ve seen cows with gnats in their eyes like that. For the gnats, you’re a two-legged mountain cow. I was glad I wore glasses.

My trail led uphill and I was kind of uptight about the poison oak and gnats, so the first part of the hike was just a push. When I got up on Cone Peak ridge I found a rough, dirt road, Cone Peak Road running along the ridge. I was at about 3,500 feet now.

Just as I started up the road, a four-wheel drive Toyota came tooling along after me with two shaved-head guys in front and a woman with extremely short hair in back. They stopped and asked if the trail I’d appeared from was the trail to Cone Peak, and I told them, no, the Cone Peak trail would have to be further up this road. On a whim, I asked them for a ride so as to shave a mile or two off my hike. The driver assented—a bit ungraciously. He was suspicious of me.

It was odd to suddenly be in a car again, with AC and crappy music and close-mouthed shorthairs. I think they were from a military base. They had a clannish vibe.

Anyway they drove what seemed like a pretty long distance, maybe two and a half miles, and I realized I could do that long scenic loop walk I’d wondered about. We got out at the Cone Peak trail and I started ahead of them, they were kind of making it clear they didn’t want me to be near them, solitary old man that I was. We were so high already, that climbing Cone Peak was no big deal. And then I went down the front of it and started the long, slanting trek across the Big Sur hills, heading for my campground at Vicente Flat.

The bug situation got really severe. At the altitude of three thousand feet in the Big Sur mountains, in the sun, in June, you’re in the domain of the deer fly. These guys are a little bigger than house flies, with striped abdomens. As soon as you stop moving, they’ll bite any part of your bare skin they can find. Stop moving just for a second, and a deer fly will land and immediately lower its tiny little head to your skin with its little striped ass up in the air and proceed to bite a hole in your skin so it can drink the blood. No subtle mosquito-style syringe-wielding blood extraction for the deer fly, no. They’re crude.

I started down from Cone Peak about 1 pm, and I wouldn’t be down below three thousand feet—and out of deer fly territory—until after 6 pm. So during these five hours I essentially could not stop, because as soon as I did a cloud of ten, twenty, thirty, even a hundred of these bloodsuckers would be chomping on my bod.

“Hey, there’s a hairless two-legged mountain cow over here—a-layin’ down!”

I didn’t have to walk fast, but I had to keep walking. Well, okay, when I really, really had to rest for a minute, I could sit down and watch my arms and legs and swat the flies, killing maybe ten per minute before moving on.

Other than the fly problem what was it like? Exquisite. The plants seemed cleaner higher up. The view of the ocean and hills was great, even though there was fog on the ocean. There were a lot of century plants or yuccas, little batches of spiky leaves with giant phallic stalks shooting up ten or twelve feet, surprisingly huge out of the little fuzz of leaves, covered with white flowers smelling like magnolias or gardenias. The yuccas were placed on the hills just so. Nature’s ongoing processes manage to put things in just the ideal spots to be the most gorgeous—the cactus, the slope, the oak, Cone Peak in the background, the foggy curve of the coast. The endless unfolding of the chaotic cosmic mind. I saw a dead striped snake, ground squirrels, a deer, lizards out the yang, and eventually a six foot rattlesnake, fat and a-buzzin’ his rattle stay away.

The path led through a couple of empty trail camps, and in one of them I thought I’d lost my mind, as the keep-it-clean signs were written in completely alien alternate languages. Hmong and Lao, according to a note at the bottom. California!

As I grew somewhat numb with fatigue, things looked prettier and I worried less about the flies and the pain in my feet. I walked slowly and deliberately since, like the day before, I was not meeting any people at all on the trail, and if I fell and disabled myself it would be a bad situation.

Towards the end, the sun was getting low and golden and I was moving more or less horizontally across enormous gold hills, hills as big as Höhbalmen in Zermatt—which we used to call “Sylvia’s mountain” because on her first day there, our Sylvia had sworn she’d climb it, and eventually she did, with me. It really is as pretty as Zermatt in Big Sur. I had that same mind-opening feeling of vast space around me, and, like I was talking about, that sense of my body being fully embedded in the natural world.

The last canyon before my Hare Canyon was when I finally got out of deer-fly territory. I stopped and changed my socks and took a luscious bath in a deep pool in Limekiln Creek, the creek before Kirk Creek. And when I reached my tent in the Hare Canyon redwood grove, the three hippies cheered to see my return. They’d been wondering about me, as it was nearly seven by then. An eleven-hour trek. By now the mosquitoes seeming like nothing. I was in bed by eight again, the campground looking more beautiful than before.

I woke up during the night feeling fully rested—and that’s when I had the vision or realization that I was talking about. It was good. Maybe I’m a new man.

The next morning I hiked back out, taking it slow. There was a lot of fog, so coming down the last gold hills I was above the fog like an airplane above the clouds for awhile, enjoying my last big space views. My little red car was still there, loyally waiting.

I stopped at a store at Lucia and got a croissant and two hardboiled eggs. Further up the coast, I got to the old new age Esalen resort around two in the afternoon and, yes, they had a spare room that I could have for a night as a random walk-in. I went and soaked my sore legs in the cliff-top hot sulfur water baths, bringing along my current reading matter, Edward “Attractor” Lorenz’s profound pop science book, The Essence of Chaos—as an bonus, having the book was a good excuse to keep my glasses on for eyeing the other bathers.

Later I watched the sunset from Esalen’s tiny, wild, rocky beach, then went to bed early. Next morning I lay in bed reading more about chaos, understanding everything, then took another hot bath soak and got a massage that lasted an hour and a half, next to the baths on the cliff, me thinking about my god visions as I got more and more relaxed, with the actual sound of the real ocean right there outside the window of the massage room, the sound forming a blue mandala of waves in the center of my mind.

So, yeah, a great trip! And all this clean and sober, no less! Yaaar!

Thank you, dear cosmos!

Tonga and Fiji

July 15, 1996, - August 6, 1996. Tonga And Fiji

Thanks to Eric Gullichsen, a virtual-reality-programmer friend from Autodesk, I have a tenuous connection with the Crown Prince of Tonga. Tonga is an archipelago of islands in the South Pacific. Given our interest in snorkeling, scuba diving, and exotic locales, Sylvia and I decided to make a trip to Tonga and Fiji.

I didn’t bring my computer along, so the these notes are typed in from my sparse, hand-written travel journal.

We took Reno Air to LA. Then Air New Zealand to Honolulu, and Royal Tongan Air to Nuku’alofa, the largest city in Tonga. We had to wait four hours, midnight to 4 am, in the Honolulu airport. The Honolulu air-terminal buildings were open to the breeze. We lay down to rest on a smooth concrete bench under some huge tropical plants, just outside the terminal building. Yodeling Hawaiian music played softly. I stared at the leaves tossing in the gentle breeze, thinking about chaotic motion.

In Nuku-alofa. The Tongans use fans woven of palm, hand-held fans with feathery fringed edges. I muse that a vortex is like a boulder. You hit a boulder and it breaks into smaller rocks. Shock a vortex and it decomposes into a passel of smaller vortices. You can’t make vector curl disappear any more than you can get rid of matter.

The elevator in the Foreign Ministry building had a marble floor. It was the only elevator in Tonga, and it was manned by a man in a tie and a blue serge skirt.

“Hello,” I said.

“Malo e lelei,” said the elevator operator. “You must learn to say hello in the Tongan way. Malo e lelei.”

The second day in Nuku’alofa, Sylvia was napping, and I walked out to a store to buy some chocolate. They had beer for sale too, and for a second I was very close to buying some. And then I remembered this if-all-else-fails prayer that old Ron had talked about at one of our meetings.

“Dear god please help me.”

I ran that number and it worked. I made it out of the store with no beer. Glad.

We took a boat out to a smaller island near Nuku’alofa. Good beaches and snorkeling there, not many people. In the evening we rode back to the town on a rickety ferry sort of boat made of rusty sheets of metal. It’s dark as we come into Nuku’alofa, lights on shore, voices around us speaking Tongan, everything casual and disorganized. Such a sense of adventure. Like being inside an archetype. The ship arriving.

First snorkel sight. A giant clam with a crenellated shell, lying on the bottom. Rising up off the side of it was a bumpy staghorn coral. The clam and coral made a wonderfully unbalanced composition, something nobody would ever think of designing, yet something with a beautiful inner logic. One single fish lived in the branches of the coral.

View from the porch. A volcano in the distance, a papaya tree, other trees with little fruits like lanterns, translucent and green when young, red when ripe. Inside each fruit is a black, matte octagonal seed. The waves beat, little waves, it’s more like lapping. The waves lap. Wind today. Lassitude, we nap all the time. So relaxing here.

The dusting of natural pixels that make the pattern on an insect pupa that I found. The dots converge as if on a strange attractor.

We flew to the island of Vava’u, also part of Tonga. The town of Neifu in Vava’u under the backwards moon, with the barking dogs, the grunting pigs.

Atop a low hill, Sylvia and I found a giant lofa bean. I felt a little guilty about making off with the two-foot-long bean pod, and tried to hide it in my knapsack, but it wouldn’t fit completely. It peeked out at the top. In a snack bar I put my hat on the knapsack and the waitress thought the pack, bean and hat were a baby. Odd, that.

Sylvia took the backpack to the post office.

“That bean is getting us into trouble,” she said when she came back.

“What do you mean?”

“A woman asked me where I’d gotten it.”

“Was she mad we took it?”

“No, she just wanted to know where we got it, so she could find one. She said it was used for Tongan ceremonies.”

“I stole the ceremonial bean?”

At the hotel desk the young woman at the counter told me that, “If you let the lofa bean ripen and get brown, the seeds can be used for—dancing.” I surmised that she meant for castanets.

In our room, Sylvia was tired of talking about the bean, so I began riffing to renew her interest.

“What a beautiful green color our lofa bean is,” I said.

And then I wondered out loud if it might be the larva of an alien centipede. After all, the bean’s vine had seemed to hang down from nowhere. Like in Jack and the Beanstalk.

“What if the bean splits open and eats my brain tonight?” I asked.

“It would get a small meal.”

On the way up to the hill where we would find the bean—this mound was called “Mount” Talau (131 meters high)—we encountered an old man walking down the dirt street. His shirt had several buttons missing, many of his teeth were missing as well, and he was carrying a small aluminum tub holding a big steak of fish flesh. He struck up a conversation with us, talking about his sister in California. His name was Lata Toumolupe.

He invited us into his house to look at his shells. We took off our shoes, sat on his couch, and he brought out his treasure, his little plastic bag with tied handles and some paper in it wrapped around his shells. Such shiny nice shells, like he’d gathered them and played with them for years. At his continued urging, I took a big whelk, two brown cowries and two tooth cowries.

“It was so touching, him offering us his treasure,” said Sylvia outside. “You should send him something nice.”

“A Swiss knife,” I said. “And weird candy. Those sizzling things. Pop Rocks.”

Going out on the Vava’u dive boat with the dive-guide and his assistant I thought of the three “godless heathen Feejee islanders,” the harpooners in Moby Dick: Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg. I think of the guide as Tashtego.

I walked from our hotel to the village of Toula. I went past the huts or fales, up a little hill with a graveyard, the graves decorated with patterns of shells. I went down the hill to the sea and rocky beach. Brittle sea stars were everywhere on the shallowly covered rocks, most with two or there arms in a hidey-hole and the other arms out snaking around.

“Thank you, god,” I thought. “Thank you for making the world.”

Coming back through the graveyard, I saw a thin young woman with a pack of children working on a grave—sweeping it with a stick broom and burning the rubbish in a small fire. The woman made a gesture I hadn’t seen yet in Tonga. She held her hand palm up, slightly cupped, with the fingers stiff and outspread and then flipped the hand down towards me, a bit as if sowing seed. The gesture definitely meant go away.

As I walked back down the hill into the village, the children came after me, friendly and laughing, three or four girls and a boy. I asked them to catch one of the free-roaming Tongan pigs, but they wouldn’t. The boy, about four, had fun poking my back-pack with a long and rather sharp stick. The girls asked my name and had me spell it for them and then they danced around me saying, “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.”

Wow, I thought, that’s me. I’m really here. It felt almost like being awake in a dream.

A little piece of coral with a tiny zebra-striped angelfish. And some fish of a heart-stopping, mouth-watering neon blue. Fish-shaped fish. Like an aquarium, but untransportable.

Now we’re on Taveuni Island in Fiji.

Diving on the deep outer wall of the Vuna reef. It felt like being on the steep slope of Höhbalmen in Zermatt. Flying along the slope, pulled by the fast current.

Over and over, looking ahead, I’d barely notice something disappearing. I think it’s feathery polyps pulling themselves—zip!—back into hidey-holes in the coral. They’re almost like that old idea of mine about there being very fast forms of life that you never quite see, or only see as flickers from the corner of your eye.

My treasures: A pig tusk. Beach shells with cockroaches. A pocketful of baby acorns. A triton shell. Coral. Giant clam shells. A reef pearl.

It was pouring rain. I sat in the large common room of our guest house, “Susie’s Plantation.” Coconut palms. Orchids. Dark red ginger flowers. Orange flowers. The locals laughing and talking in the kitchen. Such peace.

A lion fish. Red and black fins, long. They turn white from the tip inward when hassled. The clown fish live in anemones, and swim out of them at you. The anemones are pinkish, tan, fleshy. The tips are darker ball shapes.

At first I thought the clown fish were friendly, but it turns out they’re territorial, aggressive. Looking closely at some of the larger ones, I could see that they have rows of jagged sharp teeth inside their clown smile. Aggressive, menacing clowns.

Some soft coral is fat and chubby, some lean and branched. It’s like turning a parameter in a fractal generator and seeing a series of shapes. Pale purple, lavender, chartreuse.

Three teenage Fijian kids took us to see some lava tubes. These were horizontal tunnels just underground. One of the boys carried a big machete. We started joking nervously about cannibalism.

“Yes,” said one of our guides. “Eat white people.”

We took a long bus ride around Taveuni to the Bouma waterfall. The bus was Indian-made, a Shreedhar Motors product.

The virgin forest seemed like my idea of a rain forest, although another tourist termed it “low jungle.” All the trees had lianas on them (a liana being a climbing woody tropical vine), and epiphytes (a plant such as a tropical orchid which grows on another plant upon which it depends for mechanical support but not for nutrients). Life upon life upon life. Like a reef! A place where there’s total ambient nutrients available and all you really need is an anchor spot. So you attach yourself to others.

The lower Bouma waterfall is a high cascade, maybe a hundred feet, plummeting into a pool. It’s not huge. I swam out into the pool. As I approached the twenty-foot wide fan of water, I felt fear—the cascade seemed pretty strong and I couldn’t see through it. The location of the heaviest part of the waterfall shower wandered about in a chaotic orbit on the system’s strange attractor. The heaviest part of the torrent was almost too much, really hard, and it pushed me under. The water was so agitated and foamy that I could hardly float in it. Dense mist was rising up. I swam through the core three times.

Story idea about the Christmas tree worms. These are the guys who poke out of coral heads and dart inside when you come near. The part that sticks out is bristly, brightly colored, shaped like brushy cone.

“It’s a combination of the two most perfect forms,” said Onar. “The triangle and the helix.”

Tiny little balls were forming on the altered Christmas tree worms, silvery little spheres like glass mirror-balls.

“Eadem mutata resurgo,” continued Onar. “Do you know the phrase? It’s the inscription on the tomb of Jakob Bernoulli, beneath a drawing of a logarithmic spiral. The same, yet altered, I am reborn. Now imagine a quaternionic spiral. That’s the Christmas tree worm.”

Diving at “Yellow Tunnel,” a reef in the Somosomo Straits off Taveuni in Fiji. The guide drew a chalkboard picture of our dive plan. The little Fijian guide Lui swam ahead across the top of the reef, using his hands on the coral. I swam after him as if into a gale-force wind, kicking as hard as I could, an inch above the reef surface, the fish like bright confetti. Paradise. Later on I lose track and go too deep. A hundred feet. Dark. A hammer-head shark cruises by.

Saucer Wisdom

December 19, 1996. Six Months Sobriety.

Whoah, I haven’t written in my journal for a looong time. I’ve been sober for six and a half months now. Could be one reason I don’t write in my journal as much—that’s something I used to do a lot when lonely and drunk and high. Or when lonely and hung-over.

So how does it feel, Ru? I mean if you were to flip back through the journal pages, there’s probably something about drugs or alcohol on at least half the pages. And now at last you’re free. How does it feel?

I really don’t miss it. It was just so uniformly sad towards the end.

I do have a little twinge of anxiety that I might not write such odd things anymore. But I bet I will.

Last night I dreamed about scuba diving. Scuba is such a kind of nightmarish thing, or can be—the sick horror that you’ve done something likely to ruin your lungs. In this dream I’d gone halfway up, then swum back down deep, then noticed I was out of air.

I’m kind of working on a scuba story called “Tonga.” Not working on it very hard though, as I don’t feel a real urgency about it. There isn’t some single message I need to get out or some single stylistic muscle I want to exercise. It’s basically just another sphere story. The sphere will be negatively curved space, organically grown, a tiny bubble to hold a day’s supply of air. I need to work one of my obsessions or problems into it to make it worth doing. Make it a story about quitting drugs and alcohol?

Speaking of obsessions, I’ve been kind of obsessed about our neighbors’ pool pump again. It’s winter, they haven’t been in the pool since August, and every day all day long the pump runs to push some water through sun-catching black panels to warm the pool up. Like what difference does it make what temperature the pool water is?

I hate to lose serenity over this. But every time I go in or out of the house, the pump is right there, running. And seemingly I can’t talk to them about it. I tried to mention it to the neighbor woman this week in fact, and she was completely unfriendly and irrational. Me the soul of sweet reason and patience of course—not. Fact is, the neighbor woman remembers me screaming at her and her husband like a maniac not so very long ago. Get over it, Ru!

Recovery is about more than staying sober. That is, it’s about making a change in your psychic weather so that you can stay sober. Spiritual contact with the cosmic one.

The other day I ran across this little book I used to like, by Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment. And now that I’m on the recovery track, that old path looks kind of false. A “left-hand” path. The teaching in The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment is, “You’re enlightened right now.”

And recovery is: “Take these specific steps, and keep working on yourself, and you’ll get a gradually deepening spiritual experience.” And it’s this latter approach that now, finally, seems to me to be true. The old instant enlightenment idea can serve as code for: “Get high and you’ll feel good.” And the sad thing was, that method eventually stopped working for me.

The goal is to be high without having to get high. Or maybe being high isn’t exactly what it’s about. Being serene is where it’s at. Being balanced and calm and centered. I want to be serene, and comfortable in my own skin. And now, thanks to this recovery program and, yes, thanks to “god,” I’m getting there.

The first two steps of the program are like a koan:

Step 1) I can’t quit, it’s humanly impossible.

Step 2) I can quit with god’s help.

Is it really god that’s helping me? Or is it the group dynamics of regularly going to recovery meetings, and having a sponsor who I stay in touch with? Well, I think it’s both.

And who knows what god is? If I prefer to be agnostic, I can think of “god” as a special place in my brain that I push, a buzzer that calls up something higher. This higher force may just be a different mode of thought. Or maybe it’s my old pantheistic, white-light pal—the cosmic one mind.

The big new head change for me here is to think that god is also a force that’s able to help me as an individual. I ask for help and I get it—and who knows how or why. That’s the key new concept for me.

I always believed in the big cosmic one mind god. But it never occurred to me that I could ask this god for help. I was too small. But for whatever reason, asking for help seems to help me stay sober. Even if all I’m “really” doing is firing up some higher-level circuits in my own mind.

I just now phoned up Pop’s old lady-friend Priscilla and talked to her for the first time since Pop’s funeral. She sounded just the same as ever, very nice and friendly. Calling her was part of the recovery step where you go back and make amends to the persons you harmed while in the disease. It was good to talk with Priscilla. I never thought I’d say that! When Pop died, I was so wrapped up in alcoholic resentments that I said I’d never talk to her again as long as I lived. But why not? She’s a harmless do-gooder woman who loved my father.

January 26, 1997. Realware?

My tentative plan for my next novel was to write Realware, a sequel to Software, Wetware, and Freeware. I was thinking that this time I should have an outline and write the thing in chronological A-Z order instead of going into it ass-backwards like I usually do.

Looking at my list of Ware characters, and thinking about possible chapters—it’s like looking into a seething anthill. So much going on in there already! I felt like I’d only need to look a little closer to find my story. It wouldn’t be that hard.

So I’m three thousand words into Chapter One of Realware now, and I’ve woken old Cobb up in 2054. But today I’m beginning to wonder about the wisdom of this project. It’s like I’m doing the same thing again. Why not start a completely fresh book for my next novel?

February 3, 1997. Wondering What to Write.

So I decided not to do Realware for now. And I’m not into any of my possible nonfiction projects.

I worry that maybe I’m through writing books. Then I think, maybe I should just give it up and relax. I’m in the autumn of my life now. I’ve written plenty of books, and one more book isn’t going to make much difference. I’m tired of competing. Maybe now that I’m sober my creative life is over.

But when I think like that for a few days, I get depressed. I like to have something beautiful to work on. I do want to write another novel.

I just don’t want it to be a sequel to anything because I don’t want to have the baggage of all the old time-bound decisions. But I could see doing something in that same kind of space as The Hacker and the Ants, that is, the near-future Silicon Valley world. It would feel good to be writing transreal stuff about my daily life.

The far future is another thing I’ve thought of doing, like it would be cool to do the year 3000 just now as the year 2000 rolls around, like call the book 3K. But I don’t want to do that one yet, I want to write about real people and real problems.

What kinds of problems? Death, alcoholism, old age, crowding, meaninglessness, anomie, media bullshit, mass stupidity.

The solutions I’d like to get to are spiritual.

February 14, 1997. Plan Book Pitch With Greg.

I have a really great idea for a new book, and my old college roommate Greg Gibson can help me. He’s about to visit us for a few days on his annual trip out to San Francisco for the Antiquarian Book Festival—he deals in rare old maritime books.

The idea is that I have a lot of notes for science-fiction story ideas, and I’ve half-convinced Wired Books to publish them as a nonfiction book of speculations about the future. Wired magazine is spinning off a Wired Books division, see. And they like the idea of my book, but they want a hook, a frame-tale, a high concept. So my hook is to claim that all of my futuristic teachings come direct from saucer aliens who’ve actually seen the future.

Rather than appearing to be a saucer nut myself, I’ll keep my distance and say that a close friend of mine has had frequent saucer encounters, and my book consists of what they told him, story after story. This is where Greg comes in.

As it happens I have a meeting with the Wired Books editors on February 19, and I could bring Greg along. We’ll use a fake name for him. Like “Ronnie Shook” or “Gregor Samsa” would be great. During the course of my book maybe the Greg character can be abducted for good—it’s off to the triple-sunny liquid-methane beaches of Arcturus-3 for my old pal Gregor Samsa!

For publicity purposes I’ll provide an actual image of him, like a grainy ’60s photo or something. His many, multiply-jointed legs akimbo. The Viet-Vet beard. The hard, bewildered eyes.

February 19, 1997. Saucer Wisdom Meeting.

Today Greg and I had a very successful trip to San Francisco—my meeting with the Wired Books editors. They’d wanted some hook or spin on my proposal. Like I said, the book is to be thoughts about future tech, and they wanted some frame-tale which implies that I have some kind of inside track on the knowledge.

So I told Greg he should come to the meeting with me and help me run our hoax. At first Greg said he didn’t want to, maybe he was shy or something, and then I told him I really needed him, and that I’d even pay him 2% of whatever I got for the book.

So Greg and I went into the meeting and I told the editors that I get a lot of information about the future from a close friend who is an alien contactee named Frank Shook! In fact all of my science and SF ideas are from Frank. I presented this claim as if it were true, without any winks or nods.

And Frank Shook himself was at the meeting with me—as played by Gregory Gibson with his pony tail undone and his hair down. He was perfect. Like that time when he played a Dog character in the annual Hamburg Show play at Swarthmore, and he hid inside the big paper-mache dog head for the rest of the evening and would hardly talk.

Frank Shook was equally opaque today. After about fifteen minutes he “freaked out,” as if the saucer abductions had given him post-traumatic shock. He got up and left. I stayed and talked to the editors for another hour, and it looks like I may very well have the deal! Good old Frank.

Only after the meeting did I privately tell the main editors Mark Frauenfelder and Hollis Heimbouch that Frank Shook was an act. We agreed that I’d call the book Saucer Wisdom. For now we’re not sure how far to push the hoax—possibly we make it part of the marketing.

So the publicity line on Saucer Wisdom might go like this:

“Rudy Rucker has a UFO contactee friend, and many of his ideas come from this friend, named Frank Shook. Saucer Wisdom tells about Frank Shook and about his weird visions of the future. Is Frank Shook real? Apparently so. The staff at Wired Books all saw him. Rudy knows Frank from back in New Jersey. They met in a laundromat.”

After the meeting at Wired in San Francisco, I took Greg to a bar and bought him a couple of drinks. I’m still sober here, and Greg is, like, my designated drinker. Back at my house, Greg started saying I should give him more than two percent of my earnings because he has such good ideas—ideas like making Frank Shook an inarticulate moron. I have this eidetic memory of Greg squinting at me and holding up his three fingers all crooked like a crab’s claw.

“Three percent, I get three percent.”

And his squinty eyes glaring bullyingly. And then when I’d try and reaffirm two percent instead of three percent, he’d act all mad and like he wouldn’t even talk about it and he’d say that I was ungrateful. But probably that’s just bluster and probably he’s kidding. He has a weird sense of humor. Really, I was expecting him to say forget about his two percent, but he won’t let up.

Greg saw me get a foreign royalty check while he was here, so then he started yelling that he had to get all the money I get from Finland for the Frank Shook book, too.

February 23, 1997. Saucer Wisdom Deal. Problems with Greg.

So on February 23, Hollis Heimbouch of Wired Books calls my agent Susan Protter and offers her a $50,000 advance for the book! Whoa, Nellie. That’s more than twice the advance that I ever got for any of my other books. Thanks to Susan, Hollis doesn’t realize how cheaply I can be had.

Do I pay Greg a thousand dollars? Maybe not.

Greg has been emailing me and phoning me and emailing me and leaving creepy “Frank Shook” messages on my answering machine. Greg is saying Frank Shook isn’t interested in flying saucers at all, saying Frank shouldn’t be a techie, saying Frank’s job is “selling things,” haggling with me about my legal right to use the Frank Shook character, etc. He thinks he’s being funny, but he’s driving me over the edge.

I told him to stop, but then he emailed a few of my other Swarthmore friends—we have a little email circle of five or six guys—Greg saying that he and I had “a bitter argument over creative control of the Frank Shook character.” And then he asked our pal Don Marritz (who’s a lawyer) to take me to court over it. And then Don really got into the game and said he was going to sue me. And then the guys started mocking me and calling me Herr Doktor Professor. And I just lost it in fear and anger, and I told them I didn’t want any email from any of them at all anymore.

I have to totally cut the cord on this bullshit, I have to grow the book from the inside. So I wrote Greg a letter, sending him copies of some pix I took of him being Frank Shook in my garage and out by the Lexington Reservoir. I thanked him for coming to the meeting with me, but I begged him to stop with the phone messages. “This isn’t a joke, Greg, this is my life!”

I avoided mentioning the thousand dollars, because I still can’t decide how to handle that.

March 12-17, 1997. Pay Greg?

March 12, 1997.

Greg keeps saying I have to pay him that share of my Saucer Wisdom advance money. And I don’t want to.

All this trouble because I took Greg to that meeting, which was mainly because he happened to be sponging off me as a house-guest the day when I’d already set the meeting up. I’m supposed to pay him for the privilege of having had him as my guest and for having taken him along on a wild ride? What an idiot I was to promise him the two percent.

I’ve thought about this so much lately. It’s been distracting me from writing the book. Or conversely it may be that I’ve been thinking about this as a way of avoiding doing the work on the book.

But, yet again, my fight with Greg could become part of the book…

March 17, 1997.

So finally I sent Greg a check for a thousand dollars, just to be done with it. I do appreciate him having come in with me to Wired Books that day, and it really was a big help. He helped me catch the big fish, and he deserves a cut.

At least that’s what I’m supposed to say. But at the same time I feel like Greg’s a bullshitting leech, and that he shouldn’t have pressed me to go through with the offer.

[I continued stewing and fretting and flip-flopping about this so much that, eventually, in February, 1998, about a year later, Greg gave me back the thousand bucks—giving it to me in the context of helping me buy a new mountain bike while he was at my house visiting again. He said he was willing to return the money for the sake of our friendship. He was sick of the hard feelings. And then our friendship settled back down. Years later, in 2013, Greg published a detective novel, The Old Turk’s Load, and used one of my Frank Shook photos of him as the author photo.]

March 24, 1997. Nick Herbert. Saucer Wisdom.

I’m going to use another transreal model for Frank Shook in addition to Greg Gibson. I’m thinking of my hippie physicist friend Nick Herbert, who lives in a shack in Boulder Creek, not far from here in the Santa Cruz mountains. Nick’s about ten years older than me, but we’ve been friends ever since I moved out to California. I drove over to see him today and told him about my book plan, and made some hand-written notes that I’ve typed in here.

People I saw in Boulder Creek.

A woman with tan cowboy boots and round granny shades. Her bare legs white, doughy, attractive, wedged into her vaginal boot tops. Tie-dyed stocking cap: red and yellow. Black and brown striped jersey dress. White sweatshirt tied around her waist, grunger style. A black dog on a leash.

Three young men slowly playing basketball in front of the Boulder Creek Recreational Hall.

Big-stomached, bearded, pony-tailed young man with baby in back carrier. Computer hacker?

Geezers in a white American car. A rod over the back seat with suits and dresses hanging on it. He in plaid shirt, jeans with stitching, gray helmet hair. She white-haired, kind face, pink turtleneck, blue sweatpants, sneakers.

Old yellow car fishtailing down the road peeling out.

Pickup with “Tree Services” on the side. Man driving, a dumpy woman in the front seat with him. She’s scooted herself all the way across the seat to be touching him.

A bus pulls up. A burr-cut boy in a red T-shirt leans eagerly forward, gets in the bus. A long-haired boy in white T gets off, unties his bicycle which was lashed to the front of the bus. Six teens in a pack get off the bus. Slitty shades and cigarettes.

Old woman low down in seat in compact car peering over steering wheel through thick glasses. Round “golly” chin.

Bearded man, curly hair dark, shorts & black T. Things hanging from belt—phone, tools. Gets in a Pac Bell truck. Gimme cap. Carrying an envelope in his mouth like a dog.

Basketball bounce bounce, gangling.

Whipped-to-shit van—all that’s visible inside is a big beard, a nose, the brim of a high-hat.

A purple shiny car, a fixed-up tricked-out classic. The driver chewing gum a mile a minute. Big mustache. Meth lab.

Nick’s tells me about having an alien encounter thirty-four years earlier:

I was at home. I lived in the woods near Stanford. I was a physics grad student. It was called Trancos Woods, it was the slums of Portola Valley. Some friends were smoking pot with me. We started laughing at something and our laughter started seeming like one laugh.

“The sound makes us one being,” I told them. Then they left.

A voice in my head said, “Nick, we’re from the Interstellar Telepathic Brotherhood. Many of your friends already belong, although you don’t know it. We transcend space and time. Would you like join?”

I said, “Hey wait. I don’t know what I’m getting into here.”

“Here’s an example.”

The voice sent me into an acid trip with everything whirling around. Then it stopped. Then it started up and stopped. Start and stop. They would do this and then let me go.

“This is just a sample.”

I thought of killing myself with an axe. It seemed real. Why would I make it up? Why would I imagine such an unpleasant thing? I was trying out different hypotheses. Like: I could be making it up. I make up my dreams and they’re also pretty convincing. But a big part of me believed it. The Interstellar Telepathic Brotherhood beings had evolved for centuries. Like gods. They seemed inhuman. If I joined, I’d be starting at the bottom. To join a non-human organization and be at the bottom—I didn’t want it.

This was 1963, we didn’t have the word freak-out yet. Instead we called it psychotic break.

I had some friends come over to help me. I knew they were in the Interstellar Telepathic Brotherhood, even though they pretended they weren’t.

Later I couldn’t stop thinking about my experience. It became an obsession. Finally to get rid of it, I said it was true. Or at least metaphorically true. I thought it stood for the issue of whether I should become socially integrated.

More things Nick said:

“I work for a toy company that makes a product called the Liberty Light. A penlight that shines into a plastic ball full of water and glitter dots, the ball is shaped like a torch. There’s a turning disk with five colors to change the light. It costs ten to twenty dollars. We’re trying to get Girl Scout Councils to sell them.”

“Maybe there’s something we have that the aliens like. Something we take for granted.”

“Abduction relates to the teenage fantasy of being special, different, not the child of your parents.”

“All we do with slugs and worms is examine them. We don’t show them things. They’re just for science experiments. In John Mack’s book about alien abductions, the aliens always examine people’s genitals. Why would the aliens be so interested in our genitals? Because they know that we’re so interested in them.”

“I’ve been with people in hot-tubs and they’re high, and they look up at the stars and say, ‘I’m open,’ and they wait for the aliens to possess them.”

“The aliens should give your Frank Shook character something.”

“One of the big innovations of the twentieth century is speed. Like riding in cars. In the early centuries, nobody ever went faster than five or ten miles an hour. Speed completely changes your world view.”

“Reality. We’ve been given such a fabulous gift and we just throw it away.”

I’m driving Nick around and we pass a house that’s a nightmarish mess.

“Okies live there,” says Nick.

All the trees are razed. The redwoods have been sold off for lumber, and the other trees have been chipped. Raw muddy dirt, scarred and flattened by tire-tracks. A bonfire in the middle. A bitter, unfriendly, resentful red-faced man is standing by the fire, he glares at us. A lopsided pen with four chickens in the back yard. Straw. Wood smoke from a neighbor’s low chimney, a pipe barely sticking out of their roof.

Bare rafters in the ceiling of Nick’s office. Redwoods press against his house on every side. On his porch, a wood crate with an upside-down orange cook-pot sitting on it. Two buckets with scrubby plants. In the living room, a wood stove made from a spherical iron buoy Nick found on the beach. The stove has three welded-on legs. The chimney coming out its back makes the stove look like a chicken. Nick has stuck loudspeaker magnets all over the stove.

Driving home on Bear Creek Road. The tree-covered mountains. A glint of water from a wooded lake. Beyond the mountains the Monterey Bay, softened by mist. Are the aliens tailing me?

April 21, 1997. Sewage Flood. Alien Nightmare.

Things have been topsy-turvy ever since Sylvia, Georgia and I went to the Grand Canyon at spring break. When we got home there was five hundred gallons of raw sewage in our house. The main line was blocked, and the uphill neighbors’ stuff had backed up out of our toilet bowl.

While we were on the trip, I had a very frightening alien dream near Mt. Zion National Park in Utah:

The aliens are high over me, like in a long-legged bamboo-legged Dr. Seuss walking machine that’s also a bulldozer. It’s rocking uhhnnnm, uhhnnnm, uhmmmmn, the way machines do when they’re trying to push something. I’ve been protesting or something. The aliens shine a laser down into my mouth, as if it’s etching patterns onto my gums, like etching chips into the spots where my missing teeth used to be. ZZZZT ZZZTTT, incredibly painful, and now they’re etching on my real teeth too, and if I don’t get away they’ll do all of them, it’s happening so fast, like the laser that drew a shape over the stage at the ZZ Top concert ZZZT ZZZZT.

I wake myself up and feel that deep, dark, helpless paranoia of the real UFO nuts who think that the aliens have already taken over and made the MJ-12 deal with the government and we’re just the aliens’ cattle, their lab rats, controlled and dictated to by implants.

Then the Heaven’s Gate suicide broke, in fact the night that I had that dream was the night they killed themselves. Creepy.

The sewage in our house is the objective correlative of UFOlogy.

But somehow I’ve continued to write and am feeling pretty good about the book. The contracts came through and I really am getting all that money for Saucer Wisdom from Wired Book. I may make the book a bit longer than what they’re asking for. I’d like some room to stretch out. Put a real story in there. Make it a novel.

May 27, 1997. In the Movie Theater. Frank Shook.

Roar!

Here I am sitting in the sixth row at the Century 21 dome movie theater, waiting for Lost World to begin. All alone, heavily geekin’, me and my new laptop, my first day of true vacation, as I turned in my grades yesterday.

Frank Shook’s moving along well. I need to finish the chapter about the aliens, which is a little work as I need to invent a lot of things. Like more details about the aliens’ home world. And I want to do a rope world, a crystal world, a shuggoth world, and a corkscrew world.

It’s been fun and easy working on the book. It’s turning into a transreal novel, not a nonfiction speculation at all. The other character in the book besides “Frank Shook” is called “Rudy Rucker.” And all my hassles with Greg are going right into the book.

I’m thinking of Nabokov’s book Pale Fire—seemingly an annotated edition of a poem, but with a novel about the editor buried within the notes.

I have a great new laptop, an IBM Thinkpad, 133 MHz chip, 2 gig hard drive, 40 Meg of RAM, bright 16-bit screen, weighs 6 pounds. It has a nice feature called hibernation which means when I turn off the computer, it remembers where it was. So in a sense I never need to close up my current novel or my accompanying notes document, which is perfect, like this is an eternal notepad. So futuristic already.

Roar!

June 8, 1997. Swarthmore College 30th Reunion.

Sylvia and I flew to Philadelphia and got a cab to Swarthmore for our thirtieth reunion. When we got to the front steps of Parrish, the main building, I was so overcome with emotion that I felt like crying. Thinking of how raw and callow I’d been when I came to Swarthmore, so hungry for life and experience, so eager to be a hip man of the world, to learn, to create, to discover, to see god.

A kid drove us on a golf-cart to a dorm they put us up in, a “new” dorm from the 1970s. We’re even older than parents now, relative to these college kids.

Our reunion was low-key. Had I been keyed-up on pot and beer and wine like the old days I might have thought it high-key, but it wasn’t. And if I’d been loaded, I would have been the only one that way. Only about two people even seemed drunk. And nobody at all was high.

How hard it would have been to be worrying about being sober enough for each step of the weekend, and to keep running outside to smoke pot, and trying to get people to smoke it with me, reassuring myself I’m okay and knowing I’m not. Whew.

For all these years, I didn’t go to my college reunions because I knew I would get drunk and stoned and make a fool of myself. So it was a personal treat to finally be able to go. And to have it be low-key, to have it be just what it is.

“Everybody is so nice,” I said to Sylvia.

Sylvia said, matter-of-factly, “They always were. It was just you who was mean.”

It was low-key, and I was a person being nice. A melting milk of kindness, us singing “Where Have All The Flowers Gone.” And you know, I had never listened to the words all the way through before, hadn’t known the words make a circle. Flowers go to young girls go to young men go to soldiers go to graveyards go to flowers. “When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn.”

Speaking of war and soldiers, in the afternoon there was a panel and discussion among our classmates about the cultural changes over the last 30 years. And the women talked about how hard it is to have a career and a family. And it struck me that a big hard thing we men had been through was that right when we graduated, our government was devoted to sending us to Viet-Nam to get killed, and, if we didn’t want to go, we were viewed as traitors and, now, by having weaseled out of going, many of us are forever branded as cowards. Of course ’Nam was, in the long view, a passing event, but it was powerfully scarring. Revisiting Swarthmore and recalling the times when we graduated brought it back.

Of all the men in our class, Don Marritz is the only one who seems to have gone to Nam. Not a single other guy. Everyone else weaseled out. In his low-key way, Don is a hero.

We had our alumni dinner on a stage in a new theatre center. Up above were two stage lights aimed at the high wall behind us. The beams slanted down the wall, one yellow-white, and one lavender. There were grilles in front of the lights so that the whitish light made a row of about seven rectangles like pickets in a fence, and under them was the lovely orchid-like swirly shape of the lavender light. It had never occurred to me that you could make, in effect, a huge mural simply from two spotlights. It was beautiful.

I mentioned that only two people were drunk, and of course those two people gravitated to me. One told me about thirty times how much she loves my science books—and she really does know them, she’s a chemistry teacher in a prep school, and she likes to give The Fourth Dimension as a prize to good students.

The other drunk, a guy from Virginia, had this same funny approach avoidance thing with me that he’s always had. He never says anything to me but insults, but he’s never able to simply leave me alone. He kind of admires me, but he makes it back-handed. He finally asked if I’d quit drinking and I said, yes, it had been a year, thanks to my recovery program.

Then he was, like, mocking me. “Oh, poor Rudy has to be strong.” He doesn’t get that it’s much easier this way. I kind of wished I hadn’t told him I was in recovery, but it seemed worthwhile to pass the word. His ridicule didn’t bother me, actually.

The nostalgia was so intense it hurt. Intensely lukewarm. Like a warm bath of lymph that’s so exactly at your blood-temperature that you can’t tell it from air. You can’t tell if your head is submerged or not, you don’t know if you are breathing or drowning.

Everyone looked so old. Especially at first. What a shock. After a few minutes of talking to someone, their old face would morph onto their new face and they’d start to look the same. But at first, what a shock.

We danced a little. It was that same old feeling of dancing at a college party. You’re around people that you’re familiar with, but mostly uninterested in. Safe to be around. Furniture.

The two good old friends there were Don Marritz and Roger Shatzkin. So cozy to see them, so easy to talk with such a huge base of shared references. We have a mutually understood sense of humor, a sense of freedom to explore the wide field of our accustomed verbal play. As you get to know someone, you thrash out a larger and larger clearing of acceptable things to talk about without boring/offending the other.

I’m always busy lopping off any encroaching tendrils of propriety that spring up at the edges of our cleared field of play. Lying, being wild, going for the outrageous—that’s my conversational style. I’m habitually transgressive, and my payoff is when I get that surprised laugh out of people, the happy laugh of sudden liberation, the laugh that says, “Okay, yes, we can cast off that shackle as well.”

But when I do it wrong I offend, or confuse or hurt people’s feelings, and that didn’t happen this time. I was graceful and I wasn’t pushing it that hard, low-key. Let a few tendrils of consensus-reality into our clearing, let some convention reign, don’t clown too hard, be quiet and for once listen to the actual words of the song.

I’m grateful that I’m sober, and for this life and for my friends. I mentioned to Don Marritz how happy I was to be sober and he said, “You feel like you have a whole new life.”

“Yeah, I do.”

And Don’s all, “I should have been drinking all these years and then I could have a whole new life too. I’d like that.”

So anyway, as I write this, here we are in NYC at the Washington Square Hotel. It’s Sunday night and whoah it’s 1 am. I’ve been writing for an hour or more. We took the train up from Philadelphia today, which was fun.

Tonight we went with Georgia to see the Parsons Dance Company at the Joyce Theater. It was great. Especially one gimmicky, but really mind-blowing piece: “Caught.”

There was one dancer, a very powerful red-haired woman. She walked around the stage just limbering up. Then she stood under a central cone of light, like the beam of light that comes down out of an overhead UFO. Some very saucerian Robert Fripp music started up. Kind of like the little scale in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. And the lights went out and a strobe started flicking every second or two.

And in the flashes of light, the red-haired woman would be seen here, there, over there, back here, standing still each time, as if being teleported around like a paratime-abducted Frank Shook. And then the strobe went into a fast flicker for just a minute showing the ordinary slow-film kind of strobe effect while the woman jumps around and you’re like, so what.

But then the strobe goes back to slow flashing and it catches the woman at the top of a jump. And then at the top of a few jumps in a row. And then the pulsing cranks a little faster, and she’s in synch with it—they must have rehearsed this like mad—and the strobe catches her in mid-air at each position in a circle around the whole big stage like she is flying.

Like she is flying around three or four feet above the stage and the strobe is just catching her at successive locations along her smooth, levitated progress.

And then she rests under plain yellow light for a second or two and then she does another flying circuit. Once she goes around the circle flat on her back in the air, then she does it moving backwards, and then she does it with her legs moving as if she’s walking on the air! Just incredible, such a sense of mystery it gave you. Flying in frozen time.

There’s a psychic lady in a tiny storefront downstairs from Georgia, she’s called Soho Psychic, and her name is Cynthia. She can do palm, tarot, or crystal ball. I think I might go to her to get some help on Saucer Wisdom. I’m at a point where I don’t know what comes next. My character Frank Shook has disappeared. What might I ask the Soho Psychic? I’d ask her where my friend Frank Shook went. Me donning the persona of my character Rudy Rucker.

In the end, I don’t actually go into the psychic’s office and talk to her. But thinking about it helps. In fact right now I’m putting a psychic character into Saucer Wisdom. This is the most transreal book I’ve ever written.

June 11, 1997. Pig Chefs.

Still in NYC.

A funny/horrific idea I thought of that I can see using in a science fiction story. I thought of this because there was a sculpture of a cow chef in I think the breakfast room at the Washington Square Hotel. A cow wearing an apron and a chef’s hat. More common is the pig chef, the grinning pig sometimes even with a fork.

How evil and satanic and traitorous these turncoat beasts are. To be wearing the very regalia of those who kill and eat their fellows.

So now I’m thinking of my old friend Dennis, a.k.a. Sta-Hi, in his chef’s coat and hat. And imagining a situation where aliens are in fact cooking and eating humans. They love the taste.

The alien chefs have some typical kind of outfit they wear, maybe a jerkin and a cap to keep the grease off. And there’s “someone like Dennis” in that outfit, grinning crazily. Not necessarily my Sta-Hi Mooney character, but someone like my friend Dennis anyway. I smiled really wide on the subway when I thought of this today. The transgressive shock of it.

I stayed on in New York alone an extra day. I met Georgia’s current boyfriend Jim. He seemed very nice. Enthused about UFOs.

I mentioned that I’m “writing a book about UFOs” but it’s a little hard to explain the subtleties of my attitude. I didn’t have the heart to push the whole Frank Shook con on him, to barefacedly lie to the young man the first time I met him.

He and Georgia held hands walking down the street. He seemed patient and considerate towards her. He wore black strange sneakers, black pants and a shirt he’d bought in Hong-Kong, a kind of T-shirt with a slit collar and a stripe along the shoulders and a little logo that said “Alien World Domination” with two heads of the iconic Gray aliens.

Eddie Marritz and I went by Cleopatra’s Needle on bicycle. That Egyptian obelisk in Central Park. There were four iron crabs holding it up, one under each chipped corner, holding out their menacing claws, with Greek writing on the sides of the claws. How fucking weird is that? What a thing to see in your bedroom, four iron crabs with Greek writing on their claws bearing an obelisk on their backs. Frank Shook should see this?

I went to a recovery meeting in the West Village one morning. It was good to be there, I needed it. So many interesting-looking bars around, so many pot salesmen on the streets around Washington Square, “You interested in weed?” And me all alone, whew.

Fun to go into the meeting and have this instant contact with strangers. To hear their stories. Basically they’re the same people I used to meet in bars, or via pot deals.

June 13, 1997. South Dakota, Termespheres.

Now I’m in Spearfish, South Dakota, looking for the final chapters of my novel Saucer Wisdom. I’m staying with Dick Termes, a wonderful artist who puts images on spheres using his own system of perspective. He calls his images Termespheres. He’s sent me pictures and videos of the Termespheres and I’ve always wondered about them, and now finally I understand the system a little. The image is like what you’d see if you were painting from inside the sphere, looking out.

Termes uses two methods to produce his Termespheres: photography and painting. The photographic method, which he calls Total Photography, consists of using a special mount in the shape of a polyhedron. A camera is successively clamped to each face of the polyhedron, and the resulting photographs are assembled into a polyhedral (approximately spherical) Total Photograph. This method is pretty easy to understand.

The painting method is less obvious. Termes gets a spherical canvas—typically a large plastic ball such as a lawn ornament. He stands in front of it, and painting onto the “canvas” what he sees on the other side of the sphere, in front of him. He doesn’t work by looking over his shoulder. He paints what’s in front of him.

Once he’s finished a patch corresponding to what’s in front of him, he moves around the sphere to the right a little bit so that now he’s looking directly at an area that was formerly to the left. And—this is the key trick, Termes’s stroke of genius—he rotates the sphere far enough to the right as to expose the blank part of the sphere canvas to the left of what he already painted. And he works his way around the sphere this way, always rotating it so that he’s painting on the right spot.

In practice it’s simple, but, being a mathematician, I spent a couple of hours working out the formal logic of the trick, partly as a favor to Dick. I needed to draw some diagrams to fully understand it.

Coming here from New York, I had to change planes in Denver and then fly to Rapid City, which isn’t too far from Spearfish.

The Denver airport was new and huge. Muffled sound of incomprehensible voices in the vast concourse space. Whirring of the belts of the slidewalks. Propeller planes flying by like movie images, so clearly framed in the vast windows. The endless flat plains in the distance. A thunderhead is approaching with slanting rain. At the gate everyone is white white white. Speaking in a musical Scandinavian accent like in the movie Fargo. I’m mentally taping everything I hear and see for Saucer Wisdom.

“I’m hopin’ the plane gets here before the electrical storm,” says a farmer in a billed cap.

A doughy, white, lank-haired, sturdy young woman answers, “That’s what I’m sayin’.”

I feel very much on the edge of my senses as I get into the tiny low prop plane. I’m hyper-alert. I hear mysterious voices from the pilot’s crackling radio. The locals refer to our destination as “Rapid,” rather than “Rapid City.”

Termes meets me at the Rapid airport, I recognize him as the right guy, he’s bearded, bald with a sphere-dome head, pocket full of pens and pencils. Right away I can see him as modeling the missing third facet of my Frank Shook character in Saucer Wisdom, going beyond Greg Gibson and Nick Herbert. Eureka!

Dick drives me by Lead (pronounced like “leed” not “led”) where a former mountain is now a conical pit, dug out by the Homestead Mining Company.

We stop in Deadwood, which used to be pretty much a dead town, but now it’s filled with legalized gambling casinos. We go in the saloon where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back holding his famous hand of Aces and Eights, that is, two aces, two eights and a nine of diamonds. Behind the bar is a commissioned Termesphere that shows the bar and the whole inside of the place, which is gloriously hung with junk—deer heads, rifles, Indian maps on buffalo skins, slot machines on the walls, card tables.

Dick’s living compound is made of four domes. One dome that has his gallery in the upstairs, and two bedrooms downstairs. A second dome is the living room and kitchen, with a bedroom on a balcony. A small third dome—that’s the TV room. And a fourth, separate, dome is his painting studio. I’m sleeping in a tiny domelet that’s a cupola atop the studio dome.

Dick’s wife Markie is a puppeteer! She calls her company Dragons Are Too Seldom. Their sons are Lang and Kabe.

This part of South Dakota is called the Black Hills. It’s not that the ground is black, it’s that the woods make the hills dark, as in the Black Forest of Germany. The Indians didn’t go into the Black Hills much. One reason suggested is the exceedingly strong thunderstorms in this region—which is said to be a power spot. The Indians thought it sacred.

On the hill behind Termes’s house I found small yuccas and prickly pears mixed in with the very green grass. He says that around this time of year the road crews leave road-killed deer on this particular hill, and you see a lot of bald eagles coming to scavenge. The genuine American icon birds.

It’s very windy. Cottonwood fluff blows in the wind, immense cottonwood trees here, with great wads of white on their branches.

This afternoon Dick took me to where he was coaching his 12-year-old son’s Little League baseball team. I wandered off to look at Spearfish. I walked across the campus of Black Hills State University. I passed a man riding a mowing machine. He was overweight and he had a froggy face, but he didn’t see himself as unhandsome and unfit, no, he waved pleasantly, he had good self-esteem. We’d teach him different in California—with our rigid, appearance-based caste system.

I saw a beautiful strawberry-blonde woman. The women here seem mostly to be pretty hefty. Diet food is not a big concept. Butter on everything. I crossed Spearfish Creek. I stopped in a Pizza Hut and ate a pound of salad from their salad bar.

I pass a weird-looking farmer in overalls. He says, “Hi.”

Later I pass an incredibly sunburned guy with some teeth missing, he’d be a bum in the Bay Area, but here he looks me frankly in the face, sizing me up in a friendly fashion, “Hi.”

The stores in one block of Spearfish, I’m taking notes, the camera running in my head:

Northern Hills Advertiser & Rapid City Journal. Mile High Club, 5¢ Machines, Pabst Blue Ribbon. CDs Tapes Books Coffee Bar Total Liquidation 25% Off Everything. Spearfish Bootery. Global Market Goods From Planet Earth. Sharps Trading Pawn/Buy/Sell. In the window are two pawned tires with wheels, a used weedeater, and lots of antlers. Common Grounds Coffee Shop, two girls in there, one hunched sardonic, fat, she knows she will be a wife and mother, the humor and casualness of women.

Everyone is so white. I feel a little uneasy around so many whites, I’m not used to it, I feel unsafe with no Asians, Latinos, Filipinos.

I buy a bottle of water at the Coffee Shop and sit outside drinking it, writing these notes. An iridescent green beetle lands on the nib of my pen. Brought by the incessant wind, no doubt, but I also think of him as a miracle visitor, and I say, “Hi, Frank,” on the off chance that he’s Frank Shook.

Imagine that this beetle has the IQ of god. Why not? Actually even that it’s a beetle is pretty amazing. Life is an ongoing series of miracles.

More and more it becomes clear to me how absurd it is for technologists to push for anything other than bioengineering. The idea of a mechanical or even silicon robot is like the idea of a steam-powered airplane.

When I meander back to the baseball game, Dick’s wife Markie is there, a bright, cheerful woman. She’s talking to a friend about driving in South Dakota, about the road between Isabel and Timberlake.

I’m remembering everything I hear and see, sifting for clues about Frank Shook. Like I mentioned before, he dropped out of sight in my most recent chapter of Saucer Wisdom—right when someone stole my computer and unfinished manuscript. I have a feeling that Frank’s lying low here in the Dakotas.

June 14, 1997. Devil’s Tower.

Today I borrowed Markie Termes’s car and I went to see Devil’s Tower, which is about 70 miles from Spearfish. When I was done walking around the Tower I sat down in a meadow cooling my hooves in a cow pasture river called Belle Fourche River. I wrote a postcard to each of my four loved ones. Four of them! The card I sent was an image photographed from just the spot I was sitting, at the same time of year, it was magical to be sitting there inside this amazing scene, the green grass and masses of a wildflower with greenish-yellow blooms, a wooded hill, and atop it the stark fluted butte of the Tower.

I’ve wanted to see the Devil’s Tower ever since I saw it on a commemorative stamp when I was about twelve. I think I still have the block of four of them in my childhood stamp album, if that’s around anywhere.

Approaching Devil’s Tower I was excited, thinking about the approach to it in the saucer movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A scenario where the government has barricaded off the tower and is trying to keep you and me from seeing the magic.

How persistent and attractive this myth is. The government stands for what—superego? Mental blocks? Approaching the site, I was sharing in that Close Encounters vibe. I was feeling bigtime, thinking things like “I’m breaking through, I’m going all the way, nobody is gonna stop me.”

I need to capitalize on this vibe in Saucer Wisdom, to put in something that pulls out this particular stop of the human emotive calliope. I’ll end the book with a line like, “Yes, I would write Saucer Wisdom, despite the theft of my computer and despite Frank’s flakiness, yes, I would reveal these secret teachings.”

My head feels funny from looking at Dick Termes’s spherical art all evening yesterday. Things are like flipping around. And I’m bunking inside a Termes icosahedron, did I mention that? I’m sleeping in an icosahedral cupola atop his Bucky-Fuller-dome art gallery. What a wonderful place to be.

I stopped and read a marker just as the Tower came first into view. Says there’s an Indian legend that the Devil’s Tower is grooved because a bear clawed it. It’s about eight hundred feet from base to top. On the radio the band Great White is playing “Once Bitten Twice Shy.” Really some fairly convincing-sounding Stones riffs in there. Though a few minutes later I heard the real Stones doing “Beast of Burden” on the same radio station, and I remembered that Keith doesn’t just play “Stones riffs,” he plays beautiful tasty surprising things.

At the Tower in the parking lot there was a man who was holding in thrall a group of ten or twelve people, adults and children, all staring at him and listening while he went on and on, talking a mile a minute, quickly licking his lips to keep going, getting into some negatory exposition and accordingly shaking his head “no” during a disquisition of several paragraphs’ length. He had Vitalis hair and suspenders. From what I gathered—despite my best efforts not to listen—he was telling the group how to save two dollars by parking somewhere different the next time they might come here. The lip-licking was particularly despicable. I don’t think he was human. He was an alien who trapped humans.

Anyway, like I said, the Tower is scored with beautiful smooth grooves. Large grooves, really the Tower is a bundle of columns. The columns are hexagonal, sometimes pentagonal, each about thirty feet across. I suspect that they formed as Bénard convection cells in the quiescently cooling magma. The full tower is about sixty columns wide. The large blocks of loose stone at the base are called talus.

I walked an easy trail around the tower, got quite close to the base, although the first time that I went to touch the thing itself, there were some climbers directly overhead and I worried they would kick stones down on me, and I felt that their yells were disapprovingly directed at me for being there, me a non-climber.

Incessant wind. Animals I saw: chipmunk, red squirrel, yellow swallowtail butterflies, snake, white-tail deer, a quail, prairie dogs. The snake looked so armless. The red squirrel running up a twisty pine tree—it fits. The squirrel fits the tree and the two of them fit my perceptions of what I should see. We’re all DNA, we’re all part of the same wetware world.

My fellow humans were going by in male-female pairs. I was fully in an alien frame of mind, asking myself: Why do humans walk around in pairs? Is it from the nesting instinct? He is showing her places where they might safely breed pups?

I went fully off the trail, just like in Close Encounters, and made my way through brush to embrace the base of the Tower.

How terribly isolated it seemed for that guy who gets inside the mothership at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I think he’d made a huge mistake, going all alone into the giant utility-research-kitchen of the saucer, the soulless, stainless, foodless kitchen. And whoah before you know it, maybe a door’ll spring open and there will be bloody crazy grinning Dennis in an alien chef’s hat made of human skin with big toque ears!

Sitting at the base of the Tower, I imagine that a knot of roots is a spider the size of my fist. “My throat grew raw with screaming.”

I walk around the tower two times, and then I make my way down to a meadow by the Belle Fourche River. Nearby a group of women are gathered to celebrate the publication of a Wyoming anthology called Leaning Against The Wind. The women are the contributors, and their family and friends.

One woman reads a passage about how she and her man had been called low-lifes. She talks about not owning cows—but she can see them in the stockyard near her house, and she in fact works in that stockyard. Describing someone in her family: “He became a successful salesman of cow products.”

I found a prairie dog town. Awesome. The prairie dogs on their hind legs, making a “barking” noise. Little ones clumsy. All of them eating grass as fast as they can, all day long.

I drove home through the rolling fields so green, a back road. Thunder storms and then a tornado warning on the radio. Great slashing tines of lightning. One particular zigzag line gets lit multiple times pulse pulse pulse as the energy courses down the superheated air highway.

Went out for dinner with Dick and Markie Termes, to a local restaurant called Bay Leaf, an effort at fine dining being made here, and it was quite good. The Midwesterners are a bit apologetic about their non-coast-ness, but I’m certainly not going to bug them about it. Termes grew up in Spearfish!

“I’ve been blown around the Earth like a piece of dust,” I tell him.

And we’re ready to weigh pros and cons, but then it hits me: You don’t really have a choice over the life you get anyway, so why weigh the alternatives when really there weren’t any.

Speaking of the Midwest, this morning I was at Safeway getting supplies for my drive, and I thought of the superfluity of the endless Midwestern Safeways by the interstates, the Safeways and their identically polite checker girls with Norwegian oooo sounds in their speech. And the superfluity of the seemingly identical old farmers and farmwives, spry and cantankerous, making the best of things. And the superfluity of humans across all of Earth.

The endless glut of people repeated over and over with the same expressions and opinions, we’re like a field of flowers, all the same kind—well, why not, that’s how fields of flowers are, all the same, and it’s just a Romantic error to expect the windrows of humanity to be anything other than fields of people, the same pattern duplicated and reduplicated, Nature likes repeating herself.

But, anent the aliens, as I thought of our human flower-flesh, I could see the deep disinterest which the aliens would have in us, and how shallow our imagined differences would be relative to them—a slight bend of one petal, its still just another buttercup. Regarding us, the aliens must have as deep a don’t-care feeling as I do when seeing yet another squirming black cricket in the clods of a North Dakota field, me walking past the rotting bodies of the road-kill deer laid out for the scavenger American Eagles.

Frank Shook is a particularly juicy rotten deer for the Cosmic Eagles, and, no, I won’t be stopped from telling this True Story, and you reading this, yes, you aren’t letting Them stop you, you’re in the Big Time now.

June 16-17, 1997. Mount Rushmore.

I’m ready to go home. It’s beautiful here and Dick and his family are wonderful, thoughtful hosts. But four days is a long time to visit someone. I’m tired of being a guest. It’s really hard to make long-distance phone-calls to Sylvia from here, and my modem won’t work on their phone line. I miss my real life.

Today Dick took me to that rock thing, the big carvings of the presidents, Mount Rushmore. Scads of white American tourists. The carvings were like—oh well. It’s all surrounded with wheelchair access paths and big concrete gates and gross people and chainlink construction. You can hardly see the thing itself, a very so-what kind of thing, carvings of some faces on a mountain. Faces of politicians. The patriotic postcards and videos in the gift shop enough to make ya puke. Like why are “we” so great because there’s a face on a rock?

Near Mt. Rushmore is a very odd parody of it, the Crazy Horse Mountain carving, with very little of it actually done, except for Crazy Horse’s face. But the atmosphere was a lot more fun there. Lots of Indians around which was nice. And the guys taking tickets were like menacing carnival roustabouts. And the viewing area was a like a boardwalk, all wooden and rickety.

I feel like I’m going to see a UFO. When I came up to my icosahedral garret tonight, the sun had just set and there was a winking light right over the sunset, jiggling and throbbing but staying in one place. Venus? Or a spacecraft? You be the judge.

Just now I heard howling—Dick says there’s coyotes in the gully near here. I looked up and there in front of me was a big round shape like a planet hovering right here in the cupola with me. An Earth flag tacked to the wall? Or an ectoplasmic alien being? You decide.

This rural landscape is so heart-filling, it’s gentle green, or maybe not so gentle, it’s strong green in the afternoon with the sun going through each leaf. I get that old feeling of being a thimble in a waterfall, of too much Gaian beauty for me to hold. I went jogging this morning, filled with that “overflow” feeling, on a green back road. Really and truly in the middle of nowhere, in South Dakota.

Thinking about my reaction to Rushmore: I really hate patriotism, and on this trip it’s coming back to me why. Our government made a serious effort to get me killed thirty years ago. That kind of thing stays with you, you don’t forget it. But—recovery calling—am I just nursing a resentment here? What is my part in this? I feel “less than” and unmanly for having avoided the Army. Not doing my patriotic duty.

And what about my condescending feelings towards the Midwest? My snobbiness. Why do I indulge it? Probably out of fear of the “regular” people that I’m snobby about. I worry that they think I’m a weirdo and that they’ll gang up on me. This move goes back to my childhood, perhaps to my brother who often acted like I was weird as a way of diminishing my share of things. Soooo—I hate America because my brother was unkind to me?

Come on, Rudy, that was then, this is now. Holiday Inn doesn’t serve bad food against you, it’s just what they do.

List of some of the tourist traps on the road to Mt. Rushmore from Rapid City:

Parade of the Presidents Wax Museum. Jellystone Park. Black Hills Maze. Reptile Gardens. Flying T Chuckwagon. Bear Country Drive-Thru Wildlife Park. House of Scandinavia Gifts. Mystery Mountain Water Slides. Sitting Bull Crystal Cave. Rockerville Ghost Town. Cosmos: Nature’s Mystery Area. Big Thunder Gold Mine. Whoah Hoss Rides. Holy Smoke Resort. Ore House (with statue of a painted lady).

The vilest was Jackalope Village. A statue of a rabbit with deer antlers—you know, that corny old postcard wheeze. And the “Village” was a row of false fronts of primary-color garish paintings of shops, on billboards on sticks stretching some distance, with only one real door going into the Jackalope shop I think. The colors of those fake shops—simultaneously screaming, muddy, and off—the stagy sets like plastic flowers with pheromones you might use to catch wasps. How debased you’d have to be to stop at Jackalope Village. Of course, in saying that, I get that snobby little frisson of enjoyment. Oh well.

At Rushmore, Dick pointed out the pattern on the back side of some rental binoculars, how face-like it was, an alien face with two lens-eyes, and the chrome shield-shape of the holder like cheeks.

Jogging one last time here the next morning, how lovely. As I ran, I was thinking of myself as being a sphere, with stubby arms and legs projecting out, my head squashed up into the north polar cap, me a mirror ball and the endless South Dakota landscape sweeping past.

Going home at last.

July 2, 1997. Train from San Francisco to San Jose.

Today I gave Rudy a ride to San Francisco, left the car, and took the train home.

Pulling out of San Francisco, headed south at three in the afternoon. I’ll sketch the ride and maybe get a few ideas for Saucer Wisdom.

I’m sitting on the upper level of the train. Quite a bit of left to right oscillation. The rocking of the train doesn’t matter so long as I touch type and don’t do any kind of eye-hand thing. I’m typing the words into my mental memory buffer, I can see them there.

By the train tracks is a yard of containers the size of cars and refrigerators—conical, cylindrical, spherical—all rusting metal painted silver. Curves of light and shadow. Large scale.

A stranger who was just sitting in front of me is now outside on the platform, far away. Amazing how time can be so readily cashed in for space. Come back, come back!

I love how you see the back sides of everything from train tracks. All these little Peninsula burgs I never see or think about. You don’t see jack shit from the hiway, compared to this.

If I get drawn into reading the signs on buildings, I don’t see the buildings.

It would be so nice to put a bullet through quantum mechanics in Saucer Wisdom. All that “stranger than we can imagine” Dancing Wu Li Masters crap.

What did the Beach Boys mean by “I wish they’d all come be California girls?” Certainly there are plenty of girls here already, perhaps the finest ones. I guess the message was that fundamentally any girl can be a California girl. Come on and join us! California! How lucky I am to live here.

Near the train station is often where these little towns have tried the hardest to spruce up. Which usually means lots and lots of concrete. No matter how quaint your iron lampposts or cunning your bus lane markers, concrete is concrete. The Atlanta, Georgia, syndrome.

Could concrete go away at some future time? Sure it could. Why do we have it? To prevent mud, basically. Easy enough to imagine a superlawn that just won’t bust, which self-repairs. Of course if you don’t have cars there’s not so much wear anyway.

Should I riff on William Gibson’s living skyscrapers in Saucer Wisdom? Nanotech? Oh, what more is there to say about nanotech? A tenor-voiced lawn-dwarf holds forth endlessly.

A man I’m sure is a Unix hacker gets on the train. Overweight, brown snakeskin cowboy boots, pursed self-indulgent lips like a fat lady, raggedy beard, long hair, white shirt, gets on in Palo Alto or Mountain View, gotta be a hacker. He takes out a color brochure and starts examining it. The colors are bright, garish cheap looking.

I think “cheap fractals.” Funny how fractals can now look cheap. But, wait, those aren’t fractals in the hacker’s brochure—those are little porcelain figurines, page after page of them. He’s looking at them for the next half hour, Disney figurines, Hummel figurines, like that.

Maybe he wants to make those things for himself with femtotechnology. Direct matter control. Hacking atoms.

Petroglyphs

July 28-29, 1997. Mauna Loa on Hawaii.

The hau tree’s branches are like human world lines. Except the hau branches can grow back together after a fork.

The fumeroles, fields of them, the sulfuretted steam rising up in the dawn light. Holes in the ground, round deep holes, or bucked-up lava plates. Pale yellow sulfur crystals around the holes. The underworld, Avernus, Virgil with the bowl of fresh blood by the hole. Wraiths.

A former lake of fire-boiling lava in a larger caldera is cold and black now, a dead hole. The Halema’uma’u crater.

A man next to me looking down into it, talking to his kid, “I’d sure laahk to see a gaah drivin’ a four-wheeler around in there.”

When hot lava flows all the way to the sea, it makes hydromagmatic explosions. Great phrase.

Went back to the Sulfur Bank fumeroles with the sun low in the sky. Tall pink grasses. Orchids growing like wheat—purple and white flowers. The sun making stripes in the steam above the fumeroles. Spirits issuing forth, each plume the size of a man or woman, drifting, twisting, torn apart by a vagrant breeze, then forming itself again in the calm. Up close, the steam is humid, like over a steam grate in the city. But with masses of pale yellow crystals. Sulfur flowers.

I went walking across a cooled-off lava field, trying to get to the hot lava flow, three and a half miles away. It was too far. I turned back after two miles. Walking across a series of layered old lava flows, all black, the newer lava iridescent, some pieces reticulated in white. Smooth glob shapes, ruffle shapes, some tossed up and twisted like frozen splashes, and rope shapes. Ripples made of twisting smaller ripples, fractal style. The colors like the dull green-purple of raku.

“Raku, ropes, and ruffles,” was how I summarized it on a postcard.

Getting dizzy in the sun—it was like a great asphalt parking lot, but not flat, the surface wavy as the sea, and with some big domes like bubbles, cracked and shattered at the tops. I saw little needles—yellowish and glassy—lying around on this “pahoehoe” lava. The needles are called “Pele’s hair,” with Pele being the goddess of the volcano.

At our motel we saw some documentary videos. One showed lava eating a local subdivision. A slow-motion disaster, the lava moving only a few feet at a time, but your house bursts into flame as soon as the lava touches it. During the flow, some people jacked up their houses and towed them away, eventually leaving them on roadsides if they couldn’t find a lot to put them on.

Another video showed scenes of the local volcanoes erupting. These videos often show a helicopter in front. Relative to the eruption, the helicopter is like a species of bird characteristically found upon a certain kind of flower—the eruption a bright, dark flower.

August 1, 1997. Royal Wak Resort

Sylvia and I are staying at a resort hotel, the Royal Wak. It’s a plastic and concrete island situated in a desert of black a’a lava. The orange juice they serve is TreeSweet, canned in New York from concentrates from “Brazil and Mexico.” The parking lots and shops remind me of Reston, Virginia. But our room is ocean-front, looking out on palms, a royal fish-pond, the beach, a bay.

Today they have a bulldozer on the small beach, systematically shifting the sand around. They’re worried about a possible “swell” that might wash over the beach.

A jellyfish warning sign. A wavy water line, and a black struggling figure in the water with one arm raised in despair. All around the swimmer are glyphs of jellyfish. They look like question-marks with elongated wriggly tails, or like brains ’n spines—hump-bumps with the wiggles.

In a tropical park on the way here, Akaka Falls, we saw a flower the size of a face-mask—like for anesthesia. It consisted of one thick white petal and a hot-dog-sized stamen. Maybe you can stick the stamen down your throat like a gag, while inhaling—and be transported down a steam-vent.

I was looking at the Book of Mormon that I found in the Royal Wak hotel drawer. A witless pastiche of the Old Testament. No good parables, no odd stories. Clearly the work of a single man, and no writer he. The most interesting part is the few pages of introduction about the golden plates, and about Urim and Thummim, the “stones of sight.” Joseph Smith used the stones to help him read the scratches on the plates he found. I’d thought Urim and Thummim might have worked like the lenses of glasses, but I think he stared at the stones inside a hat. Joseph Smith’s eight witnesses claim they’ve hefted the plates. That’s just the same word that the SubGenius leader Ivan Stang used to me once, saying he had hefted the tits of a Church personage called Suzie the Floozie.

Love those names Urim and Thummim.

I’m awaiting a mahi-mahi burger by the swimming-pool snack bar. The gnats here come to your food. A woman near me is eating, holding her mahi-mahi burger in left hand, and continually waving her right hand against the gnats. I’m hungry, and it irritates me to see her moving so much. Now her husband is taking her picture—they’re newlyweds. Everything she does is wonderful for him.

She’s not exactly tense about the gnats, the waving is a reflex, like a horse swishing its tail. Maybe I’ll swish too when my burger comes. Ah, here it is.

GLOMP!

The gnats didn’t have a chance.

Sylvia and I keep singing this silly cheerful Hawaiian song. Numie-numie-nou ah pooku-pooku-pu a lomi-lami-lini-kau-koo. Something like that.

We walked to some nearby petroglyphs yesterday. They’re cool.

Although the petroglyph rocks are kind of sacred, I notice that the developers broke up some of them to decorate the little shops around the hotel. Sad broken glyph frags sitting in, like, the flower bed of a Benetton, with educational labels by the glyphs.

This little petroglyph book I found talks about the glyphs being in places where there’s a lot of power or mana. One big spot is in the lava field near Mauna Loa, where I was hiking a few days ago. Another is the one near this hotel, it’s a spot called Puako.

The breeze is so lovely in Hawaii. The air has this characteristic beat—analogous to the rhythm of ripples in a stream or waves on the sea. The bumpiness of the breeze is gentle, mellow, caressing. It’s fully Hawaiian, even if I’m slightly sulky about this somewhat generic hotel.

Sylvia is tan and happy next to me, reading a fashion magazine.

Melt, oh melt, my stony heart.

August 3, 1997. Petroglyphs.

The jellyfish warning sign is gone. We swam out with our masks and saw a dozen sea turtles in about fifteen feet of clear water. Marvelous beasts. Underwater flying.

Sylvia and I went and saw the Puako petroglyphs two times. They’re in a field of smooth pahoehoe lava, which has cracks, making a background pattern like the plates of a turtle shell.

The petroglyphs show men, animals, spirits. Many of them are drawn with their heads towards Mauna Kea, the highest peak on the island.

The men etched onto the rock are perhaps projections of the artists, like shadows. I imagined that I could see or scry the early Hawaiians of 1300 AD jumping up in the air, looking at their shadows, then drawing that kind of design.

The petroglyph field is in a spooky place, overgrown with introduced exotic kiawe or mesquite thorn trees. In the old days, it was blank lava here, like the slopes of Mauna Loa. So much mana here that it’s a little scary.

There was an oddly menacing line at the bottom of the sign at the petroglyph field: “Those who defile or mistreat the petroglyphs must bear the emotional, physical and spiritual consequences for those and those around them—we can take no responsibility for these effects.”

Somewhat foolishly ignoring this, I walked onto the petroglyphs with my shoes off—in my socks—to get a better photo. Immediately I felt like I was trespassing, that I had intruded.

A bit later, dizzy from the August sun, I branched off onto a mistaken path in the woods, and the criss-crossing shadows of the kiawe branches became petroglyph men all over the ground, twisting at odd extra-dimensional angles like A Square coming up out of Flatland, threatening, nay pursuing me, intent on extracting a terrible vengeance for my defilement of their field.

Writing this, I hear a knock on my hotel-room door. I peer out through the peephole. A petroglyph is in the hallway—an intense stick-figure of a man.

August 5, 1997. Beach Dive, Recovery in Puako.

Tomorrow we have to go home. I’m getting used to it here. I did a two-tank beach dive in Puako this morning. It was good. There was an eel garden at this drop-off to the continental shelf. There were about a hundred eels, silvery green, each with its tail tucked into the smooth white sand, and its body floating erect, wobbling this way and that. A few eels were swimming around free, adjusting their position. They had long slit mouths partly open. Behind them was a huge, huge form slowly moving, a leviathan of the deeps. An extraterrestrial. I feel a sense of mystery, of vastness. I’m too deep. I’m getting nitrogen narcosis.

After the dives I told my guide Benjamin about the petroglyph story I’m dreaming up. I mentioned my idea that the petroglyph at my hotel-room door could be grooved into space, analogous to a 2D petroglyph which is a 3D bump. In other words, the petroglyph man at my door is a 4D bump. And the light is warped around the 4D space curvature of the petroglyph’s lines.

Ignoring all that fancy math footwork, Benjamin asked, “Is it all the petroglyphs that are after the guy in your story, or just one of them in particular? Maybe your guy has to get a second petroglyph to help him fight the first one. Maybe the first one was from a burial site. And the helper-petroglyph might be a turtle.”

Benjamin also mentioned that there’s a lot of petroglyphs by the good fishing spots. On the subject of fishing, he remarked, “At night the fish are asleep and you can dive and just pick them up. It’s like a supermarket.”

The incipient nitrogen narcosis during my dive made everything slow and stony. God, I’d like to be stoned right now. But trace it through—then I’d want a drink. I’d come down. There’d be no end to it. Remember my little slogan: instead of getting high, I can be high. Being high is just a head-trick.

I went to a recovery meeting at Puako last night. It was great to be with some locals. We sat at two picnic tables in the lawn of a tiny wood church. It was a men’s meeting: several surfer types, a Hawaiian cowboy, a millionaire, a couple of retired guys. The cowboy talked pidgin style. He had this accent like the way Latinos talk. One of the surfers said that to be fully into the program, you should be standing on it, like on a surfboard. And he said we’re ninety percent god just like we’re ninety percent water. Nice.

Hollywood Calling

August 22, 1997. Hollywood Call About Software.

Well, I’ve been on vacation from Frank Shook since July. We went to Hawaii, and when we got back, I fixed a pair of rotted windowsills in our downstairs bathroom, and then I worked on getting my Joy Of Hacking notes ready to be printed up on offset by the campus bookstore as the text for my Software Engineering course this fall.

I’m still sober! Lord, lord. Over a year. I’m getting this deep calm feeling a lot of days.

Big excitement today as this Hollywood guy, Scott Billups, called me again about his plan to direct the movie of my book Software.

Before I go any further I need to back up and fill in the past history of the initial Software movie dealings, which ran from 1990-1992. At the time I didn’t mention them in my journals, so let me summarize them here.

It started in the spring or summer of 1990, with a phone-call from a guy named Marc Lafia. He wanted to make a movie of my novel Software. Of course I thought this was a good idea. And then he said he was just a screenwriter, not a producer, and he didn’t have any money. I let him talk to my literary agent Susan Protter and eventually she got him to come up with some small sum, maybe it was five thousand dollars. He got the money from the producers Jeff Most and Ed Pressman of New Line Pictures.

In order to work out the deal, my agent Susan Protter randomly hired a Hollywood guy Steve Freedman as a subagent. He’d given her a cold call to offer his services and she’d accepted. Anyway he did okay on the first option for Software—it was signed on November 1, 1990, with a term of three years.

When your give a film producer an option on your novel, it means you’re giving the producer the exclusive right to make a movie of your book for however long the option runs. If they actually want to make the movie, then they have to purchase the rights, normally for a considerably larger amount of money. But if you have someone repeatedly renewing an option on one of your novels, you can accumulate good money over the years.

After the option was signed, Lafia showed up at my house with his girlfriend. We walked up into the woods and sat around and talked. He was a curly-haired, bearded guy, very enthusiastic. I remember him mentioning being glad that I was sober for our meeting. He’d thought I might be like Sta-Hi.

“So compulsive,” he said, of Sta-Hi.

Now this was in 1990, six years before I got sober. So it had never before crossed my mind that Sta-Hi was compulsive, but of course Lafia was right, at least from a fully Californianized point of view.

Lafia came up with a script that I liked a lot, call it script #1—I liked it because all he did was to type in all the dialog from the novel and make it into scenes. It was the Software movie I’d most like to see. But his producers, Jeff Most and Ed Pressman, didn’t like it. So then they got my fellow cyberpunk author and occasional scriptwriter John Shirley to do a fresh script, #2.

The main thing I remember about John’s script was that in the first scene he had Sta-Hi decide to get clean and sober. He had some idea this would make the movie more marketable. And, as I was still drinking and smoking pot, this annoyed me. But Most and Pressman didn’t like John’s script—I seem to recall John saying they thought it was too literary.

About this time the virtual-reality-themed movie Lawnmower Man came out, directed by Brett Leonard. And the buzz was that Brett was going to shoot Software for New Line Pictures. Leonard wrote a new script, #3, but nobody would show this one to me, in fact I never did see it. Leonard was going to change the title to The Immortals, although around then a book or movie with that same name came out, I think it was about Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. And then Leonard’s project died out. This would bring us up to maybe 1992.

Even though Brett Leonard’s plans for a Software movie were dead, New Line Pictures kept rolling my option over, one year at a time from 1993 through 1997. And then Phoenix Pictures made a deal with New Line Pictures to use the option, and things heated up.

So, today, August 22, 1997, I get the call from Scott Billups about his plan to direct Software for Phoenix Pictures.

“Everyone’s signed off on it except this one guy” says Billups. “Steve Freedman.”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “Steve’s my agent!”

Billups slung around a lot of names for possible actors. Dennis Hopper and Ann Margret—for Cobb and Annie Cushing (who were, in turn, transreal versions of my Pop and his woman friend Priscilla). Marlon Brando for the evil killer robot at the end. Billups wants to use a woman for the Sta-Hi character, he’s talking about Fairuza Balk. Syd Mead, who was the art designer for Blade Runner and Tron is signed to design for Software. A guy named Wilson is writing a screenplay, he wrote The Addams Family and Beetlejuice. The producer is Mike Medavoy at Phoenix Pictures, which is backed by Sony.

Meanwhile Freedman is trying to get me as good a deal as possible. Not only do they want options for Software, Wetware and Freeware, they want the rights to the characters in case someone wants to make a series of like Cobb and Sta-Hi TV shows. Toy merchandising is a big factor as well. Billups wants to add an extra robot called Gremmie.

Tonight I rented The Craft, a teen witch movie with Fairuza Balk in it. She has a really big mouth, une jolie laide. She fixes your attention. I’d thought I might object to them using a woman to play Sta-Hi, but Fairuza would be okay.

Thank god I’m sober for this. I’d be a basket case otherwise. Stoned and gloating, burning out the joy of it, winding up suicidal and strung out, having destroyed my good fortune by feeding it to the “Imp Of The Perverse.”

I’ve always said that when I get my movie, I don’t want to have a stroke over it like I figure Phil Dick did—it’s my speculation that it was the making of Bladerunner that did him in—he died a few months before it came out. I saw Bladerunner in NYC when I went up there to get the Phil Dick award for Software in 1982, lo these fifteen years gone.

I remember being really surprised how different Bladerunner was from Phil’s novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. I didn’t actually like the film that much at first, I thought it was too violent, and I felt the ending was different from Phil’s. But Phil’s friend Ray Faraday said Phil had liked the new ending. So maybe he did like the movie and his stroke had nothing to do with it.

I do hope that I can get Billups to use my cellular automata graphics in the movie. For the robots’ skins. I’m going to send him that old instructional film I made about CAs.

Sylvia is calling me “the goose that laid the golden egg.” She gets that from Aline Kominsky talking about Robert Crumb in those terms. Aline even did a drawing of herself carrying the Golden Crumb Goose under her arm.

Honk!

September 27. 1997. Saucer Wisdom Dead.

So now it turns out that Wired Books has lost their funding. They’re not going to publish Saucer Wisdom after all. I got this news right after sending in my completed manuscript to them. And now Wired doesn’t even want to pay me the full amount of that fat advance. I’m siccing Susan Protter on them. I bet she’ll get the money out of them. The contract says they do have to pay, even if they don’t manage to publish.

So now what? We try and sell Saucer Wisdom someplace else, but this’ll be tough as it’s such a very strange book. I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that I made about fifty-five drawings as part of the Saucer Wisdom book. Cartoony illos of things that Frank Shook says he saw. Maybe I can’t sell this book at all. So much for any worries about my writing turning all bland and conventional once I got sober! No, no, I went and wrote a book so wild that it’s unpublishable.

For now maybe I’ll go back to my Realware project.

In Saucer Wisdom I developed some pretty good theories about a certain kind of alien, about biotechnology, and about “femtotechnology.” I’d like to bring all these things into Realware. And I’d like to use some of the same characters from Freeware again. Randy Karl Tucker in particular.

I feel a guilty pleasure at the prospect of returning to the Wares world. Originally I’d planned to do a transreal novel next after Freeware. But, duh, Saucer Wisdom turned out to be a transreal novel already.

I sold and wrote Saucer Wisdom a lot faster than I’d expected. And I wrote it so easily. Really it’s a novel, not a nonfiction book of speculations, although it’s a novel with an unusual kind of plot line. Really the plot is a short-story-sized action arc, but the book is reasonably long because of a zillion tacked-on mini-fictions consisting of Frank Shook’s visions of the far future.

You might say that Saucer Wisdom is transreal nonfiction.

October 1-November 17, 1997. Realware Plans.

Like I say, going back to the Wares world is like going home, I feel good about it. I don’t see Realware as a majorly difficult or ambitious book. I won’t be trying to knock the ball out of the park. I wasn’t trying to kill the ball with Saucer Wisdom either. Just an easily hit hall-of-famer’s base-hit that maybe is in fact a home run after all.

“His swing’s so smooth that you watch him and you can’t tell how far he’s hit it.”

It’s 4 pm and I’m observing one of my colleagues teaching. How science-fictional and odd for me to be here listening to a pleasant Chinese woman talk about token ring network protocols as an alternative to Ethernet with its potential gigabit rate. I’m supposed to be evaluating her performance.

Nothing else but writing novels feels hard enough to me. No occupation other than writing fiction feels like it’s really using all of my mental abilities to the maximum. Nothing else is as challenging and as fulfilling.

Wow, a month gone with no Realware progress. What have I been up to? Computer hacking, mostly. I had to learn some really tricky new Windows stuff. Stuff that won’t be worth knowing in a couple of years, on a par with the tricky assembly language stuff I learned a few years ago. But, hell, I get off on doing it. It’s almost like taking drugs, so obsessive and time-wasting and isolating.

I’m feeling unconfident and anxious now, what with Saucer Wisdom getting rejected all over the place.

My agent Susan Protter says, “Don’t be anxious, be strong.”

She also says, “Don’t let the next project choose you. Take charge.”

Maybe I shouldn’t be letting Realware choose me. Maybe I need to do another stand-alone book.

January 5, 1998. Wired Party.

Kal Spelletich, a sculptor, tells me a story about a guy who took a cattle-prod to punk concerts, hid it under his coat, would use it to stun guys whose looks he didn’t like. The victims wouldn’t notice him coming, he’d just go up near them and give them a taste and they’d fall down.

Which kind of guy would I choose to cattle-prod, I wonder? I’d pick the dancers who whirl around and slam into people. Or the deadhead dancers who dance like obnoxious newts, feet and arms rising and falling in that newt-like cross-gait, the way the arm and leg meet near the waist on one side, then on the other side, the body bending back and forth to make the two sides successively pinch their gelid limbs together. Ugh.

January 8, 1998. Sketching in San Francisco.

In the lower Haight.

A black man with a pickup truck full of auto parts, all copies of the same part, like a truck of turnips, the parts a little different from each other, but basically all the same. Me and Rudy Jr. and Rudy’s friend Rafael are looking at it, us a trio—old hipster, young punker, and Latino dude.

The black guy murmurs to us, “What’s up?” Like we might be into something worth knowing about. I’m proud.

On the bus, a girl with lots of red wool braided into her hair. And a woman in red velvet Xmas clothes, she has a big pot-belly, it feels homey like a small town to see someone dressed this badly.

I walk past a salon, and the receptionist has the ultimate dye job. His hair is pale purple and short, with two little spiky red tufts like volcanoes on a planet, and on the back of his head are S-curve doodles like the holes in violins.

Coffee shop. A young woman reading a big fat Japanese manga comic, thick as a phone book, reading the thing backwards, natch, and at the start of each page her eyes fasten onto the top corner, her expression interested and mild.

Back on the street. The way people’s legs bend and beat. Like flagella.

January 29, 1998. Movie in Hollywood Reporter

So Realware is going to fly. Jennifer Hershey at Avon likes the idea of Realware, she says the Freeware trade paperback has an eighty-five percent sell-through rate, which is high, so they’d definitely like another of the Wares, and she’s ready to make an offer.

And! It looks like Software is really going to be a movie! Yes, diary, today I got a Fed-Ex copy of the following article from page one of The Hollywood Reporter, January 28, 1998:

Phoenix Pics loads ‘Software’

Edward R. Pressman will produce and Scott Billups will direct Phoenix Pictures’ Software, a futuristic story about a robotic war on the moon based on a Rudy Rucker novel.

The cyberpunk story centers on a twenty-first-century slacker who takes on a generation of super-robots created by his best friend and surrogate father.

Larry Wilson is scripting the project, with Jeff Most and Chris Hanley producing and Stuart Volkow co-producing.

The picture marks the directorial debut of Billups, who trained as a cinematographer under Oscar winner James Wong Howe and has made many TV commercials and music videos. Billups also cofounded the American Film Institute’s media lab and created animatics for Jurassic Park.

“It’s one of the most substantial books in science fiction,” Billups said. “And this movie is being made by guys who have enormous respect for Rudy Rucker. Wilson and I are almost at the stage of fanaticism about Rucker and his characters.”

Wilson’s credits include Beetlejuice, The Addams Family, and Tales From the Crypt.

I’m celebrating by watching the Marx Brothers in Love Happy. The oddness of an actor smiling directly into a camera. To interact with a machine. The police search Harpo, and what comes out of his pockets is a perfect Mad magazine Will Elder list. Dog, sled, cube of ice, rural mailbox, horse-collar, mannequin legs, a welcome mat. Each item is full-sized and real.

Making Deals

February 13-16, 1998. New York City

In the Adult Video Center. Walls covered with plastic dicks. A dark arcade of booths in the back. The faint sound of tinny music from the booths.

The New York Public Library, you enter a marble hall, a hundred feet high, with a gentle barrel vault, and columns all around. Walking down a side hall, it’s like a space in a videogame, so repetitive, with the great marble blocks of the wall, the periodically spaced lamps, the great hanging wrought iron spheres, bam bam bam.

Back on the street. A window of hats. Felt bowlers, every color of the rainbow.

A store that sells lace. Wholesale only. All the different patterns. Easy to imagine them woven by artificial ants. Vants. Turmites.

Egyptian rooms at the Met. A round cartouche set between a pair of spreading wings. A sculpture of a crocodile. Hippopotamus-headed gods. Such Art Deco and Heavy Metal icons.

A big black stone sarcophagus, somewhat squat, like a booth, a teleportation booth. Very wide, with a band of hieroglyphs: owl, door, box/saw/line, quarter-moon, owl, feather, owl, furnace.

On the front of the stone booth is a huge peaceful moon face with fancy curved eyes. Under the face a kneeling woman extends her immense wings. The black stone booth can transport you anyplace in the cosmos—anywhere, anywhen, any dimension.

Video art at the Whitney. I like the ones that are projected onto something weird, like onto a huge rotating mirror, a hanging drape, or a wall of water. Some of the videos are coupled to some live real-time aspect of the gallery—a huge projected image of a water drop repeatedly forming on a nozzle that’s right there next to the screen.

Later, in Queens, we see a wonderful Noguchi sculpture, a great model for an alien. It’s a stone donut, angled up on two “legs,” with bumps sticking out all over it, knobs and protrusions. This stone donut is the Ambassador from the Crab Nebula. He has a U-shaped bump like cow horns, and a flattened toadstool bump. The knobby donut alien has a name for each of his bumps—the bumps have special functions. The knobby donuts find each other handsome, or not.

In the evening Sylvia and I have dinner with Eddie Marritz and Hana Machotka. Hana tells me she’s been taking “shamanic journeys.” This means that she attends a thirty-person workshop led by a shaman.

“Today we went to Sirius.”

At first I thought she meant Syria, but she meant the dog-star Sirius. The shaman has a mental trick for getting you there. You imagine yourself getting real small, and then you get big again—and you’re on Sirius.

The insects on Sirius are so big that one of their legs is like the trunk of a redwood tree. Hana is telling me this at dinner, this girlish fifty-year-old woman.

Unaccountable depression today.

Last night for the first time it occurred to me, “You won’t be able to write forever.”

This morning we went to a big Léger show at the MoMA. His early paintings were, I thought, better than his late ones. The earlier ones less assured, more provisional, more cubist. His late ones very fixed, outlined in black, exactly this and exactly that. One inhis “style.” I’m concerned that my work could become like that.

I’m in the nice old Reggio coffee house just now. Writing down my worries, I feel better, as always. My keyboard is like the Earth was for Antaeus—I draw strength from it.

February 1998. In Search Of The Giant Squid.

Notes on a National Geographic special that I watched on TV.

The cuttlefish, a cephalopod like the squid, is my idea of the ultimate SF alien. He holds his bunch of tentacles tight together like a cone, then darts and grabs something to eat, for instance a crab. The cuttles are wonderfully fast at changing their color—totally. Like from brown to yellow to black, and putting wonderful beautiful spots on themselves.

Squid in a mating frenzy. The males grab the females like hands grabbing hot-dogs. Pushing each other aside, snatching the females from each other.

A hooked squid is being hauled up, and another squid comes and gloms onto it, all eight tentacles and two arms holding tight so as to push its beak against its victim, munge munge munge. When the second squid is shaken free, it’s already eaten a pizza-slice-sized chunk outta one of the hooked squid’s loverly rear fins.

They attached a camera to the back of a whale in the fruitless hope they’d see the whale catching a giant squid. The whale swims deeper and deeper, tight against the other whales of its pod. They’re touching each other. And all the while they’re clicking to each other in distinctive patterns, sometimes breaking into a buzz, a creak, a crackle.

I think I need a whale versus squid battle in Realware recently.

March 4, 1998. Sold Saucer Wisdom Again.

Hey, guess what, this week David Hartwell bought Saucer Wisdom as a nonfiction book for Tor! It’ll be out in mid-1999 under the Forge imprint. Perfect. Millennium Madness.

And now I get a new advance on top of the advance I had from Wired. And Susan Protter is making Wired pay me every bit of what they promised.

To make the new deal perfect, Tor wants to use my fifty-five drawings—as is. That’s really exciting, although kind of scary. Am I good enough? I’d been planning to have my pro-cartoonist friend Paul Mavrides redraw my pictures.

But Hartwell is like: “If your book’s drawings were made by a nut in a UFO, how polished do they have to be?”

Well, I’ll redraw the pictures anyway. I’ll get a set of those new high-quality marker-type art-pens—instead of the clogging Rapidographs that I used for cartooning at Rutgers in grad school. Markers don’t clog all the time. I’ll get some hard pencils, and a big beige cube of a gum eraser, and good paper. What fun.

March 25, 1998. In Hollywood with Rudy Jr.

I brought Rudy along for this latest trip to Hollywood, visiting with my Software director and producers.

We toured the Wild Wild West sets on the Sony lot. It’s a three-story brothel built out of wood inside an enormous thick-walled building that’s a sound stage.

Studying the brothel, the guy giving us the tour says, “We wish they’d stock it and leave it.”

We visit the set of a TV sitcom pilot being filmed. Two women with perms and ballpoint pens and clipboards sit on high stools to one side. They’re the script supervisor and the continuity supervisor. The script supervisor records any change between the written script and what the actors do or say. The continuity supervisor watches exactly where people put things down, like coffee cups or sweaters, so that the continuity can be picked up again later. This pair of women struck me as really deeply symbolic—they’re like the Fates, the Parcae who spin and measure the strands of humans’ lives.

My would-be director Scott Billups talked about heli-skiing. “Long lines of powder,” he says, which makes me uneasy. He showed us a video of Van Halen with an effect he called “point in time.” Billups shoots a fleeting event (a water balloon bursting, in this case) from every angle at once with a battery of still cameras, then somehow sews the images together to give an effect of a camera panning all around this event in frozen time. So cool.

Rudy and I saw huge, wonderful skeletons at the La Brea Tar Pits museum next door. Dire wolves. Mastodons. We talked about them a lot.

At Phoenix Pictures, Rudy and I meet the studio head Mike Medavoy and the president Artie. Artie is very Jewish and wise, as if with the wisdom of the desert.

In the street, after dinner with producers Jeff Most and Chris Hanley, my agent Steve Freedman is standing there in his shirtsleeves, his arms up high to the heavens.

“It’s happening, Rudy! Enjoy!”

April 21, 1998. Concert in Santa Cruz.

I went to a rockabilly concert at the Catalyst nightclub, alone, in Santa Cruz on Tuesday night, April 21, 1998. The first act was Big Sandy and the Fly Right Boys. They played good. The musicians looked like radio ham operators instead of like grungers. Very eager and kind of geeky. Big Sandy was an olive-skinned fella. Nice voice, fairly large man, not tall.

There was an, ugh, deadhead newt-dancer woman on the dance floor. Also two cute, plain, flat-chested women in polka dot dresses doing classic swing-dance moves.

After his gig, Big Sandy was with the polka-dot women at the soda fountain out in the Catalyst lobby. I was checking them out.

Big Sandy had his hair bulging up in a pompadour, but with no break in it, continuous like a Dairy-Freeze. And close above him was a strange stained-glass lamp, a very psychedelic lamp that had no doubt been eyeballed by many upon many Cruz trippers. This lamp was not a smooth dome or cone, it had bulging wavy outlines like a cartoon toadstool or—most of all—like Big Sandy’s bulging hair.

Software and Realware

June 21, 1998. On the Way Home from Kauai.

On this trip to Hawaii with Sylvia and the kids, I drew in my spare time, instead of writing. I’ve been working on redrawing the fifty-five pen and ink illustrations for Saucer Wisdom—getting cheerful suggestions from the others.

Yesterday I took a last snorkel. A humuhumunukunukuapua’a fish darted into a hole in the reef to hide. I was wearing my diving gloves, so I poked in my finger and touched him. He grunted really loud, a lot of times, each time I’d touch him. I could hear the noise with my head in the water.

“Unk-unk-unk. Unk unk.”

He’s my totem fish, as pua’a means pig, referring either to his nose or to the noise he makes, or both.

Staghorn finger coral head, full of damselfish and wrasses. The coral like a brain, the fish like thoughts in the brain.

Yesterday we went to the studio of a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Camille Fontaine, and bought a painting from her, she used acrylic on burlap. She was a slip of a thing, in a beach dress, her lips tanned the same color as her face. Her Mustang car was painted with flowers, like wallpaper, making a good effect. She said something funny about her art:

“My style is—wishful thinking.”

Meaning, I think, that she wishes the world was as bright and harmonious as her pictures.

June 26 - June 29, 1998. A-Life Marginalia.

I’m writing these notes in a computer lab in a dorm at UCLA. The campus is off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, very plush. Sylvia and I are here for the sixth Artificial Life conference. A-Life VI. I was at I, II, and III, which were all near Santa Fe, then skipped IV at MIT and V at Tokyo.

There’s a valedictory feel at A-Life VI. The first Artificial Life conference, held in September 1987 at Los Alamos, was an incredibly intense affair, with a wide range of scientists. In the intervening years many of the more interesting subfields of Artificial Life have speciated off into disciplines of their own. The genetic programmers are gone, as are the roboticists, the artificial intelligentsia and many of the designers of artificial ecologies.

I get an uncomfortable sensation that we remaining a-life types have stayed too long at a party that ended half a decade ago. The lights have been turned up and we’re walking around the disheveled banquet room picking up table scraps and sipping from those half-filled glasses that don’t have cigarette butts in them.

But there are a few interesting new developments. Most striking is a new emphasis on genes and embryos.

A Japanese graduate student talked on a simulation of the fruit fly embryo. He had a program called SimEgg that he’d clearly worked on for months, if not years.

And then he said those dread words, “Let’s go to the demo.” As so often happens, this was followed by long minutes of blank screen and desperate fumbling with cables.

The man sitting next to me smiled grimly and remarked, “When someone says ‘Let’s go to the demo,’ it’s like when you have a CD with a scratch on it, and you’re at the part of the song just before the scratch.”

More switch-clicking and cable-jiggling, and then the presenter gave up. Nearly in tears, he began trying to describe what his demo would have looked like. And then suddenly the demo started working.

There weren’t so many of the “electronic ant farms” formerly beloved by a-lifers. When I first saw those, relatively ignorant of programming as I was in 1987, I had a fierce desire to design my own little computer world with virtual creatures that would behave and evolve. I’ve written a number of these programs since then—ants, flocking birds, schools of fish, virtual robots—and the magic is gone.

There used to be a feeling that one’s artificial world might somehow evolve into something incredible. My manager at Autodesk, Eric Lyons, optimistically said, “Maybe someday if we leave the program running over the weekend and come back in on Monday, the virtual ants are going to be in a chorus line kicking their legs and saying hello!”

But it never happened, and I don’t think it ever will.

The most elaborate artificial life world in evidence at Alive VI was the Creatures program, a commercial product from a British company called CyberLife. A lot of the CyberLife guys were there and I was gratified that many of them had read my novels.

Creatures is a little like a super-Tamagotchi toy: you see a screen with a little world with a bunch of creatures called Norns. The Norns are programmed to learn and to behave in certain ways, and it’s up to you to feed them, teach them, discipline them, etc. The Norns are revoltingly cute. Someone remarked that looking at the game made them want to throw up. It felt good to turn away from the a-life and go outside.

Sylvia and I went to the new Getty Center and museum—what an amazing piece of architecture, like being an ant inside a Caro sculpture. The collection is tchotchkes and kitsch with a few schmattas and furbelows, but what a building. And it’s free.

The one exhibit at the Getty that got my attention was a display of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The focus of the show was on marginalia, in the original sense of images drawn in the margins of the text.

A lovely concept, marginalia. The larger truths are in the spontaneous marginalia, rather than the hackneyed authorized wisdom of the main texts.

The margins of the bibles, prayer books and hymnals held mundane day-to-day images as well as semi-profane grotesqueries. The marginalia weren’t so very different from things my friends and I drew in the edges of our schoolbooks. Airplanes dropping bombs, lines of Bo Diddley guitarists (a specialty of “Corky” Short), motorcycles, machine-guns, daggers, buxom women, flying saucers, robots, space-blobs. These Gothic dudes in, like, the year 1200—they were so different from us, yet so much the same.

Part of the charm of a-life for me over the years has been its marginal quality. The brute tyranny of the computer is perhaps a bit like the force of the medieval Church. To get even further out into the cultural margins, I’m starting to do my artificial life investigations entirely in the form of science fiction novels. Abandoning the stale gospel of today’s machines.

July 5, 1998. Vans Warped Tour.

Today I went to the Vans Warped Tour music festival on two piers in San Francisco. I’d hoped to get one of my kids or my friends to come with me, but nobody wanted to. I was eager to go because two of my favorite punk bands were playing: Rancid and NOFX. All told, thirty bands were going to play, using two separate groups of stages.

The concert started at 11 am. I was worried about missing the bands I wanted to see, so I showed up at noon, which turned out to be way too early. NOFX was scheduled for 4:30 in the afternoon, and Rancid for 6:30.

The piers were naked asphalt-covered fingers sticking into the bay, just south of the Bay Bridge. No shade. Lots of little tent-covered stands selling things like CDs, T-shirts, Thai food. Two stages next to each other at one end, two stages at the other end. On each pair of stages one band would be setting up while another one played, so they could switch over to a new band right away.

I was wearing an old wild-print rayon shirt, shorts, mountain boots to protect my toes, and a Beastie Boys baseball cap. Turns out none of these kids was wearing a baseball cap, none at all. Everyone was bare-headed, except for a sprinkling of those round “beer hats” that used to come free with a raincoat. Pork-pie. Weird T-shirts. “Loser 13.” A sweet young girl’s shirt said “Smegma.” Some shirts had writing that might have been Arabic. These kids were younger than my children. I was really out of place. I began to feel uncomfortable.

An airplane circled overhead towing a sign saying “WATCH OUT FOR THE FUZZ.” I thought this might be a warning about undercover cops. I wondered if the kids might think I was a cop. Later I mentioned this worry to my hipster friend Paul Mavrides, he said, “No, Rudy, they thought you were someone’s dad.” Much worse.

I got some Thai noodles, really greasy and questionable. The cooks had these great lined faces. Then I was standing at a place where I could hear two bands a little, and the beating sun and the clash of music and the greasy food made me feel sick. I sat down where I could only hear one band. Some feet near me had pink suede sandals on them, a girl. The audience all had children’s faces, although their bodies were nearly adult and they were smoking. Fresh life boiling upwards.

A motorcycle flew past, nearly overhead, maybe twenty feet up in the air. Then another and another. The music was so loud I hadn’t heard them. There were two ramps with kids shooting their motor-bikes up one ramp and landing on another one. While they were in the air they’d do little gymnastic moves, like letting go of the handle-bars or sitting sideways.

Some of the kids in the crowd had really interesting dyed hair. One had stripes of poster-paint-bright red, blue, green. Two others had dyed their hair colorless and put patterns into it: one had a pattern like a purple splash of water with lobed drop shapes, and the other had concentric circles of orange.

I came to a booth for the Sony PlayStation, seven free consoles running fast 3D games. Spyro the Dragon got my interest. He was a cute little dragon that ran forward and hopped and breathed fire. The things he ate were mostly polyhedra with changing numbers of sides, though there were also other dragons and cows and chickens.

After awhile I got hold of a controller. I was in Spyro’s birth place, a chicken coop. I killed the three chickens by breathing fire on them, which turned them into butterflies. Then I tried to get out of the coop. It was tricky. The first time I jumped over the wall I fell in the ocean and drowned.

Really loud live punk music was going on behind me all the while. Teen-age boy heaven here.

I got my Spyro out of the pen and onto a platform and a big dragon came and gave me some advice that I should “glide” but I couldn’t see how. I fell in the ocean and drowned again. Then I gave up and a twelve-year old boy darted forward, took the control and flew Spyro over to attack some cows.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

Silently he held up the controller and pressed his thumb repeatedly on one of the buttons. That was the sum total of my conversations with people at the Warped show. Soon after this I walked past a stand selling clothes and I saw myself in a full-length mirror. Aaaargh! Boy, does that baseball cap look bad on me. God, do I look old. What the hell am I doing here? I take off the hat and it’s a little better, but the sun is way intense.

I hang around another hour, but that vision of me in the mirror has really blown it for me. I can’t do this for four more hours while waiting to see Rancid. I can’t even do two more hours to see NOFX. I give up and head to the exit, oh well. I’ve definitely seen something—not what I thought I was going to see, but something. The great Bay Bridge is hanging overhead against a perfect blue sky.

Out on the sidewalk I feel—liberated. I even see some people in their thirties. I get an Odwalla juice and a baguette of Apex sourdough, and I sit at an outdoor table eating. At the next table are some old—that is, 25-year-old—punks getting really drunk before going into the concert. Pacing themselves. I showed up too early is all.

The best hairdo of the day was on one of these punks, a woman with her head shaved except for a wafer-thin eight-inch purple Mohawk. She had two little purple tuft-wisps of hair coming out from her side-burn areas like tropical fish appendages. A ring in her lip. She was a big, fat woman, comfortable in her decorated body.

Two San Francisco cops were having lunch at the next table, not in the least interested in the drunk punks. The title of my favorite NOFX album is Punk in Drublic.

Will I try going to a concert again? Oh sure. It was hard, but it was interesting. And next time, like the undead Dracula, I’ll stay away from mirrors.

July 9, 1998. Writing and Drawing.

Sylvia went to the A-Life VI conference down at UCLA. I had some of my cellular automata on display in the accompanying art show. We two sat at the banquet with an attractive psychotherapist our age named Joanna Poppink who said that if you’re an artist in one field, working at an art in another field revitalizes you. She was a real L.A. type, with the full armory of buzzword language, but this point she made was a very good one, and I’ve been mulling it over.

I do see a lot of analogies between drawing and writing.

• When drawing, I get some quick sketch in pencil, then ink it in, then have to white out pieces and redraw them. In writing I try and write a rough version of the section pretty quickly, then go over it and tune it, and then there will be things that don’t work that I have to keep redoing.
• In drawing, whenever there’s a part I’m confused about—something tricky like two hands holding each other—I end up having to use lots and lots of white-out. And it ends up all bumpy and crufty on the paper and never does look as smooth and clean as the rest of the picture. In writing, the transitions or actions I’m not clear about take the most rewriting and reworking. But I don’t think it’s necessarily true that a rewritten patch has to be bumpy and crufty as does a redrawn patch. The bumpiness is partly a result simply of the not-so-great physical properties of the white-out I use. I wouldn’t necessarily have this problem if I was painting.
• When drawing I sometimes think that if only I could take the time to fully visualize the difficult passage then I’d be able to draw it clean and right the first time. But often it just seems too hard to think, and I go ahead and draw it wrong, just so I have something to work from. In writing, I’ll often think that if only I could fully think through a scene I could write it much more effectively. But many times it’s just too hard to think all that—I’ll feel like being active, in touch with the medium, so I just go ahead and write even though I’m not sure what I’m doing. And then I take it from there.
• In both mediums, I need to realize that something might have the superficial appearance of a finished piece, but that it’s really still a sketch that needs to be reworked. I was kind of surprised how prolonged a process it is to make a drawing. I hadn’t realized it would take so much revision. By long experience, I’m of course familiar with the huge amount of revision that a written scene takes. It’s kind of comforting to see that drawing can be just as hard.
• Paul Mavrides says about my cartooning, and about cartooning in general, “It’s not the realistic style that matters so much. It’s having something to say.” And this makes me feel free to write a little more cartoony and sketchy sometimes. And helps me fight my feeling of being inferior to a fine literature exponent who creates beautifully textured descriptions and aperçus in a work that perhaps doesn’t have all that much to say.
• I worship the notion of “eyeball kicks,” as in the early cartoons by Will Elder in Mad and Panic. Elder’s eyeball kicks are, to me, of a piece with the piled-on detail of Bosch’s teeming works. A higher apotheosis is reached in the later Bruegel where there’s still very much action, but the surface doesn’t teem and wriggle, it’s harmonious and integrated. Elder, Bosch and Bruegel (the Elder!) have always been touchstone icons for the kinds of novels I want to write. And these days I feel like I’m getting a little closer. Each section of Realware is a fresh canvas.
• The problem in painting or writing is how to suggest the endless levels of Nature’s span and detail while only using a square meter of canvas or a hundred thousand words. Painting and drawing use the trick of perspective at the high end. At the lowest end, a painter can use the fact that the fractal structure of paint is like the fractal structure of plants and dirt. Writing uses the trick of narrative at the high end—suggesting a universal theme. At the low end, writing uses the telling detail, especially the cunningly selected and seemingly random detail. At first it doesn’t look like writing owns a shortcut fractal trick like paint-scumbling. But the fractal, multiply-linked nature of language is the Muse’s gift to writers. I’m thinking about the way that a word can mean so much more than it ought to. Just those few little letters hook into so many associations. A well-chosen phrase manages, like a skillful glob of paint, to signify more than itself.

July 12, 1998. Notes on Them.

I finally saw the classic 1954 SF horror movie about giant ants, Them. I remember seeing posters for it in Louisville, I would have been eight or nine. I wanted very much to see it then, but my parents wouldn’t let me, they viewed such a movie as too trashy and too scary.

And now I saw Them on TV. It seems the very archetype of a Fifties SF invasion movie. I’d like to write a story or novel like this. Here’s the pattern:

The first victims are discovered in an isolated location. Cops find their bodies.

There’s some odd evidence: a footprint, a fragment of one of the attackers, a ripped-open crate of sugar cubes.

One cop waits at the crime scene while the other goes back to the station. The solo waiting cop’s expression changes to horror. He screams. Cut.

The cops in the office study the clue. Baffled, they call in an expert from Washington.

The expert shows up. He’s an old duffer, accompanied by his lovely, perky daughter.

The expert makes some tests and acts mysterious. There’s another disaster. The expert finally tells the cops what’s what. “Giant ants.”

Then they bomb the ants’ nest and descend into it. Very cool. This is the first climax.

When the girl insists on exploring the bombed-out nest with the hero, nothing much happens. But now we start a new arc of action, heading to the second and final climax.

Some ants have escaped the first extermination. They fly off on special ant wings, found a colony in Los Angeles, and drag a young boy into their nest. The hero and the army stage a flame-thrower ant massacre in the storm-sewer tunnels. Happy ending.

The sewer, by the way, is off one of those concrete Los Angeles River channels that appear in so many movies. In other words, the giant ants coexist beside Travolta’s Greased Lightning car in Grease, and beside the Terminator 2 truck chase. Imagine all of the L.A. river scenes happening at once in the same place! A panoramic painting.

July 20 & 27, 1998. Software Scripts #5 and #4C.

I called production assistant Stuart Volkow about the Software movie. He’s looking at the new script by Sokolow & Cohen, and there’s an alternate new script coming in from Larry Wilson. Stu says the Sokolow & Cohen script is very different.

“They fucked with the names, I don’t know why they did it.”

He says either Cobb or Sta-Hi is now called “Buck.” He says they added a ticking clock, a down-ticking digital clock.

I called Scott Billups. He’d been very high on Wilson’s earlier script, but now he’s totally switched allegiances to the Sokolow & Cohen script.

“I’m a happy guy,” says Billups. Of the Wilson script he now says, “I can’t believe he gave me such drivel.”

July 22, 1998. Around Isabel’s Warehouse.

Isabel has sublet herself a living space in a large San Francisco warehouse from the artist Kal Spelletich—I was up there today. Isabel has beautiful reddish hair these days. She’s painted a wonderful green squid mural on her wall. Other things I noticed:

A sweet potato in one jar of water is sprouting, jasmine vines grow in another.

A huge mirror ball dangles from a high beam.

Isabel wants to put in a hanging garden on a pallet on a pulley.

Kal’s hot-dog grill: a saw-horse with gas jets, and robot jaws that bite.

The “Emperor” is a local man who lives in a school bus with various fences around it. A sign on the bus says to recycle your urine by drinking it.

A big white ship at the wharves with two huge round white polyhedral domes on it.

July 24 & 27, 1998. Selling Realware.

I need to try and pull more strands of Realware together. I’m about to write the scene of Phil crawling inside the four-dimensional powerball, and I don’t really know what the powerball is. I worry I won’t be able to weave the threads together, to catch all the rabbits I’ve set loose, to pocket all the multi-dimensional balls I’ve tossed into the air.

I’ve been reduced to praying for help, whatever that means. An idea came to me: Why not have the aliens’ powerball be their literal god. A science-fictional higher being who’s followed them to the new part of the cosmos where they’ve migrated. The aliens are so evolved that they have a physical interaction with this higher-dimensional god-thing. It’s a reasonable SF conceit.

But it’s kind of ironic that I’d pray to god for help about my book and god is like, “I can be a character in your book, would that help?”

I sound like a born-again zombie. But really I’m just grasping at straws. Anything for a plot idea.

Susan Protter called. She just got back to New York, and Avon made an offer of twenty thousand dollars for Realware, the same as for Freeware. She tried to get them to go higher and they won’t. The movie plans don’t impress them. Susan also said that Tor is sending a check for Saucer Wisdom for me, my second payment for that book. Yaaar.

August 1, 1998. Santa Clara County Fair.

I figured out a lot more of the ending of Realware this morning.

Somehow Sylvia and I ended up going to the County Fair with my professor friend Brian Petersen, his wife, and his two kids, aged four and eight. It was savagely hot, wandering around on the asphalt, looking for patches of shade.

I rode on the Ferris wheel with Brian’s eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth. We were in car #1 of 16 cars, and sometimes the car in front of us was #16, and sometimes it was #2, depending whether we were at the bottom or the top of the wheel’s turns. This was confusing for me, more so for Elizabeth, but it makes mathematical sense if you work on it. It was such a hot day that we were the only ones on the Wheel.

I had my picture taken with a person dressed as the fair mascot: a chicken in nerd glasses and carrying a foam rubber laptop. I could relate to that chicken, me being a Kentucky-born CS professor.

While sitting on a bench waiting for the others, I had one of those moments of wondering at the realness of ordinary life. Wonder at all the physical objects within my view: wonder at the low yellow Western hills over on the east side of San Jose, wonder at a strange midway ride with cars moving along the circumference of a large cartouche-shaped rotor, wonder at the dairy barns, the dog show arena where Elvis records are playing, the Sheep and Swine barn, the stock-car racetrack with stadium seats, the blue sky, dusty green trees, asphalt, patches of shade, the breeze, and me in the center like a mirror ball reflecting it all. This is all there is.

We saw a digital art show at the fair as well as the usual things. The show had about ten pieces by a man named Guy Marsden. The collection was called the Relevator series. What Marsden has done is to find old electronic numeric display devices and to polish them up and assemble them in compact form. Very beautiful. His favorite items were the old school nixie tubes from the 1970s. In a nixie tube, each number has a wire in its shape, and the numbers are, like, stacked up one in front of the other in the tube, and the currently displayed number gets lit up by a halo of pale orange glowing neon. An itchy blend of analog and digital.

August 7, 1998. Software Movie. Wilson In.

The producers found two new writers: Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohn. Their credits include Toy Story, Money Talks, and Tree. Sokolow is the nephew of a NYC woman who is a producer. They’re supposed to do the script in three weeks. Supposedly they’re getting five hundred thousand bucks. Half a mil. Unfortunately the producers won’t hear of letting me write a script.

The Sokolow-Cohen job was the fifth script so far. And these two new guys had, get this, strict instructions not to read my novel, and to work only from script #4.

Two weeks later, film agent Steve Freedman called me to say they’d gotten a new surprise draft from Larry Wilson and it’s great. They’ve ordered story-boards and an effects budget on the movie.

Steve says, “This is a good sign. It means Medavoy can see the movie.”

I say, “So that $500K they gave Sokolow and Cohen is just money down the tubes?”

Steve goes, “It makes them more pregnant.”

Then he talks about what he wants to do when the studio’s option with me runs out in October. “They may try and offer us $5K to keep the option alive, but I’ll say no, you’re pregnant, you have to buy the rights outright. And then we’ll get $250K.”

I have a feeling that Steve is dreaming. But I love his jargon.

Stuart Volkow calls and describes the new Wilson plot to me, and it seems even more convoluted than before. For some reason, an evil Scientology-type cult has made its way into the story.

I told my regular agent, Susan Protter, about Steve’s theory that Medavoy has to buy the full rights to Software instead of just renewing the option—and this will happen because Medavoy is, as Steve keeps insisting, “pregnant.”

Susan points out that the producers are going to be offering one thing, an extension of the option, and Steve wants to ask for something else, a purchase, and they may say, “No, we won’t do it.”

I say to Susan, “Tsimmis,” wanting to use some Yiddish.

She says, “That means carrot.”

I say, “I thought it meant trouble.”

She says, “Well, it means commotion. Like a stew. You’re putting in all kinds of things, even carrots. And that makes a tsimmis.” She was kind of teasing me.

Stuart Volkow calls and noses around, trying to find out where we stand on the option renewal. He says the budget is ratcheting up a notch, that the action sequences are adding cost. Says they had some artists doing models of the crater, the Dex penthouse, some bullet train tracks. He says if the new Wilson script is approved, then the debate about extension vs. purchase could become moot, as presumably they’d purchase. I ask him to send me the new script so I’ll know what’s going on.

August 8, 1998. Whales and Burros.

I’ve been reading Moby Dick the last couple of months, a chapter or two each night when I “turn flukes,” that is, go to bed. In a lot of chapters, Melville at the end leans out into the sea of readers and gives some ranting exhortation, a homily derived from Nature’s Great Book of the Whale. Let us each seek then the Whale in our own surroundings and muse upon how best to render his blubber into fragrant barrels of bestsellerdom.

I wonder what is the Whale in my life?

Perhaps it’s the computer. The whaling industry was all around Melville. And computer industry is around me. My jobs have involved programming and teaching people how to program. But I’m somewhat sick of computers—they’re not something I necessarily want to write about much more.

What makes Moby Dick such fun is the specificity and liveliness of the Whale. It’s not like there’s one single rogue computer that I’m after.

Could god be the Whale that I’ve sought through all my life’s stages? I’m thinking of the ecstatic White Light, the surcease of Resentment-Fear-Anger, the Merge, the cosmic footnote that Explains All. But god should be there mainly as the subtext, I think. Indeed, the whiteness of Ishmael’s whale carries some aura of the divine.

Getting more practical again, I might say that mathematics is my whaling industry, and the rationally graspable Forms found in Nature are my whales. And the whale I seek the most sedulously is—chaos.

And what about sex? Melville alludes to whale sex only once, in a Latin footnote that says they do it “more hominum,” by which he means face to face.

Son Rudy has been working for Macromedia, but now he’s starting his own company, an ISP, or internet service provider. He’s thinking of calling it either El Burro or Monkeybrains.

Our neighbor Elena Vialo told us a great Spanish proverb or nursery rhyme about El Burro.

Ba-Be-Bi-Bo-Bu! El Burro sabe mas que tu!

The first part is just the vowels with B’s in front of them, and the second part says, “The Burro knows more than you.” That would suit Rudy’s sense of humor. But Monkeybrains would be a good fit too. As a boy he was a big fan of Curious George in the picture books. Curious Monkey, he called him.

August 14-25, 1998. Finished Realware.

I just finished writing Realware! The first chapter has a funeral, and the last has a double wedding. Double wedding of two familiar-seeming young female characters, with their brother-figure playing a heavy metal wedding march on the side. Now, that’s transreal science fiction.

I’m an old fool playing with action figures. I hope my children don’t mind forever being called into service in Ye Olde Transreale Theatre Troupe. But it’s only fun play-acting, very positive this time around. I think the book came out well.

A big theme in all the Wares books is father/son relations—Pop was the original inspiration for my character Cobb. I think I resolved my regrets about Pop pretty well in Realware. There’s actually two father figures in the book.

First there’s Cobb himself, who nobly leaves in a flying saucer at the end after telling everyone to get rid of all the software backups of him so that next time he dies, he too can go into this kind of afterworld that I call the SUN.

Secondly there’s my main character’s father, who ends up nobly flying into the SUN right after his son says a warm and loving good-bye to him.

And thus I’ve had my chance to finally say a proper goodbye to Pop.

With transreal fiction, you get to revise your own past.

August 26, 1998. Software Option Renewed.

News from Susan about the Software movie option extension. Phoenix Pictures won’t buy Software from me yet because if they do, that would trigger them having to pay Ed Pressman a couple of million in preproduction costs.

So we’re giving them a four month extension for $25K. And Larry Wilson is in Germany, working on yet another version of his script, incommunicado. Larry’s pal Scott Billups says he and Larry had a meeting with four suits and the suits gave him four notes for changes to the script. One note per suit. He says Mike Medavoy has spent over a million on Software now.

I tell Scott, “Steve says that makes Medavoy pregnant.”

Scott says, “Steve’s right, and that’s exactly how we want Mike to be.”

Europe With Peter Bruegel

August 28-30, 1998. Trip to Geneva.

Sylvia and I are both on sabbatical this fall, so we’ve decided to go on a big trip to Europe, just the two of us. Wander around for six weeks, like fresh-out-of-college kids sometimes get to do. I’m getting some money to give an a-life talk in Cambridge, and some more to give a taped interview in Rome, to be published as a slim volume in Italian.

I’m on the plane alone right now, as Sylvia went a few days earlier so as to spend a few extra days with her family. I’ve been a chicken with his head cut off, getting things ready. I feel scattered. Last night I stayed with Rudy in San Francisco. We went out for dinner with Paul Mavrides and his girlfriend Mimi at Esperpento.

Last time I ate at that place with Rudy I was stoned and drunk. That night was the inspiration for the dinner scene in the Catalanic in my novel Freeware.

We had a mellower time last night. I was sober. Rudy rode me over on his motorcycle.

I’m in the air now. I didn’t bring my laptop computer. I’m writing all these trip notes by hand in a bound paper notebook that I got. When we get home I’ll type up my notes. The typing doesn’t take as long as you’d think.

The landscape of clouds below us like a hugely plowed field. The furrow patterns are formed by chaotic attractors—not random, not orderly. It’s odd there’s no organism that will ever learn the shapes of this particular cloud landscape, the geodesics of its surfaces, its crannies and its nooks. It’s completely temporary and in some sense without purpose.

The clouds break up and we see the night-lit cities of the Bay area. What lovely luminous jellyfish of night. The volumetric shapes are made of pinpoints from three kinds of lamp: blue arclights, pink sodium vapor lights, and ordinary incandescent bulbs. Dizzying to think of all the human lives down there doing Friday night: suppers, conversations, blow-jobs, fucking, parties, and TV, TV, TV.

The smell of the cognac of the lady next to me is nearly overpowering, so yummy. What if I drank? “Dear god, please help me,” is the mantra I learned from old Ron in recovery, he taught me this one when I was a newcomer. I say this magic spell and it works, who knows why. Actual god? Or maybe I’m just activating a higher circuit of my brain. In any case, the lust for that cognac passes.

First full day here. Birds on wires this morning. Some sitting one way, some sitting the other way. Groups of lefties and righties.

Walked to Lake Geneva and waded, stepping down onto an underwater step. Delicious water. Mont Blanc big and startling across the lake, beyond other mountains.

Walking back I get lost. Big houses by the lake with lawns like parks, with benches in them, even.

September 3, 1998. Musée Ariana.

Oaks, beeches, pines. The chaotic purposeful motion of the beech branches. I come inside from the park and I’m in the Ariana Museum of Ceramics, a little known Geneva museum, one of my favorite spots. I’m out on my own today.

In the Middle Ages, forks only had one tine. A fork like that was called a “pique de table.” In the 1600s they started having two tines. It’s like time travel, looking at this stuff. And here’s a bouillon bowl, from Nyon, 1790, glazed to look like knotty pine paneling.

Out the Ariana Museum windows I can see the United Nations building, down the hill. The Ariana Museum is in an old villa with an immense central hall that rises through the second floor, perhaps sixty feet high. A second-floor mezzanine surrounds the hall, and the mezzanine balustrade bears an amazing set of eighteen marble columns holding up the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Very odd, twisty, Baroque columns. I’ve seen this space before and always wanted to come back here to figure out if the columns are all different or not. At first glance it looks as if they are, but now today I find out for sure.

I assign the letters A through R to the eighteen columns and walk slowly around the mezzanine noting each column’s characteristics. The columns are single fat worms, or braids of up to four worms, and the braids twist either clockwise or counterclockwise from bottom to top, making from three to eight full twists between bottom and top. An additional distinguishing feature is that the component worms of the columns can be either smooth or grooved.

I have a lot of fun analyzing all this, it’s math in action, me coding up the patterns by a few letters and numbers. Eventually I’ve learned that of the eighteen columns, fourteen of the columns are distinct, and four of them are copies of others. If the four copies had only been mirror-reversed then all could have been different, sigh.

Wandering around the museum, I see several examples of the huge porcelain stoves called poêles. One of them reaches all the way to the ceiling. A few years back I had a drug trip at the Mondo house in Berkeley, and it was a nightmare—my usual reaction to psychedelics. The most malignant demon in my hallucinations was, of all things, just such a poêle stove—I’d recently seen one at John Walker’s house in Lignieres, Switzerland.

This hallucination later made its way into my novel The Hacker and the Ants—I used it both in a “dark dream” freakout scene and in a robot ant attack scene. The ants had their nest in a poêle belonging to a villainous character based on John Walker.

Even in the sober light of day, the Ariana’s gigundo poêle scares me.

Downstairs in a basement gallery are some new ceramics: A thousand white unglazed ovals in a heap with the fatuous word “POTENTIAL” embossed on each one. I have a powerful urge to drop my pants and shit on the mound, literally, then and there—both (a) as a fitting comment upon such idiotic lack of craftsmanship and (b) because I’m not sure where the bathroom is.

Out in the park afterwards, I see a man with a pipe and a furled umbrella, gathering up hazel nuts.

A giant bell, a gift from Japan, hangs nearby. I gong it, and it resonates for more than a minute—a deep humming noise that rises and falls. A perfect day.

September 4, 1998. Train From Geneva To Paris.

This is our Nth honeymoon. I married Sylvia in Geneva some thirty-one years ago. I was bursting for us to leave Geneva again today—we made it! Yee-haw.

She’s next to me in this fast, comfortable train, happily writing out a dollar-to-franc conversion table. Her stepmother packed us a good lunch: cheese, tomatoes, radishes, chocolate, grapes. And we bought a loaf of peasant bread.

Yesterday I found a recovery meeting in Geneva. It was across the street from the Hotel Rex where Mom, Pop, Embry and I stayed when I came to Geneva to get married. I looked into the hotel. I seemed to see a spectral Pop and Embry in the breakfast nook—my Mom for the moment forgotten in my imagining of the old drama of the men coming to capture a bride. Riding off with Sylvia on my saddle.

The other day we two took a ride on a lake boat from Nyon to Geneva. When the lake boat passed under the Lake Geneva jet d’eau I saw such interesting shapes. The sun was behind this giant fountain, and I saw shadows where the water was thicker, the water coming down in big drapes.

The boat took us past the Eaux Vives park where we had our wedding lunch. Talk about spectral visions. I think more than half of the people who were at that lunch are dead now. Time for our kids to supply some fresh weddings.

When I was young I saw myself as the unique protagonist of a hero-epic. Time goes by, and I see life as something like a long chain of links, a rolling wheel of human seasons, with the old trees falling and the saplings coming up. This line of thought relates to the image of a single person’s life as being like a year of four seasons—your life is a cycle of spring, summer, fall and winter—progressing from green, muddy March towards the end of cold, gray February. In the Middle Ages, the calendar year started with March. I’m fifty-two right now, so if I say a “month” of my “life year” equals seven years in the real world, this puts me in mid-October. The end of harvest.

I talked to Sylvia about the optimistic notion that as you age, your worldview gets broader.

“And then it narrows back down,” she reminded me. Yes, for all four of our parents, when they got old, the scope seemed to close down to the most immediate needs of their bodies.

In Geneva, we went to see an exhibit of nineteenth-century Swiss painting at the Musée Rath, a cute little shrine of a Beaux-Arts building on Place Neuve between the opera and the park that includes the University. One artist in particular: Robert Zünd 1827-1909. He did these huge canvases of woodlands, with seemingly every leaf in place. He works down to a much lower level of detail than most painters. Yet, like any other painter, even Zünd hits a bottom level where it’s just little crusts of paint.

As I’ve mentioned before, a trick that painters use is, at the bottom level, to replace the fractality of nature by the physical fractality of paint and canvas. The “As Above So Below” teaching of painting. By practice, a painter perhaps learns to approximate a certain desired fractal dimension of nature with paint that’s manipulated in a certain way. Scumbling. Dabs for leaves. A clever artist can do this at a relatively high level and not bother with very much mimetic detail—and, even so, capture the impression of the scene. Impressionism vs. photorealism.

The three speeds of the passing landscape seen from a train. The clouds and far hills move with you, the medium distance moves towards the rear slowly, and the near things move fast towards the rear.

September 6, 1998. Sea Potato, Guignol, Brancusi.

I’m in a cafe alone, about to get breakfast. A few doors down is the entrance to the Place des Vosges—an amazing eighteenth-century square. Like stepping into a tinted architectural etching on some genteel wall. But the square’s fountains are alive—four of them—and the plane trees are green and chaotic, albeit trimmed into long multi-trunked rectangular prisms. It feels like really good virtual reality. Real reality isn’t normally this orderly.

Yesterday we had a great—if somewhat gnarly—dinner at La Bar Des Huitres. The “plateau géant,” about $60, with regular oysters, round oysters, cherrystone clams, big shrimp, tiny shrimp that you eat in the shell, a big crab cut in half, two little crabs that you pick at like you’re the crustacean, tiny black snail periwinkles, bigger spiral shell things (whelks?), long razor clams and—la pièce de resistance—a patate de mer (sea potato), which is a tough black thing cut in half, leather on the outside, then an inch of cartilaginous pearly white material, and in the middle of the part that I ate, god help me, a beige-yellow mass a bit like sea-urchin roe, attached to the thick hide by ligaments and membranes that I severed with some difficulty, finally freeing a soft mass the size of my little finger. Eggs? stomach? milt? brain?—whatever, I cut it in half and had it in two mouthfuls. It tasted intensely of the fresh sea, a tang of salt and iodine—like getting blindsided by a wave and sent tumbling over the falls in whitewater surf. But gnarly.

I thought uneasily about the sea potato for the rest of the evening, my unease compounded by three unwisely consumed balls of ice-cream.

I was thinking again about my pig-chef idea for a science-fiction film script. It’s about a guy—someone like my “Sta-Hi” friend Dennis—at his maddest, in his chef’s hat—he works for the aliens who are cooking and eating humans. This is half a story. The other half could be my old idea about “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club”—these clannish old men I’d see forever drinking and playing cards in a room off the men’s locker room at the Oakwood Country Club in Lynchburg, Virginia. Suppose that the story’s young hero boy discovers that these so-called “men” are leather bags full of sick juice. And then the youth’s friend Jody becomes a pig chef. Call the movie Killeville.

Yesterday we went to see an outdoor puppet show at Rond Point on Champs Elysées. The little puppet theater is called a “guignolet,” and is the size of a child’s playhouse, with some benches in front of it. The date “1818” is on the guignolet. Very humble compared to the nineteenth-century Opéra De Paris.

The chief puppeteer was an attractive, somewhat roughskinned young woman wearing a bowler hat at an angle. She had a loose pullover that was askew, baring one shoulder and a black silk bra-strap. Ah Paris!

Before the show, she stood at the knee-high entrance-gate ringing a hand-bell, to admit the waiting mothers and children, about ten of them, plus Sylvia & me, sixteen francs apiece. There was one baby in a carriage, who got in free.

We seated ourselves on four benches, the puppeteer welcomed us, then disappeared into the little playhouse with its faded red velvet curtains. Talking out from behind the curtains, she told us to call for “Guignol” to make him come out. Wonderful.

I never knew that “Grand Guignol” puppetry was about a puppet named Guignol. An employee on the back bench called “Guignol” a few times to get us going, and the children took it up. Eventually, Guignol came out—he wasn’t hook-nosed like Punch, as I’d expected, he was a fairly ordinary-looking puppet in a green frock coat. His wife was Madelon. She had a wonderfully high, squeaky puppet voice—and his son was Guillaume. Eventually Guignol got down to the basics of hitting a policeman puppet with a stout, freshly cut stick. A cudgel.

The sculptor Brancusi’s studio is in a building by the Centre Pompidou, “just as he left it,” except the walls are glass. We walk around the outside, peering into the four rooms. The floors are bare, there’s nothing present except one or two hundred of his sculptures, he kept the studio this way, he lived somewhere else, used the studio to show his work to guests and customers, like a gallery. Reminded me of how Greg Gibson and I fixed up our room senior year, with a hanging prism, and a spotlight on the floor, and big cardboard rug-rolling tubes that stretched from floor to ceiling. Like an art installation. We called it The Enchanted Forest. And I was the Magic Pig.

Imagine if Brancusi’s studio had an artificial Brancusi in it, that is an android, oblivious to the viewers, arranging things, working a little, maybe fabricating yet another Bird In Flight. The android Brancusi would of course eventually get out of control, break loose, wander off into Paris and meet a woman. Story title: “My Brancusi,” told from the woman’s point of view.

After looking at Brancusi’s studio we’re walking along and we hear music in the street—a woman singing opera, coming from the loudspeakers of a music store. Endless flowing tones. A lady sits across the way, and her leopard scarf is fluttering in the wind like the flowing music, like the shapes of Brancusi, like the years that swallowed Brancusi’s eighty-year life and flew on, leaving his sculptures, his cast-off shells.

Yesterday, Sylvia and I went to the Picasso museum. Across the street from it was an abandoned building full of squatters. They called it their “Anti-Museum.” They had rough studios, graffiti everywhere, no fixtures, very odd.

Good old Picasso—the slobbering zest with which he draws women. Always with the crotch triangle and its little line. He makes it seem like such a wonderful thing to have a woman to live with.

September 7, 1998. The Gustave Moreau House.

I’m out alone today. We’re taking a day off from each other. It’s raining and a bit hard to get around, and if we’re separate it’s less hard.

Almost all French tobacco shops have the same sign: “TABAC” written inside a vertical lozenge. A few modernists have rotated the lozenge to make a double cone—and they outline this shape with red neon helices.

I take the Metro to the Gustave Moreau house and museum in the Pigalle neighborhood—this is a museum Sylvia that doesn’t want to see. She looks down on Moreau. Moreau is a “symbolist,” a decadent fin du siècle Romantic, a bit like the Jugendstil artists Böcklin and Stuck—like theirs, Moreau’s pictures have an SF/Fantasy-illo quality. These guys do art that looks, says Sylvia, like they never went outside. I’ve always liked Moreau because he’s technically so inept that he gives hope to a would-be artist like me.

The Moreau house includes his apartments on the1e étage. He had a favorite small painting of his representing Pasiphae—the Greek queen who fucked a bull—there’s a white horse to the right, and in the center Pasiphae is slipping off her robes, behind her is a big black bull, to the left is a bummed-out-looking guy in a red toga. Her husband?

On the 2e étage is a huge room with a spiral staircase, very ornate, leading up to the 3e. The ceiling is insanely high, I’m talking thirty feet. Immense muddled canvases. I go on up to the 3e, where the guard gets into conversation with me. He says the effect of all the pictures together is surchargé. There’s a really scary painting of a Christ leaning off the cross, spectral, reaching out an arm to a startled pilgrim who’s using an uprooted tree as his official pilgrim staff. The pilgrim is all “Whoah!”

I’m somewhat amped up about drawing, from doing all my illustrations for Saucer Wisdom. So I brought my sketch pad and some pens and pencils along for this trip, as well as a bound notebook for writing in.

Inspired by the look of the Moreau museum, I retrieve my sketch pad from the coat check and sit down on a little bentwood chair in the huge 2e étage, trying to draw the room, including some of the paintings and above all the ornate spiral staircase. The guard for this floor hears my decisive pencil lines as I lay out my perspective axes, and he’s suspicious. He comes over to look over my shoulder. I don’t realize he’s a guard, I think he’s just a noser.

“Vous êtes architect?” he asks.

I answer that I’m an author who wants to sketch this space. “Je suis écrivain. Je veux esquisser cette espace.”

The guard says that only artists are supposed to draw in here—to copy the pictures. He’s not sure if what I’m doing is allowed. But then I say that, within the context of my sketch, I’m going to copy the paintings into the frames that I draw, and the guard relaxes. My drawing comes out pretty well.

Later I walk up the street and enter the intersection of Pigalle and Clichy, a sex-industry zone. A woman in gold hot pants plucks my sleeve outside a little theatre. If I linger, her harpy sisters will flock onto me, stingers at the ready. I move on, and get in the subway and go to a stop called Sêvres-Babylon. I get out there because “Babylon” sounds cool.

But it’s a pretty bland neighborhood. I walk on, fighting a feeling of loneliness. Wondering why I’m here. Have to keep reminding myself this is fun—even the slack bits. I miss Sylvia, but I imagine she’s having a good time—she hasn’t been alone for two weeks.

And then, as keeps happening, if one waits, something nice turns up—this time it’s a huge stone fountain in front of a church called Saint-Sulpice. One tower of the church is covered with cloth, and the wind billows in it, making tense vibrations. Inside the church is holy water in a South Pacific giant clam shell whose big wavy edge is covered over with a brass border. Crushing, vast, crazy organ music is playing, and then the organ music stops and space expands.

I venture on to the Jardins Luxembourg hoping to find Sylvia. So far no luck—I’m sitting here writing all this on a folded sheet of paper from my pocket. All caught up.

September 12, 1998. London Museums.

In London we initially stayed at a YMCA with endless alienating empty halls leading from our tiny wind-rattled room to an athlete’s-foot-floor hideously-shit-stained copious-pubic-hairs bathroom. It was so gnarly we switched hotels for the second night, me out at dawn to find the second place.

We were staying in the Bloomsbury district, around the corner from the British Museum, with its great Egyptian and Greek sculptures. The British were among the very first to rip off, plunder, and loot the cradle of civilization, back in the sun-never-sets days of the British Empire. The Egyptian holdings of the British Museum make the stuff in the New York City Metropolitan look like the broken remains found on the floor after the burglars got away.

I had a lot of uneasy feelings about the loot, in other words. But there were some great pieces. A granite Ramesses 2, 1270 BC from Thebes. So calm and beautiful, such a wonderful smooth curve in the cheek at the corner of this mouth—yet, really, how different is this Ramesses from a plastic sculpture of the hamburger icon Big Boy?

There was a lovely queen Amenophis and her husband. Really clear lines along the edges of their lips. I finally grasp that Egyptians are Africans. Black people. Amenophis’s husband looked like Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Wandering along outside, we saw a classy used cameras store with lots of old Leicas. “What can I tempt you with, sir?” asked the proprietor when I stepped in. The place was in a courtyard called “Pied Bull Yard,” next to a pub called “Truckles of Pied Bull Yard.” So flippin’ British.

In the National Gallery museum another day, I find a good Bruegel, The Adoration of the Magi of 1564. BRVEGEL MDLXIIII says the signature. He didn’t like to put the letter “H” in his name, and I don’t know why some people still insist on using it and writing his name “Brueghel” or even worse, “Breughel” with the “e” and “u” in the wrong order, and then, ugh, pronouncing his name Broy-gull, which isn’t the way they would ever say it in the Lowlands. I say Broo-gull, which isn’t fully accurate either, but at least I don’t get the dipthong backwards.

How clear and fresh the canvas is. The three kings are in a triangle of gaze, each looking at a gift held by one of the other kings. Balthazar looks like Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival. He has a beautiful pointed-toe red boot. Fringed chamois leather cape. His gift is a gold ship called a “nef.” It holds a green enameled shell, and within the shell is a tiny live monkey.

The gallery note by the picture says that Bruegel put soldiers in his pictures because for most of his life the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish soldiers. This touch makes it seem so real. Makes me want to write Bruegel’s life. The rainy Flemish day, right here in front of me. I want to go there.

Mary is a hot cutie with full lips. A guy whispers in Joseph’s ear. He’s saying “You’re a cuckold. Mary puts out.” Joseph looks undisturbed.

In the background are a bunch of interesting characters. A guy with glasses, maybe a money-lender. Also a classic Bruegel fool. And a fat guy like Bill the oyster man at our farmers’ market.

There’s a second, small Bruegel too, a grisaille of Christ with The Woman Taken In Adultery. Jesus is writing in the sand—“DIE SONDER SUND IST…” It’s the story about “Who without sin is… [shall throw the first stone.]” Signed BRUEGEL MDLXV. 1565. This picture is small, and I have trouble looking at it well. The story was said to be a favorite among Protestants, which is another heavy historical touch—to know that the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation were raging through the Lowlands in Bruegel’s time.

I see a Lewis Carroll photo exhibit in the National Portrait Gallery next door. The show is drab and depressing—all those desperate, longing photos of little girls. I have a huge respect for Carroll’s work—both for his fantasy and for his logic—and I feel a close psychic connection to the man. I’ve even pored over his letters and journals. And these photos, they open Carroll to crass suspicions, and to ribald mockery from those who don’t love his work. It’s like having a beloved friend who’s doing something really creepy, and you wish he’d stop, even though you continue to love and respect him.

Getting aboard the subway the next day, Sylvia is ahead of me and the door closes me off. It’s a door that has a slanting section at the top, like a greenhouse. She looks so excited behind the door, like a tropical bird, kind of gleeful and triumphant. She waited for me at our target stop, Picadilly Circus. On the way there I saw a Japanese woman with a London map that opened up like a flower or a cootie-catcher. The subway’s dangling hand grips are coiled springs with black Bakelite bulbs. Everything different in this parallel world.

September 13, 1998. Cambridge A-Life Talk.

We came to Cambridge for the Digital Biota 2 Conference. They paid for our plane fares and gave me some money as well. I met some of these guys at A-Life VI in Los Angeles.

It was a nice conference, although I’m less confident about the future of a-life than I used to be. The con was organized by a young, eager group who make a groovy commercial game called Creatures, which is about a world of, like, Tamagotchis who have graphics that look like trolls or Monchichi dolls, so ugly-cute that I for one would kind of like to go into their world with a flame-thrower. Clean the place out and put in something decent-looking like ants or lobsters.

I gave a good talk. The session happened to be on Sunday, and I talked about my Ware series as a thought experiment about artificial life, and about a central teaching of mysticism which says that god is everywhere. And I ran my CAPOW cellular automata program as background behind me. Actually I stood in the projection beam a lot, as I like to feel the CAs on my body, or to imagine that I do.

When I stand in the light of a computer projector, I always remember a photo of Tim Leary onstage in NYC with big oil-drop light-show images on him—this was the time he led his audience on a “Guided Trip.” I think in my talk I mentioned that I wanted to take my clothes off so I could feel the CAs on my bare skin. Sylvia later remarked that she didn’t think that would have been a good idea. Actually what she said was, “Now that you’re not drunk and stoned, why act like you are?”

The speaker after me was the SF writer Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. I’d already spent some time with him at the conference. I dislike the man—he seems unusually egocentric, even for a writer. Bloated and oddly humorless. In his lecture he argued for atheism. It’s like he doesn’t want there to be anything bigger or more important than him. I thought of the Bible verse, “In his heart, the fool hath said there is no god.”

That afternoon, Sylvia and I took a little walk to a sixty foot hill—the only hill around—called “Castle Hill.” Then we stopped in at a pub called The Pickerel for a snack. On the wall was an old literary quote about how the “pike” terrorizes “the finny brood.”

An English guy next to us, getting tanked on wine with his wife or girlfriend says, “This is Jo and I’m Frank.” Frank asked us about Clinton. Jo was blonde, with slightly crooked teeth, British. They reminded me of how, in the old days, we’d sometimes get drunk on wine on a Sunday afternoon. What a relief it used to be. To hell with sobering up—it’s still the weekend, isn’t it? Sunday’s a tough day for a drinker.

September 16, 1998. Eerie Edinburgh. Magic Flute.

I made it to a recovery meeting in Edinburgh, up on the second floor of a church building to hell and gone. A bunch of down-looking British types, with recovery mottos on the wall and the air thick with tobacco smoke. My people. I told them the pubs looked really good here.

A guy was talking to me afterwards for a long time, wanting to know how to give up weed as well as booze. It felt great talking to him, telling him about my experiences. He was a real punky Scottish Trainspotting type guy. I loved having him call me “Rrrrrudy.”

There’s a pub near our hotel that, in my mind, is a deep sea creature dangling lights to lure its poor little victim fish inside. Victims like me, man, and it’s a big anglerfish disguised as a full-on Victorian building, what they used to call a pile. The Guilford Arms. Wistfully, fearfully peeping inside, I can see that the seeming pub has a patterned tin ceiling and fancy interior columns. Just the kind of stuff I love. It’s calling to me. Gloop!

A bar we saw by the old gallows is called “The Last Drop”—a pun on being hanged.

Up at the Edinburgh Castle today, we saw a stained-glass-window knight standing on a knotted shape, and at first we thought it was a bagpipe, but, no, it was a Celtic dragon The war memorial chapel had stained glass images of Zeppelins and tanks, done up in Forties modern style.

Edinburgh prides itself on being eerie, Halloweeny, spooky. Such flinty hard gray brick walls, with spectral spires and steeples poking up at the crests of the craggy hills and at the ends of the long, dwindling avenues. Cobblestones. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is set in Edinburgh. There used to be guys who’d dig up fresh cadavers for the medical students, they were called “resurrectionists,” as a guide told us amid other grisly tales.

Such lovely faces the Scots have, all so fair and clear-skinned and crisp featured. It’s nice here. Easy to talk the language. Everyone polite. I bought a cashmere vest and cashmere sweater. Last night, for dinner we had Scottish lox and Scottish oysters, oh my goodness. They threw in some kippered herring as well.

The Scotch really do seem to be frugal. Scrooge McDuck in Lord Quackly’s castle. In our hotel room, there’s a slot in the wall where you put your room key, and when you take the key out to leave, all the power to the room is cut off. Actually this is handy for turning off the relentless timed-to-run-five-minutes bathroom vent fan.

We saw a production of The Magic Flute at the Edinburgh Opera. It was a real treat—such beautiful music and colorful sets. The singers were good, if not great, but their acting made up for any lack in range. One of the bad guys wore a black rubber dildo atop his head.

I remember thinking, seven years ago in 1991, when we saw The Magic Flute in San Francisco, how much I’d like to achieve such a transcendent work And now, with Realware done, I feel like the Ware tetralogy is a supreme achievement. Real redeems whatever flakiness was in Free. The series is solid, it’s my masterpiece.

September 19, 1998. That Year in Germany.

We’ve been on our trip for three weeks as of yesterday. I like it more all the time. There’s nothing hard ahead for me, like Geneva and my in-laws, or like Cambridge and having to attend other people’s talks. We’re on the train to London just now, heading for Antwerp, then Brussels and Vienna.

I didn’t get a chance yet to write about visiting my cousin Ela von Bitter in Cambridge. She and I talked a little about a trip we took together in 1958. My mother was sending me to a boarding school in the Black Forest region of Germany for a year, partly because my German grandmother was so eager to get to know me.

I was fascinated by fairs at that time, and I was very eager to go to the Brussels World’s Fair, Expo 58. Ela’s father, that is, my mother’s brother, that is, my Uncle Conrad, kindly organized an expedition—he drove me and his family to Brussels world fair in his sunroofed VW.

The central theme building at the fair was the Atomium, an immense chrome building made of connected spheres. But I also remember that, in the American or maybe it was the Italian pavilion, I saw a black and white art film with a sexy sequence of a busty starlet sticking out her tongue, and kind of beckoning with it. Laying her tongue this way and that between her lips. It made my pants feel tight although, as a twelve-year-old, I barely understood why.

By the way, right at the end of my year in Germany, that is, in March, 1959, I celebrated my thirteenth birthday with my grandmother. Although I was very fond of Grandma, I recall despairingly thinking at that time, “God, how cool is this—me here talking German to my grandmother—when I’m supposed to be starting in on being an American teenager?”

My worries were well-founded—when I returned to American school in the spring of 1959, I was incredibly out of it. But of course alienation is a natural state for a writer.

September 21, 1998. Antwerp. I’m Flemish.

We’re in Antwerp now. I’ve had breakfast and taken a walk. In Edinburgh I bought a good book by Keith Roberts about Bruegel and his art, and I’m reading up. I’ve decided to make Peter Bruegel the Elder a focus of this trip. I’d kind of like to write a historical novel about him and his family.

I feel there’s some parallels between myself and Bruegel—me as a novelist, him as a painter.

Bruegel’s paintings never made it into churches as altar pieces because they were satirical (e.g., a man who won’t help Christ carry His cross is wearing a rosary) and vulgar (often including people shitting and pissing). I’m never quite accepted into the standard SF canon, perhaps due to vulgarity—and, I’d like to think, because my works are ahead of their time. Misled by Bruegel’s vulgarity, Victorian scholars mistook him for a peasant, not realizing that he was in fact a highly cultured man. That’s me!

There’s a tension between Bruegel’s overarching parable-like scenes and the specificity of his people. This is akin to my transrealist implementations of classic SF tropes. Just as Bruegel prided himself on drawing his characters from life, I pride myself on my trick of basing my characters on real people. As the years go by, I try to present ever-stronger characters, and this is akin to Bruegel’s use of increasingly large human figures in his late works.

Walking down the streets of Antwerp, I’m thinking that the genes walking around me are the same genes that Bruegel was surrounded by. It’s like a little pond of fish here, not all that greatly changed over the past four hundred and fifty years. Fifteen generations.

People repeatedly started talking to me in Flemish. I realize that I look Flemish! For instance a really pretty, tall, Bruegel-faced young woman with dark hair and a baby stroller asked me, in Flemish, what time it was. She could have been Mayken Coecke van Aelst, Bruegel’s wife.

“These are my people,” I keep telling Sylvia.

I always thought that the Bosch and Bruegel faces looked like mine, like the drunk man talking to the bagpiper in Bruegel’s The Peasant Dance, or the giant, hollow-bodied man standing in the boats in the hell panel of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. My twins.

And now I learn that there’s a well-known ancient Flemish family of harpsichord makers called Ruckers. The “s” at the end of “Ruckers” means nothing—it’s common in the Lowlands to put an “s” after the name of the son. So from now on, when anyone asks what kind of name Rucker is, I’ll say “Flemish!” It’s not a German name at all.

Our room looks right out on the square in front of the cathedral. In the morning when we stepped out into the square with the huge cathedral, there was a twentyish boy running along screaming. His hair was soaked with dried blood and with fresh bright red blood. Some of his friends were trying to catch him. He wasn’t so much screaming as squealing.

Flemish words. Pickpocket is zakkenroller, a wonderfully dynamic sound.

“I’m gonna zack and roll, man.”

Travel is never quite what you expect, but I have a lot to be grateful for. I’m not working. I have a sexy, loving wife. I can afford this big trip. We have a good hotel room in the heart of town. I have a new research topic—Bruegel—which I’m excited about. I finished writing Realware. I’m sober. It’s a sunny day. I’m healthy. I just ate a great Belgian endive salad. I have good walking shoes. I have a nice new shirt and a new vest from Scotland. I’ve found a place to check my email. The world exists and I’m alive.

I got an email message from the past—Jay Semel from the early 1970s. He owns a painting by Sylvia, and he remembers me painting the car-length flames on the sides of our white Ford back then.

September 22, 1998. Brussels. I Become Bruegel.

Sylvia’s on the train to visit her parents in Geneva, and I’m alone in Brussels. I’ll see her again in three or four days. I miss her, but it’s exciting to be alone, an adventure. Of course I also feel rootless and mortal, like a piece of dust drifting around.

I’m getting the night train, a fourteen-hour ride to Vienna, and I have a day to kill here in Brussels. I visited the six Bruegels in the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts. The three high points:

• The Fall of the Rebel Angels. 1562. Fabulous, Bosch-like.
• The Numbering At Bethlehem. 1566. Someone dragging out a pig to slaughter. Holding him by his ear.
• Winter Landscape With Skaters And Bird Trap. 1565. Subtly sinister. The birds look smart and wised up.

I took a lot of handwritten notes on the pictures, but I’ll save them for a Notes document I’m already writing to help with my hoped-for Bruegel novel.

Meanwhile, get this, diary, I just saw what may have been Bruegel’s house and studio—in the Marolles district of Brussels on Hoogstraat, a narrow medieval street that was at one time a main drag. The house is six blocks down from the Notre Dame de la Chapelle, which is where Pieter and his Mayken were married in 1563, and where he was buried in 1569. How local and touching.

I lit a candle for Bruegel in the church, then knelt and prayed—for what? Oh, to say “Hi” to Bruegel, and to tell him I’m thinking about him and that I might try and write about him and/or try to learn to paint a little like him.

And then I ate an omelet in a sidewalk cafe, writing my thoughts in my notebook. A man begged me for money with his hat held out, he had the gentlest smile. I shook my head, writing with my pen, and he said wistfully “C’est l’article…” meaning something like “You’re busy writing an article.”

He wandered off—and then I worry: What if that was Bruegel who I just refused? I should give to the next beggar I see.

I walked a block, and sat down for a dessert in a cafe in the Grand Sablon square, where I saw one of those wealthy European women who makes me think of a big, Fifties, populuxe, American car—the plump lips and strong teeth like a grille, the Bezier-curve cheeks, the thick bob of dyed blonde hair—and huge knockers under a tight silky chartreuse top, with her skin bronzed from studio tan. She was very snobby-looking. Now she’s gone. I didn’t notice her walking off because I was distracted by my scribbling about her (typical for a writer), and by my outrageously delicious Belgian dessert, a cylinder of cream and meringue covered with chocolate shavings. Never mind about the populuxe Euro woman, dessert is readily attainable.

I went back to the art museum to look at some five-hundred-year-old Bruegel engravings that I requested from their print department, including L’Homme A La Recherche De Lui Même—actual prints engraved from Bruegel drawings by the publisher Hieronymus Cock in the 1500s, me sitting there looking at them and even touching one with the tip of my finger. In that one I mentioned, The Man In Search Of Himself, the man is labeled “Elck” (for “everyman”), he’s depicted multiple times in the image, he’s looking with a lantern inside things like sacks and barrels, the goof. I’m him.

After the engravings, I was starting to run out of time. I ran upstairs for a last look at the Bruegel paintings. I felt sorrowful, leaving this perfection!

“Goodbye, I love you.”

Before heading for the train station, I ducked into a Museum of Musical Instruments hoping to see a sixteenth-century Flemish bagpipe, like from Bruegel’s time. They had lots of bagpipes there, but only from the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, and none from Flanders.

The thing I did see in the music museum was a “virginal”—this being a keyboard instrument like a rectangular box on legs—made by Andreas Ruckers, Antwerp, 1620.

The first American Rucker was Peter Rucker who arrived in 1690, by way of London. Probably he was a Huguenot fleeing the Lowlands.

The Andreas Ruckers virginal appears in a painting by Vermeer—they had a print of the painting right next to the virginal. So, okay, if I’m Flemish, maybe Bruegel and I are related! I’m feeling a spark of the man within me, and I’ll fan it more.

So I get on the Brussels Metro to the train station to catch the night train to Vienna to visit Bruegel’s dozen or so pictures there. I’m getting into my SF trip that Bruegel’s alive inside me, and that he’s looking through my eyes. I’m twinking him as I like to say—this being a word I made up to mean emulating or somehow summoning up a replica-model of another person in your own head. I’m looking with Bruegel eyes at the underground subway platform.

The diabolical magic moving stairs, is this Hell? The sight of a train is very odd. A girl is sitting and singing in a lovely voice for money—and for the second time today I deny a beggar, walking past her, even though the Bruegel inside me wants me to go over to her. She’s the only living lovely thing in this human ants-nest subway dungeon.

I follow signs to get from the Metro stop into the train station proper—it’s supposedly reachable through tunnels—but I end up outside amid half-finished construction.

The sun is setting. Light glares on a glass building, no sign of green, just pipes and stone and glass and asphalt and for a minute I’m so into being Bruegel that I’m utterly confused.

So then I have to push down my Bruegel routine so that I can actually find the right tunnel to the station, get my suitcase out of the baggage claim where I parked it earlier today, change some money, locate my train’s track, etc.

And finally I’m waiting on the correct platform and—for the sake of Bruegel—I fill my fountain pen from a bottle of ink I carry in my suitcase. Pelikan ink. Bruegel is interested in the fountain pen of course.

I take out a paper and try to draw a few faces that I’d seen, in particular the face of yet another avatar of Bruegel’s wife Mayken whom I saw—this one sat across from me in the Metro, with sweet mouth and intelligent eyes. And where is my wife now—I’m a drifting piece of dust.

September 23, 1998. Bruegel in Vienna.

The overnight train was good and I slept quite well—no interruptions from tipsy, randy populuxe women stumbling into my cabin at midnight. I studied twelve Bruegels this morning at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, or KHM. I’ll list six of them here.

• The Battle Between Carnival and Lent. 1559. In one corner is a man who may be Bruegel. I might start my novel right here.
• Children’s Games. 1560. A “wimmelbild” or seething picture.
• Return Of The Herd. 1565. The beautiful fatness of the cows. The peaceful busy peasants no different than the cows. In the far background is a tiny gallows.
• The Hunters In The Snow. 1565. How I long to travel into that landscape. The heartbreaking eagerness of the fat puppy amidst the dogs. The cold damp air. The exquisite tracery of the branches.
• The Peasant Dance. 1568. The frozen time of this picture. Always the same off-balance moment.
• The Peasant Wedding. 1568. The man pouring beer looks like my cousin Rudolf. Perhaps Bruegel is the clerk or notary at the right-hand corner.

All of them in one large room. Overwhelming. It’s like every one of Bruegel’s paintings is an entire novel, and here’s this one room with a dozen of them at once. A feeling of intense urgency. I’ll have to go back multiple times. The paintings have an exponentially unfolding fractal-information quality: if you look twice as hard, you see three times as much.

I have lunch with Konrad Becker, the guy who organized my Munich gig, “Serious Killer Lounge,” a couple of years ago. Konrad and his friend Marie Ringler. Very nice, hip people. They like the Generation X dark stuff, and urge me to see the pickled freaks in jars in the Narrenturm, an old round building that’s a medical museum.

I wander around in the afternoon. I see the truck of a butcher or caterer with GöD on the back. What an awesome name. Then go for a big supper: spaetzli, salad and some schnitzels of Steinpilz mushrooms. In Vienna, they fucking bread-n-fry anything, even a dog or a cat or the cook’s penis. Like the way Egyptians would mummify anything that chanced to pass by—like there’s a mummy of a fish in the Rosicrucian museum in San Jose.

September 25, 1998. I Miss Sylvia. More Bruegel.

We couldn’t find any hotel for Venice so Sylvia’s coming here, and then we we’ll proceed towards Rome together. I’m very happy to stay in Vienna three more days. I love it here.

This morning I rode on the giant 1896 Ferris wheel called Der Riesenrad. One revolution for about five dollars, you’re in a cabin of about ten people, freely pacing. It’s like a long gondola with a wooden floor. I have this borderline Tourette syndrome thing of wanting to shout words that I like. When my group got into our gondola, I yelled “Riesenrad!” What a funny word. Everyone laughed excitedly.

I’ve shopped a little, like a bower bird, getting his nest ready to welcome the female. I got snacks for her, and a present, and I tidied up my meager, inexpensive room with its bare iron bedstead. From my actions one would deduce that I’ve missed the girl.

I bought tickets to the Italian commedia dell’arte type Circus Roncalli so I can take her there on Sunday afternoon. I saw a kind of preview of this circus by accident the other day. I snuck in at half-time because I was walking by at night alone. I saw a woman performer with red tights and red cones glued all over herself, like a hedgehog, and she got on a slack wire and made a weird bird noise and jiggled back and forth, hyper and funny.

I’ve been to see the Bruegels every day—three times so far—and I’m learning more and more. Very stoked.

I plan to do a historical novel about Bruegel’s life—probably not SF—and I’ll write it partly from the point of view of his map-maker friend Abraham Ortels, a.k.a. Ortelius. A harmony between the fractals of coastlines and of painting. I’ll try for Bruegel’s point of view as well. I relate to him for a number of reasons. He was, like me, a peasant who became a cultured man. (Kentuckian = peasant).

Bruegel was ill for the last year of his life. He did most of his cosmic masterworks in his last six years and then no paintings for a year, and then he was buried. Some of the occupying Spanish soldiers were quartered in his house. He drew fiercely mocking pictures of them that he had his wife burn so she wouldn’t get in trouble. His wife Mayken, great name.

I feel like I know what Bruegel looked like because he put himself into some of his pictures. He had long hair and a long straight nose—he wasn’t a fat peasant type of guy. He looked more like a thoughtful hippie, maybe a little like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider—but with a calmer vibe.

September 28, 1998. Autumn at the Circus.

So Sylvia showed up, it’s nice to have my big canary bird singing in the room. A sunny day.

It’s Saturday morning, and I can’t get my laundry back till Monday. On Friday afternoon my feet and legs were too tired to walk the ten minutes to the damned Wäscherei, and now she’s closed till Monday at 8 am, and the train to Siena that we’d wanted leaves at 7:30 am. Trains and hotels, somehow it’s proving difficult to get into Italy. Well, we’ll just stay in Vienna till Tuesday.

Listening to me rattle on about Bruegel, Sylvia remarks, “Why not just let the Bruegel thing be a hobby, something you’re interested in? It doesn’t necessarily have to turn into a book.”

Which is true as well. I don’t have to own the subject and put my stamp on it. I could enjoy it, rather than making it a job. I could relax. Fat chance.

We’ve been on this trip so long it’s unbelievable. Sometimes it all blends and I can’t remember anymore what city I’m in. But always I’m happy to be doing something so different.

I’m totally physically exhausted from touring every day for over four weeks now. Greedy! When you’re touring, you walk so much more than you usually do. I look forward to sitting on the train for fourteen hours tomorrow.

I got to see the Bruegels four times. Not fully sure I can do the book on him. I need to think about the angle some more. I acquired a number of books about him in the museum shop and mailed them back home today—five kilograms, too heavy to carry. The post-office woman was unbelievably rude and unhelpful. I mentioned this to my Vienna friend Konrad Becker, and he said the Viennese postal workers treat everyone that way, not just the tourists. His theory is that Vienna is far enough east that it shades into having surly State employees, along the lines of the Soviet Union’s.

There’s a snack stand by the street-car stop called Wurst Und Durst. Sausage And Thirst. Beer-drinking bums hang out there, sticking their heads into streetcars to ask for money.

Sunday afternoon, Sylvia and I went to the wonderful Circus Roncalli. One clown had a Fellini-style pointed hat and a spangled suit with high shoulders. Another clown walked around upside down on a ceiling suspended high in the tent. He was bouncing a ball up there, sweeping, and trying to drink from a bottle—but the liquid went the wrong way. We got so confused watching him. You couldn’t tell what was holding him up.

The curtains in the circus entrance-way were velvet, and people were drinking champagne—it was lovely, so full of color and laughter and love.

Leaving the circus, we had a strange moment. There was a chill in the air, and some low gray clouds—with bits of blue showing through. Some of the leaves on the trees were yellow. All of a sudden it was fall—it had been coming in gradually, but we’d been too busy playing to notice. It had been summer when we left home, but now we’d stayed away so long that it was fall, us off in a distant city. We’d stayed away longer than I’d realized. And I had a feeling, too, that, in the great “year” of my life it had just now turned fall.

It turned to fall while we were at the circus.

September 29, 1998. Train Through Italian Alps.

So now we’re finally moving into Italy. I was like a fly with my feet caught, pleasantly, in the sweet whipped cream—the Schlag—of Vienna the Zuckerbäcker (means Sugarbaker = confectioner) city. Six days.

Our train is going through “Bruegel’s Alps” as I think of them now, the mountains at the top of Italy that he traveled through in 1552 on his trip from the Lowlands to Rome. Imagine Bruegel’s reactions to seeing the Alps.

“The land—it rises up high into the air!”

The blue ranges of the more distant hills, the low gray clouds. The trees are displayed three-dimensionally, rotating as you pass them by.

More imagined remarks by Bruegel. I’m starting to hear his voice in my head.

“The rock bones show through the green flesh of the hills.”

“The plane of the world is tilted.”

As we come into Italy, I’m scared. I don’t know the language. Even so, it’s nice to hear two women chattering in Italian on the train. Colorful tropical parrots.

And, as soon as we’re in their home country, the waiters on the train become surly and rude.

October 2, 1998. Siena Bike Ride. Vision of God.

We landed in a hotel called Villa Scacciapensieri near Siena. It’s not in the center of town like I’d hoped. It’s in a suburb by a busy road, although with a nice view of the Chianti hills and a lovely big flowering garden outside our window.

The very act of being on a vacation sets up—at least in me—an expectation of achieving some kind of perfection. A striving. I always need to remember that perfection is not a reasonable, attainable goal. It’s always me in this same worldly world. Beautiful things and exquisite moments are scarce gems. Never-quite-predictable glints in the fabric of ordinary life. Wait for them.

Siena makes me think of Bruegel landscapes. The successive scrims of the hills, bluer in the distance. The surface of the Earth here is like a restless sea.

The olive trees are shoots from centuries old trunk stubs. The stubs are covered with thick green moss, and the dirt around the trunks is plowed to keep the weeds down.

The Tuscan hills. The chestnuts, oaks with acorns, porcini mushrooms and wild pigs—they all fit together in a musky, nutty whole.

This morning I borrowed a mountain bike from the Villa Scacciapensieri and rode out into some of the Chianti hills. I had a lovely view of Siena from a mountaintop winery. I kept thinking about Bruegel. A few peasants were visible working the fields, six of them picking the big sweet dark Chianti grapes, the peasants dressed in light blue cotton overalls and using red plastic buckets.

I was thinking about my scientist friend Chris Langton, and what he said at the Digital Biota 2 conference in Cambridge: “It’s all biology, folks. Our cities, this projector, and even this damned computer. Our artifacts are things that we grow—no different than seashells or termite mounds.”

His idea is to think of man not as some mistaken invader, and of our machines not as some blight upon Nature. It’s a comforting, integrated, Bruegelian world view.

On my bike ride I stopped in a small stone church on a hilltop and had a kind of vision of god.

“I made all of this,” the white light seemed to say. “It’s all biology, all part of a whole, and my divine Light is in each and every fiber of everything there is.”

Looking there at yet another tiresome painting of Christ being lowered from the cross, I thought, “Oh, all right already, I’ll even let this into my heart.”

I began thinking of the image of solemn, noble, wise, hippie-like Bruegel staring, hands folded, at Christ carrying the cross in The Procession to Calvary. The artist’s self-portrait is down in the lower right corner of the big canvas. Bruegel is my role model in all things these days.

What does the Christ story mean? God is universal, yet Christ is just a man. Even if you get crucified, the gospels tell us, god can still save you, he can still raise you from the dead.

I remember a folk-song that my friend Roger Shatzkin used to sing on the Parrish Hall steps, back at Swarthmore:

I walked into a church one day

While travelin’ on my way

I gave my heart to Jesus there

He’s comin’ back to Earth again

To save us from our sin

And if you would believe in Him

He’ll take you away where there’s no fear.

October 3, 1998. Rome. Gypsies.

So here we are, the travel twins, sitting in the Netgate cybercafe in Rome, Piazza Firenze, doing email.

“Are you Romulus or Remus?” I ask Sylvia.

No answer for now. This is beyond a long vacation, this is becoming a new way of life.

“Look out for the gypsies,” says Sylvia every time we enter a big monument area.

“Why should I be scared,” I’ll rudely respond. “I already live with one.”

“Yes, but I know how sneaky we really are,” she answers.

We saw a woman dressed all in black bent almost double, with a cane, and a tiny black backpack inching through the plaza in front of the ancient Pantheon. It’s the first place we visited in Rome. It has Corinthian columns and a hole in the middle of its dome roof.

A snobby Italian waiter had just finished shooing the bent old woman away from a cafe, really ruthlessly, and she had angled off in a new direction like a deflected slow-moving wind-up toy. Sylvia was sure she was a gypsy or a kid pretending to be old, so we cruised by her, and whoah she really was old, ancient, a Medieval type crone. I gave her a couple of hundred-lire coins.

It’s raining pretty hard. The first real rain of the trip. Blessedly the cybercafe popped up at just the right moment. California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and Papas is on the sound system here. Kinda perfect. Always cozy to plug back in.

October 4-5, 1998. Bruegel and Christ.

I keep having this feeling of having stayed here too long. Like in a fairy tale where the girl goes down for a day to the land at the bottom of the well—and when she comes back, she’s been gone for a hundred years.

How best to do the Bruegel book? I’d like something I can polish off in a year—I don’t want to make a life’s work of it. A simple option: show the pictures and for each one have a reminiscence by Ortelius, and it adds up to a novel. I could even hoax it and say I found the Ortelius writings. And then I’m just writing an intro.

Rome—the Eternal City. Lots of noisy traffic. Wonderful yellows, pinky-beiges, ochers, fawns, and umbers in the colors of the walls.

I’m sitting by the Castel Sant’Angelo, off to my left is the Sant’Angelo bridge over the Tiber, the bridge lined with angels holding, some of them, big heavy crucifixes.

My old dislike of Christianity and especially of Roman Catholicism keeps wanting to flare up. Keep in mind that my father was an Episcopal minister, and that I suffered through four high-school years at a Catholic school.

But now, for the purpose of getting the right mindset for my novel, I need to work on letting Jesus into my heart. A Bruegelian love of Christ. The light of god shining through a human form: that’s Jesus. I imagine that I can feel him standing next to me.

Of course after that pious rap, I ended up doing something selfish yesterday by carelessly losing track of Sylvia at a chaotic bus stop. Eventually I found her at St. Peter’s where we’d planned to go for the 5 pm Vespers Mass. Boy was I glad to find her, to see her head in the crowd.

St. Peter’s cathedral—what would Jesus make of it? I guess He’d be glad. But what an encrustation of symbols and rites. And the intricate symbolic and semiotic codes within all the sculptures and paintings.

It’s raining, it’s Monday and the museums are closed—no idea what to do today. I can’t wait to go home—there, I’ve said it. Rome is filthy, noisy, expensive, and I feel like a rube & goob not knowing the language. We’re hemorrhaging money here, three or four hundred bucks a day. I want to get back to my real life. Well, it’s soon. The contempt of the Italians for me makes me hate myself, makes me feel stupid and ugly.

Time for a list of things I’m grateful for. I’m in Rome. We move to a better hotel today. Tomorrow I get interviewed by this Italian publisher DiRenzo for a book and he’ll give me some money. We’ve survived this trip, almost. I’m still healthy. I have a kind, beautiful wife.

Later in the day we go to the Forum and to the Coliseum and see these Italian guys dressed up like gladiators outside the Coliseum. They have red togas and those brush hats. Very funny, lively guys, trying to get money from each person who takes their picture, and threatening everyone with plastic swords. Fierce punks, actually. Not so different after two thousand years.

October 6, 1998. Filosofo Cyberpunk. Arneson.

We were in a cruddy bus-tourist hotel our first night, but I found a classier hotel and it’s great. The nicest room I’ve ever slept in. A fifteen-foot coffered ceiling with a chandelier.

Today I did my booklength interview for Sante DiRenzo publishing, it took a couple of hours. They put out slim volumes of modern thinkers’ ideas, for university students, mostly. This one will be called Filosofo Cyperpunk, or Cyberpunk Philosopher, an Italian-only book.

Sylvia thinks this is funny, she’s been chirping, “Filosofo,” at me. “Oh, Filosofo!”

I have an uneasy feeling I ego-tripped too much in the interview, talking mostly about my life, as opposed to my ideas. Well, I can fix the thing up in proofs, and chainsaw in some stuff from my Seek! nonfiction anthology.

After the interview we went to the Capitoline Museum on the Campidoglio Hill. A great hall of busts in one room. The whole museum in glorious disorder, so Italian. No labels on anything other than the occasional engraved Latin ones. Cow skulls are a big motif in the friezes. Myoor!

The Roman noses on the busts so long and straight, like columns. And always a pulpy, twisted sensual little mouth.

I touched the penis of Aristedes of Smyrra and got scolded by a guard.

People crowded into a gallery—the live heads looking at the stone head. Really, how very much more interesting are the live ones. Yet we look at the stone ones. Well, living people go away, but the art is always the same. It’s a fixed centerpoint.

In the room of busts I saw one on the top shelf that was—I swear—the sculptor Robert Arneson, who so loved to make classical busts of himself. Yes, it was Arneson, looking quiet and sneaky, his eyes fixed on a corner up by the ceiling, his mouth tight, pulled to one side as if holding in a laugh and saying—oh—maybe he was saying:

“I beat them all. I’m immortal. Ain’t death a bitch?”

October 7, 1998. Galleria Borghese.

Looming large among the treasures of the fabulous Borghese Gallery are the sculptures of the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In his statue, The Victory of Truth, he’d wanted to show “columns, obelisks, and mausoleums destroyed by Time”—sounds like Rome! Actually he didn’t finish all that background part. He just has the personification of Truth, who looks like a Mountain Girl type hippie, peaking on acid, with that incredible Bernini doughiness in her stone flesh.

We pass a painting by Giampietrino of Mary Feeding Jesus, made about 1550. I mentioned this work in my novel The Sex Sphere, which has a big scene in the Galleria Borghese based on our earlier visit here—wow—twenty years ago.

The Galleria Borghese is rife with paintings and sculptures of rich pricks, ward-heelers, patrons. It was Cardinal Scipio Borghese who built this gallery, and Bernini did two busts of the man—the first bust developed a crack in the marble, so Bernini sculpted a copy over three feverish days.

When they were excavating near the Termini train station in Cardinal Borghese’s time, they found a Roman statue they dubbed Ermafrodito, or Hermaphrodite. It presents us with a nearly full-sized youth lying on his side, with his butt invitingly pointed at you, and his small, stiff dick laid out on one thigh so cute. He has little boobs.

Scipio Borghese flipped for this sculpture, natch, and he had Bernini make a pillow and a mattress for the ermafrodito! A bed outta marble, you wave, with all those skillful Bernini touches that make the stone look soft and real.

There’s a number of stubborn stains on the ermafrodito.

October 8, 1998. Italian Landscape. Naples. Greenland.

Speaking of Italian youths, I had breakfast with a boy, a ragazzo named Roberto. He’s one of my fans, a physics student in Rome. He had a list of big philosophical questions for me, like the lists I used to have when I’d see the great Kurt Gödel, and indeed Roberto said, “I’m twenty-one and I feel like you visiting Gödel—there is a similar ratio.” A nice thought, although I’m certainly no King Kurt.

I’m taking the train alone to Naples for a day. Looking out the train window. The beauty of the sky. Low fluffy clouds, almost touching the ground, but well separated, with a goodly amount of watery blue sky to see—like spring. But, no, it’s fall, isn’t it. The clouds are low and close enough to be noticeably three-dimensional, like weightless thickets in the air. Ravishing. The heart-blooming feeling of soft clouds and streaks of light rain.

Roberto said, “I’ve never traveled, but I’m sure that nowhere is the sky so beautiful as in Rome.”

I spend the day visiting two Bruegels in the Museo Nazionale, in the Capodimonte park of Naples. Hard to find the two Bruegels in the endless galleries. The unbelievable size of the collection. The chatting, sensual Italians and their insane trove of art.

Nobody but nobody is in the museum except the Italian guards. It feels like a high school late in the afternoon after almost everyone’s gone home, just a small clique of people left, a clique I’m not in.

The Bruegels are an oasis of intelligence in a wilderness of schlock and shit, mostly religious of course. Yes, of all the paintings in the enormous Museo Nazionale, only the Bruegels, only his Misanthrope and his Parable of the Blind have something to say.

The Misanthrope could be a Bruegel self-portrait. I have the feeling that when Bruegel painted this he knew he was mortally ill. The Misanthrope is headed to the left, into death, with mushrooms growing under the rotten trees.

The picture has a caption painted onto it, in a really weird script:

Om dat de Vierelt is soe ongetru

Daer om gha ic in den ru.

For that the World is so untrue

Therefore go I in the sorrow.

The “in den ru” catches my attention, and it hits me—wow—that I’m the Ru! In a heavily synchronistic sense, Bruegel is saying that he will go “in den ru” meaning “into a book by Rudy Rucker!” Too bad he doesn’t look a little happier about it.

The Misanthrope and The Parable of the Blind right next to it have the same milky gray sky and dun Earth. Winter. A depressing pair. Yes, Bruegel knew he was dying.

Riding back to Rome on the train, the clouds are lit from behind, the sun down west over the Mediterranean. Fields with streams, irrigation ditches, ponds, fens. Now and then the orange-edged clouds can be seen reflected in a patch of ruffled green water—exquisite. A line of pines, their green tops blended into one worm, their bare trunks twisting down like legs.

We fly home the next day, and out the window we see Greenland. Whipped cream snow with sharp-ridged peaks sticking out here and there. Mountains buried up to their necks in ice and snow.

It’s a big world.

Everything Is Alive

October 19, 1998. Objects Talking to Me.

Working on a kitchen cabinet yesterday, drilling holes to add a catch, I noticed once again how tools and objects always “talk” to me when I work with them. Bruegel’s pictures talk to him as he works. And, like Bosch before him, he paints individual objects as if they had little voices and minds.

Looking at our orange, candle-lit Halloween pumpkin in the evening, I was marveling at all the shades of color in it. The dark lines of shadow and the whitish lines of light. Developing a painter’s eye.

October 27, 1998. Starting My Bruegel Novel.

I recently happened to buy Philip K. Dick’s posthumously published Radio Free Albemuth for plane reading. A very weak piece of work, boring and demented. If Phil’s the heavyweight champ of gnarl, I’m definitely a contender. I’m out there boxing in sporting clubs in jerkwater mill towns, yas.

So I sent Realware off to Avon, and a nonfiction anthology called Seek! to John Oakes at Four Walls Eight Windows. I’m on sabbatical and I feel like writing a lot. Yesterday I started on my Bruegel novel—it’ll be historical fiction and not SF at all.

I wonder if I could use Pynchon’s move of writing the whole thing in present tense, as if narrating a movie or something I’m watching. Watching it in the chamber of my skull. The present tense mode is a little harder than it looks. Pynchon hops from consciousness to consciousness (including his own) yet somehow he avoids falling into the amateur’s tar pit of the Wandering Viewpoint.

Bruegel’s life and times make for such an interesting tale and milieu that adding SF elements would be gilding the lily. As Kurt Vonnegut puts it, including fantasy relegates your book to the critics’ urinal, that is, the SF file-drawer.

Of course I’m known as an SF writer, but I’m thinking that if slumming literary types can write an SF tale and get it out in the fucking New Yorker, like Martin Amis did this week—well, then an SFster oughtta be able to write a non-SF book and get mainstream reviews, right? I hope.

Another complication here is that, in reading a non-SF book by me, some of my core-audience scientifiction aficionados might think: All right, Rucker, where’s the good stuff? Why are you holding out? Where’s the time machine and the aliens and the fourth dimension?

Well, maybe if I deliver colorful detail, lively plot action, and richly depicted characters it can be enough.

In my first chapter, I’ll have the Carnival crowd gathering in the square by the Our Lady Cathedral in Antwerp which Sylvia and I saw. My other model for the scene will be Bruegel’s painting, The Battle of Carnival and Lent. I’ll combine and condense various scenes as needed.

Here’s an encouraging passage from Charles de Tolnay’s work, Drawings of Bruegel, where he’s talking about how Bruegel would combine parts of disparate landscape drawings into single scenes for his engravings, or would, conversely, take one drawing apart, and use the pieces as separate engravings:

Thus we see how the artist disposed with sovereign freedom the store of motifs which he had garnered in his preliminary sketches, arranging them, unfettered by any petty considerations of literal truth, and mindful only of the inner reality of his creations. We see him now combining things actually unrelated to a new, convincing and firmly constructed unity, and now separating what seemed at first inseparable, thereupon to weld the parts again into new and independent unities.

November 14-17, 1998. Santa Fe CA conference.

I’m on the plane with Peter Hughes. He’s a cheerful young fellow, 33, a hippie hacker I know from the A-Life VI and Digital Biota cons. He has a wife and a little girl, reminds me a bit of my young self, worried about getting a job. Relative to him, I’m a fatherly figure, the calm old guy.

Now I’m on the way back. This was my sixth time at a con in Santa Fe or nearby Los Alamos. I feel kind of emotional about the passage of time.

This morning looking at the Navaho patterns in the fabric of the couch in the motel room, I recalled the time I took peyote in the fall of 1966. Thirty-three years ago! What a boy I was, what a vulnerable young thing. Twenty years old. Inexperienced and young, me and my friends. I remember how they took care of me while I was tripping, taking turns sitting at my side while I was in the throes of the ordeal poison. I survived that ordeal, and so many ordeals since then. I grew to manhood and now I’m entering the autumn of my life.

The conference was for CA (Cellular Automata) people, the mere thirty of us left in the world. CAs haven’t become all that popular—and we still don’t understand why! The organizer beat the bushes and turned over flat rocks to find a quorum. We had some fanatical Game of Life hackers, also the CAM machine designer Norman Margolus from MIT—he was the one who converted me to CAs in the first place. At one time I had one of Norman’s CAM machines, which in turn led to my job at Autodesk. I love talking to Norman; he’s so wry and wise.

My presentation went over well. I wished, as usual, that there had been a few more questions. I tend to give such a high-gloss seamless intense presentation that I’m like some weird talking crystal that fell off a flying saucer. I was using the CAPOW software I built with my students for showing continuous-valued CAs. During my demo, I told the audience when I was going to ding the pattern, which is a word I use to mean perturbing a random spot of it, like a pebble in a pond.

And one of the European Game of Life guys was all, “Vhat is ding?”

And then he got it, and the next day he and the Game of Life guys were saying ding for everything they did, like if they forgot to turn off the light for the overhead projector they’d hit their heads and say, “Ding!” So I taught them something.

Margolus had the best science rap. He used a circuit board that he’d built. And his demos are actual models of real physics. But Peter Hughes and I felt we had the best demos—in terms of colors, controls, three-dimensionality and speed. Afterwards Peter was gloating to me in a fake Wild West accent.

“We showed them boys how we do it down-town.” (Meaning in Silicon Valley.)

Monday night I drove five of the guys up a canyon road into the dark hills above Santa Fe and we got out and laid down on the frozen gravel and stared up into the sky and saw about ten or twenty meteorites, blazing across the sky like sparklers being thrown, making such long big marks that there was actually time to say to someone “look over there,” and they’d look and the mark would still be there, not like how it is with an ordinary shooting star.

On the way back from the conference, Peter Hughes and I stopped in at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, new in downtown Santa Fe.

The O’Keeffe pictures reminded me of the style in which Sylvia used to paint—of course all of Santa Fe reminds me of her, she was with me there on a couple of my previous visits. I think of her at every street-corner.

It occurred to me that Sylvia is my youth, my link to the young Ru. As long as I’m with her, I’m still young. A man who ditches his wife in order to feel younger—he’s doing exactly the wrong thing, it seems to me. For who is a better link to your youth than your wife—your beloved best friend of so many years.

On the plane, Peter Hughes is giving off this weird, intense, goat-like smell, and I ask him what’s up.

“I’m taking natural hormones for doing a sex change. I want to grow breasts and be a woman. I’m going to change my name to Joy.”

California!

November 23, 1998. Final Wrap for Realware.

For the close of Realware, I used a note that Sylvia emailed me back in August about my Ware books:

SOFT are your eyes in the summer morning bedroom

WET are my lips remembering yours at night

FREE are our hearts together on a big empty beach

REAL is every minute loving you

So my last paragraph of Realware is this: “And then things were wonderful. The newlyweds’ eyes were soft, their kisses wet, their hearts free, the big world real.”

December 6, 1998. Stones Tickets.

Sylvia and I went into San Jose at 7:30 am and got in line for the Stones concert ticket sales and got some good seats. All the people in line were boomers. Teeming around us like flies were Gen-X riff-raff—trying to buy tickets off the successful boomer ticket-purchasers for selling to the less organized boomers out there.

Boomers and riff-raff, yaar, and at the same time, lining up at the curb were floats for the San Jose Xmas parade on this sunny day. The nearest floats were for The Church of Scientology, the Vietnam Gardens Project, and the Observation Nursery School. I spotted a live piglet wearing antlers as well.

“Greetings, master, our smeel is one,” the piglet squealed to me.

(Smeel being a special made-up word of mine, meaning something like lymph or aether or slimy spiritual essence. I used to say that when I’d had my spleen removed at age thirteen, the freed-up space in my abdomen had filled with smeel.)

December 10, 1998. Rudy vs. Hornets.

So when I was raking the bank behind our house last month I stepped on an underground hornets nest and they stung me four times. By now they’ve forgotten about it, but I haven’t. All week I’ve been working a campaign against them.

Now that it’s turned cold, the hornets are sluggish. Every day this week, I got up about 7 am, before the hornets’ wings had warmed up.

On the first day I raked all the junk from around the hole in the ground that led to their nest, but then they came out after me and I had to stop.

On the second day I poured a quart of liquid paraffin—lamp oil—into their hole and tried to light it. But it wouldn’t light and the hornets started coming out and I left.

The third day I scraped away some dirt for better access and they weren’t coming out. Poisoned by the hydrocarbons? In a way, I felt a little mean. While scraping around, I glimpsed some arrays of small hexagons. The Nest! I poured some methyl alcohol—into their entrance hole along with another quart of paraffin and lit it and it burned really well, a Hell fire guttering out of the ground. I was scared to leave the fire burning, so after a few minutes I backfilled some dirt over it, letting smoke fill the hornet cave.

The fourth day I looked and nothing was going on, and I was leaving for San Francisco, so I left the nest alone.

On the fifth day—today—I got a shovel and dug out the nest. I found about five pizza-sized layers of inch-thick disks, the disks made of waxy hexagons. Like layers of honeycombs. Most of the wasp-comb cells were empty, but a few held dead grubs. Oddly, there were only two dozen corpses of adult wasps.

Sometimes when I focus on something, I mentally shrink to its size. Digging at those waspy hexagons, I felt like I was inside a cavern with them. Exploring a Bosch/Bruegel underworld. I had this sci-fi feeling of entering an alien nest—I was like a 1950s sci-fi-flick hero in a floppy protective suit entering the echoing cavern of the aliens, and I imagined the shrill twittering from Them, the movie about giant ants.

But I’m concerned about why the nest seems deserted. Where did they go, why aren’t there more bodies? Maybe they all took off after my earlier attacks, or maybe there weren’t that many of them left because it’s winter? Have I been in effect bombing empty ruins? Are the layered hexagon-filled combs the remnants of earlier years? Did the hornet queen and an elite court of her attendants escape, planning to start up again in the spring?

Of course they will—the race of Hornet is as the sea against our meager human depredations. Next spring will bring a new round in my on-going Donald Duck type war against the garden pests.

December 21, 1998. Pushing On the Bruegel Novel.

Slow progress. I’m a little tight, a little anxious about the project. I’ve finally started a new chapter. It’s from Bruegel’s point of view, and it’s going good. Bruegel is in the Alps on his way to Italy. He’s sitting on the ground drawing a picture of a mountain.

When I was at the World Fantasy Convention in Monterey at Halloween, I talked to this successful old SF writer, Robert Silverberg. He always acts a bit snooty and lordly, but I think he in fact enjoys talking to me.

He was like, “Yeah, I once wrote a historical novel. It didn’t do too well. And Jack Dann did one, and so-and-so did one…”

So writing a historical novel is a not-so-unusual thing for an SF writer to do, a kind of foible or indiscretion, a little vacation from SF. It comes somewhat naturally to us, given our expertise at imagining other worlds.

Silverberg was encouraging, he said, “Get it out of your system, write what you have to—the main thing is to keep writing. And don’t ruin it by trying to make it an SF book. What is Bruegel going to do, get a new kind of paint from the saucer aliens? No, just go ahead and do it with integrity.”

January 14, 1999. Software Script Meeting.

The other day Stuart Volkow, who I’d assumed was an assistant producer at Phoenix Pictures, unexpectedly phoned me.

Phoenix has had a pretty good year, and they’re feeling expansive again. They have a different script by Sokolow and Cohen for Software, it’s stripped down, a basic action movie script. And now, Stuart says, this is the moment for me to have an influence.

“The studio head Mike Medavoy wants to meet with you. He wants to reach out. Face to face.” Stuart adds that Medavoy likes the big themes of my book, “Immortality, free will, what is the soul. And they like all the different kinds of robots.”

I asked about my original contact, the director Scott Billups, asked if he’s still involved and Stuart said yeah, so I call Billups up. He was kind of sour about me going to meet Medavoy. Probably they’re about to cut him loose.

“They just don’t get it,” Billups keeps saying. “They don’t get the genre.” And he was putting down Medavoy. “He’s surrounded by ass-kissing sycophant yes-men. I feel sorry for the guy. He’s had eight flops in a row. Ordinarily he’d be fired, but he’s the head of the studio. But the people turning the taps are asking questions. He’s distracted. He’s got a brand-new trophy wife and she’s running his ass off.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Oh Rudy. Think what a hundred million can get you.”

“Is she blonde? Great body? Big lips?”

“Whatever she didn’t have, Mike bought her.”

Phoenix mailed me Cohen and Sokolow’s latest script. It’s execrable. All my techno hipness is gone. These guys don’t know the first thing about computers. They have someone’s soul stored on a floppy disk.

My impression is that Cohen and Sokolow have done nothing in their whole lives except watch TV and movies. Every phrase in the script is a tag-line, a hackneyed quote from a commercial, a flip throwaway. Like in their script, when Cobb is about to get his brain cut out by the robots, he says “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

I am so sure.

So I flew down to Phoenix Pictures in Culver City for the day—Culver City is a node in the L.A. megalopolis. The Phoenix offices are in a tiny three-story modern brick building across the street from the enormous Sony lot.

I got there a little early, and I put my gnarly cellular-automata-based screensaver on the computer of one of the aspiring actors who act as Medavoy’s secretaries. I dream of my CAs making it onto the skins of the Software robots.

Stuart Volkow turned up in the waiting room and we had a coffee. It turns out Stuart is, not to put too fine a point on it, unemployed. And I’d been thinking of him as my influential producer. He’s just worming his way in here, acting as a go-between to stay involved, hoping for a co-producer gig down the line.

So then I had my meeting with Medavoy and the studio president Artie and a woman called Anne Rodman—she’s a story editor. We didn’t really get into specifics, it was more of a general discussion, making the point that we need a clear, three-act story arc.

“A tree to hang the decorations on,” as Medavoy put it.

They agreed that the Cohen and Sokolow script wasn’t going anywhere. I asked if I could write a new one, and they weren’t sure about that. But maybe they’ll let me consult, or write a treatment.

After the meeting, I talked it over with Stuart Volkow—my Virgil in this Inferno—and he said that for sure I was going to get some good money, and that Phoenix was likely to make my movie.

To celebrate, Stuart and I went to a strip club near the airport. I paid. Sylvia couldn’t believe it, me in a strip club with a producer.

“What a sleaze-bag!”

Funny Sylvia should think this, as in reality Stuart is kind of like an accountant. And, truth be told, it was my idea to go see the strippers. I was riding high, imagining a big success.

When I excitedly told my writer pal John Shirley about my trip, he was all, “Did they wipe their hands with Kleenex?” Speaking of the producers.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“After they finished jerking you off.” Meaning that there was no reason to set much store in what they say.

“Bill Gibson consulted for six weeks on Aliens 3,” continued John, “And the only thing of his they used was an idea for a tattoo that looked like a barcode.”

January 15, 1999. Wired and Zap Parties.

Sylvia and I took Rudy and Isabel to the annual party for Wired magazine. This may be my last one. Wired has little institutional memory and they’re forgetting I used to write for them. The crowd seemed less hip than in earlier years, the people more like plastic yuppie cogs of the growing Wired empire.

The high point was when we were dancing in the party’s disco room with Rudy and his date, also culture jammer Karen Marcelo, robot-artist Kal Spelletich, plus my fellow cyberpunk John Shirley and his wife Mickey. A graceful group, a treat.

Rudy was wearing an orange sweatshirt and had Xeroxed some tattered Monkeybrains ISP ads that he handed out like a homeless person looking for a job washing cars. It was richly funny. And I think Rudy did find a few of the right kind of customer.

Isabel brought a big stack of her jewelry ad cards, handed some out, and set some out on the advertising tables at the party. John Shirley bought a Bad Apple pendant for cash on the spot. The ideal response.

The Zap party was a gallery opening for original art from the latest “last” issue of the classic underground Zap comic. The scene was much more colorful and exceedingly crowded. The little gallery was full of—well, not exactly old hippies—the guests were weirder and scuzzier and more dynamic then hippies. Call them old cartoonists.

I introduced Isabel to my hero Robert Williams, after warning her not to stand right next to him as he’d told me he was “grabbin’ any cheeks within reach.” My pal Paul Mavrides looked ecstatic, drawing Fat Freddy and big joints in the margins of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comix for his ardent fans.

I’ve been reading Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. Great book. Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in Lynchburg, Virginia, anymore. Reading about those white Southerners, it makes my skin crawl, the sheer bullshit. Moving out here is one of the best things I ever did.

Jiving the Coasts

February 13, 1999. Visit Kids in San Francisco.

The day before yesterday, Sylvia left to visit her Dad in Geneva. I’ll be home alone for nearly a week, and then I’m going to visit Georgia in New York City, and to give a talk at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. And by then Sylvia will be back home.

On my first day alone in Los Gatos, I felt very scattered, finding it hard to focus on anything. A chicken with his head cut off. Computer diddling to keep from thinking. I played the videogame Half-Life for six hours. I got to a factory full of dynamite that I couldn’t get through, not even if I used the game developers’ secret “god mode” code. And then I quit.

On the second day, I got it together. I worked on a painting of Mom and Pop in Florida in 1950, with a UFO in the sky. It’s coming along pretty well. I’d always thought painting would be impossible, but the paints and brushes do a lot of the work. Sylvia and I signed up for a night-school painting class—I wanted to do some paintings so I can better understand where my painter character Peter Bruegel was at. Sylvia’s been a painter since way back.

That evening I drove up to hang out with Isabel and Rudy in San Francisco. My nephew little Embry was there too. He’s a successful photographer now, mostly shooting skaters and snowboarders for profiles and youth fashion ads. He had a couple of pro snowboarder friends along.

We all sat around in Isabel’s cozy room for awhile, her lovely giant squid mural still on the wall and her bulbous new iMac on a new built-in table. Then I got to go along for a fairly typical Friday evening out for our arty San Francisco kids. We went to two gallery openings.

The first was a place near the Blowfish called Southern Exposure, in a really nice loft-like building. At one of the shows, Rudy and Isabel’s abrasive friend Seth was the impresario—he had some really anti-social but funny stickers he was selling. One was “Are you UP for some speed?” with a 1940s-style sales-art style drawing of some guys with lines of speed. And at the bottom of the sticker it said, “Greetings from the Mission district, San Francisco.”

The galleries were full of people who resembled Rudy and Isabel. I realized that my kids really don’t dress badly—all the people around them dress the same. Little Embry said he felt ashamed to be wearing a coat that he’d bought new instead of in a thrift shop.

Little E was funny, he told some stories about going elephant hunting with his father Big Embry (my brother). When Big E kills an elephant in Africa he presents the trunk to the local chief, and he’s always described this as a fairly ceremonial thing. But the way Little E told it, Big Embry threw the trunk out of the back of a Land Rover into a wheelbarrow being held by a guy in a “Keep on Truckin’” baseball cap and a “Hang Loose” T-shirt who grinned and gave them a thumbs-up—that was the chief.

Big Embry gave a friend in Boulder the leather of an elephant ear, and when the friend took it to a leather shop to have a vest made and the hippie owner found out it was elephant leather, he yelled “Get out of my shop!”

On the hunt, little Embry wasn’t shooting at the animals himself. None of us fully understands why my brother is so into hunting and killing animals. He’s the only hunter in the family. Deplore him if you like, but, in the end, he goes out into the wilderness far more than the rest of us.

After the galleries, the kids and I went to a “noise show” in the grunger-filled warehouse next to Isabel’s. A guy called Scott Jenerik played a flamethrower-filled bazooka tube by hammering on it. Some Japanese men played a table full of electronic equipment making feedback. A man and two women played wired-up scissors that they used to cut up another women’s dress on stage. Everyone wore earplugs as a matter of course.

I helped Rudy build a giant fire outside in an outdoor firepit, using scrap wood, and we stood around the fire, listening to the croaking frogs that live in a hyacinth pond that one of the kids there built. I love spending casual time with my children. A fleeting view into an unknown world.

February 15, 1999. Another Script Consultation.

Back in June, my old Swarthmore College roommate and now L.A. Times movie critic Kenny Turan had predicted to me it would come to this. As Kenny put it, “Sometimes a script goes through so many rewrites there’s nothing left to work with and they say, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at the book!’”

So now Phoenix asked me to write another story outline for them, a fully new treatment, and not to worry about the old scripts at all. They used some funny slangy word for what they were asking me to do. I didn’t quite catch the word, and when I asked what the word was, they didn’t answer. Something like boomf.

I had a talk with the producers Mike Medavoy and Arnie Messner, with their story editor Anne Rodman in the conversation too.

They kept talking about Star Wars as the model for what we want to do, and I finally asked what about Bladerunner? They said they didn’t want to make a noir future film. They wanted something sunny and happy. Not dark. No seediness. They wanted to see heroism in a computerized milieu.

Anne Rodman: “The goal should be clear from the first scene: defeat an evil empire. We want action for a young male audience. The computers are the environment of the movie, not the focus.”

Arnie Messner: “Reform the rebel robots by programming them with a knowledge of human history and of how badly things like Nazism have turned out.”

Anne Rodman: “We want the Terminator 2 backstory with a happy ending.”

My Hollywood agent Steve Freedman had an aspiring screenwriter pal of his phone me up to try and make some kind of deal with me. It was a little unclear what the deal would be. She didn’t actually seem to know anything about my work. She was like a curious creature nosing out of the Hollywood thickets. I imagined a tapering snout, a long forked yellow tongue like a Komodo dragon’s. Crackling through the jungle underbrush. Drawn by the scent of food.

February 16, 1999. In Pajamas at 5 PM.

So here it is raining, 5 pm, and I’m still wearing my pajamas and bathrobe. Since Sylvia’s gone there’s nobody to tell me to get dressed. What happened to the day?

Let’s see, this morning I turned on my computer and had an idea to fix something in my CAPOW cellular automata program. I was happy to be hacking, rubbing my hands at this opportunity to geek out, and four or five hours later my program was three times faster, but part of it wasn’t working anymore. I figured the problem was with the video drivers in my new video card, or maybe with some plug-in code I got off the Web. My C++ compiler was acting funky too. Programming gets harder every year—a morass of incompatibilities.

I dropped the hacking for today. Got into proofreading galleys for my nonfiction anthology Seek! All sorts of screw-ups in the galleys—they laid out the book from the wrong frikking iteration of the manuscript. What with editorial back-and-forth, and what with my own personal vacillations, I usually end up emailing in several manuscripts of a book. And more than once it’s happened that the publisher fails to use the latest version. Publishing needs better revision control. The technology of it is oddly antiquated.

Oh well. It’s getting dark. Time to put on some clothes and go out to a movie.

February 19, 1999. NYC With Georgia. Software Treatment.

I’m in New York, staying at Georgia’s. She’s sweet and cute and rosy. Last night we had dinner with Eddie Marritz’s wife Hana Machotka and their daughter Leda. It was a real girls’ night out after awhile, very cozy sitting around in a comfortable booth with the three women, chatting after our reasonably priced Indian meal.

As usual I asked the teenage Leda, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

And, as usual, her response was a condescending, “I knew you’d say that.” We find each other amusing.

After dinner Georgia went off to meet her boyfriend, and I found my way back to her apartment on my own. On the way, I passed a rock club called Coney Island High—I’d heard of it, as my beloved Ramones had played there once—and I went in.

I saw two of the four bands, I think one was the Elevator Doors and the other was Nada Surf. I was having fun in there, sitting in a corner watching the scene for a couple of hours.

Georgia was impressed I’d made it into a rock club. “You’re so crazy!”

“I like to do things like that,” I said. “Normally I never get a chance to.” Just because I’m 52 doesn’t mean I don’t still like to see rock and roll.

There were some really choice-looking East Village types on the streets around Georgia’s apartment. Swarthy punks with greasy ringlets.

On the bus today I saw a sign with four noes:

No Littering, No Smoking, No Spitting, No Radio Playing.

In other words:

No Solid, No Gas, No Liquid, No Energy.

I visited my three publishers in New York.

First was lunch with my new editor Diana Gill at Avon. She did a nice job of editing on Realware. And she showed me sales figures on Freeware. Twenty-three thousand copies sold last year, which seems quite good. Even so, we couldn’t find much to talk about.

All in all, the vibe I get from her and the others at Avon is one of nervous discomfort. I’m imagining them thinking, “This guy sells all right and we’re somehow stuck with publishing him, but he’s weird and he’s not really one of us, and I wish he’d go away.” They’re not too interested in my Bruegel book idea.

After that I went to see Dave Hartwell at Tor, down in the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street. Dave is the guy who saved my bacon and published Saucer Wisdom after Wired dropped it. Dave thinks Saucer Wisdom is a great book, and he loves the drawings.

Dave’s a guy my age, or a couple of years older, a literary man, very pleasant to talk to. He totally loved my Bruegel-novel idea. He said he’d majored in Medieval studies and that he couldn’t wait to read my novel. Maybe he was buttering me up because Tor would like me to move there from Avon. It felt nice that he cared. They gave me a set of bound galleys for Saucer Wisdom and they looked really good.

Later I went over to John Oakes’s loft. He’s a very pleasant guy—preppy, twinkling, elfin. He’s the publisher and editor at Four Walls Eight Windows Press. He’s putting out my two anthologies, Seek! and Gnarl! The first is essays, the second is short stories. I picked the titles in honor my favorite slogan these days: “Seek ye the gnarl!”

Looking at all the crowds of people in New York, I kept doing the exercise of putting my head in a space where I’m imagining the kind of movie that the masses would like to see. I finally get the notion of making a movie as simple and sunny as Star Wars. Why punish and insult people who simply want to be entertained?

Thinking that, I immediately worry that if I get too good at putting myself into a mass-market state of mind, it’ll stick with me and I’ll start watering down everything I write.

Like that’ll ever happen. And so what if did? The great master Borges’s late-life style was really simple tales.

Riding the subway, I’m puzzling over how I might make a marketable movie out of Software. And it occurs to me that I should put in a cosmic force of good, a divine spark that Cobb has access to. And right when I think that, one of the ads in the subway seems to wink at me. It’s an ad with a man’s face, and I swear that the man winked. Like a religious icon painting that weeps or smiles. Heavy. So I’m on the right track?

Stage two. Sunday afternoon, I’m out with Georgia and her boyfriend Michael at a Greenwich Village rent party where they had jazz in someone’s loft, very mellow, very much a classic Village scene, integrated, hipsters galore. Michael is talking to me about some music tracks that he and a friend had been putting together with synthesizers, and he’s saying how it seems like random things kept coming together in just the perfect way.

I say, “That’s the cosmic harmony.”

And Michael says, “Oh right, that’s what you call the One.”

He knew this usage of mine from reading Infinity and the Mind recently. I hadn’t thought about that word lately, but now here it was back at me, right when I needed it. So of course I should call’s Cobb’s divine force the One.

So that night I had some time to write, and I worked the One into the Software treatment, and the more I massaged the story, the simpler and purer it got—it began to seem magical. I finished my treatment about 2 am, and I was so excited that I couldn’t go to sleep till nearly 4 am, tossing on my mat on Georgia’s living-room floor.

In the morning I printed the treatment and mailed it to Hollywood. It felt like a winning lottery ticket.

February 25, 1999. Providence and Pythagoras.

I’m still waiting for Sylvia to come back from Switzerland. Meanwhile my road-trip continues. I’m headed for Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, but on the way I’ve stopped in Providence, Rhode Island, to visit with my fellow science-fiction writer Paul Di Filippo and his not-wife-but-lifetime-partner Deb Newton for two nights. They say they were too lazy to get married, they kept putting it off. Very nice, casual people. Deb made the best pizza I’ve ever had, something involving a head of garlic and some dough that rises for a whole day.

Paul and I talked about SF a lot, he’s ten years younger than me, with four or five volumes of stories out, but he’s not satisfied with his level of success. He’s written a new novel called Fuzzy Dice that he hasn’t been able to sell yet. He showed it to me, and said it was Rudy-inspired. He said that each morning while working on it, he’d ask himself “What would Rudy do?”

Paul took me to see H. P. Lovecraft’s grave. For good luck, I took out my dick and touched the bare tip of it to H. P.’s headstone. Good luck!?! I just hope Cthulhu doesn’t come for me wanting another taste. And I got to go ice-skating on the public rink in Providence—Paul liked watching me circle around.

The two of us started work on a story called “The Square Root of Pythagoras,” taking turns typing on his computer keyboard. It was really fun working together like that, to move aside and have someone else take over for a few paragraphs, and to have Paul putting in funny other-mind things I wouldn’t have thought of. And we repeatedly discussed the plot of the story, giving it a much shapelier form.

Before I went to Providence, I’d been wondering if I would work on the Pythagoras story while I was visiting Paul—we’d briefly talked about it before, and I knew he kind of wanted to, but I was thinking I wouldn’t have the time or energy to get into it with him. So I’d dismissed it from my mind—and when I actually got to Providence I’d forgotten about Pythagoras entirely.

On my first day there, Paul drove me to a recovery meeting in some hall next to the Salvation Army. Great hearing the extreme New England accents.

And after my meeting I was walking around alone. I passed a student-living co-op called something like Finlanda, and that co-op had, as their sign, a blue-painted plywood billboard, maybe seven feet by four feet—and on the billboard was, guess what, a geometric proof of the Pythagorean Theorem!

The One, the Cosmos, was not so subtly telling me to write the Pythagoras story, right? And when I was having lunch, still alone, I took out a little pocket notebook that Paul had given me that morning, and I reproduced the so-called Whirling Squares proof of the Pythagorean Theorem that I’d seen on that billboard, playing with it just for practice, thinking perhaps to instruct Paul—and then I found myself making some story notes, and getting excited, and when I got back to Paul’s house we set to work.

Paul remarked that I could be like the peripatetic mathematician Erdös, traveling from one SF writer to the next and writing a story with each. It’s such a nice thing about our SF tribe, how easy it is to jam on stories together. I admire Paul’s writing. It’s very smooth and funny and colorful. And it’s reassuring to me that Paul is willing to write SF with me—this tells me that, yes, I really am an SF writer.

Endlessly chewing over the Software treatment for the Phoenix Pictures people is giving me more respect for the idea of getting a storyline straight before you write. So I felt impelled to work out the Pythagoras story in advance with Paul. In planning a story, Paul does this thing that I’ve never done—which is to decide in advance how many words long he wants the story to be. What a concept!

I have a fear of the short-story form. It’s because in the past, very many of my short stories have been rejected. Sometimes I can’t get them into any SF magazines at all. But I can always sell my novels. So I have this evidence-based feeling that I’m not good at writing short stories. Writing a story with someone like Paul gives me confidence. And to Paul, it’s selling a novel that seems hard.

When I woke today it was snowing so hard that you really couldn’t tell what part of the sky the sun was in. The sky was a uniform dotty beige. Snow whirling down. Exciting. I junked my plan to take a plane from Boston to Dartmouth, and instead I’m taking a bus.

I’m in the bus now. It’s romantic to be on a bus in New England. I first met Sylvia on a bus from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. And a bit later I often took the bus from Swarthmore to Middletown, Connecticut, to visit her at Wesleyan—where she was getting a Master’s degree. Was she only there one year? I guess so. My junior year. That was a big year in my life. I took peyote. And I learned, which was even harder, to take the bus. Before then, I’d been timid of traveling alone. But the need to visit my future wife overcame that.

I talked to her on the phone yesterday, still visiting her father in Geneva. She sounded good, ebullient even. At first she insisted on talking only French to me, being playful. I told her, “Tu me manque comme une jambe coupée.” “I miss you like a severed leg.”

Being on the road alone I have that familiar lonely-piece-of-dust feeling. I call the kids when I can. Going to that twelve-step meeting in Providence helped. It’s such a grounding experience, those meetings, how they’re always more or less the same. Not that I see the cream of society there. But the guys are always on the same wavelength as me. There’s that alky wavelength in the power-spectrum of my personality. I have other frequencies and modulations, like Math and SF, but the reformed-alky-stoner wavelength is a key component of my makeup and it’s really great to touch base with that. Doesn’t matter if a meeting is “good” or “bad.” I can only stay well by continuing to feed my recovery.

February 25-27, 1999. At Dartmouth.

I’m in Dartmouth to give a talk on the Fourth Dimension tomorrow.

“How thick is Flatland? will be our text for this sermon, oh dear ones…”

I just came back from having oysters on the half-shell and a steamed Maine lobster for dinner with two profs who were happy to meet me. They’re co-teaching a course on Math & SF here, one is a math prof, Jody Trout, the other is a comparative lit prof, Lawrence something. I’d been feeling a little homesick, but it’s hard to feel sorry for myself after this.

The formal title of my talk was, “The Fourth Dimension in Mathematics and Science-Fiction.” It went well. I had a bunch of overhead transparencies. About seventy-five people showed up. The students clean, healthy, lively, intelligent, multi-cultural. Privileged.

After a lecture, I always have this feeling of, “Is that all?” Giving a talk is an evanescent thing. A performance. As soon as you stop, it’s gone, over, drifting away. Not like something written, which has that permanence to it.

I feel blown-out and emptied after I give a big talk. In the old days I’d always drink at a time like that. Today I went as far as going into a bar, but I caught myself and merely had a non-alcoholic beer. Flirting with death, kind of. I hardly ever have non-alcoholic beer. But sipping this one gave me time to compose myself enough to get out of there. A last-ditch defense move. Sometimes I use cigarettes this way too.

I had another dinner with the Dartmouth faculty that evening. There were about ten of us for this one. Listening to the profs, I picked up that old incestuous, oppressed, small-college vibe—it reminded me of my time at Randolph-Macon. Gimme air! In a place like Dartmouth, the school is the town, and you’re stuck with the administration’s condescension, their paternalism, their pawky bossing. And your only social life is with other faculty.

That evening, I was so lonely that I ended up phoning old Greg Gibson. He was fuddled, loveable, sure of himself. Nothing will ever jolt Greg into doubting himself. Il se croit. It’s a comfortable thing, also slightly irritating.

I mentioned missing Sylvia, whom I sometimes call “yam,” and Greg said I should be making up a batch of mental “I miss my yam” pills that I can store up for when I occasionally get annoyed by my domestic life.

Tomorrow I see her again. The thought puts a song in my heart. Like I always say, when I talk with Sylvia it’s like we’re singing a two-part aria in an opera. As a way of somehow being with her already, I’ve been acting a bit like her in this hotel room. I’ve been washing socks, putting on lotion and spending a long time taking my baths.

The last day at Dartmouth was sunny, and I went cross-country skiing with David Webb of the math department. We went to a cross-country ski-resort called Norsk, where we skied on ponds and swamps through virgin snow, across a skin-smooth golf course, and on icy ungroomed bumpy trails in woods where I fell on my butt a bunch of times. The sky was clear, bright, pale blue. A fine day.

Webb talked about some weird new shit called noncommutative geometry—it’s supposed to have applications in particle physics and in quantum field theory. Way out there. Even though I could barely understand what he was saying, it was comfortably familiar to talk math.

Later I overheard a Dartmouth girl, all of twenty, reminiscing about ugly fashion in the benighted old days. “I had pink jeans. That was so 1987. Or maybe 1986.”

March 2, 1999. Nick Herbert Talks on Quantum Tantra.

Sylvia and I went to see my hippie physicist friend Nick Herbert give a performance at the Boulder Creek Library. He read his poems, wearing a robe and hat, holding a colorful stuffed fish, talking about “Quantum Tantra,” and letting some of his New-Age friends play a couple of folk songs.

“We physicists ought to be able to come up with things that make drugs look sick,” said Nick.

He meant that there should be powerful methods of real physics that would plug you into the One mind of nature, and into the little minds of objects. He’s thinking of something along the lines of quantum entanglement—thus his catch-phrase “quantum tantra.”

Nick: “For starters, get high on psychedelics, and then use an MRI scanner to talk to the souls of your organs.”

April 26, 1999. The Square Root of Pythagoras.

I’ve been working on that short story with Paul Di Filippo. We gave it this Golden-Age-of-SF type title, “The Square Root of Pythagoras.” I did the last touch-up on Pythagoras today and mailed it off. It’s a gem, a masterpiece, made all the better by Di Filippo’s enthusiasm, planning, and plot and style ideas. It dramatizes Pythagoras’s discovery that the ratio between a square’s diagonal and its side is apeiron, that is, it’s not equal to any ratio of whole numbers.

As I mentioned before, I started the story at Di Filippo’s while visiting him—we started it right after I’d been telling him about the nightmare vision of a malignant god-like beetle that I had on DMT at the Mondo house back in 1992, the beetle like a living 3D Mandelbrot set. Paul got right on that image, and he worked that freaky cosmic beetle into the first sentence of the story—it’s one of the apeiron beings that Pythagoras is having nightmares about!

The Crooked Beetle spit a number-form into its cupped claws, the number a black oozing mass almost ten stadia in length if uncoiled, now intricately folded into and through itself. The creature’s oddly articulated arm joints creaked as it urged the prize upon the human standing cowed before it.

“Take it now,” said the apeiron Beetle in a richly modulated drone. “You’re almost ready for it. The fifth and the last of our gifts.” The prize’s weight was immense, and the human staggered, lost his balance, seemed to fall sideways out of the dream universe—

Road Trip to New Orleans

May 12, 1999. Palm Springs. Turbulence.

I’m handwriting in my spiral notebook again. Sylvia and I are setting out on a road trip to New Orleans. She’ll be attending a conference on Cajun-style French. It’s an academic Francophone conference in Lafayette, Louisiana. The trip is part of a project she’s doing as part of her sabbatical. I think I’ve mentioned that she teaches at a community college in San Jose. She teaches French as well as English as a Second Language. Lots of Vietnamese students. They learn English from her, and then they come to San Jose State and I teach them C++.

I’ll be flying onward from New Orleans to Vienna to speak at a virtual reality conference called Synworld. This trip will give me another chance to visit the Bruegel paintings in Vienna.

We’re driving a rental car, so that Sylvia doesn’t have to drive back from New Orleans alone. Right now we’re three days into our road trip, here in the last town in California on Route 10, Blythe, set in fields by the Colorado River.

Most of the businesses in Blythe are dead, except for the giant K-Mart where I got this notebook and pen. We’re having supper in a Pizza Hut, empty & dull & generic, but with its own singularities nonetheless. The man in the next booth with his family prays for three minutes over their salad-bar salads. The family has to pray with him. Outside are three bums, thin and brown and grizzled as Bruegel’s Cripples. Beautiful view out the brick-wall window next to our table. The sky is blue and yellow and pink with big tall palms sticking up into it.

We spent the first two nights of our trip in Palm Springs, California. The place was almost empty—Palm Springs is like a ghost town in May. Sylvia and I had our luxurious motel swimming-pool all to ourselves. The sun was exceedingly bright overhead, casting very clear shadows of features of the water surface onto the bottom of the pool. Shadows caused by my motions.

It’s the disturbances on the surface of the water that produce visible shadows. As the surface undulates, its angles change, and the amount of light that makes it through a spot on the surface is affected by the angle of the surface. Reflectance vs. transmission. You’re not seeing the full 3D turbulence itself, you’re seeing shadows of the spots where the turbulence impinges on the surface.

The clearest things I saw were little whirlpools. They made shadows like disks. And—classic!—the disk broke into subdisks (subvortices) which I occasionally saw break down into subsubvortices.

It was fun to be me in the pool, stirring up the water, this cube of computing fluid. Seeing all these results from my motions. You stir up turbulence in the air as well, but that’s hard to see, unless the air has smoke or mist in it.

The water-turbulence effects lasted for a long time, like several minutes, the eddies moving through the fluid like tornadoes across Kansas. A single movement would start up a whirlpool wake that moved half the length of the pool before dying down. And even the smallest motions kick up turbulence. Gently setting my flat hand into the water was enough.

I love thinking about 3D turbulence. Waves seem dull in comparison. They’re more of a 2D surface phenomenon, not a twisty 3D tangle. So naturally I wonder what the turbulence of a 4D fluid would be like. I use the usual 4 : 3 :: 3 : 2 Flatland-type analogy. Here we go.

My 3D hand moves through the 2D water-surface and creates vortices in the hidden waters below, producing odd things on the surface. Imagine a 4D creature moving a hyperhand through the 3D hypersurface of our space, creating hypervortices in the underlying aether, which in turn produce odd things in our space. If you believe the nineteenth-century aether-vortex theory of matter, this would mean that a 4D creature can create matter just by touching our space. God’s finger with the spiral galaxies trailing off it.

All this from a motel pool.

May 16, 1999. Tucson. Cacti.

Being in Tucson sets Sylvia and me to thinking of “Get Back,” the Beatles song that mentions this town, the song about Jojo the loner who leaves Tucson to buy grass in California. We need to buy a copy the CD in some roadside mall store and check the lyrics. Our rental car, a Bloatmeister Poontiac Bonneville, has a CD player in the dash.

This morning we went to the Saguaro National Monument West in the desert near Tucson. Saguaro is pronounced Sah-wahro. All the cactuses!

Bushy teddy-bear cholla, chain-fruit cholla with hanging braids of fruit, buck-horn cholla, pencil cholla, and diamond cholla. Fishhook barrel cactus that tilts towards the sun till after years it falls over. Mescal, made of spherical balls of sharp leaves with threads hanging off them. Prickly pears with buds along their pads—they have silhouettes like Mandelbrot sets.

Yellow, red and orange flowers on the prickly pears and big white flowers on the saguaros—bats drink nectar from them at night. I pick a saguaro flower. It smells like magnolia, and like something else, sweet and gentle. The flowers only last for a day.

Some of the saguaros split and mutate at their tops, forming a brain-like shape. We see some fallen, decaying saguaros—as shocking a sight as a man dead in the street. Under its thick pleated skin, a saguaro has a skeleton of wooden ribs that run the length of the cactus. The fabled jelly-like “water-pith” is inside the ribs. It would be a little hard to get at, should you be going after it while dying of thirst.

I admire the way the cacti are placed so perfectly among the utterly dry red or white rocks. Like a museum diorama. Nature the supreme artist.

Little lizards lift up their striped tails to dart away. Tiny velociraptors.

May 17, 1999. New Mexico. Mandelbrot Cactus.

Sitting here looking at the beautiful silhouette of the Organ Mountains across a plowed field. On the balcony of our room in an inn called Meson de Mesilla. It feels European. A train not too far off, sounding its horn for the crossings in Las Cruces—how many, many trains there are in the Wild West. The mountain range is like a long jawbone with teeth in it. Like a cow or dog jawbone I might find in the woods. Or a T-Rex fragment.

Today we went to Saguaro National Monument East—it’s on the other side of Tucson. I walked a three mile trail. It felt like going snorkeling, cruising past the cactus clumps like they were coral reefs. The birds are the fish of this airy world, yes. I saw a dove perched very iconic on a saguaro in the shade of the main branch, a Platonic bird silhouette like you’d see in a Magritte painting. Also a family of three or four woodpeckers on a big saguaro with holes they’d made.

Everything started to seem like a Mandelbrot set after my cactus walk. Our gallon jug of water the main Mandelbutt, feeding the subsidiary quart bottle and two budlet pint bottles. One mile from the road on the “Cactus Forest Trail.”

A car full of locals drives by in the beating sun. The silhouette of their heads is like a bunch of prickly pears. A cubic Mandelbrot set!

May 18-19, 1999. Texas. The Steak. Caverns.

We’re in the middle of Texas. God it’s big. We passed through gritty El Paso, with all the radio stations in Spanish, then drove all day through nothing. Paused in some dying small towns, ended up near Sonora.

Sylvia ate a filet mignon steak for supper. She was so happy about it, and proud of herself. Her first steak in maybe a year—we’re practically vegetarians—but when in Texas… I have a great mental photo of her, leaning back in her banquette, sticking out her stomach and patting it, gleeful as an eleven-year-old.

In the morning we toured the Sonora Caverns. It felt a little like snorkeling once again, like walking among the cacti. I like things that feel like snorkeling. The intricate caves like a sonogram of someone’s heart.

The guide told us all these special names for mineral formations that you see in a cave. Flowstone, dripstone, and drapery are doughy frozen-water-like slumps. One agglomeration of whitish flowstone was called Moon Milk Falls. If drapery has stripes, it’s called cave bacon—to be savored with the so-called popcorn on the cave walls. And of course you’ve got your stalactites and stalagmites, plus the thin little soda straws.

We crossed a catwalk over some dripstone formations and the guide asked us to guess how far below us they were. I thought seventy feet, but it was only twenty feet. The moral being that you can’t easily judge the distance of a fractal, as it has no characteristic size-length. All its shapes occur at all sizes.

As the guide led us out, Sylvia claimed that some of the formations had gotten bigger than they’d been on our way in. Yet these stone growths take tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to form.

SF mysto steam came out of my ears. That flicker of the lights when we were in the Angel’s Palace room—that brief tingling sensation had been because we were skipping forward through a hundred thousand years! And when we exited the cave onto the surface, we saw futurians floating by in globes of light…

May 21, 1999. Austin. Mike Gambone.

In Austin, in the afternoon, we did get a CD of the Beatles Let it Be and we played it on our car with the AC on and the windows open, listening to the song about Jojo the loner from Tucson, sitting in our portable living room, our home away from home, digging these great songs that we hadn’t heard, by and large, in maybe twenty-five years.

This was on Sixth Street, the Austin drag with all the nightclubs. I had a fond memory flash of our Lynchburg friend Mike Gambone, who’d phoned us up from Club Foot on Sixth Street some years back. Mike was a Texan, and he’d been happy to be back visiting Austin that time. He was drinking and listening to Texas swing music, and he was wonderfully gut-joyful, calling us from a public phone, full of love.

In the daytime, Sixth Street was hot and pretty dead, but we wrote Mike Gambone a postcard. And that night we came back, and Sixth Street was great, with free music everywhere and a grainy-voiced street-corner barker shilling people for an upstairs tattoo parlor.

Lo and behold, when I checked my email at bedtime that night I found a message from Mike G—synchronicity.

May 22, 1999. Holly Beach, Louisiana.

How wonderfully random, this itinerary, these place names. We’re in a tiny redneck beach town along Louisiana’s bayou coast. This “town” is really just a wide place in the road, with a non-chain store, a hundred cabins and some house trailers. We rented the upper floor of a wooden shack. The owner asked hopefully if I wanted to buy his set of rental cottages.

All around me is the beach—a fully immersive environment. The steady rhythmic crashing of the small brown-green waves. Faint bursts of radio voices and music. Cars, trucks—and now a private plane—going by at the water’s edge. This is a beach that you’re allowed to drive on—what a stupid thing to do. The poor crabs!

I see a milky blue sky with cloud puffs. My view is framed by the low, slanting plywood roof of this second-story porch. There’s a railing of diagonal lathwork. Straight ahead, a line of power poles sketches a perspective and disappears behind jumbled silhouettes of dowdy dinky cottages—yet palaces and havens for those within—they’re made of wood siding, of paneling, of painted plywood, of corrugated iron or tin. The metal roofs are silver with lines and patches of warm brown rust. A nearby plywood wall is lemon-yellow, the grid of the panels’ butt-lines visible, overlaid on the triangular shape of the gable’s low peak. The brown-gray water is calm except at the shore where it break-break-breaks.

At the horizon are the techno-smudges of several dozen floating oil-rigs, for this is the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston. At night the rigs are lit up like Christmas trees or like spaceships. It’s science-fictional to see these great machines out on the water. Closer to shore is a trawling shrimp boat with long booms sticking out to each side, and the booms drag a huge seine. The boat moves slowly, laboriously, rocking from side to side, towing its heavy net.

Last night Sylvia and I had supper at the single restaurant here, the knotty-pine-paneled G & G Seafood. The locally caught shrimp were succulent and delicious, totally unlike the pulpy frozen shrimp one gets everywhere else.

I feel some nostalgia for the old days—like around 1976—when Sylvia and I would rent a cottage at the North Carolina Outer Banks with our three darling children. We took such joy in the beach vacations, our impecunious little family’s annual treat.

May 23, 1999. Atchafalaya. Crawfish. Rookery.

Here we are in Cajun country. Sylvia’s attending her conference about non-French cultures that speak French. I’ve been alone all day long.

In the morning I went on a swamp-boat tour of the Atchafalaya Basin. Cypresses in fifteen feet of water. Quite depressing to learn how thoroughly the environment here has been raped. Here’s the litany.

Most of the cypresses were cut for lumber in the 1920s, and only stumps remain. The water is clotted with an introduced Japanese plant called water hyacinth, which would totally take over if the state weren’t periodically poisoning it. High-tension power lines run along the now-defunct bed of a railway—the lines carry energy from a nuclear power plant to the refineries of Baton Rouge. The interstate highway I-10 cuts across the swamp basin via an eighteen mile bridge that stands on pilings a hundred feet deep. Many of the trees are non-indigenous black willows, introduced by the Army Corps of Engineers. Powerful boats speed about, throwing up wakes that disturb the animals and plants. The egrets were all but hunted into extinction for their plumes. A hundred thousand alligators are “harvested” each year. Nobody in the U.S. knows how to tan their hides, so the skins are sent to Italy. Several oil-well rigs stand in the basin, and high-pressure oil lines pipe the crude away.

I had lunch at a Cajun place called Pat’s Wharf. I got what they called a half-order of boiled crawfish. This means I got seventy-six of ’em, some were just an inch long, but most were three inches long, and a few were four or five inches long. They came on a dish like a pizza pan. I just ate the tails—the thin black waitress showed me how. I spoke to a local woman outside, an old-lady type. She had a wild Cajun accent, a mixture of French and Southern.

I phoned daughter Isabel to tell her that I’d eaten all those crawfish.

“Didn’t you feel sorry for them?” asked Isabel.

Well, yeah, it was a bit of a mass murder. I felt a little uneasy. Seventy-six trombones in my stomach playing a funeral march.

Later in the afternoon I found a lovely, unspoiled spot—a protected rookery called Martin’s Lake. The swampy land housed a staggering number of egrets and herons in its trees.

I walked in along a levee next to the shallow, duckweed-filled lake, dense with cypresses and willows. I walked about a mile, and every single tree in the water was full of nests—a big nest on every branch of every tree. Birds in incalculable profusion.

I glimpsed an island close to the middle of the lake, a kind of Earthly heaven. Some great egrets there were beating their wings like angels, two or three egrets, involved in what must have been a mating dance, repeatedly flapping in odd, stylized rhythms, first one wing and then the other, making a kind of twisting effect.

It was amazing, that I could see as far as that Edenic island—it was perhaps sixty yards off, I was glimpsing it through successive receding windows of thicket, the foliage lining up just so. I felt as if were seeing up into the heaven at the top of some cathedral’s painted dome. Bird heaven.

But nearby—wait—what’s that bumpy dark form in the water? What demon lurks in the muck of this avian paradise? Sure enough, it’s a huge alligator. Supposedly the number of inches from a gator’s nostrils to his eyes equals the number of feet in his overall length.

The first one I noticed was about six feet long. My size. Then I noticed another equally large one at his side—but the second one was all but invisible, ten feet long, black and slimy as a turd, just under the surface, with duckweed all over him, his nostrils and eyes like tiny knots on logs.

The gators are utterly immobile, waiting all day for that one egret or heron or ibis to wander too close while pecking up frogs and fish. I heard one or two huge, wallowing splashes in the distance. Gators making a score.

May 24, 1999. Abbeville, Louisiana.

We saw a church in Abbeville, Louisiana, a big Catholic church in the steaming hot town. Outside the church stood a statue of Mary, or of a saint, and on a plaque under the statue it said, “I will let fall a shower of roses,” which made me imagine a William Burroughs character saying this on his way to take a shit.

Inside the church it was air-conditioned so hard that it practically made your teeth hurt. By the door was a rack filled with really rabid anti-abortion and anti-daycare newsletters. Ranting and raving about daycarism of all things. Why? Disturbing to see such mean-spirited political literature in a house of worship.

May 25-26, 1999. New Orleans Characters.

N.O. is great. Mostly two-story buildings in the Vieux Carré (French Quarter), very human in scale. Ironwork balconies with slender supporting columns coming down to the sidewalk. It’s sunny and hot, but I can so well visualize it in the rain. Wonderful, bizarre characters, gentle-seeming.

A woman named Bloody Mary giving a tour of the graveyard called St. Louis #1. Dressed in a black dress with a long slit, draping herself on the crypts, delivering her spiel with verve.

A lean black man with a cyst the size of a golf ball on the side of his face sang “As Time Goes By” to Sylvia & me last night with a little tap-dance. A hard-luck guy, turned out in a clean suit.

A man in a bikini at the door of a transvestite strip club. He has really big breasts. A tourist asks him if the breasts were real, and the man in the bikini is, like, “Sure, you can touch them,” and he waggles them up and down in a casual this-is-an-accessory kind of way.

A wild, Blasters-style, Cajun band at Patout’s. Outside the door a man walks by with a cross on his shoulder—an eight-foot wooden cross. He’s a gray-haired guy in jeans and a gimme cap. Later I see he’s installed himself in front of a “Bottomless and Topless” place. The cross is a signboard—with a red-diode letter-crawl display all along the cross-bar, flashing messages like, “Repent!” Classic, seeing the trans-sex guy and the cross-man back-to-back.

We went for a carriage ride. The driver was a fucking New Yorker. An alcoholic New Yorker, at that. He stopped by a bar so he could run in for a “soda.”

It was a sweet moment, with him gone, Sylvia and I in the comfortable carriage seat, moon-lit puffs of cloud in the deep blue sky, the beautifully crumbling French Quarter buildings all around, and live song pouring from the ramshackle bar.

May 27 - June 3, 1999. Virtual Reality. Vienna.

So now I’m in Vienna. Incredible that just sitting in a metal tube for nine hours brought me here. From New Orleans. I haven’t seen Bruegel yet, but I’ll go tomorrow early. My hotel is only two blocks away from the museum—but big, monumental, my-legs-are-tired, Vienna blocks. My host is good old Konrad Becker, running the Synworld virtual reality conference.

I’ve been awake since midnight. The horrible bellowing opera music and Brazilian pop tunes endlessly floating up from the hotel bar directly under my window. There’s porno actors forever doing it inside my room’s TV. Like an artificially alive Sims family on a computer screen. Multiplying their numbers.

At supper I got tired of sitting alone, and I got my strudel to go and took it to a movie. The film, in a tiny rundown theater, was, oddly, a Thirties Hollywood Lubitsch film starring Jack Benny, of all people, as a Polish actor who successfully assassinates Hitler! It was a comedy, believe it or not, and very funny. Weird to see it with a handful of maybe seven Viennese, all laughing at the movie’s oddness, and perhaps savoring the transgressive aspect of seeing Nazis on the screen.

The Synworld convention has a hall of computer exhibits. Some games, some scientific demos. Coming into the space, I get my usual expo feeling of nausea at all the flashing and roaring.

Konrad Becker’s friend Marie Ringler, the conference organizer, leads a group of businessmen around. They own a digital TV company called Cybertron which is just making their IPO stock offering. They’re sponsors of this Synworld conference. A professor is showing them a virtual elephant the size of a wall, the elephant is 3D and you look at it through cardboard stereo glasses.

The fun thing with the virtual elephant is that you can pick up a physical house-painting brush and use it to “paint” virtual color onto the hulking elephant, who’s in a perpetual state of rotation, as if standing on an enormous turntable.

One of the Cybertron businessmen catches my eye, a fortyish guy with long Mozart-like hair and a tidy modern collarless suit jacket, clearly a hip dude, Austrian style, sleek and well-groomed, and with an acquisitive managerial vibe about him. Here he’s confronted with the professor’s virtual elephant and he asks me, “Is there money in this?”

Like the way my dog Arf would sniff at any object I’d show him, as if asking, “Is this food?”

Some Austrian TV people interviewed me and several of the questions were about how it feels to be living in the future that I supposedly predicted in my SF books—about how it feels to see my wildest imaginings come alive. As I carry that question with me for the rest of the day, I begin to realize that, yes, things really are getting pretty cyberpunk here and there.

At one of the talks, Machiko Kusahara, a cute fortyish lady professor from Kobe, shows slides and videos of what she delicately terms “digital beauties” from Japan. Showing one of her slides, she points out in a dry Japanese voice, “This one has very large bust.”

At dinner Machiko Kusahara explains the etymology of the “otaku” word that, for instance, William Gibson uses in Virtual Light for “Japanese technogeek.” Machiko says “otaku” is a very formal way of saying “you,” literally it means “your house.” Since the geeks are so poorly socialized, when they ask each other how they’re doing, they’ll say a distant, “How are things at your house?” instead of a more intimate “How are you?” And the non-geeks noticed this oddity of speech and picked up on it as a way to mock the geeks, who thus became the “otaku.”

Later we all go to a rave club called Flex and I’m dancing a little. The DJs are playing records and tape loops, trance dance music, and all the walls are covered with projected videos and realtime computer graphics. In one room, the walls, floor and ceiling are glowing with C++ source code, black symbols on white background—oh my god, this is my daily life back home. The kids are casually bopping around, unfazed by the C++, it’s just decoration for them, but I’m fairly stunned by the mazes of code on every side. Yes, I’m living in a world I’ve written about. It’s unsettling.

My own talk went well. It was a very hot day, and to look more visually interesting, more Californian, I took off my shoes and gave the talk barefoot, in khaki shorts and a Batik cellular-automata-like sportshirt.

I hammered on the idea that I’ve been into lately, that cyberspace : mindscape :: perspective : space. Cyberspace is, in other words, a technological method to unify the world of thought, just as perspective was a clever new trick for combining objects into a single picture. In saying this, I’m building on some ideas that Margaret Wertheim proposed in her book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.

The lecture hall had a good internet connection and computer projector, so I threw in some eyeball kicks—demos of my programs, CAPOW, Boppers, Kappatau Curves, and Hypercube. To wind things up, I projected my home page. “This is my daughter,” I said, finding a picture of Isabel. And they kind of laughed so I added, “I’ll show you my dog, too,” and went to the image of my painting, Arf and the Saucer. Down home.

Sitting in a cafe writing. I bought a new fountain pen here, a Pelikan like my previous one—whose point I’d ruined and whose barrel I’d cracked.

There’s a helicopter hovering overhead. Another street demo. Day before yesterday the demo was “Slavs Against NATO.” Today it’s young people carrying signs saying “Hanf fur Alle!” Which means “Marijuana for Everyone!” The politics of a strange city are so random.

I went to see the Bruegel pictures again and again. By the end, it wasn’t so much about gleaning new info—it was more a matter of enjoying the pleasant sights. Like jogging through the same woods day after day. Arf used to jog with me. In Flemish, a dog’s bark is Waf. I’ll give Bruegel a dog named Waf. He’s one of the dogs in Hunters in the Snow.

I’ve been paying special attention to the self-portraits that Bruegel embeds into his paintings—trying to decipher the man’s personality. The dice-roller in The Battle of Carnival and Lent, the builder’s companion in Tower of Babel, the watcher in Bearing of the Cross, the toff in Sermon of John the Baptist, the city man in the Peasant Wedding, and the sour Misanthrope. His life’s trajectory.

On the day before I left, I took the train out to the Rax plateau and spent a day alone hiking. The steep pathway down the rock face of a cliff there had a sign saying the path was only for the “Geübt und Schwindelfrei.” The Practiced and Dizzy-Free.

June 17-August 20, 1999. Software Option Renewed Again.

Mike Medavoy at Phoenix Pictures calls, and he says they’ve found yet another writer that they like. A twenty-five-year-old guy called Trevor Sands. He has a story pitch they think is great. They’ll show it to me later.

My agent Steve Freedman gets hold of Sands’s story pitch and sends it to me. The Sands treatment features NATO troops in the year 3000, with a general as the main character. They’re bombing the Moon to bring down some evil Dex robots who are fighting off the good rebel robots.

The army of the evil robots is called the One, which was my name for god in my Software novel, oh my brethren. Instead of a brain-eating scene like I’d had, there’ll be a scene where someone with a needle sucks Stahn’s soul out of his head and then immediately—why?—injects it back into him.

The old director Scott Billups calls me. He says Mike Medavoy had a heart attack, but is back at work in a limited way. To reduce his workload and schedule, Phoenix has cleared off a bunch of projects. Billups claims that includes Software.

Billups says he wants to make Software. He says he’s written a script that may be bought by a group who made a cyberpunk Pamela Anderson movie called Barb Wire. “They raised twenty-seven mill for Barb Wire when Pammie went to Cannes in her leather bustier.” Love it.

I ask Steve Freedman what he thinks of all this. Steve goes, “Scott is so…out of the loop. Yeah, Medavoy had heart surgery, but so what. They’ve paid Trevor Sands a hundred K to write his script, why wouldn’t they wait and read it? Why would they care about Billups?”

I rent and watch Barb Wire. Kind of a great B movie, really. Pammie does a good job, it’s very noir and cyberpunk, and they have motorcycles. All during the credits, Pam is in leather pants and a T shirt, in a dark alley, being sprayed by a fire-hose. I fantasize about her being in Software. Sure, I could find a way to write her in.

Medavoy calls and said the new Trevor Sands script is on its way to me.

I say, “I heard you had a health problem.”

“Not really a health problem. I had open heart surgery. But I’m feeling fine.”

I read the new Sands script. First reaction: it rocks. I’m really pleasantly surprised. It’s not totally gauche or stupid—not at all like that treatment I’d seen. It’s cinematic. It flows. I was turning the pages fast. It has a big ending.

Steve Freedman calls and tells me, “Whatever you do, don’t talk to Medavoy today, let me make our deal for our option renewal first. They’re offering $25K for a year and I’m trying to get it higher. If you talk to him I’ll kill you.”

“What do I say if he calls?”

“Screen the call. Don’t pick up.”

So then an hour later the phone rings and I pick it up without even thinking about it, and it’s Medavoy. I say, “My agent told me I shouldn’t talk to you until we work out the option.”

Medavoy sighs. “Okay. Whatever you like.”

But of course I can’t resist saying something. “I really liked the script. It rocks.”

“That’s what I needed to hear. I mean why would I want to renew the option if the script’s still no good? I needed to hear if you liked it or not. If you didn’t like it, then maybe we’ve already spent enough money on this. I used to be an agent. Agents are good at stopping things from happening.”

The next day I’m talking to Steve Freedman and I tell him that I’d talked to Medavoy and I’d said, “My agent told me not to talk to you.”

Freedman gets really upset and actually hangs up on me, but then calls back, asking for a blow-by-blow of the conversation, and ultimately decides it was okay.

Meanwhile he’s gotten me $35K for another year of option renewal, and if they actually buy the movie, I’ll get something like three hundred grand.

This new extension is for a year, it expires on September 1, 2000.

September 11, 1999. Sick. Doubts on Bruegel.

So now my sabbatical is over, and I’m back at work again. It’s nice to see the students, in their great diversity and humanity. Nice to be dealing with real people instead of with the ever-increasing flow of email to answer.

Unwisely I asked for a schedule that would get my work down to two days a week. It’s physically too taxing. I go in Tuesdays and Thursdays and I teach four hour-and-half classes each day, pretty much right in a row. Software Engineering with C++ and Object-Oriented Programming with Java. I got sick on the second day of work, I picked up some exotic flu bug from my huddled masses of students. And now I’ve had night fever and sweats and this killing ache in my neck for a week.

I hate learning Java. It’s a crappy language, a sloppy toy toolkit that—whee!—even has a real saw like Daddy’s. To me, the real toolkit is C++.

The office hours are harsh, too. I’m doing schedule advising, and I have a steady stream of students asking about transfer credits for their community-college courses. Nice to help them, but after a few hours enough is enough. And, yes, I know it’s galling that we professors have such easy jobs and that we complain so much about them.

I’m dreaming about retiring at fifty-five, which would mean only three more semesters after this one. Possibly I could initially retire to a half-time status, which many do. Assuming I can get some money for my books.

Diana Gill at Avon turned down the Bruegel proposal. She said it didn’t have enough historical detail and she didn’t like that I was writing it in the present tense. John Oakes at Four Walls Eight Windows turned it down. He says he has no interest in the subject and he didn’t like the present tense either. Hartwell at Tor hasn’t read it yet, and I wonder if he ever will.

My agent Susan Protter has no hopes for the Bruegel book, she talks about looking for a small press. When I asked about trying some mainstream publishers, she gave me an annoying answer, “Who are the big publishers? Who knows anymore? They have all have these little imprints in the big houses. I can’t keep track of them.”

I blew a lot of this summer working on my software engineering textbook, Live Windows, or whatever it’s called. I did a lot of hacking to get the C++ code for it done, and it’s still not finished, it still needs a couple more programs. I’m using the first 140,000 words of the book as the text in the Software Engineering course—I had the campus bookstore print it up on photo-offset and we sell it in the store at cost. I sent the latest copy off to Addison-Wesley, I’m still hoping they’ll publish the final version.

Saucer Wisdom came out and so far hasn’t gotten any reviews in print at all. Seek! got one review, a good one, in Wired, but not anywhere else.

I’m losing confidence in my Bruegel novel. Should I change it all to past tense? Certainly I could do that. And never mind that Pynchon writes historical novels in present tense, and that Neal Stephenson’s new historical novel Necronomicon is present tense, and that this book I read today, Headlong by Michael Frayn, is in the present tense.

I read Headlong after seeing a front-page New York Times Book Section review of it. It’s about a man who finds the missing sixth canvas in Bruegel’s Six Seasons cycle. Michael Frayn is a British playwright, so of course they publish his Bruegel book. I have to be big about this, yes. If I get any bigger I’m going to fucking burst.

The ache in my neck is killing me. Time for some aspirin.

September 13, 1999. Rededication to Great Work.

I’ve been cleaning up my desk and notes. Today I reread the Bruegel manuscript. I want to go with it. Bruegel’s life is so interesting. And I feel such a connection to him. I want to write this book. Thus far it’s as good as anything I’ve ever written. I just need to finish it. If I focus, maybe I can finish it by next June, and if it’s not a moneymaker, so be it.

My disease went away, so I feel a lot more optimistic again. And I wrote Michael Frayn a nice letter about his book, hoping to enlist support for my own project.

December 8, 1999. Nostalgia for 20th Century

I’m starting to feel this deep nostalgia for the almost-over century.

We’ll never ever be able to get back into the 1900s.

We’re truly leaving home.

How quaint and lovely it all was.

December 26, 1999. Christmas. Java. Bruegel.

My fourth sober Christmas. It was nice, the three kids were here, each with a partner, Georgia & Michael, Rudy Jr. and Michelle, Isabel & Mikey.

In the sixth grade I had three Mikes in my class: Mike Nolan, Mike Sheehan and Mike Manley. I remember there being an example in our English text, explaining why people used pronouns, saying that nobody would say, “Mike hurt Mike when Mike fell down.” And at the time I imagined a scenario involving the three Mikes, the mean Mike Sheehan slugging the unfortunate and nerdly Mike Manley just as the awkward Mike Nolan tripped and fell, perhaps over that nasty Sheehan’s foot.

I hardly ever write in this journal anymore. Either it’s because I’m too busy or maybe it’s because I feel less of a need to justify myself. Well, I don’t just write in the journal to justify myself, it’s also a way of finding out where I’m at.

I pissed away a vast amount of time this fall doing Java hacking. In particular there was an Asteroids game that I got off the web from a programmer named Mike Hall. And I made it more object-oriented and added features and then put my improved Asteroids Alive version onto my home page as an applet.

There were many, many problems external to the actual writing of the code, things having to do with finding out how to put up an applet so that most browsers can view it. Java is truly “write once, debug everywhere,” as the joke has it. But now I feel a quiet pride at having more or less mastered yet another computer language. And it’s cool to have learned about the applet distribution channel.

My initial negative feelings about Java were just fear, it’s a very nice language, although the development tools aren’t very good. And Java is fiendishly difficult to debug.

My Bruegel novel is moving along nicely, I keep managing to get back to it—whenever I get a respite from my blood-lust hacking frenzies of Java or C++. I’ve got eight chapters done. And, let’s say, seven to go. Each chapter is like a painting—and like a short story. I’m using the long breath that I used in Realware, that is, each chapter contains an entire arc of narrative. So starting each new chapter is a special effort. Each time I have to figure out the chapter’s story.

As for the Live Windows textbook, I guess I’ll revise it again for the coming spring term, although I don’t feel much like spending time on it. It’s so much a who cares thing, even if I do get it published. Right now I have a month of vacation and the Bruegel book is the only project that matters.

I went to a recovery meeting tonight, it’s still good. I often get such a fine spiritual fix in there. Sometimes it’s even like getting high, nodded back against the wall with that superfine stony yellow cosmic light all around.

Let go. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.

December 30, 1999. Off to San Francisco Milloonium.

Sylvia and I were a little frazzled from putting on that big Christmas for the six kids. But now she’s chirping and I’m chirping back. That old feeling of us singing an opera duet.

Today we drive up to San Francisco for the Milloonium—this is a funny pun-word I heard in a Subway sandwich commercial featuring the Looney Tunes cartoon characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, slobbering about the “Milloonium.”

Actually I’m calling it the Big Flip. The odometer rolling over. Nine-nine-nine to zero-zero-zero.

“I’m ready,” as Pop said on his death-bed. But in my case today, not ready for death of course, just ready for this next big change, the “emigration into a new country” as Sylvia puts it.

It’s hard not to feel that this really could be the last entry in my journals. So I’ll end with the light, the source, the vanishing point…the cosmic One.

The Millennium / 1999-2002

Cool Times

December 31, 1999 - January 1, 2000. Millennium Big Flip in SF.

Sylvia and I are here in the Hotel Rex in San Francisco. I made some journalist-like notes on how our Millennium went down.

December 31, 1999, 8:30 am. Well, the End of the World is almost here. The feeling is very strong: something will happen. I’ve never felt this way about a New Year’s Eve before. The 2K Big Flip feels like a scheduled execution.

But yet—how is it that New York City’s end of world will come three hours earlier than San Francisco’s? Seems like the Big Flip cataclysm should be like Earth rolling off the edge of a cliff. And then the whole motley ball would be rolling off at once, no? But, hey, the Big Flip’s already happened in Tonga, and we’re not feeling it here. Why not?

I’m visualizing Earth as being like a giant orange, divided into time-zone-sized segments. And now the segment with Tonga has worked its way free and it’s tumbling off alone in black space, with the Sun glinting on the curved sector surface of its Earth-rind, with South Pacific waters sloshing off the rogue segment’s edges. And meanwhile the rest of the South Pacific is pouring down into the huge wedge-shaped gap where Tonga used to be—I see a thousands-of-mile-high waterfall on either side of the gap, and the water vaporizes into steam or even into plasma when it hits the molten nickel of the Earth’s exposed core. This’ll drain the Pacific dry, you bet! I wonder how early today the drop in the water level will be noticeable in the San Francisco Bay.

December 31, 1999, 9 am. I go out for coffee and pass a street-person who has a paper breathing mask fastened over his mouth, with tape all around the edges. Does he know something I don’t know? A carful of sweat-shirted men nearly runs me over as they maneuver wildly for a parking space, the men already drunk this early in the day. Why not? The world’s about to end.

On TV, police in Israel are searching for a Southerner named “Monte Kim Miller,” who’s trying to organize a terrorist act to kick off Armageddon. I love the tradition of criminal Southerners with three names, like my Freeware Kentucky-boy Randy Karl Tucker.

December 31, 1999, noon. Sylvia and I walk to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The people in the street aren’t in a holiday mood at all. Everyone is scuttling, tense, worried. Frantic. We’re feeling that way too.

There’s good stuff in the museum, a blessed distraction. Wall-sized collaged panoramas of photos taken by the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Her low, gently rolling hills. At first we think the moon photos are black and white, but no, they’re in color, as you can see from the fact that the moon buggy and the astronauts have highlights of gold, and red white and blue logos. The moon itself is fuckin’ black gray and white. What a drag it would be to live there.

Another gallery has a collection of memorabilia from the Sixties: clothes, furniture, jewelry, posters. It’s almost unbearable for me to look at this stuff, so intense is the nostalgia—for my youth, for being a newlywed, for being a pothead. The Sixties didn’t last long enough. For Sylvia and me, they ended when I took my teaching job in upstate New York in 1972:

“Look dear, here we are on the Moon. I know it’s all black and white, and completely lacking in any intrinsic scale, but I’m sure they have a bunch of nice faculty wives you can get to know…”

Back outside, we pass a girl with long purple hair—that’s just how her hair is, and nobody questions that kind of fashion in the twenty-first century. Everywhere workmen are nailing plywood over the store windows. Borders Books and the Sanrio Hello Kitty store have added on chain-link fences in front of their boarded windows. They’re seriously expecting some rioting and looting tonight.

December 31, 1999, 6 pm. In our hotel room, we check the TV and—Y2K is arriving without any problems in zone after zone. No satellite photos of free-floating planetary orange-slices. Australia, Europe—they’re not tense, they’re not rioting, they’re celebrating with parties and costumes and cute parades. It’s just the U.S. that’s uptight.

We walk up Nob Hill to Grace Cathedral. They’re having 24 hours of music there. Just now it’s a folk-singer with a guitar. It’s easy to feel god’s presence here. God lives inside this great Gothic stone space like a nautilus lodged inside its striped spiral shell. It’s good in here. Solemn. Calm.

After awhile, we light a candle for the ones we leave behind us in this passing Millennium—that is, for our dead parents. And then we light a candle for the ones to come—for the children and for the grandchildren we hope to have. Looking at the two candles, thinking of my dead parents and of the size and weight and feel of babies, I strongly feel how Sylvia and I are nodes in the great web of human history.

December 31, 1999, 9 pm. We walk across town to North Beach to meet Isabel and her friend Mikey at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, a favorite restaurant of ours. Black and white helium balloons on the ceiling, and everyone in the room is wearing black or white. Good food and courteous service, it’s lovely, festive. They’ve set up a TV high on one wall so we can keep an eye on the other orange segments.

At our 9 pm, the Big Flip hits Times Square. And New York’s lights stay on! No insane computer breakdown. I’m almost surprised, and certainly relieved. In fact it’s something more fundamental than the lights going out that I’d been fearing, something more like an instant decay of matter—with all the electrons spiraling into their nuclear suns. The advent of the Void, of the end times, of the Randy Karl Tucker Armageddon. The amount of confetti in Times Square is awesome.

December 31, 1999, midnight. After dinner, Isabel and Mikey ride off on their bicycles and Sylvia and I walk around San Francisco. We swing through Union Square, but nothing’s going on there, only a couple of hundred people in a clearing behind a zillion police barricades, listening to some weak-ass world music. We ride a bus down Market Street to as close to the Ferry Building as we can get, and walk the rest of the way. This is where it’s at. Thousands of people walking along with us. They’re not, on the whole, violent or weird, just here to see the show.

We stop around First Street, where the crowd starts to get too thick. Hundreds of police, some with riot helmets and batons, some mounted on motorbikes, motorcycles and horses. They’re very insistent about keeping us out of the street and on the sidewalks—a display of force. Their motorcycles are doing little circle maneuvers, savoring their free space.

At midnight the fireworks start by the Ferry Building’s old tower, big fountains of colored balls and paisley-like swirlers, then skyrocket explosions, maybe ten minutes’ worth. Looking down the street towards the Ferry Building and the bay behind it, we can’t see all the fireworks, but we can see a lot of them. A young gay couple next to us with one of the guys’ parents. They exchange a little peck at midnight, just like Sylvia and me.

Green laser lights fan over the crowd now, and the twitching beams sketch images on the buildings. Fully operational. The exultant play of the still-functioning computers.

“Behold, our Lord and Master still liveth!”

Afterwards, we see dozens of people talking on cellphones. That’s a new twenty-first century thing too. But many things haven’t changed. People still wear long pants, and thick coats, and leather shoes, and wool hats. The future hasn’t swept this stuff away. We wear warm clothes because we’ve figured out over thousands of years that they’re practical and comfortable. We still like fireworks, too, and good food.

January 1, 2000, 1 am. Sylvia and I walk back to the Hotel Rex, which has a nice old Twenties-style lobby with a bar. We sit there for a bit. They’re handing out black and silver harlequin-patterened top-hats for the men, and the women get little Happy New Year tiaras. Sylvia and I don our headgear, I have an orange juice, she has a glass of champagne. It’s safe and cozy, we’ve survived. The Big Flip has come and gone. We’ve passed through the interface.

A handsome young couple leans against the bar. The woman tells us they’ve just gotten engaged and she shows off her sparkler. Looking out across the room the guy says:

“All this Y2K panic—what was that about?”

There is no Y2K bug. Never was. It was a huge scam, hyped by the hysterical and gullible media—and condoned by our repressive government. It’s better for those guys if we’re scared. And they’ll never ever apologize for harshing our vibe.

January 1, 2000, 4 pm. I did a little shopping today. In the Old Navy store they have twenty pairs of mechanical legs hanging from the ceiling, marching in place, wearing different kinds of pants. All the belts and gears of the devices are visible. Maybe they’re trying to be twenty-first-century? Oh, wait—as of today, we’re through trying to be twenty-first-century. We are twenty-first-century.

January 7, 2000. Amid the Mayans. Next Novel?

Now I’m on the island of Cozumel, in the state of Quintana Roo. Quintana Roo is abbreviated Q. Roo, which I like, since I’m a Roo too. I’m here with Sylvia and our daughter Isabel.

I’ve been snorkeling a lot with Isabel, and this morning I did a scuba dive off the beach. The sense of being all eyes. The species of sponges various as cacti, lavender and orange, some like vases. Spider-like crustaceans inside the sponges, and brittle sea stars with legs as thin as threads. A spotted moray eel. An eagle ray flaps by. Keeping watch on my air supply, I think of the story of the Five Chinese Brothers. I’m the little boy exploring the uncovered seabed while the first Chinese brother holds the ocean in his mouth.

Yesterday we three snorkeled in a place called The Sky, El Cielo. The water’s ten feet deep, with a white sand bottom. Turns out it’s a sky of starfish, big fat guys, no two alike, all different hues, each with a five-fold-symmetric pattern on its top. Personal hieroglyphs.

Party time at the hotel in the afternoon: “Drunker than six Texans at a Cancún hora feliz.”

I’m starting to think about the novel to write after Bruegel. I think I’ll have the big SF effect consist of moving around in four-dimensional hyperspace. I figure the stuff they see will look like what I’m seeing while snorkeling and diving here. Sponges, corals, invertebrates.

The book could be a crossover type SF book, marketable as mainstream. Light on the tech, and big on the wonder, plot, and characterization. The more hardcore SF books tend to show a future or alternate world in which the gimmicks cause a permanent change in a society. In the more lightweight and mainstream books, the gimmick is just that. A curio, a bauble. And society doesn’t change.

I’ll go for the latter kind of book this time. I’ll write it in first person p.o.v.—which is always easy for me. About an average Joe. In fact call him Joe. Joe Cube, echoing the A Square of Abbott’s extradimensional romp, Flatland. Have him be Joe, a Silicon Valley middle-manager, not overly bright. Joe is prone to using stale biz lingo. “Walk the walk.” “The big cats are hunting.”

He has this one crazy hacker working for him, a guy called Spazz. Joe can almost understand Spazz, now and then.

“Can you explain chaos to me one more time?”

Maybe the title is Spaceland. Joe’s wife is Jena. Spazz’s girlfriend is an Indian woman named Tulip. Do a temporary crossover pattern for the love plot. A loss, a swap, and a return. Like this:

(Joe + Jena) & (Spazz + Tulip)

(Joe) & (Spazz + Jena+ Tulip)

(Joe + Tulip) & (Spazz + Jena)

(Joe + Tulip) & (Spazz) & (Jena)

We’re going off Cozumel to see Mayan ruins near Tulum later today. Reminds me of Burroughs in the Yage Letters, of course. So many Mayan faces here, the reddish skin, back-sloping forehead, rounded-off nose, mouth small, or wide and level, like the faces in the ancient carvings.

Their big obsession with the calendar had to do, I believe, with a fear that time would stop if the exact same date ever came up again. Like our atavistic fear of 1/1/00.

Amazing visit to a ziggurat in the jungle. Waiting to enter the Coba ruins site, Sylvia, Isabel and I sit by the road, resting with some Mayans. A heavy visionary feeling. A soundless telepathic buzz. It’s like being in a painting.

In the jungle, I lie on the top step of a vine-broken ziggurat, pretending I’m about to become a human sacrifice, yelling, “Cut out my beating heart and raise it to the rising sun!”

Much to Isabel’s embarrassment.

March 10, 2000. Bruegel Picture Changes as I Work.

I’m writing the chapter of my Bruegel novel that connects with his great painting, The Hunters in the Snow. I’m relating each chapter to one single painting. I’ve been a little scared of the Hunters in the Snow chapter. It’s a big one.

Just now I had a kind of spooky-feeling experience. I figured out that Peter would be using what they called a Belgian wagon to haul his six Seasons pictures up to Antwerp, and I was wondering if a wagon like that could make it through the snow, and I looked over at the Hunters in the Snow reproduction that I have on my wall by my desk, and I felt like there was a twinkling twitch in the middle of the picture, and then all of a sudden I could see a Belgian wagon there.

I’m imagining, just for fun, that the Belgian wagon didn’t used to be in The Hunters in the Snow at all. That in fact Bruegel’s pictures are changing a little bit as I write about them. But the changes are uniform across all of spacetime, so when, in the year 2000, my copy of Hunters in the Snow changes, so do all the other copies, past and future, and everyone’s memories about the picture change to match. Reality shifts to a slightly different parallel sheet. And although I am capable of noticing this change at the very instant when it happens, afterwards I can never be sure.

March 11, 2000. Qlippoth Computer Crash.

At school I have students with their heads shaved on the sides, and with the tuft of hair on top dyed raspberry and moussed into spikes like the cartoon character Jughead’s crown. These are just regular kids, not even punks. They have the hairdos I used to see in comic books that tried to show the year 2000.

Driving some back roads home from work, I see a seedy neon bar called Coconut Willy’s. And two or three doors down from it is Thanh Binh Billiards. So San Jose.

I keep on thinking about how amazing it is to be in the Year 2000. And I’m teaching computer science. Unbelievable.

The other day I gave an in-class exam, where the students have an hour and a half to write some programs on the machines that are at their desks. And then I collect their work over the network. And to make this work, they have to follow a certain rather tricky set of steps to ensure that although they can download the test questions, they can’t communicate with each other during the test. And if you don’t do the steps your machine will stop working.

But this one Chinese woman didn’t listen to my instructions, instead she wanted to get a jump on the others by starting right in on the test. And then five minutes into the test, she’s in tears and she’s frantically yelling.

“My computer throw up! My computer throw up!”

Turns out she meant to say “froze up.”

So I calm her down and get her going again.

I’m teaching my Software Engineering students how to write videogames, and to make this feasible, they’re using a code framework that I’ve been writing for them over the last few years. Today, thinking about all the unexpected bugs and glitches a programmer encounters, this phrase from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow popped into my mind:

…stumblebum magicians who can’t help leaving themselves wide open for disastrous visits from the Qlippoth…

I’ve divided the class into teams, and they work on their semester game projects during my class meetings. Today a team of Indian women had a crash involving what’s called a null pointer. A pointer is an address that’s supposed to match a location where some data object lives, but if the pointer is zero, then it’s a so-called null pointer, and the program freaks out at the sight of it, and stops working. In this context, the null pointer is the Qlippoth. Making a disastrous visit.

I saw another form of the Qlippoth last week—it manifested itself as the dreaded blue screen of death—the screen you see at crash time on certain kinds of machines, it’s an unnatural mouthwash shade of blue, with lots of coarse-textured cryptic white letters and numbers on it.

I looked online and found out lots about the Qlippoth. The word is both singular and plural. It’s from the Kaballah. It means a hollow shell, a rind, or a demon. Here’s a choice quote:

But something stands at the doorway…that manifests itself as the terrifying whirlwind, the obscuring cloud, and the punishing fire which Ezekiel faced… The Jewish mystics call these phenomena the Qlippoth, which means the empty shells or the husks. We may think of the Qlippoth as the debris from the wreckage of a Reality which preceded the Creation of our World. It is, in fact, the desolate, chaotic wreckage left by the Fall of the Angels.

A perfect metaphor for a null pointer crash. A demonic hollow shell.

March 27-30, 2000. Visiting NYC.

I’m here in New York on my own for five days. I came out to see my editors and to visit Georgia. I’m sleeping on a mat on the rug in her living room. It’s quite comfortable.

The first night we had supper in a good SoHo restaurant, then went to the famous CBGB’s—the club where the Ramones and Blondie got their start, really just a crowded, lively, grotty New York City bar, smaller than I’d imagined, a train-car-sized place. The band was Nebula, with a psychedelic punk sound with lots of echo and a strikingly weird lead singer, nearly seven feet tall, continually pointing and beckoning and throwing himself around like a Muppet sock-puppet. It was nice to be in the wash of sound, and a relief to hear live music that rocks.

We went by the Met just long enough for me to make sure that there really is a shitting man in front of the farmhouse in the deep background of The Harvesters, like I claimed in my Bruegel book.

Later I cruised by a retrospective of the video artist Nam June Paik in the Guggenheim. A candle burning inside a hollowed out TV, just like a candle in a jack’o’lantern. Paik slogan: “The Moon Is The First TV.”

Another day, Georgia and I took the train down to Princeton to spend the night with Roger Shatzkin, his new wife Wendy, and their 2-year-old daughter Natasha, a.k.a. Tash. It was touching to pass through Highland Park on the train with Georgia. The first town where Sylvia and I lived, the town where Rudy Jr. and Georgia were born. I drew her a floor plan of the apartment. It was nice to see Georgia with baby Natasha, Georgia being so mild and calm. She reminded me of my mother, my grandmother, myself, and of Sylvia being a mother in New Jersey all those years ago.

Too much time, too many years, how can you live with it? And I have another whole third of my life to come. I could become crippled by my longing for the past. When I went to meet my editor Dave Hartwell at the Tor Books offices in the Flatiron Building at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, the nostalgia totally sand-bagged me.

I was remembering Pop showing me the Flatiron Building in early March, 1958, right before I flew to Germany for my year of school there, forty-two years ago, Pop and me in front of this same building. For an instant there, the sidewalk became a watery surface of deep time—time like an ocean of tears, us up here in the storm, swept ever onward. How proud Pop would be to see me coming to meet my editor and talking to the man about selling him my next two books.

At times Georgia is brave and optimistic about her current prospects; other times she worries about anything working out. Talking about this with me in the cab, she was looking out the window, and I could only see her big smooth cheek, the same-shaped cheek I remember from when she was my little darling three-year-old. My little girl alone in the world’s playground.

May 24, 2000. Finishing Bruegel Novel.

I wrote the last page of my Bruegel novel on May 15. It seems like a wonderful book. Very moving. What a thing it is, to have achieved this years-long dream. I hardly know what to think. I don’t think I could have pulled it off if I hadn’t been sober.

If I could pick the cover illustration, I’d use Bruegel’s weird engraving, The Beekeepers—which shows some guys with their heads completely encased in wicker baskets. It’s so surrealistic, and not like what people expect. Very much like a Magritte. It would be a kick for the reader to find out my version of the secret meaning of this picture in the novel’s last chapters—where they decapitate a guy and catch his severed head in a…wicker basket. On the inside of the book, I’m going to include black and white images of the sixteen paintings that inspire the novel’s sixteen chapters.

Today, as chance would have it, a package of the Portuguese edition of Software arrived at my door. And what do they have on the cover? A detail of Bosch’s Removal of the Stone of Folly. Vaguely synchronistic.

June 15-16, 2000. Big Sur. The One & the Many.

Sylvia is off in Geneva visiting her father again. I’m going there to join her in a week, but for now I’m on a camping trip in Big Sur.

I’m starting this entry at Esalen, after two days of backpacking around Vicente Flats in the southern part of Big Sur, 120 miles from Los Gatos. I spent the first night by a creek under huge redwoods, the exact same spot where I camped four years ago when I was just figuring out how to stay in recovery.

The other day someone said, “Draw a big circle and put an X in the middle. That’s the center of the universe. Now put a dot on the rim of the circle. That’s you.”

This remark came back to me when I saw the busy actions of the creatures in the woods. A glen of white flowers with a moth fluttering above each of them, the moths all in synch, all doing their thing. I’m not the center. Nothing would change if I were dead. I encountered a swarm of ladybugs down by a stream, maybe a hundred thousand of them. I was naked, swimming, they landed all over me, decorating me.

I saw a beetle with a rakish yet bedraggled angle to his antennae that made me laugh. Who says bugs don’t have personality?

And I saw a lizard who made an especially lovely jump, landing on his four flexed legs, the lizard on a rock in the setting sun near my tent on a high ridge the second night, and I had the feeling the lizard was showing off for me, like a boy showing a passerby his mastery of his toys, like me in 1954 Louisville, trying to do extra-good sled-rides down the hill in our front-yard for the benefit of the infrequently passing motorists.

In the woods, I was struck once again by the power of the idea of having a personal relationship with god. The cosmic One is everywhere, it’s the billow of the pillow beneath me. It’s playing hide and seek, slyly winking from the redwood knotholes. A calm, noble, bearded-hippie, god-face gazes at me from the petals of a flower. I want to believe these ideas, I like trying them on for size, but I don’t always take them seriously.

As I did four years ago, I rose at 3 am to pee, alone in the spooky moonlit dark. Always the lurking fear of something darting out from the gloom, taking shape from the inchoate forms of night, the thud and crunch of it hitting me. Praying helps some, but only if you can fully get into it, which I wasn’t quite able to do. I was more in a Pluralist than a Monist frame of mind.

In saying this, I’m referring to the William James book, A Pluralistic Universe. He’s comparing the appeal of Monism vs. Pluralism. Alone in the woods at night it’s comforting to be a Monist, and to imagine there being an overarching One mind. If you’re a Pluralist, you feel like you’re surrounded by a myriad of diverse, teeming, tiny, willful, unappeasable, capricious forces. Like the insects.

I decided I couldn’t hack a second night in the dark redwood glen, and for the second night, I moved my camp up to the high, exposed top of a ridge. In the afternoon I grew impatient for the Sun to go down as I was way too hot—turns out it was a hundred degrees up in San Francisco that day. I calmed myself, thinking, “Relax. The sun always goes down. And then it comes up again.”

And then, eventually, I got to see the Sun going down on one side of my high ridge and the Moon coming up on the other. Amazing. I could feel the Earth turn, and over my shoulder I could see the Big Dipper pointing to the North Star, the spindle of the turning.

When I arose to pee during this second night, the Dipper had swung around to a new position, still holding its homely familiar shape, its cup still pointing to the North star. Mother Earth rolling in her sleep, moving the Moon across her sky. She’s alive! Carrying me on her back like a tick.

Now it’s a day later, and I’m in a coffee shop in the Haight. I drove up Route 1 from Esalen, all along the ocean, billows of fog coming in as I hit San Francisco—ah, the eternal excitement of entering this psychedelic city.

I’m doing a reading at Booksmith, I’ll read the part from Realware about Randy Karl Tucker telling all the weird things he saw on Haight Street on April Fool’s Day after everyone got a certain kind of magic wand. In writing this, I was thinking of the Dr. Seuss book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

I get to the city an hour early, walk up and down Haight. I’m a Dharma bum back from visionary nights in Big Sur. Patchy fog with the sky like a stretched blue membrane. Up above the Roberts Hardware—one of the few “real” stores on Haight Street—I glimpse an alien apparition, the “control” tower, yes it’s a three-tined modernistic transmission tower up there, no doubt beaming down our brain commands. And I know I’m not the first guy standing here to have noticed it.

Magic San Francisco.

At my reading, a woman asks me, “What’s your theory of everything?” I realized I haven’t thought about this question in quite some time. My old way of answering a question like this was to focus on some particular reductionistic modeling mechanism. For me, “everything” has variously been: curved spacetime, infinite sets, fractals, and cellular automata.

But if you ponder the “theory of everything” question, you soon get into the question of why anything exists at all. Where does the everything come from? The cheap answer is to talk about the Big Bang. But that doesn’t really do the job, as then you can still ask where the Big Bang came from. And you don’t get much of an answer there. Maybe just, “It’s an unexplainable miracle.”

As I keep saying, in recent years I’ve started thinking of god as being more of an actual reality, and this changes my answers. What if reality is a series of thoughts in god’s mind? Or, more simply, what if the reality we inhabit is god? Whenever I talk this way, I try to make it clear that I’m using “god” in a philosophical or in a mystical sense, and that I’m not a born-again Bible-thumper.

The idea of a ubiquitous god that supports reality isn’t a totally new angle for me. In my 1984 book, The Fourth Dimension, I have the following passage:

Eternity is right outside of spacetime. Eternity is right now…In one of his sermons, the fourteenth-century priest and mystic Meister Eckhart expressed the basic ideas as vividly as anyone before or since:

“A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.

“To talk about the world as being made by god tomorrow, or yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and as near to god as this very instant.”

The unexplainable miracle of raw existence taints your world no matter what your “theory of everything.” Why not go ahead and revel in the taint! Why not let the cosmic singularity into each instant? Why not let each thought bask in the joy of divine creation?

For me, when I write things like this—it snaps the world into beauty. Everything gets yellow and stony. And I’m high on mysticism.

June 20, 2000. Why Write My Journal?

Why do I enjoy writing a journal? I can think of seven reasons.

Identity. After my roles of husband and father, the most essential thing about me is that I am a writer. For me to write is to be myself. When I’m writing, I feel I have a reason to exist.

Companionship. I don’t speak as clearly as I write. And it’s rare that anyone wants to listen to me talk at any great length about my arcane interests. The page is a patient conversational partner.

Self-discovery. In writing, I unearth thoughts I didn’t know I had. And then I rewrite, organizing the thoughts into clear patterns.

Social utility. The journal writings can seed commercial works. If people enjoy reading what I write, I’m performing a social good. And I can get money and recognition for this.

Transcendence. I become an observer rather than just a participant. I get out of myself. I see things from a broader perspective. I forget my quotidian worries.

Craftsmanship. I enjoy honing and exercising my craft. Writing a journal works at multiple levels: choosing the mot juste, building balanced sentences, forming paragraphs that express well-formed thoughts, writing journal entries that have an essay-like cohesion or perhaps a narrative zap, orchestrating the flow of the entries into a developmental arc.

Immortality. When I record what I’m thinking and doing, I’m making a temporary barrier against my eventual obliteration by time’s flow. On a more practical level—I tend to forget things, and looking back on my journals brings the past back.

Voices of Ireland

June 26, 2000. Geneva, Brussels, Ghent.

So now I’m back with Sylvia, I went to meet her in Geneva, the same city where I courted her. I first came there in 1964, after my freshman year at college, and since then I’ve been back about once a year. Say thirty times in all. We’re always houseguests of Sylvia’s family in Geneva—in principle obligated to be with them for formal lunches.

This means that our times out in the city, just the two of us, have often felt like stolen hours. You might even say that our memories of the various spots around Geneva are associated with feelings of secrecy and haste.

Watching TV in Geneva I see a European variety show at a nightclub. A man juggles a ten-foot wireframe cube of chrome pipe. Twirling it, stepping in and out of it. Attacked by a hypercube onstage. I’m starting to think about my next novel, Spaceland.

So we leave Geneva and head for Ireland, by way of Belgium. We stop in at Ghent (Gand in Flemish). Looking out the train window, I see Bruegel’s fields, with disorganized bushes and little trees grown up along the fence lines. Cows in the fields, some lying down.

We come upon a Renaissance fair in the heart of Ghent. People in costumes in striped tents, hay bales scattered around. Jugglers, bagpipers, dancers, acrobats, a strongman, and two people playing chess. For a small fee, I’m allowed to shoot a crossbow four times—this feels synchronistic, as I had Bruegel do this in my book. A woman in a Renaissance velvet dress instructs me, speaking softly in Flemish. Her skin is clear, her eyes a wonderful pale gray blue, pink cheeks. Her voice like a quiet trickle of water. It’s good to hear the low, quiet Flemish from a “Mayken,” even though I don’t understand a word.

The watery feel of the bonfire, its flames pale in the daylight, its eye-smarting smoke welcome enough, as it accompanies the heat. A man wears a shirt divided vertically, brown on the left, red on the right.

Later Sylvia and I sit in a cafe called Zenon. A feeling of deep peace. The owner helps his little spotted dog to hop up onto a chair.

Regarding Bruegel, I have the nagging feeling that I missed something in my first draft of the novel about him. I made him too passive. Like me. And I have a despairing feeling that, in the end, I don’t really know Bruegel at all. I’m gathering my strength for a rewrite. But first I want to hear some feedback from an editor.

There’s a Flemish saying: “Kwaad ei, kwaad kuiken,” which means, “A bad egg makes a bad chicken. “ I like repeating the saying to myself. We go to visit the Brussels museum with Bruegel’s paintings. In his Fall of the Rebel Angels, we see a wonderfully bizarre kwaad kuiken hatching out of a kwaad ei.

I’m thinking that Bruegel would see the brush strokes that it would take to paint something. Looking at a flower, he’d see a stroke per petal. His hand might twitch a little as he looks, as if holding a brush. I also think of Bruegel’s ability to see outlines, like Toulouse-Lautrec could do. The masses and shapes. The patches.

As a literary analogue to this, I’d like to put concise verbal descriptions of people’s faces into the Bruegel novel. Using two or three adjectives like deft brush strokes. So I’m making word sketches on the scrap of paper I always carry in my pocket. Here we go.

Her small mouth like a slit in the crust of an uncooked pie.

His meekly fuzzed pate bowed in a doze.

A girl with a sweet rectangular face, private and dreaming. Serious. Her rapid long legs. “Life is no laughing matter.”

Woman on the boat. Big teeth, flat greasy hair, a smile like a grimace.

A man playing cards. Long gentle eyelashes. A crisp nose, a mouth with a sensual wriggle.

Man smoking. Face blooming with broken veins, hair like straw, eyes mild and fearful.

June 28, 2000. Bruges. Bike Bruegel’s Lands.

Bruges was called “Bruges-la-morte” at the turn of the century, Bruges the Dead. It’s a fully medieval town. In spots you can stand in an intersection and see only sixteenth-century buildings in every direction, along with lovely canals. Almshouses, palaces. Very Bruegelian. We stay there for a couple of nights.

We see a few pictures in a local museum. There’s a Flemish woman there I stare at. White long blouse, red skirt, white hair, transparent old skin, knobbed features, bright blue eyes. She’s suspicious of my intent gaze.

Sylvia has warned me about this. “You stare really hard at someone and smile vaguely. They don’t know you’re already thinking about something else, but forgot to move your neck.”

There’s an old painted copy of a Bruegel painting in the museum, and I hear the Flemish woman say the man’s name. She says, “Brögel.” Not Broogel or Broygel but Broegel or Brögel. Or maybe it’s more like Bröckel.

I go on a bike tour in Bruges. One of my fellow cyclists, a Julie from Florida, has a perfect California-girl accent. I figure the trick is to drop your jaw slack (as if in shock) at the end of the words you wish to emphasize. Go straight to open-mouthed astonishment. So say “It was emp-taaah,” instead of “It was emp-tee.”

Great to be in the Bruegel landscapes. The tall gently curving trees that I’d noticed so much in pictures like Magpie on the Gallows—these trees line the canals. They’re poplars. With heart-shaped leaves. The knobbed Flemish trees with sprouts coming out of them are willows. The peasants cut off the branches each year because a tree sucks up twice as much water from the ground if it’s sprouting. And one of the reasons to have a tree is to dry the soggy soil.

A huge stench from the cows. A different stink from the sheep.

On the train from Bruges towards England they give us Roode Pelikaan (Red Pelican) brand cookies and Sylvia starts calling me that, joyously opening her mouth wide for the double A of the Pelikaan.

To cross the English Channel, we switch from the train to a hovercraft that goes from Ostende to Dover. Mounted on the hovercraft wall is an ad with a photo of an athlete smiling. Usually you tend to imitate a smile, to internalize it, to empathize. But in this picture, there’s no human personality behind the smile. Only a bundle of ganglia the size of a lemon, and the bared teeth like those of a resting dog or horse, or like the arrangement of a plant’s petals. Nobody home.

I’m thinking of my character Joe Cube for Spaceland. What is it like to be unintelligent? Limited? Unimaginative? And yet to be human, lovable, and interesting.

I get a “British breakfast” on the hovercraft. Scrambled eggs, some fried ham (a.k.a. rashers), a fried tomato quarter, and two ragged sausages, exactly the shape and size of loose turds, covered over with watery brown baked beans, just as if someone had taken a dump on my plate. Coming out of the shitter someone might report on their bowel movement by saying, I now imagine, “I did a sausage, but no beans.” Or the other way around. Gag.

We take a train across England and Wales to get the ferry onward from Holyhead to Dublin.

June 30, 2000. Touring Dublin. Bonbon.

Today we toured a recreated 1800 home of a Dublin merchant. A Georgian house, five floors, set up for a big family. It was all so small and the furniture so ugly, and everything so primitive and crude. They had an exercise machine that was a seat with springs and two hand-holds on either side and for exercise the merchant would sit and jounce himself up and down—so as to reproduce the effects of riding horseback, like the aristocrats. The bouncing was imagined to be good for the internal organs.

The lady of the house had a “pole screen,” which was an embroidered or painted screen adjustable in position on a pole which was set between her face and the fire so that her wax-based makeup wouldn’t melt off and so that her skin didn’t acquire any permanent coloring.

All in all, the little Georgian house seemed sad, or maybe that was just the mood I was in. The striving. The ugly wallpaper and ugly floor-coverings. I can understand why the vigorous broom of Modernism and Bauhaus seemed so salutary by 1900.

The house put me in mind of A Square’s comment upon returning to Flatland:

“Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness—which was not to become my Universe again—spread out before my eye. Then a darkness. Then a final all-consummating thunder-peal; and when I came to myself, I was once more a common creeping Square, in my Study at home.”

Dublin is a boozer’s paradise, and I feel somewhat left-out. A particularly disturbing ad that I see everywhere shows a glass of Guinness in which the top of the glass holds a softly smiling peaceful moonface, carved into the foam.

“I’ve seen that face,” I tell Sylvia. “I’ve seen it lots of times.”

The National Library’s reading room is barrel-vaulted and the vault coffered, with the individual squares painted different shades of blue. I sit there thinking about hyperspace viewpoints. Outside of space, you could easily rotate and jump around. You could put your eye down next to anything. If you were slightly ana from space, you could see through things. (Following the nineteenth-century mathematician and author Charles H. Hinton, I use the words “ana” and “kata” as four-dimensional analogues of “up” and “down.”)

What “light” would you be seeing with, once you’re outside of space? Our ordinary light is limited to our 3D space—it doesn’t leak out into 4D hyperspace. You would need to have some higher-dimensional light that the Spacelanders don’t even notice. Call it the higher light or the subtle light.

In Dublin, Sylvia and I briefly lost each other, and when I finally found her, she was in a cafe in her pale yellow pullover, her skin a nice peachy shade, her hair silver-blonde, and she looked like the best treat in the patisserie, the sweetest morsel, my bonbon. Of course I started calling her “Bonbon.”

And of course she says, “I’m not your bonbon.”

July 5-6, 2000. Sheepshead Cliff. Swarthy.

Hiking on Sheepshead peninsula, one of the fingers sticking out of the southwest of Ireland. I was sitting at the edge of a five hundred foot sheer stone cliff carved out of the land by the beating surf, looking down at the seagulls gliding. Wondrous.

How a height like this always draws me forward, what a longing to yield to the rapture of the lethal fall. One sublimates this into a desire to fly. But, no, I wouldn’t fly, and how it would hurt to smash against that first jutting rock, and to tumble all the rest of the way down, breaking.

Could Joe Cube use some hyperspace machinations to survive if he jumped off a cliff? Oh, sure. SF makes all things possible.

The next day, I rented a bike and rode up onto some hills above Kenmare. Out in the country I take a shit in the hedge by the side of the road, cover it, and shortly after I hear horses. It’s two ethereal blonde Irish girls riding big-hoofed horses. One actually says “Top of the morning” to me, and it’s not a joke. They’re so Celtic that I feel hunchbacked, hook-nosed and swarthy, like Philip Roth watching the ice-skaters in Portnoy’s Complaint. And I had just shit in the hedge.

I see a little mare with fern fronds in her mane and forelock. Her forelock is dark brown, and blonde at the ends as if frosted. The shock of hair hangs forward over her lively eyes. She crops some grass, big teeth, an Equine Princess. Dainty, dainty hooves. Her stallion is at her side. I feed them yellow flowers.

A solitary lamb in the meadow feeding. It pauses, pricking its ears—harkening to my sounds. Beside the stream, the thick long meadow grass lies combed by the overflow from yesterday’s rain, ferns mixed in with the grasses.

The Software Movie Dies

July 16, 2000. Turning into Pop.

Yesterday Isabel came down from San Francisco to visit for a day. Sylvia mentioned the anniversaries of my parents’ deaths, Mom nine years ago on July 14, Pop six years ago on August 1.

I told Isabel, yet another time, Pop’s old story about the boy who comes home from school and they tell him, “Pop’s dead,” and the boy is crying and crying, but then his dog runs up to him and he’s all happy and he says, “I’d thought you said pup is dead!”

And I connected that story to a recollection of how, when Arf died six months after Pop, I cried even more than when Pop died, but really it had been the same feelings coming out because I hadn’t let myself cry enough when Pop had died, and in any case it was kind of fitting, given the Pup/Pop tale. Pop loved the “Pup’s dead” story. Over the years, he must have told it to me twenty times.

A little later in the day, Sylvia and Isabel are sitting on a bench, and I sit down between them, and I say what Pop would always say at such a time: “A thorn between two roses.”

And Isabel groans at the corny old line and says, “Pup’s dead.”

More and more often I get that doddering feeling of being like my father. Especially around the kids.

Unrelated story: A guy tells me he’s been an engineer for fifteen years and that he finally got a job in marketing instead.

“I wanted to see what it was like to be the guy shitting on people. Giving the engineers T-shirts.”

“They’re not insulted when you do that?”

“They like getting T-shirts. They’re engineers.”

July 30, 2000. Seeing World as Shapes and Colors.

Something I’ve been trying to do lately is to see the world as shapes and colors. I try to do this in particular when I go jogging or biking in the morning, and occasionally at other times in the day. It’s a way to get high. A way to get off the gerbil-wheel of my customary wheenk. A way to get some serenity.

The point of the exercise is to get away from judging and expecting. Not to be judging what you see, like, not to judge the way that your neighbor in the McMansion up the hill has gravel in his driveway that’s spreading all over the street. Not to judge, but just to see the shapes and colors. The way I saw things when I was a boy. The way I saw things when I’d smoke pot. Just the shapes and the colors, and the sounds and the air-currents, just the physical givens.

And, equally important, don’t be expecting or fearing or looking forward or planning. If I do the full exercise then, as I wrote somewhere earlier in these notes, I can be high, as opposed to wishing I could get high.

Taking it to another level, sometimes when people ask me to do things I don’t want to do, I get defensively snappish. But on a good day, I can process an unwelcome request as “shapes and colors.” Not as something I have to get tense about.

In other words, I don’t have to be all, “I don’t want to do that! Leave me alone! Don’t boss me!” Not if conversation is just shapes and colors, just parts of a lifelong opera.

These days I worry about my three books: starting the Bruegel revisions that maybe I can’t carry off, finishing my Nth Videogame Projects rewrite which is like trying to hack through kudzu that grows as fast as I can move, and starting Spaceland. I feel overwhelmed and helpless and ineffectual. But, hey! It’s just shapes and colors.

The other day on the beach, I had a big shapes-and-colors vision of humanity. I saw the new babies coming in, and the old people dying off. I saw a speeded up image of the process—it was a seething kind of thing, like Zhabotinsky waves of population, like rotating nested scrolls.

August 21, 2000. Blown Story Pitch at Phoenix.

Phoenix sends me Trevor Sands’s latest script for Software. They hate it. And, yes, it’s terrible, the worst yet, nothing but identical characters yelling and shooting in a big concrete tunnel. No more robot evolution, no more brain-eating—just generals and colonels shouting orders, and the enemy is a 1970s mainframe talking via a face on a big video screen. So stale and lame.

So now Phoenix is flying me down to Hollywood to talk things over with them—flying me first class with a limo pickup! I’m dreaming that they’ll finally let me write a version of the script.

I’m trying to work up a good story pitch. Phoenix has spent close to two million by now, but they’re on the point of pulling the plug. This has gone on for so long that it seems kind of unreal by now. But it’s more fun to think about than my software engineering book. And, hey, did I mention that I get to fly first class? Hog heaven.

So I fly down and a limo picks me up at LAX and the driver’s talking about the Business, as they call it down here. She’s happy to hear I’m going to a script meeting. My agent Steve Freedman is waiting in the street outside Phoenix. He’s more feral, more weasel-like than I remembered. He’s wearing a Hollywood shirt, a Mexican kind of white shirt hanging out. I’m wearing black silk pants, black silk sportshirt, black silk jacket and wraparound black shades. Mr. Cyberpunk.

Seeing Steve, and remembering all the manic things he’s been saying on the phone, I start thinking of the Seinfeld show when Jerry and George go to CBS to pitch their idea for a sit-com series. Steve is George. I tell him to keep his mouth shut in the meeting and not be throwing in extra story ideas. I’m gonna get enough of those from Medavoy the producer and probably from his assistants as well. And at the end of the meeting, Steve will speak up to nail our deal.

So we go inside. It’s my third time here, a little three-story brick building across from the Sony lot—Sony does distribution for Phoenix—and Steve’s never been inside. In fact, I now learn, he’s never laid eyes on Medavoy, despite all his gossip. We have to cool our heels in a side room for a half hour, chatting with Brad Fisher, an assistant producer. Mike Medavoy is stuck in a meeting, running a little late.

“So who’s he meeting with?” I ask.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

The Terminator! Right here! He’d be perfect for the villainous evil robot in our movie. Arnold is starring in a film called The Sixth Day that Phoenix is releasing in November. I’m impressed. I switch seats with Freedman so I’m in position to see Arnold walk by.

He’s short, as the big stars always are. He glances over, checking us out. And then he’s gone into the elevator with his body-guard before I can really react. The rest of the day I’m kicking myself for not running over and handing him a paperback copy of Software that I have along. Oh well.

“Like he’d care about that,” says Freedman.

Finally it’s time to go in with Medavoy. It’s him, me, Freedman, Brad Fisher, and another assistant producer. That guy appears to be wearing foundation makeup and lipstick. Or maybe he’s made of plastic.

My focus is on Medavoy. I’m trying to come on strong. He’s starting to tell me how worried he is about the project, how he’s embarrassed to have spent two million and having nothing to show for it—not even a decent plot line. He says he’d like the film to be something I could be proud of and that he could be proud of. He wants it to be intelligent and he’d like someone intelligent to work on it.

“I’m you’re man,” I put in.

He goes on. “Maybe, but you can’t just go back to the book. And it can’t be too complicated. Those earlier treatments you did, they didn’t work. They were confusing.”

So I start my pitch. I think it’s going really well and I dunno, maybe ten minutes go by, and I’m still in the first act.

Medavoy says, “Tell me the second act before I have to kill myself.”

No coddling here! I begin rushing through the rest of it, but he stops me after I’ve barely started the third act. He interrupts me while I’m talking about the tanker-ship full of mind-virus-spray that I’ve tacked on.

“Hard to make that work.”

And then he tells us how he’s envisioned the movie. A simple thing, really. A thriller. A strike at the spaceport. As he talks, Medavoy seamlessly works in some of the ideas I just said, like a thing about having two castes of bopper robots in different-looking bodies. He does this so smoothly that I can’t tell if he’d thought of these ideas before, or if he’s just appropriated them that fast. But if he’s taking stuff from me that’s good, no?

And then Medavoy drifts, terrifyingly, into stuff about the military.

“Big base on the Moon. Like the Pentagon, but it’s, I dunno, why not the Octagon.”

I’m so flabbergasted I don’t understand. “Octagon?”

“Like the Pentagon where the military is. I was just there last week. They have two war rooms now. For a two-front war. One with a map of Europe, the other with the Far East.”

At this point I glance over at Steve Freedman, and Steve is grinning ear to ear, nodding like he’s a plaster dog with his head on a spring. Those things you used to see in the rear windows of 1950s cars.

I tell Medavoy that I don’t want a big military presence in our movie. He doesn’t care that much about this point. Whatever works. But he doesn’t want to spend any more money till he knows what he’s doing next. If I can write a treatment he likes, and write it for free, then he’ll think about it, and maybe let me write a script.

And then Medavoy is hustling us out, and I say to my agent, “Did you want to say something now, Steve?”

And Steve is all shrugging, “No, nothing.”

And I’m like, “Are you sure?”

And Steve finally goes, “Who do you see directing this?”

And Medavoy says, “Who do you see?”

And Steve says some name I don’t know.

So then we’re outside and I have the feeling I kind of blew the pitch, so I’m taking it out on Steve. “What happened to your staying in the office till we get a deal?”

And Steve is like mortally offended. “Are you kidding? Didn’t you hear me? I gave him a name. Put an idea in his head. Planted a seed. It’s up to you to get the deal. It’s all up to you.”

So we walk across the street and have lunch in the Sony cafeteria, a couple of Hollywood losers, Steve and me, cheering ourselves up with thick sandwiches and staircase wit.

Medavoy had wanted a concrete threat at the end of the movie. So I start rapping about a flying hypodermic needle, picking up the frilly banquet-toothpick from my sandwich and zooming it around, menacing Steve with it, and he’s laughing hard and I decide, yes, this is the new wrinkle I need, and in the rewrite I do over the weekend, I will in fact add a robot mosquito that’s programmed to sting the President of the United States to put an evil robot personality into him.

After lunch I talk with Steve some more. This is the longest I’ve ever seen him, so we’re getting to know each other a little. It turns out his father was in the Business as well, a not-too-successful agent. Steve is like Willy Loman Jr.—the Hollywood version, a small-time agent who’s a small-time agent’s son. Native guide. He certainly seems pretty clear on the protocol.

Before the limo comes to take me back, I go back into Phoenix and chat with that assistant producer Brad Fisher for fifteen minutes, trying to get his take on our meeting. He doesn’t express any definite opinions—he still hasn’t gotten the word from Mike. He wants me to look at Trevor Sands’s latest script, just came in yesterday. Script #10. Brad wants me to make comments, but by now I don’t see any point. He reads me a paragraph or two from the Sands script anyway, his voice filled with wonder.

“Cobb made a software copy of himself,” marvels Brad. Like I’ve never heard this idea. Maybe everyone here has totally forgotten the contents of my novel—if they ever knew them. It’s a mirror maze.

September 6, 2000. Software Movie Dies.

I write up a fresh treatment, but I don’t hear anything more from Phoenix. On August 31, 2000, Freedman tells me that Phoenix says the option expires September 1, 2000, while lately Steve’s been telling me it expires at the end of October. I dig out the option agreement—panic—it really does expires September 1. I’d forgotten.

On September 1, Medavoy sends a short fax, “Thanks for sending me your Software treatment, but it just doesn’t do it for me. At this stage I’m not sure how we’re going to proceed with this project, but I will of course keep you informed.”

I’m deflated and weary. Screenwriting isn’t for me. Writing a novel, that’s where it’s at. I’ve been stressing out like mad over, I now realize, a will-o-the-wisp. It’s time to relax and enjoy the life I have. That is, enjoy my family and my job and the new novel I’m starting. That’s reality.

We enter the no-option limbo. I’m still vaguely fantasizing that they’ll come back and renew it again. Steve Freedman wants to do nothing. He presents this as a strategy.

“I won’t return their calls. I’ll be under the action. They’ll be getting more and more worried. They’ll think we’re shopping it around.”

Whatever. As if.

Meanwhile Medavoy phones and say’s I’m free to walk, with their blessing. Sell it wherever I can. He adds that maybe the film could still be made. He says he’s sure I could write a good script, if I wanted to. He wonders when I’ll be down around L.A. again.

I’m briefly tempted by the thought of writing a script for free—on spec as they say. Take it to Phoenix and maybe they’d buy it. But, wait. If they don’t use it, my writing work has gone for nothing. As my film-critic friend Kenny Turan once told me, being a scriptwriter can be like selling your paintings to a collector who…burns everything he buys in his fireplace. I don’t want to go there.

I decided this was a good time to switch to a new movie agent, and I got in touch with Marty Shapiro, who is the film agent for Bill Gibson, Harlan Ellison, and John Shirley. He’s not a lone wolf like Steve Freedman. When you phone Marty, a secretary answers the phone.

So Shapiro checked in with Phoenix on my behalf, and Medavoy told him to forget it. Shapiro didn’t bother showing Software to any other producers. The thing is dead as a doornail.

Over the ten years of renewals, I guess I must have gotten a hundred fifty thousand off the option money. It was an interesting ride. But now it’s done. I’m ready to let go.

Spaceland

September 15, 2000. Started Writing Spaceland.

I don’t feel like getting into the Bruegel book revisions yet, not if Hartwell won’t even make a firm offer.

So I got started on Spaceland. It’s a riff off Flatland. It’s set in Y2K Silicon Valley, and the main character is a guy who can see in the fourth dimension.

The book is going good, writing itself. I didn’t ever work out the outline of the plot, I just wanted to start writing a book. I didn’t want my fall semester to kick in without having a live novel to play with. Something to love, something that makes me happy to think about.

Not trying to knock it outta the park this time, just writing it. I think of a passage in Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler:

She said that she feels the need to see someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins—that’s how she put it.

That’s exactly the kind of writer I most want to be, growing a book every year or two. My new pumpkin is getting orange in the fall sun. That’s the ticket.

Actually, writing Spaceland isn’t as easy as I’m making it sound. I’m having some trouble figuring out a consistent mental model for the world I’m setting up. I’m nearing a stage that Robert Sheckley used to call the first black spot. When you’re writing a novel you generally hit two black spots. It’s like a book has three acts, with intermissions between the acts. And the two intermissions are the two black spots. One between the start and the middle, and one between the middle and the end.

So the first black spot is when you’ve gotten things going, and then you don’t know what the real action is going to me. You’ve hammered your cantilevered platform of sentences pretty far out off the edge of the cliff, and you look down into the abyss and the timbers are creaking, and you’re madly scrambling around bracing and adjusting, lest the whole thing cascade into destruction.

And that’s where I am right now.

September 26, 2000. Philosophy: Time and God.

My grad-school friend Jim Carrig’s son Eamon is himself a student at Princeton now, studying Philosophy of Science, and he wrote me a couple of questions that I had fun answering.

(Q) How is it that time seems to move if the universe is a solid block of spacetime?

(A) The forward motion through the block universe is probably just a persistent illusion. As I mention in my book, The Fourth Dimension, the logician Kurt Gödel told me that nothing’s really moving at all. All the instants exist timelessly.

Part and parcel of each instant’s existence is the illusion that there is forward motion thru time. This pattern of illusion is like the grain of wood, kind of.

This said, I don’t normally think of reality this way. But if you look back over your life, it’s not so hard to envision it as a timeless whole. Like a novel. The novel is there even if nobody’s reading it. We can even suppose that the novel is in fact reading itself everywhere and everywhen. At any given moment, you are in fact an instance of the novel reading itself.

(Q) What are your thoughts on god?

(A) The main thing I want from god these days is the ability to stay sober. I used to see god as the cosmic One or the White Light, but now I’ve come to think of god as a more personal kind of entity whom I can ask for help.

This technique works for me, whatever its basis in reality. Going a step further, mere sobriety isn’t so much the core issue anymore. Now it’s more about me trying not to be a controlling jerk, and trying to be more warmhearted and loving. Now and then, if I remember, I ask god to help me with these goals.

This week, for fun, I’ve been envisioning a, like, hand that comes out of nothing, as if from the fourth dimension. In my mind, I shake the hand and I get a charge of goodness. I’m like a guy in a pit of quicksand sinking down, see, and the hand appears out of thin air above me, and I grab hold and the hand pulls me up.

It would be nice to see a face as well as a hand. I’m working on that.

November 17, 2000. Los Gatos Coffee Roasting

I sit in our local coffee shop and verbally sketch people, with an eye to folding them into my current Los-Gatos-set Spaceland for texture.

Smiling woman, plump features, light orange Polar fleece shirt, Ugg boots. To emphasize a point she’s running in place a little bit. Her partner also in Uggs, jeans, a sweatshirt, looks like a good guy, weak chin, unthreatening. He makes a show of checking his watch when two of their friends come in, then puts a small smile on his mouth, throwing them a bone. Leaving the coffee shop, the woman in the orange fleece glances at me, catches how hard I’m looking at her, and looks away, slightly disturbed.

A couple in identical blue and yellow biking jerseys, blue and yellow shoes, and black spandex shorts—dressed like they’re on a team. They’re standing, talking to three older, wealthy-looking guys, the three guys sitting at a table. As the blue and yellow man speaks, he keeps nodding, reinforcing his points. He has calculating eyes, long straight nose, fine teeth, and strong chin, the chin enhanced by orthodontic jaw surgery for that ruling-class look. He’s keeps on talking, hitting his stride, holding forth, and the wealthy older guys are listening to him. The woman silently gazes at the talking man. She’s like a flower pointing at the sun. Now and then the man says something to make the older guys laugh, and when this happens the woman ducks her head and stares openmouthed at the wealthy old men, milking the moment, like, “Isn’t this wild!”

A girl with a big, melon-slice mouth, full-lipped, wearing a crop-top that shows a strip of soft skin above her beltline. She’s chatting up her rumpled boyfriend, flirting with him—little adjustments of her head, and slight knee-bends for emphasis. Tight pants, ski-jump nose, her eyes bright and blank as buttons.

A nerd with pooched-out lips. Blank, willfully self-involved.

A man eating a pita and reading the paper, innocently and unconcernedly chewing. Comfort.

Woman fresh from jogging, hair stringy, crunching the end of a long biscotti, licking her thin lips.

Everyone is dressed the same way, everyone in sports gear, sweatshirts, jeans. But wait, here’s a hugely fat woman in a loose dress, long waterfall of hair, surprisingly easy in her own skin, very non-Los-Gatos.

And now more interlopers, a mother and son, the kid with slicked back blonde hair, chewing an enormous wad of gum, wearing a nylon tanktop. His mother has short curly blonde hair and a middle-aged, middle-American face, plain as a piecrust.

December 2, 2000. Caffe Puccini. Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

I’m in a favorite North Beach cafe in San Francisco this afternoon, Caffe Puccini, reading Caws and Causitries, a book of essays by my poet friend Anselm Hollo. Anselm is good at stirring up the old “ontological wonder-sickness,” as the philosopher William James termed it.

Why is there something instead of nothing? What is it like to be alive? How does time feel? What is a mind? I see minds outside the window walking by, minds in bone crania atop bodies with beating biped legs.

I walked a lot today. Alone, Sylvia off shopping, I wanted an empty day. The beautiful details of the City. Some bare plumbing pipes in the Vesuvio Bar’s men’s room were particularly striking—yes, this is the kind of thing I focus on. Like my eye is a camera.

I have a few printed-out pages of Spaceland with me, working on it off and on. I like to have a manuscript to mess with.

Anselm writes about the first time he read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” And this set me thinking about my favorite line from “Howl,” and I walked down to City Lights Books to check it out in the old Howl collection:

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden
flash

of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter &
the vibrating plane.

I’ve always loved this little list, it makes me, as a math guy, feel at home with Allen. Ellipse! Plane! And I always visualized the “meter” being like a cartoonist’s animated Scientology e-meter, standing on little legs and holding out ’trodes and with a face of a dial and needle.

But now imagine my disappointment when I turn from the original Howl collection to Alan’s “final” 1986 version of “Howl” where he takes it all back and changes the list to, yawn, “…the ellipsis catalog a variable measure and the vibrating plane.”

How English Department, how boring. In a footnote, Alan claims he meant “ellipsis” all along, he just had used the wrong word for all these years, like in the 1956 City Lights Howl, and in his Collected Poems of 1984, both of which have the line the way I like. And now he wants “variable measure” instead of “meter” as it better expresses his theories of prosody, blah, blah, blah…

Be all this as it may, sitting in the Puccini with my laptop and time to spare, I start writing a short story based on the original form of Alan’s line, centering my tale on a street-scene I saw on Market Street. My story’s title: “The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane.”

December 13, 2000. Trying to Sell Spaceland. “Transrealist Fiction.”

I sent the first part of Spaceland to Avon with a proposal and they rejected it. I can’t believe it. My new editor there, Diana Gill, says the book is too weird. Since when is that a problem? Avon bought all the Wares, after all. Of course the first three of those were bought before Diana Gill, who is, as I think I’ve mentioned, a goody-goody flat-haired doughy fannish type of the ripe old age of twenty-seven. She rejected Saucer Wisdom and Bruegel too. I don’t think I’ll be sending any more books to Avon.

The only thing of mine Diana ever did buy was Realware, and I guess she sort of had to, as that was the fourth book in my Ware series, and the series was doing fairly well.

So where to sell Spaceland? Well, Susan Protter got in touch with Hartwell at Tor, who’s still half-planning to make an offer on Bruegel. He does believe that I can do the Bruegel revisions he wants, and I believe I’ll do them, but I’m just not getting around to them, what with Spaceland happening. Susan said that Dave instantly got the idea of Spaceland, and he wanted to publish it right away, and was sorry that I’m not done writing it yet.

So today I sent him a new version of the Spaceland proposal along with the first half of the book. I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that I’m drawing a number of illustrations for Spaceland—you need them for explaining the fourth dimensional stuff. But I think they’ll make the novel more fun.

For most artists and writers, selling their stuff is a never-ending struggle. It’s a bigger part of the job than people realize. Particularly if you’re somewhat innovative. I worked some of this into the Bruegel novel, with our man scuffling for sales.

The Australian novelist and critic Damien Broderick just sent me his hardback lit-crit book, Transrealist Fiction. “Transreal,” that’s a word I made up to describe my work. The book has a chapter or two about Phil Dick, and the last chapter is about me. I’ve always dreamed of getting serious critical attention, so I’m very happy about the book.

But still—typically bitter and resentful author that I am—I’m not fully satisfied with what Broderick says. He expresses reservations having do with my, uh, occasional haste and sloppiness, limited range of emotions and topics, dirty language, and unsettling passages about getting sober. Oh well. When I’ve been dead for twenty years I’ll really get some respect.

December 15, 2000. Tucson Gig. On the Road.

I’m in Tucson to give an after-dinner talk at a conference on genomics, which is the latest word for what we were calling biotech or genetic engineering. Supposedly genomics is to biology as electronics is to electricity. A modern, high-tech spin on an old-school science.

The conference is at a somewhat plastic and bogus resort which is to-hell-and-gone, fifteen miles north of Tucson in the middle of McMansion territory.

I’m here because the organizer Roger Brent phoned me and begged me to come. I wasn’t that eager to come, so I asked him to pay my travel expenses and a $2K speaker’s fee. He agreed somewhat grudgingly, after emailing me that it felt “degrading” to pay me to speak. He doesn’t get that for me, giving a talk like this is work.

In any case, I haven’t been able to locate any of the conference people at the resort, so I pretty much wonder why the fuck I’m here. My room is in the basement.

After I flew in this afternoon, I drove straight to the Saguaro National Monument East. I got there about 4:30, and walked around in the cactus forest as the sun went down. Great “foundry colors” in the sky as Pynchon puts it. I was hungry amid the cacti. It got quite cold as soon as the sun went down. The landscape like a diorama, I was maybe a mile from the road. It was like a diorama, with the cactuses motionless, and bare gravel underfoot.

Yesterday I finished writing that story called “The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane.” It was the first time in quite a while that I’ve just written for fun. As opposed to grinding it out for the latest novel. Writing this story in an experimental, screwing-around, Sunday painter kind of vein. I’ll place the story somewhere eventually.

I had supper at the Congress Hotel in downtown Tucson, the hippest place that I know of here. I saved room for dessert, expecting to eat it with the genetic engineers at this nowhere resort. Not finding any of these genomicists, I go up to the resort’s central lodge for ice cream. A trio is playing, doing oldies and country standards. “All My Exes Live in Texas.” The lodge is packed with fifty-year-olds, people my age, all of them dancing, locals maybe. I never see people like this in California. They don’t have that high gloss I’m used to.

A sixty-year-old woman tries to pick me up. “Are you Fred?”

She has big hair and a really short miniskirt, she’s chewing gum, leathery, dances with a different guy every song, sitting at a table with three other women. I’m alone at a table right by the bandstand with an enormous dish of vanilla ice-cream.

I’m thinking of how Bruegel always paints a watching man off on the side of his dance scenes, always there’s a slightly wistful fellow observing it all. That’s me, and that’s Bruegel.

Now I’m back in my basement room.

I keep thinking about On the Road, which I’m rereading this week. I got a copy at City Lights in San Francisco last week. I’d always fondly thought of my novel Secret of Life as being my On the Road, although now, rereading Road, I have to admit I don’t hold a candle to Jack. I did what I did, that’s enough, and I don’t need to go and pretend I did more. My routine of comparing the cyberpunks to the Beats—what a crock.

As a writer, I’m more inner-directed, more self-centered, less generous and less lyrical than Jack. The way he describes the weather and the sky and the sunsets! And, most specifically, my Secret doesn’t have any character like Dean Moriarty—I don’t have a really complex foil for the narrator.

So now my clever simian mind turns to thinking about how I might better ape the Master. Could I put a Dean Moriarty into some future SF novel of mine? I could cast one of my friends, or I could make someone up. Can’t use Dennis Poague again, he was already Sta-Hi in Software.

As a lifelong transrealist, inventing characters is a weak spot for me. I tend not to feel confident that I can fabricate enough tics and tricks to match the texture of reality. Inventing a character is like growing a body in a vat. Growing a fully convoluted brain in a jar. More work than collaging in a real person. Using real people is in fact a Kerouac gimmick that I picked up on. Beat writing is transreal.

But you don’t have to go transreal. Think about a painting where someone paints a red line across the top of a green meadow patch, and the eye reads it as a lovely scattering of poppies in bloom. I recently noticed this in a somewhat cheesy art gallery. A crafty cheeser wipes a stripe, dibs some dabs, and the eye is satisfied.

Yeah, it really doesn’t take all that many actual words to limn a character. All you need is ten or twenty catch phrases and tropes to make the person seem fully rounded. Homeric epithets. Dean Moriarty’s “mad bony face.” His “Yes” and “yas.” Of course to really make it work, you need to get a simulation going in your head, so that your character comes alive and speaks.

What if I did an SF novel that set out from the start to be an homage to Road? That might be fun. It could be a picaresque planet-hopping kind of thing. Call the homage novel, say, Galactic Kicks. It could be transreal or I could do it as a pure fabrication. Or a mix. Another plus is that it would be way to do a space-opera thing, which I’ve never yet tried.

My Dean character would need to be tragic—Dean’s tragic quality feeds the richness of Road. Over the course of the book, Dean is losing his mind. A desperate downward spiral.

Reading another page of Road here in my dismal room, I see yet again how illusory is my idea of matching the book. Jack has this amazing scene about sleeping in a cheap all-night movie theater in Detroit. He says, “The people who were in that all-night movie were the end.” Love that use of “the end.”

He talks about how the theater’s double bill of movies goes deep into his mind, because he’s seeing and hearing and sleeping through these movies over and over during the night:

All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.

What a beautiful line. What a genius to write that. Yes, Jack’s unmatchable.

As it happens, Jack himself addresses the issue of trying to model your work on the work of an unmatchable artist. He writes about some musicians trying to play right after the legendary jazz pianist George “God” Shearing has performed:

Everybody listened in awe and fright…and the boys said “There ain’t nothin left after that.”

But the slender leader frowned. “Let’s blow anyway.”

Something would come of it yet. There’s always more, a little further—it never ends. They sought to find new phrases after Shearing’s explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.

Galactic kicks, man, galactic kicks. Two gone wigged cats roistering across the Milky Way in 2947.

December 16, 2000. Tucson Hike. Genomics.

This morning I had breakfast with one of the conference organizers, Susan Burgess. She told me she’d been a cheerleader in Kansas. Now she starts companies in San Diego. She said she talked to some other women who do this kind of work—making pitches to venture capitalists—and she said they’re all ex-cheerleaders.

Not only does this confirm my worst suspicions about how the business world works, it gives me a good idea for Spaceland. I’ll have my character Jena do a pitch to a VC. Her husband Joe tries the pitch alone, and it fails, and then he brings in Jena.

I drove to the nearby Pima Canyon Trailhead in the Coronado National Forest, and I had a terrific two and a half hour hike, up a mountain through cactus forests, and then along a streambed with winter water. As always, when I’m hiking, it’s a constant struggle to turn off my worrying, scheming mind and just bask in the now. I had that familiar shotglass-in-a-waterfall feeling of not being able to contain the beauty.

When I got back to the resort, I had lunch with Roger Brent, the guy who’d invited me and then been miffed that I wanted a fat speaker’s fee. But as soon I saw him, I realized it was hopeless to expect normal diplomacy from this guy anymore than you’d expect it from me. He’s a science guy, looks a bit like R.U. Sirius, he talked my ear off. A genius, instantaneously understanding anything I said. This gig should work out fine.

Picked up a few buzzwords and factoids.

The cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter DNA sequence is patented by Monsanto and is currently the vehicle for introducing extra DNA into cells.

A guy invented something called the gene gun which shoots about a hundred thousand tiny gold spheres into a Petri dish or even into your arm, and the spheres are coated with DNA and this gets the DNA into the target cells. If you can get some stuff into a cell it seems usually to get incorporated. “A cell is the most homeostatic thing there is,” the guy told me. “It repairs itself and includes whatever crud you shot into it.”

They want open source genomics, so that, say, a scientist in Kenya can make a fungus-resistant Kenyan sweet potato, which is not something that Monsanto would bother with.

My after-dinner talk went over well. I based it on my book Saucer Wisdom, using slides of my illos, and reading bits from the text, pretty much couching my talk as comedy, given that I don’t know jack shit about real genomics. It got them going, and they had interesting stuff to say about my speculations.

And then, the next morning, the con organizers paid me. All my expenses plus the $2K. I felt guilty then, like I was unworthy. Felt like I should have done it for free because they were such nice guys. I always need to remember, when trying to negotiate things, that I’m nuts.

Fractals in NYC

January 6, 2001. The Gramercy. Hartwell’s House.

Sylvia and I are in NYC for eight days. We’re in the Gramercy Park Hotel at the bottom of Lexington Ave between 21st & 22nd. Unprepossessing lobby, a generic traveling-salesman kind of place with a tiny revolving door for the entrance, distinctly un-grand. Cheap wood paneling, monochrome heavy-duty green carpets. Fast elevators. Good location, good rates.

We have a two-room suite on the 16th floor, a suite, unbelievably overheated. I get them to send up a guy with a wrench to turn off the radiator in the bedroom. The rooms are quite bare, like dorm rooms when you arrive at the start of the semester. And my roommate happens to be my wife. And we have a king bed. Yes. We eat dinner with Georgia at a nearby restaurant with a red neon crab sign and the name City Crab.

My Tor editor David Hartwell invites me to come out to his house in Pleasantville. He’s the guy who published Saucer Wisdom, and now I’m trying to sell him two more books.

Going through Grand Central Station to ride the train to Pleasantville, I’m struck by the exuberant abundance of the food court. Like a fairy-tale, like Aladdin looking at mountains of gems. Out the train windows I see the East Coast woods, the little maples, the dark streams carved into the snow, the beveled edges where the snow meets the water.

As a kind of hobby, and for the good of the SF field, Hartwell publishes a thin zine called The New York Review of Science Fiction. The editorial board is at his house putting the new issue together. One of the NYRSF guys turns out to be Arthur Hlavaty, who was an upperclassman at Swarthmore. Arthur would buy beer for me sometimes during my freshman year, he was 21. He’s white-haired now, but his voice is the same. Touching to see him.

I wait all day to talk to Hartwell about what’s uppermost in my mind, “Are you going to buy Bruegel and Spaceland ?” Makes me think a little of Bruegel courting his patrons.

When I do finally ask Hartwell the question, he says yes, probably. And he quotes the opening lines of Beowulf to me in middle English. I have mixed feelings, my old leeriness of English majors comes up. But I myself read Beowulf this year, and it’s really nice to have so literate an editor.

This man is my friend.

January 8, 2001. Editors in Manhattan.

We’re still in the Gramercy. I wake up in the middle of the night, reveling in being so high above the city. A Ginsberg line comes to me:

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the

supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the

tops of cities contemplating jazz

I form a hare-brained notion of writing a short story to go with every single one of the hundred and twelve lines of “Howl.” I mean now that I’ve done “The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane,” what’s to stop me from doing like a hundred and eleven more stories like that, hmmm?

Today I went to see a man called Bill Frucht at Perseus Books whom I happened to get in email contact with two weeks ago because he used my story “A New Golden Age” in an anthology without getting my permission—he only got permission from the fucking Randolph-Macon Alumnae Association and listed them as copyright holder, because twenty years ago the story was in their magazine. Not that it’s worth making a big fuss about. In any case, I’m going to use this contact to look into the possibility of selling a nonfiction science book to him as he’s connected with Basic Books, a branch of Perseus Books.

Frucht was friendly, younger than me, about forty-five, a bit of a weasel. Naturally there’s no talk of paying me for that story he used. But we talked about some possible book ideas. I’ve been thinking about a book centered around my first computer interest, the thing that sucked me in—lo, these fifteen years gone—the Mandelbrot set.

I suggesting calling my Mandelbrot book The Endless Beetle. He suggested The Most Complicated Object in Mathematics. He said he’s been trying to get the mathematician John Conway to write a book about triangles, but Conway was insisting that the book itself had to be shaped like a triangle. I love mathematicians.

We had lunch in a nearby Thai restaurant. There was this cute Puerto Rican coat-checker with long blonde hair who would stare into your face and smile until you felt impelled to give her a dollar for having returned your coat. Coat check is a ubiquitous NYC thing because: it’s cold, the customers are wearing thick coats, and the restaurants are too crowded for you to put your coat on your chair.

I mentioned the coat-check woman to Frucht on the way out, and he says, “Yes, I’ve had a crush on her for six months.”

I thought that was charming, the schoolyard word “crush,” and his readiness to bare these feelings. I liked the idea that a Manhattan businessman might start to look forward to seeing one particular woman in the work environment every day, a tropical flower amidst the towers of gray stone.

Then I dropped in on Diana Gill at Avon. As I’ve already mentioned, she’s rejected my last three books: Saucer Wisdom, Bruegel, and Spaceland. I didn’t want to bother visiting her, but my agent Susan Protter said I should, just to keep up the contact. So I show up, and there she is, in a windowless office the size of a lavatory.

Diana Gill puts me in mind of a frozen loaf of unbaked bread dough—like the ones that Holiday Inns heat up so that they can say they serve “fresh bread.” White, doughy, cold. Exquisitely uncomfortable with talking to me. Go away, says her body language, don’t come here again.

Perhaps she’s uncomfortable with everyone, but my natural tendency is to assume that she fears and hates me especially. Like a prim school-marm talking to a drunken hobo. And me on my best behavior!

Regarding her latest rejection, she said, “The numbers just don’t work for us.”

On the wall are the covers of two upcoming books she’d edited, both copper-colored landscapes with a heroine in flowing garments before dunes and clouds. Bodice-ripper SF. Epic. Saga.

I desperately stretched the conversation out as much as I could, just so I wouldn’t be outta there in a shameful three minutes. I bragged that I’d seen all four of my Avon-published Ware novels on the shelf in the cool St. Mark’s Bookstore.

And Diana is like “Yes, they’re good at getting our books.” My books, dammit!

On the elevator down I was thinking maybe I should have asked, “What kind of book from me would you buy?”

But I knew the answer to that would be, “None.”

Or, no, it might be, “A saga epic suitable for enjoyment by frozen unbaked loaves of bread dough.”

Oh well. She did say they’d keep my four Wares in print for the near future although here, once again: “The numbers are going down, and we can only keep them out as long as the numbers will let us.”

I’m done at Avon.

So then I went to see good old Dave Hartwell, and he took me to meet Tom Doherty, the owner of Tor. Doherty’s office is in the pointed corner of the Flatiron Building, a classic locale, with curved panes of glass. Hartwell tells Tom that he’s buying Bruegel—and that he’s been consulting with me on the plot, which is true, even though I haven’t yet done anything about it—and he says he’s buying Spaceland too.

That evening, Sylvia and I hit City Crab again, celebrating with cherrystone clams, Blue Point oysters, and lobsters. Then we went to the Bottom Line in the Village and saw a Hot Tuna show, just Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, playing acoustic. We first saw Jack Cassady in the fall of 1966, when he was with the Jefferson Airplane—at the Swarthmore Folk Festival, over thirty years ago. We closed out our night with coffee at the Caffe Reggio, a cozy, classic, Village hole-in-the-wall with a sagging metal ceiling and only one or two other customers on this cold, rainy Monday night.

I mark this day with a white stone.

January 9, 2001. Galleries. Science Books. Eddie.

Today I hung out with Sylvia all day. We walked really far across town to the far west side to look at the galleries of Chelsea, in amongst cab repair garages. Exciting to check the scene, but crappy art, mostly. Then we got a cab across town to the East Village and spent an hour in the St. Mark’s bookstore.

I looked at all the science books, trying to get a fix on what a good-selling science book topic might be. There aren’t so many books on chaos and fractals as I’d expected to see—maybe those books came and went. There were three or four books on a-life—people still go for that one, the living machine thing.

A lot of the science books are in what I call a “stations of the cross” mode, that is, the authors travel around and interview a different deep thinker for each chapter. I did the stations of cross thing when I first wrote an article about cellular automata, but I can’t see doing it again at my age.

And I found a limited edition book by Anselm Hollo, poems, called AHOE (And How On Earth), from 1997. Anselm’s poems are so nicely musicked, yet so elliptical and hard to pin down. What do they mean? No matter, never mind.

Sylvia and I went to the Met and naturally we visited Bruegel’s Harvesters yet again. Always more detail in these big paintings. Like novels. And still the mystery of Bruegel’s self.

We took the bus down to 47th and Broadway and got some half-price tickets for a matinee, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, a bonafide Broadway play in the Ethel Barrymore. Exciting to be doing this. The theater is not a very large space. The actors projected well. We were in the “Rear Mezzanine,” i.e., the upper half of the balcony. It was a silly comedy about Jewish NYC culture vultures, a comedy of manners, we laughed a lot.

Then we met up with Georgia and her new boyfriend Courtney, and took a new subway car up to 103rd Street. to see Eddie Marritz and family. Little Leda Marritz is about to go off to Brown—she had some special admission category whereby she only gets to start in January, like a second seating at a crowded restaurant. She’s worried she’ll get there and everyone will have their cliques already and she’ll be out of it, so we all reassured her.

January 10, 2001. Puking.

Last night with Eddie I made the mistake of ordering mussels with fries and eating all the fries: beef-tallow-cooked shoestring fries. My stomach started hurting on the way home. About 4 am I woke up and over the next two or three hours I threw up about five times, etc.

I was moaning, “Help me, god.” The moaning made it feel a little better. Like writing in your journal. Eventually Sylvia got up, naturally she thought I was icky and noisy. I’d made our room into quite a shambles.

Georgia stopped by and had a bagel. I phoned Susan Protter to cancel a lunch meeting. I had the kind of ironclad excuse where the person you’re calling doesn’t even want to hear any more about the excuse.

“Have a ginger-ale,” says Susan.

And I’m all, “I just hope I can keep it down.”

And she’s like, “I gotta go.”

Sylvia went out to do some shopping alone, and I napped. Then I tottered down Lexington to a big cafeteria across from the Con Ed building. It’s a warm day, for New York in January. I’m moving slowly and weakly. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Typing this on my laptop, I feel more like my old self. Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk!

It occurs to me this is the kind of cafeteria where Jack Kerouac would sketch people. Let’s knock off one or two.

Red-haired girl, pale skin, strings on her oval glasses, a sweet smile. Don’t stare at her too hard while you write, Ru. Her girlfriend dips bread into a cardboard cup of soup.

A man in a red parka and a flat-hat—that is, a chauffeur’s cap, with a small plaid check. Every fifteen seconds his mouth purses in a twitch.

Outside, a steep striped awning shades our window, with the reversed name of our cafe a rainbow arch of letters. A German flag flutters on a flagpole sticking out from a yellow brick wall,

I went back to the room and slept a couple of hours, felt better. In the evening, Greg Gibson showed up, he’s in town to visit some colleges with wife Annemarie and daughter Celia. They’re staying at the Gramercy like us—he’s the one who told us about the place. He still has his total Frank Shook look. The pony-tail, the jeans, vest and tweed jacket. As usual, he’s rude and annoying, though also lovable. Greg is better before he starts drinking. Greg’s become an author too. Today he’s bragging about the $150,000 advance he’s getting for a nonfiction book that he’s writing about a mutiny on a whaling ship. It drives me nuts I can’t get that kind of advance.

January 12, 2001. Empire State. Susan. Greg.

Today Sylvia and I walked to the Empire State Building and took the elevator to the top, I haven’t been there since I was twelve—the time I came to New York with Pop and he put me on the plane to Germany. It’s such the classic office building. That was the time Pop showed me the Flatiron Building too.

It was exciting and old-timey atop the Empire State. Cool to see the pigeons perching on the balustrade of the open observation platform. For a pigeon, stepping off the edge is nothing, no big deal, they just circle around in the air. People kept shooing them, wanting to see them fly.

I love how you get to go outside up there, and how, even now, they haven’t Plexiglassed it in, not like the Washington Monument or the Hoover Tower at Stanford—where you have to peep out through a glazed, nose-greased porthole. I noticed a helicopter lower than us.

I got a souvenir flattened quarter, a guy mashed it for three dollars. Now it has a picture of the building and the word, “Millennium” on it. You could even get your flattened quarter drilled and get a necklace chain to hold it. One of the tourists did that, and her friend said, “That necklace is hor-rible.” They were local types. I like the great, overprecise way they separate their syllables.

In line for the elevator down, the guard is jollying us up saying, “Where are you from?” The wiseguy Nuyorkian tourists say, “Italy.”

Then we had lunch with Georgia and her business-partner Margo Mooney. So brave and enterprising, they’ve made their own business—Pink Design, Inc. The two of them seem comfortable with each other. It’s nice.

Then I had to split up from Sylvia—she looked lonely and little, a piece of dust in the high canyons of midtown. I was heading off to Susan Protter’s office near Times Square. Susan and I talked about the notion of a Mandelbrot set book. She was pushing me to spit out any other possibilities I had for a book idea, but nothing else big was coming to me. Maybe string theory, but I’d have to learn it, and I don’t feel like learning new stuff. Also there’s already been a successful string theory book: Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

Susan said I should think in terms of Infinity and the Mind, which has sold well over a hundred thousand copies. I wasn’t second-guessing anyone when I wrote that book, I was writing from the heart. It had the quality of being a meditation upon infinity and mind, concepts dear to me. It was more than a simple exposition.

I bitched about Greg’s big advance. Susan said I shouldn’t try too hard to make a big score. Shouldn’t worry about the money. Should think about the heart and soul of my next book.

Later Sylvia and I go out to dinner with Greg, his wife Annemarie and daughter Celia, also Georgia and her boyfriend Courtney. Greg was in poor form. He’d had a lot of drinks in his room and in the bar before dinner, and he continued knocking them back at the table—loud, insulting, self-centered, bossy, resentful, braying about sports. Like a barfly.

And yet this man has been my dearest friend for so many years. Partly this was because he was a fellow alcoholic and I could drink with him. But the other part is that we were young together. And dreamed together of becoming writers. When he’s sober, Greg is witty and perceptive. And no other person’s literary praise means as much to me as his.

Although it’s painful to see him drunk, I still feel a deep tenderness towards him: towards his face, the skin of his hands, his ponytail, his body that’s aging like mine. The same tenderness you might feel towards a brother.

Maybe my harsh assessment of him is tinged by my envy at his recent big advance. And maybe, just maybe, I’m envious that he still gets to drink—while I can’t do it anymore. I am of course completely neurotic on the subject of alcohol, and all too prone to making mountains out of molehills.

In the morning I have breakfast with Greg. He’s his wise, weary, sober self, even looking a bit remorseful. Mr. Hyde turns back into Dr. Jekyll. How well I remember my own years of yo-yoing through that routine.

January 13, 2001. Mandelbrot. Hungerford.

Sylvia, Georgia, and I go to Grand Central Station. We’re on our way to Scarsdale so I can visit the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Sylvia and Georgia are coming along for the ride, they’ll look at Scarsdale while I do my meeting.

Before the train, we hit Grand Central’s chapel-like, subterranean Oyster Bar for a dozen or half-dozen apiece. And then we run outside to peek into the lobby of the nearby 1930 Chrysler Building. Now that’s a skyscraper, with murals on the ceiling, flowing deco pictures of the forms of transportation.

At this point, I need to mention that I’ve been writing a script for a large-format IMAX movie about the Mandelbrot set. I got this gig in 1999 from the head of the Fleet Science Museum in San Diego, a guy called Jeff Kirsch. Kirsch wants to produce a giant-screen movie with lots of zooms into the Mandelbrot set, and my job is to develop a detailed film treatment for a science-fiction story that explains the Mandelbrot set and features the zooms.

A big problem is that, out of some misguided copy-cat devotion to Arthur C. Clarke, who narrated a documentary about fractals called Colors of Infinity, Kirsch insists that our movie has to be called The Search for Infinity. And it’s supposed to involve a spaceship with a brain that’s an intelligent HAL-like computer that’s scared of infinity. It’s a wrong-headed and derivative approach, but Kirsch is adamant, and his preliminary development grant is paying me pretty well to work on the script, about a thousand dollars a month. Another plus is that I like the film-maker Ron Fricke whom Kirsch has engaged. Fricke made this amazing feature-length movie called Baraka. For the next phase of our project, Kirsch wants the National Science Foundation to kick in a million dollars. This script I’ve been working on will serve as part of the grant application.

I’m very excited about going to meet Mandelbrot. Feels almost like it felt to meet the logician Kurt Gödel in 1972. Except now I’m fifty-four instead of twenty-four. But it’s the same rush, going to see a wise older man, a guru. Mandelbrot invented the concept of fractals, an idea which has affected my way of thought as much as did Gödel’s work in mathematical logic.

Jeff Kirsch helped arrange this meeting—so I can consult with Mandelbrot about our script for The Search for Infinity. For my part, I simply want to meet the man. A hero. And I wouldn’t mind getting some ideas towards the Mandelbrot set book I’ve been halfway thinking about. If all goes well, Mandelbrot and I might become friends, and I could see him or correspond with him in the future.

Mandelbrot is waiting for me at the end of his driveway. He was worried I might not find his house as the address on the curb is covered by snow. He’s white-haired and balding, plump, somewhat diffident. I wave, but he doesn’t wave back, not sure I’m the one he’s waiting for.

When I’m closer he says, “Are you Rudy Rucker?” and we shake hands. I tell him I’m thrilled to meet him.

In the house, his wife Aliette greets us. Mandelbrot disappears to take a pee, I suppose. And then we sit in a cold room with some armchairs. They don’t seem to heat their house. Mandelbrot sits on an odd modern chair with parts of it missing, a collection of black corduroy hotdogs. He wears a jacket, a vest, a shirt, and trousers with a paperclip attached to the fly to make it easier to pull up and down. I guess he’s seventy-five. He has a strong French accent.

Mandelbrot begins talking almost right away, an incredibly dense and rich flow of information, a torrent. Fractal of course, as human conversation usually is, but of a higher than usual dimension. It’s like talking to a superbeing, just as I’d hoped, like meeting a Martian. His conversation is a wall of sound, a paisley info structure, the twittering of a Great Scarab Beetle.

During our interview, by way of keeping my sanity, I began thinking, in the back of my mind, about ways in which Mandelbrot himself resembled the Mandelbrot set. He was rather round about the middle, even bulbous, and his clothes as well as his head were adorned with any number of fine hairs. He appeared and disappeared from my view several times—he would get up and leave the room and then come back in, but maybe it was a different bud of him that came back in!

A key to my perceiving the man’s multi-budded nature was to notice that his wife Aliette in many ways resembled him—accent, age, attire, knowledge about Mandelbrot’s work. She was like a smaller Mandelbrot bud hovering near the flank of the larger bud I was talking to. She would listen attentively as we talked, and from time to time she’d remind him to tie up some loose thread. The two of them were connected, of course, by a fractal tendril of love and attention, which was rather hard to physically see.

One of the main points Mandelbrot wanted to make is that he doesn’t like our movie treatment. The idea of space travel leaves him cold. And he doesn’t see why we have “Infinity” in the title and in the set-up for the plot. He feels the fractal aspect is the root concept and that the idea of infinity is but a branch. I tell him I fully agreed with him, but that our producer Jeff Kirsch feels the notion of infinity is commercial gold. I tell him that I’ve worked out our script to involve a computer that’s scared of infinity, and the computer soothes its fears by learning to visualize the endless regresses of the Mandelbrot set. In gorgeous full color on a giant IMAX screen. These remarks don’t satisfy him. He’s not actually that interested in color graphics. He’s a hardcore mathematician.

Changing the subject, I mention that I have some hope of writing a nonfiction book about the Mandelbrot set. At first he’s surprised at this notion. I explain that I have in mind a very popularized non-technical book similar to, say, a book about the famous number pi. He allows that this doesn’t seem to overlap with anything he personally plans to do. And therefore he somewhat warmed to my idea. Why not a book on the Mandelbrot set!

But then I said I hoped to get a good advance for my book, and this proved to be a tactical error, as now he seemed to hunger for a cut of my imaginary big advance. He himself is in the process of trying to sell his autobiography.

Getting back to the movie, Mandelbrot says he isn’t clear what his role in the movie is supposed to be. I tell him we don’t really expect him to do much at all. We just want him to say he doesn’t find our project totally absurd or, even better, to give us his blessing. But now he wants some kind of ill-defined concession. Maybe he wants to be interviewed in the movie? Maybe he wants the movie to be a biography of him? He asks if I have any power to alter the project’s plans. I laugh self-deprecatingly, not wanting to flat-out say, “Are you kidding? I’m just the writer.”

Mandelbrot began repeating his request that we not present the movie as being about infinity. I grew anxious that he might do something to sabotage us. He has, one imagines, a wide range of influences. Possibly he can get the National Science Foundation to kill any possibility of us getting that million-dollar grant we need.

I felt like I was sensing the presence of the stinger at the tip of the Mandelbrot set. A stinger so fine as to be all but invisible, a stinger that, as the man grew more agitated, was twitching with rapid movements that made it yet harder to see. But nevertheless I could feel it whizzing through the air near my head. Palpable menace.

I felt a great urge to go outside and have a cigarette.

The torrent of information continued, Mandelbrot beaming it at me in his strong French accent. I had to cock my ear and listen my hardest to process it. I was conscious of Aliette watching me listen. I imagined she was judging how well I seemed to understand, watching how respectful I was. I happened to smirk when at one point he said something like, “I don’t want to sound vain, and don’t repeat this to others.” And then I imagined his wife seeing my smirk and giving me a black mark for it.

I have indeed heard Mandelbrot described as vain by some of his colleagues and rivals. But I don’t think this word would be quite accurate. Certainly he has high self-esteem—but his self-esteem is justifiable and well-earned. This said, Mandelbrot does seem to feel that he hasn’t gotten enough respect for having invented and popularized the concept of fractals. And he has these feelings even though his work has achieved a huge visibility in popular culture.

Wanting to wind things up, I said I would hope for his approval of my Mandelbrot set book if it ever came to that. He distanced himself, saying he didn’t want to approve anything. But quickly added he’d want to send me a lot of documents to make sure I got my book right. I said it would be nice to meet again sometime, he didn’t say yes or no to that. He hasn’t decided about me.

In parting, I mentioned how much he’s affected my view of the world. I also mentioned that I was as excited to meet him as I’d been to meet the great Kurt Gödel. Mandelbrot said, “Oh, Gödel didn’t talk much. I saw him at the Institute for Advanced Study. I was John von Neumann’s last student there.”

I said, “Well, Gödel talked a lot when I saw him, I was working on something he was interested in,” And finally Mandelbrot was a little impressed.

Meeting Mandelbrot wasn’t exactly like meeting Gödel. I’m not so young and starry-eyed anymore, and I don’t see Mandelbrot as a mythopoetic guru. But meeting him was like talking to Gödel in the sense that for these two special oasis-hours midway in the long caravan of my life I was talking to a great master of the intellectual arts.

I had a nice, cheerful ride back into NYC with Sylvia and Georgia, who’d looked around Scarsdale and found it less exciting than they’d anticipated—not much more than two blocks of shops.

In the evening, our old Rutgers grad-school fellow-math-major friend David Hungerford took the train into town from his home in Newark and had dinner with Sylvia and me at L’Express, a bustling, European-feeling bistro near our hotel. David had escargots, ordering them with relish, enjoying his evening out. He’s been to Belgium a lot recently, visiting fellow Communists.

He’s still the political activist. Getting the shaft. He teaches math in the Newark public high schools and ran afoul of the school board. To punish him they transferred him to a special school with all the problem students and all the problem teachers, including drunks, cokers, child molesters, the mentally ill and—Dave, the lone political agitator.

It was touching to be with him, bringing on a rush of memories. When Sylvia and I were newlyweds back at Rutgers in 67-72, Dave was always over at our house for dinner. He’d been the one I’d exulted to about meeting Gödel, and now here he was today, the day I met Mandelbrot. I had some fun showing him my Mandelbrot set programs on my laptop, talking them over, just like in grad school, showing Dave the latest gnarly things I’m into.

It was very touching, very bittersweet. We began talking about retirement, and David goes, “Could we ever have imagined this conversation in the old days?”

He’ll be sixty in March; he mentions this as he leaves. A tall gray figure—yet to me, he’s still the same thin Hungerford as ever, in his beat old unpolished shoes and well-worn clothes. When I was twenty it never occurred to me that being sixty would feel just as human, just as real.

Time doesn’t let any of us off the hook, it does the full number. I remember imagining, back at Rutgers, that we’d be different, yes, our generation would be an exception to that terrible regime of growing old and older.

Going to bed, I can see the old mysto steam behind my closed eyelids, the familiar psychedelic percolation, the live phosphenes becoming Mandelbrotian forms.

I mark this day with a white stone, too. Having a good week.

[About a year later, I learned that Mandelbrot went to the National Science Foundation and helped talk them out of funding our grant proposal for that large-screen IMAX movie about the Mandelbrot set.]

January 14, 2001. Georgia and Courtney.

Today, feeling expansive, I imagine writing The Mandelbrot Set first as a nonfiction book and then turning around and writing an SF novel about a magic fractal. A messy boy finds a dustball under his bed and it’s the door to another world. I like that second part. Maybe I should skip the nonfiction book. Another SF novel is what I really want to write.

Sylvia and I met up with Georgia and her boyfriend Courtney by Washington Square, walked through Soho to Chinatown, had some soup there, then walked across to the Lower East Side and up to the East Village. I’ve always been curious about this part of town.

We peeked into a cool dress store. They had framed Plexiglas paintings of hunting scenes boxed and lit from behind, perhaps bar and grill displays from the Sixties, beige with age. So striking to see, over and over, the recycling into art of things that I thought I could ignore. That’s an SF trick I’ve never used much—picking out really ordinary things from our present to be artifacts of the future.

I had a nice conversation with Courtney. He and Georgia seem to be getting along so well. It’s good to see how easily they seem to be resolving any little problems about merging their apartments and moving in together.

So that’s it for the trip. It was fun. Once or twice it occurred to me to think: This is New York City in 2001. A dizzying thought.

Overclocked

February 9, 2001. Second Black Spot in Spaceland.

I’m almost on the home stretch of Spaceland. My character Joe Cube is just about to find out that our space is gonna pop! Lots of stuff to sort out. It’s getting hard with more and more balls in the air.

I have these wobbly four-dimensional beings called Wackles. They look a little like cartoon devils, but really they’re good. I think I’ll have a Wackle head growing out of Joe’s shoulder—I’ve always wanted to have a guy with a small extra head on his shoulder. I remember a mutant like that in an SF book I read as a kid. The mutant was a fat woman with a baby’s head on her shoulder, and I think she was telepathic.

I mentioned before that a novel has two black spots. The first is when you’ve exhausted your initial enthusiasm and you don’t see how to write the middle. And the second is when you’ve finished the middle and you don’t see how to wrap things up at the end. Another way to put it is that, when you get to the second black spot, you’ve sailed so far out to sea that you can’t see the shore you came from and, looking ahead, you can’t see a shore where you can land.

“The anxiety of the goalie at the penalty kick.”

I feel blank. What if I never get an idea for the ending? What if I never finish this book? I better try and write something now.

Another image. Writing a novel is like a hunt. And I can smell the blood of the stag crashing through the thickets ahead of me. It’s almost time to bring down my prey.

February 16, 2001. Stella’s Baby.

I’m sitting here sketching my niece Stella’s baby Wiley, he’s resting beside me on the couch.

A cooing noise. A small round head with dark, wide-pupil eyes. The arms and the legs twitching one by one. His mouth open, making sucking gestures. Raising his foot, bending his arm, turning his head. Breathing speeds up, slows down. Head turning from side to side. Never quite still. Now and then a broad smile, the expressions varying as fitfully as the motions. Coos, yawns, grunts, now and then a burst of crying. A hiccup. I’ve positioned him so he’s facing me. Fuzz on his head, the scalp showing through.

February 26, 2001. Helen’s Party.

Greg came for a visit, and it was fun. We spent the afternoon taking a long walk up to the pond on the top of the hill behind the Jesuit Retirement Home, Greg, me and Greg’s wife Annemarie. He didn’t get all that drunk at dinner. We sat around and talked afterwards. It was good. As Greg said in his email afterwards, “And wasn’t it fun sitting in your room after dinner and talking about writing like two writers? And wasn’t that what we’d always fantasized in college?”

Sylvia and I went to a party at one of her fellow teachers’ houses Saturday night. Helen, a divorced Korean woman, cute and lively, she grew up in Queens. The party was also for the friends of two young German guys who rent rooms from Helen, as her house is larger than she needs. It was a college-type party with low lights, music, a counter full of open bottles.

As I’ve mentioned before, Bruegel often, in his crowd scenes, paints a man standing off to one side with a slightly blank or maybe wistful expression, watching. If you’re a shy person like that and, if you’re a writer as well, you can at least be getting material. Observing life’s rich pageant—a watcher in the cheerful anthill, amid babies in carriages, kids, grown-ups, oldsters.

The German renters were supplying the party music via files on their computer’s hard drive, something new to me. I clicked on their music directory to see how big it was. One of the German youths looked over my shoulder. “Nine gigs, dot’s cool.” Nine billion bytes—one byte for every man, woman, and child on Earth.

They played a song I was into when my mother sent me to Germany for school for a year in the eighth grade, “My Boy Lollipop,” by Millie Small. Love that song. I’d never realized quite so clearly, however, that the song is the brag of a fellatrice.

And that flash is a tiny extra brush stroke on my mental painting of the party.

The other night, Sylvia and I were in a coffee shop and there was a cheerful young married couple sitting near us, and the guy showed us a digital photo of his wife that he’d run through a photomosaic filter so that her picture was made of smaller pictures—I couldn’t quite make out what the smaller pictures were, I think landscapes. It would be cooler if the tiny image tiles were built from nine gigs of graphic sex shots of the young couple in action. “Why I Love My Wife.”

March 7, 2001. Spaceland Done. Cuttlefish.

So, okay, I mailed off Spaceland. I got my hero Joe back together with his wife Jena at the very end of the book. I was getting along really well with Sylvia that week, and it made me sad to think of Joe and Jena breaking up. So I healed their marriage.

Now I’m having fun finding out more about cuttlefish, as I happened to mention some of them as denizens of hyperspace in Spaceland.

A cuttlefish pupil is shaped like a W instead of like a dot. So weird. The cuttles communicate by patterns in their skin, changing them more rapidly and complexly than any other cephalopod. They’re very intelligent, up there with octopi, dolphins, elephants, and chimps.

The world cuttlefish capital is Whyalla, Australia, on the southern coast, a town in the middle of nowhere with a flat beach. The Australian giant cuttlefish (up to ten pounds) come there in incalculable numbers to mate for about a hundred days from June to August every year.

As I’ve been saying, I’m having thoughts of an On the Road style novel next. Galactic Kicks, set around the year 3000. What if my hero’s road pal is a human-sized alien cuttlefish? My version of Neal Cassady.

My SF writer friend Paul Di Filippo sent me a nice quote from Burroughs’s The Place of Dead Roads:

“Whenever you use this bow I will be there,” the Zen archery master tells his students. And he means there quite literally. He lives in his students and thus achieves a measure of immortality. and the immortality of a writer is to be taken literally. Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers.

March 20 - 24, 2001. Game Developer’s Conference.

I’m teaching game programming in my Software Engineering class at San Jose State, so I attended the annual Game Developer’s Conference competition, which is in San Jose this year.

I see some homeless San Jose people in the park outside the convention center. A chunky blonde street-girl is chewing an enormous shiny nail, a ten-penny nail, with its head sticking out of her mouth. Our fair city.

I run into a guy named John Nagel—I know him from when I worked as a programmer at Autodesk in the early 1990s. Nagel is a genius and an eccentric. He brags that he invented Spandex-backed leather. He feeds me a zinger about why we’re all working so hard these days. “Extra technology helps workers about as much as better weapons help soldiers in a war.” That is, the extra tech makes it worse for the workers, spews out more shit for them to deal with.

At an advanced graphics tutorial, the guy shows us a cripplingly complex demo. It’s an animated chameleon who changes from chrome to glass to colors while crawling along a branch.

“After what we tell you today, there’s no reason you can’t write a demo just like this,” says the speaker. Rrrright.

I look over at the twenty-something graphics hacker next to me. We exchange sick grins like students in a class that’s way harder than we expected.

In the Expo Hall, most booths are giving away toys. The game developers call the stuff schwag. I think the word is a corruption of swag. I get five free Silly Putties from the graphics-card-maker Nvidia. I’ve always wanted enough Silly Putties to completely fill up the plastic egg it comes in. My egg is so full that it bounces when I drop it.

Some guys have a little device that sits by your computer and pulses out wafts of scent in synch with your game. Their “booth-bunnies” are impressive: women with huge, implanted boobs and they’re wearing skunk costumes. The guy runs a demo for me. The shot-gun blasts smell like, he claims, daffodil, the extra bullets like wintergreen, and the enemies like butterscotch.

Sony has a pen full of Aibos, their robot dog. I reach in and snap my fingers. An Aibo comes over and sniffs me, I pat its head, it sits back on its haunches and whines. I’m in love. A Japanese programmer shows me something that looks like a videocassette with little levers in its sides. In his broken English he is giving me to understand that this cassette-sized box is the inner hardware of the Aibo, and that I could develop my own shell to put onto the box, Sony is looking to license to developers.

I have a flash of a world in which all the creatures and people you interact with are in fact armatures of triangle meshes tacked onto these Sony boxes. Someday there’s a glitch and the illusory meshes disappear, and your wife is a black box with levers sticking out of it.

“Are you my wife?” a guy says to a box, and the lever in front goes up and down, nodding yes.

A woman dressed in black is on a stage dancing. She has reflective beads attached to her cat-suit, maybe fifty of them. Ranged around the stage are eighteen digital video cameras, and they’re crunching the data into realtime moving wire frame models of the woman. The almost-all-male developers are interested in this—both in the dancing woman, and in the moving wire-frame model. They hardly know which to stare at the most.

The dancer is Megan. She has dark lips, a perky smile, and a messy pinned-up ponytail that’s appears in the wire frame models as well. She yawns, dances, and poses while the pitchman talks. She’s as ceaselessly active as the tendrils of a sea anemone.

And now she leans, the epitome of grace, on a partition separating the stage from the pit where two hackers are running the programs to clothe her wire frame model in rendered triangles. She has one arm akimbo.

What a gulf between this live California girl and the programmers thinking about how best to “spend their triangles” on rendering her form.

I begin to feel lonely and alienated. As I wander around the Expo Hall, nobody talks to me, nobody looks my way. I’m too old. On the way out, I say to a woman next to me, “Look how much Silly Putty I got.”

“Lucky you,” she answers, with a look that says, Drop dead.

April 19, 2001. Joey Ramone Is Dead.

Joey Ramone died this week.

So many memories. Buying the records in Lynchburg, in the early ’80s. Those were some of the few new records I’d buy. Rocket to Russia.

The annual Ramones concerts at the Edge nightclub in Santa Clara. I went there numerous times with Sylvia. And once I went there with Georgia and a friend of hers, and once with Rudy and a friend of his. When I went with Georgia, Joey said, “Glahd to be here in Santa Clara.” We were in awe to hear a nearby town named by the divine Joey. Georgia and I repeated this line to each other in the coming days, trying to squeeze more out of it.

The time I went with Rudy, I was sure Joey said my name from the stage. This was also the time when Rudy first saw me smoking a joint, he saw me from across the room. Naturally I heard Joey talking to me after the joint.

Another time, I took Isabel and Rudy to see the Ramones at the outdoor Greek Theater in Berkeley. At the start of the concert, Johnny and Markie were standing on their amps, silhouetted against colored lights and dry ice fog. I’m, like, “Isabel! That’s rock and roll.”

I liked the way Joey would wave his mike stand in this vaguely threatening yet ineffectual-seeming way. When he did his stage moves it was almost like watching a kid practicing stage moves in front of a mirror. Artless, yet self-possessed.

The last time we saw him was in March, 1994, at the Warfield in San Francisco, their farewell tour—I wrote about it in these journals. A big crowd, almost everyone there was wearing a leather jacket. Sylvia and me, Rudy and his girlfriend Kim, Georgia and her girlfriend Yair. Rudy and Yair got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving.

That night the Ramones played so loud and fast that you could barely tell the songs apart from each other. It was really sweaty and savage in the mosh pit, jocks and nuts, with people going by overhead. I pushed up to get a good look at Joey.

He never looked excited. Energetic, but not agitated. The man of knowledge bears himself with aplomb.

“Even though you’re dead, you’re still my friend.”

April 13, 2001, 2001. Trying to Quit Smoking.

I have cankers in my mouth and a lingering cough from smoking. Every time I have a cigarette I get an instant headache and my lungs feel wheezy. I’ve been screwing around with gum and nicotine patches, trying to quit, and always slipping back.

Today is the day I quit smoking for good. I went to see my doctor and he said that quitting smoking is mainly a mind game you have to do on yourself, but that he’d also give me a prescription for Zyban pills.

Zyban is the same drug as Wellbutrin, which is used as an antidepressant, and I’m uneasy about getting high from them or addicted to them. My doctor knows I’m in recovery, but he insists I won’t have a problem. Even so, I worry he doesn’t quite get what drugs mean to me. But I’ll give the Zyban a try, plus some nicotine patches.

The doctor says the key is to have a plan and a program for quitting smoking and to stick to it. I tell myself that if I make it through a week—as far as Friday, April 20—then on that day I’ll spend the day mountain-biking the beach bluffs at Santa Cruz as a reward.

After a few days of taking the Zybans, I’m feeling good in some not-too-precise way. I look forward to taking the pills. They’re a nice color. Like a special candy. Everything is okay.

April 20, 2001. The Monomyth.

So April 20 was the end of my first week of not smoking. And I’ve been taking a Zyban every day for a week to help not smoke. They make me a little more cheerful in the morning right after I take them, but they wear off by the evening. I’m glad there’s not too much of a psychic effect, that’s the last thing I need.

The last few days, I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about the so-called monomyth which can be found underlying so many human legends, myths and stories. I’d like to use this pattern to help design my next novel.

The monomyth cycle is viewed as a circle. At the simplest level, the cycle has three acts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Looking at it a bit differently, we can see four stages: Call, Tests, Flight, Elixir. You get the call for a big journey, you survive some tests in the higher world, you flee back home, and you bring back an elixir.

Looking closer, Campbell finds seventeen stages in the monomyth, with some of the stages optional. I like the stages and their names, very visual and novelistic.

Call to Adventure. Refusal of the Call. The Helper. Crossing the Threshold. The Belly of the Whale. The Road of Trials. Woman as Temptress. Meeting with the Goddess. Atonement with the Father. Apotheosis. Refusal of the Return. The Elixir. The Flight. Rescue from Without. Crossing the Return Threshold. Master of Two Worlds. Freedom to Live.

As my reward for not smoking, I’d meant to drive to Santa Cruz and go biking today, but it was raining too hard. I’d packed my bike into the trunk of my car, but when I reached the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains on Route 17, I gave up and did a U-turn on the rainy road. A passing cop gave me a hard look, but he didn’t stop me. I went into a road-stop pizza-restaurant that I’ve never have been into before.

It was rustic and cozy. Oak slab table top, rocky walls, pot-belly stove, five Mexicans off work for the day playing pool. I was feeling my Zyban. With Campbell in mind, the inn took on a mythological status.

The guys playing pool were like gnomes. The Chinese innkeeper and his wife were mythic as well, not really friendly, like the devious innkeepers found in tales of yore.

I sat there taking it in, hand-writing some notes on the monomyth. I thought of an acidhead I’d talked to at one of Faustin Bray’s afternoon parties in Mill Valley. The guy was saying, “Let’s be mythic. I love being mythic.”

And, yes, it’s lovely to see the world as the working-out of the monomyth. My Elixir just now is a Styrofoam cup of coffee I got from the Father and the Goddess, i.e., from the innkeeper and his wife. The passing policeman whose glance seemed to question me as I made my U-turn was a guardian of the Threshold.

I’ve been working on a short story or novel-start called “Freddy’s Fractal,” where a boy finds a UFO that’s shaped like a fractal. It appears beneath his messy bed. I’d been thinking of working this into a short children’s book, but my agent doesn’t think that’s a good idea. Maybe “Freddy’s Fractal” could be the start of a monomyth novel?

Looking over Campbell’s stages, I notice “Belly of the Whale.” The concept seems odd and arbitrary at first, but in fact it isn’t at all, it’s an archetype that I myself use in so many of my books. Stahn inside the moldie in Freeware, Willy inside Om in Realware, Joe inside Kangy the hypercuttlefish in Spaceland. Funny how often the Whale thing really does come up. You crawl inside something big, and it takes you somewhere.

I really would like to do a whole monomyth novel. Yes, I’m starting to see it. A book with seventeen monomythic chapters. I’m getting illumination here in the rainy inn.

April 25, 2001. Asilomar. Two Book Offers.

I’m back here at the Asilomar Microcomputer Conference. I think I first came here in 1988. It’s smart nerds talking about computer stuff, a lot of it hardware-related.

This time I gave a talk based on the drawings for Spaceland that I finished this week. The Flatlanders came out very nicely. I gave them long snouts that look kind of like duck beaks. And there’s one final image of a Flatlander holding together a round hole in his flat space. He’s in the middle of the hole, grabbing the edges with his beak-mouth and with his hands and feet.

I drew this last one after Susan Protter called to tell me the good news that Hartwell is indeed buying Spaceland for $9K, and Bruegel for $8K. The $8K for Bruegel is fine, given that I had almost abandoned any hope of getting it published at all. But the $9K for Spaceland seems awfully low, for an SF novel by a guy at the peak of his talents. Especially if I compare it to my friend Greg Gibson’s $150K for his mutiny book! Oh, let go of it, Rudy.

There was another mildly worrisome thing—that Hartwell wasn’t sure Spaceland would make it past hardback into paperback. I’d hate to just be writing collector’s items, for that’s about all that hardbacks are. So I felt a bit disappointed as well as elated, and I captured this feeling in my drawing of a Flatlander trying to hold his world together.

Right after giving a talk used to be a primo time for me to get loaded. But after I spoke last night, that didn’t cross my mind. I’m slowly learning that my feelings pass on their own, no matter how intense and uncomfortable they are. I don’t have to do anything.

It’s different to be at Asilomar sober—this can be a rough conference for a drinker, as they have a round-the-clock open bar equipped with hard liquor.

Last time I was here, maybe in 1995, I was hitting bottom. I remember going for a morning walk on the beach carrying a beer, very hung-over, having already done a shot of brandy, and that morning touch of the alcohol was setting off a feeling in my head as if there were a low, blue flame flickering across my brain, a soft, lambent, alcohol flame like in a chafing-dish lamp—it was a truly evil sensation, a feeling of being damned and doomed.

Still on the ever-fascinating-to-me subject of smoking, alcohol, and drugs, after a two weeks of Zyban, I noticed that if I skipped the pill for a day I felt really uptight. I decided I didn’t want to risk getting back into having to take something to feel good, so I stopped the Zyban entirely. And after a couple of days of jonesing, I was my jagged old self. My mental life is a little less mellow this way, but equally rich.

The trade-off is that now I’m back to occasionally picking up a cigarette. Especially when I’m overhacking on the fucking port of my videogame programs framework to OpenGL.

Funny how I have this never-ending compulsion to “pick up” when things close in. I mean, really, I should be permanently zonked by the miracle that I exist at all. Why do I need anything heavier than that?

May 17, 2001. Sixth Day Stole Software Plot?

Here’s a capper to the Software movie dealings.

Phoenix Pictures sent the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, The Sixth Day into the theaters in the same month that Mike Medavoy cancelled his option on my Software, back in September, 2000. I happened to rent The Sixth Day last week, and, guess what, it’s a rip-off of the ideas in my novels Software and Wetware.

The Sixth Day is about taping someone’s brain software—and then loading that personality onto a tank-grown clone of the person. The taping part is straight from Software, and using a cloned body is straight from Wetware. And, as in my Wares, it’s a flash of light that loads a recorded mind onto a target body. These aren’t at all obvious ideas that were “in the air.” It took me years of thought and effort to come up with these scenarios.

To add mockery to plagiarism, the villain in The Sixth Day wears horn-rimmed glasses like mine, and his name is…Drucker. It’s like the scriptwriters were driven by a Raskolnikov-like obsession to confess their crime.

“Yes, we killed the old woman with an axe! Yes, we stole Dr. Rucker’s ideas!”

Whether this is egregious enough to be legally actionable is something I can’t decide about. I’m no Harlan Ellison—I’m not a guy who relishes legal conflict. And I don’t want to make myself a pest that Hollywood wouldn’t want to deal with again.

So what the fuck. I got some good money along the way, and I got to see a bit of the biz. Maybe some day a Rucker movie will happen. The whole issue seems a lot less important to me than it used to.

May 18, 2001. Santa Clara County Fair Again.

Once again I drove to Santa Clara County fairgrounds to check out the annual county fair. The fair’s theme was “Barn to be Wild.” Ouch. The paper says it’s the least well-attended Santa Clara county fair ever. I showed up at the opening time of 11 am, a bit earlier in fact, and the place was all but deserted. Going in at the gate, I overhead two men talking.

“I have a very small head,” says one of them to the other.

When we got in, a man with a great Western accent was herding goats into a little pen with a pile of truck tires and hay. It was in a show, a feature called Goat Mountain, and he was Sky Shivers from a small town in the middle of Oklahoma.

“I have a very small herd,” says he. Synchronicity strikes again.

The whole reason I go to a County Fair is to get in touch with my Kentucky roots, and this guy Sky Shivers was perfect. He talked about the new baby goats having been “borned here at the fair.” Nanny-goat, billy-goat, buck kid, and doeling.

I was looking around and thinking about the year 3000 for my next novel, wondering how things will be a thousand years from now. What will be the same, what will be different? All the dopes and pinheads will still be around. People won’t have improved. The Futurama TV show is more accurate a prediction of the future than people realize.

Among the rides was a virtual-reality bucking van. I went for it—you sit inside it and watch a screen. How antiquated this ride already is. It’s from the turn of the twentieth century. The graphics not up to contemporary videogame standards. It simulated a roller coaster through a moonscape, but—can you imagine?—with no provision for centrifugal force.

“Is it scary?” asked a young boy sitting next to me.

“No,” I say, “It’s just a roller-coaster.” The boy makes a noise like that’s scary.

To me what’s scary is the ghost-house train-ride that I went on at the zoo in Cincinnati on our third-grade class outing, with the buzzing neon monsters and the wrenching cars on their dark tracks, that’s scary. I’ve never really gotten out of that funhouse, ever since.

Anyway, when our virtual-reality moon-rollercoaster ride was done, a door flew open in the side of the van and there was a cheerful, homey, motherly woman—she’d been running the thing.

“You have a nice day!”

So Twilight Zone, so 2001. You’re in a scary world and—a door opens and you meet the operator. And then you relax once more into the ordinariness of the real world, and it’s coziness. But then—another door opens…and you’re in the Cincinnati zoo funhouse. Eeeek!

May 23, 2001.Under My Bed, Freddy’s Fractal.

School’s out for the summer. I feel nice and relaxed, even though I still have a list of things to take care of. But even the cancerous, heroin-like, obsessive, all-consuming task of writing the 3D code for my textbook isn’t so horrifying when I don’t have my classes to deal with.

Yesterday I didn’t hack at all, which was really nice. I started a new oil painting called Under My Bed. It’s a perspective picture of the view under our big sleigh bed, seen from floor level, with the bed frame filling the left and edges of the canvas like the curtain and proscenium of a stage.

Drawing the perspective view of the underside of a bed is so hard that I took a storm window and set it on the floor so I could look through it at the bed. And then I traced the slanted outlines onto the window with my marker, drawing right over what I was seeing. And then I copied the foreshortened lines to my canvas. Projection! Just like Albrecht Dürer, right?

And yesterday I painted in the wood of the bed frame along the top and the left edges, and it came out looking really nice. I used Burnt Sienna, Cadmium Yellow, and Alizarin Crimson, with touches of Titanium White and Ivory Black. Love the names of paints. I used rapid, dabbing brush strokes to get a fractal, wood-like texture.

So what am I going to put under the bed? Well I want something that’s in some way like a 3D Mandelbrot set, and it’s also a UFO. And I’d really like to paint a cuttlefish. Recently I was at the Monterey aquarium and I got a good look at some cuttlefish, and I feel confident about painting one.

I hadn’t consciously realized this at first, but painting what’s under the bed is my way of finding my way further into my Monomyth 3000 novel. The thing under the bed will be the herald or messenger or helper that gets my hero started on his epic trip.

The seed for this image is my story idea, “Freddy’s Fractal,” a story idea that occurred to me around the same time that I decided not to write a nonfiction Mandelbrot set book. Recall that the story was supposed to be about a kid who finds a UFO under his messy bed. And now my plan is to use this story as the start of my new novel. It’s very indirect, how these ideas emerge.

June 12-15, 2001. Hacking. Arguing with Bruce Sterling. Heart.

It’s time for Sylvia to visit with her father in Geneva, Switzerland. She took Rudy Jr. along, and they’re going to Zermatt as well. She’ll be gone for quite a while, over three weeks. Georgia’s still living in New York, but at least Isabel’s in San Francisco.

On my own like this, I’m programming a lot, also writing in my journal more than usual. At the end of June, I’m going to take my own vacation and spend a week with brother Embry at his house on Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean.

This last week I was embroiled in an angry email exchange with Bruce Sterling about a story we’re working on. Or not working on. It’s called “Junk DNA” and I had it up to nine thousand words and he cut three thousand of them and then didn’t add anything new at all, and I was really pissed off.

So I was rantin’ and ravin’ and he of course was coming back with every bit as good as he got. It reminded me of two testosterone-poisoned middle-aged guys playing tennis with each other on the weekend, and they’re slamming the ball so hard that they grunt when they hit it, total aggression going into those volleys, that’s how our emails were.

Finally Bruce said he’d add a little more to the story, instead of just cutting stuff and telling me to write more. So while I wait for that, the story is on the back burner again.

I want to be writing fiction again, I want something nice to think about. Collaborating seems easy when you start, but then it can turn hard. The less stressful way is to dive into a new novel. But that takes a certain amount of oomph.

I’ve been computer-hacking like you wouldn’t believe. I’m working on this computer game framework code that I call “the Pop framework,” in honor of my father, not that he was interested in computers at all. Pop is a nice short word. The point of the code is that students can add only a small amount of their own code onto the Pop framework, and end up with a nice-looking computer game. And that makes it easier to teach them about building commercial-level software projects.

And my task these days is to port the Pop computer game framework to the OpenGL rendering library. Do a full lift from 2D worlds to 3D worlds. I made a promise to do the 3D port—in order to convince Addison-Wesley to buy my textbook, Software Engineering and Computer Games. The Pop framework is the accompanying code package, see. I’ve been working on the book and the code for nearly ten years.

My problem right now is that sometimes, when I work on the project, or even think about it, my heart starts pounding so hard that it feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe I have a major medical problem. Or maybe it’s just that I’m anxious about getting the Pop port done and then getting the final rewrite done.

I feel sorry for myself, living alone, sitting at my desk all day hacking, driving myself, driving, driving, driving, a pitiful shut-in, and outside the sunny summer is going by.

It’s better when Sylvia is here to make me go outside and have fun. I’ve been smoking cigarettes more and more often, and the desire for them is constantly raging within.

June 19, 2001. Internet. Biking with Gunnar.

Today was been a day of hardware hacking. I used a bunch of cards and wires to get all three of our computers hooked up to a DSL modem that runs into the phone line. We’re talking seven new cords under my desk. Me down there like Laocöon wrestling with the serpents. We’ve got a connection speed that’s about two hundred times as rapid as before. The internet is a whole different thing this way. I used to shy away from clicking links, now I just dive into ’em. Photos, sound, no problem.

I was listening to Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes on my stereo while doing this. Good rollicking music.

Last night I drove out to meet a friend of mine from my recovery group. He’s a woodcutter and lives in a trailer right off the access road to the Lupine Nudist Camp, which I’d never realized is so close to town. At first I drove too far up the access road, and a naked guy stopped me at the Lupine gate. I got a brochure from him.

I stayed up late cruising the web with DSL, reading comics mostly. Woke up surprisingly early. I went and got my old Norwegian neighbor Gunnar to go on a bike ride with me. He insisted we go to see a beaver dam he’d found. Even though he’s lived in the U.S. for most of his life, Gunnar has this incredibly heavy accent, and at first I couldn’t even understand what he was talking about showing me.

“Bay-var dom. Baay-vaar domm.

And by god, he really did show me a beaver dam back at the far end of Lexington reservoir. We had a dry winter, and the reservoir is almost empty, with long, dry red-dirt banks. Out at that far end of the dry reservoir with Gunnar, I got a bee in my bonnet and said that he and I should try and ride back along the bank.

A lake is an ellipse, right, and if you ride along the bank, it’s a simple curve. Not.

A lake, dear reader, is a fractal. It took us an hour to go like a third of the way. At one point Gunnar disappeared, I was worried, looking all over for him, but then I saw he’d just pushed way ahead of me. Gunnar’s ten years older than me, but he’s leathery like beef jerky and very reckless. Naturally he wasn’t getting off and walking his bike over the rough spots like I did. When we finally got back we were proud.

I figured out why I’ve been getting that feeling I’ve been worrying about, the feeling that my heart is about to jump out of my throat. It’s from coffee. Isabel suggested this on the phone, and it seems she’s right. When I don’t drink coffee, I don’t get that feeling, and when I do drink coffee, I do get that feeling, if not immediately, then some hours later. Too bad, I’d been getting more and more into coffee of late, to help with the programming, drinking really a lot. I hope I can start up on it again pretty soon.

June 21, 2001. A Day in San Francisco with Isabel.

For reasons hard to explain, Rudy Jr. has launched a website about President Bush’s twin daughters. In a way it’s a media art project, although the site pretends to be fairly straight-on. The site has been getting a huge amount of attention, with massively many hits.

My brother Embry mailed me a clipping about Rudy’s site from the Louisville Courier Journal, of all places:

Double-Shot Twins. And for all those inquiring minds who want to know the latest shenanigans the nineteen-year-old Bush twins are up to, thank the internet for www.TheFirstTwins.com. The gossipy fan site—the mastermind of San Francisco ex-dot-commer Rudy Rucker—features more than President Bush wants the public to see or know.

Today I got up very early and hacked for a few hours, trying to round off the recent work on the Pop framework so I can upload it to my website and stop working on it for a while. And then Sylvia called, which was nice, and then I drove up to see Isabel at her warehouse. I brought my second-string bike, the fifteen-year-old yellow Rock Hopper.

We went in Rudy’s room at the warehouse to see his guinea pigs. They make such a squeaking, as of a badly oiled machine, like a warehouse fan, and rhythmic. Remember that Rudy’s in Switzerland with Sylvia, so Isabel is feeding the guinea pigs. There are fewer of them than before. Rudy gave away the females, and now he only has the big Falfa and three of the little black ones. Georgia really hit the nail on the head when she said the guinea pigs are “rabid.” Rabid rodents. But the squeaking is kind of pleasant.

I scored a nice new XL-size red-trimmed Monkeybrains T-shirt from Rudy’s stash. He hands them out to promote his web-hosting and internet-service-provider business. I donned my Monkeybrains T-shirt for our bike ride, and Isabel was already wearing one, but she didn’t want to be a father/daughter identically-dressed pair, so she ran back in and got a different T-shirt made by Rudy: a TheFirstTwins.com T-shirt in gray.

Speaking of Rudy’s enterprises, later that day Isabel and I went in a hardware store and the clerk, a boy her age, recognized the First Twins T-shirt and said he’d looked at that site.

I told him, “Her brother (nodding at Isabel) runs that site.”

Outside, Isabel says, jokingly outraged, “Why do you put it on me? Saying, her brother.”

We biked near the bay on a small road parallel to Third Street. It had a nice port feel with ships in sight, warehouses active or tumble-down, moist blue sky, hot sun, cool air. Then we cut through the Mission—what bustle, I love the bustle in San Francisco. We had lunch at the beloved Ajax Cafe. I had a roasted yam sandwich on baguette. I ate it because I miss Sylvia, who I sometimes call yam.

When we headed back, a big nail suddenly got stuck in Isabel’s tire, such a long nail that it went all the way through and punctured the tube in three places. So we sat down on the sidewalk and tried to patch the tube, which was hard, the hard part being getting the tire on and off the rim. I borrowed a screwdriver from a furniture store for prying at the tire. And then the tube still leaked anyway, so we got some ice-cream and wheeled the bike home, using a different street parallel to Third Street, Tennessee, which was interesting, with some rundown little Victorians I didn’t know about. The so-called Dogpatch neighborhood.

We went right by the San Francisco Hells Angels headquarters. It was deserted, but tightly locked. A whipped-to-shit old house, with the lawn used as a parking lot, and the lot blocked by a sawhorse saying Hells Angels Only. We walked through the parking lot anyway. Isabel said it was safe.

Back at Isabel’s warehouse, I sat around with her for a bit. We were talking about how Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder have odd smiles, presumably because they’re blind and can’t do a feedback loop on how their expression looks.

“He had the exorbitant smile of a blind person.”

I know exorbitant isn’t exactly the right word here—but maybe it is, in the sense of being a word that brings you into the scene and makes you think. Isabel and I talked about things like that.

Isabel showed me a zine with a comic she’d drawn, a two-pager about rent and eviction, a big theme in San Francisco of late. Isabel was excited about having table space at a mini-market and fashion show coming up soon. She gave me a nice announcement for it, with Isabel Jewelry on the back. We played with Isabel’s kitten Yazsa for awhile, bouncy as a spring.

And then I came home and programmed late into the night, finishing my big 3D OpenGL hack.

Diving in Grand Turk

June 23, 2001. Grand Turk. Pounding Heart.

So Sylvia’s over in Switzerland with her father, and I’ve been planning to fly down to visit brother Embry on Grand Turk Island. Do some diving and hanging out. Kick back.

Like I’ve been saying, all this week I kept working to finish the 3D code for my Pop game framework. And my heart was racing more and more. So yesterday I started wondering if I should check myself into the hospital emergency room. But I knew that if I went in there, they’d go bananas with the tests and I wouldn’t get out in time for my trip. So I phoned up Isabel and asked her advice.

I was like, “Should I go relax in the Caribbean, or should I stay here worrying and going into the hospital for tests on my heart?”

“Oh, Da,” she said sympathetically. “Go to Uncle Embry’s. Let yourself relax.”

So now I’m on the plane to Grand Turk, which is, I hope, a wiser choice than a hospital heart-testing room. Yesterday evening my heart was feeling better. And this morning was fine as well—at least up till a minute ago, when I got out this laptop and went into the directory where I keep the 3D Pop code that I’ve been hacking. Pound pound pound. My heart flopping around like a fish in the bottom of a dinghy. Like a rabid rodent in a gerbil wheel.

I closed the directory and switched to writing in this journal. I dithered a lot yesterday about whether to bring my laptop at all, but I had the image of lots of free time at Embry’s, what with siesta hours in the hot midday, and the solitary room hours in our early-to-bed evenings.

I also brought a heavy print-out of my manuscript for Software Engineering and Computer Games, although it might be better not to work on that. There goes my heart again, just thinking about it. Pound flutter flop pound. I gotta turn this laptop off. Kick back and read a paperback.

So, okay, there’s a thunderstorm over Miami, and we landed an hour late, after the time of the connecting flight to the Turks and Caicos islands, and that flight was cancelled anyway, it turns out.

The Miami Airport crowd is diverse and colorful enough to be like spaceport aliens. Ah, those South American women. No unswinging stiff walks for these Latina chiquitas. The macaw caw of Spanish all around me. I feel dully monoglot.

I look for my luggage. No sign of that. I try and get on the next flight onward towards Grand Turk. Incredible frantic crowds fill the lines at the airline counters. It’s like the lines you’d see at heaven’s gates on Judgment Day. Everyone sweaty, humid, frantic, a woman loses it and starts screaming. I try three lines, each time it doesn’t work, either I get to the head and they say it’s the wrong line—or I lose patience and walk off. Finally I get a good line, and they put me on a flight for tomorrow, and they give me a hotel voucher. They say I should just leave my suitcase wherever it is in the bowels of the system, and tomorrow it will find its way to the islands with me. I’ll sleep in my shirt.

Outside, of course, the van for the hotel drives by really fast on the other side of the street. There’s no end to the things that can go wrong. I get a cab, and it’s an incredible $35. My heart is pounding in that frightening up-in-my-throat way it’s been doing for the last couple of weeks.

Am I about to die? It took Pop decades to die of his bad heart. My age, 55, was around when his heart trouble kicked in. That would have been 1969, the year Georgia was born, yeah, and his bypass operation was few years later. It’s very common, I hear, for men having heart attacks to deny that it’s happening, to deny that there’s pain. They might even go out and exercise, to try and “teach the heart a lesson.” Thursday, when my arrhythmia was at its worst, I bought a pack of cigarettes and some ice-cream and smoked and gorged, teaching my heart a lesson.

Buying those cigarettes, when the 7-11 clerk routinely asked how I was doing, I almost said, “I’m having a heart attack.”

The other day, riding my bike with Gunnar, I said, whistling in the dark, “I don’t care if I have a heart attack right now. This would be the best way to go. Bam, no hospital. I’m out doing something I love—and then it’s all over.”

Gunnar agreed. But from watching Pop, I know that dying of a heart attack isn’t so simple. It took Pop twenty years. He had I don’t know how many of them, attacks and strokes.

That must have been weird, the last heart attack or stroke that Pop had, and Priscilla was there and they didn’t call a doctor, they just let it take its course. Priscilla told me that right before Pop died he said, “I’m ready.” I wish I could have seen his corpse. All I got to see was a crappy cardboard box with a plastic bag of his ashes. I would have liked to have seen Pop’s face in final repose. I saw Arfie dead, and I saw Mom, but not my Pop.

It would be nice to avoid all that hospital stuff. Perfect health to eighty-four and then keel over in one flash, that would be the best. But probably my last months will be more like the Miami airport. A theater, a mess, a drawn-out fandango. Oh well. What’s the difference. In the end, you’re dead just the same.

Writing this on my laptop, cheering myself with the wheenk wheenk wheenk of my whining. I’m in the restaurant at the Don Shula Hotel where the airline lodged me. The menu, get this, is written on a football. Steak, steak, and steak.

“The kind of restaurant where the menu is printed on a piece of sports equipment.”

I definitely want a spaceport in my book. I’m strongly struck by the spaceport aspect of this airport and its environs. Huge and sprawling, with oddly shaped outbuildings. Spaceports are cool.

June 24, 2001. 34th Wedding Anniversary.

I’m starting to miss Sylvia. At first, it seemed simple and unencumbered to be traveling alone, but at this point, I start to feel an ache as if from a missing limb. And today’s our anniversary.

“Tender Ru,” I can hear her saying.

Going to the Beau Rivage Hotel with her for our wedding night, checking in, I told the clerk my name and added “et ma femme,” which she lovingly noticed.

We went out for supper at a cafe on the lake. Our server moved with such exaggerated grace that we called him the “dancing waiter.”

I tried to phone Sylvia in Zermatt. She was out hiking with Rudy Jr. A pleasant thought. The singing air of the Alps. I can see it so well in my mind’s eye, the blue sky, the bent gray hump of the Matterhorn with its cap of snow and its trailing bit of cloud.

June 26, 2001. Diving the Wall.

Grand Turk is less lively than it was the last time I was here, twenty-five years ago. The heavy development on Provo has sucked up all the business. There’s almost nothing left but the government of the Turks and Caicos Islands. The place reminds me of the dusty, blowing, empty-streeted town of The Last Picture Show.

Embry and Noreen have a house right on the beach. The first thing I did when I got here was to complain about my heart, and then I set that aside and swam out about a hundred yards to where the undersea wall drops off, snorkeling and looking at coral all the way.

Monday morning I went for a scuba dive, and by then I’d completely forgotten my neurotic health worries. I was glad to get right into the scuba gear—accomplishing one of the two reasons I came, the second being to improve my relationship with brother Embry.

As I say, the continental shelf’s edge is just a few hundred yards offshore. The bottom drops straight down in a sheer thousand-foot cliff. And then, supposedly, it angles down to seven thousand feet deep.

Grand Turk was the site of my very first dive, twenty-five years ago. I wrote about it in my memoir novel All the Visions—that was the dive where Embry and the guide Paul Hudson nearly killed me, or so it felt. That time we dove to two hundred feet, which was insanity for an inexperienced diver like me. And when we came back up, I had a nose bleed, and Hudson told me that I’d burst a lung, and that I’d be dead in five minutes. His idea of a joke.

So I was a little nervous coming back here to dive again. But it was no big deal today, as we didn’t go deeper than 85 feet. We saw some nice schools of tangs, a lot of Gorgonian sea fans, some tube and vase sponges, and I got a close look at a bunch of Christmas tree worms with my new prescription bifocal dive-mask lenses.

I saw a really big local lobster under a rock, a spiny guy. Although they don’t have claws, these lobsters are spiky enough that they’d be hard to hold onto. If you could catch one. They’re pretty quick with the old tail-snap. A woman on the dive boat claimed she’d seen a local lobster the size of a dog. What if they were the size of horses, and they lived on land, and they liked to eat people? Things would be different, all right. There’d be some changes made.

Monday evening we hung out with some of Embry’s wife’s relatives who live here. Fun to listen in on this extended Irish family. One word they used that made me laugh was “lie-low” for an inflatable rubber raft, the regular little kind that you might have in a swimming pool. A lie-low. I lie low whenever the action here dies down—working on my laptop or reading or doing yoga. I’m here for such a long stay that I want to make every effort to be a non-demanding guest.

It feels pretty nice to be with Embry and Noreen. They’re being pleasant, and I am too. I hope we can all keep it up. Today Embry and I did something kind of hard which was to launch his truly enormous white plastic boat from a native-built boat ramp that was just an inch or two wider than the wheel base of the heavily loaded tires of the trailer that we pulled there with Embry’s big pickup truck.

I was the one to back the trailer down the ramp, with Embry in the boat. Then I swam out in my clothes to the boat, we drove the boat for an hour, and when we got back I swam ashore, backed Embry’s truck down the ramp and we cranked the boat back onto the trailer.

I wouldn’t want to do this every day. First of all, there was a chance of ruining Embry’s boat and/or truck and getting yelled at. And I didn’t really like reprising my old childhood pattern of being Embry’s assistant—a thankless and resentment-provoking role. And, finally, there seemed to be a very real chance of seriously injuring myself—perhaps by getting squashed between the massive, half-launched boat and a piece of the trailer. I know from my boyhood experiences that Embry often has very little consideration about my physical safety.

But, on the other hand, it was nice to help my big brother play with his toy. And I was thinking that I don’t really have to be so quick to resent him all the time. It’s up to me not to hurt myself. Everything isn’t about you all the time, Rudy. Use your lie-low. Be here for others instead of expecting others to be here for you. Be just one of the crowd. A normal family member.

While we were out at sea, towing some ineffective lures that theoretically might catch a tuna, I got Embry to stop where the wall drops down and I jumped out of the boat with my fins and mask and did some free diving there, making about 30 feet of depth.

It was deeply frightening, to be alone in the ocean with no scuba and no partners. E’s boat drifted away. I was thirty feet down, at the lip of that thousand foot abyss, and when I looked up at the wrinkled, mirrored surface, it was as high above me as the top of a building, far and wee. I was deep and alone, a piece of plankton.

Embry really is quite lovable. In any case, even if he does something that seems eccentric or uptight or absent-minded, I can always think, “Well, he’s sixty.”

He turned sixty in May, and he’s still thinking about that. Funny to be talking about being fifty-five and sixty with him. It feels like we’re still just the same boys we always were. We’re wondering how it’ll be, getting old. It’s the next hard thing we have to do, the next in a line of so many hurdles we’ve crossed, Embry first, then me, year after year, still boys. He always introduces me with great pride to his friends and neighbors. “This is my brother the famous author.”

My heart is opening to him, which is what I’d hoped for from this trip. He and I are so similar in many ways—we both resemble Pop and, even more, Mom.

June 28, 2001. Beach Walk, Night Dive.

I walked along the beach this morning, went snorkeling, and came back to Embry’s. A woman had dropped in on them, a friend, a British blonde, bright and chirpy, plumpish, nicely curved. Beverley. Like finding a sudden heron in a glade, interesting to see her. As the days of no wife go by, the women look cuter. I miss the civilizing influence of the fair sex.

I’m out here on the porch now, working on my novel, today’s title is Frek and the Space Squid. The beach is poster-perfect, just me and the ocean and the sky. Archetypal. Not even a hint or a sign or a possibility of anyone else appearing. Completely alone, not a sound but the wind and the gently lapping waves. The water is clear as glass, the low waves are like odd lenses. There’s some hymn we used to sing about angels casting down their golden crowns before the crystal sea. A science-fiction hymn.

Another thing I notice here is the clouds, each a dollop of white and gray piled upon a flat base, the clouds separate from each other like cookies on a baking-tin, like Brussels sprouts in a garden.

There’s a very nice perspective effect, with the more distant cloud-lumps bunching up smaller and smaller near the horizon. The other day in San Francisco, I was saying to Isabel that you only see perspective in man-made things built with lots of parallel lines, but I was wrong, you also see a perspective in the appearance of a large array of uniformly distributed objects, even if they’re are not arranged in a strict grid.

In the afternoon, Embry and I drove around Grand Turk, doing errands relating to his various on-going deals. Over the years, I’ve often accompanied Pop, and now my big brother, to places where they wanted to talk biz. There’s a similarity to these office lairs—messy, with cheap furniture, and always an unlabeled, dirty pair of gray file cabinets, the two file cabinets next to each other, but not quite aligned. You’ll also see some Xeroxed jokes on the wall, and an illustrated calendar, and perhaps a disk-shaped composition-board table with a single leg of beige-painted metal that gets wide at the bottom. Sometimes Embry will make a face that reminds me of Pop, who liked to make faces.

In the evening I go for my first-ever night dive. It’s in the harbor. Dreamy and peaceful in the dark under the water, I’d thought it would be scary, but it’s not. Easy as pie. And we have flashlights.

The most fun I have is at about fifty feet, working my way down the big drop-off wall. I’m looking at bright red patches of rubbery junk growing on the wall. A special highlight: I see a cute little candy cane shrimp perched in a niche like a man sitting at his dinner table in his apartment. A pink scuttly hermit crab is in there as the shrimp’s guest. Further down, I see little striped whiskbrooms of sea pens, and two fat moray eels undulating on the harbor floor, plus a defiant lobster, vivid in our lights.

Afterwards I go by the Turk’s Head Inn and get a piece of key lime pie. The place is faded, a little ghostly. After my few days of Grand Turk I know everyone in here: the black, flirty hotel manager woman Cecily who calls me “Handsome,” the hefty Turks Islander who was our waitress the other night, and the shipping man whose cheap-furniture office we were in that afternoon—and he’s drunk. No strictures about that down here. I could move to Grand Turk and rot.

June 29, 2001. Bicycling on Grand Turk. Country Music.

Last night I dreamed about what I was like as a boy. Clumsy and forgetful. Knocking things over and not knowing how I did it. In my dream, I’m once again experiencing how worried a boy can be about small things. Still in the dream, I’m talking with Embry about my boyhood, and then about my Frek novel.

“The book’s tone should be funny and sad,” I say. “And…”

I don’t remember the third thing.

I rode Embry’s bike to the north end of Grand Turk, where there’s a small lighthouse. A pair of ratty-looking ospreys sat atop it, thirty feet up, making skirling cries as a couple of Turks islanders filled out some kind of prove-you-visited-it forms for maybe a community college class. How attractive some of these black locals are, so solid and smooth. They seem mellow. I think it helps that this is their island.

Nearly thirty years ago, someone took a picture of Embry, Noreen, and their two young kids by this lighthouse, and it became a travel poster for the Turks and Caicos Islands. It’s really a return to the past for Embry and Noreen to be living here again. Today at the airport we were picking up Embry’s brother-in-law, and one of the locals called Embry “The Mayor of Grand Turk.” Just like they used to say about Pop in his final abode, “The Mayor of Reston.” Embry is always very energized around the airport—in the old days he was a pilot for Turks and Caicos Airlines.

I had a snack downtown at a place that was playing country music. How completely lacking in any real values these singers sound, the men living on alcoholism and macho media lies, the women either of the grainy-voiced, rowdily caterwauling, prowler-gal camp, or of the stubby, battered, Tammie Wynette ilk. All the singers grieving over the unfulfillable dream, all of them crushed by the wheels of the media pigs—who seek to enslave us via the very songs the singers sing.

Later I tried to express these thoughts to Embry and he got an odd, almost wounded look and said, “You’re so snobby.”

After lunch I was biking down a tiny street of native houses and I noticed a store called Jesus Still Live. Having nothing better to do, I went in there to ask the woman about the store’s name. She was a local woman with a lovely plump daughter.

The woman pointed at her chest, “Jesus Still Live isn’t just a sign I have on the wall, it’s in here. You or me is good sometime, but Jesus is good all the time. I love this man. Do you believe in him? No doubts?”

I embarrassedly say that sure, I believe in him, yes, why not. We had a nice moment there, feeling a religious high. The same radio station that had been playing country music changed gears and kicked into an old hippie anthem, “When You Come To San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair.)”

I’m having a little trouble holding my personality together here. Time is starting to weigh on my hands. Of course I should be treasuring these days of idleness. The faded pastels of the buildings. The fish, the fish, the fish.

June 30, 2001. Fish with Embry. Barracuda.

Today Embry and I went fishing in his big boat. We brought along a black guy named Dutchie, with the ‘u’ pronounced long like ‘oo.’ When I’m not around, Dutchie often rides in Embry’s boat with him and helps Embry get the boat into the water. Dutchie has a boat too, with White Man Boat painted on both sides. He and Embry have some very weird conversations about being black and being white.

On the boat, Embry got mad at me for awhile because I wouldn’t take dictation and write out little message slips for him that he wanted to put in wine bottles he’d saved up to cork and throw overboard.

“I’m not your secretary,” I snapped. If I could have written my own messages, I would have done it. But having to take dictation was too much. I guess the task reminded me of all the other projects Embry got me to do with him when we were boys. Selling greeting cards, white mice, cinnamon toothpicks, and bunches of fresh mint. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I ever saw a cent of the profits. I was forever the exploited underling.

Looked at in a more sympathetic light, throwing out messages in a bottle is kind of a touching symbol of Embry’s perhaps somewhat lonely mental state. Marooned on an island. And, in another way, messages in bottles is another manifestation of Embry’s eternal fascination with the long-shot. He was the one who would order the surprise packages from the Johnson & Smith Novelty catalogs we used to pore over, “A five-dollar value for ninety-nine cents!” I remember one of the surprise packages contained a pamphlet about how to paint your house.

Dutchie was full of advice about setting up the fishing gear, tying on the lures, and so on. Very impatient with me, constantly telling me I was doing it wrong. I think he resented me because I was Embry’s real brother. I pretty much tuned him out.

I caught a big king mackerel, maybe thirty pounds, exciting to reel him in. We caught some barracuda and something like a baby marlin as well. All the fish were identically long, silver, streamlined. Toothy mouths.

When we got back to Embry’s house, I cut up my king mackerel, with a certain amount of anxiety about getting bawled out for messing up the counter with blood and fish scales. Embry’s become very tidy in his old age. I fried up a couple of fish steaks for lunch. It was pretty cool to be eating a fish I’d just pulled out of the deep ocean right beside the house. As fresh as it gets.

Something about the fishing trip seemed to have put Embry into a cold mood. Maybe he was hungry and tired. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been such a prick about writing the notes for his bottles. I think for Embry, being around me is as hard as it is for me to be around him. We’re torn—in that we’d like to be close and loving, and yet there are these lingering fraternal antagonisms.

In the afternoon I decided to snorkel out the hundred or two hundred yards to the wall of the shelf offshore from Embry and Noreen’s beach-front house. It was a long haul, and I was just getting to the spot where that thousand-foot undersea cliff drops, when I noticed that right behind me, following me, stalking me—was a four foot barracuda, similar to the one I’d in fact hooked and hauled in a few hours earlier.

“Payback time,” said the barracuda.

I darted at him, trying to scare him away, he simply backed off and turned sideways, studying me with his big expressionless eye. His mouth was about four inches long, with exceedingly sharp teeth. What if he were to speed in at forty miles per hour and tear out a chunk of flesh?

I decided to swim for shore. So for the next ten or fifteen minutes, the barracuda was following me, always about ten yards off, pointing straight at me, silver, implacable, patient.

I had my mask and snorkel on, and I kept an eye on him, alert for any sign of an incipient tear-out-a-chunk-of-flesh routine. I imagined the barracuda was thinking of me as something like a cow that had fallen off a ship, a cow thrashing clumsily in the water. He was waiting for me to become sufficiently weak and disorganized. And then—the forty-miles-per-hour attack!

A less sinister possibility might have been that the barracuda thought I might soon kill something myself, big as I was, and that he’d be able to eat some of my scraps.

Onward I swam—trying not to flounder like a drowning cow. Finally a distraction came. It was a six-foot black shark, swimming along the bottom, parallel to the shore. I stopped swimming and stared through my mask, waiting to see what fate’s plan for me might be. The shark didn’t veer, he continued past me on his way and—oh joy, the barracuda followed him.

So now I’ve only got sixty yards to go, and here comes another big dark shape towards me. I’m like—guys?—don’t you think this is a bit much?

She’s a ray of some kind, probably an eagle ray. She’s dark with spots on top and beige on the bottom, with a ten-foot whip-like tail. Flapping her wings with mathematical grace, and, like the shark, passes me by. Maybe an eight foot wingspan. Incredible.

For dinner we broiled more steaks from that giant king mackerel. By then, Embry and I were feeling good towards each other again.

July 1-3, 2001. Church. Rays. Babylon.

We went to church at 6:30 am on Sunday. Embry, Noreen, and I were the only whites in the church—an Anglican congregation, with a minister from Exuma in the Bahamas. It was the same familiar liturgy as at the Episcopal services that Pop used to have in his church. Nice to hear. Everyone very friendly during the Peace.

There was a squall of heavy rain after church. The little town was washed so clean. I was buying a postcard just as the downpour started. A white woman ran in, rain-soaked, laughing hard. A visual haiku. Vacation frame of mind.

I went on a snorkeling tour to Gibbs Cay near Grand Turk. Gibbs Cay is a deserted bump of an island, with plants on top, sandy beach, rocks and reefs. We dove for conch on the way there, and I “caught” two of them, free-diving in twenty feet of water. They’re just lying on the bottom, all you do is pick them up. When I caught my two, I noticed them pulling in their pairs of stalk eyes. And they have a big hook thing on their underside—they use the hook to sweep in food and to drag themselves across the sand. A big, orange muscle is attached to the hook. I felt sorry for the conchs and threw one of mine back. But I gave our guide the other. That was my contribution to our group’s lunch.

At the Gibbs Cay beach, the guides yanked our conchs out of their shells and made a salad or ceviche from their muscles—raw cubes of the meat with diced tomatoes and onions and greens. To pull a conch out of its shell, it helps to make a hole in one end of the shell—to break the vacuum. And then you yank on that hook-shaped thing. If you don’t want to damage the shell, you set the conch on some sticks in the bright sun and then, slowly, slowly, in mortal agony, the beast slips out of its shell, its hook fruitlessly sweeping the air—a sight that’s terrible to behold.

Years ago when I visited Embry on South Caicos Island we did this to a conch, and I felt horrible about it, and that night I was sunburned, and high on pot, sleeping in Embry’s low, airless attic, and I started imagining that I was a conch twisting in the sun. “Doin’ conch.” A bad trip.

Anyway, the big attraction at the Gibbs Cay beach was a school of sting-rays, a half dozen of them, each three or four feet across, each with a long sharp stick of a tail. They had gill holes right under their somewhat lifeless-looking brown eyes. The sting-rays were swirling around our feet because the tour guides had a baggie of little sardine-like fish to feed them. When the first sting-ray bumped into me, I screamed. It was big and soft, slippery, like a giant, flapping chicken liver. Supposedly you only get stung if you step on the base of its tail, which wouldn’t have been so hard to do in the confusion.

A ray would make a very nice science-fiction alien, particularly if we assume that they’re airborne. A thirty-foot-wingspan flying ray, yeah.

A four-foot barracuda was hanging around on the fringes of our ray-feeding scene, and the guide threw him a few little fish as well. I asked the guide if barracuda were in fact dangerous to humans or not. He assured me that barracudas rarely attack—unless they feel cornered. A barracuda is like a dog, curious about us, prone to following us, capable of biting, but not likely to do so—unless maybe you get into a drowning-cow mode. Or unless maybe he sees a glint of sun on your watch and he decides the flash of a shiny fish. Or unless maybe he feels like you’re cornering him. Speed up to forty miles per hour and attack!

Hard to imagine any outfitters hosting a barefoot sting-rays-and-barracudas feeding party in the U.S.

For my last dinner, Embry got hold of some lobster tails from South Caicos. It was good to have this time together—even though we’re so different from each other that we can make each other nervous. I feel great sympathy, affection, familiarity, and love for him. And for his wife Noreen. A successful trip.

On the plane, the Turks Islanders are ill-at-ease. They’re going from their comfortable homeland into the racist and hectic monoculture of the U.S. The two ladies in front of me wear sculptured, hair-sprayed dos. One of them has a high twist with conch-shell-like spiral walls. The other lady has a great bow of curls like a gift-package’s ribbon, and her bangs are as stiff as an awning.

I have a friendly talk with the Turks Island guy sitting next to me.

“Going to Babylon,” I say to him after a bit, using the word in the reggae sense.

“Yah mon.”

Babylon is where I live.

Totem Poles

July 4, 2001. Los Gatos Fourth of July Alone. Finished Spaceland.

Sylvia’s still not home. In the afternoon an orchestra played a Fourth of July concert on the high school lawn. That good old corny American stuff, the red, white, and blue, the ice-cream, the excited or sweatily crying kids. Skaters. Braided ponytails. Sousa marches. And me sitting there revising the chapter of my Frek novel, written in that quintessentially American form: science fiction.

In the evening I went to see a public dance on the library lawn in Los Gatos. Me the lonely, watching man that Bruegel often puts at the edge of a painting. I saw a pair of girls just like the little sisters in The Peasant Wedding—the big one holding the two hands of the younger one, half her size, the two of them bouncing a little to the music. I saw a stocky woman making ecstatic Bruegelian leg lifts, with her doughty husband doing his burgher best to shake his bootie.

I emailed my final edit of Spaceland to Tor Books. I found a goodly number of things to fix. While I was at it, I took out the “fucks,” “shits,” and graphic sex scenes, none of which were really necessary, and which might have stood in the way of math teachers telling their students to read my book. Like that’ll ever happen.

To me the novel seems very moving at the end. And it’s funny, and has good science and the plot cooks right along. The only dull patches are when I start grappling, not all that successfully, with trying to describe how things might look in 4D hyperspace. But those attempts are, I think, important and original enough to keep—in the hope that someone, someday can build on them.

July 20, 2001. Yoyo a Gogo in Olympia

Sylvia’s back and we’re on a road trip to the northwest. The first night we stayed in Chico with our sixty-year-old neighbor friends Gunnar and Elena, who are supposedly in the process of moving there—that is, they bought a house in Chico, but I think they’ll end up renting out the house instead of moving in. They took us to swim at a spot called Salmon Hole in Big Chico Creek. It’s in a canyon of balconied, eroded rock cliffs, and you pick your way down to the water.

Sylvia was wearing her dressy street shoes and her black bathing suit, wearing only that, walking ahead of me, and my heart melted to see her, my loved one, so trim and sexy, so much her self. I love her gestalt: the way she moves, holds herself, talks, smells, looks—everything about her. We had some nice swimming in the river hole, with a nice steady current, lots of fish to be seen, very clear, the water and cliffs all around, the rocks worn smooth and comfortable by the years of flow.

Heading further north, we stopped for a break in Olympia, Washington, a fairly blue-collar town. I noticed an old movie theater, the Capitol Theater, and they were having a music festival called Yoyo a Gogo. They have it every year, I’d vaguely heard of it. Some years back, Nirvana played at this do, before Nevermind came out. The festival is for unknowns, four days of bands, all afternoon and all night.

When I saw the crowd of lively grungers outside the theater, I insisted that I go inside to check out the scene for an hour—Sylvia preferred to stay outside and look around Olympia. The theater was wonderful—plush, old, dark, worn, with fabulous noise coming off the stage. And to think that Kurt Cobain himself played here! Like hearing someone sing opera at La Scala.

I sat and watched three musicians playing primarily by feedback alone—drums, bass, guitar—they’d play a four-note heavy-metal progression and then warp and repeat the sound, circulating it through their amps’ circuits. It felt like they’d sampled one second of fuzzed, distorted, grunge from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—and they’d expanded that into an hour-long concert.

The group was called Black Man White Man Dead Man. It’s possible that these guys may actually not have known how to play their instruments. But the performance worked. Near the end, the drummer screamed for awhile, the simplest kind of “Yaaaaah,” over and over, and then he got off stage and sat down in the front row with his girlfriend. The bass and guitar continued a bit longer, doing the feedback thing. Wonderful.

Seeing all the kids there in the theater, I flashed back to how excited I’d be when I got to go to an event like this when I was younger—like a rock show at the Louisville state fairgrounds, or the folk festival at Swarthmore, or the Cyberthon virtual reality festival in San Francisco, or the Wired party at Bimbo’s with Rudy Jr.—everyone right out on the edges of their personalities, so open and eager to see and learn and talk, to give and to receive information. Away from the strictures of daily life.

It was a Temporary Autonomous Zone, as my writer friend Peter Lamborn Wilson puts it.

August 1, 2001. Totem Poles. William Gibson.

We’re on the way back now, after looping through Seattle, Victoria, Galiano Island, Vancouver, the Olympic Peninsula, and Portland. It’s been a fun trip—we’ve been very loving and close, Sylvia and I. And when the inevitable disappointments have come up, we’ve been able to say, “Well, that’s the breaks, take the bad with the good when touring.”

We got really interested in totem poles—we saw a bunch of them at the British Columbia Museum in Victoria—that’s a town on Vancouver Island, a substantial island I’d never heard of before. And then we saw more totem poles at a Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, and a few more in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.

The First Nations people—this phrase is now preferred over “Indians” or “Native Americans”—only made totem poles for about a hundred years. They started when they got axes from the Europeans. Before they got axes, the locals had made small things called speakers’ sticks that resembled totem poles—these were like scepters you could hold in your hands. But once they had steel axes, they went big. But after a hundred years, the production died down—because the European missionaries were burning down the totem poles, and the European traders were killing off the tribes with smallpox. This said, there’s been something of a renaissance in the form, and some First Nations craftspeople are making totem poles these days.

The advent of the axes, struck me as an interestingly literal example of a new technology bringing a new art form. Computers are doing that to today’s artists, but that’s not where I want to go with this thought. Instead I want to think in a broader, more science-fictional mode. What if some aliens brought a tech that let us make physically larger art than before. Novels a million pages long! Paintings an acre in size! And then maybe the aliens’ missionaries make us stop: “This offends Galactic Empress.” And they give us a disease. And the story is set a century later, with a character who’s doing a retro, cultural renewal thing of covering the walls of an entire city with a single painting, using a set of those “live brushes” that the aliens had first brought.

Sylvia and I really got into the raven masks as well. Love those. Saw a lot of them in the museums, and saw some newly made ones in a gallery—all by members of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe. A really good new native-made mask costs about seven thousand dollars. Worth it, really. Many of the masks looked like my old pal Donald Duck, and their tribal name made me think of Donald’s utterances, delightful. The masks looked so alive—it was hard to imagine they weren’t about to twitch and kwakwaka’wakw into life.

The raven masks are always of cedar wood, painted red, black and white, and with a cedar bark “mane.” The First Nations artists give most of their animals big, square, even teeth. Even the salmon. The masks are different, yet similar—comparable to the effect you’d see if you saw a case of jack o’ lanterns by various skilled craftsmen. Not that the comparison is quite apt. I think the semiotics of the raven mask are more intricate and formalized than those of the jack o’ lantern.

In Vancouver I got to hang out with my fellow cyberpunk William Gibson, a big thrill. The first day, he and I met for breakfast and walked around town. The second day, we had dinner together with our wives. We ate the dinner at this very Bill Gibson place—it was a highly elegant Japanese restaurant hidden on the second floor of what appeared to be an abandoned, derelict, unlit office building.

I’ve known Gibson since the ’80s, and I really enjoy talking with him. We have some similarities: we’re about the same age, grew up in southern towns, read science fiction early on, read the Beats and loved them, took acid, became SF writers, drank too much, got sober. Like me, Bill’s been married for thirty-some years to the same woman. His life has been in some ways harder than mine—he lost his father at eight and his mother at eighteen. Of course in terms of fame and financial success, he’s had it good. He’s at the top. Indeed, Bill’s gotten so famous that I felt proud to be visiting him. The king of SF.

At one point in our conversations, I mentioned my notion that the cosmic One is like a radio signal, always there in the room, and you only have to tune in. In a similarly philosophical vein, he speculated that the universe is created without regard to human notions of outcomes, that events are patterned in their own way, and that fear and expectations are just an aspect of seeing it through human eyes.

Bill was desperately worried about finishing his current book project, now-overdue. He’s very articulate when talking about writing, and he can fall into a being-interviewed mode. But around his wife he’s pretty quiet. She’s a pleasant woman, and a big talker. He obviously enjoys her.

August 16, 2001. Wiley in his Crib.

Sylvia’s niece Stella is visiting us with husband Reuben and their eight-month-old baby Wiley. They’re staying with us for three nights. Nice to have them around of course, but as a geezer I like my peace and quiet, my downtime with no conversation. So it sounded relaxing to have Stella and her husband go out on a date tonight, leaving Wiley for us to babysit.

Except now Wiley’s crying. He’s fed, he’s diapered and he’s in bed. It’s 9:30 pm, and he’s been crying his head off for, by my watch, eleven minutes. I think he’s mad that Stella isn’t here. That thing psychoanalysts talk about, the infantile fury when denied the mother, there’s something to it. We tried getting him up and dandling him, but he just seemed to get madder and madder, so we figured to let him cry it out for ten minutes and then see. It’s been 11 or maybe 12 minutes now.

Hopefully any second he’ll give up and go to sleep. Generally he’s cute and cheerful, what I’ve seen of him the last couple of days. Smiles a lot. I seem to remember having to do this with our kids too, wait out the crying. It’s nerve-wracking.

Right now he’s reaching down into his reserve and giving it all he’s got. Steady sobbing, with as many really deep squalls as he can manage.

“If we get him up, will he just be more furious?” I ask Sylvia.

“How could he be more furious?” she says.

And then he really reaches down and makes a noise like he’s being strangled, or losing his voice, and I go downstairs to see what’s up. He’s on his stomach, all wet with tears, in a corner of the crib. As soon as I pick him up he stops crying, he’s glad to have a chance to stop and, god knows, he’s relieved by the touch of a human hand, poor little thing. I hold him on my shoulder for a few minutes, he’s taking shuddery breaths, he sighs. How tiring that would be to scream, to really really scream, giving it your all, for eleven or maybe twelve minutes. I’m hoping his eyes are closed. Sylvia is watching from the door, looking into the darkened room, she can see his face.

“His eyes are wide open.”

The sound of her voice sets him off again—it’s a woman’s voice and it’s still not mommy! Sylvia moves out of range and Wiley calms down again and I manage to lay him down on his back in his bed, nice and tidy, his arms are up in that cute Y-pattern they do, he’s staring up at the ceiling with his enormous dark eyes, but calm. I lean over him and pet him and sing to him for a while—what else but “Rock-A-Bye Baby,” wondering for the Nth time about those words, about the mocking dig in there, “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Why is that in the lullaby? It seems so, like, mean. But the target listeners for this bit of verse are prelinguistic. They don’t know what you’re saying. So you get to say something that gives you a bit of a chuckle, a bit of relief at the resentment you may be feeling at, e.g., 3 am.

And when I creep upstairs the crying doesn’t start up again. Joy! Sylvia and I smile at each other—it’s just like old times.

August 28, 2001. Teaching. Demo Disaster.

Today I went into SJSU and taught my undergraduate Software Engineering class and my graduate Software Project class. I’m using the same text in both the undergrad and the grad classes—it’s a preprint of my new textbook, Software Engineering and Computer Games, and I’m using the Pop computer game framework software that I revised for the umpteenth time this summer, hammering in the new code to make it do 3D graphics.

I’ve never been so well prepared for the first day of class in my whole thirty-some years of college teaching.

I’m doing live demos in the classes, using a classroom machine that has a computer projector. But, oh-oh, the demo machine doesn’t have the latest kind of graphics card, and it doesn’t support the OpenGL graphics calls that I’m using, and when I switch my demo games into 3D mode, they run execrably slow, like at five frames per second, completely unlike the thirty frames per second I’d been seeing at home. The demo machine slows to a crawl and then—it crashes. Freezes up, goes dead, with none of the controls responding. Ignominy. The machine is so badly frozen up that I have to pull the plug out of the wall to restart it. And then it takes fully ten minutes to reboot.

This happens in both classes. After the undergrad class I didn’t quite understand what had gone wrong—and made the same false moves again in the grad class.

I tried to save the situation by stepping outside of it, telling my uneasy students they were seeing an example of the dreaded “demo effect,” and that all one can do in this kind of situation is to stay calm and keep talking. They’re weren’t buying it. They were wondering if it was safe to run my Pop program on their own machines.

And after that disastrous second session, in the graduate Software Project class, two students come up, and they loftily tell me, “You should scrap your Pop framework, there’s clearly a bad architecture, it can’t be made to work, you need a fresh start.”

I’ve been working on this code for ten years, and they’ve looked at it for ten seconds. They’ve got that classic parricidal impulse to take down an old man. I taught one of them last semester in a course on Artificial Intelligence, a Japanese-American guy with a cool beard. He livens up a class all right, and I enjoy volleying with him, but I have a slight worry that his caustic brilliance gives the other students the impression that I’m dumb. If he seriously runs with his attacks on my Pop framework, will I lose control of my classes?

Naw. Unlike in my Artificial Intelligence course, where I knew nothing and was totally winging it, in these software engineering courses I really do know what I’m talking about. This is my home turf, dude. My fave break. If I can’t hold my own here, I might as well pack it up and get out of the game. And that’s not gonna happen yet.

So, yeah, I’m back in the arena. Sometimes teaching a class feels like performing in the kind of club where people throw bottles at the stage. Unlike Sid Vicious—or the old Rudy—I can’t lay a loogie on my doubters or give the finger. I have to be polite. Listen and learn. Deflate my ego. Stay calm. Although certainly a fail-safe Pop routine that automatically switches laggard OpenGL calls to standard Windows calls would seem to be—harrumph—in order.

I’ll code that this week. Better to be doing it now than doing it after the book and the Pop framework are published.

September 17, 2001. 9/11. Eadem Mutata Resurgo.

Six days now since the unforgettable 9/11.

I’m at one of my writing spots, the Jahva House cafe in Santa Cruz. Many’s the local I’ve sketched here for use in, e.g., Saucer Wisdom. Today I’m here to give a talk to the Santa Cruz Writer’s Roundtable. They meet at 6 pm at the library a couple of blocks away. I’m talking on “Finding Your Story.” We’d already programmed this event before 9/11.

Daughter Georgia, who lives in Greenwich Village now, saw the buildings collapse, each of them, pancaking down floor by floor, pulverizing the three thousand people inside, Georgia standing in the street. What a terrible thing for your little girl to see.

I haven’t been feeling much anger about the attack, it’s more fear about what comes next. And we’re stuck with what looks like the least well-equipped president we’ve ever had. For a few years I’ve been thinking about how the U.S. has been tormenting Iraq, blockading it, bombing them so often that it’s not even news anymore—I’d been worried that doing that kind of thing for long enough would bring something nasty down on us. The cause and effect, the karma. But none of our leaders are seeing it that way.

I drove down to Santa Cruz early this afternoon and I went to Four Mile Beach, my favorite. Out on the east end of the beach, quite a ways from the entrance, there’s a tower of stone in the sea with pelicans flying by, and even a puffin nest in the tower. This is my magic spot, and I knew it would make me feel good to go there today. When I get to this spot, I’m immediately in touch with the big aha. I don’t have to try to meditate or work to still my thoughts. All I have to do is to go there, and merge in.

The perfection of nature’s chaos.

Today I write a slogan of mine onto the damp sand at the water’s edge beside the tower. “Eadem Mutata Resurgo.” This is Latin for, “The same, yet changed, I re-arise.” The mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705) had that Latin saying inscribed on his tombstone in Basel, Switzerland, along with a picture of the logarithmic spiral. I often invoke this motto when I’m starting a novel. And of course it fits into the mood of recovering from 9/11.

So I wrote it with my finger in the sand, also thinking of my cuttlefish from the UFO under the boy’s bed in my novel in progress, the one set in 3003. The cuttlefish gets cut up and burned, but a scrap of him gets away and wriggles into the ground, and at the end of the next long chapter, he’ll be back, maybe looking different.

And he’ll say, “Eadem mutata resurgo.”

And the boy will go, “What?”

And the alien will say, “That’s Latin for, ‘I return, different and the same.’”

And the boy will say, “What’s Latin?”

I was happy with this line of thought, but the tragedy was still in the back of my mind, just as it’s been all this week.

The air was autumnal, tinged with sorrow, bringing a sense of the fragility of things. I walked back down the beach the way I came, looking at the bubbles in the foam winking out, like lives. A big patch of bubbles winked out in New York.

The wind was blowing the sand and I thought of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, about “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in a desert—these are the remains of a vast statue honoring a now-forgotten king. I thought of all the plans and schemes that I make for my projects, and I realized that, in time, all will be blown away like dust, erased from the face of the Earth as surely as my body and my name. Even America will blow away. Shelley:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

While driving from Four Mile Beach back into Santa Cruz to hit the Jahva House before my evening talk, I heard a nice song on the radio—it sounded like an old Dylan song, a song I’d never heard before—and the singer and the band were hitting these nice harmonies.

I started thinking how the sound of a harmony is our way of showing unity to the ear, our way of sensually representing the Oneness of the Cosmos, our way of trying to make manifest the divine immutable Reality behind the fleeting appearances of things. And I thought of the “Aum” we say in Yoga class, the divine syllable that supposedly brings the world into being. That Aum isn’t in the past, no, the cosmic Aum is bringing the world into being in the present. Here and now the universe is being engendered around us, all of it at once, all the time. It soothes me to think this way.

When I park in front of the Jahva House the song is still going on. I turn off the radio. The sound stops in the middle. But yet it goes on.

Eadem Mutata Resurgo.

In the Jahva House I wrote up this journal entry, and that’s what I read to the Writers’ Roundtable group in Santa Cruz at 6 pm. I got choked up and cried a tear or two while reading. A good experience, finally to shed a tear over the disaster. They liked the reading, it was real. Afterwards a woman said, “I didn’t know mathematicians cried.”

September 19, 2001. Dream of Flight.

Today’s working title for my novel in progress is Frek Huggins and the Genomic Elixir. A straight Harry-Potter-and-the kind of title. I thought of it last night right after I woke up from a dream.

The dream: I’m with some people, dancing, jumping high into the air. We’re on a stage, putting on a show for townspeople, this is a cross between the movie Waiting for Guzman and maybe the experience of doing the presentation in Cruz. I’m not dancing all that well, I realize, I keep slipping, and the crowd is in fact laughing at my moves. Not in a mean way, they’re enjoying it, and I don’t feel humiliated, because I’m in fact supposed to be a clown dancer.

I look down and I’m dressed in tattered tights, my big toe sticks out of the sock foot. I do a last high leap, and I hang floating in the air—this is a flying dream. As so often in my flying dreams, the people around me don’t seem to notice. I go off-stage and follow the other performers towards the dressing rooms.

The director of our show begins importuning me. He wants something from me. I want to get away from him. I go outside, and I fly up into the air. The man is leaping up, trying to catch my feet. He gets hold of me, and he pulls himself up onto my back like a rider straddling a horse. I buck and throw him off.

The scene shifts. It’s night, I’m standing in the back yard of our big frame house in Lynchburg. Someone is talking to me—it’s my anima, the Jungian dream companion that I rarely see, closer than close, my inner guide. The anima is talking about there being odd beasts all around. I see the wood of our weathered garage ripple with the shapes of worms crawling about beneath its surface. I see images of bestial dog-man faces with their noses turned up, they’re pressed against window-screens, sniffing. One of the faces is that director, and here he comes again.

This time I fly up incredibly high, beyond the clouds, approaching the blackness of space, and still I’m pursued, a person is hanging on to me. It’s not the director, it’s a woman, perhaps my wife.

“We’re at a hundred thousand feet,” I tell the woman, “We can’t breathe up here, we have to go lower.” I shove her away to fly on her own, but she can’t fly, and she starts to drop, but now she manages to brace herself against the air and swoop around to latch onto me again.

The space we’re flying and gliding in is in fact the inside of an unbelievably large room, a room with a hundred-thousand-foot-high ceiling. The walls and ceiling are covered with wood like parquet flooring. The woman and I are swooping towards the ground, I’m flying and I’m carrying her.

As we land, I see through the woman’s eyes as well as through mine. We’re friends, comrades. She’s Kathleen Turner and I’m George Clooney. We’re acting out a romantic comedy. We land at a spot that lives in my earliest memories.

It’s a patch of grass with interesting mechanical junk, out behind the lone filling-station at the corner of Rudy Lane and Route 42—which was the sole business-establishment within walking distance of my childhood home near Louisville.

And then I woke to pee, and immediately thought of the word “nanospace,” and of a title for my novel, The Genomics of Nanospace, which I then changed to Frek Huggins and the Genomic Quest, and then to Frek Huggins and the Genomic Elixir, and then I went back to sleep.

October 13, 2001. Seeing Dylan Play.

Last night Sylvia and I saw Bob Dylan play at the San Jose Arena. It wasn’t very full. We walked down from our seats to the main floor and got up pretty close to him. The crowd was mellow, not pushy, not squeezed. Bob had a drummer, bass, and two other guitarists, one of them playing mandolin and steel guitar as well.

Mixed in with his newer pieces, he sang three of the good old protest songs: “Masters of War,” “Hard Rain,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Nearly forty years old, those songs, I remember them from freshman year at Swarthmore, my roommate Kenny Turan playing the album. I remember he hitch-hiked to NYC to see Bob play. This sexy Goth-type girl Elizabeth Daniels was going too, but she declined to hitch with Kenny. He raved about the concert when he got back.

It was touching to be with Sylvia hearing the old music. Bob did “Forever Young,” too. I thought again of something I’ve noted in these journals before. As long as I’m with Sylvia I still have my youth, and this in a very concrete sense: she remembers my youth and it’s real to her.

The old songs were mutated so much that I didn’t recognize any of them at first. Dylan does that in concert—he feels his way around his songs, making them new. Partly it’s a tactic to still deliver, even though his voice isn’t what it used to be. But I think it’s more a matter of the aliveness of his mind. Exploring, making it fresh. Even the old songs were new. With “Blowin’ in the Wind,” we were thinking about the World Trade Center bombing and the war we’re wading into.

“Hard Rain” was a particular wonder to me. “Where have you been my blue-eyed son, Where have you been my darling young one.” And there follows a list of maybe fifty verses like “I saw a room full of talkers with nobody listening,” and “Where black is the color and none is the number.” Dylan interpreted each and every one of his cameo scenes with precision and vividness, using his worldly-wise, non-sold-out voice and his impeccable, Chaplinesque timing to get the absolute most out of every word.

Like, “I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping.” It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal when you just read it on a page. But Bob twisted the “branch” and stretched the “blood” in ways that made the phrase pop into a clear visual image in my mind’s eye, as intense as Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory painting of the melting watch. “Hard Rain” was like being led through a long gallery of surrealist masterpieces. And with Dylan’s timing, there’s always a feeling of not being rushed, of there being room to breathe inside each phrase.

Sylvia and I were dancing a lot at the end, and singing along on the choruses. Lots of people were smoking pot, including a little group of Indian software programmers. It was fun to see how happy they looked—it did my heart good.

Bob had a nice way of pointing the neck of his white guitar out at us. A master at the top of his form. I absorbed some of that feeling into myself, imagining I can be a master too, happy at having finally gotten lighting to work in my 3D Pop framework code, happy to be underway on my Frek novel, happy to be sober. At the top of my form.

Medal of the Italian Senate

October 17-18, 2001. To Bologna.

So now I’m on my way to Italy to get a medal and to give a talk, all expenses paid. I have no idea why. I’ve never heard of the people who invited me.

Driving to the airport, I listened to the news on the car radio, about the anthrax germs getting spread more and more. Will the world be dirty and fucked up from now on with terrorism? Fuck.

I’m wearing a light-weight black wool Brooks Brothers suit, kind of fun. I bought the suit for this trip, figuring I should dress formally in Italy. Maybe I’ll start wearing a suit all the time?

Business class is on the second floor of the plane! All men, and one chic Frenchwoman with a slice-of-orange smile, leather pants and perfect elf-boots. Individual flat-screen TVs on clever little articulated arms, one for each of us.

That animated movie Shrek is playing. I’ve seen it before, but I watched it for awhile, looking at the graphics with new understanding, having learned a lot more about OpenGL since the first time I saw the movie. For a lot of scenes, the background is just a pixel map on a rectangular box with Shreck and the donkey and the girl rendered as manikins inside the box. I hadn’t understood that before, that a seemingly 3D background could be a pixel map on the walls, and that when your character is running down a sloping field, he’s really running down a tilted plane with a picture of grass on it. Our minds are very quick to massage and smooth our inputs to resemble familiar reality. Throw us a bone and we see a leg.

In the night I slept. At some point, around 3 am maybe, one of the stewardesses went into the cockpit, just ahead of where I was sitting, and it was daylight out there, the light streaming out of the cockpit like out of a UFO door. The Pilots.

Finished reading The Hobbit, a nice book. Tolkien does this thing that Pynchon did in Gravity’s Rainbow, of now and then sticking in a song. The songs, in either of these books, aren’t especially good, but they break up the text and make the book seem like more fun.

It’s rather hard, I would hazard, for a novelist to write a really great song, because the level of polish on a traditional song is radically higher than the level of polish on even a very well-honed paragraph in a novel. Real folk songs have high polish because they’re oral tradition, almost on a par with proverbs.

Actually The Hobbit has a few proverbs as well, like, “Never tease a live dragon,” and “Escaped the goblins to be treed by wolves.” These too are a bit weak, but a reader appreciates the variations of textures among text, song and proverb.

Eventually we were coming down across northern Italy. Mountainous. Valleys with rivers and villages, the sun is low, illuminating the mist. I’m excited. A limo met me in Bologna, we headed east and south to Rimini. I’m in Il Grand Hotel Di Rimini.

I had a good supper downstairs in the hotel restaurant before bed. Lovely fresh shrimp with avocado. Artichoke risotto. Fire-grilled anglerfish with a bit of flour on it.

The film-maker Federico Fellini grew up in Rimini, and is known to have been fond of this particular hotel. There’s a scene set here in Amarcord, Fellini’s sweet memoir-movie about his youth. In the movie, some boys are on the autumnal patio of the hotel, which is closed down for the winter—with leaves blowing, time passing, and the boys miming the fancy guests of summer by ballroom-dancing around the terrace together.

So now, in the dining room, I’m of course seeing it as a Fellini movie. The place is a bit run down. A keyboardist is playing something like the Nino Rota songs from Fellini’s films. The ceiling is thirty feet high, with plaster rosettes and swags. The guests are very human, very individual, very sharply limned. A slightly sour-mouthed woman alone. A good-looking middle-aged man with his white-haired mother. A wealthy older couple with their daughter and the daughter’s baby. Two women in intense conversation, smoking cigarettes.

October 19, 2001. Rimini.

It’s 4 am and I’m hopelessly awake. I might as well stop fighting the jet lag for an hour and enjoy it.

“Take the hands off the clock—you’re gonna be here for a whiiiiile,” as Camper Van Beethoven says in “Eye of Fatima,” a song describing a motel-room acid trip.

I open the European-style roll-shutter and the window and let the night in. There’s a disco by the beach, just a hundred meters off—or is it a live-music club? They started up around 10 pm both tonight and last night. It may be 4 am, but they’re going strong. If that’s a live band I wouldn’t mind seeing them. But if it’s not, then it could be just an empty room, like a fairy-tale trap, like the elf-banquet in The Hobbit’s Mirkwood Forest—you go charging into where you think the party is, and it’s dark and empty, and then you turn around and something gets you. Listening a little more closely—yes it’s disco. Hearing a really familiar cheeser radio song now. And, oh my god, here comes “Sympathy for the Devil.” Work it, Mick.

At night, every window in this beleaguered old hotel has its roll-shutters closed. No fresh air for any of us well-to-do geezers. Another reason not to open the windows is that most of the windows have really bright spotlights trained on them. The hotel managers use the striking old building itself as an all-night sign.

I have the energy to describe my day now, so let’s do that. I had breakfast alone at 11:30 on the patio. A really large preying mantis was on the chair next to me. My breakfast companion. The Glork of Glaxxon himself. A truly tiny hummingbird was working a planter of weary October geraniums, a bird the same size as the last two joints of my pinky.

I walked down to the beach with its colorfully painted concrete cabanas, all closed for the winter. There were a fair number of people strolling. To the left I found a canal leading into town, lined with fishing-boats at anchor. A good sign, gastronomically. Great to see the classic fishermen doing things along the stone wharf edging the canal. Pescatores.

It was good to be out seeing stuff. The Mars Rover’s excitement to finally be shooting pictures, sniffing soil, tasting the air—after all those long hours in the shuttle rocket.

A billboard for what might be a store like a Wal-Mart, its name listed in a variety of European languages. Ipermarket and Ipermarkt. They mean hypermarket. Bigger than a supermarket. For the hypermen and hyperwomen of hyperspace.

Close to the ancient stone arched bridge of Tiberius there are fewer boats, certainly no big ones, the river/canal shallower here. The land has risen up on either side, with stone walls along the water now, and the walls are covered with large, well-executed graffiti in full color. One that catches my eye shows a teen boy’s dream bombshell blonde, nude, with a little dog burying his muzzle in her crotch, licking her, the image all cheerful and animé-style, the dog a humorous, spiky clip-on accessory. A wall-painting like this wouldn’t be allowed to stand longer than one day in Puritan Amerikkka, but here the paint’s peeling, the image has been up for maybe a year. In Catholic Italy nobody cares. Sin’s all taken care of. “Tell it to the priest.”

I turn at the bridge and walk into the old-town district of Rimini, a pedestrian zone, it’s a little past noon. I sit down on a bench in Piazza Ferrari, and I keep hearing someone playing a trumpet. At first I assume it’s, like, a school-boy band member grab-assing on his lunch hour. But then I’m hearing “Taps,” and I see that a real ceremony is going on here—a line of boy soldiers with semi-automatic rifles, a man with a banner, another man with a wreath saying something like, “For Our Fallen Brother Soldiers,” in Italian.

The man is setting the wreath on a Futurist-style war memorial dated 1911. It’s great to see a real, local thing happening, the town like a living cell that I’ve insinuated myself into, and here’s a mitochondrion busying itself, the pulse of civic life. Two different ladies come up to me and ask me what’s going on, as I’m dressed Italian style in black pants, dress shirt, vest and suit-jacket.

Fellini’s Rimini, I think. He’s dead, and my memory of his Amarcord movie, is a nostalgia for a nostalgia. And you, reading this in forty years, can be nostalgic at third hand—for me.

“The tears of things,” as Virgil says.

I roam the whole little town for the next four or five hours, seeing all the main streets and piazzas. The Piazza Cavour is especially lovely, with an old fountain, a statue of a pope, four or five big old arched buildings, and a long, ancient fish market with sloping thick stone tables. There are no tourists around. It’s the opposite of Rome, very refreshing. At lunch a group of girls at the next table are talking some English and I think, oh wait, here’s some other tourists after all. But then the girls switch to rapid Italian—for some reason they were just practicing English. I have a real feeling of having teleported oneself to another world.

One last thing I saw: a newspaper headline about “Elletrosmog,” which must mean “electrosmog,” a lovely word for, maybe, running out of cell-phone bandwidth, or perhaps for the concern about biological effects of increased radio-frequency radiation.

The disco has finally stopped playing. I’ll have another go at sleep. It’s 5 am now.

October 20, 2001. The Conference. My Talk.

Well, I never did get back to sleep. Heard the train, the fog-horn, the garbage trucks, and when it was 7 am, I got up and did yoga by my bed for about an hour. Had breakfast with John Searle, a philosopher I met last night at dinner. He’s sixty-nine, still teaching at Berkeley, going strong. He’s known for a famous argument against machine intelligence called the Chinese Room Argument. I’ve never liked that argument—in fact I think it’s wrong—but I haven’t gotten into that with him. Searle isn’t too well informed about computer science. Indeed, he freely admits he’s not technical at all. The Chinese Room Argument is popular because it backs up what many people want to believe—that humans are unique and that machines can never think.

Yesterday I was in the Malatesta Temple, a neoclassic marble building used as the Cathedral of Rimini, and I was in fact thinking about the inevitability of human-style intelligence in evolving systems. My idea is that intelligence arises from an ability to mentally simulate the world.

Simulation is a powerful method for improving your survival ability. If you can simulate, you can plan and anticipate. Once you simulate the world, it follows almost automatically that you get an ability for abstract thought. And one of the symbols you acquire is that of your Self. And then you’ve just about got consciousness—at least if you agree with that recent book, Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt 1999).

Damasio argues that consciousness amounts to forming a mental image of yourself observing the world. It’s a bit more than just having an image of yourself in the world. You get to consciousness when you add on a second-order symbol of your “watcher” self that looks at the simulation with your embedded self in it. In terms of a computer game, the lower level self is the “player,” and the second-order self is the “user.” Once you can see yourself as a user watching the game, you’re conscious. You’ve woken up out of the game’s dream.

As I’m typing this on my laptop, I’m sitting, half-crazed with jet lag and fatigue, on the marble floor of a lecture hall in the basement of a small conference center attached to the hotel. There’s a session of talks this morning, and another session tonight. There’s an overflow crowd. On my way here, I walked around a little, but today I’m too weak to be into serious touring.

They have a remarkable level of security around the conference, partly because one of the conference attendees is an aide of General Colin Powell. Three blocks in every direction are fenced off, with armed police at all the intersections asking for conference passes or identity cards. They’re used to anti-terrorism security in Italy. It goes back to the days of the Red Brigade in the late 1970s.

In the U.S. on the other hand, they don’t really know how to do anti-terrorism. Like they were trying to search us for bombs as we went into the Bob Dylan concert a few weeks back, but immediately the search process degenerated into them looking for drugs. Puritan Amerikkka. A joint doesn’t matter. A bomb matters. Keep your story straight, dudes.

So what about the talks? Well, it’s an Italian conference, like those Armando Verdiglione fests I attended in the late 1970s. High-flown intellectualism with curlicues. There’s an impressive number of intellectual types here in the audience—you gotta hand it to the Italians on that score. I doubt a conference like this would gather anything like this kind of crowd in a U.S. town the size of Rimini. People like to visit Italy. The conference logo says, “Il fuoco nel cristallo,” meaning, “The fire in the crystal.” And the conference theme is the nature of life.

As for this morning’s talks, hmmm, well, there’s five fiftyish white men sitting at a white table in the front of the room, a moderator and four speakers who’ll each talk for about twenty minutes. The moderator’s introductory talk is in Italian. He has a very harsh and strident voice, and he comes back and talks some more between each of the other guys. You can put in a special earphone to hear a translation. It’s vague all-purpose bombast.

The first talk went by, and now the moderator with the ugly voice is back. He sounds truculent, as if his patience is at an end. Despite how he sounds, I can tell that he’s happy, like an exultant crow, and that this is one of the better days of his life—moderating a fancy session of talks.

Okay now a new speaker is starting—oh good, it’s Richard Dawkins. He’s always interesting, and wonderfully lucid. He explains that evolution is really about individual genes competing with each other—this idea is from his book, The Selfish Gene.

After him came a good talk about evolution by a guy called Niles Eldredge. He said, “Nothing happens of any consequence in evolutionary history unless ecosystems are disrupted and lots of unrelated species are forced into extinction. A mass extinction is a golden opportunity for new species.” So why worry?

After the session I had a chance to talk to Dawkins in private. He referred to the harsh-voiced moderator’s long speeches as “driveling bullshit,” an amusing phrase to hear from this tidy, impeccable Oxford don.

I told him my SF notion of a race of knotted vortex tubes that take the form of sunspots. A race of evolving vortices within the body of a star, and they become intelligent. Dawkins remarked that you need a very large population for a long time to have evolution, so we’d better do this in a giant star. Thinking of my plans for just these kinds of aliens in Frek and the Elixir, I countered that my creatures could live in a number of stars that are close together, as near the center of the galaxy. And they’re able to hop from star to star, drifting though space as loops of magnetic flux, their genomes being their shapes. Dawkins wondered aloud if a knotted space curve is sufficiently expressive to use as a genome—and we left it at that. At least he didn’t say my idea is complete nonsense. I’m going to run with it.

Another interesting person I talked to that day was the popular-science author George Dyson. He says that he’s especially interested in a-life in the “wild,” that is, arising not in a controlled research experiment, but evolving inside some computer on its own.

George suggested that maybe in a thousand years, the descendants of some lab worm would rule the Earth. How? Suppose the worm becomes a standard “lab rat” for genomicists. They get its code into digital form and start fiddling with it. And without us noticing, it does millennia of evolution in a few years. So now I’m thinking that the evil rulers of the world in Frek and the Elixir are highly evolved worms.

The day of the talks, I had dinner with an Italian lady named Margherita Hack and her husband Aldo. She’s seventy-nine and he’s eighty-one—they were married in 1944, grew up together in Florence. She’s one of the most beloved science writers in Italy, author of some fifteen popular science books, also was directory of the astronomical observatory in Trieste.

I happened to sit down with them on the patio before dinner, just to talk to some non-Americans, and because they looked so Italian, so Fellini-esque. They were friendly.

I didn’t realize how really popular Margherita was until right before my panel that evening when I was sitting in the front row with her, and a steady stream of people with shining faces came up to get her autograph.

At supper, Margherita’s husband kept trying to tease me—he’d ask me if I was nice to my wife. And then he’d forget all the things that I told him two minutes later, like that I live in San Jose. They’d lived in Berkeley for three years. He said that North Beach and Little Italy in New York left them cold.

“I don’t like to be around Italians in America. They have a false memory of what Italy is really like.”

Funny. I guess it’s like the way I might not want to hang around Americans in another country. Sylvia’s Hungarian cousin Tibor used to say something like that about seeing other Hungarians in Washington D.C. “Drei Schritt vom Leib,” Tibor would say, using a German phrase that means something like, “Keep them at least three paces away from my body.”

The session with my talk was that evening. I hadn’t pre-planned anything, but after the morning talks about biology, I decided to rework my Saucer Wisdom slides that I’d used at the genomics conference in Tucson last year. The slides show a bunch of my SF-style drawings, and I arranged them into three “tales”: Tweaking Other Species, Tweaking Ourselves, Tweaking Gaia. It seemed like it should work.

When I got to the evening session with Margherita, there was a preliminary planning discussion with the emcee and us four speakers. I said I planned to talk about weird genomics hacks. And the emcee says, “I thought the talks tonight were all about space exploration.”

And, yeah, come to think of it, that’s, um, what the program’s summary of this session says—but I’d blanked out on that because right now I’m more interested in genomics than space travel. But the emcee, Pier Angelo, was a pro, a popular Italian TV science-show host, and he said we’d find a way to weave it all together.

Margherita Hack kicked off the sessions with a talk about space travel, and it was great. She made space travel sound like as much fun as Magellan visiting the Spice Islands. The next speaker was French, and he was talking about the different kinds of beings that might live out there in the cosmos. He talked for an unbelievably long time.

All the while we were on the stage, under hot lights, us four speakers and the emcee sitting in chairs in talk show format, and the audience of maybe three hundred in an increasingly hot and humid basement room. To center myself, I hand-wrote some notes on my situation:

On a stage, anxious I picked the wrong topic. A man is talking in nearly incomprehensible English. I feel like I’m going to totally freak out and see the world start—what was that word I used when I was a stoner? Oh yeah, start clipping, that’s it. If you turn up the gain on an amp too much, you get band-pass clipping. In visual terms, there’s much more data than you can fit on the screen that the peaks cut off to flat mesas of monochrome. It calms me down to remember this, to be able to name the exact type of freak-out that I’m having, and to be writing about it. I’m clipping. To the audience I look like I’m diligently taking notes. For some reason the speaker is now miming evolution, he’s acting out a bacterium, a jellyfish, a shrew, and a platypus as he gesticulates across the stage.

Things were seriously dragging on. Including the emcee’s comments, the first two speakers had used up two hours—instead of the expected forty-five minutes.

The third guy to speak was Kary Mullis, a Nobel-prize-winning Southern California surfer who’d discovered a key tool for decoding the genome. His talk didn’t go well, the time pressure had freaked him out, and he was angry and sweaty and maybe drunk. It gave me the willies to see him losing it.

I went on at eleven fucking thirty. But I kept it together, and I shrugged it off when the emcee Pier Angelo couldn’t remember my name. I complimented the emcee and the three prior speakers and then I fucking nailed my talk. My cartoony slides were a good idea, as most of the people didn’t speak English at all. They were locals from Rimini or maybe Bologna, a less intellectual-seeming crowd than had come in the morning. A real popular science audience. They were sweaty and dog tired. I wrapped up my routine in twenty mins.

And then the evening’s talks were over. Since Pier Angelo was a TV star, there was instantly an intent circle of dyed-blonde fortyish Italian women clustered around him, rapt. I wonder if he picked one up.

The people who came up to me were eighteen-year-old boys. Yeah, the typical readers for my SF and science writing are sweet, small-town guys, shy and friendly. One of them was excited by my use of the word “McDonaldization” in my talk, he’d never heard it. He taught me the Italian for “mad cow,” which is “mucca pazze.” Now that’s a phrase worth knowing. Wait till I use it on the kids, especially Isabel, who always thinks cows are funny.

October 21, 2001. Medal of the Italian Senate.

The big deal today was the awards ceremony, televised on Italian network TV. About thirty of us got medals for our lifetime work. I remember Pop getting a medal in Reston for public service and being proud of it—and me, the eternally rebellious son, being unimpressed by it. And now I’m at Pop’s age.

It feels really good to get this medal. It has a bas-relief of Palazzo Madama on one side, and SENATO DELLA REPVBBLICA on the other. It’s The Medal of the Italian Senate in a jewel case from “De Dominicis Gioielleria ROMA.” Yeah.

Other awardees included Kary Mullins, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, Howard Gardner. Arthur Clarke and Colin Powell got awards in absentia. For each of us there was this nice presentation text on a sort of diploma, describing our achievements in rodomontade Italian prose. What the hell, I’ll copy mine out for you, dear diary, since I don’t have Sylvia here to read it to!

Rudy Rucker’s weird and wonderful mathematical tales make him the Lewis Carroll of our day and age, designing a new wonderland that mockingly unfolds on this side of the looking-glass.

With his visionary flair to describe the infinite niches of everyday life, Rucker uses the science-fiction cipher to depict the present with stunning accuracy. Rucker is a twenty-first-century Argonaut exploring the currents of a fractal ocean of possible worlds and as such has assigned a cognitive function to the hyperbolic flights of his fancy. His conviction that the crux of any ontology can be clarified only if represented in outlandishly fantastic terms makes him the writer best equipped to portray a reality which is undergoing a profound transformation down to its very foundations. Few authors have managed to convey that sense of uncertainty and dynamism with which the twentieth-century scientific revolution has imbued every dimension of our human existence.

For his extraordinary ability to move so adroitly between reality and imagination, a gift common only to the most brilliantly talented science-fiction writers, the Pio Manzù Centre today is honoured to make this award to Rudy Rucker.

My heart is full. I mark this day with a white stone.

October 22, 2001. Depressing Dream. Dinner in Ravenna.

I didn’t mention that yesterday afternoon I took a bike ride into Rimini, and went back to that square I liked so much, Piazza Cavour. It was populated by Sunday idlers—maybe a hundred fifty of them.

What a lovely sound filled the square. The human voice. No Muzak, no boom-box, no leaf-blower, no traffic, no airplanes, just the sound of a hundred or so people talking, not shouting or cursing, just talking Italian. So civilized. The voices bouncing and reverberating off the centuries-old stones, the air vibrant and full, lightly punctuated by the calls of playing children.

I saw a free funghi show put on by the local Mycologists’ Club. Tables with labeled samples. A poster showing the underground mycelium of a mushroom. A hand-written admonition on each table: “Non toccare I funghi.”

On my way back, I noticed some cute little brick houses across the old Tiberias bridge over the port. I asked a concierge lady back at Il Grande Hotel di Rimini about them—she said they were for the “sea workers.” The pescatores.

Now I’m sitting in a cafe across the street from the Rimini train station, about to go to Ravenna, writing these notes on paper. Unaccountable exhaustion and depression, everything’s gone well, I’m on vacation, why am I so down? Loneliness and the stress of making a good impression at the conference, or maybe it’s a side-effect of the jet lag. This morning I had a sad, sad dream just before waking:

Sylvia is living with a new man, a bearded guy my age, a stoner and a drunk, he’s dragging her down. When I show up, she looks at me and says, “Poor Ru,” with deep tenderness and knowledge of me. I want to talk to her alone. The best we can do is to get into a shower together. The other man is waiting outside, he can hear us, and he’ll even tolerate us having sex, but we won’t get a chance to talk in private. Of course my wife and I do want to have sex, but even more than that, I want to pour out my heart to her, and to be understood as only she can understand me.

Sigh. The thing that imprinted me on my future wife the very first time we met: she listened to me and understood me and appreciated me as no one else ever had. Seeing her every day, as I usually do, I sometimes forget how much I value that.

In the cafe, I feel better after writing up my sad dream, and then I move on to making a series of drawings about how a knotted vortex tube can fission off a knotted copy of itself—this is something I’ll need in Frek so those intelligent solar vortex tubes can evolve and reproduce.

October 23, 2001. Ravenna.

I got to Ravenna yesterday, and I walked around the old town seeing some sights, in particular the cathedral, or Duomo. The space of the great nave has a “carved-out” quality, with domes upon domes, arches upon arches, hollows off of hollows. One of the Duomo’s chapels is especially exquisite, with a low barrel vault that’s covered with mosaics. It’s like a pale blue sky, with more than a hundred birds in it, each bird singular, specific and of a unique species, each bird using little more than thirty tiles.

On a staircase up to the Duomo’s tower, I came upon an open window with a view onto an orange tree, a garden and another church. There was sun and a gentle, moist breeze that felt like spring. It reminded me of youth, the Louisville pastures, of Heidelberg, and of my delight and surprise at the blooming wood sorrel in our back yard after the February rain the first year we moved to California. I stood at the open window, incalculably moved.

Before I could eat dinner, I had to walk around waiting for eight o’clock so as not to be absolutely the very first person in the restaurant. One of the spots that I waited in was in the Piazza Del Populo, a really nice rectangular space with a fancy Venetian palace along one side—they use it for a city hall. Lovely arches and crenellations on top. Above the palace was a sliver of a new moon with Venus beside it. Two tall columns with statues in the foreground. Exquisite.

And then I ate at a wonderful place called La Gardela. The place was much fuller than the other places I’d seen, full of Italians, even at eight. I realized that if I only ordered something whose written Italian name I could understand, I’d end up with ravioli—so I spied out two different diners having dishes I liked the looks of, and I pointed out those dishes to my waiter. I ended up with a fresh artichoke salad and—the prize-winning plate of the trip—Spaghetti al granchio, where the “granchio” are small, very sweet crabs broken in halves. You pick up a half by the legs and crunch out the meat with your teeth.

Promenading with the locals after dinner, I tested out the notion of being pre-conscious, experiencing the world with an empty mind, with no internal model of the world, no self-image, simply a part of the world in and of itself, letting “the world think me” instead of “me thinking the world.”

Today I went around Ravenna and checked off (literally, with my pen) most of the sights listed on the back of my map. There weren’t all that many, and some were grouped together. The tourist office had free yellow bikes that tourists can use, all you had to do was let them make a Xerox of your passport. Riding a bike helped me avoid that worn-out-flagellum feeling that my legs get when touring European cities.

The biggest sight in town is the St. Vitale basilica (means large church), with its Byzantine-influenced fourth-century mosaics. The basilica is made of weird big flat bricks like flagstones. They built it so long ago that even bricks were different.

Inside the basilica, the walls and vaulted ceilings around the altar are entirely covered in mosaic. You see saints of course, and lots of specific bible scenes, like that insane old man Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac, also a fair number of interesting animals in the landscapes—an amazing heron here—plus any number of purely decorative motifs such as ribbons in helical patterns. And, naturally, the star of the show, our lord god: the eye in the triangle.

I went to the St. Vitale basilica in the morning, and I came back in the evening to hang around looking up at the mosaics for a really long time. I arched my back and propped my head against the wall to keep from killing my neck.

I had all sorts of thoughts looking at the mosaics for so long. The longer I looked, the brighter they seemed to get. And more and more details unfolded. The fractal process of seeing. I had an image of the whole thing being like—what else?—an epic science-fiction novel. I’m a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. I also felt a certain amount of religious excitement.

The mosaics are strikingly crisp and bright. Unlike paintings they don’t peel or fade, and if tiles fall off, they can replace them. Viewed close up, the mosaics are eerily reminiscent of the pixelized images we see all the time. But—since the tiles aren’t limited to any pre-ordained grid—the pixelization is crisper and more intelligent. Also, there are great subtleties in the colors of the individual tiles—we’re not stuck with some limited ranges of RGB computer pixel colors.

I love that the tiles aren’t aligned according to any specific raster, that’s so much cooler. The raster has to go. Taking advantage of their freedom, the tilers line up a row of dark tiles along a curve to very clearly mark it out, and the tiles can be trimmed to narrow rectangles and aligned so that their orientations match the directions in which the color fields flow.

Right beside the basilica is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. It’s a small, brown, unprepossessing, cross-shaped brick building with a slight dome—it doesn’t look like much more than a mud hut from the outside. It contains the remains of a Roman Emperor’s daughter, who died in 450 AD. I didn’t even bother going in there until my second, evening visit to the St. Vitale basilica.

But the Galla Placidia is the most amazing thing I saw in Ravenna. The central dome and the barrel vaults of the four cross-arms are totally tiled.

It was evening, and I was all alone in there with a single, shaded light-bulb aimed at the ceiling. I noticed an especially striking geometric pattern along the underside of a thin arch in there. The pattern showed a repeating maze, depicted with a 3D-shadow-effect that made it look as if the maze-lines were carved into the arch. And now the maze image did this funny popping-out-and-reversing thing, like a Necker cube. Very saucerian.

Who will ever know if the Ravenna that I stepped back out into after this vision was the same one that I started in?

Thinking some more about the amazing Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, it struck me that this building would serve as an excellent model for a UFO in my Frek novel. Dull mud outside, and glowing colored images on the inside. And in the UFO, the tiled images would be moving.

So this is all great fun, but I’m getting tired of being alone, tired of my thoughts, tired of always thinking about myself and what I see and do. It’s a nice break when I work on my novel—that’s something a little different, I mean there’s “people” in there who aren’t me. The characters in my novel aren’t like having a wife around, though, or having students to deal with.

Tomorrow at the crack of dawn I’m heading home, the fish flipping off the tessellated wharf and back into the water.

Wheenk for Bruegel

November 7, 2001. Sailing with Rudy.

Today I went sailing with Rudy Jr. on a sailboat that he picked up for a thousand dollars, a nice big white plastic boat, twenty-four feet long, I think, bigger than the one my mother used to have in Maine. We sailed from a marina near the San Francisco airport up to the Bay Bridge, and then, as it was getting dark and the tide running against us, we anchored in Islais Creek, right next to the warehouse he lives in. It was exciting.

Recently I’ve been plagued by old remorse about having been an ill-tempered, self-centered drunk while my children were growing up. So today I kind of wanted to tell Rudy I wished I’d been a better father. But that’s something I’ve said to him before, back when I was first getting sober, and I restrained myself today from saying it again. It does no good to tell my kids over and over that I’m sorry. I’d just be pestering them, draining off energy. The right thing, the harder thing, is to spend as many days like today with my children as I can, days when we’re relaxed and close and happy, days when I’m loving and approving.

Today I approved of Rudy’s boat, his motorcycle, his new Mohawk, his new business as an internet service provider, his new Rottweiler/German Shepherd dog Slug.

I had been worried about that big dog, but he’s turning out fine. As for the Mohawk—at this point I barely notice Rudy’s hair-styles anymore. Not after last years’ double Mohawk with the green clown-puffs on the sides. The motorcycle—well, it’s a good one, he has a helmet, he drives safely. And Rudy’s new business is earning him enough money that he doesn’t have to get a so-called real job. And the sailboat, the sailboat is wonderful. My children have always been eager for my approval, even while doing things likely to provoke disapproval. That’s how I was with my parents, come to think of it.

Rudy took his shirt off while we were sailing and I gave him a pat on his bare back. Touching that dear skin reminded me so much of him being a little boy. The same skin, the same back, just bigger. Looking at him today, I also could see something I don’t notice so often, which is how much he looks and moves like his mother. Like Sylvia. The way he cranes his neck to look at something.

There was an exciting moment near the Bay Bridge when an oil tanker, the Saint Vassoulos, nearly ran us over. It was the size of a city block, if you could tilt a block up on its edge. The wind was weak, and the tanker kept seeming to turn the way we were going. It had very little maneuvering room, barely fitting under the Bay Bridge. Rudy managed to get the sailboat’s little motor started and got us out of the way in the nick of time.

We saw so many interesting things. It was like a children’s book about the harbor. A little tug pushing a barge past us. Two fishermen catching something—bait fish?—in a pair of conical nets. Another tug with a barge. A seal.

Then suddenly it was getting dark. The sun slipped behind the hills of San Francisco. The water was striped orange and dark purple. Heading for the shore, we came in under two great skeletal steel boat cranes, constructivist giraffes. Passed a barge lit by the fitful flicker of a welder. Glided into Islais Creek. The Homeric archetypal thrill of coming ashore in a strange place aboard an open boat at night. Mythopoetic. Rudy nosed around the creek and tied up to a staircase on the side of a low drawbridge. Beside the staircase was a mysterious locked metal door in the bridge’s pier, the door dogged down by four handles.

Sailing past all that action and finding a magic door was wholly like a computer game—but better. It was real, and I was with my son.

December 19, 2001. Rudy and the Keysniffer Virus.

I took another day off to visit Rudy in San Francisco. Great to be out of the office. The last six weeks I was mostly hacking on my Pop computer-game code framework, and working on the final draft of the Software Engineering and Computer Games textbook. It’s been hell on my body, the endless mousing and keyboarding. I went to yoga yesterday, which was great. This week’s teaching: soften the muscles that hurt, instead of fighting with them. Soften don’t fight. And lead your life this way as well. Words to live by.

Rudy is excited about having been written up in the San Francisco Guardian. It seems that some darkside hackers made a keysniffer virus called Badtrans which, if you have it on your machine, sends a record of every keystroke you make to a certain list of darkside hacker email addresses. And one of these addresses is suck_my_prick@ijustgotfired.com. Love that name, rough and tumble hacker humor. The catch is that Rudy’s Monkeybrains happens to be hosting this particular domain and email account.

Monkeybrains.net is Rudy’s new business—it’s a small-scale locally-run internet service provider. It’s like Earthlink or AOL. Monkeybrains is growing fast, although at this point, Rudy still only has, like, a few hundred customers—instead of a few hundred thousand. He offers dial-up service, and he hosts some customers’ websites on his stack of server machines.

Badtrans is a widespread virus, and Rudy’s server that hosts the ijustgotfired.com domain has accumulated about a gig of keysniffing data in the last week—these are the records of every single key pressed on the machines of something like thirty thousand people. The FBI found out about this, and they’ve asked Rudy to give them that data for their investigation, and he’s balking—at least until they get a court order. Rudy’s feeling is: Why should the pigs have everyone’s passwords, love-letters, mortgage applications, porno searches, and so on?

Clever programmer that he is, Rudy made a browsing webpage for his Badtrans data. Just for laughs, Rudy added a “drunkenblur.com” security certificate to the page. He’s not letting the public access the Badtrans data browser, but he showed the browser to me. You can type in any word you want and the browser searches the gigabyte of data and displays any keysniffed emails that include that word.

I searched for “Rucker,” and I found two emails from a woman in Alabama. She mentioned Fort Rucker, where perhaps she or her husband work. Both messages started out, like, “Well I hope I’ve gotten rid of that virus. I’m NEVER opening an attachment again. And I’m sorry about sending it to you…” Then she’s off on her normal concerns, writing about her Christmas plans, about some dog biscuits she baked, about her family and her smalltown life—and little does she know that her email is being cackled over by a father-son cyberpunk pair on the other side of suck_my_prick@ijustgotfired.com, in a warehouse in San Francisco.

The FBI is seriously hounding Rudy for the data, and he’s kind of nervous about it. I’m happy I can talk to him about this, and share in his concerns.

December 31, 2001. New Year’s Eve San Francisco.

Sylvia and I came up to spend New Year’s Eve in San Francisco again this year, just like on the Millennium two years ago. Nobody’s scared this time around. Lots of people shopping.

We went to a New Year’s Eve party at the warehouse where Rudy and Isabel live. Georgia was there too, and my nephew Embry. Six Ruckers! All the other guests were Gen X friends of the kids, some even younger. Cute and lively. Some were like cartoon characters.

Two separate drunks took me aside to talk about how they were trying to give up drinking, I guess they noticed that I don’t drink. Maybe I’m at a point where I look like I have something they want. One guy was like, “I still drink, but I don’t get drunk.” I remember that stage. All trouble and no fun.

Anyway, the main deal was hanging around with the kids and their friends, fresh and full of life. Isabel had made the place pretty by putting up Christmas lights. By now we know so many of their friends that it felt quite comfortable, maybe more comfortable for me than a church potluck or a Math. & CS Dept. picnic.

But Sylvia and I didn’t want to stay too late, and after awhile we headed over to the Fillmore to see Les Claypool and his Flying Frog Brigade jamming weird eccentric covers like “Ten Thousand Light Years from Home,” “Shine on you Crazy Diamond,” “Tax Man,” and right after midnight, Les playing Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” on his bass.

It was so good to walk into the Fillmore, like some kind of church, with its incense of a hundred joints, the rose window of a colored-oils lightshow on the wall behind the band. The blonde guitarist wore a top hat and dreadlocks to his waist, and Les the bassist had overalls and glasses with flashlights on them. The eternal Fillmore, so San Francisco, so hippie, so free. It was one of those moments when I feel like I’m exactly at the center of an ongoing historical reality.

In bed that night, thinking about how much I love Sylvia, hugging her, I had this moment of thinking of her as a fertile field that I’ve tilled and husbanded all these years, us growing our crop: our three children. I flashed a mental image of the field like you synoptically see in Bruegel’s painting The Fall of Icarus, with me the low-hatted peasant tending his Eden.

January 9, 2002. Hartwell Wants Wheenk. Vulgar Bruegel.

My editor Dave Hartwell wants me to flesh out Peter Bruegel’s character in my novel make him more rounded. More wheenk.

My original use of the word wheenk harks back to my thoughts of ten years ago, in 1992, when I returned to teaching after being a programmer at Autodesk. I felt desperate then, like a rabbit in a trap. And I imagined the noise a trapped rabbit would make: wheenk-wheenk-wheenk. But that’s neither here nor there. Right now we’re talking about fixing my Bruegel novel.

I’ll have to do the fix in a good way. I don’t like the cheap way that some mainstream do characterization by having internal monologues in which the characters repeat over and over the same thoughts. Wheenk wheenk wheenk—over and over. That’s why many bestsellers are fat. Page after page of repeating each character’s wheenks.

“I’m proud, but I need money.”

“Does he love me?”

But maybe I do need to wheenk, and I’m foolish to resist. Look at my own thoughts for instance, half the time I’m on a wheenk treadmill. Putting in wheenk could in fact be pretty simple. For starters, search through the book for every occurrence of “Bruegel said,” and add some internal wheenking to that paragraph.

Literary wheenk is a trick I tend to neglect—partly because I never got good at doing it, partly because I have a kind of contempt for it—as I’ve so often seen it overdone. But, as a writer, wheenk can be your friend.

And I’m going to be looser about being vulgar. Good god, that’s all I used to do, be vulgar, so why should I pretend to be all prim now, just because I’m sober and getting old. If I don’t tell the truth of how I actually imagine Bruegel, I’ll be missing my chance.

Here’s an example of the new dispensation, some dialog where Bruegel’s friend De Vos is mentioning figures whom Bruegel might add to his sketch of a mountain.

“Joseph and Mary on the way to Egypt,” suggested de Vos. “The hermit Saint Anthony. The repentant Mary Magdalene taking a piss.”

“I’d like that,” smiled Bruegel. He was known among his friends for his fondness of sketching people in their private moments.

Yes, let my Bruegel book be somewhat vulgar. And I need to put in the wheenk of the man’s thoughts. The colors atop the underpainting.

January 9, 2002. In NYC. A Book of Journals? Recovery Meeting.

I’m typing this on my laptop in a hip coffee shop called alt.coffee near Ave A and 9th Street, across from New York’s Tompkins Square Park, full of twenty-year-olds. The place is in an old house, the bathroom has a tub in it, and the tub is piled full of obsolete computers and monitors, all covered with colorful graffiti.

Last night I was been looking through my electronic journal files for the last twelve years. I tend to write more notes when I’m on the road, especially if I’m alone. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something more useful I could be doing with my time. But writing helps me keep my head together. And to figure out what I’m thinking.

Occasionally I fantasize about a fat book of these Journals, but at this point it’s something I’m too diffident to propose, not even to so loyal and devoted a publisher as John Oakes of Four Walls Eight Windows, with whom I lunched today. For now it’s enough that he’s publishing my essays, stories, and out-of-print novels.

I made it to a NYC recovery group meeting the other day, a small gathering where we all got to talk. I was wheenking about the way that I tend to always have bad thoughts about people that I pass on the street: envy, fear, racism, snobbery. And how I’d be calmer if I didn’t do this. And how it takes constant work to keep such thoughts at bay so that I can feel some serenity. To be loving and accepting. To delight at our common humanity. Nobody had any ready answers—just jokes, and sympathy, and worse problems of their own—but talking aloud about an issue helps.

One person said I could try a yoga breath routine, where you “inhale acceptance” and “exhale fear.” This head-trick does work, although of course I can never remember to keep it up for longer than about thirty seconds.

A fun thing about the meeting was that it let me hear some local New Yorkers tawkin’ their squawk, in that thick wonderful accent, really it’s as quaint as Scotland.

February 9, 2002. An Alien in Chinatown.

Sylvia and I walked through Chinatown during a Chinese New Year’s parade. We saw some dancers in horse-costumes acting really odd—men in makeup bucking themselves. On a normal day the local Chinese people are often stoic and unsmiling, but at their New Year’s parade, everyone was excited and cheerful.

The amplified music floating down the streets seemed archetypically nostalgic. When I told Sylvia the music made me nostalgic, she says, “For what?”

And I say, “For planet Earth.”

Heimweh in German means home-pain. Homesickness. I saw Greg Gibson at his book fair this weekend, and it gave me Heimweh to see him, homesickness for the irrecoverable past.

Chinatown is as close to another world as I get in San Francisco. So wonderfully funky and flaking. The peeling paint on a 1922 building at Grant and Clay. The building houses the Buddha Bar on the ground floor. Paired icons: Buddha and the neon martini glass.

March 19, 2002. Done Revising Bruegel.

I ended up changing the title of my Bruegel book to As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel. I’m not positive that was a good idea, but we’re going with it.

I finished my revisions a couple of weeks ago, making the book 30,000 words longer, which means I wrote pretty much a thousand words a day for most of February and the start of March, which is a lot for me. I was working at white heat.

The novel is a cornucopia of scenes and events, like one of Bruegel’s early Wimmelbild canvases, the ones that are covered with writhing little people. On the other hand, my novel’s also like Bruegel’s late pictures, the ones with cosmic landscapes and noble, architectonic figures. And what a tear-jerker! The tragedy of life as an artist, and the tragedy of life itself. The tears of things.

I feel like this is as good a book as I can write. A peak of my career. Amazing to think I did it. I hope it sells well.

And then Hartwell sent me back some pages with his further changes. He managed to put his finger on every short-cut I took, ferret out every weak spot, peel away each loose fleck of paint. So I thought about it for a week, made some notes, and got all the changes typed in. Another three thousand words. And emailed it off.

The very last change-request was to deepen the personality of my minor character Hans Franckert. So I gave him cirrhosis of the liver. So much for merrily waving that mug of beer, dude!

Didn’t even print and reread the very last changes, some of them. No time, no time, no time. And no more energy. Smooth it out in copy edit. Get it the hell outta here. Dab, dab, dab, and hammer it into the crate. A fucking masterpiece.

I’m threadbare, worn thin by the seemingly endless rounds of revisions and copy edits on my three books: Spaceland, Software Engineering and Computer Games, and As Above So Below. Insanity to publish three books in less than six months. Like you love dessert, yeah—and then you go and tackle a whole table of sweets at once.

It’s been an extreme ordeal. I feel harder and tougher, like some youthful part of me has been crushed.

March 21, 2002. Day Before My 56th Birthday.

Spring! I’m a spring chicken, as the kids like to say, a spring lamb.

School’s been easy this week. For one thing, I cancelled classes Tuesday and called in sick—so I could go to the Game Developers Conference being held in San Jose again. I listened to panels talking about how to teach game programming, and I did what I could to hype my forthcoming text. As is my eternal fate in every endeavor, my particular way of teaching games programming is probably too difficult and idiosyncratic to be widely adopted. Me and my Pop software framework. But it’s interesting to hear about what the others do. At least I’m done.

Today I’m giving midterms in both my classes, so I don’t have to teach today either. And next week is spring break. Alright! I’m typing this as I proctor my Software Engineering midterm. If a proctologist is a rectum doctor, is a proctor an asshole?

A birthday is a time to yearn for the past—and to fear death in the future.

Yesterday I saw a work of art at the San Jose museum: The Third Eye, by Michael McMillen. It was a peephole lens set into a real door in the wall. The door had a padlock on it. You couldn’t go in. But you could look into the peephole and see a truly convincing diorama, seemingly life-sized, although the hidden installation is only three feet across.

What I saw through the peephole was the inside of a Sixties head shop, with posters on the walls, baskets for sale, a glass counter case with pipes and rolling-papers, a rotating fan on the ceiling, and a flickering strobe in one corner. Through a little grill in the door, I could hear faint music of The Doors, and smell a whiff of sandalwood incense. I remember buying buffalo-leather sandals with Sylvia in a Highland Park head shop like this.

What I’d give to step into that past—when Sylvia and I were newlyweds, Sylvia with her two pigtails. She was always shopping for ponytail holders back then—she liked pairs of little glass balls with a rainbow sheen on them, and a rubber cord between the balls. Yes, I remember the head shops of Highland Park and New Brunswick, Washington D. C. and New York—with all my life ahead of me, twenty-two years of age, ah, sweet bird of youth.

How fleeting it was, my youth. It didn’t last nearly long enough. Was there some way I could have slowed it down? Stayed there longer? No. But I enjoyed it to the max. I remember those great days in grad school that I’d spend alone in the abandoned math building—the department had moved out of these three great old Victorian piles to some new concrete boxes across the river. I still had the keys to those old Victorian offices, they were all cleaned out and empty, and I’d hang out in there all day lying on the comfortable old waxed wooden floors, me with my notebook, writing down ideas about infinity for my Ph.D. thesis, sometimes smoking a joint as well, sometimes writing about the fourth dimension, not yet knowing why I was doing that, sometimes bringing in my kalimba thumb-piano—man, those were the days.

Taking my first teaching job in Geneseo, New York, was the thing that put an end to the Sixties fun—that was in the summer of 1972. But what else was there to do? Not have a job? Abandon my academic career? Get drafted?

Geneseo was the only job I could find in my chosen career as a math professor. Not that being a math professor ended up being my whole life. I’ve been swept along by the currents of history, a chip in the stream. I did still have a little fun in Geneseo. I’d climb into a small, woebegone tree in my rented back yard, and I’d smoke the hash that my college pal Don Marritz sent me, using a funny fake return address: Slim’s Dude Ranch, Stone Arabia, New York. And I’d listen to the Stones on my earphones.

But really the Sixties were over once we hit Geneseo, that little faculty town, us with two children, me working for people who hated the Sixties, who wanted them to be over, who acted like they’d never happened. Could Sylvia and I have thrown everything over and moved to San Francisco then and there? But the Sixties were ending out west too. Opting out of my career wouldn’t have stopped time.

It’s so nice that I still have Sylvia with me—peephole into the diorama of my past. Among other things!

So that’s yearning for the past. As for fearing death in the future, well, I’ve got a few years yet. It always is so hard to visualize being totally gone.

It’s always better to focus on the now, if you can mange to. These are good days in many ways. I feel like I’m at the height of my creative powers. I mean, an SF novel, a computer science textbook with accompanying software, and a historical novel all coming out in six months—what more do I want?

It’s later on into the day now and I’m proctoscoping the second midterm of the day, this one is for my Artificial Intelligence class. News-flash: AI is a grab-bag of cheap, special-purpose tricks.

I’ve been having some trouble with this class for the last few weeks. It’s the second time I’ve taught it, but this time I tried to spend a little more time on a certain kind of AI that works by modeling reality as a symbolic logic knowledge base, and then trying to derive inferences from the knowledge base. In other words, you treat the knowledge base like a set of axioms, and try to prove theorems from these given facts.

The endeavor has a really bogus feel to it. I feel like I’m teaching Reaganomics, or Bible stories, or anti-drug propaganda. And my students can’t in fact write any demo programs with knowledge base AI. First of all, it’s a massive and tedious effort to write out a full set of axioms describing any non-trivial or interesting situation. And, secondly, the automated theorem-proving methods are so flaky and complicated that we wouldn’t be able to get them to work. So fuck that shit.

These days I prefer to think of AI in terms of Wolfram’s New Kind of Science, which is finally in print. Wolfram has an odd view of logic, it’s so meta that I can hardly wrap my mind around it. He feels that you can often get complex-seeming behavior from really simple computations—if you let the little computations run for a long time. Examples of this are cellular automata and the Mandelbrot set. Wolfram says that you needn’t worry about writing out complicated sets of “axioms,” and you don’t need to prove things. Instead you set a batch of gnarly little computations to running, and sift through them using an automated search. And then you find some nice computations that happen, for whatever inscrutable reason, to munge away and produce outputs that resemble what you want.

In a way, this is what it’s like to talk to people. Each person’s off on their own thought stream, doing who knows what, and there’s no particular reason to suppose that they’re making logical deductions or, god forbid, “proving theorems from a knowledge base.” The gum-chewing woman behind the counter, the man who bumps you in line, your partner, me, you yourself, we’re all carrying out a steady cellular-automata-like munging of our thoughts, with the world’s random inputs keeping things going. You go around talking to people, and eventually you hear something interesting.

I’m in a philosophical mode of thought these days because I’ve been working on an application to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leuven near Brussels, Belgium, to come next fall and do research into the philosophy of mind with them. It would be a nice gig, kind of like going back to where I was at in Heidelberg in 1978 to 1980, when I was working on my nonfiction book Infinity and the Mind, and writing my SF novels White Light and Software. I’m getting a sabbatical semester off from San Jose State, see, so the idea is to find some kind of low-stress overseas gig.

Sylvia is worried sick about leaving our house in Los Gatos empty—or renting it out. I hope she can find something interesting to do while we’re in Belgium, if she comes. Maybe this gig would be a terrible idea? They speak Dutch/Flemish in Leuven, although they do speak French in Brussels. A long-shot alternative is to be in Paris for three months working on a computer music program for a guy who makes electronic music. But this sounds like it might involve too much computer hacking on my part, which is the last fucking thing I want to do on my sabbatical semester off.

Aw, Rudy, stop worrying. It’ll work out. And now the AI test is almost done.

Lines Sylvia wrote for me in a March 22 poem years ago:

It’s your birthday! Let down your proofs—

Count my numbers, Process my words,

Weigh my mass, And square my root!

Feel my fractals, Join my space—

C’mon, baby, Let’s tessellate!

April 4, 2002. Casa de 17. Yes, Monomyth for Frek.

I haven’t worked on Frek and the Elixir for about five months, because of all the wrap-up work on those other three books. I’m starting to look at Frek again. I hardly remember it. First thought is: I should put in more wheenk. And I’m worrying that it might be a hillbilly-dumb idea to simply adopt the seventeen-stage monomyth structure for my novel. Being all wholesale and Procrustean: one chapter per stage, no matter what.

But the other day, driving home from Santa Cruz on Route 17, I passed that same road-stop pizza-restaurant where last year I had my vision for my new novel as a monomyth. And, lo and behold, the name of this particular inn is: Casa de 17. Seventeen, get it? Hadn’t noticed that before. I settled upon the seventeen stages of the monomyth in the “House of Seventeen.” How perfect, how synchronistic.

It’s like, by showing me this restaurant’s sign, the universe is reaching out and tapping me, elbowing me, smiling at me. I tried to explain my excitement to Sylvia.

Planning a novel is non-logical—it’s out at the limits of what I can do, and there’s no hope of my finding a short simulation of the process. A process like planning a novel is what we call “computationally irreducible.” That means there’s no way, even in principle, to predict the outcome. The only way to find the end is to live through the entire process.

When you get into this kind of zone, you’re out on the very surface of your brain, and you become sensitive to the tiniest chaotic emanations of the world around you. And the world, feeling your sensitivity, gladly dances with you. Do-si-do. Casa de 17. Yaaar.

I’m high all right, but not on false drugs.

So, yes, I’ll figure out a way to make the seventeen stages work as chapters. I won’t back off from that idea. The stages will be a help, a crib sheet. According to the monomyth, for instance, Frek is supposed to meet a girl in the next chapter. Okay, fine, it can be a girl with pigtails, a girl modeled on my first crush ever, Renate Schwarzwälder, who was in my class at the school I attended in Königsfeld in the Black Forest in 1958 and I was—aha!—twelve. Just like Frek.

Minds and Machines

April 10-11, 2002. Flying to Torino, Italy.

I’m off on another business-class junket to Italy. The gig is hard to understand. A night-club owner in Torino, or Turin, is paying my trip costs plus $2K for me to give a talk to high-school and college kids on a Saturday morning, my presentation to be followed by talks by Italian critics and by my Italian translator on the topic of, I guess, my work. I told them the title of my talk would be “Welcome to the Mad Scientist’s Laboratory,” I figure I’ll show some computer demos and some of my illos for Spaceland and Saucer Wisdom.

Yesterday my new film agent Marty Shapiro nailed down a deal to sell an option for the movie rights on my novel Freeware to a guy in Seattle. The guy’s gonna pay $20K for an eighteen month option to develop a script for a $30M movie. After the Software experience I’m not all that optimistic that this will come to anything.

Bragging about the deal, I told Sylvia, “I was so stoned when I wrote Freeware that I can’t even remember what it’s about.”

“You’re bad,” she says. Just the response I was looking for.

The guy in Seattle is telling me on the phone that Freeware is the future, that its message should be heard by one and all. Huh? I actually do remember the book, in particular I remember my character Randy Karl Tucker, like, Randy getting pissed on by Honey Weaver, getting wasted on camote, making a pet chicken out of imipolex plastic, and (in my opinion, although not expressly stated in my book) fucking the aforesaid pet chicken—Kentucky boy that Randy Karl is.

Right now I’m sitting on my bed in the City Hotel in Torino. The sound of opera singing from across the hall is very loud, I guess it’s on their radio? Or maybe it’s some live person or persons rehearsing opera? Bellowing. Cute, in a way. Just the thing to remind me I’m in Italy.

My host Mauro the night-club-owner met me at the Torino airport, a nice young man, well, he’s 37. This gig seems like it’s on the up and up. Mauro is a Communist, I think. At least he talked about communism a lot, although somewhat warily, what with me being Amerikkkan. He seems to think Bruce Sterling is right-wing, maybe because Bruce comes from Texas, which cracks me up. They’re having Bruce here to do a gig like mine next month. I’m thinking I should I go ahead and convince them in advance that Bruce is a John Bircher, a cousin of George Bush.

Could be five hundred high-school kids there for my talk, says Mauro, gulp. Anyway, he dropped me at my hotel, and I went out to do my initial Mars Rover number, trundling around the streets. It’s cold and raining. The streets are so Italian. It’s so wonderful, so amazing that this parallel Italy universe is ongoing, and that I can access this plane of existence.

The most memorable thing on my first foray was a nice cafe full of women in pairs and threes and fours, sitting at tables drinking coffee and eating pastries, all of them talking to each other, all of them using their hands to talk. The quick visual effect of looking in through the tinted glass was of a tide pool of anemones with their tendrils waving.

Mauro and I had dinner at a mid-range Sardinian restaurant, great spaghetti with clams. Mauro wanted me to go see the band My Cat Is An Alien at his night-club, but I couldn’t face it. Can always go there tomorrow or the next day. I’ll jump on stage and sing “Duke of Earl” like in my Dead Pigs days, right? I could do that sober, sure. Maybe sing “Duke of Earl” for my talk to the five hundred high-schoolers? Would that be the next right thing to do?

At dinner Mauro was asking me what it’s like in California, saying he had trouble visualizing everyday life there, and I was finding it hard to express. I said, “In the U.S. people define their own roles in society. This means that our people are wild hyenas and charlatans. Insecure, tense, and unstable.”

Mauro told me a bit about Torino. They sometimes call it “Fiat Nam” because its economy is so dominated by the Fiat auto plants here. These days, though, Fiat is trying to close down much of its local production—so as to relocate its operations to labor-cheap countries in the Far East. Torino is traditionally one of the more Communist cities in Italy. Mauro’s collective, called Hiroshima Mon Amour, works to keep Torino interesting by bringing music shows to their nightclub and by organizing various kinds of art shows and public lectures.

Now it’s 2 am and I’m having one of those jet-lagged Camper Van Beethoven moments.

“Take the hands off the clock—you’re gonna be here for a whiiiiile.”

David Lowry of Camper Van sings this line with warpy, snit-snit, down-the-wormhole bad-acid guitar licks in the background.

I open the door to the night balcony and it’s raining. I’ve been looking forward to this moment. There’s nothing like jet-lag when you’re traveling alone and you can turn the light on and fire up the laptop, my drug of choice these days.

Maybe I’ll do some work on Frek and the Elixir tonight. Or just write a long journal note.

What if I didn’t have my books to define myself by? It would be tough—to just live in the light of day and not to have my mindscape lit by the footlights of the literary stage. A writer feels emotionally different from his or her fellows, right? Ironic and detached.

Well, just to deconstruct that old trope—from listening to people talk about themselves over the years, I’ve found that most people feel different from others. Even the seemingly bland dummies are alienated, it’s just that the bland dummies don’t have the talent for making a geschrei about it. No raucous tumult.

And, second deconstruction, it is occasionally possible to be, or at least to feign to be, a Whitmanesque yea-saying artist who fully embraces the daily things, like Jack K. going, “Wow, what great apple pie! With ice-cream on it! Yes!”

I had a hit of that in Amsterdam—simply looking at the friggin light poles around the airfield, enjoying how they were grouped. And right now I’m taking a non-alienated joy in being awake alone at night in Italy, with the sound of rain outside, me here at the leading edge of spring, with my fingers and my words and my hard drive, sketching, sketching, sketching.

“What a sweet thing is perspective,” as Paolo Ucello used to say.

Ding dong goes the elevator, bringing my opera-singing neighbors back to their room. 3 am. I’m gonna be here for awhile.

April 12, 2002. Italian Intellectuals.

Saw some sights today. Took a taxi to an enormous central square called Piazza Castello. Such a big square that it has a palace in the middle of it, with tons of space around it. And arcades over all the stone sidewalks around the edges. I saw a really cool old brick building with the bricks sculpted to look like drapery around the windows, and layered to make the walls look like folded piles of cloth.

Then walked down the arcaded Via Po to the Fiume Po, that is, the River Po, running strong, although non-navigable, with low falls like in the James or in the Ohio Rivers. Last night my host Mauro said no city is really a city without an ocean, lake, or river.

I went out for dinner with Mauro, his friend Fabrizio, and two of my Italian translators, a man about my age named Antonio Caronia and fortyish guy named Daniele Brolli, who’s the one translating most of my books these days. Brolli says my translations are selling well, so the Mondadori publisher will keep putting them out. I’m having a good run in Italy just now, just like I did in Japan in the ’90s, and in Germany in the ’80s.

Brolli is a clever guy, kind of a California-looking type, balding with hair practically shaved, wearing a black double-breasted motorcycle jacket. He reminded me a little of my San Francisco SF writer friend Richard Kadrey.

Brolli grew up in Rimini and does writing of his own—he published a novel that he described to me. If I understood him correctly, it’s about a pair of gay lovers who are serial killers, and when one of them dies, his soul infects everyone in Rimini, and then it turns out that the man orchestrating this transformation is an ordinary-looking guy who may in fact be the concentration camp fiend, Dr. Mengele, who’s arrived by a kind of psychic time travel. Oooh kay.

Antonio Caronia disappeared for nearly an hour as we sat down to eat. Later Brolli was gossiping about him to me, they’re friends of course from years on the same scene. It seems that the ravaged-looking fifty-eight-year-old Caronia has a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend he’s always fighting with. And that’s what he was doing on the phone.

Caronia fits the classic image of the European intellectual—stooped, a few side teeth missing, wrinkled raincoat, smoking skinny cigarettes that he hand-rolls from Gauloise tobacco, talking endlessly. It was touching to think that these colorful strangers, Caronia and Brolli, had at some point made a few bucks translating my words. The unintended consequences of me typing something so many years ago.

April 13, 2002. Talk in Turin. Machine Minds.

I woke up very early, like at 4 am, and I watched the dawn break amid the cheeping birds and the persistent rhythm of the steady rain. I felt stunned from the jet-lag, like I’d been hit over the head with a wooden mallet. I had five cups of espresso with breakfast.

My morning talk went very well. There were several hundred people there, mostly university students, cute and lively. The way I ran it was to show a slide with a picture and two or three lines of text. I’d say the lines and maybe add a few remarks, and then Vittoria the interpreter would render what I said into Italian.

I felt my usual affection for my simultaneous interpreter. This is the person who gives you human interface. Vittoria was a classic Italian type—chic, dark, strong-featured and lipsticked, with dyed blonde hair. Very talkative of course, with a cute accent. I showed her my Boppers a-life critters on my computer screen before the talk. She said, “They are very agitated-a.”

I told the audience I wouldn’t be talking about current events, and that I’d be describing science-fiction ideas to dream upon. I told them not to be scared of playing with ideas, and that they should push any preconceived notions out of their heads.

And then I went into some stories about the evolving bopper robots and soft plastic moldie robots from my Wares, hit them with some computer demos from my CAPOW and Boppers programs, and proceeded to the tweaks of nature and humanity described in Saucer Wisdom. I put in a lot of jokes, and they seemed to get most of them.

At the end I compared our web to the uvvy-mediated radiotelepathy I talk about in my novels. Segueing into my current thing about oppressive media mind control, I told the audience that every single coffee shop and restaurant in America plays recorded music in order to control the moods of their customers. The students were surprised to hear this. None of the eating or drinking places in Italy plays recorded background music. None of them. People in Europe are allowed to experience the human sounds of people talking.

We took a coffee break, and then we had two speeches about me by my two translators, whom I’d met the night before—Antonio Caronia and Daniele Brolli.

Caronia said cyberpunk was dead—he wishes!—and then he went off about a 1930s Marxist called Benjamin, followed by a rant against globalization. Vittoria sat next to me, interpreting his speech for me, skipping large chunks, and liberally commenting on Caronia’s style.

“He is making many many parentheses. It is impossible to translate Italians. They do not get to the point.”

Then Daniele Brolli talked, and it was wonderful. He gave a fairly detailed discussion of why my writing was unique and important—music to my ears. He spoke of cyberpunk using any means necessary to communicate, mixing different modes, compared me to the surrealists, spoke of how I communicate a sense of enthusiasm and energy, and of how I achieve things quite impossible in officially sanctioned literature. How nice it is to be taken seriously.

We had a fancy lunch—featuring a lavish paella. The platter of paella was right in front of me, and sticking out of the saffron rice was the body of a large squid, with the diamond-shaped flukes of its tail like wings on the tapering barrel of its purplish body.

“Hi there,” said the squid. “Eadem mutata resurgo.” It was speaking in the voice of my cuttlefish character Professor Bumby from my novel-in-progress, Frek and the Elixir. “The same, yet altered, I rise again.”

After lunch, I did three interviews and got paid a wad of Euros in cash. A great day.

April 14-15, 2002. Shroud of Turin.

I spent Sunday looking around Torino. Most of the streets were empty, but then, rounding a corner, I encountered a thousand Italians standing on a cobblestone street, most of them dressed in black cloth and leather, calmly talking, smoking, and using their cell phones.

“What means this Concourse?” as A Square asked the Linelanders in Flatland.

They were waiting outside a church, waiting for their turn at Mass, the priests running one seating after another all day. No jostling or urgency to be the first in line. It couldn’t matter less how close to the front of the church you sit at Mass.

I tried to imagine the intricate web of relationships among these people—there really were a thousand of them present, maybe even two thousand—and most of them life-long residents of Torino, you’d have to suppose, and most of them seeing each other several times a week. And all of them talking, the sound of their massed voices echoing off the old stone buildings like in the squares—such a quintessentially human sound.

Nobody looked at me, not even a glance. Among all these thousand people, only I was invisible. Like a ghost, living just outside their plane of reality.

A lonely day. This trip’s lasted long enough.

In the afternoon I made my way to the cathedral and I saw the chapel of the Shroud of Turin. The shroud itself was hidden from light in a long box/altar, but hanging above the box was a two-thirds-size photographic replica. Supposedly they wrapped Jesus in this particular shroud after taking him down from the cross, and his blood, or perhaps his numinous emanations, painted an image of his face and body onto the cloth.

Of course both reason and historical evidence tells us that the shroud is a hoax perpetrated in the 1400s. But I wanted to make the most of my visit. So I stood there imagining, and even pretending to believe, that inside that box, only a few feet away from me, was a cloth that had touched the body of Jesus Christ, this cloth marked with something like a photograph of his beloved, holy face.

I could feel a thinning of the usual wall between mundane reality and the cosmic absolute. I knelt and prayed. And I hear god’s voice in my head. The same voice that I heard when I had my mystical vision on acid in 1970. Saying the same thing as before.

“I’m always here, Rudy. I’ll always love you.”

And now, Monday morning, I’m on the plane home. I just watched the movie Ali, about the boxer. It was a good film, I liked how Ali seemed to have such a thoughtful, unflappable quality. And how he could switch over to clowning and ranting at any time. My fellow Louisvillian, I’m proud of him. Ali, me, and Hunter Thompson—the Louisville three.

Changing planes in Amsterdam, I picked up a Dutch Donald Duck comic book for study—just in case I need to learn Flemish for a stint in Belgium this fall.

April 30, 2002. Fifteen Years at SJSU. Retire?

It’s rainy today, which feels cozy. California feels especially like itself when it’s rainy, not that it rains often. Maybe the rain brings back the early trips that I made to Big Sur and Esalen in 1986 and 1987.

San Jose State had a faculty awards banquet and they gave me a gold-colored letter opener and a handshake from the President for my fifteen years’ service. Kind of surprising I’ve been here that long. I asked my fellow math professor pal Tatiana Shubin, also here for fifteen years, how long she planned to teach.

“Forever,” she says in her Russian accent. “I love it. Why would I stop?”

I’ve been enjoying my classes quite a bit lately myself. The Software Engineering students are doing really well with their computer game projects. I have some graduate students doing master’s degree thesis projects with me, and one of the students—a guy called Wiley Dai—is using my Pop framework to make a 4D Space Invaders game where you shoot at flying hypercubes.

And my course on Artificial Intelligence is okay again, although parts of the semester have been unpleasant, as I’m unable to find any real content in certain bullshit chapters. But now we’ve been programming some neural nets to learn how to recognize people in a group of a hundred faces, and that hack is very nice.

So, yeah, I’ve been enjoying teaching, and when I’m home alone all day, I feel a bit at loose ends. The idea of retiring doesn’t seem quite so alluring to me as it seemed a couple of years ago. Of course another reason my job seems comfortable of late is that I’m only teaching half-time this year, thanks to the credit I get for helping those master’s students with their thesis projects.

Publisher’s Weekly gave Spaceland a starred review yesterday, complete with a little interview with me. Awesome. Maybe the book will do well. Then there’d be a demand for me to do another Silicon Valley SF novel—like Elmore Leonard with all his Miami detective novels. It would be easy to do another, I think. I know this place so well.

An SF-style situation that caught my fancy the other day was when I was commuting to work on Route 17, listening to Howard Stern, and there was a woman talking to him on the air via her cell phone, and she’d taken off her blouse and she was driving in traffic near Boston, giving her coordinates, and other listeners were trying to see her, and then she stopped at a truck stop and a man comes over and looks at her boobs, and she hands him the cell phone and the guy is talking to Howard Stern, and Howard is asking the guy how she looks, asks the guy if he wants to touch her breasts, gets the woman back on the phone, asks her if it’s okay if the guy touches her breasts.

She says “Sure.”

So the guy touches her breasts, and Howard asks him how it is—all this is taking place in the matrix of the commute, you understand, we’re all commuters potentially at the scene, it’s live, it’s awesome. Juvenile, yes, but amazingly cyber and hive-mind-like in its own way.

It would be nice to push this just a notch further to make it full-on SF. Maybe there’s a mystery involved as well. In a way the situation is like Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, which was the first vaguely cyberpunk book that I read, back in 1970. A book about a wild-ass radio-show host—although maybe Jack Barron wasn’t quite so nihilistically in-your-face as Howard Stern. Not quite so 21st C.

May 23, 2002. Hoax Interview. “Jena and Me” with Rudy.

Yesterday I gave a prankish interview to an Italian guy for a new weekly to be called Ovo. He had this mistaken idea that I had already done some work on the “Rudy simulator” that I sometimes bullshit about in my interviews—it’s supposed to be a comprehensive database of my writings, with some kind of AI agent to generate answers from the database. This would give a user the sense that they’re talking to me.

I decided to hoax the reporter from Ovo. I went ahead and assured him that. yes, yes, I have the Rudy simulator working. So he did a phone interview “with Rudy for real,” and an email interview “with the Rudy simulator program.” It is, of course, much easier for me to simply imitate a Rudy simulating program than to write one!

One of the phone interview questions that the Ovo guy asked was why I’ve been saying that I want to stop programming. And my answer is that you can work so much more rapidly in fiction. In a novel, I can create a whole alternative world in a few months. But just to get some 3D objects to bounce around in a room—as I did in the Pop framework—that took me nearly ten years of programming. Fiction is the highest-level virtual reality programming interface that we have. And you can depend upon the human mind to simulate all the details that you describe.

Rudy Jr. and I are working on an SF story together, very cool—it’s called “Jenna and Me.” It’s a transreal tale inspired by Rudy’s trouble with first the FBI about the Badtrans virus, and then with the Secret Service about his website about President Bush’s twin daughters, thefirsttwins.com. Wild shit.

June 10, 2002. Jolted Awake by College Reunion.

Sylvia and I went to Swarthmore for the thirty-fifth reunion of my class of 1967, and brought along our daughter Georgia, also a Swarthmore grad, class of 1991. This is so far beyond anything I could have imagined back in college—that I’d be at a reunion with my daughter who’s thirty-two. My class has moved out past the event horizon, beyond the point where light rays can reach, deep into the twenty-first century.

At one point during this reunion, I went running around the old Mary Lyons dorm with Greg Gibson, reviewing it, and then he starts telling me that he uses his memory of this dorm as so-called memory palace—a virtual space for organizing mental lists. But meanwhile he couldn’t remember what floor our old room had been on—which was a vintage befuddled Greg touch. The funniness and the boyishness of this moment.

And, ah, the sweet visual prospects upon the buildings, the fields, the trees. Thousands of views, all engraved in my mind, stored as mental shoeboxes of snapshots, and the reality fits over/under the memories like biology-textbook transparent templates. “Hi, we’re still here, still bleeding.”

A very short life-cycle like that of a gnat is simply comic, like a sped-up Chaplin film. Born/die/born/die/born/die. Silly gnats. Many plants are on a one-year life-cycle. They sprout in the spring, they bloom, blow, wither, go to seed and die. We’re used to this wheel, and we like it. But the seventy or eighty-year cycle of a human life, that carries with it an air of tragedy.

I have an emotional hangover.

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch, wheenk, wheenk, wheenk.

I may or may not have mentioned that my nickname in college was Pig. And Don Marritz well remembers this.

“Georgia is radiant,” he told me. “Like in Charlotte’s Web.”

“You mean like Some Pig?” I said, that being the other phrase that Charlotte the spider weaves into her web above Wilber the pig’s pen.

“Well, look where she comes from,” said Don.

Georgia does look radiant. Our girl.

As I’ve said, Greg Gibson was my best friend in college. We used to spend a lot of time getting drunk together. For awhile at the reunion party, he and I stood off to one side together. It was comfortable. And Greg said, “I’d rather be here, than over there.” He meant being off to the side instead of in the mix. “That was always our act back then,” continued Greg. “It worked for us.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That, or being alone.” We weren’t very sociable boys.

When I was in my thirties, I studied, in a casual way, the teachings of the trickster sage G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff claimed that, for most of our life, we’re sleepwalking—and when we awaken to see what’s really going on, we can barely stand the intensity.

The reunion woke me up for a bit—in that sense used by Gurdjieff. And it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Driving from the reunion to New York City in a traffic jam on the hot Jersey Turnpike, I felt sick of me, of my life, of the stink of my thoughts.

But now, a couple of days later, I’ve calmed down, I’m going back into my familiar, comforting dreams. This evening, when Georgia stopped by our New York hotel room, I was delighted to see her. Walking along talking with Sylvia and Georgia and her boyfriend Courtney after dinner, I was glad to be slipping back into my cozy niche. Yes, I’m back into my dream of life.

Don’t want to wake up and stare into the void.

June 12, 2002. New York. Courtney and Georgia.

I used to be bothered by the notion that other people are as conscious as me, I even used to think it was a paradox. Like I’m the center of the universe, so how can you be the center too? And if you’re not the center, then what are you?

By now I’ve learned to accept that each of the million people I see on, say, the New York City streets has a rich inner life. Except that, of course, it’s easy for me to revoke this enlightened, open-minded feeling and to suppose that some individual person whom I see might have no more of an inner life than a cockroach—and that this person’s mind holds only a few crude images of genitalia, plates of food, and bags of money. It’s easy to fall back into this, but it’s incorrect. The cosmic Light is everywhere.

I like how the city’s odd fish go motorvating past me on the sidewalks. The open doors of the curious shops are like gaps into the crannies of reefs.

On the sidewalk by Union Square at night, Sylvia and I saw a pair of drummers—a beefy white guy in a T-shirt with a drum kit, and a Rasta black guy with a half dozen upended plastic buckets. The black guy wore a turban, and he had lively eyebrows like our son. The drums pulled everything together—the traffic, the buildings, the trees, the passers-by, the billboards, everything together in a rhythmic matrix of sound.

On our last night, we four went out for a light dinner at Bright Foods on lower Eighth Avenue, and none other than the singer Debby Harry was sitting at the counter eating. Blondie herself. Awesome. I liked how she filled out her Levis.

And then we went to see a ballet at the Joyce Theater across the street. At the intermission, Sylvia and Georgia went to get a coffee, and I was standing there alone with Georgia’s boyfriend Courtney.

He says, “You know I love Georgia so much. And I’m getting ready to ask her to marry me. And I wanted to let you know that.”

Wow! It was like when I wrote Sylvia’s father to ask him if I could marry his daughter. I told Courtney that I appreciated him telling me, that I thought he was a fine young man, that I had confidence in his success, and that he had my blessing.

Then the girls came back, and I didn’t say anything to them yet. We saw the second act of the ballet, and after the show was over, Courtney went to the bathroom and I shared the news with Sylvia and Georgia.

“At the intermission Courtney told me he wants to marry Georgia.”

Georgia was flabbergasted, quite stock-still with surprise, afraid at first I might be teasing her, and then very happy. I don’t know when Courtney is actually going to ask Georgia himself, but I hope it’s soon. I’m not sure if he realized that I would tell Georgia his plan. Our family isn’t big on secrets.

This is exciting news. It makes me see Georgia in a new light. As a bride.

“What should I do now?” I asked Sylvia when we got back to our room.

“Button your lip and keep your trap shut,” she said.

I’m happy about Georgia and Courtney. They’re already living together. He’s handsome, pleasant, and bright. I think the marriage will work.

June 2, 2002. At the Movies.

As I type this I’m, believe it or not, at the movies, which is a fair measure of how fucked up I am, to be keyboarding in a house of mirth. Yes, I’m sitting in the Century 22 dome theater in San Jose, waiting for the digital projection of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. This is about the geekiest possible thing to be doing, working on your laptop before Star Wars—it’s perfect Silicon Valley.

I remember the old days when Pop would sometimes take me to a movie and we’d have popcorn. Popplecorn, Pop would call the popcorn, kidding around.

But wait, is that a real memory? Did Pop ever take me to the movies alone? Or was it always the whole family? I do remember him taking me fishing a few times, just the two of us. And sometimes for rides in his car, like for a business errand. And I remember the time he came to visit me at Swarthmore when I was a senior, and we took a long walk in the Crum woods, talking about the meaning of life. That was a good day.

Anyway, now I’m alone. With my laptop. On summer vacation. Yaaar.

Lives of the Saints

July 6, 2002. In Grindelwald.

We’re in Grindelwald, Switzerland, in a six bedroom chalet that Sylvia’s father and stepmother rented. Sylvia’s brother Henry came up with us for a night, and Sylvia’s aunt and her cousin arrive today. A Hungarian cook is part of the company as well. That’s eight of us.

It’s raining just now, but not too hard. Today Sylvia and I hiked up through some woods. Rocks, waterfalls, cliffs, trees, flowers, glaciers—endless variations on the classic Alpine themes. Then we came to a little restaurant. The Swiss always have restaurants up at the end of what seem like impossibly long trails.

In the evening we played cards, the favorite game of Sylvia’s family, it’s called “Stock Out.” Each player gets a full deck of cards, and you compete to rapidly fit them into certain spots on the table. It was like eight frantically interwoven games of solitaire at once, with lots of yelling.

Fun to be sitting around the table with the big group. They looked touching.

July 8, 2002. Portrait from Lives of the Saints.

In the evening, Sylvia was questioning my plan to take a day-long hike alone tomorrow—she was worried about my safety. And I was a little pigheaded about my plan being fine. Basically we had a little quarrel. And then she fell asleep, but I couldn’t.

I walked across the hall to an empty bedroom and opened up the double windows onto a mown grassy hill, with the starry sky above that, and the pitch-dark silhouettes of trees around the edges. I sat there and did a meditation exercise. By the time I was done, I’d reached a state of being more accepting, and more willing to give a little ground, and ready to make up with Sylvia. I’d gotten rid of my tension. And in the morning things would be fine.

Thinking back to that peaceful half hour of meditation, it seems magical and special, like a postcard. My head silhouetted against the hill, with the night, the alps, and the dark trees out there, and me earnestly working on my mental state.

“A Portrait from the Lives of the Saints,” is what I mentally entitled this image, kind of joking, but kind of not. It felt nice, here amidst the in-laws, to have a warm thought about myself. Der Heilige Ruedi, that being how they spell my name in Grindelwald. I’m seeing a golden ladder in the background of the picture, with the triangular eye of god at the top. And perhaps some flying bats.

July 9, 2002. Big Hike to Glecksteinhütte

Today I had a really good hike, involving a kilometer’s worth of altitude gain, up to a mountaineers’ hostel called the Glecksteinhütte. I started through some meadows, worked up over some cliffs, then took a trail along the wall of the canyon. Near the end of the canyon, the trail zigzagged up a monstrously high cliff, then made its way over a hump to the Glecksteinhütte.

There weren’t any other day-hikers on the trail, only some serious mountaineers carrying all kinds of gear. Looking up at the beetling cliff that I still had to climb, I noticed a waterfall coming off it. Fully a hundred meters above me the waterfall became mist, torn apart by the wind, dispersed into a puff of fog. It got windier near the top, almost windy enough to blow me off the trail, right down a five hundred meter cliff to the glacier below. The glacier had big cracks in it, transverse to the direction of its slow flow, like the way a fish filet splits when you bake it.

By now, clouds were pouring over the ridge from the direction of the Schreckhorn, or Fear Mountain. It started spitting rain, and I wondered if I should turn back. But the hostel was only about twenty more minutes away. I pushed on, my lungs laboring in the thin air. It began pouring rain. I hurried faster, glad for the metal cable that was attached to the cliff as a banister, although my hands were stiff and cold. The wind was making my windbreaker ripple and snap like a pennant in a gale, and the non-waterproof material had soaked completely through.

Finally I reached the hostel. Standing in the doorway were two lean mountaineers and a plump, wooly lamb. The place looked comfortable, like a primitive inn. All pale pine on the inside, with curlicued Swissy names carved on the chairs, official carving, not hiker-carving—all of it in the same orderly Gothic black-letter font. But there was no stove and no heat.

I found a party of thirty Lithuanian hikers who were planning to spend the night. They’d brought a lot of food with them, interesting looking stuff like half-peeled cucumbers, cubes of bacon-meat, and bread sticks. The hostel had a kitchen so you could buy food. And they had beds upstairs for rent. I would have liked, really, to spend the night, making that much less time amid my in-laws. But Sylvia was eager for me to come back—I called her on a borrowed cell phone.

I asked the hostess how much longer it would rain. She didn’t know, but she said there was some thunder, so I shouldn’t go out for a while. She added that, on the other hand, I shouldn’t wait much more than an hour, for if it rained longer than that, the rock slides would begin. Ah, yes. Beaned by a chunk of twelve-million-year-old Öhrlikalk rattling down from hundreds of meters above.

I wondered if there might be certain “successful” rocks around that, over the decades, centuries, and millennia, have managed to strike and kill more than one person. I visualized a cheesy SF show about a killer rock with six notches to its credit, lookin’ to make it seven.

I put off deciding what to do next, and ate Berg Rösti mit Spiegeleier, that is, grated potatoes fried brown in ham fat with fried eggs. A bowl of coffee, a bowl of tea, a piece of apple cake, half a chocolate bar. I was wet and cold, and eating a lot of food seemed like a very good idea. I was near a ticking cuckoo clock, a heavy-duty Swiss clock made of carved pine to protect the dangling weights. Periodically I looked outside at the pouring rain.

I talked to a rangy mountaineer, a boy in his twenties, slightly bearded, smoking a cigarette right down to the filter, standing in the doorway staring up at the Wetterhorn. He spoke a thick Swiss German that was a bit hard to understand. I mentioned that I hoped to walk down in the rain. He shrugged that problem off. He was wondering if the two other mountaineers who were on the Wetterhorn would make it back. This guy and his companion had done a day hike partly up the mountain and back down in the fog.

“We got as far as that last piece of snow you can see,” the guy told me.

“You must have started early,” I said.

He gave a thin smile. “Exactly not. And when I was part way up, I had to run back down here for my ice axe.”

He’s so otherworldly and tough that he puts me in mind of a Santa Cruz surfer. Staring and staring at that mountain. Compared to what he’d done, maybe the walk home from here wasn’t so hard.

So finally I decided to go for it. The rain was perhaps letting up a bit, and it was hard to visualize spending the night up there, unable to get warm. I paid my tab and got up my courage to ask the landlady if she had a spare raincoat. This is the kind of thing you can do if you speak the native language—it’s so much easier for me to be in a German-speaking country than an Italian-speaking one.

The lady kindly went and got both her and her son’s raincoats, had me try them on, and told me to take her son’s. He was about seventeen, and he was working in the kitchen. We agreed I’d leave the coat at the Mountain Guide’s Office in town, in fact the coat was embroidered Bergführerverein Grindelwald.

Before leaving, I gave the boy a lovely yellow Monkeybrains T-shirt I’d been wearing—from Rudy Jr.’s company. The boy was happy to score some Silicon Valley garb.

Just as I was about to leave, a beautiful, blonde Lithuanian woman struck up a conversation with me in English. Her face was very wide, giving her an exotic Polar look.

“Our party isn’t only Lithuanians,” she tells me invitingly. “One of us is a Finn.”

She and her friends are excited to meet a Californian. There are some possibilities here. But I bid them farewell, and make it back to the chalet.

Sylvia is glad to see me, and I’m glad to see her.

July 11, 2002. An Alp to Myself.

Yesterday it rained and I went for a medium walk with Sylvia and her stepmother Adèle. We proceed through the woods and across Alpine meadows. A herd of twelve pink pigs attached itself to us and followed us for about half an hour. It was exquisite. Twelve pigs in the rain. A haiku.

Today I got the bus to 1,900 meters, then hiked to the top of Gemschberg, a 2,700 meter peak. Wonderful. I hadn’t planned to go on this mountain, as it has no trail going up it. But I’d had my eye on it because of the peak’s odd shape—it curves to the left like a wave, with a knobby smaller peak down to the left side. Kind of a Chippendale thing.

When I got to the Gemschberg’s base this morning, I saw that the whole climb to its top would be across green, bulging meadows that bent into interesting surfaces. A few cliffs, yeah, but it looked like you could work the meadows to get around the cliffs. And I saw a dodgy field of shale near the top. I decided to go for it.

The climb took about four hours. At the start, I had fun eyeballing the grassy slopes, almost like walls, figuring out my routes. Then the meadows became less steep, and it was more a matter of zigzagging, and watching that my feet didn’t slip. And then I was walking through that final long triangle of loose shale, with insane cliffs on both sides.

My early novel about the transfinite, White Light, was to a large extent based on memories of my long hikes in Zermatt. And today I tasted a bit of that old feeling I’d get in Zermatt when I’d power my way up a series of incredibly steep Alpine meadows, as if moving past the different levels of infinity. Upwards past the transfinite alefs.

At the apex of the Gemschberg I found a cairn of rocks, and a notebook and pen in a piece of plastic pipe with screw-on ends. If you make it to the peak, you get to sign your name. The most recent visitors were from a week earlier—and only four groups in all over the last month! I didn’t see anyone all day on this peak. Lovely to have an Alp to myself. I spent an hour at the top, reveling in my solitude.

I could hear a faint tinkle of cowbells from a kilometer below. And periodic huge, cracking rumbles from the glaciers on the mountains on the other side of the valley—amazing sounds, stretched out by the distance, like monster subway trains beneath the ground. Such power. I saw a vast cascade of ice and snow flowing like a waterfall off the cliff supporting the glaciers.

And in the silences, always the sense of music coming from the mountains.

The Alpine meadows have a sweet, spicy smell. I’ve tried before to pin down which, if any, flower the smell comes from, but it seems to come from all over. Maybe it’s the grass? I’d forgotten this smell, but I recognized it from the other times. It’s been ten years since I was in the Alps.

And the views, ah, the views. The perfect Swissness of it. Views like on chocolate boxes, but out here for real, all around me, huge and fractal.

At one point, a cloud come roiling and seething up the slope towards me atop the Gemschberg, the cloud moving faster than I could run. It was as if the cloud were alive. I was scared of it. And as it passed me, I noticed that the cloud was full of hollow cells with fat corners and thick edges, and that the cells were full of smaller cells. A fractal. Mandelbrot always said that clouds are fractals. And today I finally got the picture.

July 15, 2002. Raucous. Whither, Whence, Why?

Back in Geneva I got online and worked on a raucous, vulgar email message for two or three hours, sending it to my Swarthmore chat group—five or six guys from my class. It felt good to write wild and crazy after being polite for the past few days. Writing as madly as if I were drunk and stoned—I still have that capability:

Amid the drozz

what shards of joy

to hear the hee-haw

of my boys.

It’s a trip listening to my father-in-law talking with his sister. The two eighty-year-olds. Kind of like the conversations in Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold. Both have heavy Hungarian accents, and they mostly talk Hungarian to each other, but around me they tend to talk English. Here’s a pattern conversation, which takes place as I help clear the dishes from the table after dinner.

He: “Rudy will fall and hurt himself in the kitchen, it’s pitch dark.”

She: (Stagily, wonderingly, cranes and stares into the kitchen, which is fully lit by the early summer evening glow.) “What are you talking about? There is lots of light.”

He: (Pauses, stares at the chandelier.) “If it’s not dark, then why did you put on this lamp?”

Sylvia and I drove to Bern, Switzerland, for a day’s outing. We had a great time, just the two of us, free as birds. We saw an interesting mural on the side of a building that had been the studio of the artist Fredrich Traffelet (1897-1954). It was a row of silhouettes, showing scenes of birth, marriage, and a funeral, with lots of people milling around. Here’s the caption and my translation:

Aus Tauf- Hochzeits- und Grabgeläut

Mischt sich der Klang des Lebens.

Whoer Wohin Wozu?

Du fragst vergebens!

Baptisms, weddings, and funerals—

Their sounds make the song of life.

Where from, Where to, What for?

No use to even ask.

July 20, 2002. Leaving Geneva.

Our last day in Geneva. It’s getting stressful. At times I get a feeling like a balloon is expanding inside my chest—oh, that’s my heart about to explode. But so far so good, and, as they say in Hungarian, “Most már guggolva is,” which means, “Now even squatting also.” In the sense of, “Although this is becoming difficult, we are now so close to the goal that I would be able to make it even in the uncomfortable position of squatting.” Just guggolva down, take a dump, and make your little corner of the world büdös mellig, warm and stinky.

I secretly got outdoor opera tickets for Sylvia and me tonight, and I plan to whisk her off for a good time after our final meal with her father.

Most már guggolva is.

And now we’re in Paris, standing on our cheap hotel’s tiny balcony. Nice to be outside. Low gray clouds after a sunny day, surrounded by white, five-story buildings with steep, gray, slate roofs.

We saw the Paris Opera building today, encrusted with ornamentation. The statuary, the images, the mounds of stuff at the bases of the walls. Little faces on everything.

Great to be here, on our own again. Sylvia loves Paris so much.

August 26, 2002. Nick Herbert. Quantum Tantra.

So I got a grant from the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Letters to do research on the Philosophy of Computer Science and on Hieronymus Bosch. They like that I’m publishing a novel about Peter Bruegel.

“Philosophy of computer science” is a topic name which I’m pretty much making up. There isn’t as yet an official discipline of that name. I’ll be organizing a seminar on my ideas for the philosophy department at the University of Leuven.

It’s a very cool gig. I’d thought I’d have to stay in Leuven, but the academy is setting me up with a furnished apartment, and a private office in an old part of Brussels near the art museum. They’ll pay my airfare and give me about $3K a month. I have a subsidiary gig to help a guy with a chaotic electronic music program in Paris as well.

I’ll be in Brussels from September 15 to December 15, three months. Sylvia wants to stay in San Jose and teach for the first half of her fall semester, so we’ll be apart for about five weeks. And then she’ll join me over there.

Ever since I got back from Switzerland, I’ve been busy doing page proofs and a certain amount of rewrites for my various books. But now that’s all cleared away and I can get back to Frek and the Elixir.

It’s hard to get started up again. One’s work in progress can come to feel quite alien in just three weeks. Having to stop and start my writing projects is something I don’t like about teaching. But today, oh joy, is the first day of class at SJSU—and I’m not there. I’m on sabbatical, in Los Gatos Coffee Roasting working on my novel. Yaaar.

I hope I can stay on my novel for at least a couple of weeks now. Impending distractions include a rewrite of my transreal “Jenna and Me” story with Rudy Jr. And, of course, I’m making plans for my seminar on the philosophy of computer science. Also I’m writing a review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science for the American Mathematical Monthly. Just reading Wolfram’s fat book is a job in itself.

We went to visit my freaky old friend Nick Herbert yesterday. Betsy, his wife of thirty-five years, died of cancer a week ago. Nick is quite distraught, and full of talk about his beloved Betsy.

As part of the funeral arrangements, Nick and some of Betsy’s midwife friends took Betsy’s body, in an open coffin that Nick had made, to an overlook in Santa Cruz and propped her up so she could “see” the ocean one last time. And then they attached the lid with pegs—no nails. Later that day they took the coffin to a crematorium in Santa Cruz.

I later said to Sylvia, “I wouldn’t want to be the one to close your coffin.”

And she’s like, “Thanks a lot!”

But I meant it would be too heart-breaking. Poor Nick.

Nick and I also talked about a partly-baked science notion of his that he calls Quantum Tantra. I read about it in his essay, “Holistic Physics, or An Introduction to Quantum Tantra,” which is, in my opinion, a small masterpiece.

Nick points out that the brain is, like any physical object, a quantum system. And quantum systems can change in two types of ways: (I) In discrete, abrupt steps brought on by observations. (II) In a smooth evolution of internal state while unobserved.

Our communicable, standard mental content is all of type-I. This is what language represents. But type-II is closer to how our inner mental experience feels. Consciousness feels smooth and analog, like a vibe, like a wave on the sea. In type-I thinking, you reason. In type-II thinking, you merge.

Today, feeling our empathic oneness, Nick and I merged minds as we spoke.

September 4, 2002. More Yosemite with Rudy. Isabel and Egypt.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Yosemite with Rudy Jr. for three nights. We carried our food in a small, plastic bear-barrel, and a bear showed up and tried to get the food out, batting the barrel around. Later we were at the isolated Lake Mildred and we were talking about oddball theories of cosmology.

And I was like, “Oh, why make it so complicated. It’s just god. It’s all god, all around us.”

Rudy wasn’t particularly into this. I guess he’s still in the mode of looking for the barbed hook inside of any talk about god. But what I said makes sense to me. God is everywhere all the time. The tricky part is to see god not just in the perfection of Yosemite, but in the little perfections of daily life. In the shadow of a bush in your back yard. In the sound of a voice heard in the street. Not necessarily a religious god, maybe just a white light. A light shining through things—like a sun shining through the pieces of stained glass in a window.

Today I went up to San Francisco to spend the day with Isabel. I love my time with my children. We had lunch in the lesser-known Chinatown of Clement Street, went to a big Egyptian art show at the Legion of Honor Museum, and sat on a nearby bluff looking at the San Francisco Bay and talking about the meaning of life.

Amazing, how some of the Egyptian stuff goes back four thousand years ago. As if someone in the year 6000 were to be looking at artifacts from us. I never think about human civilization being here in 6000. To me, 3000 AD is as far as I can stretch.

Thanks to the Bomb, I grew up with an ingrained sensation of living at the end of history. As in, “These are the End Times.” But people also tended to think that way before the Bomb, didn’t they? Maybe it’s one of those persistent illusions that people have. Maybe humanity really will be around in the year 6000, and maybe Earth won’t be a lifeless, fried, polluted cinder.

So welcome to the new Millennium. We’re really here. I knew it for sure today, seeing my fellow twenty-first-century Californians in the gallery, mingling with the stelae and mummies and block sculptures of Ancient Egypt.

The Brussels Illuminations / 2002-2003

Becoming Belgian

September 15, 2002. Going to Brussels.

I’m on sabbatical from teaching at San Jose State this fall and I have a grant from September 15 to December 15 from the Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgie Voor Wetenschappen En Kunsten, that is, the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. I’m going to have an office in their academic center in Brussels, a building called VLAC for short.

My (self-invented) gig is to run a seminar and to talk with the philosophers at the University of Leuwen on the “Philosophy of Computer Science.” I hope to be discussing cellular automata and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. In particular, I plan to work on a paper with a pair of philosophers, Mark van Atten and Leon Horsten. And in the back of my mind I have the hope that I’ll finally stop writing and hacking long enough to give some sustained thought to the nagging issue of what the hell it is that I’ve been pissing away so much of my time on for these last sixteen years in Silicon Valley. What is a computation?

I’d like to write a prolonged philosophical meditation like Infinity and the Mind. This new one will be about the meaning of computation, instead of being about set theory and logic. I’m not entirely sure I can do it. Another part of me wants to use my upcoming free time to finish my novel in progress, Frek and the Elixir.

I’m going to be alone at first. Sylvia plans to work for half a semester, so she won’t come till the end of October, which means I’m looking at six weeks alone. The longest we’ve been apart in thirty-five years.

God knows I’ll need my journal for company over there.

I’ll use the web to find an English-speaking twelve-step group in Brussels to help me stay sober. And to have a group of people to jabber at in a frank and open fashion. People who will understand how hard it still is for me not to sink back into drugs and drink. Especially alone in a foreign city for six weeks. Not that I seriously think I’m in danger of going back out. Fooling around reorganizing the journals yesterday, I read a lot of entries from the early 1990s. Man, that stuff could get bleak. I was so unhappy at times, so desperate.

The two guys in Brussels said they might meet me at the airport. I feel shy about meeting strangers. I jokingly told the kids that when I get to Brussels, I’ll hide in the men’s room till my greeters go away.

Riding across the Atlantic, I’m in the very last row of the plane. Right by the bathrooms. There’s a woman with an aluminum cane leaning on my seat. This is the third time she’s been back here. Audible flush through the partition behind my head. I wish I had a companion so we could make horrified faces at each other. A man rubs his butt across my shoulder—next! The woman with the cane is gone. But here are two fresh butts, not even female, floating inches from my right cheek.

September 16, 2002. I Arrive.

So my two young philosopher collaborators-to-be met me at the Brussels airport—Mark van Atten (29) and Leon Horsten (36). One of them was holding up a copy of my essay collection Seek! so that I would recognize them. They got lost twice driving me into town, but we talked about philosophy of mathematics so the ride was interesting. Their attention wandered when I tried to tell them an SF idea from my Frek novel—the bit about the living sunspots who can fly through empty space in the form of vortex loops. Like giant magnetohydrodynamic smoke rings. Thereby colonizing other stars. You were saying?

My hosting group, VLAC, is located in what was once the royal stables, across a narrow street from the King’s palace and its big tree-filled public park. My retrofitted office is smooth, modern, gray—with a view of a garden and the cobblestone street. The building is very old on the outside, very new on the inside, the way they like to do in Europe.

My two new philosopher friends have a temporary office on the same floor as me so they can easily hang out with me during my visit—although normally they’re in the university town of Leuwen, about an hour’s trip from here. I’ll probably come into my nice office most days.

My apartment is a room in a fairly modern building called Residence La Source, a short tram ride from the office. The room is nice, very quiet, on the third floor, facing a large courtyard (a hidden square, thirty meters across) with a big beech tree near my window. My room has a thin wall to wall carpet, wood furniture, a queen bed, a little kitchen in a separate nook, wardrobes for clothes. Pinkish walls. Not too sterile. It’s large for one person and basically big enough for two, but I’ll clamor for a bigger room when Sylvia comes. For now, the room is great. The phone system is unable to handle my computer modem, so I’ll need to do all my email and web stuff in my office. That’s okay. Makes my life less frantically wired.

French is the common language in Brussels, not Flemish. The neighborhood I’m in has lots of brasseries, tabacs, cafes, shops and a few little theaters. In the streets I see a mix of average looking Europeans and Islamic North Africans—particularly Tunisians—also there’s a lot of people from Zaire, that is, the former Belgian Congo, also people from Rwanda and Burundi, which were once Belgian colonies as well.

An enormous old city gate stands two blocks away. It’s a relic of 1350, and looks like a little castle—the Porte de Hal. There’s a big train station near the gate, I’ll be using that to go to Leuwen. A fancy shopping street up the hill, and a working-class square downhill. Everything so very European.

September 17, 2002. First Day Frenzy.

Today I started by walking down to the square, and I went to the Cafe Union for a coffee. They didn’t have croissants, but directed me to a nice bakery next door to get one of those for takeout. Most of the people in the cafe were drinking beer. I later learned that in Belgium, a “cafe” is a low-end bar, like a dive bar. And a “bar” is a fancy place like in a hotel. Everyone seems casual and messy and slow here. Not Californian at all. And of course some of the Flemish faces are straight from all those Bruegel paintings I studied when I was writing my historical novel, As Above, So Below.

The Cafe Union has a lot of bizarre paper maché masks hanging on the wall, and I recall that Carnival is very big here. The weather is cool with low gray clouds, like in Heidelberg. The air smells a lot like car exhaust.

I got the subway to the Academy, where my office is. It’s three stops from here, and I bought a ten-ride ticket. I wanted to get a month-long “abonnement,” but you have to go to the train station for that and have your picture taken—way too complex for today. I got a bus/streetcar/metro map too and began planning routes, poring over the tiny markings.

I brought my laptop into the office and used the Ethernet cable for some email. Then I got to work making my desktop machine usable. The first thing was to swap out the European keyboard (with its displaced a, m, q, w, and ; keys) for an American keyboard they had kicking around. And then getting the computer to “realize” that the keyboard had changed took awhile. And there was more stuff like that too, but I’m used it. Just like home.

I had lunch with the Secretary of the Academy, a Nicaes “Nick” Schamp, who took me out along with the Academy secretary Inez Dua. They’re both Flemish (recall that I’m at the Flemish Academy for Arts and Sciences), and they live outside of Brussels in Flemish-speaking towns, Ghent and Aalst respectively.

Nick was interested to hear about my version of Bruegel’s life. From researching that book I happen to be unbelievably knowledgeable about things Belgian. Inez is about the age of my daughters. She smiles a lot, toothy, lives with her boyfriend, just got back from a vacation in Rimini. And I’d expected a gray-haired “attack secretary” like we have at San Jose State.

We went to a faculty club—it was like a club in a movie, with oriental carpets, forty foot ceilings, wood-paneled walls. Everyone but me had a tie on, but they let me in anyway.

At the end of the meal, I sprang my request to switch to a larger apartment when Sylvia comes, and my hosts said, “Sure.”

My two philosopher hosts weren’t around today, they were in Leuwen, which is, as I said, where they live and teach, but one or both of them plans to come hang out tomorrow. To get ready for them, I spent a little time writing up a sketch of a plan for a series of lectures that might become seeds for chapters in my intended pop philosophy book about computation.

I’m thinking the first lecture might perhaps be called Cockroach Phenomenology, the title having to do with the relation between the device of the computer and the language we use for it. The “cockroach” is the computer processor chip with all its little legs and its rigorously deterministic insect-like response-loop behaviors.

“Phenomenology” is a ten-dollar philosophy word whose meaning I’m in fact unsure of, but I heard the philosophers use it while we were getting lost coming in from the airport. Already learning! Like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, I’ll try and enlist this fine word to mean something that suits my purposes. These thoughts all very primitive as yet.

Going back on the street after lunch, it was sunny, a nice day. I walked by the palace and down to the main art museum and saw some great Bruegel and Magritte paintings live. I learned I can get a one-year museum membership—I’ll do that so I can comfortably drift in there as often as I feel like.

In my room in the apartment building I lay around, studying maps and guidebooks and the yellow pages for my various missions, such as improving my office computer and finding good places to eat.

I watched some TV too. They showed these really odd-looking cows that were in a contest, cows with big fat butts that were shaved so as not to get a crust of manure on them. That was on the Belgian news show in Flemish. And when the news was over, they rebroadcast the same news show again, so I got to see the cows again. The first time I saw the cows, I didn’t realize they were real, I thought they were joke cows made of plastic or maybe chocolate. Cockroach phenomenology.

For supper I went out of my neighborhood to a ritzier area called the Sablon, which is near the museum and has great antique stores and fancy cafes that aren’t scuzzy dive-bars. I found a bus that goes straight there, it’s about six blocks from where I live. The bus went right by Bruegel’s former house!

September 18, 2002. Mark van Atten.

I went to a different cafe for breakfast, Cafe Louvre, also on the small slightly seedy cobblestone square downhill from my apartment. The square’s named after the church on it, St. Gilles. The Cafe Louvre has one side at an angle to the street, so the floor-plan is a pentagon instead of a rectangle. Ah yes, the cater-corner entrance pattern, as Christopher Alexander might say in The Timeless Way of Building.

It felt mellow, Belgian, the tables lined up like school desks, the waiter missing many teeth. I brought in some raspberries from the outdoor market and a croissant. God, it’s good to have coffee in the morning. It was the first time I’ve really relaxed since I got here. The Belgians don’t seem uptight. They’re in a backwater, unhurried. I was working a little on my latest printout from my novel-in-progress, Frek and the Elixir, thinking of it as Surrealist writing.

I bought a membership at the Royal Whatever art museum today on my way back from my office in the afternoon. The main museum. I ran upstairs to see their four Bruegels, including the cover picture for my novel. I’m talking about The Fall of the Rebel Angels, with a Bosch-like tumble of good angels and rebel angels, arranged into a cone of figures coming out of a big disk of light. The bad angels are turning into demons, into collages of humans and animals. The animals include butterflies and a possum—the picture contains a veritable atlas of fauna, even a lobster, called a kreeft in Flemish. And, as I mentioned before in these journals, there’s a wonderful kwaad kuiken (bad chicken) with a kwaad ei (bad egg) falling out of its butt.

In the Bruegel gallery, I noticed a man who kept reaching out and pointing at details of the pictures with the corner of a pamphlet, bringing the paper within millimeters of scraping the canvas. I wanted so badly to kill him that I couldn’t properly focus on the pictures. How have the paintings survived all these years with idiots like that coming in all day long? But, hey, there’s no need for me to have a peak art-appreciating experience each time I come into this gallery. I’ll be here for weeks, months.

I had my lightweight Contax film camera with me today and I took a few pictures. As I always say, when I’m alone, my camera is my companion. But at times it seems pointless to be taking pictures of architectural details or plants the way I do. For what? To look at the expensive print once, and to put it in my drawer. I’m starting to wonder about digital photography. With a digital camera, you can take lots of pictures and not worry about paying to have them developed, and you can email them or put them online instead of in your drawer.

I checked at a photo shop, but I haven’t yet seen a digital camera I like. They cost twice as much here as in the U.S. Also, I’m hung-up on lens and image quality, and those cheesy little digicam lenses and lo-res chips bother me.

As a half-measure, I can give the photo shop a roll of film and they’ll develop it and put the images on a CD instead of printing them. Costs a bit less.

The main thing that happened today was that I hung out with Mark van Atten at his VLAC office. He’s twenty-nine, it turns out, got his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Mathematics at Utrecht three years ago, had a post-doc there, and now has a post-doc renewable for up to nine years at Leuwen. What a deal. His colleague, Leon Horsten, on the other hand, is teaching five courses.

The very first thing I asked Mark today was, “What is phenomenology?” I’d been wondering about that word. Mark said phenomenology is (a) the process of describing the world directly in terms of what you perceive, as an artist might, and (b) the name for a school of philosophy developed by Husserl which tries to focus on what one notices in one’s mind. Come to think of it, my great-great-great-grandfather Hegel’s big book on philosophy is called The Phenomenology of Mind. Not that I’ve ever gotten very far in that book.

As we talked I started thinking that I might call my first lecture, “Pac-Man Phenomenology.” Never mind the cockroach I was talking about the other day.

So the Pac-Man is the computer processor chip with its rigorously deterministic insect-like response-loop behaviors. And phenomenology refers to what this Pac-Man sees, which is simply bytes. The odd thing is that I can describe so much of my mental world in terms that make sense to the computer.

I dunno. There’s an idea in here someplace.

Mark and I talked a lot about Kurt Gödel. He knew I’d met him, and had questions. He spent a month this summer going through the Gödel archives in Princeton, and had Xeroxed and typed out various of G’s handwritten manuscripts.

Turns out Mark, from Rotterdam, knows zilch about Brussels. Today was like the first time he’s been here. But as he has no formal duties whatsoever at Leuwen, and is single, he’ll be coming in to VLAC three days a week, so I can count on him for some companionship. Raw youth though he is, a year younger than my son.

Coming back to my apartment, I felt tired and lonely. That “What am I doing here?” sensation. Watched a Bill Cosby show on TV, in English with Flemish subtitles. And now I’m writing these notes. This writing is, come to think of it, kind of like taking photos of odd shapes, creating something that will probably end up gathering dust in the drawer. It’s writing simply for the sake of writing. But it makes me feel good, it helps give a shape to the day, it stands in for talking things over with my wife.

I went out for supper. Walking along, seeing things alone, I imagine writing about them in my journal. There’s such a need to communicate what I see. Lacking companionship, I encrypt my feelings in finger twitches to be munged into bytes by the Pac-Man chip in my computer, the bytes to be sent by my Pac-Man as pulses of electromagnetic waves to Sylvia’s computer-chip Pac-Man, which turns it into graphical representations of language, which she eyes into thought. Hi.

In the street I hear a loud click in a metal box on the stone wall that I’m passing, and suddenly all the street lights in sight go on. Very Magritte. Sunlit blue clouds in the night sky.

I went to a mysterious dark pizza place that I saw from the bus yesterday, no lit-up sign, just writing by the door, “Sale Pepe Rosmarino.” Everyone in there but me was Bruxellois, it was completely full, I was satisfied. The warm sound of the human voices lightly vibrating the air of the room, three-dimensional waves lapping all around. They had house-made pasta as well as pizza. I ate the best seafood linguine I’ve had since Ravenna, and it was cheap.

The Sale was decorated in a very original way. Extremely dim flame-shaped light bulbs in chandeliers, clean fresh-painted walls, and on the largest blank wall, in its center, hung a single painting with an ornate frame, only, get this, the painting is the size of a 3 x 5 card. The cooks came out and served the food. One of the cooks looked just like Neal Cassady in the photo we saw in the Los Gatos Art Museum last week, the photo of cheerful Neal kneeling over a friendly blonde woman on a mattress on the floor with his dick in her face to get a blow-job, yes!

My room is getting nice and messy, every surface is covered with stuff I don’t even see after I put it down. Thus decorated it begins to look homey. It says hello to me when I come back.

September 19, 2002. Street Notes.

For this entry, I’ll just type in the raw pocket-square-of-paper notes that I jotted for the day.

Salon D’Art Et Coiffure—name of a Brussels art gallery. Art and Hairdo Salon.

Bosch & Bruegel—> Surrealism—> Comics.

Snack La Casbah.

Brands of detergents: Mr. Propre, Dreft, Omo, Bonux, Dixan, Dash, Persil, Ariel, Coral, Vizil, Match.

As I anxiously flip through guidebooks and newspapers in the afternoon, trying to form coherent plans, I imagine Sylvia’s soothing, sympathetic voice: “Little Roo worrying with his maps.”

Brussels is as grotty as NYC. The fractal unfolding of the city’s details as I continue nosing.

Comics are popular in Belgium because so many Belgians look like comic book characters. Man: round stomach, windblown wide tie, white chin beard.

Name in the phone book: Ruckineer.

Glimpsing a U.S. congressman on TV, I realize I’ve been enjoying a respite from hating those people.

In the computer parts store. They have a high counter and service is slow. It’s like a U.S. car parts store. Everything in Brussels takes longer than I expect it to.

September 20, 2002. Train Nightmares. Seminar.

Today I went to Leuven to set up the course I’m going to teach in the Philosophy department. I woke this morning at 4:30 am (still feeling the jetlag), I thought about going to Leuven to post the announcement for my course and I felt so stoked. I had this idea of preparing some nice demos for the first meeting of the class next week, so I turned on my computer and used my CAPOW program to play with one-dimensional cellular automata for about an hour, saving some good ones as parameter files. Seeing the CAs do their thing, I got that same Christmassy joyous feeling that I used to get from cellular automata when I first saw them around 1986 with Charles Platt’s program.

Being in a foreign country, I consistently make mistakes stemming from an inability to perceive cues (e.g., a TV screen with the name of the train destination above the escalator to the track) that (once you know about them) you would think impossible to miss.

The mechanics of my train trip to Leuven today left me a bit jangled, so I need to write about that part to get it out of my system. Like try and make it a comedy routine. Transmute it into fucking art.

I’ve been wanting a metro/bus pass so I can hop on and off the public transportation, I’ve been using metro or bus something like four times a day and would do it even more if I didn’t have to think about tickets. You can only buy the long-term passes at the train station.

So this morning when I was at the train station to go to Leuven, it seemed like my big chance to get the pass. Little do I realize that getting my pass will be a multi-step process. As follows.

• Take metro to the train station.
• Wait in line fifteen minutes and ask to buy a 3 month metro pass for €96. An €, or euro, by the way, is currently about $1.
• Request denied. I need a photo.
• Buy a banana to break a €20 bill to get change for the photo machine.
• Take photo for €4.
• Wait in line twenty minutes, study a brochure about the passes, notice in the brochure that, for slightly more, they have a fuller pass that includes trains in the Brussels area. I’ll be going to Leuven once a week for three months, maybe a couple more times, maybe fifteen times in all, it would be nice not to have to get that ticket each time. So I ask to buy a three month combined metro/bus/rail pass for €108, mentioning that I plan to travel to Leuven. Am strongly advised not to get this particular pass, as the Brussels metro/bus/rail pass will not in fact work for the train line that goes all the way to Leuven. Am advised that a pass involving Leuven can however be bought in any Flemish region of Belgium, for instance in Leuven itself. Postpone pass purchase.
• Go to ticket machine in station lobby, try to buy single round-trip train ticket to Leuven for €7.80. Denied. Payment only possible with a “Proton” cash card. Train to Leuven about to leave, no time to buy ticket at counter. Plan to buy ticket on board.
• Run to wrong track. Redirected by train worker to a “train to Leuven.”
• Error. I actually get on a train for “Leuven-la-Nve Université.” Forty-five minutes into the ride, the conductor comes to me and reveals that there are two Leuvens with universities: the correct (for me) Leuven with the Katholische Univerisitaat, and the incorrect (for me) Leuven-la-Neuve with the Université Catholique. One is in the Flemish region, the other in the Walloon region. They are quite far apart. Conductor initially friendly, eventually scornful. Get off at next stop.
• Successfully take a connector train to the correct Leuven, completing a second leg of a large equilateral triangle.
• Before starting back to Brussels that afternoon, I get in line in the Leuven station to purchase a combined metro/bus/rail pass that covers the Brussels/Leuven run. Triumphantly hand agent my picture, fill out form, confidently wait while he returns with freshly printed and laminated pass which now contains my picture glued to an official watermarked form with my new minted code number printed on it, the whole package ink-stamped and hermetically sealed into a vibrantly official package. My beautiful new pass is right there in the agent’s hand, only inches away. I ask how much pass will cost.
• Error. Pass costs €304, which is €100 more than it would cost to just get the Brussels pass and buy the train tickets separately. €100 is a lot of money to throw away. But I hesitate to reject the newly assembled pass and to suffer the scorn of the superficially friendly agent. And VLAC has in fact promised to reimburse all my expenses for travel within Flanders. And I don’t really want to go back and try to buy the pass in Brussels again.
• So I purchase the damn pass in Leuven.

I was more bugged than I wanted to be about that €100 overage. For about an hour I was obsessed with having fucked up. But, hey, once my VLAC sponsors repay me the money that I paid the train people, it comes down to the Flemish government taking some money out of one of its bagpipe sacks and stuffing it into a different one. So relax, already, Rudy. Think about the donut, not the hole in the middle, you swinker.

And now I’ve got the precious pass laid out next to the computer, and man does it looks good. My picture. Short gray hair, cue-ball head cocked to one side, mouth half-open—like a dog hearing something.

Train travel perfectly instantiates so many of my neuroses that it’s almost parodistic.

To begin with, the old-style dangerous metal wheels and gears of the train itself are a nice match for the giant analog clocks they always have in train stations. The Industrial Age! The big clock’s minute hand moves forward in abrupt ticks. The train leaves at 9:48. The clock says 9:46. Tick. 9:47! I’ll be horrors late!

Running up the stairs, down the long platforms, my armpits abruptly beginning to swink (“swink” being an archaic word that means “stream with sweat from exertion and worry”), dreading the very real possibility of getting on the wrong train—it’s so archetypal, so much like the fabric of a dream. I do in fact dream about botched train trips fairly often. Over the years I’ve probably dreamed about five or ten times as many train trips as I’ve actually done.

Once you’re on the European train, the other perfect touch is that you meet a menacing authority figure—the smiling conductor whose smile is only skin deep, the father who doesn’t really like you, and you can’t communicate with him, thanks to the language barrier! You’re trying to explain yourself to your father, but a chill wind tears your words away. Your lips move but your voice is inaudible, at the very most you emit a gibbering squeak. I think of Franz Kafka’s Letter to My Father, a book so over-the-top that it’s weirdly funny.

The point of the trip to Leuven was to visit Leon Horsten at his office, and to give him an announcement/ad that I made up for my course. Leon’s in the Institute for Philosophies, a nice nineteenth-century European building, red brick. Oddly enough, they have so many English-speaking students that the Philosophy courses are all conducted in English.

My course will meet on Wednesday afternoons from two to four, with about ten meetings, held in a seminar room on the ground floor with twelve-foot tall sash windows opening onto their pleasant garden. The philosophy department will sponsor this class as their graduate course on Philosophy of Science.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, I’m really excited. A philosopher at last! Here’s the titles of the topics that I put on my ad. I’ve been working on the syllabus for the last three or four days:

1. The Live Typewriter

2. The Phenomenology of Pac-Man

3. Unknowing Yourself

4. Seek the Gnarl

5. I Seem to Be a Fluttering Leaf

6. Wetware Hacking

7. The Mind’s Hall of Mirrors

8. The Anthill Awakes

When Leon, Mark and I went over to one of the Philosophy buildings to give a copy of my announcement to a guy who’s the advisor for the English-speaking Philosophy majors, we had to cool our heels in this typical academia lobby, beat old couches, endless flyers tacked to corkboards, a set of wooden cubbyholes for mailboxes. Leon and I got into this incredibly erudite discussion about infinity, complete with known-by-heart quotes from primary sources. It was wonderful, like manna. It’s been years, maybe since Heidelberg 20 years ago, that I had the chance to share intelligent conversation about these matters that lie so close to my heart.

Tonight I went down to the Union Brasserie in the St. Gilles square near my apartment, the place full of young people, everyone clean, happy, lively—eating cheap, nice food. Things are getting good.

September 21, 2002. Lonely Day.

This morning I went to a meeting of the Belgian Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Science. What a concept. Twenty or so pleasant academic types, we heard a talk proposing that “Quine’s New Foundations present a credible challenge to the de facto hegemony of Zermelo-Frankel set theory.” Rrright.

I’d hoped to make new friends, but ended up splitting off with Mark van Atten. The Belgian logicians were all in knots talking, and it seemed natural for Mark and I to drift away. We walked through the Congolese section of Brussels nearby, which was kind of interesting. Incredible fabrics for sale.

I talked a lot to Mark, I’m so full of talk on these solitary days. He said he had a bad relationship with his father. He has a yearning puppy quality, big liquid eyes and a huge Netherlandish nose. He collects comics, especially Tintin. Says even though he grew up in Rotterdam, he’s never gotten high. And I’d thought by now all the Dutch would be skeevy stoners.

I went into the office to check email and maybe to write some Frek, but the enormous swinging palace gate of steel bars appeared to be chained closed. I had to scale a low wall to get into the compound, then used my keys to get into my building and into my office. There was someone else in the building, a woman scholar editing a book on linguistics, she said the gate only looks looked, the Belgians just wrap the chain around it. She was a thin little old Swedish woman named Karin, very nice, she seemed even lonelier than me, but I didn’t talk to her very long. It was depressing to be in the dead building. I did my email, went out and walked around Brussels.

It was raining and all of a sudden I hit a solid wall of loneliness. My globe-trotting San Jose State professor colleague Jon Pearce had warned me about this. With so many of my various diddly errands out of the way, I was confronted with the vacuum left by the absence of Sylvia. Although I’d gone all week without smoking (inspired by my Los Gatos neighbor’s quadruple coronary bypass this week), I now bought some cigarettes and had a few. But, that wasn’t in fact much help, a cigarette’s not your homeland, not your wife!

Gloomily I walked through the lovely Grand Place or Grote Markt square, the scenic heart of Brussels, ringed by fabulous old buildings. I saw funny Belgian brass bands playing and marching around, with the musicians wearing masks for the Festival of the famous Manikin Piss statue of a little boy peeing. In my dark mood, the square seemed too crowded, complete with unsmiling stone-faced Chinese-speaking tourists.

Still looking for a decent digital camera at a good price, I wandered into some hideous soulless brutal glass-and-stone monolith monoculture neighborhoods—where every trace of quaintness had been stomped by developers. There’s pockets of the monoculture all around Brussels, like dogshit on the sidewalk, it’ll take a bit of practice to learn how to avoid them.

I got an underground tram back to St. Gilles square, and I was happy to be back in my familiar, grotty neighborhood. I darted into “my” supermarket and bought some supplies, then hit the English-language twelve-step recovery meeting that I’ve found. They meet in the same place twice a day, it’s like having a favorite bar you can drop into for a quick fix.

I was glad for the chance to chat a bit with some fellow nuts. In the main part of the meeting a French guy told at length the story of his life—but speaking English. Afterwards I was smoking a cigarette with some young American guy who’s been sober a month, and he made fun of the French speaker, calling him La vache qui rit. Unfair, but it felt comfortable to be around my fellow humans and their gossip.

Back in my room, Sylvia phoned, and we talked for a long time and things looked good again. One week down, five to go.

Another great meal at Sale Pepe Rosmarino later on, swordfish with such a nice lemon and olive oil on it that I wanted to tip up the plate and drink the juice.

September 22, 2002. No-Car Day. I Feel Like Myself.

I woke up today feeling really like myself for the first time in a week. The jet lag’s finally over. I lay in bed for awhile, reading this great biography of my musician-hero Frank Zappa.

Today is a Sunday, and it turned out to be the one day in the entire year that cars aren’t allowed in downtown Brussels. Kind of like an Earth Day. It was wonderful. Most days the air is dreadful; you’re in very real danger of getting run over; and there’s an incessant roar.

I walked to the office and back through the nice old streets of the Marolles and the Sablon, no monoculture in sight. Everybody was in a happy holiday mood—the streets belonged to people. Walkers and bikers.

I went by Bruegel’s house. Seeing it brought tears to my eyes, nostalgia for the years I “spent” living in that house with Bruegel’s wife Mayken, shaking the flower petals down on her in the back yard the day before our wedding, painting in the attic, having my friends Williblad and Niay come to live in the back yard, the birth of my sons Jan and Peter, my death…

Funny how mixed up my characters get with my own memories. I stopped in at Bruegel’s church too, a service was in progress, it felt great. The actual building where Bruegel was married and buried.

Later I spent some time in a surrealist-looking cafe, drinking Mid-Eastern mint tea, fresh mint leaves in a silver pot, with a long-necked silver dispenser to shake in the extract of some flower, maybe almond blossoms. While I sat there, I tried to study people’s clothes and body language as closely as Sylvia would do. Figuring out where people were at.

Later it started raining really hard, sending people scattering like leaves, everyone getting under the niches of the ornate architecture, like the chickadees nesting under the eaves of our porch. I ran into the main art museum and spent some time looking at the Magrittes. He had this one great phase called his vache period (meaning “cow” or “silly”). At this point, perhaps to annoy the art connoisseurs who were becoming interested in his more familiar kind of work, Magritte painted funny things in cheerful pastels, painting very loosely, quite differently from his standard grayish, tight, classical style. The vache pictures didn’t sell at all well, Magritte was already trapped in his reputation.

After the rain came the sun, gilding the lovely old buildings. Usually when I’m a place this great, I know that I have to leave in like two or three days. It’s wonderful that I’ll get to be here for so long.

When nobody else is with me—particularly not Sylvia—I sometimes grunt softly when I eat something good. Pigging out. I bought some Elephant chocolate in the supermarket today, just an ordinary-looking big bar and it’s gruntin’ good. Compared to this stuff, what they sell us in the U.S. isn’t chocolate at all.

The Philosophy of Computer Science

September 25, 2002. My First Class.

It’s great to be here. What was I kvetching about before? I’ve been talking to Leon and Mark, trying to pin down a topic that we can do a joint paper about. They’re actually interested in working with the ideas that I suggest, which is kind of staggering. And they’re coming up with good insights. It’s great.

The idea we presently have is to rehash the old thing about the meaning of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem for the question of whether a machine can ever emulate the human mind. I do see a fresh way to do this, if we use some new angles relating to Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. There is, however a sense on my part that I’ve done Gödel’s theorem—been there, done that, got over it. There’s been probably a thousand “Minds and Machines” papers written by philosophers. Better to forget about that stuff and talk about Wolfram.

When I talk to academic philosophers, they often ask me what it was like to meet Gödel. I think they hope I might have gotten some new insight in person from the great man. Like maybe I have some secret teaching to report.

“He took off his clothes and stood on his head and wrote GOD = DOG on the blackboard with the chalk held in his toes. I was surprised.”

The other day I was self-aggrandizingly thinking of Mark as Boswell, and me as Sam’l Johnson. Like I’m the irascible elder with a hoard of talk to share with the eager young man. Actually I’m not always sure how Mark feels about me. Sometimes I catch expressions on his face that seem to express feelings other than unconditional approval.

It’s like an arranged marriage, this linkage that Mark, Leon and I have jointly consigned ourselves to—by getting our grant. Part of the grant is that the boys get paid to hang out with me.

The other day I had lunch with Mark at that same fancy faculty club near VLAC. We wore neckties and after lunch we sat in armchairs in the lounge, talking about Gödel’s and Brouwer’s philosophies of mathematics, and the waiter brought us coffee and chocolate. Yeah, baby.

Today, I successfully took the train to the correct Leuven, and I had the first meeting of my class. About thirty-five people showed up, which was nice. Mark and Leon had predicted about ten.

I called my first lecture “Prolegomena,” which is a classic philosopher’s word meaning something like “Preliminary Introduction with Wild Promises.” And I started from a diagram I’d designed to depict the whole field of philosophy, working in all these great words like ontology, epistemology, hermeneutics, phenomenology. Never forget that Ph.D. means “piled high and deep.” As the students were philosophy majors, I was able to get useful input from them as to whether what I was saying was coherent. And Mark was there too. Everyone was polite.

I plan to write up and hand out my lectures as I go along, and then I’ll have a running start on my projected tome about the meaning of computation. Today’s working title is Philosophy and Computers, a simple pattern like Infinity and the Mind, or Geometry and Reality.

Yesterday, just for the company, I went out for dinner with Kirsten Aijmer. She’s the scholar lady who’s at VLAC in the office next to mine. She’s Swedish, married forever like me, has four children. She looks a little like my mother looked when she was old. Spunky, dry, independent. She showed me a very long paper that she’d co-authored about the use of the word “well” in the English, Flemish, and Swedish languages. She calls a word like “well” a particle. She’s an expert on particles, and she wrote a book about them, but she in fact forgot to mention “well” in the book—thus the paper. At dinner I asked if she, like, knows about the California use of the particle “like,” and she was interested in that.

Another day I had a really great supper at an obscure Moroccan restaurant called Beni Znassen. No real sign on the place, just a string of red Xmas lights. I had a big pot of vegetables in thick spicy chicken broth just like one of Sylvia’s stews, plus a plate of couscous and a plate of scampi in a reddish sauce thick with North African powders. It took, literally, two minutes for them to bring out the food after I ordered it. The waiter looked like my college friend Don Marritz, a Moroccan Don with that same round, evenly whiskered chin. They were watching a soccer game on TV. I like that name Beni Znassen. I might use that odd second word in Frek. Some kind of creature can be a znassen.

September 27, 2002. Beni Znassen. Dogshit in Street.

It’s a rainy Friday. I bought an umbrella, and it’s vigorously trying to escape my possession, sneaking off here and there. It’s still in my possession after forty-eight hours, something of a miracle, like managing to keep control of a winged and unleashed dog. But I can see the umbrella across the room in a stand right now, whew. Of course I may well walk off without remembering to take it.

I went back to Beni Znassen for dinner last night, they had Islamic MTV on. It gives me such a frisson of alienation to see Arabic writing on the screen. It’s like finding myself inside a potentially hostile UFO. The owner is named Mustapha—he has white hair and a white goatee, tall, alert, aging, looks a little like a mean biker. He watches his round-chinned bestubbled waiter like a hawk. Maybe the waiter is Mustapha’s son.

Mustapha wanted to give me a free tumbler of some oily clear alcohol after dinner this time, as I’m becoming a regular. After teaching so long at San Jose State, just about any ethnic minority imaginable feels familiar to me. I only hope that Bush doesn’t generate too much anti-American sentiment while I’m living in this neighborhood.

Stepped in dogshit in the street with my waffle-sole Nike Air shoes last night, and how the hell do you clean that off in an apartment? A session with the toilet water, lots of grimacing, many Kleenexes, results imperfect, so this morning I took the subway a stop further so I could walk half a kilometer through a long city park, grinding my heel into every soft patch of sand. Ick.

September 28, 2002. Zappa. Mechelen. No Laptops.

I bought a portable CD player and a couple of speakers yesterday afternoon, got the whole package for about €100, from a Maghrebien, or North African. The guy only had about twenty objects in his store. I really wanted to hear that warm friendly mellifluous Zappa voice, rather than going home to an evening all alone, and with no plans for dinner out.

I’d already bought two Zappa CDs in Leuven the other day, planning to get a player. Dear Frank. It’s so good to hear him. The speakers are wonderful. I wonder if my neighbors are going to mind the noise. In my isolation, it’s hard to judge how loud I’m playing it.

This morning I did yoga for a half hour to Zappa, and it was great, so much better than hearing the typical dippy yipping & drum machine of yoga studio CDs. I really worked out on “Disco Boy.” I can’t see the point of buying CDs by anyone but Zappa.

I’ve been taking dozens of pictures of people in the street. I’m too shy to stick my camera into their faces of course, but I’m using a sneaky technique of just holding the little Contax in my hand down by my side, with its flash off for god’s sake, and the distance set to about nine feet, and squeezing the shutter off every so often with my pinky. Rudy Jr. showed me the trick of holding the camera upside down, which makes it look even less like you’re taking pictures.

Since I’m using film instead of digital, I don’t yet know if this is working. Maybe I’m just snagging pictures of the sky, the cobblestones, or my leg. But as I think I mentioned, it’s cheap to have a roll converted into CD files instead of into prints, so I’m being casual about shooting. I should have about a hundred pictures by the middle of next week, I’ll pick out the good ones and post them on Rudy’s Jr.’s Monkeyview photo site. Feeling my way towards digital photography.

Good sign I saw on a store in my home neighborhood of St. Gilles: Produkten voor Huid & Haar. As in, “I haven’t seen huid nor haar of so-and-so this week.” Another Flemish word that pleases me is, Vrouwen, for, of course, women.

I have a new favorite brasserie in St. Gilles, a vaguely Art Deco place, and today I tried to write on my laptop in there. It took me a while to get my nerve up to lay the machine on my table. I haven’t seen a single person using a laptop anywhere in Europe except in an office.

The two people sitting next to me got up and moved. But then it got more crowded and people had to sit by me and they were really talkative. Back in California there’s this understanding that no matter how physically close you are to someone, you look at them like they’re not a human being, as if they’re a fly, or a stain on the wall, or a messy pile of newspaper. But in this cafe the people are all catching my eye and making faces and saying things to me.

I talked to an old Belgian woman for quite some time, a real classic bourgeoise type, I think she was lonely, she was full of words, though it was hard to follow, as: (a) there was loud music, and (b) she talked bad English, and (c) she sat on the side with my bad ear. Still it was nice to see her lips moving and her face pointed at mine.

And then there was a couple who talked French to me, a cute red-haired tough-cookie hairsprayed hipster type and her black partner, they’d been painting her apartment, and they had paint all over themselves. That California-blonde frosting on her hair was house paint. They drank coffee—in this particular brasserie, coffee’s as popular as beer. The guy talked about building meter-long models of boats. I couldn’t catch if he made money doing that or it was his hobby. Whatever. I was happy to be sociable.

So in any case, it seems hopeless to try and write on the laptop in cafes/brasseries like I’d imagined myself doing. Using a laptop in public here is such a peculiar thing to do that it’s like you’re squirting a jet of gasoline from Vaselined lips and lighting the plume in the air. Pass the hat for twenty-centime pieces. Or, no, it’s worse, it’s like you’re taking out a bible and a prayer stand and kneeling down and making a public scene of your monomaniacal devotion.

“Why are you holding that flaming cross?”

I’ll just write with a pen in public, and save the pounding for the privacy of my pad.

October 1, 2002. Woods. Yoga.

I took the tram down to this very large wooded park, “Forêt des Soignes,” at the south edge of Brussels, near “Vivier d’Oie,” meaning “Pond of the Goose.”

The park is filled with beech trees like you see in Magritte pictures. The leaves falling. I get to missing green plants and fresh air in the city.

My fantasy address for myself, in my role as golden goose and king of the geese: Oie D’or, Chez Roi des Oies, Vivier d’Oie, Bruxelles.

I’m having second thoughts about co-writing any kind of paper about “Minds and Machines.” Mark suggested I look at this long philosophy paper by some guy and the paper begins, “I must start with an apologia.”

Ugh!

Another factor here is that I have a firm conviction that any philosophy paper I co-author will be rejected. The puny-termite academic editors will seize their chance to chastise a vulgar popular writer like me. The process brings back the desperate feelings of my early days in academia, slaving over math papers for tiny journals that would reject them. Or if they’d appear, nobody would read them.

Maybe I should be agreeable but stall until I’m gone from here. Talking about “Minds and Machines” with Mark and Leon is indeed useful to me, and their questions and analysis is clearing up many of the ideas that I want to discuss in my tome. But making it a paper for a phil journal? I don’t see that happening. And I’m not sure the boys do either, nor do I think they care. Let slack reign supreme.

I went to a yoga class in French in a 19th century building in the Sablon yesterday, second floor, it was interesting, but not mellow, and I don’t think I’ll go again. I understood about ten percent of what the irascible teacher said. He had some odd opinions, like that you should never sit cross-legged, and when he saw me sitting lotus style, he went into a five minute diatribe about it.

From what I could catch, he believes in Egyptian Yoga, whatever the fuck that is. Much of the class was devoted to standing erect with our feet parallel. Welcome to Fort Dix! Well, I did think a lot about my breathing. And the old building was incredible. And it was cool to worm so deeply into a local scene.

Maybe I’ll take Sylvia there, and I can whisper “What’d he say?” over and over.

My favorite French word of the day: Tuyauterie. The name of a store that sells pipes, like a plumber uses. Tubes = tuyeaux. Love all those vowels.

October 3, 2002. Geek Philosophy. Electronic Music.

Gosh, time’s speeding up. As more and more little tasks get taped into subroutines I begin to fall back into sleepwalking through my days. What had seemed an infinite expanse of time is melting.

This week I gave my second lecture at Leuven. I sat in the Leuven market square afterwards with Mark van Atten, really digging the Europeanness of it all: the stone gingerbread of the city hall, the milling students having some kind of fraternity rally—they were drinking beer, wearing diagonal sash ribbons, playing brass band instruments.

Just for fun I’m gonna spend next Wednesday night at a hotel on the market square called, yes, De Professor, “de” just being “the.” Flemish sometimes seems like an English dialect. When I overhear it, so many of the phonemes are the same that I’ll think the people are talking English.

I might give my book about philosophy and computation the title, Early Geek Philosophy. It’s a pun that’s been kicking around in my mind for years. And it’s a way of not having the so-boring word “computer” in the title. I think you need the “early” or the joke doesn’t quite work.

Sylvia mailed me a book that I’d ordered online before leaving: Philosophy and Computer Science by Timothy Colburn. It’s pretty good—considering that, being a pre-Ruckratic geek philosopher, Colburn focuses rather too exclusively on the topic of “Minds and Machines.”

Lecturing to the philosophy students in Leuven this week I tried to tell them that an Intel microprocessor chip has googol-squared possible states, and I did a little computation on the blackboard to prove this. As I juggled the math symbols, the students’ faces turned sad and baffled, like kids hearing there isn’t going to be any Christmas after all, or as if I’d dropped my pants. Horrified by the sight of the mathematician’s gnarly rig. Panic and angst. But, gee(k), I kind of hate to leave out the really good stuff.

I could lard my tome with notes and addenda like it’s a total parody of a Greek philosophy tome. An off-kilter humor book to leave on the top of your toilet tank, the thin pages slowly swelling with moisture, foxing in the waning winter light. Early Geek Philosophy.

I still have these big pangs of loneliness when I hit the blank spaces in the day, like coming back to my empty room. “Hello, walls.”

“Helloooo, helloooo.”

These days I’m digging Zappa’s low-priced sampler disk, Son of Cheap Thrills, my fourth Z-man CD. It has some songs I never heard before. “Whets New in Baltimore” has this great soaring, lush, romantic guitar solo. Doing yoga to Frank is a high point of each morning.

I just finished reading a biography of Zappa that I picked up here. Frank really let the network news get to him in his later years, obsessing over the evils of Reagan-Bush and the televangelists. He was watching C-SPAN whenever he wasn’t working, poor guy.

I always try to fight the trap of having my mind run by the news, of being eternally in reaction to what the Pig is putting out—if I’m into the news, the Man owns my mind as surely as if I were agreeing with him. Living alone in Belgium is a real vacation from the U.S. media bullshit. Gives me lots of extra mind space.

An American expat, Gerard Pape, came to my apartment the other day, along with his student Sinan Bokevoy. These guys are from Paris, they’re at the CCMIX center (Centre Composition Moderne Iannis Xenakis). They write, study, and perform electronic music relating to the pioneering composer Iannis Xenakis. They’d like to develop some electronic music relating to mathematical arcana such as chaotic attractors and cellular automata.

The idea is that I’ll help them give a concert in December. I’ll present some live video, generating it with my own gnarly graphics programs, running them on my laptop. I was relieved to find our piece will only be one among a number of others, like fifteen minutes. The concert will be free, and for maybe fifty people—not much more intimidating than a seminar talk.

I suggested a few attractively chaotic math equations that they might plug into the music-generating software that they have. But I am politely but firmly refusing to do any programming on this front. And I’m not going to create a superduper software video-jockey that performs my part of the show automatically. I’ll be a real-time video jockey—creating cellular-automata and artificial-life video on the fly.

I also agreed to give a couple of lectures to some students at the CCMIX center after Sylvia gets here, and that way we two will get some free trips to Paris, and I’ll get paid some money as well.

I was happy to have the two guys with me in my hermit’s cave. Gerard is a very cultured and pleasant guy. I asked him what’s new in Paris, and they’re still talking about the “Paris Plage” they set up this summer, with sand and palm trees by the Seine to make it like California. The thirty-year-old Sinan used to make good money writing jingles for TV ads in Turkey before catching the geek virus and coming to Paris to study computer music.

October 4, 2002. Bruegel in the Rain.

I enjoy going out and doing little errands here. Sinking root-hairs into the neighborhood, seeing the disparate mental photos slowly merge into a whole. The corners I was scared of the first day now seem safe and familiar.

Last night I went out to look for a meal and it was just starting to rain, but I figured it would be okay as I have my new light-blue raincoat. I pushed on to the Marolles which is only ten minutes from my apartment, it’s Bruegel’s raffish old neighborhood. The rain started pouring. My pants were getting wet, and water was coming down my neck to the collar of my shirt.

I cut in through the arcades in these 1910 housing projects, very elegant buildings actually, two-tone brick, some of them are being retrofitted, thin buildings with wide steps under archways, me in and out of the rain and the scaffoldings—the rain really pouring, one or two other people around, all of us running in and out of the buildings’ arches and terraces, then me alone in the night, on the wet cobblestones, and I felt Bruegel’s ghost come up and walk along beside me, no big deal. He’s read my novel about him. He likes it.

What a trip to be living here just now.

Have I mentioned magpies? They’re about the size of crows, mostly black, but with a snow-white vest. I found a magpie feather. The magpies might be even bigger than crows. And more cautious. It’s hard to get close to them.

I’m interested in magpies because Bruegel’s last painting was The Magpie on the Gallows. He left the painting to his wife Mayken in his will. The painting shows a pair of magpies, in fact I’m always seeing them in pairs here too, the man and wife.

In the painting, the gallows that the one magpie perches on is drawn in a skewed perspective, like an optical illusion. I think Bruegel is saying that execution is part of a verkehrte Welt, a crooked world.” The painting also shows a man taking a shit, not a big surprise in a Bruegel painting. “I shit on death.”

Peter Bruegel the Elder. Flemish for “the Elder” is “de Oude.”

I’m Rudy de Oude.

October 8, 2002. Recovery. Mulholland. Art Nouveau.

A few nights ago, Saturday, I spoke at the English-language recovery group for half an hour, sharing my story. It was their big evening meeting. It was nice to hear my own summary of how the disease took me down, and about how recovery helped me get better. I was nervous, as I was telling all this to twenty people I hardly know, but I gave a good performance, seasoned old prof that I am. Several of them remarked upon how serene I sounded. People picked up on two things that I said.

The first was my notion that you can think of god as a radio program that’s always in the air. All you need is to turn on your mental radio and you hear the divine voice. Analogous to the way that, in any random empty room, if you turn on a real radio, you hear voices. God is everywhere, instantly accessible if you make an effort.

The second was my favorite slogan: “I didn’t quit, I surrendered.” By this, I mean that my efforts to quit booze and pot never worked. I had to surrender and give up and accept being in recovery—even though I thought that the recovery people weren’t like me, and that I’d hate the meetings, and that I was too shy to get a sponsor, and that I didn’t want to pray for help. I surrendered and did those things, and I got better. Who knows why, but it worked.

I’m fortunate to be sober at last. What a drag this visit would be if I were wasted every day.

I went to see Mulholland Drive at a tiny unheated hole-in-the wall theater that was fittingly called the Styx. At the last minute, two young Goth kids joined the audience, otherwise I would have been the only one there, in a screening room so small it felt like I was watching a large-screen TV in somebody’s basement.

Seeing the film, I was glad to see the California landscape, and it made me proud of my home, and of my ability to have taken root there. I’d seen Mulholland Drive before, today I went to see it just to hear California English, to see California scenery, and to grok that one great woman-to-woman love scene in the film.

“I’m in love with you,” breathes blonde Betty/Diane to brunette Rita/Camilla. Yum.

Also I had some slight hope of figuring out the film’s tangled story better than before. At the end of the movie, when the screen suddenly goes black, the two little Goths were sitting behind me, trying to understand what they’d seen, and I got up and walked out past them, slow and sinister, and as I passed them, I repeated the last word of the film, just that one word.

“Silenzio.”

I’m starting to have been here long enough that I’ve stopped having that cringing I’m-a-tourist feeling, and I feel free to be weird. I live here, too!

They don’t seem to plan to heat my office at VLAC—at least not “heat” in any sense of the word that’s stronger than “avoiding a decline to absolute zero.” Keep in mind that this stone building used to be the Palace stables. I bought myself an electric heater—I got it at the Palais d’Electricité I’d been curious about. It’s a run-down store with an interior oddly about a fifth the seeming size of the building. A thick shell.

A few days ago I took a walking tour of some Art Nouveau neighborhoods of Brussels. The best part of the tour was getting to talk to two pretty women who were on the tour also. Pretty by my current standards, in any case, which are getting broader every day. How I miss the civilizing influence of the fair sex!

Talking to those two women, one Chinese, and one German, I got the feeling that there’s a very large supply of women out there, and that a man can always find women. I told them that I’m writing a book about computer science and philosophy, which is certainly not the strongest opening line I could come up with, but even Early Geek Philosophy seemed to impress them. Better than me being a guy watching sports and the financial reports on TV.

The German woman asked “Have you found the secret of existence?”

Not for lack of trying! My daughter Isabel and I were talking about that stuff last month, enjoying the old “ontological wonder sickness” of asking why anything exists at all. I’d told Isabel that when I was younger I used to think I would find out the secret of life, but now I’ve come to believe that I’ll never know. I just won’t.

Anyway it was certainly a boost of morale to manage to talk to two women, however briefly. How to meet women? Art.

But I haven’t been alone long enough to want to follow through. After the tour, I had an early supper alone at an Art Deco cafe, sitting by the magazine rack with the late sun slanting in. I took some good photos, I think, really close, of people coming over to get magazines. I like the Flemish faces, generous with the lip, and the noses here, don’t ask. Full sail!

Last night I watched Flemish TV for two hours. I liked the ads the best. It’s fine not to understand the details. Some nights I might wake up and work on my writing from three to five am. Other days I might sleep till nine-thirty, which is late for me.

This morning I wrote from about 6 am to 10, finishing a new chapter of Listening To The Machine (the work formerly known as Early Geek Philosophy), then shopped for two hours, talking French all over the place. The secret is to totally overdo the pronunciation, rolling the R’s, rehearsing the words in one’s mind before saying them, anything to avoid the cowardly point-and-grunt.

Although I’m in fact working a lot on Frek and on the Long Overdue Computer Tome, my life here feels unstressful and unrushed, as everything I do is totally on my own personal schedule. Later today I found a great green grass square called Liberté with a cafe where I had some tea, feeling so much a part of things, satisfied with the chapter I’d written. Walking a cobblestone street nearby, I had a pang of not wanting this stay to end.

October 9, 2002. At Hotel De Professor in Leuven.

Sylvia sent me a cute email about imagining me at Hotel De Professor: “I guess you’re snoozing at De Professor right now. I can just visualize all the professors sleeping in their little single beds, flat on their backs, long white beards tidily spread on top of their fluffy down duvets, dreaming of equations and such. Zzzzz. Wouldn’t I just love to come bouncing in!”

This morning, looking down from the Hotel De Professor window at the people on the cobblestone square—it was like looking at Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent painting, the same buildings, the same people, the same high viewpoint, and the square colored rectangles of the flags. So great.

Walking around town, I passed a grandmother with a toddler. They were standing on a tiny bridge over the tiny River Dilje, and the grandmother was quacking in Flemish to attract ducks.

Later Mark van Atten and I went to the Erasmus brasserie in Leuven. It’s named after the famous Erasmus who taught theology at Leuven back in Bruegel’s day. We ordered pannenkoeken, or however they spell it, but don’t call ’em crepes in Flanders! Mark and I sat side by side so we could look at the painting of Erasmus on the wall, and we were so happy and almost giggly, it was fun.

October 10, 2002. Slicing Wolfram.

Today it suddenly struck me that I’ve committed myself to a lot of things involving Stephen Wolfram’s thousand-page tome, A New Kind of Science, known as NKS for short:

• Review NKS for the American Mathematical Monthly.
• Discuss NKS in my philosophy seminar here.
• Base a Software Project course on NKS at San Jose State next spring.
• Talk about NKS to the Leuven Computer Science Department next week.
• Speak on NKS at the Belgian Logic Society next month.

Panic! Although I’ve been behaving like I’ve read and mastered A New Kind of Science, I’ve in fact only rapidly skimmed parts of it and duh, reading the fucking thing is one of the main projects I said I’d do here. Snap to, Ru!

So I started reading the book at last, and there’s a lot of good stuff, a lot that I didn’t know was in there. I’m getting the picture. It’s sinking in. I can see how to get some good little programming projects out of the book too. I can have my class at SJSU next spring write some easy little Java programs and we can put them on a website about the book. That’ll be the class project, cool.

Wolfram’s tone does definitely take some getting used to. It could be that’s what makes it a little hard to maintain a prolonged focus on the book. Sample from page two: “I have come to view [my early work] as one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science.” Okay, Stephen.

Reading onward, I occasionally get the vibe of somebody who’s been staring too long at the same porno magazine, trying to whip himself up into fresh transports of excitement over the same old blurred photo of the same woman.

“I must say, she strikes a very provocative pose, hmmm.”

In this case, the “same old blurred photo” is a one-dimensional cellular automaton known as Rule 30. The algorithm is very simple, but it spews out a wondrously chaotic pattern of foam.

The physical weight of the NKS book is kind of an imposition. It wears out my wrists and it’s a literal drag to take anywhere. So I got out the big carving knife that I have in the apartment—the knife has those tiny nicks in the blade like you see on the knives in Bosch paintings—and I figure I’ll cut the book into reasonably-sized slices. I’ll do this over a period of weeks, cutting off one slice at a time as needed.

Yesterday I started the slicing. I cut loose an initial chunk to read in bed. And, doing this, I noticed that the copy is in fact inscribed to me by Wolfram himself, and I felt a little abashed. Am I attacking the man’s book with a knife because I’m jealous of him? I mean how literal is that?

But, seriously, I might be Wolfram’s biggest supporter in academia. So many of the other profs have these weird resentments towards him. They haven’t spent those hundreds of hours staring at cellular automata programs running on their computer screens and they don’t get what he’s talking about.

I remember about twenty years ago, when I first met Wolfram, I asked him what other people thought of his papers, and he said, “Some of them say it’s trivial, and some of them say it’s wrong. I figure that’s a good place to be.”

With Bosch and Bruegel

October 12, 2002. Ill. Bagpipes. Bosch in Ghent.

I feel leafy (like a feebly fluttering leaf) today, I guess I have some kind of virus. Last night I had tedious fever dreams about installing an endless series of self-referential Turing machines in the Leuven marketplace. Then I woke up thinking there should be some way to make some kind of monster out of a Turing machine for Frek. What could be more horrible to encounter in Dimension Z than mathematical logic?

All of a sudden, writing a fat book on computers and philosophy feels like a tremendous waste of time. Like—why am I writing about Turing machines again? A dog returning to his vomit. Somehow my stupid tome’s manuscript is already twenty thousand words long.

Part of the problem is that I proposed an absurdly ambitious outline for the tome in my ad for the course three weeks ago. A tedious bloated ego-trip. And now the book feels like a big nightmare pillow, just like Software Engineering and Computer Games did. Something you hit and hit and hit and it doesn’t even move or get dented, and you’re crying and yelling and your face is all wet and red.

These weeks in Brussels are supposed to be like a vacation, for Christ’s sake. But for lack of anything else to occupy my slack time, I write. Although I appear busy, I really have no idea what I’m doing. I’m like a broken assembly-line churning out junk. Cars with seven wheels and no engines.

So be it resolved: As of today, I’m stopping work on the tome and getting back to Frek and the Elixir. And I won’t work all that much on Frek either. I’m going to spend more time looking around Brussels and Belgium. I think I’ll go to Ghent today.

Speaking of Brussels, I had some nice pancakes the other day at a brasserie called Het Ketje— “The Lad” in Bruxellois. Het Ketje is one of the town’s “bars without a key,” meaning they’re open around the clock. A shabby place with a lively crowd.

As I came out from washing my hands before eating my pancakes, the waitress rammed into me by accident. High point of the day, physical contact with a human being. In fact I think her hand may have touched my crotch. Score!

Everybody here seems really interested in Tintin comics. The author was Belgian. I picked up a Tintin at a newsstand next door to Het Ketje, but so far I can’t get past the first page. Les 7 Boules De Cristal. There’s too many words in the frames. Words suck. Especially words in a foreign language. And why aren’t the characters ducks? I’m planning to go to the Brussels History of Comics museum next week and get the Tintin backstory.

Speaking of relentless tourism, I hit the Museum of Musical Instruments the other day. It’s in a great Art Nouveau building which was at one time a department store. Amazing place. They give you awesome headphones that play the sound of each instrument when you stand in front of that instrument’s case.

They have a staggering collection of bagpipes (dudelsack in German, doedelzak in Flemish, cornemus in French). They have bagpipes from, get this: Flanders, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Ukraine, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia, France, Poland, Greece, Sicily, Northern Italy, Britain, Ireland, and of course Scotland. Each species of bagpipe is idiosyncratic and different from the others.

In a similar way, convergent evolution has given eyes to lobsters, houseflies, squid, and humans—but the details of these eyes are quite different. The various bagpipes result from convergent evolution directed to the problem of how to super-annoyingly play a horn continuously without ever interrupting for a breath.

With their drooping pipes the bags looked kind of shamefaced. Like limp, abruptly unveiled male genitalia. Bagpipes were big from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and then went out of fashion in most countries, although there was, supposedly, something of a resurgence in the 1970s. Disco Doedelzak!

The museum also had three harpsichord-type things (virginals and claviers) from around 1620, made by Joannes Ruckers, Andreas Ruckers, and Hans Ruckers, all Antwerp boys. These guys were the forefathers of the first American Rucker, that is, of Peter Rucker, who hit the James River of Virginia in 1692 amid a boatload of Lowlands Huguenots. I belong here in Flanders.

The subway and busses are starting to feel natural. Every morning on the way home I see the same poster for Ashley Judd in some movie or other. And then I always think about how good Ashley was in that Ya-Ya Sisterhood movie I saw in the plane over here, a lively Southern bad girl.

Two people asked me in French for directions yesterday, pulling over in cars to talk to me, and I knew the answers both times, tricky questions, too. They were coming into the city from the suburbs probably. Consulting the native Fleming, yes.

Going off on a new non-writing tangent, I’m doing a little research on Hieronymus Bosch. There’s only a handful of Bosch paintings in existence, about thirty, the same as with Bruegel. I’ve decided to try to see them all. I can pick off some easy Bosch paintings right around here, in Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, and Rotterdam. Day trips!

Brussels has a minor Bosch Crucifixion with Donor. In a lot of medieval paintings the people who paid for the picture, the “donors,” are shown kneeling in a corner. This is about the only one of Bosch’s pictures, in which the donors haven’t been painted over. I wonder if Bosch usually ended up painting the donors over after having fights with them? Brussels also has a good workshop copy of Saint Anthony that I’ve begun studying really deeply, visiting it over and over again.

So, pressing my quest, today I took the train to Ghent and I saw Bosch’s Saint Jerome and his Christ Carrying the Cross. It’s an easy half hour train ride to Ghent, and a ten minute taxi ride to the museum. Since I’m weak and diseased today, I just did the museum and then I came back home, not bothering to wander the city on my aching legs in the rain.

The Christ Carrying the Cross is a classic. The cartoonist R. Crumb did a version of it for a cover of Weirdo comix once—indeed I kept thinking of Crumb’s version while looking at Bosch’s today. There are eighteen heads in the picture, the beam of the cross, and not much else. Amazing heads. and Veronica is holding a veil with Jesus’s face on it, and she looks, in my opinion, kind of sleazy. Some scholars think this masterwork of a painting was done by Bosch’s workshop shortly after the artist himself died. There was a shadowy apprentice figure who was said at the time to be better than the Master himself! Perhaps a time traveler?

The Saint Jerome in Prayer is mainly interesting for the gnarly Boschian mound of plants that St. J. is leaning against. The plant is almost on the point of turning into a dog-pile of demons, in fact for a second I thought one bud was a demon-head, but no such luck. The plant, with its sharp stalks piercing hollow seed pods, is, if you think about it, a precursor of Art Nouveau, with a vengeance. There’s a curious beast at the edge of a pond in this painting—the creature has six legs. A fox sleeps curled up next to a torn-off rooster head. A magpie sits upon the central plant.

I saw an interesting show of Max Ernst graphics in the same museum as well.

And now all this stuff is running around inside my feverish head: Turing machines, Wolfram’s book, Max Ernst, my character Frek’s impending trip into another dimension, the great master Bosch, and Art Nouveau.

October 13, 2002. Rotterdam. North Station Hookers.

Got up early today and felt better. I took the train to Rotterdam. I’m on a Bosch roll. Fuck the writing.

I saw four Bosch paintings in Rotterdam, including his masterful Peddler. I like this painting a lot. I’ve always felt that the peddler looks like me. And he’s Bosch too. At some level, I’m Bosch.

For now, my Bosch research is just for fun. I can’t as yet visualize writing a novel about him, but that’s fine, some things can just be hobbies. Not everything has to be another writing project, as Sylvia once remarked to me. For the near term I’ll go back to focusing on my SF novel and I’ll let the rest of the stuff slide.

There was a liquid-eyed guy sitting across the aisle from me on the train back from Rotterdam, and he must have stolen my nice silk scarf—it was next to me when I dozed off, and when I woke up, the guy and my scarf were gone. What they call a zakkenroller here, a petty thief or a pickpocket. I’m gonna have to buy a new scarf, as it’s colder every day.

From the train I saw a street of hookers by the North Station in Brussels, the women posed in the sidewalk-level windows like wedding cakes, or, no, like live mannequins. Most provocatively displayed, some of them, and, harrumph, very scantily clad.

A few of the hookers looked suspiciously tall—like men, in fact. But still, a good number of them really did seem to be European females, attractive enough, at least from a moving train a hundred yards away.

When I think of the hookers, I remember the way our dog Arf would sniff the spring air in a certain way—and then he’d take off for two days.

But outside the hooker windows and leaning against the walls there are, I noticed today, watchful pimps, all Maghrebiens, like the guy who stole my scarf. Those pimps would take a lot more than a scarf if they could. You could end up like a clean-picked cow-skeleton.

No, no, I can’t imagine getting involved with the pimps and the hookers. But as the lonely weeks roll by, the thought of a woman’s companionship begins to seem rather amazing. Not just the sex, but the conversation, the banter, the touches and pats, the operatic exchange.

Only two more weeks till Sylvia gets here!

October 14, 2002. New Scarf.

The big event today was buying a new silk scarf to replace the one that was stolen—or that I lost, one never knows, does one, and I shouldn’t be so fast to accuse the Maghrebien on the train. I went to about seven stores, shopping like a woman, taking my time, nosing around, asking for “une escharpe de soie,” and I almost got one at Hermes that cost an arm and a leg, but instead I bought one in a non-name-brand boutique for only an arm. It’s very bright and gaily colored, in stripes, like a giant grosgrain ribbon, daring for me indeed. I think the shop where I bought this scarf was mainly for homosexuals.

It was raining today, so I stayed home and wrote on my novel, and I just came into the office now at seven in the evening to do email and to print the latest chapter of Frek.

There’s a skinny, pushy guest-scholar at VLAC who’s talking about getting all of us visitors to give talks and to listen to the others talk, and what a waste of time that would be, like something I’d have to do back at my real job. So I dread the sight of this guy now, and in my mind I rehearse impassioned angry speeches to him whenever I’m riding the subway into VLAC. I may start coming to the office exclusively at night so I can continue being a hermit slacker.

I listened to Zappa’s Joe’s Garage a lot today; picked that up in Rotterdam. They had endless stores, the town like a free-port shopping mall. Although at first I thought Joe’s Garage sucked, it’s growing on me. Like funnnnngus. I can’t get “Catholic Girls” outta my head.

October 17, 2002. Tintin. Treats.

Mark van Atten and I went to the Comics Museum in Brussels. It was a very nice building, designed by Horta (the local Art Nouveau king in 1910) and with a good brasserie.

I couldn’t get that deeply into the exhibits, many involving Hergé, the author of Tintin. His real name was Georges Remi (1907-1983), and “Hergé” is based on the French pronunciation of his initials reversed, that is, RG.

Having visited the museum, I got around to reading the French Tintin book that I bought last week. Tintin wears plus-fours, seems to be about eighteen, is kind of a reporter, and has reddish-blonde hair with his signature hair-do, a piece sticking up, kind of a pompadour, cowlick or, as the say in French, oup, or, in Flemish, kuifje.

There’s a character called Captain Haddock who has a funny way of cursing. He often says “Tonnere du Brest,” (Thunder of Brest (a place in France)) and to insult some bad guys he unleashes this great stream of invective: “Sauvages! Gredins! Analphabètes! Va-nu-pieds! Ectoplasmes! Chauffards! Saltimbanques! Nyctalopes! Zoulous! Cornichons! Moules à gaufres!” The last one means “mussels on waffles,” which I guess might be considered a bad thing in Brussels.

Yesterday I taught a really good class, and now I can rest for a week! In the morning I took it easy and had a nice coffee down at the Louvre Brasserie, full of beer-drinkers today. The beer-drinkers all seem to have the same thousand-yard stare, they’re looking out into space, taking stock. Maybe coffee drinkers look that way too. But they don’t stay in the brasserie for as long.

I didn’t prepare quite so much for my class this week and it was fine. I’m glad to drop that printing-out-my-lecture-notes thing I was doing. Winging the lectures is the way to go. After class, I had a pancake with my friendly, lively philosophy students at the Erasmus Inn across from the Philosophy Institute.

On the Wolfram front, I read a review of Wolfram’s book in the New York Review of Books that really made the book sound lame, so much so that even I am having doubts. But you gotta consider whom it’s coming from, in this case the physicist Stephen Weinberg whom I’ve always regarded as the worst kind of academic Mandarin wet blanket. I’m trying to get Mark and Leon here to work on a paper about Wolfram’s ideas instead of about “Minds and Machines,” but Mark seems dead set on combing over this well-worn material for the hundred-thousandth time.

It’s like making a trip to the town square on the day after the market, and looking for food. A wilted lettuce leaf on the ground, perhaps a shriveled grape. Actually it’s like going to the market square twenty years after the market was there, and meanwhile the other academic church-mice have been there every single one of the intervening days, scavenging, scavenging, scavenging.

“Maybe we’ll find a gold coin that nobody ever noticed!”

“Sure, Mark.”

I had lunch with Leon today, and after a lot of prodding I managed to get him to invite me to visit with him and his family on Sunday. I told him I would really enjoy a taste of civilized family life. He thought it was funny to apply the word “civilized” to a family that includes two young boys (ages four and one). I’m looking forward to it.

On an impulse, I went into a theater and bought a ticket to go the ballet next week, Romeo and Juliet, it’s the La Scala company of Milan. I’ll be alone, and I’m a little worried my heart will burst and break, being there without my wife. To compensate for that, I got on the web and managed to get tickets to the Paris Opera for Sylvia and me after she comes. Yeah, baby.

I bought myself a few treats in Leuven yesterday: a half pound of chocolate truffles, yet another Frank Zappa album and—this was really feeble-minded—a magazine of pictures of Bettie Page too corny to be erotic. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to sell real porno magazines in Belgium. A Catholic country. Not at all like the Netherlands.

The chocolates I got were from a small place called Tartufo, and they’re the best chocolates I have ever had. They have fresh cream in them, and you need to keep them in the fridge, and they only keep for about a week. I ate about seven of them on my way to class, five more when I got home, and four more this morning. There’s three or four left, and I can’t wait to eat them, even though my stomach is starting to feel iffy.

Today I went to downtown Brussels and worked on my Frek corrections for an hour in the very fancy cafe of the Hotel Metropole, all encrusted with decorations on the walls and with a fifty-foot high ceiling. I can’t believe how lucky I am to be here with money in my pocket and no particular worries.

I saw a total Bruegel character on the subway, he was like in another reality, maybe drunk or simple-minded, or maybe only I could see him and he was a ghost. He kept sighing and twisting his neck and head. He smelled heavily of eating meat, as some people here do smell. He had the exact huge potbelly shape and stubble and blank, mindless expression as the fat Carnival man jousting in the foreground of Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent painting, sitting astride an empty barrel.

I’m going to put this guy into my Frek book. Getting into real-time transrealism is a good way to make my life seem that much more interesting. I’m thinking of this part of my journals as The Brussels Illuminations. Like I’m rising to some mental crescendo.

The days and weeks go faster and faster. I have to continually remember to do things to break the rhythm so the time doesn’t slip away. Maybe I’ll go to Antwerp. There are some new ad posters in the subway, but the Ashley Judd one that I like is still there.

October 18, 2002. Load of Knowledge. Happy.

On the comedy album, We’re All Bozos On This Bus, the Firesign Theatre group give a parodistic history of humanity’s intellectual development. Using the plummiest of British accents, one of the guys says something like, “Wherever man went, he left behind a great load of knowledge.”

I’m thinking of Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science as this enormous fresh cow pie, and we dung-beetle academics are scuttling out of our burrows and happily rolling up balls of the rich material to take back into our hovels for feasting.

Or, in a less icky vein, you could speak of A New Kind of Science as ship full of spices and silks, in from the Orient, bringing the port to life. It’s a gift, an opportunity. It would be madness to turn one’s back on Wolfram’s largesse.

I was walking near Bruegel’s house in the Marolles district today, passing a junk store called Le Royaume des Puces (Kingdom of the Fleas) and a Bruegelian bum came up to me, asking for money “pour acheter un joint.” To buy a joint. The divine herb is no longer limited to jazz musicians and long-haired intelligentsia.

Speaking of besotted Bruegelians, this week at the Brussels museum I noticed a copy of his festival canvas, The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, which is presumably lost. It’s a nice big copy, a dog-pile of drunk peasants around a giant barrel of wine. A “rather less edifying scene,” as Bruegel’s sniffy critics used to say. Nearly every one of our man’s pictures includes someone shitting or taking a piss. In his Fall of the Rebel Angels he even figured out a way to paint farts (as little tubes of flame). A fucking genius.

By the way, today I found out that I was wrong all this time about which precise house on Hoogstraat in the Marolles was in fact Bruegel’s home. The correct house is a block down the street from the one I’d thought. But it’s a comparable structure, all brick, three or four stories high, with a treppengiebel (stair-step gable line), a garden in back, nearly the same, which is fortunate, as I talked about it so much in my novel. The real Bruegel house is locked and seems to be empty, unlike the mistaken Bruegel house which is broken up into apartments.

Basically today was a perfect day. I woke up, read Wolfram for an hour, took a bath, did yoga, listened to Joe’s Garage, worked on my novel, and went out into the streets of sun and clouds. I walked through Marolles, had leek soup, quiche, and flat chocolate cake at Pain des Puces (Bread of the Fleas), then ate a little container of raspberries from a fruit stand in the street by Bruegel’s real house, went into the big museum and looked at Bosch and Bruegel paintings yet again, got to my office about three, put my new photos on the web, did a bit of email, then walked through the magical evening rain to get the tram back to my St. Gilles neighborhood, and had a bouillabaisse at my favorite restaurant, Au Stekerlapatte, behind the Hall of Justice, right where they used to burn heretics alive in Bruegel’s time.

A day to remember.

Recently I put a Magic Pig character into Frek and the Elixir. Senior year at Swarthmore Greg Gibson and I put vertical cardboard tubes all over our room, to make it a funner place to get high in, and I was telling people that I was “The Magic Pig in the Enchanted Forest.” I’m satisfied and happy to be writing about a Magic Pig in my novel.

Frek is gonna have so much in it.

Re. writing, today I saw some inspiring advice by an L.A. baseball player who’d had a good game in the World Series against the Giants. “Just make the most of it. Be loose. Let it fly. Don’t go home thinking you held anything back.”

October 19, 2002. Antwerpen. Mad Meg.

Today I did another outing—I took the train to Antwerp.

While there, I added a sighting of another Bruegel painting to my life list. This was the Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) in the small Museum Mayer van den Bergh, a building which resembles a sixteenth-century house but was actually built in 1902 by the grieving mother of Fritz Mayer van den Bergh when he died. One of Fritz’s greatest scores as a collector was to recognize and buy this unsigned Bruegel painting for about a hundred dollars at, quoting from the printed museum guide, “a public auction in Cologne, where it had hardly attracted the attention of the numerous museum directors and connoisseurs present. At that time Bruegel was in the eyes of most people, if not an unknown, at any rate a somewhat inferior painter of rather less edifying scenes.”

Dulle Griet (the meaning is really more “Stupid Margaret” than “Mad Meg”) is a big raw-boned woman striding through a Hellscape carrying a bunch of loot in her apron—she was probably modeled on the Regent of the lowlands in Bruegel’s time, a woman named Margaret of Parma, who was definitely ripping off the locals. I have a whole chapter about her in my novel As Above So Below, where she imprisons Bruegel, and in rebellion he makes this painting.

Dulle Griet’s expression is, like, “Yaaar, let’s kick butt.” I hadn’t picked up on this before, as the panel is painted in such dark colors that it doesn’t reproduce well. Seen in person it’s fresh and clear, in a wonderful state of preservation, no cracks, no dirt, the yellows and oranges of the burning cities exquisite.

In the foreground is a fish with legs, backing off from Dulle Griet, staring at her with a wonderful expression of terror. And in the foreground, there’s a funny frowny-faced Grulloo—a head with two arms/legs. His head is exactly round with a :( expression of two dot eyes and a down-turned mouth.

As Antwerp was the town where Sylvia and I spent our days in Belgium together a few years ago, I missed her very keenly. The loneliness is getting to me. Eleven more days. Where do I put the pain? Nothing to do but recognize it, accept it, experience it, talk about it. And rattle on and on about art history to take my mind off missing her.

Elephant in Flemish is Olifant, just like in Lord of the Rings. I know because I had some Olifant coffee in Antwerp.

As I’ve been studying the Bruegel paintings and the excellent workshop copy of Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony in Brussels, I decided to list all the things that you typically see in these Bosch and Bruegel hell-paintings:

Bagpipes, harps, roast fowl, hollow crystal spheres, pennants, fish with legs, fish with wings, eggs, helmets, shit, burning cities, spoons, swords, pikes, rigging, fat-bodied demons, spoonbilled birds, bowls, ruined towers, dead trees, apes, pools of water, creatures with fanged mouths like cats, heavy things dangling from chains, meat on spits, cages, dancers, Grulloos, pigs, priests, nuns, round tables, drapery, fruit, stoves, seed pods, nose rings, jugs, insect wings, mussel shells, fish scales, barns, knives, ears, and more bagpipes.

Hell is listening to bagpipes! Sqwooonk!

I’m making this list because I plan to chain-saw a Bosch scene into the current chapter of Frek and the Elixir. I’ll be like a bumpkin carving a copy of the Venus de Milo from a log. Put in ever’thang on that thar list I done made up! And end up with: The Klein Bottle Bagpipe From Subdimension Z.

In the margin of his own drawings, the incomparable Master Bosch wrote, in seeming self-mockery, “Miserrimi quippe est ingenii semper uti inventis et numquam inveniendis,” which means, “It is characteristic of the most dismal of minds always to use clichés and never their own inventions!” The thing is to be confident enough to say this.

I saw a beggar in Antwerp with his head completely covered by ugh scar tissue, and with a depression in the top. Bosch and Bruegel didn’t look away from guys like this, they studied them, maybe even hung out with them and drew them. I think if I were to start looking at the beggars more closely, I’d also need to start giving alms to them, and talking to them and being nice. But I didn’t do any of that today.

The way I’m seeing it now, my Frek novel can make good transreal use of me being in Brussels. The alternate world that Frek visits begins as Brussels and turns into Bosch’s hell. One slight worry that this might not be the best mental exercise to put myself through, in terms of having a good state of psychological health.

But, hey, I’ll have the ghosts of Bosch and Bruegel backing me on this one. I hope.

That line of Pynchon’s: “The sick realization that the spirits weren’t nearly as friendly as they seemed.” You realize you’ve been talking to a mask covering up something you can’t begin to imagine. Creep me out.

As it happened, after writing this note and falling asleep, I had a nightmare of being in a cave with a boy guiding me. He knew his way around, but he wasn’t entirely friendly. He was the daemon, the animus, the spirit of the underworld.

The cave held an immersive virtual reality game, incredibly complex, and I was scared of playing it, for I knew that at any time it could shift into a Bosch hell world and drive me crazy. I had a feeling that I was close to seeing sights so terrifying that they’d permanently destroy my mind.

I kept trying to wake up out of the dream. And I’d think I had gotten out of that VR game—and then I’d realize that I was still inside it, still in the dream.

October 24, 2002. Hideously Diseased. Feel Like Ghost.

Sure, I can handle being sick, I just work around it. Bullshit. That’s what I like to tell myself, but now I’m into day four of disease, and it’s hard not to start feeling that god hates me, and that I’ll never be well again in my whole life, and that I’ll bobble along forever with a shitty low-grade fever, achey joints, hurting ears, a stomped up nose, a sore mouth, and my shirt soaked with sweat every time I walk a block. I’ve got hoof and mouth disease. Shoot me, douse me in kerosene and burn me in a pit with the rest of the diseased cattle.

I caught this ailment from, I believe, Leon Horsten’s one-year-old son Maarten. Sunday I met Leon, his wife, and their boys Vincent and Maarten, ages four and one. I was well when I met Maarten, and twelve hours later I was sick.

We went to this cool Central Africa museum that King Leopold II put up to house his various Congolese lootings. Great masks. Inevitably they had a stuffed elephant, that is, an olifant, and that was the four-year-old Vincent’s favorite thing. I bought him a little flat soapstone elephant carving from Kenya at the museum, and he was very happy with it.

Maarten was cute enough, but streaming with spit and yellow-green snot, his eyes puffed up and pink. If Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had the hideously diseased Maarten in his posse, the U. N. inspectors would be within their rights to bust the man for germ warfare.

Meanwhile, slick with sweat and hideously diseased, I’ve managed to move into a much nicer apartment, up on the fifth floor, with a view of the streets and buildings. It’s great after six weeks of staring into what was in effect a prison yard, although with a nice big tree. No tree here, but there’s sky and people and old buildings to see. It’s like a halfway house for rehabilitating me out of solitary. Starting a week from today I’m actually going to have conjugal visitation. Wonderful. I’m starting to feel threadbare.

I went to see that ballet version of Romeo and Juliet alone tonight, but it was such a bringdown that I left halfway thru. Seeing all the couples talking at intermission just fucking wiped me out. On my own all the time, I’m starting to feel like a silent ghost, someone not fully in the world.

As it happened, waiting for my tram home from the abandoned ballet, I saw this nice kid from Canada go walking by. I know him from the recovery group. I gave him my ticket and he was thrilled and ran off to catch the second half of the ballet, so that was cool. It was vaguely miraculous to run into the one person I know in town who would want the ticket. The world is a Great Novel we all live in—no coincidence is too far-fetched.

October 25, 2002. Saint Anthony. Bruegel Book Arrives!

It’s a rainy day. On the subway I noticed there’s no more Ashley Judd poster at the Troon station where I get out. Quite a loss. The other female icon that I see every day is a little plastic statue of the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit. She’s in a window display near my apartment, in a shop for collectors. I stand there and stare at Jessica Rabbit, a gentle smile playing on my lips. That’s how hard up I am. Can’t wait for Sylvia to get here.

For lunch, I went over to the art museum and had a very good meal in their cafeteria. Salad bar! A rare chance to eat fresh vegetables. I spent a half hour studying that Bosch workshop copy of Temptation of Saint Anthony which I’ve mentioned. Saint Anthony has such a nice, reassuring smile behind his full-length beard. He’s looking out from the picture at you. Like a reformed alky biker.

“Ain’t this some waald shit?”

And I said my weekly “Hello” to Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels. Every time I look, I see more new stuff in it. A bird’s nest filled with chirping fish. A creature whose wings are mussel shells. An artichoke with a red spike.

Bruegel’s demons are more upbeat and cheerful than Bosch’s. He’s painting this stuff as a happy game—and Bosch is often playing, too, but with Bosch, you also get the feeling that he’s driven by bizarre compulsions.

Studying Bosch’s images of scary seed-pods, I imagine that his rich, older wife made him have sex with her a lot and that he didn’t like it.

“Get down on it, Jeroen!”

A High Gothic complaint comes scrolling out of Jeroen’s mouth. But then he’s on his knees doing penance.

I got the first printed copy of my Bruegel novel from Tor today! As Above, So Below in hardback. It looks really nice.

The book has black and white images of sixteen Bruegel paintings, one for each chapter. With great efforts, I purchased reproduction permissions from museums all over Europe, and I got hold of very high resolution electronic image files.

But, to my disappointment, the ham-handed designer cropped most of my images—just bam, bam, crop, crop, take off the outer edges, and who cares about Bruegel’s composition or about the sly shitting man in the corner. Only the uncropped, full-canvas images look correctly balanced and composed.

I have to keep telling myself that the art doesn’t matter that much, and that the readers aren’t going to notice. But with only a little intelligence and restraint, the images could have been right. I worked on those files for months. Sigh. I’m overdoing it, I know. I’m only worried about the art because I’m worried about people liking the text.

To chill myself out, I went to see a Hollywood action movie, and then I went to a busy brasserie called Le Trappiste. It’s kind of Art Nouveau style, on a busy street by the movie theater. I got out As Above, So Below, and I let myself enjoy it, instead of fretting about the illustrations like an uptight nut.

Leafing through the book reading things, I was worried that it wouldn’t seem good. But, yes, there are good things. One passage actually made me burst into tears, right in the cafe, I had to get out my handkerchief.

This part is near the end, where my map-making character Ortelius is wistfully asking Bruegel’s wife Mayken if their mutual friend Williblad mentioned Ortelius in a recent letter to Bruegel. Williblad is off in Naples now. Ortelius is homosexual, and both he and Mayken once had affairs with the charismatic Williblad.

“I—I don’t suppose he mentioned me?” asked Ortelius wistfully. Mayken’s heart went out to the frail, balding map-maker. It would be hard to carry passions the world thought wicked or absurd. Not for the first time, it struck her how odd it was that she and this man had shared the same lover. It wasn’t a comfortable thought. But Ortelius’s homely, yearning face spoke to her nonetheless.

“He did mention you,” said Mayken, gently patting his knee. “Quite warmly.”

Oh, sob. It hurts so good. And, yeah, that’s the way I feel, man. Seeing my homely, yearning lonely face in a wall mirror amidst the gala crowd during the intermission at the ballet last night—that’s what sent me out into the rainy street.

Celebrating my book tonight, I ate supper very incautiously. I had coq au vin, which came with the deadly Belgian French fries, fried in beef tallow—they always make me very queasy. But, as I ate these delicious morsels, mopping up the thick gravy with the crisp greasy fries, grunting and trembling with delight (it was 9:45 pm), I was completely unable to mentally reproduce what bad effect the fries had on me when I last ate them a couple of weeks ago. And then, just to fully put a stake through my stomach, I had chocolate mousse with whipped cream.

And now I feel like I swallowed a cannonball. Well, I used to celebrate a new book by drinking a fifth of whiskey, so this is a step up. I bought a pack of cigarettes today as well.

Yee-haw!

October 26, 2002. Atomium.

In 1958, my mother wanted me to go to Germany to school for a year “for my asthma,” though maybe it was really because I was fitting in so badly at Louisville Country Day School, or because my parents were sick of me and my tantrums, or because my grandmother wanted to see me—I’ve never really been sure. In any case I said I wouldn’t go off to the German boarding school unless I could visit to the Brussels World Fair on my way. My Louisville friend Niles and I were fascinated by the Kentucky State Fair, and we’d often mused over how great a World’s Fair would be.

I went to Germany in the spring as their school year started then. I’ve always been known in the German branch of the family as quite the spoiled brat, and Grandma gave my Onkel Conrad enough dough for him to drive from Germany to the 1958 Brussels world fair in his sunroofed VW. Conrad, his wife Gabi, cousin Ela, cousin Frederike, and I think cousin Christian, all of us squeezed into Conrad’s VW bug. Maybe Christian sat on Aunt Gabi’s lap. I don’t remember it as a difficult trip, and it was exciting to open the sunroof and feel the air beating in.

We saw the Maniken Pis statue in Brussels, stayed in a hostel for families, and walked around Expo 58 for two days. We only did free stuff, and never bought tickets to go inside in the fair’s big iconic building, the Atomium.

Today at last I did go inside the Atomium, forty-four years later. Jesus, how the years pile up!

It was a really long and complicated tram ride out to the Atomium from downtown Brussels. I saw this very Bosch thing from the tram, a poster for some kind of off-brand Chicken McNugget—a fried nugget running around on chicken legs with chicken claws.

The Atomium is a cube that’s a hundred meters diagonally from corner to corner. It’s balanced on one corner, and there’s a huge twenty meter sphere at each of the cube’s eight corners, with tube walkways running along the edges of the cube. There’s an additional sphere in the center of the cube, with eight additional tubes leading to it from the eight corners. It’s a fairly simple object, mathematically speaking, but having the additional central sphere does make the thing seem kind of intricate.

The structure was gleaming forty-four years ago, but now it’s tarnished and even rusty. Later I talked about this to Sylvia on the phone, “They should really keep the place up. Maintain it.”

And she says, “It’s Europe, Rudy, everything’s old, it’s hopeless.”

I got an elevator to the top sphere where I could look out dirty plastic windows at low smoggy Brussels with, to the east, a view of the dun, flat Flemish fields so often painted by my boys Bosch and Bruegel. A gray day.

On the way back down, you go through a couple of the other spheres, which hold a series of exhibits relating to the 1958 World’s Fair. The old photos are a knife in the heart. All the bright pavilion buildings of yesteryear are gone. I’m filled with elegiac thoughts of my kind, dead Uncle Conrad. Too much nostalgia.

“J’était ici en cinquante-huit,” I tell the girl at the souvenir stand outside as I buy some Fifties postcards. She’s the first person I’ve spoken to all day.

I’m filled with the tragic sense of life. Looking at a tree beneath the low sky, it seems the saddest, most wretched thing I’ve ever seen.

But, in a way, I wasn’t really depressed. It was more that I was indulging myself in ham-bone operatic feelings. Wallow in it!

Back downtown I heard a woman on the street call “Yoo hoo,” and for an instant thought it was Sylvia. High time for her to get here.

I went and bought myself the most expensive beret I could find. They cost according to how big of a diameter they have. I’m not talking about the headband size, mind you, I’m talking about the floppiness, droopiness and zootiness of the thang. I got onze pouces, a pouce being something like an inch, my beret a notch up from the lowly dix pouces or the dix-et-demi. The onze pouces looks more original, the haberdasher assured me, that is, it’s more likely to give my family members a good laugh. It looks like something Erasmus would wear.

Had dinner with Leon Horsten at Au Stekerlapatte. It was pleasant. We talked about philosophy of science, about things like quantum mechanical decoherence, that is, the difficulty of remaining in a mixed mental state.

I brought my new Bruegel book along to show Leon. He was suitably interested and impressed. The cropping of the images is bothering me less all the time. I told Leon it was good of him to come into town to join me. He said there was no need to thank him, it was fun.

My new apartment looks out at an ancient checkered brick building, as if from a Bosch painting. I see chimney pots with crows and magpies.

I did a huge push on reading the Wolfram book over the past two weeks, finally writing my review of his book for the American Mathematical Monthly. I still keep flip-flopping between thinking Wolfram is a mighty prophet and thinking he’s vain and full of crap. “That’s the right place to be,” he might say. “In a mixed state.”

In a recent email, my friend Jon Pearce formulated an image of my activities. “Your mind is like a Bosch painting, full of nightmarish creatures nibbling waffles by the side of a pond: lobsters, squid, bagpipe monsters, and Wolfram.”

Reunited

November 7, 2002. Reunion With Sylvia.

The day that Sylvia was coming, I was so emotional that I threw up after breakfast. I’d thought I was calm, but my body told me I was kidding myself about that. On the way to the airport, I was filled with deep longing. My mind became a churning kaleidoscope of images of fragments of Sylvia—like her hands, ears, cheek, lips, etc. And then she arrived, incredible.

She’s been here a week and a day now. It’s wonderful to see her cheerful, friendly face, to hear her voice, to hold her in my arms. I’m not writing as much in the journal now, as I have Sylvia to talk to. For the first week she was jet-lagged, and then she caught a bad cold. But now she’s settled in.

It’s comfortable to have my companion to share things with, it’s romantic to be with the woman I love, and husbanding my wife is my sacred duty—but there have been moments when I miss my recent freedom. I’d gotten used to having everything my own way and to doing things at my own pace. I want to hang onto some of the self-sufficiency I developed.

The other day, Sylvia and I had a nice lunch with Mark and Leon near the VLAC office. The boys giggled nervously when Sylvia asked them what exactly we’re up to. To an outside observer such as her it looks like mainly we three hang out and have lunch.

Another day, Sylvia and I saw a free classical concert for four saxophones in a vast white eighteenth-century church near the palace. Turns out the saxophone was invented in Belgium. Playing together, those four saxes melded and echoed beautifully in the big empty church. On the wall was a carved list of all the parishioners who died in the Great War, among them some Comtes, Princes, Barons. How real the World Wars still seem here. The disastrous application of machines to killing.

I showed Sylvia the Bruegels and Magrittes in the art museum, she loved them, it was great. And naturally I took Sylvia for dinner at that Moroccan place, Beni Znassen. She dug it. The white-haired owner Mustapha looked impressively intimidating, although by now he says hello to me. The Arab music videos with wiggly writing were playing, the whiskered round-chinned man was our waiter, and we had a big pot of mint tea.

Wednesday, Sylvia and I went to Leuven and I taught my class. I’d decided to talk about recursion theory and Turing’s Halting Problem, which rather turned off the philosophy students. One woman walked out never to return. “Because of that,” she said, gesturing at my symbol-filled blackboard. Next week I better lighten up.

In the evening, Sylvia and I went to the medieval Leuven Faculty Club where Leon and Mark hosted us for an intricate three-and-a-half hour dinner. Leuven is so old-Europe. Sylvia really picked up on it.

November 9, 2002. Paris.

Here we are in Paris. I’m getting paid to help Gerard Pape at CCMIX make some electronic music based on a strange attractor, also to lecture to his music students about chaos.

It’s been raining, and Sylvia and I have been pounding the pavement, you might say she’s running me ragged. I sweat a lot at night, I still have a touch of that grippe. I’ve been thinking about my skeleton more than usual today. We were sitting in the Madeleine Church, which is big Napoleonic church from the 1800s, in the middle of the classy shopping part of Paris. And I visualized each of my weary bones, linking them together.

I was looking at all the candles that people light for their dead, one of the candles burning for Sylvia’s mother, who used to love the Madeleine Church, back when she’d bring her eight-year-old Sylvia to Paris. Ah, how the years slip away. And the paving stones of these monumental spaces endure, worn but little by the fleeting dances of us skeletons.

One thing about Paris is that Sylvia’s the expert here, which is a nice switch for her from me in Brussels being the expert. I enjoy abandoning my attempts at control.

We’re here for four nights this week, then another three or four nights next week, with a couple more visits yet to come. It’s great not to have to rush through Paris—normally we’re only here for three or four days total.

When it comes to being chic, the Parisians blow away the Bruxellois. The grandeur of the city, the architecture, the stores, the museums—incomparable. It’s a kick to be here, if tiring at times. Everything is something of an effort. I’m hoping to get a little better at doing Paris. Like the way I can do New York by now without feeling overwhelmed.

I will say that the Parisians can be brusque. Yesterday at a Metro stop, I used my indifferent French to ask a guy a question about the trains, and he rapped back in English, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.” And then he jumps into his train. Harsh.

We saw a great Bosch painting at the Louvre, his Ship of Fools. Quite a small picture—the art historians say it was sawn out from a bigger panel. There’s a group drinking and singing in a boat. Up in the tree-like mast of the boat sits a professional fool. He’s wearing the ass’s ears of the trade, and he has his own bowl of wine, he’s sipping at it, smiling, facing away from the amateur fools. He’s like a heavy drinker at a party, in particular like Greg and me at the Swarthmore parties.

I had a weird vision relating to Ship of Fools when I was sweating and half-sleeping last night, or when I was taking a nap. In this vision, I myself climbed up into that mast or tree, and I put on the fool’s outfit. And I saw below me a seed pod walking with a pair of legs.

November 15, 2002. Art Nouveau with Sylvia. A Play in a Tent.

A great day.

Sylvia and I walked into the royal palace next door to VLAC. On this one day out of the year, the palace is open to the public.

We examined a really odd artwork the Queen had commissioned—it’s one million (literally 1,000,000) green Thailand beetle wing covers glued to a section of a ballroom’s coffered ceiling. The wing covers also cover the chain suspending one of the room’s three great chandeliers, and this one chandelier is coated with glued-on green wing covers as well. The chandelier hangs low enough so that you can look up and clearly see the iridescent emerald beetle parts. On the ceiling the effect is more one of a shimmering mosaic. The wing covers are arranged in organic swirling patterns akin to those used to represent foliage in Renaissance tapestry.

And then Sylvia and I had lunch in the heavily Art Nouveau dining room of an elegant 1905 restaurant called De Ultieme Halucinatie, or The Ultimate Hallucination. The place is in a perfect state of preservation, with unbelievable art glass, and yet it’s being used. Sylvia and I were the only customers in the fancy part, it was like being millionaires on the Titanic.

After that we took the tram to the house of Victor Horta, the Bruxellois Art Nouveau architect. Every item in Horta’s house was of his design: the candleholders, the banisters, the chairs, the lamps, the rugs, the wall paintings, it’s incredible. He loved the snaky curves with a little ding near the top.

I guess it was WWI that put an end to Art Nouveau. The movement only lasted about eight years. Like the dear fleeting Sixties. Then they had Art Deco between the wars. And after that it’s been glass boxes forever and ever and ever. Less is ess aitch eye tee. I’m hoping that now things can get funky again.

Last night we saw a play in a tent that had popped up in the middle of the St. Gilles square near our apartment. The production was in French, a play within a play involving Molière. The audience was seated at candlelit tables, on the square’s cobblestones, beneath the tent. They’d laid out some boards to serve as the stage, with props brought in by actors on a wooden cart as needed. Lots of broad farce, it was wonderful. My favorite was a rubbery guy who played an old man simply by using a three-foot cane so that he had to bend himself double. At one point I laughed really loud at him, and he stagily glared at me.

November 19, 2002. Paris with Sylvia. Surreal Opera. Electronic Music.

I’m on the train back to Brussels from our second trip to Paris, and Sylvia’s on her way to Geneva to visit with her father for a week. She’s going to Geneva straight from Paris.

Sylvia and I made our long-planned trip to the Paris Opéra, in that wonderfully over-ornamented building, the Garnier Palace. It was so dreamy in there, so elegant. The opera was a 1930’s Surrealist piece by a Romanian man called Martinu: Juliette, ou la Clé des Songes. The Key to Dreams.

The sets for the three acts were, believe it or not, three different views of a giant accordion, and at times the opera seemed like an animated Magritte painting. It’s only in Act II that the hero finally gets to talk to his dream-woman Juliette. She irrationally turns against him, saying he reminds her of un gros crocodile empaillé (a fat stuffed crocodile). Hearing this line, Sylvia looked over at me with that special grin of delight she gets when she learns a new mock-insult to call me.

Afterwards, around midnight, we had dinner in a fancy red-plush Art Nouveau restaurant around the corner called Le Grand Cafe. They had a lobster tank that literally looked like an exhibit at the Monterey aquarium, twenty feet long and ten feet high, the lobsters comfortably crawling around, barely noticing they were in captivity, and with big fish swimming above them.

Monday in Paris, I spent my second day at the CCMIX center, consulting with Gerard Pape and Sinan Bokevoy about this concert piece we’re supposed to present next month—their electronic music with video by me.

In the studio, Sinan was tweaking his latest electronic composition. Sitting there, I got a little bored and I started working on Frek on my laptop, still sitting next to Sinan.

I’m working on a scene with Frek in an alternate universe’s projection room, a windowless room with lampreys hanging from the ceiling, all very weird and strange. And it flashes on me that this is one of those times when reality overlays art. Because here I am with Sinan from Istanbul, in the windowless electronic music studio, with a pile of big fat black cables behind me, perfect for plugging into my spine like lamprey eels.

Sinan is still playing his piece. First there’s the dilated sound of a hammer pounding, stretched out in time, sinister, then a single voice that’s been expanded into a choir, like an acid trip where things shatter into droplets of sound.

The usually genial Gerard Pape is off in his office like an absent puppetmaster, somewhat overwrought today. He’s just fired his secretary, there’s an open bottle of vodka on his desk, and his smile of greeting is a tense rictus. And I still have to get him to pay me my travel expenses. But, sitting with Sinan, I realize that of course this gig isn’t about getting paid, it’s about getting input for the projection room scene in Frek and the Elixir.

I ask Sinan why the electronic music sounds so sinister. “Its because these are sounds we’re not used to hearing,” he says. “And anything strange is a possible menace. Also, the sounds are deep, like big things. And dissonant, like unpredictable disorganized things. And they seem to come from every side, like things you can’t get away from. Polyphony is a creation not by god—and so we think of it as satanic.”

November 22, 2002. Outraging the Audience at Leuven.

I gave what may have been the worst and least successful talk of my career yesterday to the Computer Science Department in Leuven. I encountered complete hostility and incomprehension regarding the controversial thesis I presented: Everything is a gnarly computation.

To start with, I arrived nearly fifteen minutes late for my one-hour talk. My geekly host hadn’t sent me any directions on how to find the building, despite my begging for a map. Instead he’d just sent me a seven digit “universal location identifier number”—but who knows in what universe.

When I’d finished walking the half mile from the wrong bus stop to the right building, it turned out they’d switched the building for the talk—without telling me. When I got to the right building it took five minutes to make their computer projector work.

I regret to say that I was in a state of cold fury with my host by then. I spoke sharply to him, and my anger made it hard to focus on my talk.

I did have a very well-organized set of PowerPoint slides to show, but my time ran out way before I was done. And then the only comment form the audience was from an old fart—biologically younger than me, but mentally older.

“I hated the beginning of your talk and the end of the talk,” he said. “It’s all completely wrong.”

“How about the middle,” I snapped back, feeling like Johnny Rotten ducking his shoulder to avoid an incoming beer bottle. “How did you like that?” I was about this close to just fucking walking out.

After the talk I made half-hearted amends to my geek host for being tense with him before the talk. We went to the computer science faculty lounge for a cup of tea. And then several people come up and they too want to argue about every little thing I’d said.

And they couldn’t understand at all why, back at San Jose State, I teach a course on how to write programs for computer games. It was like me telling some stuffy English professors that I teach porno novels in my literature course. Or science fiction.

After the horrible talk and horrible reception, I walked through a plowed field and into a pasture, looking at the mild blue sky and fluffy white clouds, the green grass, the Bruegelian traceries of the bare trees, with crows in them of course, a herd of cows watching me, some lean chickens pecking in the long, wet grass. Lovely, lovely.

Yet, in the background, the insane roar of a nearby freeway. They say Belgium has the densest freeway system in the world.

The upside of the day was finding a great Booklist review of As Above, So Below: The Life of Peter Bruegel in my email back at VLAC in Brussels:

Rucker’s keen insights into Peter Bruegel’s spellbinding and politically subversive work underpin this animated, suspenseful, and affecting tale, a step up from Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. Bruegel’s great gift was his perception of the sacred in the earthy, and Rucker follows suit in this vital portrait of a sweet-natured disciple of life’s fecund beauty in a time of cold-blooded tyranny.

In the evening I finished writing a review of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition that I’m doing for Wired magazine. Reviewing Wolfram and Gibson is of course an honor, but, bitter subterranean that I am, I have a bit of a resentment backlash about spending my time hyping the careers of these more commercially successful men. Anyway, here’s a passage from my Wm. Gibson review, centering on a quote from Gibson’s book. For me, that quote really hit home, reminding me of why I’m somewhat hard to live with:

Eventually Cayce encounters the maker of the footage. “Cayce looks into the dark eyes. The maker sees her. Then doesn’t. Turns back to the screen.” There’s some heavy self-knowledge hidden in these words, for they describe what it’s like to live with a novelist, especially one who dreams a work as deep as this.

November 23, 2001. Solvay Park.

So Sylvia’s still off in Geneva, and I’m lonely again. I could have gone to a meeting of the Belgian Logic Society, but I decided to bag it. My grant here only runs three more weeks.

It’s starting to look like the boys and I aren’t going to finish that joint paper. At this point it’s mostly a rehash of Lucas’s fallacious old argument that machines can’t be as smart as us. Years ago, I’d mentioned a new angle on that argument at the very end of Infinity and the Mind—and I’d thought we might use my idea here. But now Leon has in fact convinced me that my idea has a hole in it. Oh well. I’ll eventually finish my tome on computers and philosophy, and I can show that to VLAC to satisfy them that the boys and I did something during the term of my grant.

I’ll meet with my seminar class three more times, and I’ll give a special lecture to the Belgian Logic Society in December, and that’s gonna be it. The seminar is still a lot of fun. I’ve got it down to a nice routine of lecturing for an hour and then letting the students spout philosophy for the second hour.

Anyway, today I took the train down to this village called La Hulpe, which sounds like a gang-girl name, especially since they don’t pronounce the ‘H’. It’s in the Walloon (French-speaking) part of Belgium. It features the Solvay Park, which abuts the immense Forêt de Soignes.

As it turned out, I had to walk nearly an hour along a busy road from the train station to reach the park. Fierce car noise! The opposite of what I’d come for! I was walking along holding my fingers over my ears and singing to drown out the sound. Crazy old man.

The Solvay park had a little castle, sealed up, and there were huge open green fields nearby. Man, it felt good to be out in those fields. I thought of a scene in As Above, So Below, when Bruegel gets to go out in nature for the first time in months:

How hard he’d been working, and for so long, with never a day in the country. In the distance he heard his dog Waf barking. Tingling with pleasure at his body’s large motions, Bruegel ran across the fields to catch up.

I ran, then went in the woods and laid down by a log and did yoga stretching for about half an hour. Coming out of the woods, I had to crawl under a hedge. It was dry and comfortable under the hedge, with a nice view of the endless green fields, so I lay there for awhile.

And then the crows got on my case! They must have had some nests in that hedge, and they thought I was lurking like an egg-eating fox. About fifty of them gathered, wheeling around overhead doing their alarm caw until till finally I crept out, the abashed fox.

On the train back, I was reading a Herald Tribune I’d picked up. Somehow I’ve stopped being self-conscious about being American. It’s what I am. I live here.

November 24, 2002. The Old Routine.

They’re putting up Christmas trees. This morning I read Wolfram, did yoga, ate a tangerine at the market, rode the bus to Grand Sablon, looked at Bruegel’s house, and sat in on a service at the exquisite Our Lady of Sablon church, with the sun streaming through the lacy stained glass High Gothic windows, bathing us in divine light. I hit the museum and looked at Magritte again, went to my office to do some email and send in my William Gibson review. Phoned Sylvia, then hit a recovery meeting on the way home. Christ, I’m lonely.

It’s starting to seem like Sylvia was never here at all. There are all these things in Brussels that I never had a chance to share with her. She was only here three weeks, she was sick for one of those weeks, for another of the weeks we were in Paris, and now she’s gone. Love in vain.

I’m still writing that Bosch-like alternate world chapter in Frek and the Elixir, with Rundy the Magic Pig peeping out, small and meek and pink, from his burrow under the hill upon which the demons are massed to get Frek. It’s been real fun writing these Bosch-style scenes. It wasn’t mentally disturbing at all, ha-ha-ha—meanwhile I’m cutting the manuscript into paper dolls and fingerpainting the wall with my own shit.

A few weeks ago I was talking to Leon Horsten about trying to imagine that everything I saw was an ongoing computation, and he was like, “Aren’t you worried that thinking that way could drive you crazy?”

And I was like, “I used to have that kind of worry, but I’ve been doing thought experiments of this nature for years, and I’ve found that my sanity is rather robust.”

I mean, I’ve done things like trying to see the fourth dimension, imagining invisible aliens all around me, thinking the world is made of mathematics, visualizing transfinitely high mountains, etc. Head trips like these always seem scarier in advance than they are when I actually take them.

December 1, 2002. Home Stretch.

So, okay, Sylvia’s back from Geneva. We kiss and hug, she spends the night, she’s there in the morning, she’s interested in me. I love to look at her kind warm face. Seeing her is like Christmas morning. And she’s still sexy. Not to mention the fact that she grew my three children in her stomach. The wife.

Speaking of wives and children, Georgia called last night to say that she’s now officially engaged to Courtney with a ring! Our Georgia. She’s really at her peak of beauty, in full bloom. How lovely that she’s found a man to undertake the great adventure with her. I think they’ll get married this summer. We’re starting to talk about wedding plans.

I had a great seminar at Leuven. Sylvia came along for the day, she likes the peaceful medieval quality of Leuven as much as I do. After class I had my best pancakes yet in Belgium, so hot and eggy and thick they were almost like an omelet.

So there are only two weeks to run on my grant. At this point I feel like just kind of “mailing it in,” in terms of any work I’m doing here. Mainly I want to hang out with Sylvia.

Thursday we went to the Grand Place downtown and had lunch at the Roy d’Espagne, complete with an open fire in the middle of the room. Friday I laid around the apartment, working on my novel, while she went shopping and bought a new red suit. Friday evening we went to the Sablon district. All the stores were open for a Christmas-tide fest , one place with museum-quality African masks. A brass band. We ate in the cozy Leffe cafe, eating mussels by an open fire. Saturday we walked over to Ixelles and checked out a museum there, a show on, of all things, Finnish Symbolism, then hung out in the Belga cafe. Sunday, today, we walked through the Marolles in the rain, had a big lunch at the place where I had dinner the night I imagined I saw Bruegel’s ghost.

It’s nice to be showing Sylvia all the things I’ve found, to be holding her hand across the table in a crowded bistro. The other day I made a decision to try and give in to her ten times a day, to do things her way, tell her I love her, listen, pay attention, etcetera—to do that ten times a day. But keeping track of the numbers is too hard, so I end up just being nice all the time. Having had those rushed three weeks together, and then having her gone for a week, and then getting her back—it feels like a second chance, and so far I’m doing it right.

Our three kids are going to turn up soon, and then we’ll all go to Geneva for Christmas, and then I guess Sylvia and I come back to Brussels and stay in a hotel for a few days. And then it’s back to California—to the sun, the greenery, the clean air, the bicycling, the healthy food, the spacious house, the easy living, the yoga classes, the friends.

December 5, 2002. Concert With Gerard Pape.

Today I did my concert performance with Gerard Pape in Paris. The gig was called “Recontres 2002: Musique et Arts Visuels.” It was held in the auditorium of an art center, a nice little space.

Gerard had written a twelve-minute electronic music piece called “Clouds,” using samples based on tympani crossed with storm sounds. It played on the eight speakers in the room, with Gerard twiddling knobs at a console all the while, adjusting the mix.

And I used my laptop to project onto a wall-sized screen a series of live demos, allotting two and a half minutes to each:

• My CAPOW cellular automaton reaction-diffusion wave shown in shades of gray, and sparingly perturbed by mouse touch clicks.
• The “boids” from my Boppers program, leaving ribbon trails and twisting around like a swarm of gnats in three-dimensional space.
• A smooth, undulating, cellular automaton wave making a blue surface like the water in a basin.
• The boid-gnats again.
• The gray clouds with the click-bombs again.

What I had in mind was a storm, with gray clouds and with lighting bolts or perhaps H-bombs flashing amid the clouds, in conjunction with a forest with gnats endlessly buzzing around each other, and beneath the gnats a peaceful blue puddle.

The piece went over well. The other composers—Curtis Roads and Paul Méfano—quietly, earnestly, said, “Bravo,” to us as we sat back down. There was an audience of about a hundred people. Very satisfying. Gerard said nothing quite like our collaboration had ever been presented in Paris.

Rather than automating the process, we used our brains as the transducers between equations, sounds, and images. That is, rather than really using the chaotic algorithms I’d shown to Sinan, Gerard ended up artistically mimicking the chaotic effects in his own way. And on my part, rather than piping Gerard’s music into a program, I’d listened to it a number of times until I saw how to turn it into a visual chaotic flow.

December 9, 2002. Satori in Paris.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about quantum-mechanical “coherence,” in the sense of being in a mixed state, also about “entanglement,” in the sense of your state matching some other system’s state.

It’s like I’ve been trying to imagine how quantum computation would feel from the inside—and discovering in the process that it’s something I do all the time. I’m reaching the point where I can turn off my forever-talking inner narration and spread out into a quantum-mechanical union with the world. Today I felt like I’d merged with the smoke from a smokestack.

I was walking in the Latin Quarter, looking at the smoke from a chimney against the sky, not naming it, just seeing it, letting its motions move within my mind. And I realized that I myself am no different than a CAPOW screen of a 2D CA with the touch mode cursor dragging across it. I am entangled with the smoke. I am coherent, but my coherence includes the smoke, I have joined the system, merged it into me. It’s like the old koan:

Q: I see a flag blowing in the wind. Is the flag moving or is the wind moving?

A: Your mind is moving.

And finally I get it, a nice moment of aha, a satori in Paris.

There’s so much that I saw and thought on this visit—too much to write down. Life’s slipping away from me, journal-wise. I’m putting all of my writing effort into Frek these days, and the musing and observing stuff goes into my conversations with Sylvia.

School’s Out

December 12, 2002. Last Lunch With The Boys.

I had lunch with the boys today, Mark and Leon, maybe for the last time. We talked some more about our paper. Perhaps we’ll get it done, one way or another, but as I say, I may just satisfy VLAC with my lecture notes or with my eventual book.

Mark and Leon seemed so cheerful and playful, puppyish almost. Not a care in the world. A good example for me, the dour old fretter.

I got my PowerPoint slides ready for my talk Saturday to the Belgian Logic Society. Leon then told me there wouldn’t be a computer projector after all, so we’ll go with a Plan B. Leon will make physical transparencies of my slides, and I’ll lay them onto an overhead projector.

I’m not all that optimistic about how well the talk will go, in terms of mechanics. I personally think the room we’ve reserved is too small, so we’ll have to switch rooms, which will eat up quite a bit of time, but I could be wrong.

Email was down today, which meant I couldn’t receive the expected request from some Jennifer at Wired for a fifth revision of my wretched seven hundred word review of William Gibson’s book, Pattern Recognition. Jennifer keeps reading the new versions and imagining that I have an “argument” or a “point” and is then puzzled why some paragraph doesn’t support her fantasies.

As if I had a point! I’m simply making additions and changes at random, and eventually the deadline will slam down and Jennifer will have to leave me alone. Argument? When I do a review, my procedure is to vamp, strut, pose, brag, settle scores, entertain, quip, pontificate, savor, appreciate. It seems old-fashioned of Jennifer to imagine that a review or essay should have a point. The way I see it, when someone buys an article from me, it’s like they’re buying fabric. A square yard of my prose.

Follow-up on the images for my Belgian Logic Society colloquium talk. In advance of the talk, Leon brought in a box of transparencies, all blank. He’d brought the wrong box. Saturday when I was giving my talk, Leon showed up ten minutes late. He had the transparencies with my images, but he’d forgotten the overhead projector, and he couldn’t find one in the building. So they moved me to a room with a computer projector—which didn’t work. Being somewhat experienced with Belgium by now—I’d prepared a Plan C, which was a printed version of the slides in miniature, six to a page, and I’d made up twenty or thirty photocopies of these sheets. I handed them out, and the talk went very well.

December 25, 2002. Christmas in Geneva.

Our three children arrived, also Georgia’s fiancé Courtney. It’s a big thrill to have them here, and I showed them some of the sights I’ve seen. The whole group of us is living together in our two-room apartment, a cozy family dog-pile.

We had a little Christmas tree, nailed to a board with no water, and pretty soon the tree was really dry. Right before we left, Rudy Jr. and I took off the decorations, and dropped the tree out of our third-story window. The tree landed—bam—upright on the sidewalk, shivered, and every single needle fell off. We laughed.

The plan was to spend Christmas with Sylvia’s father in Geneva, so I rented a large nine-seat van and we drove ten hours with me, Sylvia, and the four kids—Georgia, Isabel, Rudy Jr. and Courtney. We drove across France, though Burgundy. Lovely sunset and mist. What joy to be in the car with my whole family.

Rows of tall bare trees at the field edges, their crowns spotted with great balls of mistletoe, like tumors in the trees’ virtual flesh, making the trees look polka-dotted, and somehow playful. I felt exuberant, managing this trip, even when arriving at my father-in-law’s. Now that I’m practically a father-in-law myself, it gives me more sympathy for the old man, for his forbearance over the years.

We had a wonderful Christmas Eve, Sylvia’s brother Henry and family there as well, lots of toasts, great goose-liver to eat, fish, and chocolate truffles that Rudy Jr. brought from Brussels. The nicest moment around the big candle-lit tree was when Sylvia’s father Arpad read a family Hungarian Christmas prayer. Sylvia was, as always, the star of the family, translating the prayer into English, so graceful and well-loved—and basking in the attention. I started thinking of her as a cornucopia. A horn of plenty, who produced our three lovely kids.

Xmas morning was nice. Sylvia and the kids and I went to the church where we two were married thirty-five years ago, married by my father the Episcopal priest. Amazing to come back there with three children. Thinking of Pop and Mom there today, I cried. It felt good.

The rest of Christmas day was problematic. My father-in-law and his wife went off to visit her relatives. And my family and I drove eighty miles to the other end of Lake Geneva, along with Sylvia’s brother and his family. The idea was that we’d have a festive dinner with another in-law down there.

But while we were eating, we got a frantic call that my father-in-law’s house, empty for the day, had been seriously robbed.

When we get back to the house, we found the place looted—all the drawers emptied, a safe hammered nearly open, muddy footprints all over. A bunch of Sylvia’s money and jewelry stolen. Cries and arguments. Very stressful.

When I phoned brother Embry on the phone that evening, I told him, without filling in the details, that it had been like having thirty episodes of Dynasty compressed into half an hour.

December 26, 2002. Driving Back to Brussels

Today I have a better perspective on our painful Christmas. Like, I thought of the tale of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. And how at the end, the Whos down in Whoville were singing their Christmas song even though they’d been robbed.

And I remembered the feeling I had after communion in church Christmas morning, sitting in a pew with my beautiful wife and three fine healthy children after the wonderful drive through France together, thinking right then that, no matter what happens to me in the rest of my life, I made it as far as this moment. I reached that moment, and nothing will ever take it away from me. Last night I’d forgotten that feeling completely, but today I remembered it again.

And I got over my chagrin about our stolen jewelry. Sylvia and I can buy some new diamond earrings while we’re here. Antwerp’s all about diamonds, right? And maybe I’ll get her some new pearls for her next birthday. And as for the gold earrings, well, I just gave her a new pair for Christmas. And she was wearing those, so they weren’t stolen.

We drove back to Brussels today as planned. On the way out of town, we dropped Georgia and Courtney at the Geneva train station—they’re heading up into Germany—then we drove the ten hours back through France to Brussels: me, Sylvia, Isabel, and Rudy Jr.

And, yes, of course the drive was a bit of a drag, and we had backaches from the seats and the Christmas stress, but once again, it was a glorious thing to spend so much time boxed up with our kids.

Coming into my by-now-beloved Bruxelles, I felt happy. My home away from home. Even the Belgian rest-stops seemed cute and nice compared to the French ones. Belgium is such a comfortable, unfussy country. We’re out of our apartment now, so we checked into what I consider the nicest hotel in Brussels, the Hotel du Grand Sablon, right on my favorite square, the chic, non-touristy Grand Sablon, next door to the art museum with the Bruegels.

December 29, 2002. Diamonds. Magritte’s House.

I closed up my office at VLAC, and took everything off the computer there. Ending, ending. We saw a gallery show of Magritte’s stuff, notably a vache period drawing of a pipe whose mouthpiece is a penis, entitled La Pipe-Bite.

Turns out that “ma bite” means “my dick,” which sounds a lot like “Magritte.”

They wanted €100,000 for this drawing, which seemed high. Interesting, though, that one could buy it at all. We had an early supper with the two kids at a wonderfully funky old Surrealist meeting-place called Perroquet. After dinner, I caught one last Brussels recovery meeting. I made it through all this time here without drinking, which is great.

And the next morning, Rudy Jr. and Isabel caught a train to Berlin, planning to meet Georgia and Courtney there.

Sylvia and I went to Antwerp to look for some new diamond earrings in the diamond neighborhood on Pelikaanstraat. We ended up at a discount place called Diamondland, dealing with a Russian guy named Vladimir who had little square leather boxes, each filled with about fifty papers folded in nine, and inside each paper was one or two loose diamonds, each diamond worth from one to four thousand dollars.

We picked a nice pair of stones that seemed bigger and maybe clearer than Sylvia’s old ones. Our man Vladimir showed us how to look through his loupe, he called it a “Jewish microscope.” At first I was going to accept his first price, but Sylvia kicked me, so I started offering less.

“You want to bargain?” exclaimed Vladimir. He looked almost surprised to hear this from an American, he was like someone hearing a dog begin to talk.

But we managed to shave off a couple of hundred bucks. It was all very satisfying, and nice to have something good come out of the Christmas robbery.

While we were waiting for Vladimir’s helpers to mount the diamonds, we had maybe the best meal of the trip, at Brasserie Fouquets near the Antwerp train station on the main street leading into town. I had fish soup loaded with lobster, and a pheasant cooked Brabantine style, meaning served with grilled endive and a dark sweet sauce. It was wonderful, just the luxury meal to be eating while waiting for your diamonds to be set. Sylvia and I feeling like lovers.

And then we made it to the old part of Antwerp and I showed her Bruegel’s Dulle Griet, also a lot of fashionable stores. Antwerp is cuter than Brussels.

The streets were unbelievably full. It turned out everyone from the neighboring districts of Flanders was in town to see a post-Christmas parade. We sat out most of the parade in a place with these great plain unfinished wood tables that you see in Antwerp. The place was a gin bar, it turned out, with scores of special gins listed on a board over the bar. But we had tea and coffee.

And then we went out and caught the tail end of the parade in the rain, a float with people in front of a clock face wearing clock hands on their arms to symbolize the New Year—followed by a Santa’s sleigh, the mayor of Antwerp in a carriage, and a final marching band, the musicians with weathered Bruegelian faces.

Today, Sunday, our big excursion was to go to the house where René and Georgette Magritte lived from 1930 - 1954, from ages 32 to 56. A very small house, and they only lived on the ground floor, renting out the two upper floors. The place had a living room, a bedroom, a dining room that Magritte used as his studio, and a kitchen and bathroom in back. Georgette provided the museum with some of their possessions—tables, chairs, a clock, some china dogs, a lamp, hat rack, bowler, umbrella, axe, and so on. The walls were painted lovely Magritte colors.

It was almost hallucinatory to see these rooms—they looked so much like his paintings, and the objects in them were so close to the objects he painted. Everything seemed realer than real. Surreal, in other words. Like seeing Platonic forms, the originals upon which a great artist’s works were based.

Upstairs were a few drawings, photos, papers, etc. We saw an intensely erotic drawing of a naked woman lying back in an armchair with a leg cocked up so that her vagina shows. She’s fondling the large erect penis of a man leaning over her from the side. He’s clothed, with only his genitals exposed. Mmmm. Now that’s good art!

There was a photo of Magritte’s casket at his funeral. It looked so small. And so archetypal. He himself painted caskets several times.

The house was out to hell and gone, by the way, in a working-class part of Brussels not too far from the Atomium. A complex tram ride.

When we left M’s house, it was pouring rain, so we ran into a somewhat down-at-the-heels brasserie and, not wanting to try anything risky, ordered pancakes, and then a cheese plate. And they brought out really great cheese. We were kind of surprised how good it was, and then I was thinking, they don’t bother making and serving bad food in Belgium. What a concept.

Pouring rain all day long.

We had one last supper at the expensive but always lively Vieux St. Martin in the Grand Sablon, notable for serving food non-stop. Usually in the early evening there are lots of people in there eating. Most of them seem to be fashionable, wealthy Belgians, around my age. Well-tanned. Sometimes in lively family groups.

I finally dared to have the “stoemp” dish that I’d had my eye on for three and a half months. It’s a central mountain of orange—mashed carrots, parsnips and potatoes. And circling the mountain is a twelve-inch-long house-made pork sausage. Like the worm Ourobouros who girdles the Earth, biting his own tail. I’d been a bit leery of attacking the World Worm with knife and fork, uneasy about what vengeance he might wreak, but I took on the stoemp and survived, in fact it was yummy.

Going up to our hotel room, I felt light and happy. There were so many hurdles to jump here, and I cleared them all. And now it’s back to sunny Californee, golden Californi-yay.

December 30, 2002. Conclusions?

I keep feeling I ought to think back over things I learned on the trip and sum up. Draw some conclusions. Learn a lesson. As if life worked that way. But I might as well try:

• I can live alone for a longish time, but eventually I need a woman to live with, preferably Sylvia.
• Philosophers aren’t interested in pushing arguments to sharp conclusions. They like to raise points, to air questions, to muddy the water, to pursue tangents, to unleash hares, to savor red herrings. Once in awhile this does lead to a conclusion.
• I deeply need nature.
• Nick Herbert is right: the irreducible core of consciousness is a macroscopic mixed-state quantum system that actively protects itself from collapsing into a single state.
• I had satori in Paris, seeing that chimney smoke against the sky.

San Francisco Bay Area

February 12, 2003. Wolfram Speech. The Kids.

So I finished the Wolfram review for the Monthly, started teaching again, and settled in. It’s nice to be back to knowing what’s going on. And to have the nice green hills all around. But of course being home is a little dull.

Low energy today. I think I’m coming down with a cold. Caught it last night sitting in the drafty first row of a big auditorium at San Jose State, after introducing Stephen Wolfram, who came here to give a speech about that big book of his that I’ve been studying, A New Kind of Science. He drew a really big crowd, several hundred.

Before the talk, I had dinner with Wolfram and some people from our computer science department. A treat. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I find it relatively rare that I talk to a person whom I consider to be truly intelligent. Sylvia came along for the dinner too, I was happy to be able to show Wolfram to her, this rara avis I’ve been going on and on about since September.

As well as my undergrad computer games programming course, I’m teaching a graduate software projects course where we’re making a website with programs illustrating Wolfram’s ideas. What can I say, I’m the guy’s legman. He was urging me to write a nonfiction book about his new ideas, and I’m certainly well positioned to do so—the book would be more or less the tome about philosophy and computers that I was thinking about in Brussels.

But I still can’t quite come up with a really fresh concept that would make my tome-writing exercise be more than what I call “jacking off into a used rubber.” By this, I mean that I want to avoid simply repeating thoughts that I’ve already expressed in my other nonfiction books. Some writers successfully manage to write the same book over and over, but that’s not for me.

Sylvia’s birthday was this weekend. Georgia and Rudy Jr. were with us in San Francisco. These days it seems like the kids are often annoyed with me. Frowns and flare-ups. I remember how I looked down on my father in my late thirties and early forties. It’s so weird to have my life being turned around and played back at me this way. Inside out and upside down.

February 21, 2003. Sick and Depressed.

I’ve been sick since February 12, ten days. The main fever is over now, but I still have a low fever, and I feel like I’m in a bubble all the time. It’s a virus, but it feels as if I’m depressed. I take no pleasure in the things I used to enjoy. Writing, exercise, teaching, eating, talking to people—it’s all ashes in my mouth these days. Absurd how big a difference a half a degree of body temperature makes. How radically contingent my well-being.

I wish I was dead, six feet under, pushing up daisies, in the Void, over and done with, gone and forgotten, a blank slate, out of the picture, done for, eaten by worms, a footnote to history, long gone, a closed case. Wishing all that puts me into a slightly better mood. The more depressingly I write, the happier I feel. The old “incantation of evil” move.

I’m sitting on the terrace at Borders Books in Los Gatos, soaking up a bit of sun. Paul Di Filippo sent me a draft of an essay about me that he’s writing for the program book at Readercon in Boston this July where I’m to be the Guest of Honor. Very nice. And yesterday the San Jose State college newspaper had a profile about me. Egoboo, as we call it in the SF world. Ego boost.

But of course—sticking to being depressed—there’s something melancholy in seeing your career summed up. “And now he slides below the horizon, and we see the fading of his once-golden dreams, forever unfulfilled.”

Paul Di Filippo’s appreciation gives the impression that I’m mellow and enlightened. Yet my family thinks of me as uptight. No man is a hero to his valet, his wife, or his children. I’m very bitter about Bruegel not getting reviewed by the New York Times.

More and more often these days I feel like my father. I’m even wearing my hair in an old-man fashion, the silver-gray hair in a straight part along the left of my head. And when I give unwanted advice to my children, I hear the same resonant, baying mucus-voice tones of Pop.

One bright spot is that I’m getting along quite well with Sylvia. She shares my interest in the kids, and my sense that we’re becoming somewhat superfluous to them. She takes pleasure in my little achievements. And she’s just as freaked about old age as me.

I guess a big reason that I feel blue is that I haven’t had the energy to work on my Frek this week. I’m anxious about a possible failure of the imagination, a drying up of the cornucopia—just now when it’s time to write the last chapter.

I’m desperate to resolve my anxiety over whether or not I can successfully wrap the thing up. Go git ’em, Rudy. You can do it. Nail it. You don’t have to punt—run for the touchdown on fourth down! Rah rah.

Get on the keyboard and the Muse will come.

March 3, 2003. Finished Frek.

So okay, I finished the last chapter of Frek and the Elixir, the day before yesterday, Saturday night. I’d gone out to a recovery group meeting, and Sylvia was asleep when I got home. So then I sat up late writing, and I nailed the last scene. I’m really happy with it. What a journey it’s been. I can’t believe I did it. One step at a time, it adds up. Like a coral reef. Polishing the ending a little more today.

“It’s all together,” said Frek, thinking back over the long quest. “We’re done.”

I’m going to have to find something new to do with my life. It’s a shock finishing a novel, like stepping off a cliff. I had some good email with Bill Gibson about this:

Me: “I just finished writing this long, somewhat fantastic novel I’ve been working on for nearly two years, and I have this desperate loose-ends feeling I get when I finish a book. Sometimes people say it’s like having a baby. But it’s also like being born and out of the cozy womb.”

Gibson: “I know what you mean about emerging from a book. I’m sort of like something asymmetrical scuttling around without its accustomed shell.”

Me: “That’s rich, love it. I also think of a magpie without a nest to stick things in. We’re lucky to be writers.”

I can’t believe how high a level I’m working at. Amazing how the Frek chapters slowly accumulated. As slowly yet ineluctably as a tree pushing forth from the ground, despite the frosts and winters.

March 29, 2003. Big Sur & Esalen with John Shirley.

I took my fellow cyberpunk writer friend John Shirley backpacking to a spot I love, at the south end of Big Sur. It’s the Vicente Flats campground, which is five miles off of Route 1. We camped Tuesday and Wednesday nights, then spent Thursday night at Esalen.

Vicente Flats is the same spot where I went in June, 1996, alone, just getting into recovery, and I had a spiritual experience there. And I was at the same spot in June, 2000, again alone, and that time it was very spiritual, too, although also kind of spooky. This time I took John Shirley along, and it was more complicated. Here are my notes on the trip, some taken from jottings on the folded-in-four pieces of paper that I typically carry in my hip pocket.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003. My birthday’s come and gone, and I’m in Big Sur, on the ridge above Vicente Flats and Kirkwood where I camped three years ago—I made a painting of that time, called Big Sur. I brought John Shirley along this time—I felt uneasy about going alone. It’s good to have John along, but he’s very much out of his element. He wore street shoes and thin socks, he got blisters, he broke (then fixed) his glasses, and he didn’t get it about helping to set up the camp. I put up our tents, gathered the wood, built the fire, cooked the dinner, cleaned the dishes, and filtered some bottles of water, doing all this on my own, and feeling somewhat resentful.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003. I keep wondering what to do next, now that Frek and the Elixir is all but done. Not that I need to decide right now about the next project. First finish Frek-polishing, then finally write that short story I’ve always wanted to do, “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club.” I feel uneasy about Frek today. Maybe it’s no good. I saw so many holes on my recent read-through.

All this worry and I’m in a sea of beauty. Green hills, wonderfully curved, the gnarly oaks, fractal white cloud puffs, the Pacific Ocean hanging anomalously high in the sky, fog-quilted. Yuccas, flowering sweet pea vines, fungi, red tail hawks, bumblebees, and banana slugs. John Shirley is waiting alone at our campsite below.

Walking down from the ridge towards the camp I pause in a broad meadow dusted with a low layer of tiny white forget-me-nots. A single huge oak. Its dappled shadow pool is perfect Art Nouveau. Too bad John won’t come see this.

Back at the camp, I walked along a stream with John discussing the ripples, and then we sat under a hundred meter redwood, John reading Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, about G. I. Gurdjieff, and me looking at The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita by Sri Krishna Premi. Quite improbably, John lugged these two tomes in his pack and, when we reached our campground, presented me with my book. Extra weight on a backpacking trip, insane, but we had a pleasant interlude under the tree, looking at our books together. Two curmudgeonly beatniks seeking the Light. The Dharma Bums thing.

Thursday, March 27, 2003. So yesterday I slept well, and today John and I two had a good hike back out to Route 1. I was having some Big-Sur-parting feelings:

• My soul is as a wineglass in the waterfall of beauty, too small to hold it, even though I long to seize, possess, and hold on to it all.
• Sorrow at being about to leave, once again, this most cherished spot.
• Remorse over getting irritated with John about the camp chores yesterday.
• Concern that, looking back over the past year, I’ve often quarreled with people.

After I express that first thought to John, he goes into a rap about the meditative practice of mindfulness, that is, not fastening onto thoughts, and being in the moment.

I begin doing mindfulness as I walk, and it’s working, more or less, and after ten minutes I thank John for the suggestion.

“You’re not doing it right at all,” he says.

So I yell at him.

We show up at Esalen and get in a big tub with a bunch of people who are taking a class on John Campbell’s teaching. John and I were laughing and happy. There are different circles of people at Esalen: the newbie seekers from whom the profits flow, the pro teachers and revenants, and the leathery hard-bitten Big Sur hippies who run the place. I’m thinking of John and I as seasoned artist-practitioners.

We’ve rented cheap bunks in a communal room. I leave John there and go outside.

Then I’m by the ocean, with the sun going down, me on the rocky Esalen beach, alone, below the house where Terence McKenna and I led a seminar five or six years ago. I have an urge to send the New York Times Book Review a letter defending Terence against a reviewer who, last week, said that, in Terence’s last days, you couldn’t tell if you were talking to Terence, or to his brain tumor. Actually Terence was the same all the time.

A seagull looks at me. Its eyes disappear when seen directly head on. I use my pen to sketch him on my pocket scrap of paper, drawing him in five or six positions: staring out to sea, cawing, looking at me, looking down at his feet, glancing at the shore. Sulfur smell from the stream raging into the sea. The sea here is somehow wholly unlike in Santa Cruz. It’s Big Sur sea, nay, Esalen sea. How lucky I am to be here.

I say, “I love you,” to the seagull. He bows. We do it again. Maybe the seagull is Terence.

Book idea: Memoirs of a Crazy Mathematician. Settling scores, taking credit. If I wrote a memoir, I wouldn’t have to learn anything new, and I could talk about myself all the time. I’m old enough. Fifty-seven. That’s really, really old. Book as press-kit.

Patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel. A memoir is the last resort of a writer. But would I really want to use that title? Me—crazy?

I climb the steps to the lawn and look back at the setting sun, warped by clouds and atmosphere to the exact shape of a UFO, I sketch it. A vertical shaft of light streams up from it. Perfect.

I recall how, hiking down the mountain today, I saw an isosceles down-pointing triangle of ocean, the same shape as a woman’s delta of pubic hair, the Divine Triangle, seen from the mountain trail as a triangle of sea, Gaia’s womb. And spreading out on either side of me on the trail were the ridges of Gaia’s open, welcoming legs. Earth is Gaia’s body, the sky her mind, her face the Sun.

At dinner John flies into a rage over something that one of the women serving food says to him. He was staring blankly at her while she put food on his plate, and she said, perhaps a bit reprovingly, “Hello!” And then after giving him his food, she added, “You’re welcome!” In other words, she was being a little snippy. The fact that John is wearing a cowboy hat isn’t helping the Esalen people to like him.

When we sat down with our food, John wouldn’t stop muttering about that woman. I said to lighten up and enjoy the meal. John had lost it. I started a conversation with the people next to us at the table. John stalked off to spend the rest of the evening lying on his bunk in our room.

I looked in on him, and we argued. I was annoyed at him for making a scene, and he felt I was unsympathetic. Back out in the main lounge, I mistakenly drank three cups of blackberry sage tea, thinking it was herbal, but it was caffeinated, and that night I couldn’t sleep for a really long time. Replaying my argument with John in my head.

We were in a room with six bunk beds, with my bed under John’s. It bothered me to be physically coupled to his creakings, also to have the plywood bottom of his bed being so close to my face. In the wee am hours, I relocated myself to the one other vacant bed, an upper bunk across the room.

The other guys sharing our room drifted in very late.

I had visions of a spaceship crew’s quarters, and an image of Shirley crawling towards me across the ceiling of the room, his fingers sticking to the ceiling like a gecko’s. At that point I actually felt some joy at being embroiled in such a gnarly emotional scene, so different from my normally placid life. And then came sleep and troubled dreams.

I rose at 6 am, glad to have my long space voyage over with. I went to the beach again, then to yoga class, then to breakfast with Shirley. When I saw him, I shook hands with him and said I was sorry about our argument, and that I wanted to be friends today. But he didn’t want to talk.

Most of the way home John pretended to sleep, though really he was awake, just dogging it. He perked up a little when I played some Frank Zappa. Nearing the San Jose train station, I again tried to smooth things out. Again it didn’t work.

Finally, just as we said goodbye, John spoke up.

“You can’t expect me to fit in at Esalen. When I had my band, I used to break beer bottles over my head until the blood ran and I’d dive off the stage into the audience.”

A valid point. I can’t expect everyone to be a yuppie like me. Along these lines, when I got home, I emailed another cyberpunk friend, Bruce Sterling, that I’d had kind of a hard time hiking with John, and that John hadn’t liked Esalen.

Bruce emailed back, “You’re lucky Shirley didn’t shoot everyone at Esalen.”

Around suppertime today I called John to check if he was okay, also to clear up the lingering bad vibes. He sounded cautious and perhaps abashed.

He said, “We had twisty trails, steep ravines, and crumbling paths but some great views.” Meaning this symbolically, I think.

“It was better than staying home, man,” I replied. And we left it at that.

People talk about meditation techniques, but with little result. For years I was in the dead-end of looking for a path that was complex and esoteric. But now I feel that enlightenment is about being a decent compassionate human being, and not about energy spheres or vibration levels. I remember Ram Dass’s story about the guru coming into town from umpteen years in the cave and someone jostles him, and the so-called guru screams, “Watch your step, asshole!” Ram Dass says that this moment revealed how little work had in fact been done.

I went to my recovery meeting and talked a little about my hike. Compared to the other guys’ serious real-world problems, my tiff with John felt very picayune. All the guys at the meeting really heard was that I’d had some time off, and that I’d managed to go backpacking in Big Sur—something they’d never done.

I constantly need to remember how lucky I am, with a good job, a nice family, a great house, a good career, etc.

April 8, 2003. My Microscope.

I bought myself a binocular Leica phase-contrast microscope, and it showed up four days ago. So I’ve been having a lot of fun looking through it.

My initial goal was to reproduce the experience I had in the eighth grade, in spring, 1959, when the science teacher at Louisville Country Day let us troop to his desk to look through a microscope at a bustling crowd of paramecia, probably from a hay infusion—a hay infusion being what you get if you take some rain water and put grass or leaves in it and let it stand for a few days, producing scads of bacteria and the protozoa that feed upon the bacteria. I still remember my astonishment at seeing so many critters during that 1959 demo, and my intense desire to look at them some more. But all I got was a second or two.

My appetite was reawakened when, a few years ago, in a large-format Imax movie about size-scale, I saw an image of protozoa bumbling around near some green algae.

And now I’ve got the real thing. The scope didn’t come with any glass slides, so over the weekend I was just looking into drops of water sitting on curved rectangles of transparent plastic I’d cut from a drinking cup.

In the very first drop that I examined, I found a huge segmented worm or nymph or something, and then a crowd of water-balloon protozoa slithering around in a thicket-fragment of moss. The drop was culled from an old giant clamshell that sits by the sprinkler in our back yard. The worm thing was awesome, all of its cells were transparent, like glass, but with shadowy shapes within. The creature consisted of perhaps a score of cells in all—it was like a glass model assembled from transparent gobbets. But it was highly animated—urgent, trembling, and with tiny bristles and hairs.

To get more samples, I made trips to the creek in the gully below our house, and up to the pond on the top of St. Joseph’s hill, near where I smoked pot with Arf and saw the UFOs in 1995 when I was starting Saucer Wisdom.

Speaking of UFOs, on Google I found a site devoted to the thesis that the atmosphere is full of “air protozoa,” which science has thus far resisted acknowledging. It’s kind of a stuzzy idea. The real protists are almost just water—they’re light-weight protein sheets and skeins within the fluid water, so maybe there could be similarly evanescent beings in the fluid air. I’m tempted to write an SF story or novel about this notion.

Today I saw a paramecium whom I felt sorry for because his water drop was evaporating. The drying leads, I guess, to their death, unless they maybe encyst themselves. Did the protozoan sense his impending doom? He was moving around in a desultory, depressed kind of way, like someone scuffling through the debris of an abandoned fairground, knocking aside the abandoned fragments littering the ground.

There are so-called ciliates and flagellates among the protozoa—a ciliate is covered with short beating hairs which are hard to see, and the flagellates have one or two long, whip-like tails. They seem so purposeful a lot of the time, but I know from my artificial life computer simulations that it’s quite easy to generate seemingly complex behavior by combining a few simple drives, such as these: go straight, turn every so often, head towards oxygen, head towards food, head away from light.

Actually my protozoa don’t seem to mind the light, even though it must be incredibly intense under the lens. I have a bright little halogen light at the bottom of the scope which is focused upwards onto the, harrumph, specimen via a set of lenses called a condenser. The flat thing that the slides sit on is aptly called the stage.

Back to the light, yeah, I guess the protozoa might not see the light. I mean, these are single-celled organisms. They don’t have, like, an eye. Can they even be said to have brains? Not really. But there is a lot of stuff inside them, so many sparkling structures.

“So I’m unicellular, so what? That makes me less than you?”

God’s mind is everywhere.

April 10, 2003. Bacteria and Spermatozoa.

Rudy Jr. came down with some microscope slides and cover glasses on Monday—a belated birthday present. We looked at a drop of one of my infusions, I’ve made three from the pond on the hill, one from the creek, and one from the stagnant water in the backyard clamshell, refreshing the infusions with bottled water and blades of grass. As well as the busy ciliates, Rudy noticed some smaller capsule-shaped spots—bacteria! Hay bacilli, yes, three micrometers long.

The fact that my scope is “phase contrast” means that even if something is transparent, it can produce a shadowed or glistening effect. An area of water that might look quite plain under ordinary lighting, will, with phase contrast illumination, show a silvery background with dark shapes that, when you adjust the focus, reveal filigrees of dots. Schools of bacteria. The filigrees remind me of the kinds of fractals that M. C. Escher drew to represent coats of mail or nests of snakes. Patterns like this occur in mathematics when you plot the sets of solutions to certain algebraic equations in the complex plane.

Anyway, Rudy and I were able to see the bacteria that the paramecia were feeding upon. Amping up to 400x magnification with the phase contrast turned on, I was even able to see the internals of the bacteria. I noticed that many of them were in pairs—these were individual bacteria in the act of reproducing by splitting in two. The protozoa tool through the swarms of bacteria like rapid, all-devouring blimps.

Over the days, the bacteria multiplied into incalculable numbers. There were definitely millions of them, and maybe billions. Each of them individually visible through my scope. Sometimes they cluster into a sphere or a mat, or into a roundish haystack or into a band, like the tidal debris at the edge of a sea.

The individual bacilli flip from left to right like little blinker switches, and the combined mass of them shimmers. The paramecia are continually diving in to gouge out a few. Rather than bunching up, some of the other bacteria arrange themselves in rows, linked together like chains of sausages.

It’s all amazing, and it’s infecting my mind. Sylvia on the couch or in the bed now seems like a long, huggable paramecium. I feel as if my body is transparent, with the Great Microscopist looking into each of my cells. The highway traffic, people in crowds, even the flow of my thoughts—it’s all like jostling protozoa.

This shows every sign of happily blossoming into one of my “Everything Is ___” trips. In the past the blank has been filled in with: infinite sets, Love, information, curved space, fractals, chaos, stories, cellular automata, artificial life processes, computations, god, and probably a few more. Someday I’ll enumerate my successive dadas—in French, “dada” means hobbyhorse or obsession, a usage which predates Dadaism.

My college friend Don Marritz’s first question about my microscope was, “Have you looked at your sperm?”

Sylvia was curious about this herself…

It took the phase contrast and every bit of the 1000x magnification to see my sperm cells, but there they were, beating their long horse-hair tails, wagging their one-track-mind heads, pointier than I’d imagined. Love in vain. They’re alive in a limited kind of way. They don’t eat, they only live for a half hour, but they’re active and responsive—while they last.

April 15, 2003. The Protozoan Zoo

I’ve begun thinking of my infusoria (another name for protozoa) as my pets. They’re living in infusions all over my desk—my homies, my dawgs. I say “Hi” to them when I come home. My original infusions are nearly two weeks old now, and clouded with bacteria. My friend Greg Gibson was kidding me about them on the phone. He says that, crotchety person that I am, I’m bit by bit learning to get along with other beings—starting with paramecia.

I got a really good new sample from the pool in the rotten crotch of an old oak tree on the top of the hill above our house. Here are some of the things I’ve seen.

Paramecia that tumble as they swim. Their cilia are arranged in a spiral fashion so the beating makes them spin as well as go forward. Looking at a tumbling paramecium, you can make out that one side is flattish, the other side more domed. Certain ones of them are smaller at the forward end, with a kind of scallop in the side there—the mouth. If you think of the smaller end as a heel, the shape is a bit like a slipper, although they’re moving heel-first.

Protozoan reproduction. I saw a pair of paramecia that had only half divided. You’d think they’d be still and calm while the Blessed Event is taking place, but they were as hyper as the others. Completely unaware. Like people playing videogames while they fuck.

Calm spheres of spheres. Big round protozoa sitting still, their bodies filled with smaller droplets. They resemble a pool of vinaigrette salad-dressing. Every so often the polar cap pooches out a bit to ingest something.

Vorticellae. These fellows resemble tulips or wine glasses—they’re cups with a long contractile stem that’s typically fastened to a bit of dead vegetable matter or to a mat of bacteria. Around the lips of the cup are beating cilia. Quite often, one of the guys unexpectedly snaps his cord short, and it coils up in a helical pattern.

Types of bacteria. They’re called cocci, bacilli, or spirelli depending on whether they’re spheres, capsules, or spirals. Within some nasty decaying water that had a glob of deliquescing frog eggs in it, I saw a bunch of spirals winding through the water, like screws in wood. Spirelli!

Rotifers. These guys are maybe fifty times the size of a paramecium. I assume they’re made up of several component cells. They’re shaped a bit like a Y, with very short Y arms. The arms often snap together, acting in these cases as a dragon mouth, perhaps biting off a bit of rotten leaf. The body of the rotifer is transparent, and I think of myself, qua microscopist, as analogous to a four-dimensional hyperbeing who’s able to see right through a human’s body.

Within a rotifer’s body some tiny organ beats, not exactly a heart, it’s more like a pump that’s sucking in water. But the more interesting thing that the rotifers do is to generate a pair of whirlpools. The ends of their Y arms have cilia that beat so as to generate “immense” maelstroms that are four or five times the size of the rotifer itself. Paramecia, bacteria, and specks of vegetable matter are swirled around in these whirlpools. It’s a very violent and intense natural phenomenon, despite taking place between a slide and its cover glass!

I’m reminded of E. A. Poe’s tale, “Descent into the Maelstrom.” Paramecia drawn in like doomed ships, or like Nicean barks sucked into the maw of Scylla by the swirl of Charybdis.

I found dozens, or hundreds, or maybe even thousands of these rotifers in the sample I took from the crotch of the oak tree on St. Joseph’s hill. They move so intemperately. Before finding the rotifers, I’d thought things were relatively calm at the micro level. But these guys are like savage dragons. Like Irish setters romping in a calm pond. Actually, I got sick of the way the rotifers were stirring things up, the clumsy oafs, and I began trying to cultivate rotifer-free infusions.

Amebas or amoebae. These are perhaps the most well known of the protozoa, probably due to their relatively large size. You examine them in high-school bio classes because they’re large enough to see with an inexpensive scope. But in the wild, they’re fairly rare. I’ve only seen two or three of them so far. They moved surprisingly fast, sliming along on their celebrated pseudopods.

As the days go by, populations of fresh protozoa appear and disappear in the infusions standing in jars on my desk. Today I saw a new kind of paramecium—it turns out that paramecia come in a zillion varieties, like birds. The new ones today have tufts of cilia at either end. They’re like grizzled prospectors. They move impatiently, abruptly, like cars in a speeded-up-action film. The water of their infusion is cloudy with bacteria, and I can see that the cilia of these tiny tough customers are beating up maelstroms as well. Setting up a whirlpool by your mouth is a good way to get food.

I’ve moved beyond phase contrast to another lighting method that’s called dark field illumination. Here the background becomes dark, and the critters are lit with golden highlights, showing the sensual, undulating bumps in their surfaces.

Lovely.

April 16, 2003. Hacking. Lucky Wander Boy.

When not playing with protozoa, I’ve been in a bloodlust hacking frenzy, integrating some funky public domain C code into my Pop videogame-programming framework. The code is for loading so-called meshes and skins into our games, producing small, mobile, colored 3D game characters—penguins, monsters, robots, tyrannosaurs, whatever. You can download libraries of meshes and skins online, these files dating back to the mid-ʼ90s computer game Quake.

I hadn’t hacked code this fanatically since last August, before my semester in Brussels. I’d forgotten how much hacking hurts, both mentally and physically. The daze, the lack of ability to focus one’s mind afterwards. The overall malaise. The aches in arm and back. The emotional numbness.

My friend and fellow CS prof Michael Beeson says hacking is like being a drug-addict. “You don’t get around to doing all the normal life-support things that you need to do.”

I was especially vulnerable for this onset of a hacking frenzy as Sylvia had just left town to visit our daughter Georgia in Manhattan to confer on wedding plans.

In the old days, when I was home alone, I’d drink and smoke pot 24/7 until the last day before Sylvia came home. I remember one time in Lynchburg going to a bar in the morning and clamoring for a drink even though they weren’t really open yet. I had a taste of that same pattern this week—I put in a twelve-hour hacking session one day, and the next morning I got up early and put in two more hours without even eating breakfast. It’s like—run your obsession for days at a time without ever pausing to look up.

But today, I swear, I’m not gonna start hacking. I want to work on my revisions for Frek and the Elixir. Marking up Frek on my read-through made me feel bad about it, and now fixing the glitches makes me feel good. When I’m revising a book I often think of the I Ching pattern called, “Work on What Has Been Spoiled.”

And today I’ll do some yoga to help alleviate the aches from my latest Big Hack.

I just read Lucky Wander Boy, by D. B. Weiss. It’s a novel about a guy obsessed with a (fictional) classic videogame, a hapless geek-chic poseur, wonderfully presented. Great book. I loved it when the hero, Adam Pennyman, is playing a violent Japanese combat videogame with a hacker friend, and the friend says, “Your kung fu grows stronger, Pen-Yi-Mon.”

And I dig that the book mentions this real-world open-source program called MAME, meaning Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It’s an obscure bit of software that Rudy Jr. introduced me to, and which I really admire. You can use MAME to play any of the old games, like Pac-Man, or Super Mario, or Star Castle, or Paperboy, or Burger Time…it’s great.

I did feel like Lucky Wander Boy had a bit too much wheenk, that is, too much internal monologue about the main character’s needs and obsessions. Phil Dick had a lot of wheenk—also more than I like to see. And best-selling novels tend to have, in my humble opinion, way too much wheenk. I like Baudelaire’s put-down of wheenky writers: “Their hearts chatter in reams.”

Some might say that I myself tend not to have enough wheenk in my novels, hard-boiled minimalist cyberpunk that I am. Perhaps my aversion to wheenk is a mask that covers my anxiety about my emotional deadness and my lack of writerly empathy? Indeed, by way of making my books more appealing, I do sometimes try and shoehorn in more wheenk.

The ending of Lucky Wander Boy is a cool infinite regress, like a game within a game within a game… When I was starting out as a writer, I wanted to end one of my books that way, in a circular loop or in an endless regress, and I asked my wise mentor Robert Sheckley about the idea, and he said he’d been tempted to use that move with every single book he’d written, but that he never did, because to the reader it comes across as a cop-out.

So I’ve resisted the lure of the regress, but I think it works nicely in Weiss’s book. Of course it might also have been good if he’d written one more chapter with, like, the hero getting it on with the Japanese game designer woman who’s the proprietor of the Super Lucky Spank brothel.

I’m awed by the great blurbs Weiss got, and I’m envious that he managed to use SF moves without being tarred by our sales-killing genre brush. I plan to recommend Lucky Wander Boy to my CS 134: Game Programming class, not that many of my students seem like they would ever once in their lives read a novel.

April 22, 2003. The Color of the Internet

I went to spend the afternoon with Rudy Jr. in San Francisco. He’s still running his Monkeybrains internet service provider biz, and he’s hosting some websites for businesses. Today he showed me the “cage” that he maintains in a so-called server hotel in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood. The cage is like one of those wire-walled personal storage areas you might see in the basements of an apartment building. Rudy’s Monkeybrains cage is full of servers on shelves, also a big router box. The servers are flat computers running a type of Unix. They’re called pizza boxes.

Rudy pulls a rubber plug out of the back of one of the pizza boxes and tells me to look into the plug. I see a faint red light, grainy with information. The output of an optical fiber line.

“That’s the color of the internet,” says Rudy. “You just saw a gigabit per second.”

Rudy says some of the servers belong to an “Eric” in Hong Kong who hosts Danish porno merchants on them. Rudy’s hosting the host.

“The internet is a pyramid scheme,” he explains. “You buy some and you sell it to people lower on the pyramid for more money. What I’m doing is to keep moving higher on the pyramid.”

April 30, 2003. Selling Frek to Tor.

So David Hartwell gave us an offer for Frek and the Elixir. He says they could slot it into their schedule for next spring, which would be nice.

The amount he offered was good, more than for Spaceland or for As Above, So Below, but less than the amount that I’d mentally pegged as the minimum I would take. So I wondered where else I could try.

My agent Susan Protter started reasoning with me. Scholastic Books of Harry Potter fame already told her they probably wouldn’t pay me more than Tor, and they would take months to decide. Susan’s feeling was I oughtta stay with Tor. She says not to try another publisher because I won’t do better.

I do have an issue about the font-size in Tor’s edition of my Bruegel novel, which makes the text look very cramped. And since Frek is even longer, if they try and shoehorn it into a small-sized book it would look terrible. Susan says David agrees to do his best to make sure they use a bigger book size and, hopefully, a larger font. But he can’t promise anything. He says if the Spaceland sales are holding up when they go into production, then I can for sure have Frek in a larger-size book.

If I leave Tor now I’d be burning down my last and best publishing connection. And there’s always a next time to hope for a better treatment. I have to earn the good treatment by doing well in the marketplace. That last argument gets my goat of course.

But the publishers don’t really look at the book per se, they look at the sales numbers on your previous books. Susan claims I’m still haunted by the bad sales of Saucer Wisdom, which truly bombed.

It would be kind of nice to just say yes to Tor and let the book come out. Dave Hartwell says he’s already had a sketch of the cover made and he can put it in next spring’s list. Come on, Ru, A decent advance and a rush to publication is bad news? Don’t be a sulker.

Susan just phoned and twisted my ear to the point where I said, “OK.”

Her voice got hard then, tired of my waffling, “You just sold a book, be happy!”

All right already.

May 18, 2003. Firing my Agent

I finally got up the nerve to fire my agent Susan Protter. I tend to hold her partly responsible for the somewhat lackluster state of my career. I got the idea for taking this move when she talked me out of sending Frek to Scholastic Books, the publishers of the Harry Potter series. I figured my book was somewhat in the same vein. But Susan thought that was a waste of time and too big of a long-shot. Of course she may have been right. But I’m dissatisfied and I feel I need a change.

I figure my next book will be a nonfiction book of some kind, and I want to use the eminent science-book agent John Brockman—he of the $1.3M advance for The Last Whole Earth Catalog, he who was even able to get my flaky friend Nick Herbert a $50K advance for a book about the nature of mind, he of the illustrious client list as long as your arm. I figure he’s worth a try.

And what galvanizes me into leaving Susan just now is that I got a voice mail from her saying that she’d talked to John Oakes of Four Walls Eight Windows about me doing a nonfiction book for him. That’s certainly a possibility, which in fact I’ve informally discussed with Oakes myself. But if I don’t want Susan to be handling this deal, I need to cut our ties right now.

So I snail-mailed her a letter thanking for all her good work, then saying I wanted to try a new approach, and that I didn’t want her to represent me for my next book. My fellow SF writer and now-ex-Protter-client Terry Bisson told me a couple of months ago that he’d used this procedure to escape Susan’s clutches fairly painlessly. The key would seem to be the written, snail-mailed letter. Doing it on the phone would be impossible. Susan is too good an agent to take no for an answer on the phone. And an email would be too informal, too easily mistaken for a fleeting snit.

So then I began waiting for the penny to drop. Terry Bisson said Susan was very nice about him quitting, very professional. But, who knows, maybe I’ll be a special case.

A few days later I talked on the phone with Susan Protter about me getting a new agent for my next book. She didn’t let go easily. She argued that since she’d already had a conversation with John Oakes of Four Walls Eight Windows about me possibly doing my next nonfiction book with him, that meant that she had initiated my next book project and that now I was bound to seeing it through with her, and I can’t do it with Brockman.

This was exactly what I’d feared she’d say. I got angry. I said it was unacceptable, and that I didn’t want her to try and weasel in on my next project. She said she was getting screwed, which is absurd, as she’s agented me for twenty books and hasn’t managed to break me out into the big-time.

Changing tack, she asked why I wasn’t happy with her, she said it was a bad time for me to leave her, what with the new Frek contract coming through. She said it would be bad for her reputation as an agent to have me leave. I just kept saying I wanted to try someone new. And then finally she said all right.

I’ll still have to deal with Susan concerning the books she already represented in the past, as she has the agency-clause right to represent me for any further editions of those books. The agreement is that she won’t have to turn those rights over to a new agent until she retires. But I no longer think she ever will retire. And if she ever does retire, she won’t ever admit to being retired.

May 22, 2003. Big Sur Pine Satori. Isabel and Gus.

I just got back from two nights in Big Sur with daughter Isabel, twenty-eight, and her boyfriend Gus, thirty. We drove to Bottcher’s Gap on Palo Colorado Road and hiked in seven miles to Pat Springs Camp. We three had the site to ourselves, and we pitched our tents on the edge of a ridge looking out towards a valley of lower mountains—with the Pico Blanco peak beyond the valley, and to our left the Ventana Double Cone range.

In between the peaks, we could see patches of the Pacific Ocean and its horizon, seemingly high in the sky. I always love how high the horizon seems when I view it from a ridge in Big Sur. There’s a mathematical reason for why the horizon looks high, but I won’t go into it.

My outing with Isabel and Gus was a very different story from my recent ordeal with John Shirley. Gus is a devoted backwoodsman, in fact most of the year he lives alone as caretaker on a ranch in the Northwest corner of Wyoming. He’s a man of few words, but certainly he warmed up during the trip.

“I’m having a really great time,” he remarked, returning from a side-excursion to the Double Cone. He has long legs and can walk very fast.

Gus and Isabel taught me how to play cribbage, which Gus learned from a ninety-year-old man on a neighboring ranch. Gus’s dream is to buy a largish piece of land, maybe fifty or a hundred acres, and cut down enough trees on the land to hand-build his own cabin, and then to work part-time to pay for food, taxes, and travel. A real pioneer type.

It was sweet to see Isabel with him. Sometimes she reminds me quite a bit of Sylvia. Once when he brought her some water, she stuck out her lips to offer a kiss, which was the kind of gesture Sylvia would make.

The second morning out there, I got up first, just before sunrise, and I was looking at a medium-sized pine tree just down the ridge from my tent. Gentle dawn breezes were playing over the tree, and every single one of its needles was quivering, oscillating through its own characteristic range of frequencies, and the needle clumps and branches were rocking as well, working their way around their own particular phase space attractors, the whole motion harmonious in the extreme. Insects buzzed about the tree, and, having looked in the microscope so much of late, I could easily visualize the microorganisms upon the needles, in the beads of sap, beneath the bark, in the insects’ guts—the tree a microcosmos. The sun came rolling over the ridge, gilding my pine. With all its needles aflutter the tree was like an anemone, or like a cartoon character with a halo of “consciousness rays,” or like a dancer.

“I love you,” I said to tree, for just that moment not even needing to reach past the tree to imagine the divinity behind it, for just that moment seeing the tree as the body of god. “I love you.”

It’s misleading to say that plants are sessile and animals motile. The plants move in their own fashion—they just don’t use muscles. They let the wind be their muscles, and, of course, on a larger time scale, they move by growth.

And consider the wonderful doughy flesh of the madrone trees. They look like trees sculpted by someone unconcerned with the normal standards of how trees should be shaped. Thin branches sprout from fat branches with no intermediate size stages. The trunks have great wens and buboes, elephant-wrinkles and stomach-paunch folds. And they puddle out at the base.

After breakfast, I sat on a madrone branch and five ants crawled onto my hand and bit me. Gus pointed out that the ants must use a pheromone to orchestrate the attack, for they all bite at just the same instant, which tends to really get your attention.

I saw lizards, quail, a rattlesnake, another snake, a wild turkey, chipmunks, and squirrels as big as cats.

We walked through a number of sloping meadows, and they were filled with purple flowers bunched on stalks like snapdragons, I think they’re lupines. A wonderful and delicate scent of nectar filled these meadows, and in some of them we found swarms of thousands of ladybugs, mating or migrating or hatching. I’ve seen masses of them in springtime in Big Sur before. The number of black spots on the ladybugs’ backs varies from one to the other.

This was my fourth trip into this zone of the Los Padres National Forest. Prior trips were with Rudy, Jon Pearce, and Rudy again. I kind of missed Rudy this time, as that first trip I took with him there was so magical. He and I were seeing all this for the very first time.

And now I’m with my laptop on a cafe table beneath a tree in sunny blue-sky Los Gatos. I’m done with teaching until the fall. I look up at the tree overhead, it has small, pale, fresh green leaves. Maybe it’s an aspen or linden. And, yes, the leaves are doing the hand jive. The branches rocking. It’s good.

June 1, 2003. Computer Games.

I finished writing “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club,” a gnarly short story that I’d always wanted to do. It goes back to the years 1980 through 1986, when I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, the home of the right-wing god-pig TV-evangelist Jerry Falwell. I was an unemployed freelance writer, a young cyberpunk. One of god’s jokes, to put me there.

I’d somehow managed to join the inexpensive local country club so that my family and I could use the pool, and so I could play golf with a couple of my wastrel friends. I always noticed a group of zombie-like old men drinking and playing cards at a table in the men’s locker-room. And I developed some very odd notions about the true nature of these men. Thus, “The Men in the Back Room At The Country Club.”

I sent my tale to Gordon Van Gelder at Fantasy & SF. He’ll take like three months to get back to me, and then he’ll probably reject it. I have a lot of trouble selling my short stories. I think the story market is more conservative than the novel market.

I got a PlayStation 2, and I’ve been playing computer games that I bought. The best game I have is Grand Theft Auto. You’re not in a maze, you’re in an open 3D world, and you can go anywhere you like and do anything you want. There’s criminals, cops and hookers.

The game is really violent and sleazy. It diminishes me as a human being to play it. It’s kind of fun, tho. At one point I wandered onto a golf course and I beat to death some women and old people, hoping to find lots of dollars floating up from their corpses. I got like $3. I felt sad and ashamed.

I think the game has already influenced me in such a way that “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club” is probably the bloodiest, most violent story I ever wrote, albeit in good fun.

Re: Grand Theft Auto, my writer friend Marc Laidlaw, who now works at a big game company called Valve, emailed me this note about things he and his fellow Valve workers did while researching the capabilities of the Grand Theft game engine:

We would do stuff like get a hooker into an ice-cream truck then take the truck off a huge ramp that would cause it to flip over in midair. And while it was spinning, we’d cut to the first person view and watch the hooker’s reaction just to see if her expression changed while the world outside her window was spinning. That sort of stuff is the reason I think Grand Theft Auto is a great game.

In line with my current interest in researching computer games, last week I went to visit my old student Alan Borecky who’s a programmer at Electronic Arts, a huge computer game company up near San Francisco.

Everyone was so much younger than me. It’s been fifteen years since I worked at Autodesk and there I was already the oldest guy. Mostly the programmers were nice to me, but I could tell some of them wondered, like, what is this old man doing in here.

One guy disapprovingly said virtual reality is like crack, and if you can get people hooked on it, they’ll never go outside. He didn’t seem to grasp that the games they sell are VR. That’s why gamers in fact don’t go outside much. He was hung up on that old distraction about needing the immersive goggles for it to be VR. Once you have an interactive 3D environment with yourself embedded as a controllable player icon, you’ve got VR.

In the Tiger Woods golf game that my student Alan works on, you can customize your player’s appearance. You can give him/her tattoos, jewelry, glasses, and pick sportswear straight out of the current catalogs of Nike, Puma, etc. The game has two hundred screens of User Interface.

Alan told me that the engineers had worked out a really good coupled-springs jiggle model for the women golfers’ breasts, but the marketing department made them turn the jiggle way down.

I bought some books about computer games too. The best was David Kushner, Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack the hacker and John Romero the gamer, co-creators of Doom and Quake. A great book, reminiscent of Steven Levy’s Hackers.

Kushner says the book took him six years and hundreds of interviews. The old “stations of the cross” routine. I can’t visualize doing that kind of project at all.

But Kushner did it and he got some great bits, like the following about John Carmack, and how Carmack’s years of graphics hacking have given him a better appreciation of the world:

In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, “Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection off the overhead lights on the back of the faucet.” Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. “These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,” he said. “I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.”

I know this feeling so well from teaching computer graphics. Kushner mentions that in Doom there’s a type of enemy called a “Former Human.” A.k.a. someone who’s a graphics programmer.

June 5, 2003. Mind & Quantum Computation.

It’s odd not to have a book or story to work on. And with no agent, I really feel at loose ends. In a way it’s vivifying, liberating. I mean, last year at this time I was finishing three books at once.

Maybe I’ll never write another book again. Not having an agent anymore puts me that much more adrift. I had Susan Protter for twenty years! Sooner or later the Muse will throw an idea my way.

Like I already said, if I write a nonfiction book, I don’t want to do a stations of the cross routine. That is, I don’t want to be running around interviewing so-called experts. Nor do I want to be “jacking off into a used rubber,” as I crassly like to say. That is, I don’t want to pretend to be excited about some old topic that I’ve already finished off.

An issue that interests me these days is the nature of consciousness. I could build up my thoughts to book length by integrating them with my Leuven lecture notes, the ones I was calling Early Geek Philosophy or On Computation.

What I’m seeing in terms of consciousness is a dialectic triad inspired by my friend Nick Herbert’s brilliant essay on what he calls “Quantum Tantra.”

• (Thesis) A computer should indeed be able to behave like a human. Eventually we’ll build a computer model of a person—I call this a lifebox.
• (Antithesis) Upon introspection we feel there is an ineluctable residue that’s not captured by any scientific system. We feel ourselves to be quite unlike machines. I have a sense of having a soul that lies beyond any lifebox.
• (Nick Herbert’s Synthesis) The notion of your soul can be given a scientific meaning as your immediate perception of your uncollapsed wave function, which is entangled with the uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.

It could be that there’s something unique about how we humans manage to couple our mental quantum computations with our logical reasoning. But it’s more likely that machines, or, perhaps any physical object at all, can have a soul like humans have. In other words, everything is conscious and alive.

In order to figure out what I’m actually talking about, it’s time to play some catch-up ball re. quantum computation. So I found my nice old introductory text by Daniel T. Gillespie, A Quantum Mechanics Primer. I bought this book back at Rutgers and read it in Geneseo in 1976. I notice that on the back pages I’d written a couple of drafts of my poems “Drunken Hearted Man” and “She Got a Phonograph.”

I finished reading the Primer on the beach at 14th Avenue in Santa Cruz yesterday. It was so lovely, there, lying beneath the tall Monterey pines, with the long luscious crunches of the clean green waves running a hundred meters parallel to the beach, feeling like my mind was a coherent, uncollapsed quantum computation.

June 7, 2003. Bisson. Matrix Reloaded. California Speak.

I got together with some other SF writers for a picnic lunch the other day: Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, Carter Scholz, Stan Robinson. We met at the Berkeley sailboat marina. It was great to be with them. There’s nothing like hanging with other writers.

Terry Bisson is the one who encouraged me to desert Susan Protter. I followed him like a lemming. But now I learn that Terry’s even more clueless about agents than me. Terry’s new agent is, get this, seventy-nine years old and won’t even look at his SF. I can’t believe I took his advice.

I saw Matrix Reloaded last night. What a piece of shit. Like, the supreme hacker, the “Architect,” is a white guy with a white goatee and he’s wearing a suit with a vest and some groovy pin thing under his tie? And to try and make what he says be “smart” the scriptwriters had him use double-talk long words. Like a BBC host. How lame, what a failure of the imagination, how Hollywood.

The supreme hacker should be someone like my weird friend Bill Gosper talking Gosperese. Or a slobbering geek surrounded by trash and wearing a funky XXL T-shirt with a picture of a fractal. Or John Carmack or John Walker. An uncool-appearing person who’s in fact cooler and stranger than you can possibly imagine.

Snapshot of California-speak. A California woman is talking, telling about an experience where she finally told an employer that she couldn’t work so many hours and the employer said okay.

“I’m like—” She switches into mime mode. Runs her hand across her brow, does a knee bend and yells, “Whooo!”

June 13, 2003. North Beach. Umunhum Bike Ride.

The other day I went on a walking tour of North Beach led by Bill Morgan in honor of the 50th anniversary of City Lights Books. They just published Morgan’s The Beat Generation in San Francisco walking guide.

Most memorably, we saw the cruddy Marconi Hotel on Broadway, cattycorner from City Lights, where Carolyn Cassady dropped off Allen Ginsberg after giving him the boot. He’d been staying with her and Neal in Monte Sereno near my town of Los Gatos.

Up the street and around the corner at 1010 Montgomery is the apartment house where Allen lived with Peter Orlovsky and wrote “Howl” in the years 1954-1955. At this time Allen had an unfulfilling job at a place doing “market research.” His employers had one of those old-style giant computers.

Yesterday I rode ten miles across mountains on my bike, from Mt. Umunhum to home. Sylvia dropped me off, and I made my way home like a dog you can’t get rid of.

The ride was nice. I saw beautiful flowers. On the really steep downhill spots I walked my bike rather than taking the risk falling down. And, it goes without saying, I walked the steep uphill spots too. It was nice to do the ride at my own pace, unhurried by friends.

June 17, 2004. What’s Interesting About Society?

Still casting about for a book topic, still not sure I want to dive into a book on the meaning of computation.

I’ve been reading a few pop science books about society, just now a piece of junk called The Wisdom of Crowds. These low-level pop-sci books say one thing over and over and over and over, illustrating their points with shopworn received truths and predigested news stories—without ever jumping out of the system to carry out any meta-analysis. I think of sheep in a cement cell, lapping at a spreading puddle of their own lukewarm urine. “This is great stuff!”

I hate so many topics that have to do with society. Elections. Corporations. Committees. The stock market. Triumphant movies about sports.

But there are some things about society that I would enjoy writing about. How people avoid bumping into each other when they’re walking on the street. How your emotions chaotically dance around when you’re talking to friends. The bonding with family. Listening to the sounds of a city through an open window. The inverse-power law and the statistics of book sales.

June 26, 2003. Pitching My Tome.

I walked around North Beach two weeks ago, making notes. I keep collaging still-unused book proposals together. I have it down to two main lines: either a Tome On Computers or my Memoirs.

Today, I decided to set aside the Memoirs for now and go ahead and try to finally put a stake in the Tome’s heart, this project that’s haunted me for going on seventeen years—ever since I moved to Silicon Valley. Just do it.

Why didn’t I do it before? Well, whenever I’d discuss the tome idea with Susan Protter, she’d be kind of negative about it. And, frankly, when I’ve discussed it once or twice with editors they haven’t been that interested either. Particularly when I mention that I’d be writing about chaos—they feel like it’s been done. But, lord, how many books are there about relativity theory? Chaos and computers are here to stay.

I still can’t home in on a title. I have a persistent illusion that the right title will snap my ideas into focus for a fresh new book.

So ever since North Beach those two weeks ago, I’ve been working on a book proposal for the tome. I wrote the big science-book agent John Brockman about it the other day, calling my project Computers and Reality. My basic pitch is that working with computers has changed the way I see the world—and I want to share that.

He answered, “Computers and Reality sounds good—and it’s right up my alley.”

How refreshing to get an answer like that!

Cons

June 29, 2003. Wolfram NKS Conference. My Lifebox Triad.

We’re starting a big trip back east. I’m speaking at two conferences. The day before we left on the trip, I received a copy of Software translated into Russian, and my first name in capital Cyrillic letters looks a little like PYAN. So I started calling myself “Pyan,” and then started calling Sylvia “Pyanova.”

Back east we hit the NKS 2003 conference, in a hotel on the outskirts of Boston. Organized by Stephen Wolfram to discuss that big book of his, A New Kind of Science.

Wolfram gave a big talk with a demo, and he quoted Immanuel Kant: “It’s absurd to hope that Newton can make comprehensible a blade of grass.” Meaning that natural patterns emerge from parallel computations, and that they don’t have simple formulaic explanations.

I was on a panel called “NKS and Foundations of Mathematics,” along with Wolfram and Gregory Chaitin, an important autodidact logician who works for IBM. That felt pretty cool to be up there with those two guys, kind of historic. When I spoke, I explained what I thought was right and wrong with Wolfram’s ideas, having gone over his book with a fine tooth comb by now.

Wolfram seemed genuinely eager to hear what I said. I’m as well as or maybe better-informed than anyone in the world on the topic of NKS and the foundations of mathematics. Odd to be in such a position. An expert at last.

Just before I left, Wolfram took me aside and urged me to write my next book all about NKS. And I’m tempted. His NKS sold, he says, three hundred thousand copies. And people might want a shorter simpler version. I can visualize a sleek, slender volume called, say, On Computation.

But to do that would be subjugating myself. I want to express my ideas about computation, dammit. There could possibly be a middle way of sorts, that is, to bring NKS repeatedly into my book, relating it to all my chosen topics.

I hung out a lot with good old Brian Silverman, a fellow cellular automata fanatic from way back. He wrote a program called The Phantom Fishtank that I was obsessed with in the mid-1980s, and he formulated a wonderful CA rule known as Brian’s Brain. He said my panel with Wolfram was the best thing by far at the conference. Good old Brian.

I came up with a new version of the dialectic triad that I’ve been groping for. It can be the basis for my book on consciousness and computation.

• Thesis: The lifebox.
• Antithesis: The chaotic mind.
• Synthesis: Cellular automata.

In other words, the mind’s churning is like the gnarly eddies in a so-called von Karman vortex street—which is what you see in a turbulent fluid such as the wake behind a moving object. You can emulate this style of churning with a cellular-automaton rule.

July 1, 2003. Greg in Gloucester. Karen in Vermont.

After the Wolfram con, we went to stay with my old pal Greg Gibson for two nights on Cape Ann near Gloucester.

Greg took me on a long walk through the central part of Cape Ann, it’s called Dogtown. He claims he’s going to write a “travel book” about it.

Walking in the woods with Greg I had a flashback memory of my college-boy self. How unsure of ourselves we were, how uncertain of our ability to become men, to marry women, to get jobs, to raise families. And here we are with our women. The fertile triangles we’ve fruitfully tended all these years. Our fields of wheat. Farmers plowing their furrow. “And she bore him three children.”

Seeing Sylvia with Greg also brought back my sense of her old college self. Yes, she’s changed in many ways, but her voice, her motions, her smell, her physicality are all the same. She was wearing a pale blue sleeveless dress very like a dress she wore back then. My field of grain. My girl.

Greg’s wife Annemarie is so cute and touching. Sample facial gesture. We four were riding in Greg’s van, Sylvia and I in back, seeing Annemarie in profile. She was about to say something, hesitating, and her upper lip softly touched her lower lip, preparing to speak. Her eyes always round behind her round glasses, her fuzzy little ponytail, her round mouth. Just before we left she started bouncing on a big trampoline the Gibsons put in their front yard.

Then we went to Concord, Vermont, to spend a night with Sylvia’s Swarthmore College roommate, Karin Johnson. Karin’s husband David Isles has a Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic just like me. I can just see the two Swarthmore girls in the snack-bar, “Someday we’ll latch onto a pair of mathematical logicians.”

David has a touch of what you might call “stentoritis.” Declaiming in stentorian tones. He can’t stop talking about the evils of Bush and the Republikkkans. I think men our age expect to be elders who are listened to. And if the government is very explicitly shitting on what they believe, it’s hard to deal with. But it’s better to let it go. If you talk about them all the time, then they own your mind.

Their farmhouse overlooks a five-acre field of wild flowers and grasses, sloping down to little Shadow Lake. There were lightning bugs at night. After dinner, I walked down into the field, surrounded by the lovely flashing in the silent night. In the face of the overwhelming beauty, my reflexive reaction was to want to somehow alter my consciousness. With a cigarette at least. But I didn’t have a cigarette. All I could do was open my mind wide. “Here I am. A lightning bug is blinking on my leg.”

I went up to the bedroom, leaving Sylvia to talk to her roommate. Sylvia’s voice. For me, one of the most characteristic things about her is her voice.

Right before we left Vermont, I had a great yoga session on my purple mat, rolled out on the lawn beneath the silent sky. Sun filling the air. That line in The Matrix, “You think you’re breathing air, but that’s prana!” Sunny air.

July 3, 2003. Return to Boothbay Harbor.

I’m sitting on the porch of our room at the Spruce Point Inn, Boothbay Harbor, Maine, overlooking the harbor entrance. It’s 11 pm, Sylvia’s asleep, I’m writing on my laptop.

Our family used to stay at a cabin that my parents owned near here. Sylvia and I always dreamed of coming to this particular inn because we’d seen it from the water. But they’ve put us in a new addition, which isn’t nearly quaint and organic enough. A startling lack of windows and cross-ventilation. All the rooms have air conditioners roaring, which is exactly what I’d expected to be getting away from by paying so much for a ritzy ocean-side suite.

I guess I’m so quick to find fault with the room because of my unpleasant feelings about being here at all. Returning to Boothbay Harbor is a knife in my heart. Too much nostalgia. I don’t really like nostalgia.

As I said, my parents used to own a cabin here. I brought Sylvia here for the first time thirty-six years ago, on our honeymoon in 1967. And then we came here every summer until 1986, which was the year we moved to California. Also I came here with my parents one or two summers before my marriage. So I’ve been here about twenty times in all.

But now all the others are missing. First and foremost my dead parents, and as a big second, our very much alive children, and third, brother Embry and his family, who came here sometimes too. Not to mention Sylvia’s parents who were here once or twice as well.

The last time I was in Boothbay Harbor before this return, it was just me and Mom, closing down the family cabin before she sold it, this was July, 1986. She and Pop were divorced by then. Mom and I packed a few things into a little U-Haul trailer to haul back to her condo in Louisville. That was a heart-breaking trip. Partly we were selling the cabin because Sylvia and I were moving out west and we didn’t really want to keep coming back here. Partly it was because going to the cabin with my mother had become fairly burdensome for Embry and me, as Mom had grown so old and crotchety.

That last time, Mom and I were only up there for two nights. The first night I got drunk and stoned down on the dock, wallowing in sad nostalgia. And then when I came back to the cabin I was impatient with poor Mom. I think she was trying to get me to fix up some stuff in the house, as if the whole big family were there together once again, but the charade made me too sad. The next day I said I was sorry that I’d had too much to drink, and she mildly said, “Then don’t do it, Roo.”

I got busy that last day, helping her, and I felt better. I worked off the guilt. On the road, we took turns driving her car, towing the little trailer down to Louisville. I remember I was looking at some essays by Edgar Allen Poe, preparing to write The Hollow Earth.

Back to 2003. It’s 6 am in the morning. I’m sitting on an Adirondack chair on a grassy lawn sloping down to the ocean. A fresh gentle sea breeze. Birds chattering. The sky is lightening. It’ll be a fine day. A seagull cruises overhead, loitering on the wind. A lobster boat chugs by, its high bow like a cartoon tough-guy’s jaw. Hey, it’s nice here. It was just my grief over the temps perdu that was making it seem so bad before.

Sylvia woke up and I brought her three cups of coffee. We feel cozy, and now it’s 9 am. I already did yoga on the lawn.

I thought some more about my anxiety in the face of nostalgia. Sylvia says she simply and purely enjoys nostalgia. She says it’s no shock for her to have to think of the past, as she thinks about it all the time.

Maybe I avoid thinking about the past because I still have some guilt over the dumb things I did when I was drinking. But just now, doing yoga, I was imagining Mom and Pop’s pleasure at seeing us here in 2003, and I remember how much they loved me and how readily they always forgave me.

It’s important to let myself off the hook, to forgive myself. To untie those cans from my yowling-dog tail. I need to untie those cans over and over, as they tend to reattach themselves when I venture deep down dappled Memory Lane.

On the Fourth of July, we went on a fireworks cruise organized by the Spruce Point Inn. Sylvia and I sat in a plastic lawn-furniture love seat on the back deck of a sight-seeing boat, heavy diesel thrumming. The night was very foggy, with boats all around us—green lights on the starboard, red lights on the port side, the coast guard boats with blue lights, everyone with white lights in the rear, also some with white searchlights that reflected wonderful chaotic ray-bundles when beamed onto the restless water. The higher-flying skyrockets did little more than tinge the misted sky a sudden green, red, or white—but the more numerous low rockets were nicely visible as dandelion stars of sparks, softened by the haze, the colors bleeding out across the heavens.

July 6, 2003. Lobsters. L.L.Bean.

I was studying the rectangular opening in the side of the “bedroom” of a lobster pot. Imagining the lobstermen’s intense debates over the optimal measurements of the hole.

The pots are, these days, rectangular wire mesh constructions divided into two “rooms,” the parlor and the bedroom. The parlor is entered by hopping/swimming up through some elliptical openings, and it holds a conical passageway of net that leads to the bedroom. In the bedroom there is bait, like rotting fish heads. The lobsters go in there to eat and then they can’t get out, as the back end of the conical passageway is hard to get through. But the smaller ones can escape out the slit in the wall of the bedroom.

I’d like to write a short SF story about aliens deploying “lobster pots” in Washington, D.C. They’re house trailers with, in the bedroom, maybe coke, hookers, oil money, votes. Some guys can go in and get out but at some point they get so “big” they can’t escape.

The UFOs come by every morning and haul the trailers up into the sky, empty them out, and lower them back down.

In what sense do the quarry get too big? Maybe the pots are quantum traps. If you’re coherent, and in a mixed state you can tunnel out. If you’re decoherent and simple-minded and hung up you can’t get out.

I’d like the aliens to trap neocons and Bushites, of course. Clean up the planet.

While in Maine, I ate five lobsters in five days. (1) Steamed at the Boothbay Lobsterman’s Coop on a dock. (2) Shelled in the Spruce Point Inn restaurant with chanterelles and asparagus on spaetzli pasta. (3) Steamed at Spruce Point Inn outdoor lobster roast before the Fourth of July fireworks cruise. (4) As a box lunch lobster roll on Monhegan Island. (5) As a lobster salad at Mom’s beloved Le Garage Restaurant in Wiscasset.

This afternoon we stopped in Freeport, Maine, to visit L.L.Bean. In the old days, like thirty years ago, it was the only retail store for tourists in that town, but it wasn’t really like a store. You had to go up some wooden stairs to the second floor where they had a small showroom.

And now Freeport is, I heard a salesman say, one of the largest clothing outlets in the country. L.L. Bean itself is the size of a mall anchor store, all the other brands are around it. The monoculture has swallowed Freeport with a vengeance. I hope the day will come when the monoculture crests and recedes, lest it ruin everything in the world. We had coffee in a Starbucks in Freeport. A cappuccino in Maine. Unthinkable thirty years ago. I don’t like it. I’m old, and I don’t like change.

I did like the sign by the Men’s Fitting Rooms in Bean’s, “Ladies, kindly wait outside the Men’s Fitting Rooms.”

Sylvia laughed. “They know what we’re like.”

July 14, 2003. Readercon. Barry and Greg.

I was guest of honor at the Readercon, an annual literature-centered science-fiction convention. I was on panels about Offbeat SF, Higher Dimensions in SF, Math in SF, and Vernor Vinge’s theory of an impending AI “Singularity.” I put in a plug for “Jenna and Me,” that story I wrote with Rudy Jr. We published it online in an ezine called Infinite Matrix. I did well at the con. It was pretty easy—since I wasn’t drunk.

I signed several hundred books, editions from every stage of my whole life, some if which I’d forgotten. The high point was when I gave a big speech to three hundred people about my SF writing. I’d prepared a draft of my talk: “Power Chords, Thought Experiments, Transrealism, and Monomyths,” and I even got the organizers to print up and pass out a hundred copies, not that I read the talk verbatim.

At one point I went into a mock-bitter rant about the despised status of SF. And then I said, “I know it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.” And I told the story about Greg Gibson playing the role of Frank Shook at my Wired pitch meeting for Saucer Wisdom. At the end the audience clapped for a long time. It felt wonderful. We solitary writers live for these brief moments in the sun.

On the last day of Readercon, Greg and his wife Annemarie turned up with Barry Feldman and his wife Randy Warner. Greg, Barry and Randy were all at Swarthmore with Sylvia and me. I begged off from the final dinner with the con organizers to be with my friends.

It was terrific to see Barry. He had that same twinkling-gem quality as in college. It was so relaxing to be joking with him and Greg together, just like old times.

Right away Barry started in on me about being part German—me being Rudolf von Bitter Rucker had been a big deal to my new Jewish friends at Swarthmore back in 1963—but now, forty years later, in 2003, when he started on this theme once more, it had been so long that I was simply puzzled.

“You’re talking about my mother being German?”

Randy was touched to tears at hearing the ancient college banter. Barry seemed so small and cute, his forearms two-thirds as long as mine, and I wanted to wrap him up and take him home with me—which of course I said numerous times.

We took a walk around the mostly paved neighborhood of my freeway motel. Barry and Randy had been staying as Greg and Annemarie’s guest for a few weeks—they’re visiting from Greece, where Randy works and Barry paints landscapes.

Greg said that every morning he tells Barry, “Feldman, you’ve got a fuck of a lot of staying out of my face to do today.”

“Doesn’t that hurt your feelings?” I asked Barry.

“I have no feelings,” said Barry, doing a Zen routine.

Barry somehow managed to steal a roll of yellow plastic caution tape—just while we were walking around the block—he’s like Chico or Harpo Marx that way, conjuring odd objects seemingly out of nowhere. So then I got him to tear off a piece and we tried to tie it around Greg’s ponytail. It’s always been easier to tease the forbidding Greg if Barry’s around. Such larks, Pip.

And then—the perfect way to have dinner with my Marxian brothers—we went up to our motel room and I ordered room service, a nice big meal for the six of us, putting the bill on my free room’s account.

It felt like hanging around the dorm. My beautiful wife lying on her side on the king bed, her lovely curved hip jutting up. Randy Warner there with her tiny voice, Annemarie perched on a round end table, Barry twinkling in the arm chair, Greg by the desk. The human music of their voices.

A Temporary Autonomous Zone.

July 23, 2003. Agent Brockman.

So I signed on with mega-agent John Brockman. He only wants to represent this one next book, the nonfiction tome about computation. He doesn’t want to touch any of my SF novels. I may end up going back to Susan Protter after this nonfiction book. But I’m counting on Brockman to get me a bigger score than usual. That’s the whole reason I left Susan.

I’ve been talking to Brockman on the phone. He doesn’t like Computation and Reality as a book title. He said the publishers think computers are dead, what with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Most of the book title examples he likes have colons in them, like Joyce’s Journey Through Heisenberg’s Haze: The Blahblah of Whatever.

He said, get this, “You’re in California—score some dope and go crazy with it. Take the readers on a trip. A ride.”

“I don’t use dope,” I said.

“I don’t mean it literally,” he backpedals. “Make the book fun, exciting, take people to a new place. Make it trippy.”

Brockman’s advice is all very welcome. A change from getting advice like: “Rudy, I don’t think people are buying your kind of book. Why don’t you do a book like that book about longitude?”

So I rewrote the proposal and changed the title to The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

The “lifebox” is the thesis that you can make a computer model of a person, the “soul” is the antithesis that there’s something more, and the “seashell” is the synthesis that you can emulate a soul with a gnarly chaotic cellular automaton such as the ones that make the textile-like patterns on South Pacific cone shells.

The title is arranged in the order of thesis, synthesis, antithesis because the actual words sound better this way.

Georgia’s Wedding

August 13, 2003. To Georgia’s Wedding

Back in the plane! We’re flying from San Jose to NYC, where we’ll meet Rudy Jr. and Isabel, and drive up to the Full Moon Resort in the Catskills to help our daughter Georgia marry Courtney Lasseter on Saturday, August 16.

My personal resolution is to be calm, supportive, easy-going, and to remember to keep asking god—whatever that really means—to help me stay that way.

August 18, 2003. In NYC After G’s Wedding.

So now the big day has come and gone. It was a lovely ceremony. My little Georgia was beautiful, her face so clear and sweet, with those same plump cheeks she’s had ever since babyhood.

All the preparations came to fruit. The food, the table-settings, the room-arrangements, the place-cards, the flowers, the baby-sitters for guests’ kids, the music, the bonfire, the hikes, the this and the that.

Georgia wore a great bridal gown from Suzanne Erman, a fashion designer whose work Sylvia had seen in a shop in Paris. Sylvia had her own new outfit, a winning combination drawn from the three outfits she bought, plus a major new string of serious pearls. Isabel had a great red and white dress, which set the color scheme for our flowers, and Rudy was in a new white Hugo Boss suit that I helped him buy at Macy’s a month ago.

I myself was dressed really well, also in a new Hugo Boss suit, mine dark blue with widely spaced orange-brown pinstripes, a new non-button-down white shirt, a new silk necktie. My goal, as I kept telling Sylvia and the kids, was to look like “old money,” and I did.

We hung out with our new in-laws for a day and a half, getting to know them, working past shyness, breaking down some walls. It was worth doing. Courtney has a lot of relatives.

Our own friends and relatives showed up the night before the wedding. We had a rehearsal-dinner BBQ for eighty-five that Courtney’s father Bob hosted. Among the guests were Sylvia’s cousin Judy, my brother Embry and his two children and their families, Swarthmore pals Greg, Roger, Don and Don’s brother Eddie, plus their wives, old David Hungerford from the New Jersey days, and all sorts of familiar friends of Georgia that used to pass through our house. Seeing them all at once was dizzying, like my whole life passing before my eyes, a year per second, sixty years in a minute. Whirl, whirl, whirl! You’re at your daughter’s wedding!

The ceremony was in a grassy green field by the Esopus Creek, with low blue mountains all around. A thunderstorm hit hard right before, then broke up just in time. The hills were garlanded with clouds and fog. The lodge was on a rise, with a two hundred yard walk from there across the meadow to the spot that Georgia and Courtney had picked for their ceremony.

The big moment for me was walking Georgia across that field to give her away. Right before I walked her, I was almost breaking down into tears. I was thinking of when I would first take her for walks in the little park across from us at 43 Adelaide Avenue in Highland Park, that park a part of the Jewish Community Center—called the J for short.

Georgia and I would walk along the little driveway to a sand box, and on the way Georgia liked to pick up tiny pebbles and put them through the holes in a metal sign-post. I guess I showed her that trick, me seeing everything through her young new eyes, noticing tiny small things, the whole world new again for me. I was twenty-three.

One particular day I’m thinking of, Georgia found something icky in the sand box, maybe a gnarled root, and she said it was “eggpop,” just a made-up word, but the perfect one, and we laughed and said the word to each other a lot.

I wanted to tell her about all this just as I was about to walk her, but there was no way without breaking into sobs. It was enough for me to pat her cheek and hold her hand and say how much I’ve always loved her.

And then we were walking across that big misty meadow, with lovely slender Isabel in our lead. The photographers stood aside, and we were walking for a whole minute or two, me holding her dear hand that I’ve held so many times before. She squeezed tighter and tighter as we got closer to the waiting groom. And then I kissed her cheek good-bye, shook Courtney’s hand, and sat down.

The minister was serious and the readings were very apropos, really heavy and profound. A 4D-style vision by Black Elk, a wonderfully understated Whitman poem, and last was Rudy Jr.’s, reading of two Denise Levertov poems that Sylvia had found in a Beat Poetry anthology. Rudy too was feeling the emotion, he had to pause to keep from breaking into tears. I was wiping my eyes with my handkerchief by then.

The main thing in the service was how Georgia and Courtney looked each other in the eye so lovingly. It was perfect to hear those good old Book of Common Prayer wedding vows from their lips. It was real.

And then we had the wedding feast.

I’d never been able to visualize spending the money to put on a big wedding. But G brought it in for a fairly reasonable sum, thanks to having scouted around so thoroughly. Even so, when I’d first heard the number back in February, I’d been fighting it, but I got over the sticker shock and, in the event, it actually felt good to be shelling out for this. What the hell.

It made me feel like a rich, powerful family head, the capo, with Sylvia and I hosting the wedding dinner for the hundred and twenty guests beneath a big white tent, and me impeccably clad in my old money duds. You might say it was atavistically satisfying to show off our place in the world.

So I finally get why people have always liked having wedding feasts, what the heck, go ahead and blow off some of that accumulated fruits of your labors. I mean, I’d understood it in theory, but I’d never imagined that so fiscally reckless an act could actually feel pleasant. And it was of course great to help Georgia have such a nice party.

There were a lot of toasts, and a nice thing about the toasts was how many of Georgia and Courtney’s friends said what a good match the two seemed to be.

I myself found that, when I made my toast, I couldn’t put all my feelings extemporaneously into words. And I felt a bit inhibited because the tables happened to be seated in such a way that I could hardly see anyone that I knew—all of our friends and relatives were way in back. I managed to say how amazed I was to be hosting this wedding, and to say how life rolls on and happens—including all the things you weren’t able to visualize. I said what a splendid young man Courtney is, but I was too excited and dizzy to say how wonderful Georgia is.

Here’s what I’d like to have said—and I actually ended up emailing this to Georgia after the fact.

In praise of Georgia. Her face, her voice, her humor. Her great career as a graphic designer—she carved out her own business in NYC, the toughest town in the country! Determined? I remember the time that Sylvia and I were on a sailboat near the beach in Maine and she, about six years old, saw us out there and she just dove in and swam all the way out to us: indomitable, eager Georgia. The school papers she used to bring home all marked V. G. for “Very Good,” but really meaning, we figured, “Very Georgia.”

And Georgia’s way with language—sometimes she coins such the perfect phrase, or uses a familiar word in such a wonderfully off-kilter way that Sylvia and I then think of her as speaking “Georgia-ese.” To her “stoic” is dull, “raucous” is obscene, a “groover” is a square, “rustling” is sorting through your papers and possessions.

She’s very musical and I love to hear her sing. Once when she was visiting our house, she was in her bedroom with sister Isabel, and she sang a note, and I swear I saw a cartoon speech-balloon outside her door with a perfect, chrome note inside it. That voice, so cozy and confiding on the phone.

And now she’s married. Here’s to Courtney and Georgia!

August 21, 2003. Last Night in NYC. Wrung Out.

I gave a reading at the KGB bar in Manhattan last night. It went fine. A hip literary venue. But I’m feeling burnt-out, all stirred up, in emotional turmoil. I did like the wedding, and it was good to see them tie the knot. The vows were lovely. But I’m wrung out.

Maybe it was overreaching for Sylvia and I to stay on in New York for so long after the wedding. I’m ready to go home to my regular life, to fall asleep within my routine, and to forget about the wedding. Sylvia’s somewhat listless and tired—she’s drained by the wedding too. Even so, she says she’d rather be decompressing in NYC than in Los Gatos, and maybe she’s right.

We had drinks with two of Georgia’s college friends last night, Bethany and Valeria, and they came along for the KGB reading. It made me proud, to have those nice young women there.

Looking at popular science books at a huge Barnes and Nobel in Union Square, scouting the competition, it struck me how unnatural my latest nonfiction book project is. The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. Say what? It’s like this is the first time I’ve ever planned a project by looking at the market and trying to ape it. And then I did it wrong.

It never even occurs to me to look at other SF books when planning my own SF books. I’m always confident that what I’m doing is just light-years ahead of the rest of them—well, maybe not ahead but light-years distant in some dimension or other. I’m serene in the knowledge that my SF is inimitable.

I finally meet my new nonfiction agent John Brockman in person. I had lunch with him, his son Max, and his assistant. Brockman is older than I’d expected. He seems like what you call might call a patzer in Yiddish—a meddler, a braggart, a blunderer. A lively character, certainly, and I found it easy to talk with him. And he seemed to enjoy me. He seemed to have some preconceptions about what kind of person I am. My old rep.

Anyway, he’s sent my proposal for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul to about ten big houses, all at once, and he seems confident that one of them will offer us a good advance.

“I wouldn’t be having lunch with you if I didn’t think that,” he said. “My son Max is expensive.”

His office was impressive, a penthouse in a building on Fifth Avenue across from the Plaza Hotel. Brockman mentioned that Simon and Schuster has already turned down my proposal. But he didn’t think we’d get any action till September, when everyone’s back from vacation. He also sent the proposal to John Oakes at Four Walls Eight Windows, as an ace in the hole.

I had a so-so meeting with David Hartwell at Tor. He suddenly wants even more changes made to Frek and the Elixir. He says that, as yet, the book doesn’t succeed as a novel. So I’ll fix it. And then Tor will just shove this book off the cliff like it’s done with my others. The usual blare of no ads, no tour, and no mainstream reviews. Dave was also saying I might have to cut eight thousand words—or break the book into two volumes. They’re not marketing it as a kids book at all, even though I’d hoped they would. And I don’t like the flap copy. And Tor won’t put any of my older books into those small mass-market paperback editions. Etcetera.

From time to time I’m managing to relax and enjoy NYC a little. You really do see the most remarkable people here. It’s the 21st Century, but we humans remain the same. The subways have really easy-to-understand electronic signs and announcer voices. The train cars are sleek—but slouched in the seats are the same fat women who were in the seats forty years ago. Our machines change, but we don’t.

On the street, a sparrow wanders about like a raindrop path on a windowpane.

Saw some pictures of Georgia’s wedding today. How lovely she is.

Done Teaching / 2003-2005

I Want to Retire

August 28, 2003. Frek Done. Vision of My Death.

So now I made the final changes to Frek, and we haven’t sold Lifebox yet, so for now I don’t have anything to work on at all. It was nice, the last couple of days, digging my hands into the novel again, kneading my prose. I really need a writing project. The smart thing to do would be to start writing the short-short stories I’d planned to work into the Lifebox tome as spacers between the chapters. I’d planned nine of them, though in the end, of course, the publisher, if I get a publisher, could nix this. But whatever happens, if I write these stories, I’ll have them for publishing somewhere.

I’ve been reading Dada: Art and Anti-Art by Hans Richter, who was a Dadaist film-maker himself. It’s fun to hear about these guys. And I saw a movie about the early skateboarders, Dogtown and Z-Boys. I’ve always loved stories about groups of people inventing a new kind of art or behavior that sweeps the wider world. Would be cool to do an SF story about a thing like this.

I’m back to teaching, and it isn’t too bad. It’s a matter of having something else to work on, which is why I want to start writing some stories.

The first or second day of school, I stopped by the outdoor espresso bar in the courtyard of MacQuarrie Hall where my office is. I was waiting to buy a coffee, and the students were bustling around, every shade of yellow, tan and brown, many of them so lovely, and there were two servers behind the counter, with two lines of people waiting. Some really sweet music is playing on the bar’s sound system.

The young woman serving the other line looks familiar to me from last year, kind of butch-looking, a bit stocky, with short dark hair dyed blonde at the tips, a pleasant face. She doesn’t notice me.

Recognizing that barrista girl from last year, and seeing her politely doing her job, business as usual, I had this sudden aching sensation of how this very scene would continue even if I were dead.

There’s not really so many more years that I’ll be coming into work at San Jose State. Before too long I’ll be gone. And life will go on. For a second I had a ghostly sensation of not even being present.

How sweet it is to have had my little bit of life. I can’t control my life, I’m swimming in a great ocean. I treasure every day.

September 1, 2003. My Life in a Nutshell.

I’m writing this lying on the lawn chair in the dark on our deck. Down the hill some people are singing “Happy Birthday.” How human and cozy. In a few minutes red Mars will come up over St. Joseph’s hill. Tomorrow I go teach Computer Graphics. I have a good demo ready, a Lissajous pendulum program.

Today I finished painting a Philip Guston-style canvas in my studio—the back yard. It came out really well, it’s called “My Life in a Nutshell.” A whisker-chinned one-eyed potato-head is bent over a keyboard. Guston did a painting like this of a bristly bum-head staring at a bottle. In the sky of my picture there’s a sun/alien, but my potato doesn’t notice. Maybe his writing is what’s making the sun so strange—or maybe the sun/alien is his muse.

September 15, 2003. Selling My Lifebox Tome.

Disappointing news from Brockman. John Oakes of Four Walls Eight Windows is the only publisher willing to make an offer for my nonfiction book on computers and reality—The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul.

Oakes is an old supporter of mine. He’s the guy who published my essay anthology Seek! and my story anthology Gnarl! Also he reprinted my novels White Light and The Hacker and the Ants.

Susan Protter wanted to sell my new book to John Oakes in the first place. And the whole reason I left her was that I counted on Brockman to find me a bigger publisher for Lifebox—and a fatter advance. Oh well!

Yes, all twenty of the publishers besides Oakes turned me down. Brockman let me see the rejections. The most recent one said my book sounded “too far out.” A recurring difficulty for me. I’m quite discouraged. People on the outside have no idea how hard—in terms of marketing—it is to be a writer, with every single sale a difficult one, your whole life long. Push, push, push. As I’ve mentioned before, this was a big theme I wanted to get across in As Above, So Below—how much of a working artist’s or writer’s life is consumed by marketing the product.

Maybe I screwed up the proposal in that it was overstuffed and complicated, reasonably so, as my plan is to figure out what I’m doing while I do it. A standard practice in emergent computation, but not something smiled upon by your average editor who of course wants a concise high-concept statement of a single timely idea. Preferably “viewing with alarm” or “holding out a bright new future.”

Only John Oakes is willing to trust me. It’s like with each book there’s always just the one guy between me and unpublishability. Like David Hartwell and John Oakes. It’s conceivable that I might reach a point of not being able to sell a book to anyone at all.

So, okay, now John Oakes made a final offer, a little better than I got for Frek, and it’s as high as we’ll get. $17,000. I’d been dreaming of $50K. That’s how much I’d need to take a full year off from work to write this thing.

I’d been letting myself imagine that I could start scoring big book deals and have enough money to simply live off writing and never have to worry about teaching again. But that’s not how it is. I’ll continue to teach as I write.

People always ask me how I manage to teach and write, both. Like I have a choice? But it is harder to do, as I get older. Hell, I used to teach and write, and also piss away a lot of my time getting drunk and stoned. I miss pissing away a lot of my time—that’s another thing I try and work at, finding interesting ways to waste time.

But anyway, I’m ready to go. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I’m expecting to reach some new insights and higher integrations. And, like with any other adventure, I don’t know in detail what I’ll see before I set out.

I’m rearranged my bookcase, moving some new reference books into place. My life feels empty when I’m not carrying a book-fetus in my brain-womb. Love those little kicks to the medulla. And the endorphin fix.

September 17, 2003. Zyban Molecules Around Sun.

I had a physical recently and I’m in good shape all around. The doctor urged me to get back off cigarettes, and day before yesterday I once again filled a prescription for Zyban, also known as Welbutrin. I took this drug for two weeks in 2001 to help quit smoking. But this time I only took it for two days.

The thing is, a Zyban pill makes me feel high about forty-five minutes after taking it. I was laughing about this with my officemate Jon Pearce day before yesterday, feeling voluble, expansive. I even laid a pill on him. Share the joy.

The prescription said “Two a day” so, what the heck, I took another pill on the drive home from school. My old addict behavior. I had trouble swallowing that extra pill dry. It lodged in my throat for about ten minutes, dissolving, making me even higher than before.

And I remembered how much I really love drugs. Taking something and feeling different! Yeah! Grinning up at the sky through my car’s open sunroof, I stared at the low, bright, 5 pm California sun—it’s like no sun you’ll ever see on the East Coast, man.

In my euphoria I imagined seeing—molecules swarming around the sun like winged ants on a nuptial flight. The little colored-ball-and-stick molecules of my psychoactive medication. Yaar. Rising to the sun so joyful.

Back home, five minutes later, the molecules were gone. And I was already coming down. Damn. Go back to my days of chasing the high? No.

So that was two days ago, and I took one last Zyban yesterday morning. And then, looking in the mirror after that pill, I felt the faintest ghost of an acid flashback. A sense of seeing my face deform like clay into a monster’s. And all day yesterday, whenever I felt happy, I’d look inside myself and feel that ghost of a high. But damn it, I want my own moods, not some drug’s actions. I’ve come to treasure my serenity, my psychic integrity.

So, okay, forget the Zyban. I know the average person would think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, the average normie might not fucking notice taking three Zyban over two days. But it’s not for me. No more Zyban. I can’t go there.

Problem is, how do I quit smoking? Pray to god for help? Note that I’m not using “god” in any standard religious sense. More like the Absolute, or the White Light, or the Cosmic One, or the Glow that lives four inches above the back of my head.

This morning I woke at dawn, with all traces of Zyban gone, and I started begging god to help me quite smoking, and also to give me, pretty please, some of that dope euphoria I’d been reminded of. I prayed harder than I had in a very long time. And I had this vision of Vastness above me, as if I were a minute c. elegans worm on a microscope slide—such as the worm I in fact looked at the other day.

It was kind of terrifying. Awe-inspiring in the old Bible sense of awe. Enormous god looking down at tiny me, a wriggling speck half-hidden in Earthly debris. I tend to think I’m big and important, but I’m small and mortal. Not an especially pleasant feeling.

Even so, I felt a sense of love from god. How can god care about something so tiny as me? Well, perhaps god is infinite, pervading all of spacetime, and thus has enough energy and attention for each of us. When I happen to see a c. elegans on my slide, or a paramecium, I go ahead and love the little thing. And an omniscient god might be in some sense seeing all of us all the time. Why not? I always imagine god as being everywhere. Like the light imbuing a stained-glass window.

The result of this rare bout of prayer/meditation was that today I felt very happy and relaxed. No high, no come-down, just my own right size. I was kind to my students and colleagues and it didn’t even pain me. And I didn’t smoke. Maybe I can keep it up.

Or not. Hell, it’s just cigarettes. And there’s always nicotine gum.

October 5, 2003. Insomnia, Mid-Life Crisis.

It’s 3 am, and I’m awake. So often these days I wake up this time of night and then can’t go back to sleep for an hour or two. Sometimes I cure it by eating a bowl of cereal with milk. Other times I just lie in bed waiting for the sleep, worrying about this or that family member, fretting over my career, thinking about my classes, planning computer programming projects, pondering ideas for my new book. Now I manage to relax into the fact that I’m lying in bed in the dark, and I luxuriate in that. Once in awhile I can get into a head-trip of mentally zooming forward into the phosphene images that I see when my eyes are closed, always heading towards the darkest areas, and then, if it works, I’ll find myself entering virtual realities or dream scenes—and then I’ll be asleep.

Tonight instead of any of that, I decided to lie on the living-room couch and write. Initially I was going to work on The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, but then it seemed like more fun to work on this, my journal, which I haven’t done for a long time. I remember in Brussels when I had insomnia, I’d just get up and write for a few hours, knowing I could sleep late in the morning.

Yesterday Sylvia and I went hiking on the bluffs by the beach in Santa Cruz with a group of people from the San Jose State Math Department, two of them being colleagues who’ve retired and who are pushing seventy. It gives me the creeps how seriously old age is coming up on me. From time to time I feel like I ought to retire from teaching, but seeing my retired friends makes me think I might have a lot of years to go. Once I retire, what do I do? How will it feel to know I’m in the final stage of my life?

I have actually been kind of enjoying the work at school the last week or two, making some cool new 3D graphics programs for the students to doctor up for their homework projects. This said, there’s an uncreative aspect to the programs, as they resemble demo projects that I’ve created before.

It’s a let-down not to be on an exciting stay in Europe like last year. Like, tomorrow’s Sunday, and the thought of going down to the crowded-with-yuppies Los Gatos Farmer’s Market and reading my same George-Bush-drenched Sunday paper and browsing the same books on the Borders shelves, and looking at the same dull clothes in Banana Republic—it makes me want to scream. I could go biking instead, but all my local routes are so familiar.

My discontent has to do with a feeling that my time is running out. I don’t want to slog along in a numb daze, robotically doing the same things until I keel over.

At least I’ve got The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. I have some material from the Brussels lecture-notes that I might eventually collage in, but at this point I prefer to make a fresh start on the thing, and let it develop its own character. I’ve written a couple of thousand words. Very much a “jacking off into a used rubber” feel at this point. I’m expecting that will lessen as I dive ever-deeper beneath the surface.

Writing my books Infinity and the Mind and The Fourth Dimension was in both cases a matter of delving into matters that seem obvious. Forcing myself to stare at the blank walls of accepted fact and to pick out the faces that others don’t see. That was the wild thing about my peyote hallucination in junior year Swarthmore College, how everything looked like a face—even my ceiling.

Everything is alive, and there are gold coins lying on the picked over parade-ground, and with enough patience and reapplication of effort I can see them—even though the others can’t.

The “parade-ground” is one of my recurrent metaphors about the difficulty of writing projects that involve widely familiar topics. I think of a military base where the thousands of recruits are under strict orders to pick up and pocket any slightest scrap of litter—a paper match, a bit of twig. In my metaphor, the recruits are the less-rigorous or less-fanciful thinkers who’ve policed the very same intellectual landscape that I plan to explore.

And, yea, I propose to find something as wonderful as Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Ah, Bosch. Actually, I’ve been wondering if my small remaining energies might not be better spent upon a novel about him than upon The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. I’m imagining an SF tale called “Bosch and the Aeroforms,” this last word being something I picked up from a saucer-nut book I recently acquired from a used book store: Trevor J. Constable, Cosmic Pulse of Life: The Revolutionary Biological Power Behind UFOs.

The author thinks there are what he calls aeroforms, that is invisible protozoa up to hundreds of feet across, floating about in the sky. He “photographed” some aeroforms by pointing a camera loaded with infrared film at an empty dawn sky, aiming towards spots where he felt a presence. His photos are in his book—they remind me of blotchy prints I’d sometimes get when I was printing my own pictures as a boy, and I’d carelessly let water drops dry on the negatives.

I see a novel or at least a short story in the aeroforms concept, possibly involving time travel to the age of Jeroen Bosch. A pleasant line of thought. The tale could transreally be about anomie and mid-life crisis. Oh, wait, that’s box-office poison.

I bought another used book on the web, too—William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content, a book that I worshipped in the 1970s, and then lost by drunkenly lending it to some forgotten friend.

I paid way too much for my used copy, $140, and it’s not in very good shape. But I just had to own it again. It was pure joy rereading it. I recognized so very many bits that I’ve totally integrated into my worldview, so many kicks and tricks that I’ve used in my transreal work.

What I hadn’t remembered from reading the book in the 1970s is that it’s set in San Jose. It’s a Bildungsroman transreal novel about Craddock’s experiences as an acid-head while a student at San Jose State, 1963-1967. He was born in 1946 like me, and went to college the same years as me—attending the school where I now work.

I wish I could find him and give him a copy of my mirror-world right-coast work in the same vein, The Secret of Life, set in the same period. Looking for Craddock on the web reveals only one hit, a reprint of some typically tangential bio notes he’d written for a Contemporary Authors reference volume, back when Be Not Content came out.

I learned he was born in Los Gatos, and later lived in the Santa Cruz mountains. Right when I moved here in 1986, I remember seeing a column by Craddock in the Santa Cruz Good Times, a free newspaper. I hope he’s still alive. Maybe I could help him get Be Not Content back into print. I could write an introduction, if that would help.

I often worry about wasting time, right, and I found a wonderful line about this in Be Not Content. The author-narrator Abel Egregore expresses a worry about wasting time to one of his stoner friends.

The friend guffaws and says, “Time? How can you waste time?”

Some real enlightenment to be had there. Time and space are all-pervasive ineluctable modalities. What’s to waste? You use one second per second no matter what you’re doing. A wonderful teaching.

Why not be happy with what I have?

October 22, 2003. I Want to Retire.

This semester is more tiring than usual, as I have to commute to the campus four days a week. Usually it’s only three days or even two days. Yes, I know we professors are spoiled, but the job is harder than it looks.

Basically I’ve done nothing but grade programs, papers, and midterms for the last two weeks. I’m thinking I’d really like to retire after this coming spring term. If I do that, I think my regular paychecks, would run through August, 2004.

I got some info about what kind of pension I can get after that, and I found that I can just about get enough to live on, at least in a frugal way. Sylvia doesn’t want to retire just yet, but eventually she will too. I’m wondering if we might sell the house here in Los Gatos and move to San Francisco. Changes in the air.

Thinking about retirement makes me that much more impatient with the work at school. The students, the meetings, the obligations. Grading a big stack of tests today, I was at that certain point when it feels like I’ve been grading for a really long time and the stack of remaining papers isn’t perceptibly smaller.

I always think of that Christmas hymn, “They Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” about the hordes of angels. The song is like an alien invasion tale, really. “And through the cloven skies they came.” The test papers are fanning out and multiplying, each ungraded test slip-sliding and becoming two. The beating of angels’ wings.

I’ll be fifty-eight this spring. It occurs to me that my father made a seemingly capricious decision to retire at what seemed to the rest of us like too early an age. And then he ran, unsuccessfully, for the Virginia State Assembly. And in the process he started an affair with his campaign manager, Priscilla Ames, and then he left my mother for Priscilla. He was drinking a lot. Those were his worst years.

Maybe he was having fun, but it didn’t seem like it. He and Priscilla drove around the country quite a bit in his Cadillac. I remember they went to Key West and Arkansas in particular. For awhile they had an apartment in Fort Smith, Arkansas, lying low. When the scandal died down, Pop and Priscilla made their way back to his beloved Reston and they opened a little convenience store, though the store only lasted for a year or so.

I remember Pop telling me that he’d been somewhat timorous about returning to the town where he’d made such a scandal, but was reassured when he asked someone about it, and they said, “Oh, Embry, that’s old news.” But of course that news never did get old for Mom or for my brother and me. We stayed annoyed. Poor pariah Pop.

Had Pop already had his first round of heart trouble by the time he retired? Let’s see, he was born in 1914, and I remember once at Christmas in Reston, smuggling a new-born baby into the hospital to see Pop. That must have been Isabel who we smuggled, me carrying her under my overcoat, Isabel so cute. She was born in the fall of 1974, so Pop would have been sixty. And, yeah, he retired from the ministry two years after that. At sixty-two.

So, gosh, if I’m talking about retiring at fifty-eight, that’s way earlier than Pop. But, face it, that semester I took off to Brussels ruined me for regular work. And, come on, even if I do quit teaching next spring, it’s not like I’ll be fully retired. I’ll still be writing books—into my sixties at least.

At this point in my life, I can appreciate that my father was driven by a midlife crisis—well, latelife crisis is a more accurate phrase. I’m in the throes of it myself. We’re taking about an utter dissatisfaction with the status quo. I need a change. So retire already!

I just hope I can stay sober and not have those bad drunken years in my sixties like Pop did. There are times I feel like, “Why not just do whatever the hell I want, like Pop did?” But he sure didn’t seem to get much pleasure out of his drinking.

What if I do whatever the hell I want—but without getting drunk and stoned, and without leaving my wife. Maybe within those parameters I could have fun.

“Take this job and shove it. I ain’t workin’ here no more.”

By way of building my resolve, I went to an informational workshop about retirement, up in Mountain View at the offices of CAL-PERS (California Public Employees Retirement System). I think I was the only professor there. The woman in front of me was a toll-taker at a bridge! The woman leading the workshop had been an orderly in a madhouse.

It gave me a good kind of solidarity feeling. I’m a public employee like the rest! The leader assured us that our state government—now in the hands of science-fiction actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people—won’t be able to loot the CAL-PERS funds. Not like Congress has been doing for years with Social Security.

November 20, 2003. Perspective Transformation.

I’ve had the most incredible ongoing backache for the last couple of months. I do yoga every day and that just barely keeps me ambulatory. I think it’s a combination of my latelife crisis and the huge amount of computer work I’ve been doing. The mouse clicks, the hours in a chair, the hunching over the screen.

Last week I did a revamp of my so-called Pop game framework for my Game Programming class. And, for my Computer Graphics class, I developed some object-oriented code for showing tumbling 3D polyhedra with second-order polyhedra mounted on their corners, and even third-order polyhedra on the corners of the second-order guys. And with everything spinning. Hack, hack, hack. Lots of debugging, and lots of anxiety during the bugs.

It would be good for my body not to touch a computer for a month or two. But everything I do is about computers. Maybe I could just limit myself to writing on the laptop. That’s not quite so bad. I can lie on my back, and I don’t use a mouse, just use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around. Even so, as I lie here doing it, I feel the stress in my back.

I’m getting too old to be a computer jock, my body can’t take it. I keep thinking of an article I read years ago, a union rep in Detroit talking to an auto worker, and the worker says, “You gotta get me off the line.”

The wear and tear of having to act like a machine.

I’ve done a lot of work on my Graphics class lectures recently. I’m worried not enough students will sign up for the Graphics II class I’m teaching next semester, and I want my present students to feel that I’ll do a competent job, so I’ve been on my best behavior in terms of giving clear, well-prepared lectures and demos.

A few weeks ago, before I knuckled down, I gave a lecture that was such a fiasco that I started laughing and said, “It’s a good thing I have tenure!” But now I’m doing good, and it looks like I’ve got sixteen signed up for next term, so the class will run.

Sometimes it’s odd to me that anyone might imagine that I’m a good teacher. I think I have this neurosis called impostor syndrome. Like—I’ll imagine that I can’t write, I can’t program, I can’t teach. Imagine that all these years I’ve been faking it on every front. But in reality, there are times when I really nail it.

I got a nice SF idea from computer graphics this week. It would be cool to have the world freeze into a perspective-transformed state, and you walk into it, and the distant things really are small, but you stay the same size, and pretty soon you’re stepping over mountain ranges and even out past the Moon. You enter the world shown inside a painting, but with everything in there just as shown, smaller and smaller the further away it was supposed to be.

Maybe I can use that idea in my “Bosch and the Aeroforms” story. A lot of my ideas have come from things I learn about while teaching.

I got a big box of As Above, So Below paperbacks today, speaking of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish Masters. The book is a very nice package, although I still think the font is too small. We have a good quote from Wm. Gibson on the paperback—I had to really work on him to get that, but he kindly came through.

In a similar vein, I’m now starting to scheme about getting Stephen Wolfram to write a blurb or even a preface for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. My review of Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science finally came out in the American Mathematical Monthly. This is the review I was working on for so long in Brussels last year.

I’ve gotten some good responses to my review from other mathematicians. Even Wolfram likes it, though he’s not happy that I had to put in a mild sentence about Stephen’s frequent controversies with other researchers about priority claims. Looking back on the history of mathematics, these kinds of squabbles are fairly common.

The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul is moving along rapidly. My hope is to do a quick, light job. I’m starting to feel very good about the book. I think it’ll be a masterpiece.

I’m not quite so desperate to retire from teaching right now, mainly because there’s only two weeks left in the fall semester! We’ll see how I feel in the spring.

November 21, 2003. Hidalgo Cemetery.

Today is Friday, my day off. Instead of working at home, I went mountain biking in the Almaden Quicksilver Park near the Guadalupe Reservoir. It was beautiful. Lots of brilliant autumn leaves, as always reminding me of my big peyote trip thirty-eight autumns ago. I know I can’t do drugs anymore, but I’ll never stop missing them. That day in 1965 my head got full of the colored leaves. The leaves never left.

“And Mary kept all these things in her heart.”

I passed by a big patch of prickly pear cactuses, and someone had carved a heart shape out of one of the big flat pot-holder-shaped cactus lobes. It looked cool. There was a mercury-mining community in these hills back around the time of the gold rush.

I came across the Hidalgo Cemetery, no gravestones left there at all, just long grass and amazing old cypresses. Big thick trunks, although the trees aren’t all that tall. It’s a rather windy slope. A feeling that I’m on the verge of a new stage of my life. Completely alone in this park.

On my way back, I rode over something that looked, as I crossed it, like a snake. I went back to look. It was, aaaugh, a very big lizard who’d been resting there. The weight of my tire had broken off most of his tail. The tail was frantically twitching around on the ground. The lizard himself was motionless. Maybe scared I’d grab him if he moved? Or maybe just really sluggish from the cold. I had the notion that he was keeping himself under strict control, as opposed to his cut-off tail which had no control at all, desperately writhing. Ow.

Driving to school the other day I had a funny mental image. On the radio was a caterwauling woman country singer, going on about her man having a bunch of different girlfriends, and “doin’ them all the same as me.”

And I had this R. Crumb-style image of a big penis driving a pick-up truck. Country Penis wearing a little billed cap. His hairy balls are scrunched up in front of him. He’s erect and bobbing, cheerful, optimistic. No roof or cab on the truck, Country Penis in the open air. Not a care in the world. Doin’ them all.

December 8, 2003. Rocking on the Tome.

This Lifebox mamma is writing herself. Just like it was with Spaceland. All I have to do is type out whatever the voices in my head are telling me. They don’t tell me a whole lot at one time, though. Only a little every day. But it’s accumulating like snow on the ground in a blizzard.

I have so much to say about my chosen topics. The nice thing is that, with having so much material compared to the space I have to fill, I don’t have to write about things that I don’t really care about.

Right now I’m writing a short survey of physics, as viewed from the standpoint that everything’s a computation. I’d been worried about the quantum mechanics section, but I think it came out all right. Just write it, Ru. Get it done.

Yesterday I was walking in the woods. Can I use that in the Lifebox tome? Everything’s grist for the mill.

December 11, 2003. Chaos with Ralph Abraham.

Finally this arduous semester ends. The four-day-in-a-row schedule got to me, also the back-breaking hacking. But, hooray, I survived.

This Sunday I took a nice walk in the woods. It was raining. Heaps of life in the soil and all around. My joy was compromised a bit by the trail I chose, for it was hemmed in by road noises in one direction and gunfire from a rifle range in another. The sun came out briefly. Ah the trees, the leaves, the clouds, it’s all the same kinds of patterns, all so beautifully gnarly.

I had lunch with Ralph Abraham after my last class to celebrate. Ralph was teaching a course at San Jose State this term. He’s retired from UC Santa Cruz. I really look up to the guy, the Grand Old Chaotician. It was cold and windy, we two admired the whirling leaves in front of MacQuarrie Hall. Hard to imagine a better qualified pair of observers for this lovely chaos than Ralph and me. Really seeing it. It felt as good as the time Robert Sheckley and I were crossing a street in NYC years ago, high, and we nearly got run down by a taxi.

Today Ralph was talking about a science video of a rabbit smelling a pineapple. And how it’s hard to bring a smell to mind because, instead of being a primitive sensation, a smell is a learned association to a certain olfactory stimulation pattern.

Sometimes I don’t understand what Ralph’s talking about. He always says surprising things, not at all what I was expecting, and often irrelevant to the conversation’s topic. Sort of like my own conversational style. I really enjoy talking with him.

December 31, 2003. New Year’s Eve with Mermen.

We spent New Year’s Eve in San Francisco, sleeping at the Hotel Bohème in North Beach. In the evening, we took the bus to hell and gone, out to the Beach Chalet on Ocean Beach at the end of Golden Gate Park. The bus went along Market Street, and then through some housing projects—saw kids with graffiti on the sides of their sneakers.

The attraction at the Beach Chalet was the great psychedelic surf band the Mermen, reduced to a skeleton staff: guitarist, a bass and a drummer. The guitarist is a middle-aged guy with a shaved head, somewhat overweight, distracted, self-effacing, ironic, brow creased with thought, and a to-hell-with-everything-but-art demeanor. The demeanor of a man who’s about 50% more intelligent than everyone he ever talks to, and who’s wearily learned to live with this. Reminds me of my artist friend Paul Mavrides. The guitarist guy has all sorts of electronic filters he can run on his carefully selected notes, and he gets a wonderfully dreamy surf sound.

It wasn’t a crowded place, the Beach House, just a dinner spot. At midnight Sylvia and I were dancing on some carpeting between the windows and the band. Outside the west-facing windows lay the night. The Great Highway that runs along the beach, a beat parking lot, the beach with a dozen poor-people’s fires, and beyond that the sea, iced with moving lines of breakers. We were pressed right up against the end of the country, the edge of California.

The three Mermen were accompanied by a little light show projected from an assistant’s computer. First mandalas, and then film loops of seals, whales, and dolphins underwater. The liquid spacey music. The bass player was a California girl, chunky, cute, serious, with long dyed-blonde hair hanging nearly to her waist. Perfect.

Dancing with Sylvia was, as always, a revelation. She’s so lively, so cute and graceful. When she’s dancing she gets this blissful look, a big relaxed smile, her eyes focused inward, her lovely hips swinging from side to side. My Big Fish. Sometimes I forget just how great she is. I’m lucky to be married to her.

We had to get the bus back to the hotel—this was my bright idea to avoid driving on New Year’s Eve. Coming back, we had to change busses, getting out on Market Street, in a sudden driving shower of rain. We ran two blocks to the stop for the next bus, on Kearny Street, and just as we get there our bus pulls up, hooray. This bus stop has a little shelter roof, and it’s packed with drunks and freaks, mostly black. As the bus pulls up, a group of them get into an intense argument over whether the large, brightly lit and throbbing vehicle in front of them is in fact a city bus. Some think it might be a flying saucer or a hole in space. Most of them decide not to be taken in by the illusion, and they remain in the shelter as Sylvia and I motor away.

Write What?

January 13, 2004. Esalen. What is the Mind?

Sylvia and I are spending two nights at Esalen. It’s the kick-off of a six-day road trip to L.A. We’re planning to see a concert in the new Disney-funded and Gehry-designed symphony hall down there, also we’ll stop off in Santa Barbara, driving coastal Route 1 all the way down. A vacation trip.

I’m drinking blackberry sage tea (caffeinated), remembering my stay at Esalen with John Shirley last year. Kind of funny in retrospect. I have a really vivid (but imaginary) memory of him crawling across the crew quarters ceiling, with his hands and feet like suckers against the titaniplast. Gollum! The roaring winds of deep space. I haven’t seen John since, although if we met it would be cordially. I do love him, even if he’s difficult. Like in a story—the pals have a falling out, but of course they get back together.

Sylvia and I went in the Esalen baths last night. We had a big tub to ourselves on the cliff over the surf, the water hot and sulfured, the sky clear, and with the great milk-spill of the galaxy showing—first time I’ve seen the galaxy in a long time.

Down on the beach with Sylvia today, I was remembering my idea in March, 2003, of writing an autobiographical book called Memoirs of a Crazy Mathematician. And back then I decided I that was shy of that title, also I didn’t feel too stoked about writing my memoirs, and then I got embroiled in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul.

When I finish the tome, I think I would like to write a novel featuring a pair of crazy mathematicians. I’m thinking in terms of writing it from the point of view of a lesser guy, kind of like me writing about Wolfram or about Gödel. The competent journeyman describing his outré friend. A Boswell approach. And the regular guy has some life adventures, ordinary human stuff, Bruegelian romances.

I’m writing this lying on my bed at Esalen. We’re back in our room, end of the second day. I’m tired out from doing nothing and eating a lot. I took a little hike up the canyon today, not much. Down on that stony beach with Sylvia today, she and I looked at the ocean and talked about consciousness, for as long as we could stay on topic, although there’s always a temptation to say, “Why try and figure it out? We’re here. Isn’t that enough?”

In Esalen I always feel like I ought to be able to break through, like good old William J. Craddock talks about in Be Not Content. Craddock would try and do it with acid and still he’d never break through. Nobody does break through, do they? Sylvia’s more content with that than I am. My mind is a stream with ripples that I call thoughts. All I can do is throw pebbles into the water.

Before supper I was lying down resting, watching my mind, doing Esalen. The odd things that pop up. A goddess appears and lowers a crystal ball on a string into my mouth, or, no, it’s a Tinkertoy construction instead of crystal. Lying there studying my mind, I notice that I get a slight rush off each breath, an oxygen high, a tingle at the top of the nasal passages. Funny I never noticed that before. You get a free high several times a minute!

At bedtime I’m tired, worn down by having sat by some hideously dull sixtyish denizens of Orange County who were at Esalen because it was a “good price.” They talked only of the food. I wonder if they were swingers. After getting away from them I sat on the deck in back, stoking a bonfire. Sylvia came to sit by me.

Sylvia and I talked a little about our dull dinner partners, and I remarked, “I saw them naked in the shower at the tubs.” And a guy near us, like, gets up and leaves. Offended, according to Sylvia, by my crass frankness. What it is.

Later, vaguely worrying about my faux pas, my mind cycles in repetitive loops.

The next morning I took a little walk, all the while thinking about the mind. Miraculous how my mental life is generated by a carpet of cells that have grown themselves into a mat. How can that be? I see a footbridge, I have a model of it, I walk onto it—and look down at the ripples in the stream, at the standing waves of foam. The waves and ripples are like my mind. A woman walks past me across the footbridge. Her face twitches anxiously to see a silver-haired man in black jacket and sweatpants standing there. I’m the troll on the bridge. Myth overlays life.

And all these thoughts are coming from the meat weave in my head, and this flow of new associations is being layered onto my previous thoughts. A complex, gnarly, ever-changing tangle.

I think it’s very rare that we have fully chaotic and random-seeming thought patterns. Maybe when I took acid on Memorial Day in 1970 it was like that? Not even. That was structured gnarl as usual, but very dense and fast. Perhaps my vision of the White Light was a glimpse of pure, unstructured chaos. Roar! With all the neurons firing there’s no real content, simply a rush of stimulation.

Piled high and deep.

January 17, 2004. Arbus-Eyed in L.A.

Driving south from Esalen, I notice a few spots where I see the triangle of ocean between two hills. Again I think the shape is like the pubic delta—something I was thinking about last spring. It would be nice to paint that, a Magritte kind of double image, a mountains-and-sea combo as the delta of Venus.

In L.A. now. So we went to that new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall last night. It was a good show. Not knowing L.A. we decided to stay right downtown near the hall—this wasn’t that great of an idea.

The one humanizing touch on the ruthlessly high-tech Gehry building is where kids or street people have pissed on the ground, dipped their hands in the piss, and pressed their hands against the gleaming metal walls, holding their hands in place long enough for the piss to begin a corrosion process, leaving faint handprints.

I took a walk alone this morning. Downtown L.A. is like downtown San Jose. What if you built a city center and nobody came? Dead, dead, dead. The air filled with the roaring of giant fans, the ventilation systems of the Saturday-empty office towers surrounding us. The few landmarks seem crushingly distant across the endless blank stretches of hard pavement.

Finally I encounter an anomalous efflorescence of life: trailers, lights, endless canvas bags in the closed-off street outside the hotel. There’s a big “L.A. Marathon Finish” sign with helium balloons. But no crowd comes.

Slowly I realize they’re filming a commercial here, a shot of some guy finishing a race—maybe it’s for a bank or an insurance company or a health-care provider.

Most of those commercials that you see—they’re filmed here in L.A. The downtown on weekends is a vast, empty set, like the world after a humanity-destroying holocaust. Bad move to stay here.

We had lunch with Nick Kazan, an old college friend. It was nice to see him. Same smile, same weight, same mustache, only gray. He’s worked on a lot of scripts, maybe fifty or a hundred, out of which about fifteen have been made. Slightly bitter about the biz, but he kind of loves it. It’s getting harder for him to find work as he gets older. We’re nearly over the edge, we two.

Nick had never walked around this godforsaken downtown L.A. neighborhood in his life. We looked at the awesome old Bradbury building and the Grand Market. Walking down Broadway, we were the only white people for blocks. I was happy to see some human beings. Now I’m back in the hotel, back in the land of endless fan hum.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the Diane Arbus show that I saw three times at the MOMA in San Francisco. Diane has such a way of getting to the essential humanity of her subjects. They always seem to be as interested in her as she is in them. She must have been such a character. It made me want to write an Arbus-style novel with lots of ordinary people lovingly depicted and made fully human. Their individuality. Their lives.

On our second night in L.A. we didn’t have anything to do in our dead neighborhood, so we returned to the Gehry for another show. This was in a small room downstairs, a local ballet troupe. We had dinner at the Gehry cafeteria again. I was enjoying looking at the people, trying to see them as Diane Arbus would. Arbus-eyed. People sense when you are looking at them with utter interest and compassion, and more often than not, they look back and smile.

February 18, 2004. Crazy Mathematicians.

My publisher, Four Walls Eight Windows, sent the first part of my advance for The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul yesterday. Seeing a check is always a stimulus. And Frek and the Elixir appears in the start of April. I have no idea how it will do. It may sink like a stone—as usual. Why would this time out be any different? Most readers have already made up their minds about me. I’m that weird, annoying guy who won’t go away.

In the back of my mind I’m starting to scheme about what to write next. More and more I’m leaning towards doing a somewhat transreal novel about mathematicians, called Craxy Mathematicians. I mean to type Crazy, but really Craxy is even craxier. I know mathematicians inside out.

When I meet a fellow crazy mathematician there’s a tendency to overlook all the superficial aspects of the other person and to jointly waltz into the ozone. Math could be a commonality we have with aliens. Of course what we think to be interesting is something that’s relative to our biology. Perhaps each race’s mathematics can emulate the other’s. Bogonian Tube-Gas Flutter Spectrum Harmonics is the objective correlative of Number Theory. And the Differential Geometry that underlies our computer graphics is essentially the same as Slime Taste Synthesis.

Last month I saw the movie Big Fish with Rudy Jr. Just the two of us. It’s a movie about a boy whose unreliable father is a great story-teller. The father verbally morphs real people into the characters of his tales. I was all but sobbing at the father’s funeral, where all the living models of his characters show up—and the son is amazed. Nice final image of the father as a big fish leaping out of a muddy river—shaking himself and swimming on. Sigh.

The images of the father in the hospital bed looked so much like my own father, whom I often saw in hospital beds during the final decades of his life. I’ll be there before I know it. There’s no way out.

Last night I woke up at 3 am and had a cigarette. It was raining, a California storm, lovely on the back porch, a view of all the things I love: clouds, dripping water, plants. Sweet Gaia.

February 25, 2004. Back to Teaching.

The start of the school semester always reminds me of the analogy I thought of when I first came to San Jose State and I was working on The Hollow Earth: A ship headed for Antarctica gets frozen into the winter ice, and then it has to wait a season till it can move forward. Well hopefully it won’t be a whole season, but I haven’t made much progress on the book this month.

So I’m teaching a section of Graphics II and two sections of a graduate Software Project course. I’ll split the grad students into three-person teams and have them write computer games in the project course.

Two good things about teaching are that: (a) it gives me new things to think about, and (b) being with my students is as close as I’ll ever come to hanging around with friendly saucerians. Even the native English-speakers are like saucerians, being CS majors.

I’ve been in mega-hacker mode, revising my computer game framework, and writing some demos of lighting and textures. Papers to grade as well, but mainly it’s the hacking that sucks up all my time. The other day Sylvia came home at 6 pm and I was still in my PJs, and I hadn’t eaten all day. I was hacking. I told my students about this incident, and they seemed to appreciate it. The kind of thing they’d do too.

Teaching the advanced lighting algorithms this semester has enhanced my appreciation of the specular highlights on things, the diffuse and ambient lighting, the emissivity, the radiosity. In other words, I am having fun with the hacking.

Earlier in these journals, I mentioned the programmer John Carmack talking about his lighting-algorithm enlightenment trip. Sunday morning I was fully on that trip, staring and staring at Sylvia’s dully opalescent toroidal silver brooch in church, analyzing all the realworld lighting algorithms involved.

Nobody can ever really know how much fun I have.

Like, hacking lighting algorithms is one level, and the next level is waking up and seeing lights in a new way, and the top level is to go outside on the rain-washed hills and not be thinking anything at all. Not verbalizing. My life pure, coherent, unobserved.

There’s one spot on the path near the former nunnery at St. Joseph’s Hill. I was there today. It’s so bosky and closed in, the oaks so tumble-down and gnarly, a real little Eden. I’m always thrilled to be there.

I wish I was there all the time. In the light.

March 4, 2004. Wolfram’s Call, Frek Arrives.

I’ve mentioned Zhabotinsky-scroll patterns several times in these journals, but I’ll describe them once again. They’re a pattern that occurs in nature, and which you often see in two-dimensional cellular automata programs.

If you slice a mushroom in half, the cross-section of the mushroom’s cap is a Zhabotinsky scroll. A bean or a fetus is a bit like a Zhabo scroll. If you run your finger through water—or stir a cup of coffee with a spoon—you’ll see linked pairs of eddies that are Zhabotinsky scrolls. And you see large versions of the Zhabo scrolls in satellite images of weather patterns.

The scrolls come in pairs of spirals, one clockwise and one counter-clockwise, with the two spirals joined along an outer edge. In a dynamic system, the scrolls are rotating, continually growing outward from their centers, but only growing to a certain characteristic size.

Anyway, for the last few days I’ve been cranking to design some cellular automata programs that create good, lively Zhabotinsky-scrolls. Partly I’m doing this for the Lifebox book—for the sections on morphogenesis and ecology—but also I’m doing it because Stephen Wolfram has been planning, with much fanfare, to phone me on Tuesday, wanting to try some computer experiments with me over the phone.

By way of getting me ready, Wolfram mailed me a new copy of his Mathematica software. And he had one of his techs phone me to give me a half-hour primer on how to use some special software which is an enhanced internet communication method.

I get daily messages from his secretary, checking on my current state of preparedness for my impending mind-meld with the great man. And, as I say, this has driven me into orgies of Zhabotinsky-scroll cellular automata hacking.

So Wolfram called on Tuesday, and it was great. He had two assistants join the conference too, the four of us linked by these special wares that meant that we could share computer desktops—like I’d be watching Wolfram’s computer screen, with him writing in Mathematica code, and his assistants and me making suggestions. I had my phone on speaker mode. All four of us were on the phone, as well as on the computer.

Wolfram did some quick Mathematica experiments on the Zhabotinsky-pattern-generating Hodgepodge CA rule, testing if it’s complex in a certain interesting way which he calls Class 4, and which I call gnarly.

We switched over to my desktop after awhile and then they could see my screen. I showed them some of my brand new Zhabo scrolls. This was a spot where the web link slowed down—Wolfram’s screen was lagging a minute behind what I was seeing on my screen. The communication software’s realtime compression algorithm was bogging down on my moving CAs—as the images totally change several times a second.

The whole exchange felt very futuristic.

Eventually Stephen started gently chiding me, like he always does, asking why I look at CAs with such complicated rules. Like some of my CAs have two real numbers in each cell, acting as activator and inhibitor, emulating a biological spot-formation process that good old Alan Turing was investigating back in 1952.

Wolfram himself believes in looking at the simplest possible rules. Like his favorites are Rule 110 and Rule 30—they’re one-dimensional CAs with a single bit per cell, and with their update rules summarized in eight bits.

Stephen has this notion that it’s more scientifically significant to find the gnarl coming from very simple things, so as to prove that the gnarl is inherent in logic—as opposed to the gnarl being smuggled in as scuzz stuck to the more complicated rules. Scuzz like bacteria that drop into a culture dish from a careless lab-worker’s fingers.

And he has an almost puritanical horror of using analog-style continuous numbers for the cell states. It’s even a stretch for him to be looking at the Hodgepodge rule—whose states are five bits each. Like I say, he’s happiest with one bit per cell.

I never know quite how to answer Wolfram on these issues. “My rules are beautiful, like light-shows,” I tell him. “I like watching gnarly things.”

And I do think it’s significant that the complicated rules produce the same kinds of patterns as the simple ones. Nature herself is complicated. Nothing in the natural world is clean and simple. But even so, the world has its stable structures. The fundamental structures are chaotic attractors, robust against scuzz.

It’s important to know that you can get Zhabotinsky scrolls in the messiest systems, and that the scrolls can be just as clear as the ones in the simpler systems.

My novel Frek and the Elixir came in the mail the other day, the first bound copy, and it looks beautiful. Tor did a great job, it’s bound in signatures, the font is good-sized, the print job is crisp, the paper is nice, and they got some great advance blurbs for the back cover. It seems like this one ought to sell well.

I’m always kind of amazed to see a years-long dream like this as a final finished product. An object I can heft in my hand.

Losing It

March 24, 2004. Sick With a Virus. Worn Down.

I’ve had a cold virus for a week and a half now. I feel like I’m in a bubble—my throat hurts, I can’t breathe well, nothing seems interesting or fun. These days, once a virus takes hold in me, I can’t shake it for weeks. Complaining a whole lot about it helps a little, and if nobody wants to listen to me, I write down my complaints in my journal.

My disease started a day or two after I went to a NOFX concert in San Francisco with Rudy Jr. and his girlfriend Penny, a great treat for me. It was a cold night and I smoked a lot of cigarettes, excited, wanting to blend in with the punks. NOFX performed a great song about President George Bush with the sing-along chorus: “He’s the idiot son of an asshole.”

My 58th birthday came and went ten days after the concert, but by then I was too sick to get much joy from the celebration. Not that my dear family didn’t come through anyway. Isabel sent me some nice toys, Sylvia made a layer cake, Rudy stopped by and we had lunch in the back yard. Talked to Georgia on the phone. But being sick paled the pleasure. We’d planned a little party with guests, but I asked to postpone it. Weak and sad. Flattening of affect.

I’ve also been having the worst backaches I’ve ever had. I think this relates to my virus, to the computer work I do for my courses—and to worrying about my lectures.

Teaching is in some ways a relief as then I get out of myself and forget about my aches and pains. On the other hand, I’ve run out of material in my courses and have no idea how to kill the remaining half of the semester. Lower back stress! My student evaluations were bad last semester, and I think this semester they’ll be worse. I have to write two tests right now and the prospect paralyzes me. I’ve been teaching for too long. I need to get off the assembly line.

You’d think that by now I could teach CS in my sleep. But of course I always have to make it hard for myself by trying to do something new. Or I try and get the students to do something new. In the old days, if a student bungled a program, I’d swoop in and fix the code, hacking with the student in my office on my machine. But now, with my nearly constant back-pain agony, I physically can’t carry off the big hacks. It hurts too much to work with the mouse and the keyboard all the time.

Waiting in the background is that book I’m writing, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, the would-be-commercial science popularization that I roped myself into doing because I thought I should write about what I learned about computers in Silicon Valley—as if I’d learned anything and as if anyone would care. What a fucking waste of time.

Working on the Lifebox is another physically taxing computer job. I’m always dragging around big blocks of text and formatting illustrations. Instead of thinking and writing, the work often feels more like cutting and pasting—or chain-sawing and welding. And I always get rushed and frenetic when I work on it. There’s so much to do, many loose ends, it’s a hydra.

I hunch my shoulders when I’m working on the Lifebox on my computer. I tense up and rush, trying to beat down the endless, blandly nodding pillow of material—I feel like I have to hit it and hit it and hit it and hit it some more, like a kid sobbing and drumming his fists on a locked door. I already felt this way when I was starting on the tome in Brussels in 2002.

Anyway, the Lifebox is up to 75,000 words now, a shade more than half done. I’m making it all up as I go along, just like my class lectures, so that’s a little stressful too. Why can’t I do things the easy way? Finish it and mail it in, Ru, mail it the fuck in!

Who gives a rat’s ass about computers, anyway? Not the public anymore. The enrollment for our computer science courses is down by a third and still falling! A nationwide trend.

Due to some budget cuts at San Jose State, my teaching load was slated to double next fall, so I’m going on half-time leave in fall, 2004, so as to keep my load down to something I can stand. But, wait, a few months ago, I was thinking that I was going to retire or at least go on full-time leave for fall, 2004, so what’s with this measly half-time leave, Ru?

Well—I’m hesitant to fully jump off my comfortably salaried cruise ship. Anxious about swimming in the great South Pacific ocean of retirement, thousands of miles from shore.

I tell myself that things aren’t really that bad.

I do enjoy working on my nonfiction book somewhat, and it kind of seems worth doing, even though at times I think it’s fatuous. I learned to use that word from Bruce Sterling who had “his” character sling this epithet at “my” character in our story “Junk DNA.” I’m thinking that fatuous means self-satisfied, superficial, and stating the obvious with solemnity.

As I’ve stewed over at length before, Lifebox is skirting the dreaded zones of “jacking off into a used rubber” and “looking for gold coins on a well-policed parade ground.” But nobody can do it quite the way I’m doing it. And I still have hopes of breaking through to some new levels of understanding. I have a coin inside my *squeek* rubber, haw!

From this, I somehow free-associate to the way the girlfriend in Fellini’s 8 1/2 is a fan of the funnies, and she keeps quotefully saying, “Gulp,” only she pronounces it gul-peh. And then she always laughs. Take off that rubber and give the Muse your coin, old man. “Gul-peh!” She blows a kiss. Turn me on, O sacred Muse, come thou and lie with me.

On a good day, it really is fun to see my students. They’re cute and lively and eager and they genuinely appreciate it when I teach them something—which I often do. I worry too much that I’m not a good enough teacher. How good do I have to be, really? The students like me, they’re excited about the material, and they’re learning a lot.

Maybe I shouldn’t be in such a rush to retire. There’s nothing after retirement but increasing irrelevance, followed by death. I have this tendency to always want to rush on to the next activity, check the next box on the list. I got married when I was twenty-one and we had our first child when I was twenty-three. Always onward, zack-zack.

I went to yoga today and that was good, although my back kept clenching up. The teacher said you have to love your body and not be mad at it, which wasn’t the way I was thinking right then, so it was useful to hear. To think of my body as tenderly as I think of my wife’s body or of the bodies of my children—as something to care for and honor and love, as something cute and lovable, something precious. Rather than thinking of it as an enemy to be dominated, an opponent to be broken, a stubborn mule that needs a taste of the knout.

I remember the skin of our babies, so taut and smooth. Like little rabbits. I was Mom’s little rabbit.

Would be nice to go to yoga again tomorrow. But many days I don’t feel like being in that enclosed stuffy studio. Instead I do yoga, though not for as long, in my back yard. That’s a touchstone for me, yoga in the back yard, looking up at the trees.

Except when the leaf blowers are going. That’s become a big issue for me. It’s kind of ruining my enjoyment of my yard. All day Saturday, and many other days as well. Non-English-speaking Mexican gardeners with leaf-blowers, hedge-trimmers, weed-whackers. Fifteen or twenty years ago when we moved here, the noise was a tenth as much. Back then the gardeners still used scythes and rakes and brooms. Now it’s all noise, a snarling buzz that gets right into my brain. I’m always longing for quiet.

This journal entry reminds me of the sad last letter that poor Mom wrote me from the old folks home. She was wishing she could have her own right food just once, instead of whatever glop they were feeding her. But she was also trying to be brave, braver than I’m acting right now, as a matter of fact. Poor old thing. I wish I could see her one more time.

March 25, 2004. Matrix. Depression. Ready to Drink?

Okay, it’s the next day, I’m still sick, still in a bubble, still depressed.

Last night after dinner I felt well for an hour. How wonderful it was to see colors and shapes again, to have energy, to feel able to do. My hold on contentment is so tenuous. Stopped up ear-canals and a fever make such difference.

When I got up this morning I thought maybe I was okay. At least I got the tests written yesterday, and they’re pretty good. Clever and difficult to answer, yet fairly easy to grade, I believe.

And now I’m giving the tests. I’ll sit and type into my laptop for a couple of hours the way I like to do. Kvetching into my journal my problems, what joy.

This classroom’s a little cold. They’ve had problems with the thermostat all semester. Earlier in the semester it was much colder, and I complained, and the janitors turned it up, and then it was about 85 degrees all the time. I had to teach in my T-shirt. Finally, when the students weren’t around, I pried the wall-bolted plastic thermostat-cover out of the wall, working the bolts out of the plaster. Then I pried the special-wrench-needing tamper-proof secondary cover off the thermostat, and manually turned the fucker down. Since then it’s been mostly a little too cold, although I’ve privily ripped the thermostat cover off of the wall twice more to readjust the thing, always when no students are around to see. Direct action.

A film-maker named Josh came to my office with his crew before class this morning to interview me for a talking-heads stations-of-the-cross movie he’s making about artificial life. It’s to be part of a ten(!) DVD set of the Matrix movies, including, like, the cartoon version, the making-of, the scientific background, etcetera. Nice egoboo to be interviewed.

Josh mentioned that only the more colorful interviewees would “make the cut” into his movie, so, old buffoon that I am, senile war-horse, I rose to the occasion, harrumph, and tried to say lots of extreme things. Doing the punk thing and cursing so much that the director looked genuinely discomfited.

I mentioned the thing about the big software Architect in the movie not looking at all like a real-life computer hacker. And I made the point that the most rudimentary thermodynamic principles make it evident that you wouldn’t gain energy by keeping people on life support in glass bidets for use as D cell batteries, as stipulated in The Matrix. People are dissipative systems, duh, they turn energy into unusable heat.

“Oh, the Wachowski brothers don’t say their movie is science fiction,” was the response to this. “It’s about artificial life.”

Such a stupid answer. Like, these people have no idea what “science fiction” or “artificial life” actually mean.

So, just to fully flummox the interviewer, I hit him with a totally insane remark. “Computer-based artificial life is bogus because it doesn’t have cunt juice on it.”

Oh, that will get you onto the commentary disk, Rudy. I’m foaming at the mouth. Doddering. Waving my cane. A psycho. I wanted to physically smash my computer to bits, jump up and down on it. Slow dissolve on that.

The interview felt liberating to me. It plugged me back into my old punk self. The feeling carried over into my classes, when I was proctoring the last final and urging the students to write a long discursive answer to an essay question.

I went ahead and told them, “Pile it high and deep!”

Today I go on spring vacation for a week. If I wasn’t sick I’d be happy about it. I had planned to go camping, but I can’t visualize that, the way I feel. There’s really nothing I feel like doing at all. It’s been six months since I finished my last painting. I’m wasting my life, man, I’m wasting my life.

I’m experiencing the proverbial hallmark of depression, the inability to take pleasure in one’s accustomed little treats. Sex no longer interests me, food tastes like sawdust, I hate my book, I hate my job, my house looks dirty and dull. Is this just my two-weeks-long low-grade fever talking—or might I be suffering from depression as well as having the flu?

I’ve always uncharitably thought of depression as being for losers, for weak sisters, for self-indulgent babies, for fakers, for malingerers, for people too stupid to give up drugs and alcohol, for uncreative zhlubs, for pill-heads looking to score antidepressant drugs. I’d like to think the clinical depression trip is not for me. But what if?

How dull of me to be writing a journal that’s all complaints. Wait—does this mean that now I’m complaining about complaining? And, in ruing that, I’m now depressed over being depressed about being depressed? Jesus wept.

If I’m depressed, then what? That Zyban/Wellbutrin drug is an antidepressant. But I didn’t like it when I tried using it quit smoking. If I don’t want to use pharmaceuticals, what do I turn to? Change myself? Change my life?

Meanwhile it’s been nearly two weeks since I went to a recovery meeting, and I’m starting to feel like drinking or using. I’ll get a prescription for back-muscle-relaxant meds, yeah, baby, Percodan and Vicodin. Or why not start right in with bourbon and pot? Why fuck around? If I’m going to feel so crappy all the time, what’s the point in being sober?

Maybe I should get some whiskey on the way home. I’ll go for one of those real expensive new bourbons that I see in the Lunardi’s supermarket, golden brown in their clear glass bottles, I’ve run my fingers over the bottles a few times, the glass feels so thick and smooth.

I’ll wash the bourbon down with some nice German or Dutch beer in green bottles. And I’ll buy an expensive Merlot wine for back-up, and maybe some nice dry sherry and what the heck, throw some cognac into the shopping cart too, and why not a twelve-pack of Tecate and some Pacifico beer too, and a pint of vodka to hide in the freezer, and that really doesn’t sound like enough beer—better get a couple of cases of Millers.

I should score some killer hi-bud pot while I’m at it, though I’m not sure where I could do that. My old connections would be kind of shocked, maybe even hesitant to sell to me—although I can also imagine them gloating and glad. Maybe all of the above. I could talk one of them into it, someone like Queue Harmaline from The Hacker and the Ants.

Ah, that first taste of the bourbon, the clink of the ice-cubes, the immediate rush of good feelings and the vanishing of pain and care. Why turnest thou from Nature’s Perfect Elixir, my son? The sweet perfume of pot, the smile that crawls out onto my face and won’t go away, the surging exhilaration, the rush of clever ideas, the vanishing of self-doubt. Why abandonest thou the Divine Herb, dear seeker? “Euphoric recollection,” is what they call these kinds of thoughts in my recovery group.

And, hey, as long as I’m going back out—I never did heroin, so I really ought to check out heroin this time around.

And more acid, I never took enough acid… But, naw, in all honesty, I can’t say I would feel like facing the ordeal of acid even one more time. The special-effects toon-town media image of acid is much more appealing than the nightmare reality of it.

Ditto for the pot and booze, if the truth be told. Yes, the first sips and puffs would be good, but then there’s all that running around to get more, and then the inevitable fights with people. And then the gray light of dawn, back at square minus-one with a hangover, and then running around to get more stuff, etc. And, waaah, no longer having my seven years, eight months and twenty-five days of sobriety. And sure as shit, I’d end up back in the program anyway. Or dead.

I’ll catch a recovery meeting tonight or maybe that one at noon tomorrow. All I have to do is not drink and use till tomorrow, and the meeting will help me get back on track. If there were no meetings at all, I don’t think I’d last very long.

Off and on I’ve been planning a big diving trip with big brother Embry to Yap and Palau next summer. Seems like a lot of money and commitment, and it makes me anxious to contemplate doing something so grand without Sylvia. My knee jerk reaction to the trip, at least today, in my diseased state, is that I don’t want to do it, it’s too hard. But probably I should do it. At least it’ll be something to put in my journal besides complaints.

So I worked on this plaintive entry for a couple of days now, putting in nearly a full four hours, while proctoring those three tests, and. I was at my little laptop keyboard all day. But, guess what, my back feels better than usual. Because I’ve been expressing myself.

Why can’t I quit my job and live in San Francisco? I bet we could afford it. Can I talk Sylvia into it? She’s almost as sick of her job as I am of mine. But we don’t do anything about it. Inertia. Staring up at the sky as the enormous stone of Death plummets straight down towards us. The ragged shadow is racing out towards the horizon on every side.

March 26, 2004. Suicidal Thoughts.

I was okay this morning but now I’m in a fever bubble again. Two weeks of disease now.

Today I tried to fix myself. I went to yoga and loved my body. And I went to a recovery group meeting. They talked about praying to god for guidance, which is something I’d forgotten about. It also occurred to me that teaching students and writing Lifebox might plausibly be viewed as a good thing to be doing, in the sense that these activities make a positive contribution to society.

It’s three in the afternoon and I feel so weak, I think I’ll get in bed. I wish I was dead.

In the evening we went out to dinner and a movie with our neighbors Gunnar and Elena. Me quite feverish and sweaty. Angry solemn thoughts about how to kill myself. Knife in the heart? Gunshot to the heart? Hanging? In each case, I’d leave such a gnarly corpse—I guess all corpses are gnarly. Would be an ugly thing to do to the family. But there’s a romantic attraction to it. I can’t go on like this much longer. Leave a simple farewell note saying, in toto, “Fuck it.”

Thinking along these lines, I was starting to scare myself, and I shared some of my feelings with Sylvia before we went to bed. I told her that I wanted to die and that I thought I might have depression. She was taken aback, but she comforted me a little. Said I should go to the doctor.

Yes, I realize that I’m overdramatizing. It’s just a virus. How would I act if I had a really serious disease?

Dis-ease. How apt the word is.

March 27, 2004. The Edge of Madness.

Intense pain in my throat and ear. I can hardly swallow. And now I’ve acquired a stomach ache as well, from all the aspirin I’ve been taking to control my fever. Nur das fehlte noch. “Only that was missing.” The last straw.

Vacuumed the house, napped on the deck. That birthday barbeque we postponed last week is rolling around tomorrow and I’m still sick, but we’re going to do it anyway. I feel ashamed of myself for being so much trouble.

While I was napping, the leaf-blowers started and I came inside, though not without visualizing getting a sniper rifle with silencer and infrared sights and picking off the gardeners one by one. It’s Saturday, and they’re working on overtime to make our neighborhood shitty and loud. At the very least I should slash the tires of their trucks. Leave a note saying Sabado Silenzio Por Favor on their windshield so they’ll know why. <grin>

It would also be a good idea to set fire to the that one house across the gully that gets leaf-blown for three full hours every Saturday morning. Plant a time-delayed fire-bomb to go off at 2 am and be waiting across the gully with my infrared sniper scope and pick off the owner and his entire family as they come running out of the house. Their heads exploding like rotten cantaloupes. Leaf-blow that, motherfuckers. <grin>

This afternoon Sylvia and I went for a hike in Almaden Quicksilver Park by the Guadalupe Reservoir—I’d meant to walk to Hidalgo Cemetery, but the slanting path by the reservoir looked easier and more inviting. Sylvia’s been kind of distant all morning—she’s disturbed by my desperate complaining last night. After walking awhile she relaxed enough to call me Drama King.

I go, “Don’t you have any sympathy?”

And she goes, “You used it up.”

Of course the fact that she says this means that she thinks I’m better. It’s when your wife gives you sympathy that you’re really in bad shape.

I think I have some slippery nylon rope around that would be perfect for hanging myself from the eucalyptus tree. They say you come in your pants when you hang, and that mandrake roots grow wherever the semen drips onto the ground. What a great way to die. Maybe I should take my cock out before I hang myself. The morning joggers going by, my face black and distended, my dead cock stiff. <grin>

There’s this geek convention of writing <grin> to indicate when you’re kidding. And here of course I’m parodying that by writing some really just very mentally ill stuff and putting <grin> after it anyway, so it looks as if, in my madness, I imagine I’m only making mild jokes.

But don’t fret, Dear Diary, I’m only having a little fun here, doing a strip-tease with my character armor as Der Meister used to say. Cheering myself up. Dropping my usual journal-style of reflective calm. Extreme times call for extreme measures.

Senior year in college, Greg Gibson and I began referring to Wm. Burroughs as Der Meister, and we never stopped. We were kidding, but we weren’t. How sweet to reach that point of alienation where you can write exactly what you think.

The crazier I write, the better I feel.

March 29, 2004. A Brief Respite.

Yesterday as I woke, I had a mental image of a wall of blocks bursting open. Like I’m out of the tomb. I’m still weak, yes, and my left ear and throat hurt fiercely, but finally I’m back to being me.

In the paper I saw an article about the seventeen-year cicadas being about to re-emerge this spring after being underground since 1987. A synchronistic symbol of my hoped-for resurrection? A personal Easter.

I’m working on my old Hieronymus Bosch story again today, the one I used to call something like “Bosch and the Aeroforms.” I doubt if I’ll be able to sell it, but it’s nice to be working on something I care about. The story involves giant invisible paramecia, a weird trick with mathematical perspective, time travel, and Jeroen Bosch himself. I decided to change the story’s title to, “Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch.” A plump woman named Guadalupe is the unreliable narrator.

My sickness has put things in perspective. Who knows, after all, how much time I have left? I’m quitting teaching for good as soon as it seems feasible. Perhaps quite soon. I’ve heard rumors that the state might offer a kind of golden handshake deal to encourage retirements among us more highly paid senior faculty.

I’m not touching my Lifebox tome for a month. Instead I’d like to go ahead and start my novel, the one with a title like Crazy Mathematicians. This last week has put me in just the right frame of mind to write it.

In the afternoon I went biking, a long ride, savoring the mildness and the sweetness of spring. The gentle breeze. Happy.

April 2, 2004. Hike Big Sur.

After a day off, my disease came back—sweaty, sore throat, and in the morning I was in a bubble. But I fought it back as it was my day to go backpacking in Big Sur with Rudy Jr. We took it easy, found a trailhead on the Coast Road, did a slow one-and-a-half hour ramble up the South Fork of the Little Sur River, and made camp at four in the afternoon.

Rudy’s big dog Slug came along, with his own little saddle-bag knapsack to carry his food. Relaxing. Watching the fire, listening to the river, with Rudy and the dog. I rolled on my back on a log in the moonlight for forty minutes, it felt so healing. The redwoods and the stream are so archetypal, so Big Sur, so eternal.

The next day we hiked to Camp Pico Blanco at the base of the peak of the same name. It took seven hours. Lots of poison oak, and Rudy was tormented by ticks. I felt weak and feverish starting around noon.

But, ah, the Big Sur views, the delta of the ocean, the meadowed hilltops like green elephant heads. Rudy was wearing a tricorn hat—a gift his girlfriend Penny got in Colonial Williamsburg. He looks like a guide, especially with the feather I tucked into his tricorn. Everything is the same in Big Sur—it’s my eighth backpacking trip here, and I feel myself surrounded by old friends. The yuccas, lupines, and irises.

April 8, 2004. Tight Strings. Dorkbot.

I’m still not quite past my virus—it’s been a full month now. And the depression has been getting worse. I’m thinking that my parents had depression towards the end. Although that was in their seventies, not in their fifties. I’m doubting my judgment these days.

It makes me feel better to draw or to write—I’ve seen mentally ill people doing that in church-basement rehab. I can still write. Although naturally I’ve started worrying that I might quite suddenly lose my ability to write books—I might become too depressed to write at all.

I had this vision the other day of myself as this tuned musical instrument—like a piano or a harpsichord—and the strings are wound so tight that the wood is warped and cracking.

Thanks to Rudy Jr. I got invited to speak at a monthly event called Dorkbot. Their slogan is, “People doing weird things with electricity.” Very geeky and hip.

So last night I gave my talk to a hundred kids aged twenty-five to thirty-five in San Francisco at an art gallery. I showed some slides explaining my idea about the Lifebox, Soul, Seashell dialectic triad and I talked about the notion of gnarly computation. Then I read three short-short stories that I wrote for the Lifebox tome. And then showed them some live cellular automata demos.

Before the talk we had a great dinner at an Indian restaurant across the street from the gallery—this was in an unpromising Tenderloin neighborhood, but it was the best meal I’ve had in weeks. Isabel, Rudy, and Sylvia were there as well as Marc Powell and Karen Marcelo from the Dorkbot group.

I totally forgot about being depressed.

April 10, 2004. No Pills.

So I went to the doctor yesterday and mentioned my depression, and he said it could either be what they call postviral depression, which will go away on its own—or it could be major depression. He suggested I try taking an antidepressant, just in case.

He gave me a two week supply of some sample pills to try, a so-called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. He said if I liked them, I should take one a day for six months.

So I took one of those pills yesterday and I didn’t like it at all.

In a way, the pill was as strong as acid, in the sense that at no time after taking it was I unaware of its influence. Yawning with waves of nausea. Sedation, lethargy. All night a sensation of melting—fitful dreams from which I’d emerge as if from a pool of phosphene goo.

I’m still getting over the pill’s effects today, thirty-six hours after taking it! The way I feel really reminds me of coming down from a psychedelic trip, that same sense of waiting for my body to get itself together. This feeling has always reminded me of a classic black-and-white Dorothea Lange photo of an unhappy woman with her hands over her face and cigarette between her fingers. The picture’s title is Bad Trouble Over the Weekend.

Yes, I overdramatize—we’re talking about one sample antidepressant pill.

April 12, 2004. What Just Happened?

We had a good Easter. Rudy Jr. and Isabel were here. After lunch I stretched out on the chaise lounge on the front deck, and Sylvia cheerfully said, “Nap time!” And indeed I dropped off for half an hour. Delicious.

I’m back from the slough of despond. That really black depression I had last week—if I were to stay in that place for, like, two weeks solid, I think I’d be willing to throw in the towel and go for the drug. Looking back at that homicidal/suicidal stuff I wrote with the <grin> tags last week gives me the creeps.

You could almost say that I’ve just had a nervous breakdown. More midlife crisis. I hope it’s over. I like the “postviral depression” explanation, because if I buy that, it means that I’m out of the woods.

Yes, I’m ready for my life to get back to normal—although of course that phrase is a joke. Life never does, ever, “get back to normal.” It’s always mutating onward. The attractors continue to bifurcate, as Ralph Abraham would say.

In some ways, this experience has been useful.

First of all, these last few weeks have made me more sympathetic than ever before to the mentally ill.

Secondly, I’d been stuck in the middle of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, writing a chapter about human psychology. And now I’ve had a great chance to research some aspects of human psychology—such as uncontrollable mood swings, and getting stuck on a bad attractor.

A week or two ago, I got an Esalen catalog in the mail with a description I’d written of a class that Ralph Abraham and I are hoping to teach. In the description, I’d chirpily written, “It’s calming to view moods in terms of chaos and strange attractors.”

But, really, when you’re down the way I was a few days ago, that line of abstract talk feels completely inapplicable. Maybe my recent experience can help me write about moods in a more realistic way.

I Retire From Teaching

April 23, 2004. Empathy. The Haight.

The other day I got some news that Sylvia’s father’s health had taken a turn for the worse. So rather than phoning her with the bad news, I did the right thing and drove across town to her workplace to talk to her about it in person. To tell the truth, I’m surprised I thought of doing that. It’s not like me to do something so considerate.

Sylvia had been wanting to show me around her workplace for a long time, and I hadn’t been there for maybe five years, so she was pleased to have me visit, despite the sadness of the occasion. We took a nice walk on a hilltop behind her office, a spot where, a hundred and fifty years ago, an aviation fanatic named Montgomery used to ride on gliders that he’d designed.

Sylvia and I are getting along better than last week when I was so screwed up. She’s chirping again, my canary. My fondest wish, really, is for her to be happy.

Day before yesterday I went to San Francisco to do a reading at Booksmith in the Haight, which was nice. I love looking around the Haight, although the drunks and stoners can be kind of unpleasant. Some stranger outside a bar walked up to me and screamed in my face.

“I want to fuck your daughter!”

Er, excuse me, I’m not really a punching-bag, Bozo-the-clown, bourgeois father-thing such as I might appear to be, what with my neatly parted silver hair and my tidy outdoorsy-preppy clothes—no, I’m in fact a radical novelist on my way to a book-signing.

May 5, 2004. Semester’s End.

So okay, I’m not depressed, my chest is clear, and I’m managing to not start smoking again.

At school I’m definitely over the hump for this semester. Only four more teaching days to go. At the start of each of my three classes yesterday, I gave each of my students a free copy of my books Realware or Saucer Wisdom. Casting bread on the waters, even if I end up not coming back.

Things are quiet around here this week, as Sylvia’s in Geneva visiting her sick father. I’ve been feeling these big waves of sympathy for her. She’s always just her same gentle self.

I was down in L.A. for a one-day conference about…something. It was called, “Self-Organizing Systems: Evolutionary Art, Literature, and Science,” and was orchestrated by an English professor.

I gave a great performance, projecting images from my laptop, which was running my CAPOW cellular automata program. In the upper half of the wall-screen the audience could see a three-by-three grid of nine Zhabotinsky rules, and on the bottom half of the screen I was scrolling the text of my short-short story “Aint Paint.”

The story took nine half-page jumps to read through, and with each jump I adjusted the upper half of the screen to zoom in on of those nine live, swirling Zhabo scrolls in magnified form. The audience loved it.

Last night, all alone, I kicked back and watched darling Renée Zellweger in Down With Love. I love Renée even more than I used to love Doris Day. In a way, she reminds me of Sylvia—not in her physical appearance, but both of them have a goofy, playful quality—like when Renée is dancing in her living room before her big date with Ewan McGregor. I should mention, however, that Sylvia detests Renée Zellweger and, for that matter, Doris Day.

I’ve also been listening to a formerly-missing-from-my-exhaustive-collection Zappa record that I just got, Them or Us. The first song is a cover of a classic doo-wop song, “The Closer You Are” by the Channels. God, it’s beautiful. Frank loved doo-wop just as much as he loved Edgard Varese’s modernist noise-music.

I can never get over the fact that Frank’s dead. He lived December 21, 1940, through December 4, 1993. He only made it to fifty-three. Enjoy your time alive, Ru.

And I have been enjoying myself this week. Peaceful yoga most mornings, in the well-watered green grass of my little back yard. Green trees all around, the sun yellow, the air clear and cool.

May 15, 2004. Snap Decision to Retire Now.

So the Terminator—that is, our California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—somewhat unexpectedly signed an executive order offering a golden handshake in the form of an increased pension rate for any faculty member who retires by the end of July, 2004. Supposedly, in the long run, this move saves the state money, as they can hire cheap part-timers to replace us highly paid oldsters.

And now, snap decision, I’m taking Arnold’s offer. I’ve done all the paperwork, and I’m about to mail it in.

I’ve been in the teaching game for thirty-seven years. I’d like to use my remaining years to do what I love best: writing. In retrospect, my recent month-long hassle with a virus and depression was probably my inner self telling me that, yes, I really do want to retire. I have more reasons that I wrote out to convince myself—but no need to list them here. I’ve already mentioned most of them anyway.

Mostly feeling joyous about my upcoming change, but naturally I’m also feeling some anxiety.

Sylvia is uneasy about my retirement. Women her age know it can mean trouble to have their husband home all the time. Will I become small and bullying, forever picking on my wife? I’ve seen men like that in the supermarket, dogging their wife’s steps. Idle, bitter, carping bullies.

I consulted the I Ching three times in the last twelve hours, hoping to get some unequivocal advice along the lines of, “Go for it, Rude Dog!” But it’s subtler than that. The I Ching is no namby-pamby Triple Happiness Lucky Dragon fortune cookie.

Here are my three readings, along with the morals I drew from them:

• Exhaustion: “One is exhausted by the commonplaces of life.”
Moral: Go ahead and retire.
• The Abyss: “The superior man carries on the business of teaching.”
Moral: Teach a course as a lecturer next spring.
• Increase: “The increased strength must be used for something great.”
Moral: Write a good book. Stay on good terms with Sylvia.

The man of logic takes comfort from lists.

Looking back over the last couple of year’s entries, it kind of seems like I’ve been gearing up to retire. I never really felt like teaching again after tasting the freedom of Brussels.

Time to see what comes next. Jump off the cruise ship and swim on my own.

May 17, 2004. Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

Tomorrow I teach my very last class as a fulltime professor. I think of Goodbye, Mr. Chips—a book they had me read in the sixth grade. As I recall, it ends with old schoolmaster Mr. Chips dying and imagining a stream of his boys appearing as he recites the roll-call one *sob* last time.

Me, I’ll be like, “…Nguyen, Nguyen, Nguyen, Nguyen,…”

That’s San Jose humor—at least a third of my students are Vietnamese, and about a fourth of all Vietnamese families at some point decided to (or were forced to) adopt the surname Nguyen, which was the name of a line of kings—it’s as if a quarter of the people in England called themselves Windsor.

I’m making this dumb joke to keep away the tears. I’m a good teacher, and a lot of my students are sad I’m bowing out. They wanted more classes with me, or for me to advise them on master’s thesis projects. It’s called quitting at the top of your game.

The other day at graduation, I was talking to the father of one of my students and the father was trying to act like he was a programmer, even though he wasn’t. At this point, as a programmer, I’m like a leathery weathered guide who’s been out there just about every day for eighteen years, on the peaks in weather the average person never even sees.

Retiring? I can hardly believe it’s finally come to this. Another milepost closer to Death. But, you know, whether or not I retire, Death’s equally near, so why not grab the freedom while I can.

May 18, 2004. My Last Lecture.

As soon as I woke up, I was planning my final lecture. I’ll do this class today, and in about two weeks, in place of a final exam, my students will demo their semester project programs for me, and then I’ll be done.

At the outdoor coffee bar under my office building, the barristas are playing a Ramones CD, including “I Wanted Everything” and “Rock ’N’ Roll High School.” Synchronicity everywhere these days. My fave band has come to sing me goodbye. Joey’s dead. This fall I had a premonition exactly here at this coffee bar that I’d soon be gone.

I sit for awhile in the sun, drinking tea and listening to the Ramones, penning this note. No rush. The Ramones sing their exquisite, “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” Life is good.

What if I got up and started dancing? All around me students are studying, as if there were no music.

Leaving my last class, I feel light as a feather.

Now it’s the evening. Opening my email at home, I find a note and an attached memoir-essay by Amylouise Donnelly, a woman who was a student in an interdisciplinary class that I taught with philosophy professor Bill Edgar at the State University College at Geneseo, New York, in 1974.

Our course title was “The Limits of Conceivability,” and I presented some of the material that later led to my book Infinity and the Mind. We had a good-sized class, maybe forty kids. Edgar was a popular teacher, and I’d put up a lot of ads around campus. We met in a big classroom in a building called Newton Hall.

I have faint memories of Amylouise—she was an intense girl, thin, quirky, loquacious, with straight hair and maybe blue eyes. I think I might have lent or given her one of D. T. Suzuki’s books on Zen to use as inspiration for her term paper. I haven’t heard from her in all these years and today out of the blue she sends me a nice email about my Bruegel novel, As Above, So Below, plus an attached reminiscence called “The Limits of Reality,” about the “Limits of Conceivability” class back at Geneseo.

When I think of how I may have explained “real” in one of my earliest Philosophy classes, I hear myself rapping my knuckles on one of the desks in Newton Hall, staring at my first college mentor, and saying “sounds real enough to me.” And then I hear this upstate teacher with a downstate accent, who asked even the freshmen to call him Bill [Edgar], snap back at me. “So what would count as not real to you?”

In that same room sat a bird of a completely different feather, a flamingo rounded over his bad penmanship. Scribbling mathematical figures onto a child’s newsprint pad, he’d fade in and out of a cloud of silence. Occasionally Rudy would look up from his pad, squinting through glasses as thick as platform shoes, pull a long brown strand over his young ear, and say something like…

“You can’t tell what’s real or not real until you understand the field of all possible realities.”

Bill would look at Rudy like the younger man just had a prefrontal lobotomy. Then Math Magus Rudy, sinking into nothing but his own cryptic smile, would speak again.

“Maybe.” Pause. “Don’t you think?”

I felt like Alice, mesmerized at the Wonderland trial. Blackboard after blackboard of Rudy’s transfinite proofs would fly like a pack of rebellious cards in the face of Bill’s good-natured logical positivism.

“Off with his head!” I could almost hear Bill’s brain thinking.

While Rudy sat, the Cheshire cat, smiling.

Fading.

How nice of Amylouise to send that, and how synchronistic to get reportage of my thirty-years-ago teaching self on this, my last day of teaching. I was indeed the first longhair prof at Geneseo, and perhaps the first pot-smoker on the faculty. But I wasn’t aware at the time that Amylouise had a crush on me.

May 21, 2004. Attic Repair.

There’s three Mexican guys walking around on my roof tearing off the shingles. Roofers! Now that I’m retired I plan to fix the more pressing problems with our house.

We’re putting on white shingles, so that the beating California sun doesn’t drive the living-room temperature up to a hundred degrees on a summer day. And while the shingles were off, Rudy Jr. came down and helped me with the task of crawling into the hideously low-ceilinged attic to further insulate the house against summer heat. It was more a matter of worming around on our stomachs than actually crawling.

To make things more complicated, we discovered an extra roof inside the attic. Apparently the front half of our house was added onto what used to be a really tiny three-room cottage. So the old roof is still in the attic, so Rudy and I had to ripsaw a hole in the long-hidden inner roof.

And then we rolled out some radiant barrier stuff that I got at Home Depot; it’s like bubble-wrap with aluminum foil bonded to each side. We stapled it to the ceiling rafters. I put one staple into my left hand’s middle finger, and I scraped the crown of my head on one of the low ceiling rafters.

Manual labor.

June 1, 2004. The Final Demos.

I keep telling people I’m retiring, and then I gauge their reactions. It’s a social form of thought, you talk to everyone you meet about a decision to check if what you’re doing is reasonable.

I met my students one last time to see their final demos for our Advanced Software Project class. The students had all signed a card for me, they brought a pizza, they took some pictures. It was very touching—I was close to tears.

In my office I erased the sign I’d made on my whiteboard saying:

“Look homeward angel and melt with ruth.”

Teaching Assistant 1967 - Professor Emeritus 2004.

Waaaah. Yaaaay.

And then I cleaned out my office.

I went to the CS Department graduation ceremony for undergrads, and I recognized hardly any of the students—I’ve mostly been teaching grad students lately. It was boring to be sitting there sweating in an academic gown. I’m really ready to be done.

And now it’s all over. It’s still sinking in.

Today, by the way, is the eight year birthday of my sobriety.

June 3, 2004. Bike to Hidalgo Cemetery Again.

I’m retired, it’s vacation, I’m glad. I’m in Almaden Quicksilver Park, sitting at a picnic table beneath an oak high atop a long ridge that I biked up. Writing these notes on a folded-in-four sheet of paper from my pocket.

Today feels like a turning point, me going off bike-riding alone on a week day. Still processing the fact that I’m retired. Edging into a new phase of my life. Autumnal, ripe, brimming over.

The meadows are dry, summer gold with empty seed cases like pennants on the grass stalks. The oaks are green and vigorous, a bit dusty-looking already. Billions of chaotic oscillations in the grasses and the leaves, indeed this page is sun-dappled with shifting shadows. Quiet.

A woodpecker taps now and then. They’re such slow workers most of the time. You rarely hear the conventional jackhammer rat-a-tat.

Drifting down from the north is the muted roar of San Ho. But I’m facing towards a big valley of parkland, including the Guadalupe Reservoir and Mount Umunhum (means “hummingbird” in the Ohlone Indian tongue).

I’ve only seen two other people up here today, I’m maybe three miles into a seven mile ride. I’m hoping to make it to the Hidalgo Cemetery again, and maybe get a photo of that heart-shaped hole I noticed in the prickly pear lobe last time I was here. I brought along my new digital camera, the Sony Cybershot I got myself for my graduation.

June 4, 2004. Signing Out.

I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off to get my paperwork in order—there were all sorts of angles connected to the pension. Today’s the final scavenger hunt, amassing six or seven signatures to complete my Employee Clearance Form. I turned in my keys, got the library to forgive me for the two books I’d lost, applied for an emeritus faculty card, etc.

The campus looks different now that I don’t work here. I’m lying on the lawn, doing yoga, waiting for the CS secretary to get back from lunch so I can get one last signature from her.

I never did yoga on the lawn here before. But now it’s not my worksite. It’s more like a park. Speaking of yoga, I wonder if my back will stop hurting now.

“It’s hard to do nothing for a long time,” I said to a yoga teacher last week. “That’s what meditation is all about,” she answered.

As I stretch my body, I remember to be aware of my breath.

One philosopher that I’ve been reading—Antonio Damasio—says consciousness is the act of observing yourself observing.

Everywhere I go on the campus today, I hear the buzzing of machinery. Ventilation fans.

I’m looking at the oscillating leaves in the tree above me. All those gnarly chaotic processes. Probably the leaves are doing as much computation as my brain. And don’t forget the insects!

The Beatles: “I’m taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”

The ghost of Abel Egregore, the hero of San Jose graduate William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content, walks by, an echo of an acid trip that Craddock took right on this spot, forty years ago.

“How can you waste time?”

Way Out West To Naropa

June 7, 2004. Naropa. Poe Tale. Bad Dream.

So we’re here at Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, again. My old poet friend Anselm Hollo is on the Naropa faculty, and he got me invited this summer to teach a seminar on Transreal SF Writing.

The last time we were at Naropa was in the summer of 1981. It was the Naropa Institute then, but now they call it Naropa University. A very arty, literary scene, it’s fun. I met the Beats here, twenty three years ago, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso and old Bill Burroughs. Der Meister. That time I was giving some lectures on, of all things, the philosophy of mathematics. But this time it’s writing.

What is writing? Creating a virtual reality. Compressing your sensation. Ordering your reality. Crystallization. Becoming twinkable—that is, encoding your personality so that others can mentally emulate you.

As it happens, I came here with a pre-existing writing assignment of my own—I’m supposed to write a story that takes off on the initial fragment of Edgar Allen Poe’s unfinished tale, “The Lighthouse.” This is for a small-press anthology with, like, twenty authors finishing Poe’s story in various ways.

I’m planning to take a transreal route, that is, to write a story relating to my stay here in Naropa. Suppose that the hero brings Poe back to life in some way. A small Poe, a pocket-sized Poe. Imagine shoving little Poe into a woman’s pussy, how he’d hate that. I still have this joy of torturing Eddie from the long trek that he and I did together in my novel The Hollow Earth.

What did the lighthouse mean to Eddie? Suppose it’s his own dick. In his fragment, he makes a point about the weakness of the lighthouse’s base:

Thus the floor is twenty feet below the surface of the sea. It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been filled in with solid masonry. Undoubtedly the whole would have been rendered more safe. The basis on which the structure rests seems to be chalk…

And here the manuscript fragment ends.

I’m thinking that the layer of chalk is only an inches-thin membrane, like friable plaster, and under it is a shaft leading down into the Hollow Earth. The giant sea cucumbers are within. Poe’s dick, or perhaps my hero’s dick, snaps off as easily as the lighthouse. My dick snaps off and I replace it with Eddie Poe.

Can I relate this to the experience of taking a writing seminar? The experience of emulating an older writer whom you admire?

Back in 1981, we were invited by my friend Newcomb Greenleaf, who was working for Naropa. Newcomb and his wife Ditty were heavily into a meditation practice where they were learning to internalize the image on a certain Tibetan Buddhist tapestry, and to visualize the image as three-dimensional scene. The targeted scene showed a bi, fierce Tibetan Buddha, with a couple of his peers sitting near him, one blue, and one enveloped in flame. It seemed like a cool mind-task to me, to build up this whole scene in your head, to learn to see it from every side, to be working on that one particular mental image hour after hour, year after year.

Back to my story. My character will take something to make the Poe routine happen. A drug? An ampule that I find in William Burroughs’s former room at the Boulderado Hotel. An ampule that has been curiously overlooked by twenty years of chambermaids. I shoot up and—

Ftoom.

A silent explosion inside my head. The Tibetan gods Sangatha, Shambala, and Trungpa appear. Giant sea cucumbers as well, gesturing from within the hollow earth. A hole has opened in the floor. I lie flat on my stomach peering in. My penis grows stiff. It snaps off, crawls out of my pants, and turns into Eddie Poe, jumping up and down in fury.

Last night I had a nightmare.

The reason I retired from teaching is that I’ve gone senile. The students put together a petition that I be farmed out. I’m like a stroke victim. I can’t think logically. When people talk to me, I see their lips moving but I can’t follow anything they say.

My condition is the result of a wild few years of abusing chemicals and electricity. There was a year or two when I was always in this back room with industrial chemicals and brain-shock devices. As so often happens in a dream, the extra room is amid my customary haunts, just off my living room, or right off the classroom where I lectured. By now I’ve given up the chemicals and the brain stim, but it’s too late.

I should have stopped in time but I didn’t. I ruined my brain.

I shoot up in Bill Burroughs’s room, my tongue snaps off and jumps up and down in fury. A hole opens up in the floor and I see Jack Kerouac amid the thin hare screamers. The sea cucumbers of the Hollow Earth. The Hell Bardo. Tim Leary’s head, as big as a car, lit up like a refrigerator bulb.

I should have stopped in time but I didn’t.

June 9, 2004. Writing Exercises.

Now that I’ve retired from teaching—it’s been all of two weeks—having a class to teach feels precious. Absurd, in a way.

One day in my writing class I had them do an exercise where they all lay down on the floor of this big carpeted room that our class is in—pretending they were in a spaceship. And then I left the room and came back and made UFO-whoops, and we debarked down the fire escape. Exploring a new world.

We were playing at being aliens freshly arrived on Earth, with the understanding that we would talk a lot, but use spontaneously made-up alien words. It was fun. The students were good at it. They were happy to play.

The day after that, we did hive mind. That is, we lay down on our backs on the room’s rug again, but this time we lay in a circle with our shoulders touching and all our heads near each other in the middle. We called out phrases in the voices of the characters in the stories we were now working on, all of us staring up at the ceiling, unable to see each other.

It worked—the voices seemed to come at me as if from a shared, larger brain. With the inability to see each other, a lot of the social interaction aspects of speech drop out—no roles, no distance. When we sat up and looked at each other again, I felt very close to those kids.

The third and final exercise for the class, which we did on the last day, was just to stand in a circle holding hands and making a buzzing noise for a long time, getting into a communal groove.

On the last day of my workshop, I had the students read the short-short transreal science fiction stories that I’d gotten them to write. They were pretty good stories, and the students were happy.

Meanwhile I’d been working on my transreal SF story about Poe, saving it onto my key chain minidrive after each update. I ended up calling it “MS Found On A Minidrive.”

So after my students had all read their stories to the class, I read them the latest draft of my Poe story. I had some anxiety about being workshopped, but the students were positive and they made some suggestions that were actually very useful to me.

I think maybe I could teach writing.

June 12, 2004. My Reading at Naropa.

They have literary readings at Naropa every few days. It’s fun. I haven’t been to events like this for long time. The venue is cozy, a gym-like auditorium full of creative people. The readers are all good writers, only they don’t get published through commercial channels at all. A whole ’nother world from the one I run in.

On Saturday night, near the end of our stay, Anselm Hollo and I were the main entertainers. Anselm read new poems—he’s my favorite poet in the world. And I read my new Poe story, “MS Found On A Minidrive.” We had a crowd of about three hundred people.

I’d been continuously revising my story, and by then it was really good—funny, gnarly, heavy. I’d worked in some transreal stuff about my nostalgia for the 1981 days. My narrator was a would-be-writer attending a Naropa workshop. And I projected onto him some transreal stuff about people wanting to write.

My reading took twenty minutes, and I made the most of it, really using my voice—pausing, hamming it up. It was a triumph, it fully blew the minds of the audience, and people were amazed that I’d written it in only a week. I think it was the most satisfying reading I’ve ever done.

Everyone was pressing up to me afterwards, it was just like I’d always dreamed a great performance could be. And the little cadre of students that I’d had in my workshop noticed and appreciated the tweaks and changes I’d made to the story since I’d read it to them in class.

But it’s nice to have that over now, as I was somewhat cranked up getting it done. I think again of that image of the harpsichord with the strings tightened to the point where the delicate wood is about to crack.

Not that the strain was all that bad—writing was all there was to do at Naropa over the week. No kind of party scene like there used to be, at least not for sixtyish sober faculty. When I was at Naropa in 1981, I was in an alcohol blackout nearly every night. But now I’m different. During the stay, I even rode a rented bike to a recovery meeting in a factory district of Boulder.

The poet Anne Waldman of Naropa seemed quite an imposing figure to me. Slowly I realized that, from her side, she viewed me as imposing as well. We were able to converse a bit. She said three inspiring things that in fact influenced how I wrote my story:

• Your duty as a writer at Naropa this summer is to go beyond anything you’ve tried to do before.
• A writer should always oppose the status quo and the establishment. If you yourself have had some success and have made a little empire, you should break down the empire and abdicate from your throne.
• Naropa believes in the tradition of the literary outrider.

I like that last one a lot, that’s me. Saturday night, I was reading the part in my story where the narrator’s penis has turned into a talking Edgar Allan Poe, and the penis snaps away from the narrator’s crotch, and it flies out into the night. At this point, the audience was rocking so hard that I couldn’t resist a side remark.

“Did someone say outrider?”

Today we had a last farewell visit with my old mentor, dear Anselm Hollo, and we hugged goodbye and he gave me this sharp, sad, knowing look, perhaps the same look I was giving him, both of us aware that one of us could die before we meet again.

June 13, 2004. Through the Rockies.

Leaving Boulder, we headed for Pinedale, Wyoming to visit our daughter Isabel and her boyfriend Gus.

Starting out, we drove through Rocky Mountain National Park, stopping for a big Sunday brunch at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. This hotel was used as the set for The Shining, the movie about the writer who quits drinking and goes after his family with an axe.

Come to think of it, I was an alcoholic writer reading The Shining when we were in Santa Fe in July, 1995, and I was trying, unsuccessfully, to quit drinking with a regimen of pot and O’Douls.

The mountains were amazing—at one point we were two miles high, and the air was so thin I was seeing black spots when I tried to walk around outside. Lots of elk.

And then we were down to a mere one mile altitude, a desert landscape. We had coffee in a classic western coffee shop in a truckstop-strip Granby, Colorado, the very town where a guy had turned his bulldozer into an armored tank a week earlier—and had razed five or six buildings in revenge for having been evicted from the building he used for his muffler shop. Granby may be gritty and sun-blasted and wind-blown—but its human passions run as high as in the palaces of Renaissance Venice.

On the street outside the coffee-shop, a local codger started talking to me. Incredibly he seemed to think I was a local too. Well, I guess there aren’t many non-locals walking around in Granby. I should have asked him about the bulldozer.

Tonight we’re lodged in the Rabbit Ears Motel in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We lucked out and got a room with a balcony right over the Yampa River. How nice to hear its rushing gurgle.

Yampa, yampa, yampa.

June 18, 2004. With Isabel in Pinedale.

So now we’ve spent four days with Isabel and Gus in Pinedale, Wyoming. They just moved into a rented house in town from the ranch that Gus had been caretaking for the last nine years.

Gus is a real Western type, even though he was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. Slim, dark, tall, a man of few words, with a kind smile and a good sense of humor. His father’s family is Sicilian. His father was a high-school math teacher, and he retired this year like me. Gus and Isabel plan to find jobs in Pinedale, but not yet, they want to rest up from their move for a couple of weeks. Gus is kind of spooked about being in town and he keeps talking about going camping.

Isabel and Gus are two of a kind, not liking to play society’s games, and fairly unstressed. We went out and saw some mountain trails with them, very beautiful, like Switzerland, but with hardly any people. The actual Rocky Mountains or, more precisely, the Wind River range.

The snow in the high country is just now melting, amid sweet wildflowers and rivulets of running water. Beautiful lakes and rocky peaks. So much empty space, mind-boggling. How feeble my few descriptive words are.

I’d never visualized this kind of place before, a beautiful natural space that’s empty. The immense empty valleys soothe the soul. As always, it bothers me that there’s so much more beauty than I can fully take in. Over and over I want to leap out of the car and immerse myself in the landscape, but of course I can’t do that all the time, and even if I do jump out, the immensity escapes my grasp.

It’s country so big that hiking doesn’t seem like an appropriate way to move about. Riding horses really makes sense out here. Or maybe you don’t really need to move. During our visit, my best contacts with nature came when I managed to slow down and merge into it. Gus is a past master at enjoying nature. We were by the incredible Green River Lake, and he was grinning, lying on his back, chewing a long stalk of grass. The hobo archetype.

In one mountain meadow we found a mound of moose droppings, like rabbit pellets or deer pellets, but bigger—the size of those foil-wrapped chocolate eggs you give to kids at Easter. In fact Isabel’s friend Hilary and her hippie ranch-hand father once dipped a bunch of moose pellets in chocolate and put them in a candy dish for a joke at a party.

Isabel says that relocating to Wyoming was like moving to another country. A country that’s not necessarily inhabited by aesthetes. Some of them seem quite raw. But the grandeur of the Wind River Range fills even the rudest countryman’s soul.

Isabel is thrilled to have us here, although diffident when it comes to us buying her furniture for her rented house. We especially wanted to get them a bed, and finally we did. It made them uncomfortable, but then they were glad to be up off the floor. I feel so much like the pushy old father.

Father’s Day is in the offing, as a matter of fact. Speaking of our kids to Sylvia, I jokingly said, “I’ve been like a father to them.”

Sylvia and I are staying in a cute motor-court from 1929, a collection of tiny log cabins. They really know how to chink a log cabin in Wyoming. I wonder how it would be to live here permanently. I might have trouble finding friends. The streets have a lovely, calm, backwater feeling that I remember from our early days in Geneseo, or even in Lynchburg. Before my career started. I had all the time in the world.

Isabel showed me a shortcut she takes through a vacant lot on the way to the library, it felt cozy, doing something with her, running around her little town, temporarily out of my prodding parent role.

No email for me in days, it’s great. The one computer geek thing that I’m doing—other than now and then working on these journals—is to copy the photos from my new digital camera onto my laptop. I’m really loving my little camera, it’s incredibly versatile.

I’m starting to think about getting back to the Lifebox tome, I need to do the chapter on computation and society next. I’d like to break through to a radically different way of talking about society. To throw a bucket of ice-water in the face of the sleepwalking morons who think media news and the politicians are what matters, when these are in fact the most remote and irrelevant epiphenomena of society’s computation in progress.

Death Watch In Geneva

July 18, 2004. Bastille Day. Hike Combloux.

For the last four months or so, Sylvia has been terribly anxious and upset over the health of her father Arpad. The old man is eighty-five, and he seems to be entering his last days. So we went over to Geneva to sit at his bedside. Naturally it’s very stressful.

After awhile Sylvia and I took a few days off, going on a little car trip across the Swiss border into France. Sylvia wanted to be over there for Bastille Day on the fourteenth—the French national holiday.

So we went to Annecy, a French town an hour south of Geneva, nestled by the French Alps with a big lake of its own. We spent an afternoon lounging on the manicured grass by the lake, watching people go by, enjoying the silent song that seemed to lift from the waters. We found a nice room overlooking a canal in the old part of town, had a great dinner, and saw fireworks right overhead as we sat in the lakeside park. A perfect day.

In our room at the hotel, at one point I laid my head on Sylvia’s chest and listened to her heart beat. So soft and tender. All the next day I thought of her quietly beating heart. Thump, thump.

We drove from Annecy deeper into the French Alps, ending up at Combloux. Sylvia had attended a summer camp in a chalet in Combloux when she was eight—over fifty years ago. She and her family had been living near Paris then.

Combloux has a fine view onto the Mont Blanc, which is the highest mountain in Europe—it looms over the landscape like the castle in Heidelberg, like the Matterhorn in Zermatt. Huge, dreamy, silent, hallucinatory.

Not much action in Combloux itself, though. Farmers, cows, graying tourists. Some noisy grass-cutting machines in the fields. In our good old days in Zermatt, grass-cutting was silent. They used scythes.

I wanted to get in a big hike, so, one of our days there, I took off alone, feeling a bit selfish, but really wanting this day of freedom. I got as far as Petit Croisse Baulet, a thousand meters higher than our hotel. Fabulous views of the Mont Blanc.

I picked up an ant because I knew he would nip at me with his mandibles, and I wanted the feedback from this humble mountain denizen. I wrote a haiku:

Halfway up the mountain,

As far as I can go.

An ant bites me.

On my way back down, the sky clouded up. Coming down, I passed through a meadow with a low, tin-roofed barn, and with pines around the meadow. I heard a sporadic noise from the barn—something inside it? No, that was rain on the tin roof. Scattered rain drops all around, how lovely. And now in the meadow I heard cow bells—a dozen cows in a line, making their way into the shelter of the trees.

Nobody there but me, the raindrops cooling my hot head. The sounds of the tin roof and the cow bells. A moment of perfect beauty, a moment to live for.

At the edges of the village, I saw another vignette. Loose chickens scratching in the wet dark green grass. Their bodies such canonical chicken shapes. A gray-haired peasant and his wife are trying to push a wagon of hay bales into their barn. Their grandson is maneuvering a tractor to help push the hay. I wave and smile, they wave back. We’re in the same rain.

As I write this entry, we’re back in Geneva. It’s the middle of the night. Hard to sleep here. And what’s the difference, after all, when I do get to sleep. It’s not like anything special is going to happen tomorrow. Just more visits to the sad nursing home.

July 21, 2004. Museum of History of Science.

Writing this note, I’m at the Swiss nursing home cafeteria, which has food that’s better than 95% of American restaurants.

I hope I can manage to have a good conversation with my father-in-law Arpad before I leave. I well remember that the very last time I saw my own father we were angry with each other, and it’s a memory I never stop regretting. It would be good to have a clear conscience about my last visit with Arpad.

Some of the days here in Geneva, I go off on my own, taking a bus downtown. It’s fine with everyone if I’m not underfoot. The bus from Arpad’s house to downtown is called the Prégny-Bossy line. Image of a wife: pregnant and bossy. Everything fits, always. God is a novelist.

One day I went to a huge green park on the shore of Lake Geneva—La Perle Du Lac. The lawns roll down to the boat-dotted waters, the trees flourish from the nightly rains, the sky’s a pale blue, with scraps of cloud.

The handful of buildings in the park are former mansions from the eighteenth century, each in its own sward of green, set with trees, and no boundaries at the edges. One of the buildings holds a Museum of the History of Science.

It’s a small museum, maybe eight rooms on the two stories of a house. Parquet floors and enchanting prospects from every window, most of the windows open to catch the breezes from the lake. Glass cases hold brass scientific instruments: microscopes, telescopes, barometers, Leyden jars, spectroscopes, orreries and the like. It stands to reason these instruments would be found here, in the nation of watchmakers; indeed quite a few of them are of Swiss manufacture.

Some of the old microscopes have an odd linkage of hinges that makes up a flexible brass arm to hold a little lens at the end—this to be used to focus sunlight onto the sample being viewed. They’re called “arms of Musschenbroek.” Surely that’s a fact worth knowing.

I was looking at the instruments with an eye to using them in an SF story. There’s an antique scientific instruments shop on a street in the Old Town part of Geneva just below St. Peter’s cathedral. Imagine a character getting a rare microscope there and discovering that it has a special feature, it enables him to shrink down to microscopic size. Or, better, he acquires an optical instrument with which you can see ghosts. The thing has, say, calcite crystal lenses. Ghosts are a natural for an old-timey instrument.

The Museum of the History of Science has some very large acoustic listening tubes for use in the water. They’re shaped a bit like Alpine horns, and you listen at the little end. The big end has a membrane over it. They were built by a Geneva scientist called Jean-Daniel Colladon (1802-1893). Using his listening tubes, Colladon measured the speed of sound between the lakeside villages of Rolle and Thonon. About two hundred times as slow in the water as in the air.

Colladon was also the first to notice that if you shine light into a stream of water at one end, the light will follow the curve of the water as it falls. He achieved a proto-Las-Vegas entertainment effect by using the illuminated stream to light up a bowl.

Imagine a guy with a fusion reactor inside his bladder—he pisses light.

After the museum, I wandered along the lake for awhile, moving very slowly on the hot humid day, drinking in the beauty, finding my way back to the Prégny-Bossy bus line.

July 25, 2004. Final Scenes.

In the park I saw a baby lying naked on a blanket with his weary mother doting on him. In your last days, you return to this state—a virtual infant, swaddled and spoon-fed by women, screaming for no good reason.

What does it matter, in the end? We fade in and we fade out. A wheat stalk grows and flourishes—then dries, crumbles and rots in the autumn rain, leaving its grain to sprout. The cycle never ends.

One day, coming back from the hospital, I had a long dinner with Sylvia in a lakeside restaurant beneath huge plane trees, with trunks like sycamore trunks, all mottled and peeling. Being there in the lively, French-speaking crowd of locals felt like being inside a Renoir painting. Half the people had little dogs with them.

Sylvia’s brother Henry came over for dinner, and we talked about old Arpad. I brought up my fond memories of him. He had his own opinion on everything, and expressed himself with such vigor and humor, always in his deeply Hungarian accent. In the old days, he could be so charming. Sylvia’s parents seemed so scintillating and cosmopolitan to me when I first came to Geneva as a Kentucky youth. Lo, these forty years gone.

A few days ago, I went swimming at the lakeshore with Sylvia’s nieces, the water shallow, lukewarm, and ducky. And now I have about twenty bites from a type of parasitic schistosome called a puce de canard, which literally means “duck flea.”

They’re not really fleas, they’re transparent worm-like critters. They spend their larval youth in snails, then come out into the water and systematically infest ducks, sending their eggs out in the duck shit to infect the snails on the bottom of the lake. Their version of a life cycle.

Apparently, at the lake, the puces tunneled into my skin as the water dried on me—my nieces told me it was important to shower and towel off, but I didn’t listen. And now the puces de canard are inside me, dead or dying, with their sick, gross, tropical-disease proteins producing allergic mosquito-bump reactions in a constellation of itchy red dots on my arms, chest and back.

Yuck. And here I’d been thinking how lovely Lake Geneva is to swim in. Well, to be fair, there aren’t any puces de canard out in the middle where it’s cool and deep. The puces were so bad in the lake at nearby Annecy that the city flat-out killed all the ducks and dredged up all the snails near the beaches.

I went to a recovery group meeting today. I would summarize the day’s discussion topic as, “I used to be different, but now I’m the same.” I used to view myself as different, a special case, too good to obey any rules, totally unlike other people, and certainly not curable by a recovery program. But—at least in this area—if just do the normal thing, the same as other people, my life goes better.

I mentioned a couple of years ago that there’s a saying in Hungarian: “Most már guggolva is,” which literally means “now even squatting also,” and which figuratively means, “the end is so close that I could last this out even if I had to crouch down with my back bent double.” I thought of that phrase this afternoon while my annoying sister-in-law was talking at me. With me not processing a single word that she said, just blandly smiling.

Today I said goodbye to my father-in-law Arpad in the fashion I was hoping to. I was alone with him for a few minutes, and I said some nice things to him, about how impressed I was upon meeting him forty years ago, and how I’d always enjoyed listening to him, and how kind he’d been to us over the years.

“Take care of Sylvia,” he said, coming out of his fog. “She is a wonderful woman.”

A good moment.

Last week I bought a box of ten fancy multi-colored sparklers in the same store in downtown Geneva where Rudy Jr. and I used to buy fireworks twenty years ago. Things don’t change very fast in Europe.

I hadn’t gotten around to lighting these sparklers yet, so tonight right before bed, our last night here, I went out in the back yard in my pajamas and lit them, two a time, four at a time, using them up, running around the yard with them, sticking them in the ground, holding them out at arms length and flapping like an eagle.

At some level I was thinking of this as a magical rite to bring back the memory of those glory days when everyone was healthy and our young children were at our side.

Sylvia watched from the upstairs bedroom window, and then her stepmother’s silhouette appeared in the downstairs window, watching as well.

It felt like the end of a European movie.

Endings

August 17, 2004. Blogging at Boing Boing.

I’m spending two weeks writing a guest blog for the popular online site, Boing Boing. My first taste of blogging. I’m alternating little photos from my digital camera with paragraphs of my musings and comments on the images.

Walking around in photoblogger mode, I pay more attention to what I see and hear. I pick out images, I grab phrases, I formulate mental descriptions. Photoblogging raises my awareness level. At the same time, it sets me aside from events as well—I become more of an observer than participant.

I’m enjoying the communal aspect of blogging on a big site like Boing Boing. I’ve gotten a nice outpouring of love from long-time readers who are suddenly able to access me via the email links in my posts. It feels like having a lot of friends—which I don’t in meatspace.

And investing my attention in this particular website is like having a cool place to hang out. The Los Gatos coffee shop isn’t bad—but it’s not what you’d call cool, filled as it is with retirees, yuppie moms, blank-faced engineers, fake athletes back from fake bike rides, etc.

And now the usual series of snobby putdowns erupted from this pathetic, world-hating man…

September 6, 2004. Uneasy At Retirement. Big Sur.

A few weeks ago I went for a day hike in Big Basin park, and it hit me that I feel a bit lost and unmanned by having retired. I gave up the best job I ever had to do—what? Vegetate? Be a self-centered old crab? Achilles brooding in his tent. I took my kickball and went home.

Since retiring, I’ve had this bee in my bonnet that Sylvia contradicts me all the time.

“If a man speaks in the forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” I’ll remark bitterly.

But, look, Rudy, she’s been contradicting you for, like, forty years. Ever since you met her, the day before your eighteenth birthday. And over the years as she’s become more self-confident, she contradicts you more. But I don’t think there’s been any huge change in her behavior in, say, the last six months.

Thinking things over in the Big Basin woods, I realized that contradiction is suddenly an issue for me. These days it makes me anxious to be contradicted. Why? Because, as a man without a job, I’m socially impotent. A puttering neuter. Sidelined. Out of the game. A meek, dim bulb whose opinions don’t matter. A has-been.

Back in college at Swarthmore, my artist friend Barry Feldman used to quote Walt Whitman’s lines whenever we caught him out in an inconsistency:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes)

Does my wife contradict me? Very well then. Be large.

In church on Sunday, I saw an old man who always used to be there with his wife—and now she’s been dead a year. He looks so solitary, like a single shaker from a salt-and-pepper set.

Sylvia’s voice and her curved surfaces are so comforting. I need her. Open your heart and think the best of her, Ru. She’s having a hard time these days. Her father is dying. If she’s unhappy, it’s not about you.

Sylvia and I went camping in Big Sur two weeks ago. I came up with a good rap for the final “The Answers” section of my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul:

I went camping in Big Sur with my wife. It was a hot day, and I had the chance to stand in the cool clear flow of the Big Sur River, up to my neck in a big pool that accumulates right before the river flows across a sand bar into the Pacific. Standing there, I closed my eyes to savor the sensation of water and air. My arms were weightless at my sides, my knees were slightly bent, I was at perfect equilibrium. Each time I exhaled, my breath would ripple the water, and reflections of the noon sun would flicker on my eyelids. Exquisite. And, no, I wasn’t high, I haven’t been high for years.

I was all there, fully conscious, immersed in the river. And I became powerfully aware of a common-sense fact that most readers will have known all along.

“This isn’t a computation. This is water.”

In other words, I’m thinking of taking back my claim that everything is a computation.

September 7, 2004. One More Visit to SJSU.

Today I went in to San Jose State to meet with my two last Master’s degree students: Harry Fu and Min Yang. I’m supervising their thesis projects and they’re almost done.

Min just had a baby, and her laptop is set to run a slideshow of the mite.

“I can see what you’ve been thinking about,” I said, smiling.

She hasn’t done a lot of work on her project. She’s using cellular-automata-based waves for a surfing game. Harry Fu is making a 3D cellular automata program—we’re shooting for some nice 3D Zhabotinsky scrolls. I know that they exist, but I’ve never seen them on a screen. Harry’s made good progress.

Going in to talk with the students, I had this worry that I wouldn’t be able to say anything useful. But once they started telling me what they were doing, I was full of suggestions, and when Min showed me some broken code, I instinctively knew how to feel around in it to find the broken part. And once I found the bug, I knew how to fix it. I’m not going to forget my software engineering skills overnight.

It was pleasant having the students call me “Dr. Rucker.” To be somebody. To be respected.

But seeing the crowded hallways and classrooms reminded me that I really am glad to be out of that as a fulltime job. In the halls between classes, you feel like a particle of food in the large intestine, so hot and compressed and pullulating. A little of that goes a long way.

I had a nice talk with my fellow professor pal Jon Pearce. He mentioned that he’s been unhappy because his wife’s depressed. And he sees his role in life as trying to make her happy. And when his attempts persistently fail, he feels thwarted and resentful. But now he’s trying to rise above that. He’ll simply go ahead and try to make his wife happy—not because he expects it to work, and not because he expects anything in return, but simply because that’s his predilection. And trying to make her happy makes him feel good.

We men talk a good game anyway.

September 14, 2004. Ending My Lifebox Tome

I finished Lifebox and sent copies to my agent, my editor, and a few peers. My big dream book. The ending has a valetudinarian tone. I think of Pop at the end of a church service, holding up his hand, being a priest, his face shining with god-light, saying something like, “Render no man evil for evil.”

With the book done, I feel like I’ve set up a special system of thought and now I’m mentally reaping immense rewards. Like I’m climbing up the ladder I built from trees I grew.

Here’s the Lifebox ladder from the end of the tome, a list of six teachings that sketch the book’s chapter-by-chapter flow from lower-order to higher-order things:

• Computer Science: Turn off the machine. Nature computes better.
• Physics: See the gnarl. The world is interesting.
• Biology. Feel your body. Your body is gnarly.
• Psychology: Release your thoughts. Avoid repetition.
• Sociology: Open your heart. Others are as complex as you.
• Philosophy. Be amazed. The universe is a miracle.

This morning, doing yoga, I had this deep sensual pleasure in the unsolvability, unpredictability, and undecidability of natural phenomena. The jiggles of my thoughts, the trembles of my legs. A passenger jet flying by low overhead looked as beautiful as a cellular automaton glider.

And I found a subtitle for the tome that my editor likes. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy.

What more do you need?

September 20, 2004. Sylvia’s Father Dies.

Yesterday Sylvia didn’t want to do much. She was worrying about her sick father. I went to San Francisco for the day to visit with Rudy Jr. But I was a little depressed myself. Rudy had a cook-out, and I should have been excited and interested. But I was just sitting around.

In the evening I went to a cocktail party for electronic musicians at the French consulate in San Francisco, which I’d expected to enjoy. But it was ashes in my mouth. Too much trouble to talk to people. I’m so deaf that making conversation at a cocktail party is too hard. I’d rather be riding my bike or on the beach.

And then at 6:30 am in the morning today, September 20, 2011, we got the word that Sylvia’s father was gone. He died while I was on the train back from San Francisco last night. Maybe that’s why I was so down yesterday. Feeling death in the air. In the train station the light seemed black. my eye landed on a newspaper someone was holding, and only one word of a headline was showing—and the word was, “Death.”

That reminds me of the time in 1991, when I flew to Cincinnati because Mom was dying. That time I saw a shroud of black plastic wrapped around a big sign over the interstate, and it was so creepy, so much a harbinger of death.

So today I started smoking cigarettes again. Got plane tickets for me, Sylvia and Georgia. Many memories of old Arpad. Visions of him as a touching young man. How elegant, worldly, and sophisticated he was.

Sylvia was recalling a moment a few years back when he acted loving for a few minutes, looking out the window at the new-fallen snow with her—and before reverting to his by-then obsessive worrying. “For those few minutes he was—normal, and it was so wonderful.”

September 23, 2004. Arpad’s Funeral

Last night we went and saw Arpad’s body in the funeral home. He was lying in a coffin, wearing a tux, with his hands folded on his chest. His hands were so thin they looked like flat gloves, or like bas-relief plastic copies of just the upper sides. They had a lot of makeup on him, and had bent his mouth into a smile he never used. I touched his hand and said goodbye. He was ice cold. So very motionless. So utterly dead.

Sylvia said it wasn’t really him, and she was right. An extinguished candle is no longer the flaming candle. A body’s computation halts and in that instant the soul is gone. Does it go somewhere else?

In French-speaking areas such as Geneva, instead of having “Funeral Home” on the sign of a mortuary, it has “Pompes Funèbres,” meaning, roughly “Funereal Pomp.”

It reminded me that years ago Arpad and I were discussing ceremonies, I don’t remember why, maybe we were talking about the Roman Catholic Mass, and he said, “I like pompous things.” Since Arpad wasn’t a native English speaker, I wasn’t quite sure whether, on the one hand, he was unaware of the negative connotation of “pompous,” or whether, on the other hand, he liked pomp so much that he was saying this to defy my sense that pomposity is a bad thing.

Today we went to a chapel in the St. Georges cemetery in Geneva. That same coffin was there, but with the lid on. So coffin-shaped, such a symbol of death. Behind the coffin was a door in the wall, and two men in black cloaks peeped out. Like sacred beetles ready to devour an offering placed by their hole. Priests.

One of them spoke in French and mentioned how Arpad had traveled to the four corners of the world, and that now he was taking a voyage that we all must take to the beyond. The kingdom of god. I liked the SF sound of that. The other spoke in Hungarian, raising his voice very loud. Hungarian is a language for high emotion.

Henry spoke about Arpad, very touchingly; Georgia reminisced; Sylvia read the twenty-third psalm.

On foot we followed the hearse across the graveyard to the crematorium. The hearse went around back. We descended into a basement viewing room, and there, one last time, was the coffin. One by one we filed up, touched the coffin, said goodbye, and went outside.

We all drove back to the family’s house and ate catered snacks on trays and talked and talked and talked. For us, it’s not yet.

Everyone in the family loves Sylvia. As I said before, she’s the star. The prettiest, liveliest, most interesting, and kindest. It’s been wonderful to have our daughter Georgia here for her as well.

We stayed a few more days in Geneva after the funeral. Sylvia, Georgia, and Sylvia’s eighty-four-year-old Aunt Emmi were going through old photo albums. I viewed one from 1949, when Sylvia was six and her family had just moved to France, having escaped Hungary. She was such an interesting-looking child, with her full dark lips, her grins, frowns and glares.

Sylvia says that since her parents always found fault with her, she figured she might as well make faces for the pictures.

There’s a great shot of Sylvia sitting in the last row of her first grade class, compressing her mouth into a tight thin line. And at the end of the year, she was first in the class, the best student, smarter than all of them. That’s why we ended up together, Sylvia and me. I sometimes forget just how smart she is.

Being around my in-laws day after day, I think of a phrase in Thaddeus Golas’s classic little tract of hippie wisdom, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment: “Love is the only safe haven.” It’s best to open my heart to everyone.

The last day in Geneva, Sylvia’s brother Henry was around all day, and the four of us talked a lot. It was like we couldn’t get enough of talking. Very warm feeling. Bonding. Some of the reminiscences pleasant, some painful.

Sylvia boxed up and brought home a big oil-painting portrait of her mother Pauline—the only specific thing that Arpad left to her. It’s on our living-room wall in Los Gatos now and it looks great. Hi, Pauline.

Return to Geneseo

October 1, 2004. Leibniz’s Monadology.

I’m in San Francisco alone, for a small conference run by a group that promotes Swiss technology. I talked last night on my beloved theme of “Robot Consciousness.” I went for the informal person-to-person approach, and didn’t use slides.

I was looking the listeners in the eye, telling stories, spinning theories, laughing, talking, and from time to time dipping into the profound. It went over well. I’ve still got the touch. All those years in the classroom.

When I got back to my motel room I watched the re-broadcast of the first Kerry-Bush debate. I thought Bush seemed like a lying fool, and that Kerry did great, was presidential. I thought it was a slam dunk, and that now Kerry would surely win.

Peaceful here this morning alone in bed with my laptop. I woke up at 5:30 am, still feeling the jetlag, and watched TV for a few minutes to see how the media plans to report the debate and, sigh, it seems like the pricks will spin the debate as being a tie or even a win by Bush. The media has become this crazy Brave New World Republikkkan mirror-world. They slide the poison across as smooth and homey as scrambled eggs. And at first you don’t realize the newscasters are ruthless pod aliens pretending to be human.

“Come on and eat some breakfast,” they say. But in reality, their “breakfast eggs” are coming at you through the hair-thin ovipositor that the monsters have stabbed through your skull so fast you didn’t notice. Watching TV is the opposite of peaceful.

I turned off the tube and read the entire text of Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz’s The Monadology on my computer, along with annotations by the philosopher Eric Steinhart. I think this is the first time I ever used my laptop to read something long that I didn’t write myself.

Synchronisitically enough, Steinhardt proposes a cellular automaton interpretation of the monadology, complete with a shrinking-towards-the-edges tessellation like I discussed in my book, The Fourth Dimension.

The idea of the monadology seems to be that each entity in the world has a kind of soul called a monad. And each monad consists of a view of the world. There is, says Leibniz, no objective world per se, just all those monads, each of which contains a subjective world, and the subjective worlds just happen to match.

The monads don’t communicate with each other. In Leibniz’s famous phrase, “monads have no windows.” Bi-fucking-zarre. They just happen to match. Each monad holds a whole model of the universe, although with one region enlarged and with lots of detail. This zoomed-in zone is the “body” associated with the monad.

I hear a door slamming in the hotel hall, a shower running downstairs. Other monads doing their thing. I can, with a slight effort, switch my point of view to theirs. The unlit white lampshade in the corner of my room is a monad, thinking about its light bulb. The gray-teal patch of San Francisco Bay that I see out the window is a monad that experiences the world as a watery flow. The photons flying to my eyes from the computer screen are minute, gnat-like monads. My hungry empty stomach is a monad. Each monad is the whole universe as seen from one particular point of view.

A wildly extravagant worldview. I don’t yet get why Leibniz is advocating it. First of all, he’s dodecaduplicating the universe a zillion-fold. And then he has to assume that all the copies are in synch. Why not just have one universe and no synching to worry about?

But, for the fun of it, I’ll try and think of everything as monads today.

I got into monadology, by the way, because I have a feeling that it could be a useful screwball theory to use for my new novel Crazy Mathematicians. In there, I have this idea of a so-called Knobby Giraffe seed of the universe that’s available at every spot in spacetime. If you change the local version of a Knobby Giraffe at some particular place and time, all the other Knobby Giraffes change to match—and you change the entire universe everywhere and everywhen.

The Knobby Giraffes are monads.

The Monadology also reminds me of Thaddeus Golas’s classic tract, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, which for some reason has been on my mind of late. This book is so small I can never find it around the house when I want it. As I recall, this slim volume begins by saying something like, “There’s only one kind of us around: When contracted we’re matter, when expanded we’re mind, when fully expanded we’re energy.”

Time to put some granola-monad in my stomach-monad.

October 4, 2004. Other Worlds.

It’s striking how often I write about travelling to another world in my science fiction novels.

What does the notion of another world mean to me, exactly? Escape. A symbol of the mental world where I spend so much of my time. I love that line from the Blondie song: “I’m not livin’ in the real world.”

Back in 1981, I quoted that line to my Calculus students at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and a few of them were outraged. One Add-A-Bead proto-Republikkkan snipped, “Where do you think you are living?”

Um, wow, I’m living in my head, man. The underworld.

My magic door to the other world is a fluttering leaf, a shadow, a cloud, a flame. All I have to do is look and think, and I’m lost in the ozone again. High on life.

Another way of looking at it is that writing is my other world. Writing is what I like to do best. I’m in fact compulsive about my writing, preferring it to the uncertainties and disappointments of daily life. My heroes leave the ordinary world for adventures in fabulous other lands. For the real me, those other lands are my books.

October 11, 2004. When Will I Write Again?

I keep fiddling with the notes document for my Crazy Mathematicians novel, figuring out my plot, my science ideas, my social ideas, my characters. Frequently breaking for naps in my backyard hammock.

I’ve written 20,000 words of notes—and I’m getting anxious that I’ll never actually start the novel. But, dammit, I’m not ready yet. I’m still figuring out significant details.

Sooner or later, my anxiety will build to the point where I go ahead and dive into the actual book. Somehow I’ll get inspired. The Muse will, as I sometimes say, show up and sit on my face. Come to me now, O Muse!

My theme in this upcoming SF novel is that a guy can jump over to a parallel spacetime, replace his other self that was native there, and take over that second life.

Sometimes my own life feels as odd as that. As if I’d just showed up here from some other dimension, and now I have all these possessions and all these seeming memories, and a wife and children—it all seems somehow remote and arbitrary.

When I was looking at Sylvia on the porch last night, I started mentally playing with my head, going for a sensation of jamais vu. I’m thinking: What a nice-looking woman. Seemingly I’ve lived with her for nearly forty years, but I don’t know the first thing about her. She’s a voice in the air, a shape in the fog.

I do yoga for a long time in the back yard every morning. I have a new trick of rolling back and forth on a largish smooth stone—as a way of massaging that persistent, possibly arthritic pain in my right shoulder and upper back. With Sylvia off at work, I grunt and roll to my heart’s content. Like a dog in the grass. She doesn’t like it when I loudly grunt. Thinks it makes me sound like an old man. Actually I remember that, when I was young, it annoyed me to hear my father grunt. Two peas in a pod.

After my daily yoga, I go over my email, drink black tea, and graze on cereal, fruit, and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. In the afternoons I lie in the back-yard hammock with a print-out of my Crazy Mathematicians notes—and I drop off to sleep. Mr. Retirement.

Later, awaking in the hammock, I feel uneasy, thinking that my productive life could be over. So soon? I used to have a job, a place to go, but now I’m home alone.

October 14, 2004. Geneseo Colloquium. Sundance.

We lived in Geneseo, New York, from 1972 to 1978, way upstate, near Rochester. I was a mathematics professor at the state college there. They laid me off in 1978, for no real reason—and I was very angry about it at the time. But in the end I had a good career anyway.

And now, incredibly, a young Geneseo mathematics professor, Jeff Johannes, is teaching an interdepartmental freshman course called “Infinity, the Fourth Dimension and Geneseo,” based on my transreal Geneseo novel White Light and on my nonfiction book The Fourth Dimension.

Jeff has invited me to come out to meet with his class of twelve students, and to give a Mathematics Department colloquium talk. And they’ll pay my way.

So I flew out there. The prophet receives honor in his home town!

As soon as I get there, I walk down Oak Street, where Sylvia and I lived for our first year or two in Geneseo. At 41 Oak Street, the tiny old house that we rented with little Georgia and baby Rudy Jr. The setting of my novel White Light. How sweet and cozy Oak Street is. It’s overwhelming. I walk down to Second Street and find our other house, the one we owned, 2 Second Street, where Isabel joined us as well. Oh, that house, so pregnant with images of our three young kids. I’m brimming.

On campus, I find my host Jeff Johannes at his office in the math department. We stop by the library on the way to the colloquium talk I’m giving. The librarians have set up a glass case right in the main entrance, “Rudy Rucker Returns.” Joy!

Before I left, twenty-six years ago, I gave the library a box with copies of my Geometry and Reality lecture notes, copies of the mimeographed notes for my courses with philosophy professor Bill Edgar, and copies of the mimeographed poems I’d hand out at the faculty readings. All of these are on display. The lecture notes were the seeds of The Fourth Dimension and of Infinity and the Mind. The poems were my first steps into literature.

Jeff and I sat down with my old math department office-mate Gary Towsley in the library cafeteria.

“This is very emotional for me,” I tell them.

“It feels good?” asks Jeff.

“Like a knife in my heart.”

I gave the colloquium talk to about a hundred kids and a few faculty. My title was “Seek the Gnarl: Adventures in Computer Science.” While we were waiting for the lecture to start, I put a psychedelic Mandelbrot-set zoom loop on the computer projector. A long zoom.

Then Jeff introduced me, and I began by saying how nice it was to come back, and that it reminded me of the Woody Allen movie where a writer is invited to make a speech at his alma mater, and he shows up drunk in a cab with a hooker and a corpse.

“So I’m already ahead of the game,” I tell them.

Puzzled laughs. I tell them I’m going to use PowerPoint slides. And I say how I always mean not to use PowerPoint, but it’s so easy that I slip back into it, like masturbation. Big, startled laughs.

I compared the three fields I’ve worked in, that is, math, computer programming, and science fiction:

• Math uses logic to draw surprising conclusions from arbitrary premises.
• Computer programs lay down arbitrary rules and deduce the consequences.
• Science fiction sets up arbitrary worlds and discusses what happens.

Then I showed them some software demos: A hypercube program, the Mandelbrot set, and some cellular automata. I discussed the threefold division of computations that I used in my Lifebox tome.

• Simple: Dies out or repeats.
• Gnarly: Complex moving patterns.
• Random: Seething dog barf.

I pointed out that gnarly patterns are rarer, that they lie between simple and random, and that gnarliness is characteristic of life and thought.

And then almost an hour was up. I hit them with my list of conclusions from the end of my Lifebox tome, and then we were done.

The audience liked my talk. Jeff and Gary said no math colloquium had ever gotten such good attendance, or such long and hearty applause.

Sundance, a hippie book dealer whose legal name is Barry Caplan, was at my talk—he’d told me he was coming, which is why I made sure to have that Deadhead Mandelbrot loop running at the beginning—to give my man some eye candy. I often used to hang out with Sundance in his then-quite-small bookstore when I was there in the early 1970s. He still has the same shoulder-length blonde hair and the same New York wise-guy voice.

Sundance took me out for lunch at the Big Tree Inn. Seems he’s a millionaire now; the college gave up on competing with him, closed their bookstore, and gave him the contract for all the textbook sales! His store is beautiful, filled with lovely framed Art-Nouveau-style posters by an artist friend.

And who do we find alone in the Big Tree bar but Prof. Dave Kelly, my poet hero and drinking buddy of yore! He’s ignored my email to him about my visit, also the announcements about my talk—in a town this small, important things are done face-to-face or not at all. And, if you’re riding the Tao, as I seem to be, you just run into whoever you want to see.

Dave is fatter than ever, still sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, quick as a knife. It takes him a beat until he recognizes me and then he says, “You look like you’re inside something. Like a costume, or a mask. I couldn’t see you at first.”

I slide into my old stance of trying to impress the great man—he’s eight years older than me, and was already a published author of poetry chapbooks when I was making my start. It’s comfortable and fitting to honor him.

After going over how many of the old Geneseo couples are still together, Dave gets off one of his characteristically shocking lines, “One of the pay-offs for a long-term marriage is that one of you gets to bury the other one.” He doesn’t really mean this, he’s in fact quite the devoted family man, but (I theorize) he talks this way as a kind of reaction to his fear of death. Whistling past the graveyard.

As we talk, Dave keeps swatting at the air in front of him. “Why are you doing that?” I ask him.

“There’s a fly,” he says, a bit sheepishly.

“I don’t see anything,” I say, putting on a faked expression of concern, and for a moment Dave looks uncertain.

Got him! We men, and the mind-games we play on each other. We’re having fun.

After lunch, Sundance takes me to see Buzzo, who runs the record store in Geneseo. Buzzo was here, too, back in my Geneseo days, and he was also a guy I’d enjoyed talking to. His store hasn’t changed in thirty years, there’s even the same hand-lettered signs on his walls.

Buzzo too is the same—weirdly mumbling, needy, smart. He now has the appearance of an old Italian man with a big white beard. He still has his band, and tonight he’s recording a new version of the old song “Eve of Destruction,” tweaking it to be about the upcoming Iraq war. His wife Ellie divorced him, but she still works in his store with him, and still takes care of him. She has the same sweet smile. Buzzo lives in the basement of the store. He accidentally acquired a second wife in Rochester whom he doesn’t like. He only sees her once a week, on Wednesday nights.

I head down to the bottom of the campus alone, cross the road, and walk out into the Wadsworth farm fields, just like old times. Remains of a crop of beets, muddy furrows, I’m trying to get to the Genesee River. Eventually I make it. The river is narrower than I remembered and very muddy, but magnificent in its own way, a great living thing, sinuous as a snake, forever rolling and turning in its bed. Great chunks of the bank where I stand are on the point of caving in. The river’s shaping of the land is never-ending.

On the way back into town, I drop in uninvited on Gary Towsley and his wife for dinner. They welcome me, they’re good friends from the old days. As I mentioned, Gary was my office-mate in the math department. He’s a forward-thinking guy—he was the very first person I ever heard talking about chaos theory, and this was way back in 1976. Olympia is a Geneseo math professor as well.

Gary is just fixing a nice little Tuscan meal, and they give me a share. I’d eaten with them the night before as well, right after getting off my plane—they’re very hospitable. Gary is a great cook, although so taciturn that I can’t be entirely sure he welcomes me. But I think he does. And Olympia talks enough for two or even three.

At 8 pm that evening, I give an on-campus reading for the English Club. Dave Kelly shows up this time, also Dan Drake, a guy who lived near us in the 1970s, and who gave us our first aquarium. I don’t recognize him at first.

To Dave Kelly’s delight, Drake comes up to me, and the first words out of his mouth are, “I guess you don’t remember getting drunk with me and breaking a whiskey bottle on the bear fountain in Geneseo’s main intersection.”

There’s also two nice math major boys at the talk, Joe and Eli. Joe has these giant urban-primitive Ubangi-type grommets in his earlobes. My old student Amylouise Donnely and her husband are there. This is the same woman who was in a class I taught with Bill Edgar, and who emailed me a few months back. It’s good to see her in person. She’s pleasant and harmless. Jeff Johannes and his fiancée Julie are there. Julie is helping Jeff teach his course on my books. She teaches writing at Monroe Community College.

I read a couple of the short-short stories I wrote for the Lifebox tome: “Aint Paint,” and “Lucky Number.” And then I talk about the craft and biz of writing.

Before my talk, Dave gives me the latest chapbook of his poems. So I wind up my session by reading the first poem in Dave’s book—it’s a good one, too.

On the way home, I stop by alone at my old bar, The Idle Hour. I called it The Dewdrop Inn in White Light. The place is exactly the same, but exactly. I drink a non-alcoholic Labatt’s Nordic beer.

October 15, 2004. Bill Caren. Faculty Party.

This morning I went downtown and had a great scrambled egg sandwich on Main Street. The first person I saw was Sundance, standing out in front of his store. He let me park my car in his private lot. Believe it or not, parking in tiny downtown Geneseo is a bit hard, and they have meters now. After breakfast, I set out on foot to find the so-called dinosaur trees—a pair of great fallen oaks that Sylvia, the kids and I used to clamber on of yore, trees like stegosaurus skeletons.

The pastures down in the valley are more deeply overgrown than in the past. The mingled meadow plants are right up to my shoulders. An amazing symphony of harvest tones: purples, oranges, umbers, yellows, carmines, browns, siennas, scarlets, tans, ochers, crimsons.

I find some trails mowed through the meadows. I figure they use these for the fox hunt—one of Geneseo’s claims to fame is that it hosts America’s oldest hunt, thanks to the Wadsworth family who founded the town, and who still live here.

I walk all the way to the bottom of the valley, and it gets quieter and ever more beautiful, but I can’t find the dinosaur trees. Maybe they rotted away, or maybe the Wadsworths sawed them up. It’s been, after all, thirty years. I’m also looking for a hollow tree that I used to sit in and smoke pot. Inside that crumbly tree trunk, I’d think of myself as being like Saint Anthony in the Bosch paintings, indeed I even wrote a poem called “Saint Anthony.”

I don’t see the tree, but I remember the poem. In the poem I describe seeing what I thought was a goblin face in a tree trunk, and I say that the face is in some sense real since I’ve perceived it, and then I wonder, “What sees me for real in indifferent thicket?” Stylistically, I liked the way the phrase “in indifferent” makes your eye or your voice slow down.

Walking back up to campus, I drop in on my old teaching-partner Bill Edgar, now head of the Philosophy Department. He’s 72. I find him outside, talking to a student. He looks at me with a rather stony expression.

“Have you heard about me?” he asks.

“Heard what?”

“I have Parkinson’s disease.”

“That’s why you look less ebullient?”

“Yes.”

We go to Bill’s office and chat a bit more. His wife Stacey turns up, a cheerful, solid woman, a professor as well. Everyone is so immediately the same—it’s like I just stepped out of the room for half an hour.

I’m fairly sure I’ll never see Edgar alive again. I thank him for all the great interplay we had in the old days.

“You used to put me on the spot,” I tell him.

“I didn’t know what I was talking about,” he says.

“But you always hit the ball back,” I say.

That was the good thing about debating him. He never gave up.

Nearly everyone I run into has a health story to tell. Dave Kelly has a spot on his lung, Bill Edgar the Parkinson’s, Bill Caren will talk about his heart valve, Rosemary Teres’s back is bent, Michael Teres’s back has lost two disks, Buzzo is recovering from a heart attack—jeez.

Bill and his wife Loretta were our best friends in Geneseo—along with the Poagues. Bill was an administrator, but we grew close because his daughter Chelsy was Georgia’s best friend. Like all the thirty-years-older friends I’m meeting, Bill looks different at first, and then my brain subtracts the changes and I see the same person.

He’s reading the paper in an office on the second floor of the administration building.

“I do about an hour of work a day,” he tells me. “My pension had reached the point where I had nothing to gain by not retiring, so they let me retire, but they’re paying me anyway.”

“What do you do?”

“Labor relations. When there’s someone they need to fire, I’m the guy who goes to see him.”

“You’re like Sonny Corleone? A hit man?”

“I’m a problem solver.”

After a moment’s hesitation Bill agrees to go out for lunch with me. He hoarsely whispers, “Cancel my appointments,” to his secretary, and we go to, once again, the tavern at the Big Tree. Seems like it’s that or the sub shop.

After a bit I ask Bill if he isn’t sorry he divorced Loretta, as she’s such a great woman. He gives me a hard look.

“Were you sent?”

“Yeah. Sylvia sent me.”

In the same vein, I later ask him, “Did you fuck so-and-so?” referring to a woman that used to flirt with him a lot.

“Where did that come from!” demands Bill, refusing to answer.

It’s always been my role to be direct and irreverent. I could have been a great journalist.

As the meal goes on, Bill says, “Life is good,” several times, but, as ever, he tends not to look fully happy. But to some extent, that’s just the set of his face. Life is good. For as long as it lasts.

We get more and more comfortable together and start saying crazy things and laughing a lot. For a while there it feels like the old days. We fondly reminisce about the time Sylvia and I and the Carens put on a big French dinner for this dinner group we were in, and we served the duck a l’orange practically raw, but everyone was so drunk that they didn’t care. The cheap after-dinner brandy was vile, and the next morning Bill and I briefly convinced the wives that the brandy bottle said “Keep Away From Eyes” on the back, and that everyone at the table had noticed. The four of us laughed ourselves to tears over the joke. Still giddy from the partying.

Now Bill says a really touching thing. Once he’d been at work in the administration building, and he and the other office-workers looked out the window and saw me with my three kids. I’d given the kids colored chalk, and I was lying on the pavement and the kids were drawing my outline on the ground.

“That’s my friend,” Bill told his co-workers, who were inclined to tut-tut such unconventional behavior. “He’s a faculty member,” continued Bill. “He’s untenured. He’s my friend.”

Bill is the most fun to talk to of all the people I run into in Geneseo. I feel an utter lack of pretense with him, complete freedom in what we can say. When we go outside, it’s pouring rain. Bill gives me a giant golf umbrella with “Geneseo Admissions” printed on it.

I go back to the room, and phone Michael and Rosemary Teres, who were our neighbors at 41 Oak Street. They’re art teachers. Rosemary tells me they’re having a buffet party for Sue Bailey’s sixtieth birthday tonight—Sue Bailey is another old friend. All right!

Then it’s back downtown to Sundance’s store for a book signing. Not a huge number of people there, maybe a dozen, including Jeff and Julie and that loyal pair of math students Eli and Joe. Buzzo turns up and we start joking and reminiscing, getting into some old routines. He seems more together than yesterday. He gives me a CD copy of the version of “Eve of Destruction” which he recorded last night. Back home in California I’ll play it, and it rocks, and I’ll even figure out how to put it on the web.

Sue Bailey, whose birthday it is, turns up with a copy of my Bruegel novel to sign. She’s a dean at the college now. Her husband Randy died of skin cancer four years ago.

After Sundance’s, my math-professor host Jeff Johannes takes me over to his house. The idea is to meet with his Rudy Rucker class there from five to seven. I’d noticed on his syllabus that he planned to give the students a walking tour of the Geneseo of White Light, so I’ve suggested we do it now.

The rain’s let up, and we go for it—I show the students the two houses we lived in, and then we go up to the graveyard where my character Felix Rayman leaves his body. I truck around rapidly, the coat-tails of my father-in-law’s cashmere overcoat flying, looking for the same old beech tree that I used to like to stand under, and yes I find my same old tree wet in the rain, I rub my hands lovingly over its smooth bark, savoring the familiar curves, urging the students to do likewise. Relevant quote from page one of White Light:

Wednesday afternoon, I walked up Center Street to the graveyard on Temple Hill. The rain was keeping the others away, and it was peaceful. I stood under a big twisting tree, a beech with smooth gray hide made smoother by the rain running down it, tucks and puckers in the flesh, doughy on its own time-scale.

How beautiful it was to be there. And how odd, also, to be a carnival-barker tour-guide of my own life. And how gratifying that someone cares. The students are shy and friendly. This is catnip for them. They’ve never met a live author, and I seem to be sufficiently colorful. To complete the expedition, Jeff Johannes’s fiancé Julie even finds the old Wadsworth gravestone I mentioned in White Light, the one that says, “Remember that you must die.”

We have a light dinner at Jeff’s, and after the students leave I chat with him a bit more. He’s a little worried about his job. The department scolded him for teaching the Geometry course “Rudy’s way,” instead of “Don Trasher’s way.”

Don Trasher was the guy most instrumental in getting me fired way back when. And these days he’s the chairman of the Geneseo math department. The thing was, I’d wanted to make the geometry course be about pictures—instead of about formal axioms, which was what Trasher was pushing. It’s insane, funny, and somehow touching that the same tiny battle continues. Like Gulliver returning to find Lilliput and Blefuscu still at war over which end of a soft-boiled egg should be cracked open.

I go back to my room and change again—I keep having to switch out of soaking wet shoes and dry the wet ones on the air blower in the room. Good thing I brought two pairs. And then I head for Rosemary and Michael Teres’s party.

The house is jammed, maybe forty people there. Names, faces, memories. It was like some movie scene where a character sees a rapid montage of his years in the homey village where he lived as a young man. I won’t list all the details, but, just as a sample, I noticed that one of the guys, Joe DiChario, still has that touching way of jerking his shoulders up and down when he gets excited. He’s gray and wrinkled, but he has the twinkle of a boy. A musician.

Perhaps the most interesting bit I hear at the party is the New-Zealand-accented Diony Young’s detailed accounting of how she and Roger the mailman found our former landlord Jim Vickers after he hanged himself in the garage of that house we rented at 41 Oak Street. Mr. Vickers was a terrible miser—I remember that he wouldn’t repay our deposit when we stopped renting from him, even though we’d left the place spotless, and even though we were broke. At some point after we left town, Mr. Vickers’s wife cleaned out his bank account and ran off with the money. That put him over the edge, and he hanged himself. Poor old man. I guess the “White Light house” is haunted now.

Sylvia should have been at the party. She would have loved it, and everyone would have loved seeing her. At least I took a lot of pictures for Sylvia. So much information, so little time.

October 16, 2004. Hiking Fossil Creek. Dave Kelly.

Today I went hiking at the so-called fossil creek with Gary Towsley and our old Geneseo friend Mike Millard. This is a spot we used to go to with the Millards and our kids years ago. The Millards live near the creek in a farmhouse which used to be rather tumbledown, but which now is worthy of a spread in Better Homes and Gardens. Mike’s a stockbroker, and his wife Fran repairs Oriental rugs.

A little stray collarless fox hound joins us for the walk. She looks like a beagle but with longer legs—in fact at first I think she is a beagle, but Mike and Gary set me straight. There’s passels of fox hounds around the valley. Geneseo has America’s oldest fox hunt, remember? Maybe this dog lives on the farm that owns the land with the creek. She’s, like, our guide. I feel like I’m on another planet, and the dog is a friendly alien. Yet the men with me are so familiar: the confident opinionated rhythms of Millard’s voice, and Gary’s thoughtful silences and sage observations.

The leaves are indescribably beautiful, reds and yellows against the glowing gray sky. We go up onto a ridge, and hike about two miles to look down on a horseshoe waterfall—this whole area is loaded with little cousins of the great Niagara Falls, less than two hundred miles off.

On the way back we root around the creek bed for fossils. Mike finds a nice trilobite imprint in a bit of shale for me.

I’m starting to feel really tired. I’ve talked to more people in the last three days than I normally talk to in three weeks. I rest in my room for awhile, then I head out to Dave Kelly’s house in the country, about five miles out of town.

I’d been uneasy about going, that maybe he wouldn’t welcome me, but he’s excited and happy, says he called the motel twice to see if I was coming. He’s a lonely old man, a prophet without honor in his home town. He wasn’t invited to the Teres’s party last night. I feel a deep tenderness towards him.

I’ve noticed in my conversations over these three days that most people in Geneseo aren’t too fond of him. They don’t appreciate or realize that he’s a great poet. “They think that because they know me, they know my poetry,” Dave once remarked to me. “They think I write fat, drunken poetry.” People gossip meanly about him. Reminds me a bit of how they treated me when I lived here. A writer’s life can be a thankless one.

Dave’s made food for me, and has already eaten his share, even though it’s only, like, five o’clock. He says he overspiced it and that he feels sick as a pig. The barbed Dave Kelly humor. I postpone eating my share.

We go for a walk, then sit in his parlor recalling old times. He likes to tell war stories about things that happened to him in earlier years. He says he regrets how mean he used to be. His health isn’t great. But he’s full of enthusiasm about his three daughters.

By now it’s dark and I’m finally ready to eat the food he made. It’s curried chicken and peas with what Dave calls a “bis-cuit,” putting on a Southern accent and beaming. The Father archetype.

Then his wife Sylvia shows up, it’s great to see her. She’s cheerful and excited, bouncing in on some special shoes she’s proud of—they have springs in the heels. I sit and talk with them for another hour, it’s sweet. We show each other some photos. In parting I tell them how many happy memories I have of all the good times we had at their house.

Amazing parties Dave and Sylvia would have some nights, out in their house in the middle of nowhere. I thought of these as literary parties, which made me enjoy them the more.

One time, my Sylvia and I went over to their house for a whole Sunday afternoon. To start with, Dave, the two Sylvias, and I went cross-country skiing on the deep fresh snow, leaving our three kids in the hands of the Kellys’ three daughters. And after that, the Kelly daughters—who’d been paid in advance for this—served us a meal and continued baby-sitting Georgia, Rudy Jr. and Isabel. We grown-ups sat at the dining-table and ate and drank for five hours while the day waned. The six kids watched the old version of King Kong on TV. A wonderful day. Epic.

The snows of yesteryear.

After the Kellys, I swing by to say good bye to Gary Towsley and Olympia and now I’m back in the motel and tomorrow morning I fly home. It’s been great, but I’m wrung out. I told Towsley I’ll be back before too long, now that I’ve established a beachhead. He laughed at that.

And now I lie here in bed, editing these journal notes about my Geneseo trip, editing my impressions, editing my present and my past. And on the plane tomorrow, I’ll edit some more, slowly discovering what I saw and what I thought about it.

Yet Another Novel

October 29, 2004. Belated Retirement Party. Starting a Novel.

A few days ago the Computer Science Department had a belated retirement party for me and a couple of others. Rolled sandwiches, fruit cubes and cake in the mail room. Very nice. They gave me an inexpensive pair of pens engraved, respectively, 1986 and 2004. Dear Sylvia was there as well, she brought some beautiful flowers.

Looking at some of the pictures that Sylvia took of this little party, I can’t believe I’ve actually retired. Me, that polite gray-haired man? What have I done! Is my life over? Should I have kept on teaching?

On the upside, I was watching a documentary on the film-maker Buñuel last night, and they mentioned that the surrealists were against work, even in principle. Rather than saying I’m retired, I could equally well say that I’ve stopped working.

The last few days have seemed long and empty. Raining, Sylvia at work, and me with no appointments of any kind. Not much to do around Los Gatos. Visit the two coffee shops. Bike on the hill above the winery. I’ve lost the habit of going to yoga class, preferring to do it alone. Alone, alone, alone. Listening to my Zappa records in the empty house, just like in my empty apartment in Brussels. But in Brussels there was a real city to walk out into. And a seminar that met once a week.

It’s not the work that I miss, it’s the social contacts.

What makes time doubly empty for me is that I’m between books. There’s some clean-up work to do on Lifebox—which I’m putting off—and the first few pages of this new novel to write. I’ve rejected the Crazy Mathematicians title and I don’t have a new title that I’m really sure about. I do have a sketch of a plot outline.

Starting a novel is scary and hard. It’s like you’re picking the seed to grow a whole universe from.

Sitting in the Great Bear Coffee Shop, I finally managed to write the first five hundred words of the book. I’m worried they’re too funny. I have this reflexive tendency to be funny, and I worry that it undercuts the reader’s identification with my characters. I need to be sure and have wheenk as well. Pathos. I like for my stories to be emotionally moving as well as funny.

Writing that little bit of the novel felt really good. When I’m writing, I’m in the zone, the ozone, mindless in the sense of “the Zen doctrine of no mind,” absorbed by my craft—and the minutes and hours melt away.

Thank god I’ve got a book to write. Sometimes I bitch about not being able to write a bestseller, but I’m so lucky that I can publish books at all. I revel in the craft of writing. And it’s no accident that so many of my heroes leave the ordinary world for adventures in fabulous other lands—for the real me, those other lands are my novels.

November 5, 2004. My Novel Comes To Life.

I’m making progress on my Mathematicians novel. The first couple of thousand words came really easily, I had all this great character background stuff that I’d written in my book notes, and I slotted that stuff right in. I read the new pages to my mathematician friend Jon Pearce and he loved them.

Running and running and finally jumping into the air, flapping, and, yes—once again I’m aloft.

It makes me oddly anxious to see my material take on life. It’s gonna break my outline! So much the better. An author learns to accept an increasing loss of control.

For the title, I’ll use Mathematicians in Love instead of Crazy Mathematicians. I remember my writer friend Terry Bisson had suggested I call my Bruegel novel Bruegel in Love, and later I wished I’d listened to him. “Love” is more commercial than “Crazy.” It’s sweeter.

Daughter Isabel is visiting, and I went and walked with her on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and I made some hand-written notes for a scene I want to set there. Here are the notes from on the beach:

Container ships chugging past toward the Golden Gate.

Little shore birds running—they look like they’re on wheels, their bodies just glide along. How nice it would be to cup one in your hand and feel its heartbeat.

The horizon line isn’t straight—its wavy, scalloped, undulating. Giant waves out there, far outsiders.

The waves closer in are smooth and clean, like slow gray hills, with perfect lips, and spray blowing off them towards the sea.

A marbled gray sky, with shafts of afternoon sun coming down through rents in the cloud cover, pillars of light like fingers of god.

Crossed the dunes and the beach grass to reach a coffee shop called Java Beach. At the corner of Judah Street and La Playa. They have a checkered floor. Black leather couches. An old man in a flat hat, wearing a red carnation.

So now I’ve written up the beach part, and my characters Bela and Alma are sitting in the Java Beach coffee shop looking at rain running down the window pane. So this morning, to simulate rain, I set up the sprinkler in our back yard to hit the bedroom window and I sat and looked at that for awhile.

So California, to use a sprinkler for fake rain. I remember when I was in Torino a couple of years ago, and it was pouring, and how excited I was to look into the shabby garden and see spreading raindrop circles in the puddles.

The drops on the window aren’t all that round. Their edges are scalloped and jagged.

Big and small drops accumulate on the glass, and then one drop starts moving, and it makes its way down, zigzagging as it swallows the drops it gets near.

It’s a bit like what computer scientists call a self-organized critical process, like a sandpile with sand continually being added. Here the sprinkler is adding water drops and some of the drops get lucky and set off a big trickle. There’s only a few really successful trickles. It’s that power-law thing again. Only a few players get to ride the Tao.

A sliding drop is sniffing its way. It moves left and right, now slower and now faster, influenced by the presence of droplets, and perhaps also by dirt, oil, and soap residue on the glass.

The trickles are objective correlatives for the lives of my characters.

November 15, 2004. Blogging. Seeing Music.

I finished the first chapter of Mathematicians in Love last week, modulo a few walls, nodes and gates that I’ll inevitably have to carpenter into the story/maze later on. I hardly saw or talked to anyone last week, other than Sylvia. Somewhat claustrophobic. As a retiree, I have no social life.

Having no social life, I’ve started a blog, and I’ve been posting an entry every couple of days, which means I have all the more reason to stay *ugh* indoors.

Usually I do weird new technological things like blogging for reasons I’m not fully aware of at the time, and with unpredictable results. That’s the nature of new media.

As a practical matter, it may be that by blogging, I’m doing research for Mathematicians in Love. That is, I can see some of my characters becoming bigtime lifebloggers. Video bloggers. Vloggers.

The word vlogger vaguely reminds me of a slightly older boy, Phil Ardery, at church camp in Kentucky, about 1962 when I was sixteen. Phil was a witty guy I looked up to. At camp he was telling stories about some other summer camp experiences.

At one of these earlier camps, Phil and a friend would tease a guy named Sampson because they could hear Sampson beating off every night.

They’d yell out, “Flog it, Samps.”

Phil said that his yelling friend had a lisp, so that the words actually came out as “Fwog it, Samps.”

Thus: vlogger.

That was a fun time at that church-camp in 1962. This legendary Louisville character Churchill Davenport was in our cabin with us, and he carved his name on the wall and misspelled it as CHURCHHILL. He was such a cool guy, a real wild-ass. The band NOFX now has a song about “the punkest motherfucker I ever did see,” including the lyric: “He’ll puke on you, he’ll fuck your Mom, he’ll smoke while huffing gas.” That was Churchill. And all the while he’d be conning you and cozying you along—in case he might eventually need something from you.

“How does it feel to be so smart?” Churchill would often ask me, as if he were really interested.

Saturday night Sylvia and I saw a great band, Wilco. I’d never heard them—I just bought the ticket on the guess that they’d be good. Saw them in a nice venue, the Frank-Lloyd-Wright-style Performing Arts Center in my dear San gets-no-respect Jose. As usual, Sylvia and I were the oldest people at the concert.

These guys rocked in an interesting way. No hair, no costumes, no spit. The workmanlike musician thing, kind of like Zappa’s bands. The drummer looked great and ecstatic, his arms up in happy spider arcs. They’d play a simple, catchy ballad, and then wipe this great smear of sound across it, like an earthquake. Or pile up huge riffs and loops so that the big hall became an aural funhouse.

Everyone was standing up after awhile, and then I was tired and I was sitting down, letting the music wash over me, my eyes closed, turning my head slowly, savoring how the sounds came in differently as I moved my ears. Each person at a concert hears something slightly different. The soundscape is like a 3D cellular automaton filling the room, amazing how quickly it updates, amazing how it stays in synch with the twitches and twiddles of the musicians’ picks and knobs.

Sitting there, letting the great sounds of “Spider” wash over me, I was able to let go of my gerbil-wheel concerns. I went ahead and imagined that god was speaking to me. If I used to be able to entertain such beliefs when high, why not do the same thing sober?

So I imagined that the chaos, the big aha, the noise in the sky, the synchronistic universe—they were funneling me the exact impulses that I need to figure out the next chapter of my novel about guys who funnel impulses to alter the universe. The cosmos dancing with me.

I peered deep into the sounds, examining their ragged edges, gnarly as the borders of the Mandelbrot set. Dappled sound. And for the next few days, listening to any sound at all, I realized that I can do the same thing—to notice the little patterns. Sounds are standing waves in a stream, chaotic enough to be universally computing.

It’s said that the origin of the universe was one big Om. But, that sound of creation is everywhere and everywhen, in the tapping of my keyboard, in the ringing of my ears, in the hum of my computer—well maybe not in the hum.

My Mathematicians in Love character Bela can’t get a job as a math professor, and I’d been thinking of doing the obvious and having him get work in *ugh* the computer industry. But coming outta the Wilco concert, I’m thinking Bela might become a musician. A fun job. Orpheus was said to play the lyre in such a way that animals would gather around, and trees would lean over, and even the rocks would get soft.

Go a step past that. Bela’s weird axe or instrument is capable of emulating the universe. He can predict any phenomenon by playing it.

“Hum a few bars and I’ll fake the rest.”

Loosely unrelated thought. I remember an old comic book—let’s say it was a Bugs Bunny comic. Bugs gets a tuba-like Horn of Plenty, and all kinds of food comes out of it: turkeys, bottles of juice, carrots. And then Elmer Fudd jumps up and down on the magic tuba, and it comes apart, and Bugs puts it together wrong. And when he sqwonks it, things break and disappear into the horn. Bugs says, “Oh-oh, it’s a Horn of Nothing.”

Trip to Milan

November 16, 2004. Bound for Milan. Mirror.

A few weeks back, an Italian writer named Arianna Dagnino did an email interview with me about my “lifebox” concept, and about digital immortality. She was writing an article for L’Express, a French magazine similar to Time.

And now she got me invited to be on a panel on “Digital Eternity” to be held at a trade fair and culture expo called FuturShow, in Milan, Italy. Arianna likes high-flown, dreamy, whimsical high-tech ideas. She wrote a book called “Jesus Christ Cyberstar,” arguing that the internet is somehow like early Christianity. And a book on being a nomad, with web surfing a part of modern nomadism.

I’m at the San Francisco international air terminal right now, waiting for them to print my ticket, staring absently at a clear space behind the ticket counter, assuming it’s a mirror. And then I realize it’s open air, and that I’m staring into the far distance. This terminal is huge.

And then I flash on how it would be to look into a real mirror and see beings in the distance that aren’t present there in your real world. The alien cockroach mathematicians.

These guys are definitely going into Mathematicians in Love. Thank you, Muse.

November 18, 2004. Plugging into Milano.

The FuturShow is in some big hall on the other side of Milano from my hotel. I got a message from one of the organizers that I should come in and check out the venue today. Bill Gates is giving a talk at 9:30 am. The message said I could phone them back and they’d request a taxi for me. But I thought public transportation would be more fun. You get more of a flavor of a city that way.

The guy at the hotel desk tells me that the Metro is broken or closed or something. Not just the one train, but the whole line is out for the rest of the day. I later learn that the Metro is closed because somebody committed suicide by jumping under a subway train. Apparently this happens here fairly often.

In any case, the guy at the desk tells me I can go via street-car if I change lines along the way. So I get into California-ant-mode, rushing and sweating to be at the FuturShow venue at 9:30 sharp to hear Bill Gates and to meet my hosts. But, in the first street-car, seeing Italians all around me, and watching the big buttery-yellow buildings passing by, I snap out of it.

“Do like in Italy.”

Nobody cares when I get to the FuturShow. The organizers that I’m imagining to be “expecting” me are Italians, for god’s sake. Whenever I get there will be fine, even if it’s tomorrow.

So before getting on any second tram, I looked around downtown for awhile. The big sight is the cathedral, the Duomo—a great stone Gothic wedding-cake set on a monumental open square. I went up some stairs and I walked around on the roof of the Duomo, with stone gingerbread all around.

After the Duomo, I went into the local Prada store, which may well be the flagship Prada store, given that Miuccia Prada herself hails from Milano. I’d just read a profile of her in the New Yorker, and I’d been fantasizing that my host Arianna might introduce me to Miuccia, but that’s probably not too likely. Miuccia’s in the stratosphere, and I’m down here below the radar.

The Prada store is in the Vittoria Emmanuel galleria, an amazing nineteenth century arched shopping arcade off the cathedral square. Right beside the arcade is what must be the world’s greatest espresso bar. It’s the Zucca, on the Duomo square. I went there just about every day.

The Zucca has great Art Nouveau tile and a fifty-foot-high ceiling. You get your cappuccino at a zinc bar for less than $2 a cup, and the barristas are sharp dudes. They do elegant artisan-type moves to marbleize a fern pattern into your cappuccino foam. I’m not sure what a zucca is. They have a tile image of one, and it’s some kind of vegetable—but I can’t tell which one.

After my preliminary sight-seeing, I caught a beat, rickety old tram the rest of the way to FuturShow. As I’d half-expected, there was not in fact anyone there to meet me. My host Arianna wasn’t there today.

The show itself was like a trade show, a bunch of booths for crap like videogames and wireless products. Each exhibitor’s booth was hidden inside white sheets. The exhibitors had video projectors shining images onto their tent walls from the inside, which was cool and dreamy. I’d like it if they used something like squid skin that just oozes into different colors. If you wanted to know the details about a booth, you had to go inside the tent, and the booth bunnies and the tech droids would start in on you.

I used the organizers’ computers to do some email, and I got interviewed on camera for a daytime Italian TV show. They’re into my lifebox notion of getting digital immortality via uploading your mental software. And they’re publishing a little essay that I wrote for them on this topic—it’ll be in Milan’s evening paper, Corriere Della Sera.

For supper, I found a terrific place called “Le 5 Terre,” near my hotel. They had an ancient stone column and arch in the middle of the room. Lots of Italians in there, also a few travelers. An open antipasto bar where you could pick things out.

I ended up going there three nights, as it was handy and they were nice people. One night I noticed they had risotto di zucca on the menu, so I ordered it, as I was still wondering about the name of that Zucca espresso bar by the Duomo. The risotto had yellow cubes in it, so I formed the hypothesis that a zucca is a yam.

I tended to eat way too much at Le 5 Terre, and I was in considerable discomfort nearly every night. One night I dreamed I had a heart attack with a physician lunging forward to stick a long hypodermic needle into my chest, and the next night I dreamed there was a nuclear war and I was trying to protect Sylvia.

November 19, 2004. Fashion. Cyberpunk Vendors.

Milano is one of the great capitals of the couture fashion biz. All around town they show videos of walking models—even in the subways. Never smiling and never getting anywhere, these models. Just walking their runways. I could watch them for hours.

Today the museums were closed, so I spent all morning looking at the fashionable boutiques on Via Della Spiga, one of the world’s ultimate fashion streets. Essentially any brand you see advertised in Vogue has a presence in Milano: Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Prada/Miu Miu, Armani, Valentino, Gio Moretti—and many more.

The Marni boutique had perhaps the most outrageous item: a tweed diaper for women. Expose every single millimeter of your gorgeous gams! Wear a nanoskirt with a crotch strap!

I actually walked the half-mile length of Via Della Spiga three or four times, back and forth, studying it, entering some of the stores, mulling things over—also killing time till I could have lunch. There weren’t many shoppers, it being Monday morning.

There were more fashion-biz types in the street than anything else. A Mercedes limo picking up some guys at D&G, wonderfully smooth and well-dressed Italian men talking their elegant English to an American distributor. A cheerful Italian couple on foot, a man and a woman, in the biz as well. She was wearing bicycle-riding bands to clamp in the bottoms of her pants. Is that street-wear? Or does she actually ride a bike?

What is fashion about? It’s complex. At the most obvious level it’s about making shapes, a kind of polychrome sculpture. But it’s got a big semiotic level—the shapes are signs in an ongoing game as intricate as painting or pop music.

And the whole social thing. Purses in particular can get quite abstract, as they don’t have to actually fit your body. Certainly a purse is a symbol of a woman’s physical femininity. One Gio Moretti offering was all strapped up, a purse in bondage, perhaps subjugated to the male, yet wearing an outrageous girls-world color and sprouting a hopeful pair of leather hearts. Love springs eternal.

Fashion is plumage, adornment with various purposes, some of them antithetical to each other. To call attention to you as an individual, or to make you look like a member of the in-crowd. To display your wealth, or to make you look like a raffish street-person. To make you look sexy, or to make you into a leprous and memorable clown.

Most of the high-fashion customers that I saw seemed frozen-faced, uptight. Or maybe that’s just because they saw me near them. I think back to high school, to the rich kids who had the best clothes. Often as not, these were nasty, unhappy people.

But certainly there are people who do fashion for fun, often in a freestyle way. I have to reach no further than daughter Georgia, famous among her family and friends for her striking thrift outfits. She bought her Fifties high-school prom dress for a dollar at a rummage sale…and was the envy of her classmates.

Eventually I exited the mental cyclotron of Via Della Spiga and found a nice little art show: Dino Caponi, Il Metafisica dell’Esistenza, or, The Metaphysics of Existence. Ah, Italy.

Aren’t these Prada heels lovely?

Why don’t men get to wear such nice clothes?

And in what ways is making a beautiful painting different from making a beautiful shoe? A painting, or a novel, tends to be about the external world, or about the artist’s inner self, or about the interface between the two. And, at the metalevel, a painting or a book is also about its relation to the other works in the history of art/writing. But a shoe does all of these things as well.

Naturally I start groping for a science-fictional fashion angle. As the Sheck-man once said, “The SF writer is consumed by a rage to extrapolate.” The better I can understand fashion now, the better I can write about what they’ll be wearing in the year Y3K. I don’t think it’ll be collarless Star Trek uniforms!

And, yes, I know it’s futile, for me—a male mathematician in jeans and a Brooks Brothers shirt—to try to understand fashion. I’m like a dog standing with all four legs on the dining-table, gnawing on the Thanksgiving turkey.

“Woof!”

In the evening I noticed a roving troop of Chinese-Italian hawkers selling up-to-the-nanosecond toys in that cool old galleria off the cathedral square. This one woman had radio controlled robot cars that do flips and were covered with flashing lights. She explained the robot to me in Italian, which I don’t know. A cyberpunk moment. And then one of her cohorts held a ball of flashing lights up to my face and Bela’s newly conscious blogware entered my soul.

I was fascinated by these particular hawkers, they were always lined up in that huge, Art Nouveau galleria. I think that, coming from California, I’m interested when I see Asians. Faces from home. Like my students. I’d end up staying in Milano for almost a week, often alone, and some days these cyberpunk Sino-Italian gadget-hawkers might be the only people I talked to, other than waiters. I kept going back to look at them and their toys again and again.

My attitude towards them reminded me of this story by Flannery O’Connor where a guy comes up to New York City from Mississippi. He’s staying with his modern daughter, and he notices a black guy in the apartment building, and he’s eager to talk to the black guy, expecting it’ll be a touch of home. A person he can relate to, not like all those rushing-around pushy city folks. To get in good with the black guy, the old man calls him “Preacher,” which always used to go over well in Mississippi. That doesn’t work, but the old guy keeps it up, trying different approaches, and after awhile the black guy gets so outraged at the old man’s familiarities that he kills him.

My translator Daniele Brolli would later claim that no Chinese person in Italy ever dies, they just sneak in a new one to use the freed-up identity slot. He said that the cute hawkers I saw selling toy robots in the galleria were slaves of the Chinese mafia, indentured servants. He didn’t seem to like them.

November 20, 2004. My Panel on Digital Eternity.

So I did my panel on “Digital Eternity,” with Arianna Dagnino—what’s the word—proctoring, emceeing, chairing, intervening. There were two others on the panel besides Arianna and me. Carlo Galimberti and Francesco Lentini. The format was that we repeatedly took turns talking for three or four minutes.

Carlo Galimberti talked about treating mental disorders by putting people into virtual realities. And Lentini was an intense programmer who’s created a virtual girl called Eloisa. She has some rudimentary AI, and she has an on-screen mesh face that moves when she talks. He’d brought along an hour-long PowerPoint presentation that he kept wanting to shoehorn into our panel. He also had a video of a nude virtual woman—this was supposed to be Eloisa. He was eager to show the video to us, never having been able to air it on the web before. Desperate much?

Hardly anyone showed up for the panel, like maybe thirty people. There were problems in getting the simultaneous-translation headsets to work, so we fell back on the old expedient where I’d say something and then a woman would translate it into Italian. And then the woman went away, and there were headsets, but most people didn’t wear them. I didn’t have a sense that anyone in the audience was understanding anything I said. And nobody showed up with a book of mine for me to sign.

In other words, it was one of those gigs where I’m, like, “What the fuck am I doing here?” Oh well. I’m getting a break from writing, I’m meeting a few people, and I’m having a free week in Italy.

Unfortunately, Galimberti presents me with a copy of his hardback book that I’m expected to carry around for the rest of the day—and then all the way back to California. It’s not even a book that he wrote; it’s an anthology that he edited.

The organizers can’t or won’t get me a taxi after the panel, so I take the tram back into town and look for a restaurant. I’m very tired and hungry, and I’m carrying Galimberti’s increasingly heavy book of academic essays written in academic sociology jargon. I worry that if I throw it away, Carlo will somehow find out, like maybe a local will carry it back to him. He’s a nice guy—and I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. But finally I get so exhausted that I wedge his book behind a big metal electrical switch-box on the street.

November 22, 2004. My Translator. Sights.

I spent a day with my translator, Daniele Brolli, who came over from Bologna. I’d met him before, when I spoke in Torino in 2002.

He’s translated about six of my novels, including the Ware series. He also writes the stories for Mickey Mouse (Topolino) comics, writes SF and horror novels, and does journalism. Touching and mild-mannered. Full of opinions. A good guy. He’s still single at forty, although with a girlfriend. He’s from Rimini like Fellini, who made a movie called I Vitelloni, about young men who didn’t want to grow up.

Brolli said a funny thing when I remarked that when I cross the street against the light, the Italian drivers speed up and try to run me down.

“They want to make a point.”

He initially agreed with my theory a zucca is a yam. But later he emailed me that, no, zucca means pumpkin, which makes more sense. Nothing like having a translator.

Most of the museums and sights I tried to see in Milano were closed or inaccessible for one reason or another. Wrong day, or being renovated, or overbooked, or being moved to a new site. I couldn’t see opera at La Scala, I didn’t manage to see any Futurist paintings, nor could I view Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

One interesting spot that I did happen upon was the Brera Palace, a big stone building right there on a city street. It’s an art school downstairs and a museum upstairs. It was great seeing all those art students. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing like the warm sound of human voices bouncing off that lovely, worn stone.

The art in the Brera was the usual endless diarrhea of religious paintings. Who cares? Bruegel cured me of feeling like I have to give a fuck about this crap. But there was one picture in the gallery upstairs at the Brera Palace that got to me. Sordello e Cunizza, painted in 1850. It was like a fantasy-book cover, this Renaissance-type guy kneeling in front of a woman, his face buried in her belly. The genuine sorrow of his pose was ripely romantic, and something about the raw emotion made me feel sympathy for the artist himself, a guy called Federico Faruffini. I was thinking that’s an image of the artist himself in the painting, depressed, desperate, on his knees.

“Oh, Cunizza, I love you so.”

I went to a library/museum where some of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts live—it’s called the Ambrosiana. There’s one amazing hall that’s all marble and tile, with a marble balustrade and a mosaic on the curved staircase wall. The tile patterns on the floor of the hall are like the tesseract figure that’s often drawn to represent a hypercube. I could see lots and lots of cubes in this pattern, and they kept popping one way and then the other way, as in the famed Necker Cube illusion. I was fully buggin’. I love my trips to Italy.

Name of an Italian lingerie store: “Intimissimi.”

November 23, 2004. Arianna’s House in Milano.

On my last day, I went down to the countryside south of Milano to visit Arianna and Stefano Dagnino. They live next to a rice farm, with rice silos.

Arianna had been reading my ongoing blog so when I inevitably mentioned risotto, she interrupted. “Yes, you had risotto di zucca,” she said with a laugh. I had the feeling she was eager for me to blog my visit to her house. Like—the documentary crew has arrived!

The Dagninos’ youngest child Morgana was at home with them. I had fun playing with little Morgana. I love children. Their son Leonardo was at school. When Arianna was pregnant with Leonardo, a friend of hers who works at the Ambrosiana archive let Arianna touch a da Vinci manuscript for good luck.

Arianna and Stefano gave me a nice lunch, pesto. Arianna wasn’t sure if, being American, I’d ever heard of it. The dish originated in Arianna’s home town of Genoa. She told me that downtown Genoa has the largest historical district in Europe—because there never was enough money in the town for development to dig in.

Although I’m fiercely lonely on this trip—just like back in Brussels—when I’m together with people like Brolli or the Dagninos I’m instantly wondering if maybe it’s too much trouble to be socializing, and I begin craving a return to total isolation and autonomy. But it’s comforting to hear voices, satisfying to make new friends laugh, good for the heart to be pleasant, and interesting to hear what others say.

After lunch we were going for a walk, and the Dagninos bundled up little Morgana and set her in her stroller. I was sitting out on the patio with her, me in my overcoat, the two of us waiting for the Dagninos to finish getting ready. Morgana started crying for Arianna, but I begin to sing to her. I was sitting about ten feet away. She got very interested in the sound, and she calmed down. And I was beaming at her, feeling happy and serene, enjoying the sun, feeling all grandfatherly, sitting by the stroller in the sun. Being an Italian grandfather. Like I’m Marlon Brando in The Godfather, playing with the kid in the tomato garden. I wouldn’t mind watching over Morgana all day long.

After these few days of touring, my legs are about to fall off. Physically, I feel like I’ve been tied up in a burlap sack and kicked down a flight of stone stairs. I’m more decrepit than I used to be.

Back to Work

December 6, 2004. Revising the Lifebox Tome.

Back home, I worked a little on getting my novel Mathematicians In Love going. A nice change, getting back to fiction. But then I was running into plot problems so I switched to the Lifebox rewrites and corrections.

I’d asked for advice about the Lifebox draft from my friends John Walker and Scott Aaronson. By the end of fixing all the glitches they’d found, I was ready to choke the both of them, which shows what a bad, ungrateful person I am.

I made the mistake of emailing the two guys and telling them that I wanted to choke them. Walker’s used to me, and he understood. But I’m not sure about Scott, I haven’t heard back from him, I’d better send an apology.

I got a nice blurb from Wolfram for Lifebox! He really likes the book, which means a lot to me. He keeps saying it’s better than I or my publishers realize. Of course there’s an element of self-interest in his praise:

Rudy Rucker is an outstanding prophet of what will probably be the greatest intellectual revolution of our times. This book tells the ever-surprising story of his transformation as he discovers the wonders of the computational universe, and grapples with their implications for humanity’s oldest questions. For people who thrive on new ideas, this book will be a classic.

The other day I was watching a pretty girl in her twenties, standing in front of me at the counter of Andalé Taqueria. She laughs in response to something the cute man behind the counter says. But it’s not really a laugh—and this is the interesting part—it’s a gesture that stands for a laugh. She shows her teeth and makes a high wavering noise.

Sylvia and I were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to each other day before yesterday. She was curious about it and she’d dug it out. And there’s this great passage about the “third person” you sometimes see in your dreams. I’ve often had a dream like that—like I’m walking with Sylvia or with Greg Gibson, and there’s someone else whom I can’t quite see. It’s a common hallucination among polar explorers as well, and, according to his Waste Land footnotes, Eliot knew of this. I see some SF possibilities. Here’s the passage from the poem:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

December 13, 2004. Slow Time.

The other day, I was noticing how slowly time seems to go these days. I can view this as bad or good. In a bad way, I can look ahead at an afternoon or an evening and think, “I’ll never make it through this.” In a good way, I can think, “I’ve got all the time I need. I can relax.”

The other day, I had a feeling of being into an endlessly expandable kind of slow mental time. I have to fight my puritanical busy-ant fear of empty time. Slow, empty time is a good thing. After all, the faster your time goes, the sooner you die.

My neighbor Rita, who’s in her eighties, was bemoaning the speed of time the other day: “You say Christmas is in two weeks? I feel like last Christmas was just two weeks ago. I feel like I’m on a express train to the graveyard.”

When I do any kind of activity—reading, writing, or working on my blog—the time melts away. My self-reflective mind is turned off and the time goes fast. A hobby, like a job, is a “pastime.” TV is a pastime, too—but usually when I watch TV, I feel like I’m being robbed. I’d rather spend my evening staring at my shoe and wondering why the time goes slow.

I still remember how incredibly slow the time would pass when I’d be on a psychedelic trip in the old days. Not that I took very many trips, but I do have this memory of my one really big acid trip, way back in 1970—that day was like a year, or even ten years or a thousand. Maybe the trip never ended. Maybe this is still that same day.

My guess is that the speed at which I perceive time to be flowing relates to the rate at which I’m having thoughts. So if you’re tripping your balls off and having a billion thoughts per second, then, yeah, a second seems like a long time. And if you settle in on the zombified gerbil wheel of a TV program, with a fresh thought every five minutes or so, then yeah, the whole evening is gone in a flash.

Another factor in my experience of slow time these days is that I’m not talking to many people. Sometimes I’ll go a whole day without using my voice. Maybe conversation speeds up time by reducing how much I think. If I’m chatting with someone, it’s like I’m replaying little routines from my memory bank—rather than crafting fully new thoughts. In a way, I’m oblivious when I’m talking. So that speeds up the time.

“Are we there yet?”

January 2, 2005. Science Fiction Goofs.

I’ve been revising the Lifebox for about six weeks, and now I’m done, I think. So now I’m sitting around waiting until I feel like I’m ready to get back to the novel. In my copious free time I’ve been goofing on some new SF routines.

I’ve been thinking about the tidal wave that hit Indonesia and Sri Lanka. And how after the first wave the ocean drew way back, and people could see all these fish flopping around on the bottom. A few people made the classic mistake of walking out to collect the fish.

Imagine a science-fiction version. Due to some disruption, say a quantum supernova, reality is drawn away. Everything disappears in a certain zone, exposing the creepers and scuttlers that live “under” reality. Those flashes you see out of the corner of your eye, they’re real. And now they’re exposed, hanging there, flopping and twitching. They look like—cone shells! You step forward into the reality-drained zone, filling your collecting-bag with the specimens, but then—what’s that rumble?

So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can cellular automata get me high?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile cone shell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.

Now as it happens, these little guys are fierce carnivore predators, prowling around in search of small fish to harpoon. Yes, the cone shells have a “harpoon” that’s a tiny barb at the end of a tentacle, and the barb is laden with a venom called a conotoxin.

Today an article in the Washington Post reports that a new conotoxin-derived pain-killing drug named Prialt has been approved. Prialt is said to be a thousand times as strong as morphine. It’s so powerful that if it’s injected into your muscles or your blood stream, it stops your heart. The only way to take Prialt is to inject it into your spinal cord so that it goes straight to the brain. And, natch, a relatively common side-effect is hallucinations:

The world broke into cellular automata, at first in patches and then in chunks. A pair of gliders scuttled by, unwieldy as crabs on stilts. As I spoke, the sounds from my mouth became long strings of oscillators. And then a Zhabotinsky jellyfish engulfed me.

Sylvia and I were up in San Francisco, staying in North Beach at the edge of Chinatown. And I noticed a place called the Tang Fat Hotel next to the Mee Mee Bakery on Sutter Street near Vallejo Street. I’m visualizing my Mathematicians in Love characters lying low in the Tang Fat Hotel. On the run from the flying cone shell aliens. I wonder if I myself could actually check into the Tang Fat for a night, even though it’s for long-term occupancy.

“It’s okay,” I’ll tell them. “My fat is tangy.”

January 12, 2005. Georgia is Pregnant.

Sylvia and I just spent a week in Manhattan. We stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel once again. They’re on the point of renovating it, so this might be the last time we can afford to stay there. This time, we initially had an airshaft room, and when I complained, we got a suite facing the park on the eighth floor, for the same price, the best hotel room I’ve ever had in NYC. It was such a beautiful view, the platonic NYC, like a half-remembered 1940s children’s book, pigeons wheeling over the park, pink clouds in the rising sun.

It’s energizing to be in the city. One rainy day I hit Times Square for old times sake. No ghosts of Burroughs and Huncke, or even of Eddie and Rudy. Instead they have, excuse me, a Drug Enforcement Agency Museum? A Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant? A Toys R Us? Eeek!

There’s still some porno stores over on Eighth Avenue by the Port Authority Bus Station—all are seemingly run by lean Sri Lankans, who’ve replaced the bulbous, bearded, Ukrainian proprietors of yore.

One day Sylvia and I walked through Central Park with Courtney and Georgia. They took my picture sitting where my hero Martin Gardner had sat for the cover photo on his annotated edition of Alice in Wonderland, about fifty years ago. Incredible how your destinies overtake you.

We saw our old party friends Henry and Diana Vaughan from Lynchburg. They were in town buying clothes for their boutique. They seemed feckless and youthful, even now—drinking and smoking pot while showing us pictures of their grandchildren. I miss having them around.

The big news is that Georgia’s three months pregnant. Her stomach bulges out a bit. In a way it’s a counterbalance for Sylvia losing her father. Old trees falling down, new ones coming up.

Georgia’s still working ten hours a day at her graphic design biz, and she says she won’t be able to afford to take more than a month off when the baby’s born. We had a nice evening at their house. Her husband Courtney brought out four of the large-format art photos he’s been taking, and they were good. He was friendly to us, and he’s loving towards Georgia. The two of them are happy in their tidy married nest.

They were playing Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, a record that Sylvia and I listened to when Georgia herself was a newborn. Sitting there with the music, it seemed as if everything will be all right. Why do I worry so much about my kids? Life goes on, the years flow by, I can’t control everything, I can’t lead other people’s lives. Our baby girl is pregnant and it’s wonderful.

On the literary front, I saw my editors David Hartwell and John Oakes. Also my former fiction agent Susan Protter—who knows, I may yet go back to her. We’re kind of circling around each other. It’s not like I have another agent in mind—all Brockman wanted to handle was the Lifebox, and in the end, he didn’t score jack in terms of results.

Dave and John both said they’d be interested in Mathematicians in Love, which is good. What’s bad is that they’re both pretty tight-fisted. Dave happily told me a couple of stories about books on which he was “the underbidder.”

I got John Oakes to agree to let my daughter Isabel redraw my pictures for The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, which is great. And she’ll get paid.

Dave Hartwell has gotten me a gig to give the keynote talk at this big fantasy conference in Florida in the spring. ICFA, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

Someone on the organizing committee objected, “We can’t invite Rucker, he’s a difficult drunk.”

Dave told him, “Not any more.”

I said to Dave, “I wonder if my drinking years had a bad effect on my career.”

Dave replied, “I don’t think so. Even now, I still talk to people who are very disappointed when they see you at a con and you aren’t swinging from the chandeliers.”

Aside from all that, I had a peculiar moment in Dave’s office when I felt like I was being shunted from a winner-world to a loser-world. We were talking about Frek and the Elixir, and Dave was all enthused, beaming at me, saying that Frek had just about sold out its hardcover first printing, had sold over four thousand copies, and that was really amazingly good. And then there was this—*pop* in the continuity, like a scratch on a record—and Dave looks confusedly at the piece of paper he’s holding and he’s, like, “Oh…wait. It says you’ve only sold two thousand. That’s, um, not bad. But how could I have misread the figures?”

And right there, I would submit, is when the great author, a.k.a. god, reached in and said, “Let’s have Rucker struggle a bit harder. I like it better that way.” Like in the Book of Job.

I noticed the taxis a lot this time. It’s like when you’re snorkeling or scuba diving and you see schools of one kind of fish. Or, for that matter, like seeing flocks of seagulls or of pigeons. Or herds of cows. Taxis are a particular kind of artificial-life form that’s found in Manhattan.

Looking down from the hotel windows I see the taxis swarming like paramecia. They’re distressed about a spot where a lane is closed. Nudging, nuzzling, honking.

The taxis’ horns can be heard at any hour of the day or night. From the moment I exit the airport until the moment I leave, the world is studded with the honks, near and far, like hanging Christmas balls, like stars, like raisins in dough. The taxis egg each other on like barking dogs.

Sign in Times Square: DON’T HONK. FINE $350. The unequivocal directness of the admonition strikes me as funny. DON’T HONK!

One day it was raining and a slight man in front of us on the sidewalk began dancing a soft shoe and singing in a light, fine tenor. Yes, it’s “Singin’ In The Rain.” Like he’s channeling Fred Astaire or the Bingle.

This guy is, however, not all there. When a taxi pushes its snout through a light and comes to rest blocking our cross-walk, our para-Astaire yells, “You’re supposed to stop at the light.” His seeming good humor has melted away.

In the street he stops to glare into the taxi, and perhaps the driver makes some gesture of defiance.

“You better not get outta there!” screams our entertainer. “I’ll break your head!”

Like a farmer scolding a wayward hog. Doing his civic duty to keep the taxis in line.

I saw a nice show of Isaac Newton’s books at the New York Public Library, including a letter that he wrote Leibniz in 1677 about the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (i.e., that the antiderivative is the integral.) Newton wanted credit for the theorem, but he couldn’t stand to actually tell it to Leibniz, so he wrote it out in code as a bunch of letters and numbers:

6accdae13eff7i3l9n4o4qrr4s8t12ux

The idea is that the string means six letter a’s, two letter c’s, one ‘ae’ dipthong, thirteen e’s, and so on. And these letters form an anagram, that is, they can be rearranged to spell a description of the fundamental theorem of the calculus in Latin: Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitates involvente, fluxiones invenire; et vice versa. This means, “Given an equation involving any number of fluent quantities to find the fluxions, and vice versa.”

Crazy mathematicians.

Dali’s drooping watches in The Persistence of Memory at the Museum of Modern Art. An old-school analog of my soft moldie robots.

January 26, 2005. Girl Watching.

I’m sitting in the Great Bear Coffee shop on Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos right now, writing a freakout scene in Chapter Two of Mathematicians In Love. And right outside the window I see my character Alma!

Wavy brown hair, a little shorter than shoulder length. Pleased expression. Soft white skin, rounded cheeks. Wearing a blouse that’s a cascade of pale yellow organdy ruffles, sticking out from under her short black leather coat. Jeans of course. She gets into a beat old big white car with a cute boy her age at the wheel. Twenty-year-olds. They’re eager and pleasant. She’s huggable. They’re talking. The car drives off. It’s a Mercedes. I’d been expecting a Dodge.

Four lovely teenage girls at the table next to me, on their way home from school. Laughing with each other over an instant message that one of them is seeing on her cell phone. Two more girls at the table next to them, two more at the table beyond that. I’m so invisible to them, such a humble old yearner. I keep switching between my near-vision computer glasses and my checking-out-the-room regular glasses. Is that too obvious? Better stick with the regular glasses. I can, after all, see my laptop screen well enough.

On my right is a guy nearly my age, gap-toothed, grinning, taking in the pulchritude as well, our eyes meet, mutual understanding. Now the four teenage girls see something outside—their ride? Off they swirl, this little flock.

An older girl walks in and smiles nicely at me. I’m a tidy old man, after all, and evidently a writer, with my manuscript on the table beside my laptop. Yogically sitting cross-legged on my chair, as I to do for the sake of my eternally sore lower back. A sage-looking pose. And I’m, oh yes, writing right now.

On with the computer glasses.

January 30, 2005. Equivalents.

I went for a walk in the Almaden Quicksilver Park today. I always have this sense of giving myself a special treat when I come to this particular park, which is only a twenty minute drive from my house. I’m getting away from the friggin’ computer and touching Gaia.

“Like it’s supposed to be,” I often say to myself when looking at a natural landscape.

It’s great how Nature keeps on doing her thing unaided. Sky and mountains, hills and fields, rocks and trees, branches and pebbles, bark and ants, microscopic critters.

I took some pictures of the sky. I love pictures of the sky. Around 1930, Alfred Stieglitz took a lot of pictures of the sky and gave them all the title “Equivalent,” which, he said, meant that each of the sky images captured a pattern that was equivalent to some specific mental or emotional state. A good move on his part.

If it’s just a picture of a cloud, people are like, so what, but if you tell them that it’s really a picture of your inner turmoil or of your momentary serenity, then it seems more interesting. Gossipy monkeys that we are.

I got off the trail and walked through the woods, generally knowing which way I was going. My hip aches. Arthritis. Good that I can still scramble around.

Being retired is starting to feel natural. It’s important to remember to keep getting out and doing fun things. Lately I’ve been working a little too hard, pushing on Mathematicians In Love.

Diving Micronesia

February 9, 2005. To Yap.

I’m about to leave on a three-week trip with my brother Embry. I’m flying from San Jose to Los Angeles, then Honolulu, then Guam, then Yap. I’ll connect with Embry in Honolulu. We’ll stay in Yap for about a week, fly to Palau for a week, fly to the Micronesian island of Pohnpei for a week, and then travel home via connections so fucked-up that they’ll take two or three days.

The idea is that we’ll do a lot of snorkeling and scuba diving together. Palau and the Micronesian islands are primo spots for this.

Embry’s five years older than me, and we haven’t spent all that much time together over the years. We weren’t very close growing up. And as adults we’ve lived far apart. But he’s my flesh, my brother. We have the same genes, and he’s the only other person who remembers where all the furniture was in our childhood home on 620 Rudy Lane, Louisville, Kentucky. He might also be the only other person who remembers my parents when they were young. A fellow veteran of the Wonder Years.

We two have been talking about this trip for months. It’s a retirement present to myself. A once-in-a-lifetime treat.

I was considering leaving my laptop at home, but I brought it after all. Slight fear of it getting stolen or somehow getting wet—one imagines the Pacific islands as dripping in moisture. But the laptop’s five years old, so if I lose it, it’s not the end of the world. For sure I’m not gonna blog during this trip. It wouldn’t be practical with, like tin-can-and-coconut-shell modems. But writing is my favorite thing to do. If I enjoy it so much, why quash it?

Embry and I will be sharing rooms, but I don’t imagine we’ll talk all that much. We weren’t big talkers in the old nuclear Rucker family of Mom, Pop, me and Embry. We’d all sit around reading magazines. Like strangers in a waiting-room.

A big trip like this, so far around the cheek of the globe, I always wonder if I’ll make it back. What if I just stayed in the South Pacific for good? Hard to visualize me doing that. But what about plane crash, drowning, shark-bite, or cone-shell envenomation? Oh hell, if I died in Micronesia it would be okay…who gives a fuck.

I’m a little fed-up with life as usual. God willing, I’ll return invigorated. Eadem mutata resurgo, as Professor Bumby says in Frek and the Elixir. One of my favorite slogans. “The same, yet changed, I return.”

I wonder if they do have cone shells in Micronesia. As I’ve mentioned before, cone shells are decorated with patterns resembling the spacetime trails of gnarly one-dimensional cellular automata. We’re putting a cone shell picture on the cover of my Lifebox tome. And I have some alien cone shells as characters in Mathematicians in Love.

Now I’m on the plane from Honolulu to Guam, a seven hour flight. I’m sitting next to a Yapese man from Guam, an unusual-looking fellow, a cross between Polynesian and Asian. He tells me that parrot fish are very good to eat.

The Honolulu airport was open to the outside air, with breezeways looking out onto the airfields and the airport gardens. I had a long wait there. I sat on a bench, looking at the startlingly blue sky and its whipped-cream clouds, smelling the jungly vegetation scent coming up from a sunken garden, enjoying the humid, caressing tropical breeze. Relaxing, I remembered something I’d just read in a travel guide to Micronesia: yes, there will be delays in your travel—but why not enjoy them?

We’re over the empty Pacific now. Lots of little clouds down there, like a field of cabbages, or like cotton bolls. I remember those expanses of clouds from my trip to Tonga and Fiji with Sylvia. It’s so great that I get to be here again.

February 11, 2005. First Day in Yap.

I walked into the jungle on an ancient raised pathway with stones set along the middle. Palm trees were all around, hibiscus, vines, banana leaves, dragonflies. Little huts with Yapese sitting in them. A fat brown man, nearly naked. I wave, he waves back.

A sudden squall of rain. I huddle against the trunk of a tree to stay dry. Nothing but green plants visible in every direction, the branches lashing furiously in the sudden wind, the rain coming in a torrent, its noise filling the air.

The air is so warm that it doesn’t much matter if I get wet. But I like being sheltered by the tree, its multiple trunks covered with woody vines. Up against the clouds a pair of slender-winged sea-birds continue circling despite the rain. Red and yellow flowers amid the waving greenery.

I’m having an adventure.

February 12, 2005. Betel Nut and Stone Money.

The first thing I noticed on landing in Yap was that all the guys picking up guests had big wads of stuff in their mouths. And their spit was bright red, redder than blood even. Vermillion. The red spit spilled out from their mouths onto their lips. It’s from betel nuts.

Betel nuts grow all over Yap on trees resembling coconut trees, but with bunches of acorn-sized nuts. People chew the nuts when they’re green. If the nuts are allowed to ripen and get orange they’re too hard.

Embry and I had reserved a cabin at a decaying, quaint-looking wood-and-bamboo compound of seven huts called Pathways, but they’d lost our reservation. The one hut they offered us had half of its thatched roof missing. So we’re staying in a stubby, utilitarian, two-story hotel called ESA. The ESA was so cheap that we could afford to get two separate rooms. A big plus when you have jet lag and are waking up at odd times. Eventually I learned that the ESA hotel is Palauan-owned and Yapese-run, and that ESA stands for the initials of somebody’s name.

We walked a half-mile from the ESA to Colonia, the capital of Yap. Colonia has a about twenty tiny stores, also a few shipping buildings. And the all-important Yap Fresh Tuna Company. Catching tuna is the biggest business here. The map of Colonia is simple: two streets crossing each other.

The sidewalk is tinted red so as not to show the betel nut spit, which makes a permanent stain that looks as if someone had been stabbed. There’s also spittoons in the form of red-painted wood stands with plastic sacks in them.

There’s a betel nut stand in town. This is where you see the most people gathered, although you also see bags of betel nuts in the three markets, and in some of the other stores as well. It costs one or two dollars for a bag of fifty or a hundred betel nuts. The nuts look more or less like large green acorns.

I asked a guy running a native crafts gallery about betel nuts, and he offered me one and showed me how to use it. You bite it with your back teeth to crack it in half. Then you sprinkle it with some white powder that they call lime—maybe it’s ground-up shells or maybe it’s the ground limestone that people sometimes use for fertilizer or for athletic field markings. I think the lime potentiates the drug as well as mitigating the bitterness. And then you wrap a piece from a big pepper-plant leaf around the nut and put the whole quid in your mouth.

Being in recovery, I wasn’t quite sure if I should try a betel nut. But curiosity got the better of me. So I accepted the nice fresh betel nut, and bit it open with my back teeth. A lot of bitter clear juice popped out. I spit out the nut and sprinkled that white lime powder onto its open halves. Then I wrapped it in pepper leaf, and put it back in my mouth. The guy who gave it to me advised me that beginners don’t swallow the juice, although experienced users do, so as to “get more kick out of it.”

Quickly the side of my mouth with the nut grew numb. Shortly after that, I began feeling euphoric and relaxed. As if some invisible missing piece of my personality puzzle had just been snapped in. The betel nut juice seemed to fill a hole in me. I felt—as any druggie would put it—like I’m supposed to feel. In other words, I was high.

Embry declined trying a nut, preferring to observe its effects upon his younger brother—’twas ever thus. While I was still enjoying my betel, we two walked around the tiny town. Just for the hell of it, we wandered into the office of the Yap legislature. The receptionist was a handsome, dignified older woman with her teeth bright red from betel nut spit. We chatted for awhile about the building. Our conversation was slow and relaxed. She and I were on the same wavelength.

In Yap there seems to be absolutely no social opprobrium on betel nut chewing. Hard for me to grasp, coming as I do from puritan America. I kept thinking there’d be some occupations where you’d be discouraged from chewing, but all the people I encountered were chewing: dive masters, hotel and restaurant people, villagers, secretaries, school teachers—and even the white locals here chew. One white man told me that betel kept him from going crazy over the leisurely Yapese pace, like it was tuning him into their vibe. A local guy told me that he chews betel “just so something is moving”—meaning I’m not quite sure what.

One afternoon we went into a local arts and crafts store where I bought a hand-woven cloth for Sylvia. The shopkeeper already had a large betel nut in her mouth, but while she was typing up my invoice, she picked up a second betel nut—this one the size of a small egg—and crammed it into her mouth with the first nut, not even bothering to add the lime powder and the pepper leaf. She looked so wild and greedy that I had to laugh. Like a kid eating Halloween candy.

I’d guess that chewing a lot of them in succession would give you a cumulative, growing buzz. Certainly some of the Yapese seemed fairly zonked, although that could also be the tropical languor and the low-stress lifestyle. I didn’t see anyone acting wildly out-of-it. Although, yes, they were indeed forgetful.

The Yapese said it’s almost impossible to quit betel, and that they’d started when young, and that they know betel is bad for them. They chew up to a hundred nuts a day. Those bulging bags of betel nuts on sale in the market aren’t family party-paks, dude. Those are one person’s daily supply. I didn’t see the white lime powder for sale. That seems to me more in the way of a personal supply, and everyone has their own hand-made lime-shaker. Some people use old Tabasco bottles to hold their lime, Tabasco being a favorite spice here.

The effects of the betel and lime on people’s teeth is devastating. A betel-nut- chewer’s teeth become black and are slowly eaten down to stubs. Doing a little research, I learn that betel has spread across Southeast Asia. To remind users of the Pacific Island origins of betel, in places like Malaysia, packs of prepared betel quids are sold by “betel girls” wearing bikinis. The betel girls work the traffic jams of cities such as Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.

Maybe I should try another betel nut tomorrow. Just one. Or no, maybe I should get a bag of them. Just one bag. Better to get the bag here in Yap, where the stuff is nice and fresh. Naaah, don’t start up with a new drug, Rudy.

Well—actually, the next day Embry and I each accepted a betel nut from the perpetually betel-stoned Madeline. She was really hitting the betel nut all the time, with huge bulging mouthfuls of red spit. She runs the ramshackle Pathways hotel. We’ve been going there for some of our meals—even though the grounds are infested with virulent, invisibly tiny mosquitoes that the natives call “ligeli.”

This time the nuts tasted so strong that Embry and I spat them out after a minute, although both of us felt quite zonked for half an hour. Not really all that pleasant. Not wanting to lose my hard-won sobriety, I didn’t push my personal experimentation with betel any further.

You see pieces of Yap’s famous stone money lying around all over the place. These are large disks of stone, as big as wagon wheels, usually with a square or round hole in the middle, and often with some symbols carved onto the wheel.

The story on Yap’s famous stone money is that about five hundred years ago, some Yapese canoes reached the rock islands of Palau—quite some distance away. The Yapese adventurers were impressed by the crystalline rock of the Palau archipelago and they carved out a disk of stone to take home. In order to carry the disk, they put a hole in the middle so that a group of men could bear the disk threaded onto a log. And to get the heavy stone home, they made a little bamboo raft to float it on.

Back in Yap, the money served as a trophy of the men’s adventure. The harder your trip was—storms, sinkings, drownings, attacks by Palau warriors—the more that given piece of stone money was worth. A more valuable piece of stone money had more of a story associated with it.

What could you buy with stone money? Not goods or a house—for those you needed a different kind of money, shell money, which was the real money used for day to day kinds of things.

But you could give a disk of stone money to a family as the bride-price for taking a daughter as your wife. Or, as one of our dive guides would later explain to me, “If your brother Embry got drunk and made a lot of noise in the village and some family was mad at him, you could give them a piece of stone money to make it all right.”

The interesting thing is that, when you pay someone with stone money, you don’t necessarily have to move the stone money anyplace different. It lies in the same place on the ground, but you reassign ownership. Often a village’s stone money would be lined up near the central dancing area to make what they called a stone money bank.

As I say, the stone money is scattered all over Yap. You see it in every village, and pieces of it are near most public places as well.

Later when we were on a dive boat in Palau, passing through the rock islands, I was talking with our Palauan boat pilot and I said something like, “The Yapese used to come here and tear off a piece from these islands.”

The pilot, high on betel-nut, laughed wildly at the folly of those rustic Yapese. And the next day he returned to the topic, pointing out a natural bridge worn into the rock islands, and joking, “That’s where they took away the stone money.”

February 13, 2005. Scary Dive in Yap. Pet Bat.

Lots of little yellow mongrel dogs in Yap, but they don’t yap all that much. They look intelligent. Yesterday, walking near sunset along the ocean to a village called Badelbob, Embry and I passed a trio of the dogs, all of them exquisitely sensitive to the motions of our feet and our eyes.

This street that we were walking on has a lot of stone money resting next to it. The street passes through the district of the “out islanders.” Strictly speaking, the state of Yap is a little archipelago of islands rather than just the one main island. The out islanders are the Yapese who aren’t from the closely bunched five central islands. The out islanders have low status, like rubes in a big city.

Our dive guide Kintu is an out islander. He took Embry and I down to a depth of eighty feet and lay on the bottom, hoping for some twenty-foot-wide manta rays to show up. The mantas were said to have a “cleaning station” here, a spot where wrasses swim into their gills and eat the parasites.

I saw one manta, far away, swimming, its cape-like body rippling. Getting on with our dive, we worked our way along a lovely wall that was like a china-shop—pale pink and green plates of coral with Zhabotinsky scrolled edges. A school of gray fish the size of pizza pans, clouds of brightly-colored little fish, all patterned in stripes and dots. Hummocks of brain coral with its convolutions coiled in stripes.

The current got more intense as we rose—it was like a gale-force wind in a mountain pass. Our guide Kintu had us stop and hang onto rocks. The current was ever stronger, like a liquid hurricane. Kintu gave me a “reef hook,” a little S of metal attached to a cord. I hooked the S under a rock and I held the cord. We were only about ten feet deep at this point.

Kintu made a gesture which I took to mean that I should surface. Later I found out that he’d meant that he would surface and signal the boat, and that the rest of us should wait beneath the surface dangling from our reef hooks. But I mistakenly surfaced with Kintu, and the current really took hold.

Kintu grabbed my hand as the current swept us away, out towards the open sea. We were moving very fast, faster than a man can run, maybe even as fast as a car. The dive boat was suddenly very distant. And the dive boat’s pilot, stoned on betel nut, didn’t immediately notice us. It occurred to me that if Kintu and I were washed all the way out to sea we might die. Indeed, if I’d been alone, it could have been curtains. But Kintu hung onto me, and waved his free arm, and eventually the dive boat picked us up.

Later I saw Kintu in the supermarket buying beer. He was carrying a little rectangular woven purse, kind of like an Easter basket, just big enough to hold his cigarettes and his bag of betel nuts.

Embry and I went back to the rickety Pathways compound for a nice dinner, which included grilled parrot fish—lots of firm meat on those colorful reef nibblers.

A sweet young woman wearing a grass skirt and a floral lei came into the outdoor dining area, which was an open patio of plastic furniture. Her breasts were bare. There was no embarrassment or self-consciousness over the breasts.

The girl was the daughter of Madeline, that Pathways manager who I mentioned before—a thirty-one year old woman whose teeth have been dissolved down to tiny black stubs from her constant chewing of betel nut. The daughter had just been to an ethnic dance for tourists, held in their home village twice a week.

After dinner we saw the daughter once more, now dressed in jeans and T-shirt, playing with her pet fruit bat. Her grandfather had shot this little bat’s mother—to cook the mother for a meal. He’d found the baby under one wing, and the girl had raised it. She let me play with the bat—it nipped each of my fingers.

The girl had a wad of betel nut in her cheek now too.

They do things different on Yap!

February 14, 2005. In a Gaugin Painting.

Scuba diving is in some ways a continuation of air travel—there’s a lot of waiting around, a lot of worrying about numbers, and you’re in a crowd. I always worry about using up my air before the others, and I have trouble not swimming ahead of the others. I tend to feel out of step. I love seeing the cool stuff, but I don’t want to scuba dive every day by any means. Often I’m just as happy with snorkeling. When I’m snorkeling alone, I enjoy the coral more. I can relax and not have the rest of the party being ahead of me or behind me. And I’m not worrying about my air.

Embry is a little more gung-ho about scuba than I am, and he’s determined to see the manta rays of Yap, which means going back to that same murky 80-foot-deep spot where we went the other day.

So today we split up and I got the congenial staff of the Pathways Hotel to drive me up to a beach by the village of Wanyan. Yap seems only to have two beaches. They’re not what you’d think of as commercial beaches. Just spots where there’s sand. It’s a little hard to express just how truly unlike the U.S. it is here.

Since all property in Yap is privately owned, I had to pay someone for permission to sit on this particular beach. But who? There’s absolutely no signage in Yap.

I was in the Pathways van with a beautiful woman and a twelve-year-old boy, both Yapese. The little boy was the brother of the girl with the bat. He and the woman driving had lovely, rounded features.

Nearing the beach, we pulled into a driveway. The woman and I get out and she talks in Yapese to a man for a several minutes about my beach fee, and the upshot is that we drive somewhere else in this little village to discuss the deal with a different guy.

This guy comes out of his dilapidated house—made of driftwood and corrugated sheet metal—and he has an even longer discussion with my Pathways guide. His mouth is red and bulging with betel nut. I get out of the van, ready to pay, but then we get back into the van.

“How much does he want?” I ask.

“Two dollars.”

“Should I pay him?”

“No, we’ll do it through the hotel with paperwork.”

Ah, humanity, and our love of complicating things. These villagers didn’t have much action going on—I’m almost the only person I see coming to their beach this morning—so they enjoyed making the most of the deal.

On the beach I find only one other group, a Filipino family. A man, his wife, his wife’s mother, and two daughters, one with Down’s syndrome—she runs around with her tongue hanging out.

The beach is littered with ocean debris, and dotted with coconut palms whose trunks are very wide at the bottom. I think of women’s hips, or of bell-bottoms. The coconut palms slant every which way, making a frieze within which the Filipino family and I move.

The ocean is shallow for about a hundred yards, and then there’s some dark blue deep water, and after that some turquoise shallow water. And you can see breakers maybe a mile out, where the open sea crashes into the reef that rings the island. The sky is changing every minute. Fluffy white puffs alternate with gray rain clouds. It’ll shower for a few minutes, and then it’s back to blue sky and wafting breezes.

The Filipino man, Julio, comes over and invites me to eat. I join him and his family, they’ve laid banana leaves on a low table, and he’s grilled some fish: tilapia and parrot fish. Also there’s rice and a bunch of quartered roasted sweet potatoes, which were just harvested by the mother-in-law from her garden. They talk about their worries about their afflicted daughter, and I sympathize.

After lunch, I put on my shortie wet suit, my fins, and my mask. I snorkel my way a hundred yards out to the deep blue water. I see lots of three-dimensional Zhabotinsky-scroll coral. And staghorn coral heads with gemlike blue and aqua fish hovering among the prongs.

Later I take a walk along the beach and find four majorly collectible seashells, the kinds of shells I’d normally buy in stores. Meanwhile the beach is filling up with Yapese teenagers, boys and girls, playing volleyball, picnicking, playing guitars and, yes, ukuleles. I relax, leaning against a fat coconut palm, admiring the handsome brown people moving through the frieze of trees.

Noa noa, dude. I’m in a Gaugin picture.

For once in my life I’m utterly content and happy.

“Sir?” A Yapese man walks over. “You like some banana?”

He gives me a little bunch of three stubby bananas, sweet, firm, thin-skinned, delicious. He wants nothing in return.

I snorkel some more, and later on the Pathways van picks me up. It’s a new posse of locals inside—two women and a two-year-old, also a big guy who carried our bags at the airport. All of them but the two-year-old are chewing betel nut. Calm and friendly, enjoying the ride. On our way out through the Wanyan village, an old guy with a mouth full of betel stops us, and he has a long conversation with the big guy who’s next to me in the van. I think they’re discussing the ramifications of my two-dollar beach fee.

Now, the Pathways people had said they were going to charge me twenty dollars for the drive, but when we get back to their hotel, nobody asked me for money. For the moment, we’d all forgotten about it—them because they’re Yapese betel-chewers, me because I’m old. But I did remember to give a couple of dollars to the driver and to the big guy who’d been sitting next to me.

The next day I stopped by Pathways and tried to give the agreed-upon twenty dollars to Madeline the manager, but she said she didn’t have her wallet, and that I should give her that money some other time.

Not like the U.S. at all.

February 15, 2004. Nudibranch Alien.

Embry went back for a third try at seeing the manta rays today, but I was more interested in finding a different area in Yap to dive. So we split up and I went to dive Yap Caverns at the southernmost tip of Yap, just me, my dive guide Kintu, and a guy called Gordon to drive our little boat.

The caverns were good, with rifts and boulders and huge bumphead parrot fish. I was looking up through the rocks at cathedral shafts of light, with schools of big fish silhouettes above me.

Kintu showed me a memorable nudibranch, a flat sea slug the length of my thumb, iridescent creamy white, with an orange band around his undulating edge. Instead of eyes, he has two white antenna in front, and a bizarre mini-grove of tree-branched extra antennae in back.

The nudibranch would be a good model for a fictional alien, as I explained to the guffawing Gordon and Kintu after my first dive, having told them that I’m a science fiction writer. Kintu was sweet, a bit shy. As I mentioned before, he’s from an out island called Satawal, at the far east end of the Yapese archipelago, an island with a population of five hundred, with no airstrip—and it takes three days to a week to get there by ship from Yap, depending on how many stops the ship makes. I’d kind of like to go there.

Gordon the boat pilot was fat and talkative. He wanted to know if UFOs were real or not. He’d seen a couple of episodes of X Files. We agreed that, in any case, diving is as alien and spacy an experience as one could ask for.

On my second dive, I saw a school of jack mackerel, each of them the size of my arm, plus a shark the size of my daughter, a giant turtle, and a spreading carpet of sea anemone, with a father clown fish amid the anemone’s stalks, guarding his baby clown fish, little guys like darting specks.

Later when I met with Embry he was feeling happy, as he’d finally seen a manta, very close up. I was sorry to have missed it, but I’d had a great day. And maybe I’d see a manta on another island.

February 16, 2004. Yap Village. Fallen Soldier.

The last day of our stay on Yap, Embry and I rented a car and drove around the island. Everything was a little blown-out. Yap was hit by a hurricane this year.

We went first to the village of Kaday, which was hard to find. There really aren’t any road markings, the guide book’s directions seemed out of date, and only the vaguest of paper maps are available in Yap. But eventually we found Kaday, and we walked into the village along an ancient Yapese raised-stone path, wending among patches of taro, palm trees, cassava, bananas, creeks and ponds. The food crops weren’t in tidy rows or anything, just patches of them mixed in with the jungle plants.

We saw lizards, frogs, land crabs, a bird with a red back, butterflies, a yellow-and-green grasshopper the size of my middle finger, and a black/white/black striped boar with tusks and a long, long snout, tied up by a rag knotted around one foot, poor thing, fated to be slaughtered. He looked so intelligent and so doomed.

I thought of the phrase: “The taste of wub.” This comes from Phil Dick’s story about a telepathic, pig-like alien “wub” who transfers his mind into the body of man who’s eating a steak of the wub’s flesh. “The taste of wub,” muses the man after the alien’s mind takes over his body. “Very fine.”

The Kaday dwellings were shacks of corrugated iron, many of them open on two or three or four sides, like pavilions, primarily for keeping off the rain. The temperature is always eighty degrees. In these villages the dwellings seem just on the point of deliquescing back into organic natural life. The path through the village was covered with ground-hugging grass.

The village was deserted. Because of the hurricane? Or everyone just out for the day? Or hiding? Embry and I walked to a river and sat there, wondering at the silence, the beauty. A tropical rain-shower hit us.

We took shelter under the eaves of the so-called men’s house—a thatched hut at the middle of the village. Betel nut fronds lay on the ground, with most of the nuts gone. Some ancient disks of stone money beside the hut in the rain.

A shared moment for Embry and me to remember—which is, after all, in large measure what we’re questing for in this trip, my old brother and I.

Later we went looking for the wreck of a WWII Japanese bomber supposedly near the airstrip. We asked some guys doing road construction, and they said, “We don’t know, we are out islanders.”

It’s odd about that class distinction. Coming from the U.S. mainland, we think of Yap as being about as off-the-grid as you could possibly get. But the out islanders are viewed as even further out of the picture.

Several times we saw older women walking around bare breasted in grass skirts, as casually as bare-chested men in shorts.

Everyone carries a little pandanus purse that’s shaped like a miniature Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s shopping bag. I mentioned that our dive guide Kintu had one of these. The purses are woven from something like palm fronds—the fronds come from the pandanus tree, which grows a hard pineapple-like fruit that only the fruit bats eat. And the purses are used to carry your stash of betel nut, lime, and cigarettes.

We’ve been eating the best fresh tuna I’ve ever had here, sometimes cooked, sometimes as raw sashimi. I’m going to miss Yap.

One touching tale. In the local paper, the Yap Networker, I saw a front page story about a Yapese man aged forty-two having been killed in Iraq. Yapese can join the U.S. army, as Micronesia has a loose association with the U.S.

On the morning of our last full day, Embry and I were having breakfast on this floating wooden Indonesian bark that’s the restaurant of the Manta Bay Inn, and we saw some U.S. soldiers there. Embry said hello to one of them, and we learned the soldiers were in Yap from Guam as the honor guard for the fallen Yapese soldier’s funeral.

It gave me such a turn, to see the winds of global war spinning a little eddy all the way down here to Yap. It reminded me of Bruce Sterling’s SF novels, with the workings of distant governments filtering into the furthest backwaters. It gave me a chill and a shock of recognition, to think that it’s actually 2005, and I’m in Yap, and my life is dark science fiction.

In the afternoon, I saw a man walking into the simple restaurant at the ESA hotel carrying a huge fresh tuna with its skin peeled away to reveal its luscious-looking purplish flesh.

“Is that going to be on the menu here?” I hungrily asked.

The man and one of the Yapese women working at ESA just kind of waved me off. They were, like, “This is for something else.”

That night Embry and I went out to dinner somewhere else, and we passed the ESA restaurant. Inside, at a long table, were the soldiers we’d seen and some Yapese—two of them near the head, a woman and a man. It was the man who’d been carrying the fish. And now I realized he was the father of the dead soldier.

His expression looked so—gently baffled. Nothing makes sense anymore if your son is killed. My heart went out to the bereaved parents. In the face of such sorrow, my opinions about the war itself were irrelevant.

I wanted to go in and say, “As an American I appreciate and honor the sacrifice that your son has made.”

I was too shy to say this in person, and I didn’t want to bother them, but now I write these words here.

Right before bed I took a last walk down the street near our hotel. On the left was a thin little bay, on the right some shacks, the decaying Pathways Hotel compound, a tiny store, and some warehouses made out of shipping containers.

The stars overhead, brilliant among the scudding clouds, the air moist and palpable. The ass end of nowhere. I heard a radio voice coming from a parked car—someone was listening to a preacher, an evangelist who was working to stir up the fear of death in his flock.

I could hear the words. “Think of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King gunned down in their prime. Think of coronary heart attacks. Think of cancer, of plague, of terrorism, of death in car accidents—”

So odd to hear this demented, negatory ranting in Eden. The voice of the Serpent. Resist him, dear Yap!

February 17, 2005. Dive Rock Islands of Palau.

Palau is a separate nation from Micronesia, a bit further east, and more or less between the Philippines and Vietnam.

It’s a thirty or forty minute drive from the Palau airport to our hotel, across two or three bridges. Palau is a cluster of islands, somewhat more citified than Yap, but not all that much more. On the way to the hotel we pass through downtown Koror, which is the capital of Palau. This downtown is a crumbly third-world shopping strip, with stores, hotels, restaurants, and steady traffic on its two-lane road.

Our deluxe hotel, the Palau Pacific Resort, is out at the end of the next island over. In the evening Embry and I take a free bus back into Koror and walk around. It’s exciting, so alien. Unlike Yap, there’s not any one main race here—it’s polyglot. Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese, Palauans, Koreans. The Palauans, by the way, are quite dark-skinned—they’re what you call Melanesian, while the Yapese are more Polynesian.

We went into a market to look for some rolls of old-fashioned film for Embry’s underwater camera. It was wonderfully bizarre in the store. The only newspaper for sale was the Weekly World News of January 31, 2005. Headline: “UFO Washed Ashore By Tsunami,” with a large black and white photo of a pie-pan UFO superimposed upon the wreckage of Phuket.

Somehow I’m reminded of Interzone, the hallucinatory city where William Burroughs set his Naked Lunch. Not that I’m seeing people do anything particularly louche in Koror, but it feels utterly outside normal reality. I chuckle as, for perhaps the two hundredth time in my life, I recall some beloved lines from Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine. And in my head I add some bits of my own:

“You win something like jellyfish, meester. Or it win you.”

Brushing the tout aside, Bradley hurried up his hotel’s bare stairs and into his room. Too late he spotted the shape high in one corner of the ceiling, a gauzy veil like the mucus casing a parrot fish exudes. Faster than thought, the parasite dropped onto Bradley’s neck, sliding under his shirt collar, across his back, into his underwear, down his legs, and along his arms to his hands. As finale, the slime-creature formed a tight, thin mask over Bradley’s face. A prickly tingle shivered in his every nerve.

The boy who’d spoken to him in the street reappeared, standing in Bradley’s doorway, his lips red with betel nut.

“Skin like that very hot for two three week,” said the boy, tittering. “Then…wearing the Happy Cloak.”

Our Palau hotel is luxurious, but in some ways a let-down after the raw authenticity of Yap. This morning I took a walk in a jungle beside the hotel, and I heard a tropical bird song, three tones like a squeaky door, do-mi-(ti below do). And another bird doing a rising coo-coo-coo-coo call, although without breaking into the frantic squawk at the end that one might expect.

The hotel’s beach has wonderful coral, starting about twenty feet out, at depths ranging from four to eight feet. Embry and I went in snorkeling right away. We saw scads of tropical fish, most notably a slowly whirling school of parrot fish—these guys gnaw on the coral, they have a very strong beak-like mouth. They’re shaded in iridescent blues and greens. And they have cute, tiny, chartreuse (or yellow-green) fins like bird wings.

Best of all, the beach is loaded with giant clams, I saw one little “garden” of ten of them, each shell easily three feet across. Big crenellated shells. The clams keep the shells cracked open about a foot, and stretching across the opening is the clam’s mantle, which has two holes in it shaped and positioned more or less like, well, like a woman’s private parts. The mantles have symbiotic algae living within their tissues, and are patterned in the most elaborate and psychedelic fashion imaginable—a bit like tie-dye, but more spectacular than that. No two of the clams look at all the same, even regarding palette of colors. I immediately wrote the mantles into my manuscript of Mathematicians in Love, where I’ll describe a futuristic membrane-like computing device as follows:

The skin was undulating, with slight ripples moving back and forth across it, interacting to form delicate filigrees and fleeting moirés, like a living piece of watered silk. The skin was spotted and striped with blues, greens, aquas, yellows, and purples—like a cellular automaton, like an old book’s marbled endpapers, like the mantle of a giant South Pacific clam.

There’s some smaller bivalves—I think they’re a kind of scallop—who wedge themselves into holes in the coral heads, and these guys have the colored mantles too. In the middle of a large maze-patterned brain-like coral boulder, you’ll see a pair of iridescent blue or green lips, leopard-spotted with black or brown dots, as intricately detailed as the borders of the Mandelbrot set.

Turning on the SF reality-warper, I can readily visualize the men and women of the future instilling cultures of Pacific-clam-algae into their genitalia so as to achieve some startling and magnificent effects. Is this really so inconceivable in a world where women’s faces are being heavily siliconed? The futuristic blue-green labia and leopard-spot penises won’t be on continual public display, but one can expect to see starlets offering occasional “accidental” displays of their really quite stunning biocosmetics via upskirt and upkilt shots.

Fuel your jets with this clip of VaVoom and Princesse YaYaYa exiting their hovertaxi at the Blub Gub awards!

Embry signed us on with the dive company Sam’s Tours, a nice outfit. Today we rode for an hour down to the lower end of the Palau archipelago—where the best dive sites are. It was a lovely ride, passing scores of muffin-shaped rock islands. Paradise. I’m finally in Palau. I’ve been looking at pictures of it and wanting to come here for twenty years.

The first dive was depressing, as it was in a spot where a bunch of the coral had died from an El Niño heat wave a couple of years back. Maybe the guides were showing us this to educate us. But the second dive of the day was one of the best ever. It was called Turtle Dropoff. It starts where a six-foot-deep reef suddenly drops two thousand feet into the abyss.

The tide was running, which meant we drifted along the wall—and the dive boat would pick us up further down the line. I was down at about fifty or sixty feet, moving really fast along that wall. It felt almost like I was riding a bicycle and looking at scenery. The wall was covered with waving soft corals—shaped like lung passages, like prickly pears, like bushes and bowls and brambles. Everything alive. Schools of fish above us, fish on the wall, fish under us. And out in the deep water, five-foot-long reef sharks.

The sharks beat their tails in a rhythm that seemed sullen, sulky, slow, skulking. Not sneaky, though. Sharks don’t have to sneak. Maybe the thing that differentiates their motions from that of other fish is that the sharks are the only guys who aren’t worried about someone else eating them. They’re not all twitchy and jittery and birdlike and abrupt. Nobody’s gonna rush out and bite them. They can friggin’ well relax. You don’t like it, whatchoo gonna do about it?

At one point I’d drifted out to the front end of our party of seven, and I saw a really big shark coming towards me along the wall, not more than twenty feet away. Not only that, but here came a hawksbill turtle three feet across, also swimming straight for my head. I could see deep into his eyes.

Naturally the shark and the turtle missed me, but now, I noticed something creepy swimming beneath the turtle, something big and flat. At first I thought it was a ray, but then I realized it was a fish, fully as big as the turtle, swimming on his side.

On the surface, our guide Keith explained the situation. “That’s a bat-fish. He eats the turtle’s shit.”

February 18, 2005. Jive the Texan. Disco Clam. Marley.

Our same group of divers went out together three days in a row. It was interesting getting to know them. As I mentioned, it’s an hour-long boat ride each way from the Palau harbor to the dive sites.

There were two cute Chinese women in our dive party, sisters from Shanghai, although one of them, Safia Chen, now lives, naturally, in my home town of San Jose. She owned a restaurant in Milpitas near all the high tech companies, but she sold it. Safia’s younger sister Wei lives in Macao, which they described as the Las Vegas of China. Macao has a reputation as a wide-open Sin City. Both women were married, but their husbands weren’t diving with them.

There was a guy called Bill on the boat, a Texan who’s lived in Taiwan for quite a few years, making a living selling custom industrial robots to chip fabs. Big talker, big Texas accent. He has a Taiwanese girlfriend, so he has some expertise with Chinese women, and he was bragging to me about how he was going to try and get a date with Wei. He told us that Asians all have open marriages and that it’s not like the uptight U.S. Asian sexual mores are different, insists Bill.

Overhearing him, Wei’s sister Safia is like, “Who say? Why it different?”

And then Safia tells us that Wei’s husband owns a casino and two hotels in Macao. To my mind, this calls up an image of a very tough character. A guy with an implacable security staff, a private army of martial arts warriors. So I’m thinking Bill’s prospects with Wei aren’t too rosy.

Anyway, it’s me whom Wei likes, I’m sure. She’s always smiling at me. But she hardly speaks English, so I don’t get to ask her about Macao.

All this by-play results if you just mix together a half-dozen people for three days! We’re such social organisms. Like fish.

Bill the Texan was always touching Embry and me when he talked to us—on the arm, on the back, patting and glad-handing, and we privily agreed that spending two hours a day in a small boat with this guy was getting to us.

So I took Bill aside and asked him not to touch me anymore. I told him that my brother and I had grown up in the hills of Kentucky and that, in Kentucky, when someone touches you on the back, your natural defensive reaction is to whirl and to punch the guy in the face as hard as you could. Therefore, I explained to Bill, it’s not a good idea for him to be touching me and Embry like that. We’re not always able to control how we react. That’s just how it is with people from Kentucky.

So Bill backed off, which was a relief. Embry didn’t hear me running this head-trip on Bill, although of course later I told him. He loved it. Next day, to get in on the fun, Embry told Bill that he’d seen Wei’s husband on the dock, and the guy was indeed a Chinese gangster. Gold-framed shades, Shantung silk suit, and two seriously big bodyguards.

The Rucker brothers messing with Bill’s head.

Today we did a hole dive, Blue Hole. We floated down eighty feet through a vertical shaft in some coral and came out into an immense cathedral-like space. Not all that many fish in there, but the guide showed us a fire scallop, which he preferred to call a “disco clam.” This thing is a shell, which is open, and it has undulating lips with iridescent white lines flashing on and off along the lips, and some kind of organic lure protruding from the center, a soft lure with a gnarly pincer, waiting to snag curious fishies or shrimplets.

After this dive day, I hung around the docks for awhile. The vibe seemed like I imagine it to be Jamaica—colorful cloths, lots of dark-skinned Palauans, and reggae music everywhere.

Bob Marley was singing “No Woman, No Cry” on an outdoor bar’s sound system. I first heard that song when Sylvia and I were in some sense exiles—ex-pats living in Heidelberg. Nostalgia for Marley’s nostalgia.

I did yoga on a dock for half an hour, with beat-up old boats around, sun going down, very mellow. Nobody bothered me. I studied a column of ants. In the setting sun, the ants’ shadows were a quarter of an inch long, which wonderfully magnified their motions.

I could hear a guy talking in the bar, a young heavyset guy with a shaved head and a face like a white marshmallow with a few holes in it. Like the Pillsbury dough-boy. He has a very heavy-duty underwater camera on the table behind him, and he was pitching his work to his companion.

“Bottom line, bottom line, I get that slide up, I’m sellin’ Palau.”

February 19, 2005. Blue Corner. Jellyfish Lake.

Today we went back out with our dive party and we had the greatest dive of our lives. We were at the classic Palau dive spot, Blue Corner, where the Philippine Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. Intricate currents, rich nutrients in the water, overlapping biomes. We went down a wall covered with hard and soft coral, then drifted with the flow. Out in the open sea were big sharks, considerably larger than me, some of them. Not all that far away.

We were at a depth of seventy feet. Looking fifty feet further down I saw a vast swirling whirlpool of big-eyed trevallies, each of them trying not to be out on the edge of the school. These were large fish, the size of children. They circled like a slow cyclone, making a shape like a nest, with every now and then a bright flash as one of the fish turned onto his side to wriggle deeper into the core. Staying away from the sharks.

Clouds of butterfly-bright fish drifted around us, yellow and white like confetti. Up above us was a school of several hundred barracuda. A turtle paddled off the lip of the reef fully sixty feet up from us. An eagle ray with a fifteen-foot wingspan flapped by. Pure science fiction, floating among busy aliens in another space.

My mind crisped like a flash-bulb going off.

To cap off this amazing day we swam in Jellyfish Lake. I’d heard about this place about ten years ago, when I went to the “Planet of the Jellies” show at the Monterey Aquarium with Bruce Sterling—later we wrote a story “Big Jelly” about giant flying jellyfish. What a romp it was today to wallow amid the jellies. Almost too good to be true.

The Palau jellyfish barely sting, and they don’t eat anything. Like the giant clams, they get their nourishment from algae cultures that live inside their bodies. All the jellies do every day is to pulse their bells so as to move themselves into the sunniest part of the lake to help the algae in their tissues feed upon the light. Shades of my moldies in Freeware!

We swam out a hundred yards into this lake, wearing masks, snorkels and most of us with fins. Keith, our guide, said the visiting ctenophorologists studying this colony estimate it’s now fifteen million strong, although in that recent, overly-warm El Nino year, the population had dropped to virtually nil, with nothing left but some estivating spores or polyps.

So how was it in Jellyfish Lake? It put me in mind of a certain kind of program that I used to write with my computer graphics students. You define the geometry of some graphical objects, and you set them to moving around in space. In my graphics classes we used polyhedra, toruses, and teapots—but in this lake, the objects on display were rounded bells with four dangling clappers apiece, the clappers positioned like table legs on the bottom sides of the bell, with lots of bumps on the clappers.

The jellies came in a range of sizes, with a size distribution obeying an inverse power law. There were a certain number of four-inch-diameter jellyfish, twice as many two-inchers, four times as many one-inchers, eight times as many half-inchers, and sixteen times as many quarter-inchers. And none smaller than that.

The jellies were moving in random directions. They seemed to have no inkling of up or down. Even though they like to be in the light, this doesn’t prevent them from pulsing along in the wrong direction for quite a while. When they get down to a depth of twenty feet or so, they manage to turn around. They move themselves via repetitive pulsations of their bells.

I have a theory about jellyfish pulsation. There’s a cellular-automaton-style reaction taking place in the cells of the bell, and this leads to moving waves of excitation. The waves move radially out from the center. The waves travel at the same speed in the flesh of any jellyfish, large or small. And when the wave hits the rim of the bell, the bell contracts, thus propelling the jellyfish in the direction of the bell’s summit.

My insight in the water today was that, if a jellyfish is half as big as another, it will pulsate twice as fast. More precisely, a jelly’s pulsation rate is inversely proportional to its radius. This follows from the fact that the speed of the reaction waves in jellyfish flesh is a constant quantity.

So at one level, I’m looking at the jellyfish with a scientist’s eyes. But the scene is also completely spacy, science-fictional and psychedelic. When I sink into the water, there’s nothing in my visual field but the greenish yellow sunlit water and the endlessly many jellyfish moving every which way. A couple of times I dove down to twenty feet, then floated up, with jellies all around me, just jellyfish everywhere without limit, with no visual indication of up or down.

How densely packed were the jellies? At the thickest regions, there might have been twenty or fifty of them touching my body at any one time. Four big guys, eight smaller, sixteen smaller, thirty-two tiny ones, like that. Maybe more. I’d feel something smooth touching me and I’d think I was brushing against another person. But always it was a jelly. My new friends.

At one point I made sure that nobody was close enough to see my actions through their dive masks, and I then hiked up one leg of my trunks to ensure that my penis had touched a jellyfish. To help with my novel.

As I mentioned, the jellies do sting, ever so slightly. And the longer I stayed in, the more I could feel their venom. When I was free-diving down through them, I’d feel tingles on my lips where the jellies touched.

“Jellyfish like that very hot for two three week, then—wearing the Happy Cloak.”

On the boat back from Jellyfish Lake, the cute Chinese woman Wei leaned against my shoulder, pretending to be asleep. Score!

February 21, 2005. Kayak Palau. Automatism.

Yesterday I went on a kayak tour in the rock islands. It was one of the very best days of my life. The guides were three Palauans: Jake, Ding and Rayna. They were wild-ass black natives, talking rapid-fire Palauan to each other all day. Jake was the very image of an old-style island chief, although later I found out he went to college, started a career as an accountant, and threw that over to be a tour guide.

There were five of us tourists. Brother Embry didn’t come. The guides loaded five single-seat hard kayaks onto their motorboat, and we sped out to our starting point. For the rest of the day, we kayaked in stages. We’d kayak to a fresh location and the motor boat would be waiting there, we’d tie our kayaks to the boat, go snorkeling, climb up the ladder to the motor boat, replenish our supplies, and then remount our kayaks.

Jake had six waypoints for us:

• An underwater tunnel leading to a tree-lined lagoon filled with giant clams.
• A sunken ship from the 1930s.
• A rocky point where he speared a fish.
• A large lagoon with a beach where we had lunch.
• An underwater tunnel to a cave filled with blue light from the water.
• An arch connecting two bays, with soft corals growing beneath the arch.

Along the way, we skirted the edges of two dozen little rock islands. Their edges are eaten away by the ocean, so they stick out of the sea like muffins. In our kayaks we could paddle beneath the ledges. Little stalactites hung down, the turquoise waves lapped at the rocks, tree leaves drifted about.

The muffin-islands are less lush than I’d realized. From a distance they’re solid green, so one thinks of a jungle. But the greenery is more like a thin layer of icing on a mound of stark, toothy, gray rock—porous limestone that’s eroded into thousands of blades and spikes. Humus collects in the pockets of rock, seeds take root, and you get trees and bushes, some of them fairly large.

Paddling into that lagoon for lunch, I felt I was flying—the water was that clear, with the sandy bottom all white. It was as if my kayak were gliding through empty space. And quiet, quiet, quiet all around. Not a whisper of wind in the trees, only the gentle lapping of the waves, the occasional calls of birds and, of course, the sporadic whooping of the cheery Palauan guides.

I felt a wave of joy, wading around in that lagoon, and a profound sense of gratefulness, both to the world for being so beautiful and to fate for letting me reach this spot. Peaceful in Eden. The world as it’s truly meant to be. I’m glad I lived long enough to get here.

High in the air above one of these sunny backwaters, I see a large, dark—bird? It’s the size of an eagle, but, no, it’s a fruit bat, the sun shining through the membranes of its wings. The islands seem like green clouds come to earth—mirroring their fluffy white brethren above.

In our last snorkel spot, I saw pale blue and pink soft corals, like branching broccoli on the sandy bottom. Fractals. They were growing in a channel connecting two bays, and the channel runs beneath a low, natural-bridge arch.

Swimming through the arch, I encounter a shoal of perhaps ten thousand tiny tropical fish—like the fish you’d see in someone’s home aquarium: zebras and tetras. With my snorkel on, I marvel at their schooling motions. They move in unison like iron filings in a field. Ropes and scarves of density emerge from the parallel computations produced by their individual anxieties.

The turbulent water currents compute—the clouds in the sky, the cellular automaton reaction-diffusion patterns on the mantles of the giant clams, the Zhabotinsky scrolls of the shelf corals, the gnarly roots of plants on the land—everything computes, each moment flowing from the moment before, orchestrated by nature’s laws.

So I’m thinking that maybe, yes, maybe everything is a computation after all. A view I’d turned against back in September, 2004. But universal automatism is good. It gives me a point of view from which I can make sense of all these diverse forms I’m seeing here. So maybe Wolfram is right to chide me for wanting to “take it all back” at the end of the latest draft of my Lifebox tome.

But, wait, what about my thoughts, can I see those as computations too? Well, why can’t they just be fractal broccoli, flocking algorithms, class four turbulence, cellular automaton scrolls. I want to ascribe a higher significance to my thoughts, but why make so much of them? Are my thoughts really so vastly different from the life forms all around me in these lagoons? Why not relax and merge. All is One.

And if I find it useful to understand the One’s workings in terms of computation, don’t think that this reduces the lagoon to a buzzing beige box. The lagoon is not reduced, the lagoon is computing just as it is. “Computing” is simply a way to describe the dance of natural law.

Speaking of dance, when we got back to the dive shop, Jake and Rayna were kidding around with this nice, cute, young American woman who’s just moved to Palau and is supporting herself by working at the shop—I met her the other day because she came along on the Blue Hole dive on her afternoon off. And Jake and Rayna start dancing and chanting, crouched, facing each other, their hands shaking in the air, slapping their thighs, vital and joyous as a pair of indestructible cartoon characters. Archetypes.

I mark this day with a white stone. And last Sunday was a white stone day, too—I’m talking about the day when I was on the beach alone in Yap. And yesterday, with the Blue Corner and Jellyfish Lake, that merits a white stone too.

What a trip.

February 23, 2005. Pohnpei.

We had an exhausting flight from Palau to Pohnpei. The plane left at 2 am, and the trip took about twelve hours. Slept twelve hours after we arrived. The flight from Pohnpei to L.A. is going to be worse. But now we’re here for a week.

Pohnpei is the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia, which includes Yap, Chuuk (formerly known as Truk), Kosrae, and numerous out islands as well. Not that the main town on Pohnpei looks much like a capital. The place is only a small step up from Yap. By the way, the capital towns of Yap and Pohnpei have almost the same name: Colonia and Kolonia.

Geographically speaking, Palau and its many islands are part of Micronesia as well, but politically, Palau is a separate country of its own. Both Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia have fairly close affiliations with the U.S. and both use the U.S. dollar as currency.

Before World War Two, the Japanese had taken over the islands of Micronesia. They were emigrating here in a big way, and they were disenfranchising the native population. After the U.S. won WW II, the Japanese settlers in Micronesia were sent back to Japan, and the Micronesian natives took over again. The U.S. has been in the Micronesians’ good graces ever since.

We’ve fetched up at a Pohnpei resort called The Village. It’s a collection of palm-thatched cottages built of mangrove wood, and with palm mats for some of the walls. No air conditioning, but it’s on a ridge with a steady breeze, and three sides of each cottage are permanently open to the breeze. They’re screened, so bugs haven’t been much of a problem. The beds have mosquito nets in any case. For some reason they’re water beds, good in a way, as they help keep you cool in the night. I’d thought the rocking might be uncomfortable, but I’m sleeping very well. Embry and I had shared a room five nights in Palau, but now we’re back to separate rooms, which is more comfortable.

Although we’re building up a lot of nice shared memories, I can’t say that I’m always that fond of my brother. All these old issues that I thought I’d put behind me are coming up. Ever since our childhood, he’s had this annoying habit of occasionally belittling me to other people, and making out that I’m untrustworthy. He doesn’t do this constantly, but he does it often enough to get my goat. Of course maybe he’s just envious of me. Brotherly competition. And to be fair, at other times, he builds me up.

It could be that my not-entirely-happy upbringing encouraged me to become a novelist writing escape-literature—it takes manure to grow a fine bed of roses. And I am content, at this point, with being the man I grew up to be. If I wanted to exaggerate, I could say that Embry took his best Cain-slew-Abel shots at destroying me, but he didn’t succeed. And now I’m as strong as him.

Another, less emotional, and even kind of funny, problem with Embry is that for some reason he decided to leave his hearing aids at home, and he sometimes fails to understand what people tell us, or what I tell him, and then he gets confused, querulous, and even angry. A real geezer.

This morning Embry farted rather loudly while we were on the hotel patio ordering breakfast, but maybe he’s so deaf he doesn’t hear the fart, or he just doesn’t care, in any case he goes on like nothing happened.

“I’ll have some poot hot tea.”

The cute little waitress Yumi was, like, I don’t believe you did that—is that a mainland custom? Not that she said this out loud.

Embry and I stay away from politics as much as possible, as, over the years, he’s adopted a lot of conservative positions. We’ve managed not to discuss the current American president even once—may his name remain unspoken. Listening to Embry’s political opinions makes me understand how tired my children get of listening to me and my own idiosyncratic views.

Embry and I are both very forgetful. When we were rooming together on Palau, we had a terrible time with leaving our safe unlocked, and with keeping track of our keys. This got to be a running joke: our room was the hotel Alzheimer’s ward.

My father used to joke about Alzheimer’s, come to think of it. “Maybe I’ve got that…that disease…what’s it called?” Of course when Pop’s mind really went—after his strokes—at that point he didn’t joke about senility anymore. Wasn’t able to.

It’s definitely good to have Embry along, I truly wouldn’t want to be doing this trip alone. And, even though we sometimes get sick of each other, we are brothers, and I often feel quite tender towards him. That deep organic flesh bond. There’s something so mythical and legendary about pairs of brothers, and, come to think of it, they’re usually somewhat in conflict with each other. That’s just the way it is.

Another cloud on my horizon is that I’m starting to miss Sylvia very much. I’m writing this entry on the porch of my jungle cottage. It’s up on stilts in the midst of an honest-to-god jungle: surrounded by coconut, breadfruit and ivory nut trees, with ferns and orchids growing out of the tree crotches. The warm water of a lagoon is visible through the trees, and the steady breeze of the trade winds wafts through. The cute water bed has a mosquito net like a canopy. How Sylvia would love being here, and how I’d love to see her delight. I feel almost selfish and greedy to be taking this trip without her. Her voice is so small and far and brave on the telephone.

But, as I keep telling myself, this could well be the biggest trip I ever get, and we have less than a week to go. The only reasonable thing to do is to enjoy every bit of the trip while it’s happening.

Yesterday, on our first full day in Pohnpei, Embry and I took a tour to these Micronesian ruins called Nan Madol. I’d never heard of them before, which isn’t surprising, given that I’d never heard of the island of Pohnpei. We went to Nan Midol via a smallish motor boat, along with about seven of us guests, a Pohnpeian man called Bidi handling the dual outboard motors, and a Japanese man called Tomo acting as guide.

Our first stop was at a tiny sandbar with a couple of trees on it. We went snorkeling. Ah, the fish of Micronesia. There’s one largish fish called the diagonal-barred sweetlips—it’s pale yellow with dark stripes that break into dots near its belly. This is a reaction-diffusion pattern that I’ve created many times with my cellular automata, using a rule devised by Alan Turing. Computation everywhere.

Embry found a little pipefish, which looks like a seahorse without the wings. A bumpy long segmented body, and a little horse head, the whole fish only a few inches long. It was nosing around in a little algae-coated bowl of coral.

I’m particularly fond of some small bluish-green fish that are found schooling in the stag-horn coral. They’re iridescent, and their exact color depends on the light—often they’re the pale turquoise of shallow water over sand. Other times they’re tinted like the sky, and sometimes they seem to glow as if they’re electric.

Snorkeling here is truly as if you’re swimming around inside the most lavish possible pet-shop aquarium. And the water goes on as far as you can see in every direction, and there’s currents flowing through.

The coral comes in a wonderful range of shades. There are some rounded heads that are that tacky orangish-pink “coral” color beloved by mail-order catalogs, but you also see delicious, pale mauve tones. And the staghorn corals have stunning lavender tips.

For our second stop, we pulled into a Stone Age wharf made of, yes, stones. A few shacks of corrugated tin nearby. We debarked and walked up a trail along a stream to a tropical waterfall—white rivulets splashing down a bumpy fifty-foot slope of smooth dense volcanic basalt rock. I jumped into the pool at the base of the falls. It was about ten feet deep, and I swam around. I was the only one swimming.

I looked over at our guide Tomo on the shore, and he was making wavy motions with one hand, and then holding his hands very far apart. Something big in the water? I opened my eyes beneath the surface, and saw some medium-sized, brown fish.

Now Embry beckoned me towards the shore. Tomo had thrown in some bread crumbs, and there, eating the bread, was a fresh-water eel four feet long, a really fat guy, with alarmingly sharp, dog-like teeth. I wondered whether it would be wise to touch his tail. I was standing in the water about a foot away from him.

“Electric?” I asked Tomo.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

And then the eel swam back into the deep water, not quite touching me. On the walk back down to the boat, Tomo told me that that for the Pohnpeians, an eel is, “Halfway between man and god. Or for some people maybe like a pet. They don’t eat eel, but they eat dogs. Dogs not a pet on Pohnpei.”

Later, Patti the inn-keeper told me that for some kids in Pohnpei, the dogs are like pets, and they’re often heart-broken when the father of the family decides to butcher Fido for a feast. It’s a common trauma.

Speaking of dogs, there’s two resident mutts at the Village resort. As soon as I moved into my room, they came and slept on my deck for an hour.

“A sign of acceptance,” says Patti.

Back to our outing. Nan Midol was the home base of some Micronesian warriors who ruled Pohnpei for about a thousand years. Rather than being on land, Nan Midol is a collection of about twenty little artificial islands created by making little walls in the water and filling them in with coral. And sitting on the islands are structures made of what you might call stone logs.

The way this works is that when volcanic rock cools slowly, as in the plug of a volcano, it forms long vertical crystals, like in the famous Devils Tower of South Dakota. Pohnpei has two volcanic towers like this—one is called Sokehs Rock, the other is called Chickenshit Mountain, in honor of the legend that a mythic rooster pooped it out. Now if you quarry a big chunk of stone from one of these volcanic plugs and heat it over a fire, it breaks into log-sized chunks, often hexagonal or pentagonal in cross-section. And these “stone logs” can be six or even twelve feet long.

So the warriors floated the stone logs down here on bamboo rafts, and piled up the stone logs to make structures a bit like log cabins. Being South Pacific islanders, they didn’t make solemn Lincoln-log flat rectangles for their walls, no, they bowed them in a bit, and ran the corners up to jutting, pagoda-like points. Think tiki bar.

Our boat pulled into one of the old canals. We climbed onto some stone steps, and paid a minion of the unseen tribal chief $3 a head. Nobody else there but us.

Ah, the romance of stone ruins amidst jungle plants. Breadfruit trees with great oaky leaves had knotted their roots into the ruins, with the great oval green breadfruits swaying in the trade winds. Everything was pristine and natural, no trash in sight, no signs, nothing but the ruins, the jungle, the rising tide of the sea, and the single uncommunicative minion of the Micronesian chief.

Today we went diving, Embry, me, two other tourists and a pair of guides in the same flat, open, seatless motorboat that we rode to Nan Midol yesterday. We rode through a harbor with rusty Chinese fishing trawlers who come here for the tuna. On the way back from diving, the sea was getting rough, so we motored though an intricate maze of mangroves which grew so dense and low that we had to practically lie down in the boat. This part was very cool.

When we got to the dive site, we had lunch in the boat. Tomo had brought a picnic for us. By now, Embry and I have learned to order “bento” instead of “sandwich” for lunch. A bento is a wad of rice with grilled tuna and some boiled vegetables, the whole combo squeezed into a clever wrapping of banana leaf. A green, conical pack with a leaf-flap. You eat it with chopsticks. Wonderful.

The high point of our dive was a school of eighteen man-sized sharks. I also saw any number of enormous sea cucumbers, segmented like centipedes, leopard-spotted in brown and white, with fan-shaped feeding tubules sticking from their fronts like legs. I’m crazy about sea cucumbers. One of my favorite models for aliens.

It was a woman named Sheryl—one of Embry’s white acquaintances who moved to Pohnpei from Grand Turk—who talked him into coming here. Sheryl met us at our hotel for dinner. She was a chatty single lady, and she brought an interesting cast of characters with her, saying they were her local “family”—a white lawyer, the white editor of the island newspaper, and two Pohnpeian women, Elizabeth and Emmy. Emmy showed up two hours late, making an entrance with her two-year old daughter, her seventeen-year-old daughter, and one of the daughter’s friends.

I liked talking to Elizabeth and Emmy, getting local info from them. It was soothing to be with them. The leavening and civilizing influence of the fair sex. They were pleasant-looking, in their forties, with smooth brown faces and cute accents. They had a languid island look, like brown Chers, not unlike a number of people I’ve known in multi-culti San Jose. But Pohnpei was Emmy and Elizabeth’s home turf, and in their power and situatedness, they also seemed a bit like elegant sharks, finning along just outside the reef.

The women told me that only one of the twelve clans on Pohnpei thinks of eels as gods. Elizabeth’s clan has a god which is an owl, other clans have the shark and the manta ray. They do eat dogs, sometimes casually, but more often for special occasions. If the chief of your clan asks for your dog for an important feast, say for a funeral, you gotta hand over the dog.

The big local drug on Pohnpei is sakau, similar to the kava of the Tongans and of the Fijians. It’s made by squeezing the roots of a certain pepper plant in water. Betel nut isn’t so big here as in Yap. Apparently they grow pot as well in Pohnpei, and it’s best to have a guide if you go mountain hiking, lest you stumble onto something you shouldn’t see.

We’ve been invited to a party at Elizabeth’s on Saturday night, which is pretty cool. They’ll be serving sakau. I don’t expect to be drinking much of it, but I’ll probably have a taste, wanting to see what’s what. All these wonderful alien drugs out here in the islands.

After dinner a young couple from Minnesota whom we’d dived with were getting loaded on sakau at the hotel bar. They’d bought a whole quart of the stuff from a local, and they were full wasted. Effusively they called Embry and me over to chat.

“Is it like pot?” I asked.

And the guy says, “No, it’s more like a speedball. Like a combination of coke and heroin.”

Embry was shocked. “What a thing to say!”

I mentioned that we’d been into town for dinner, and the woman said, “You two really get around. That’s great.”

Walking back to our room, Embry asked me, “What did she mean by that? You two really get around. We hardly do anything.”

“It’s because we’re so old, Embry. She thinks it’s amazing that we can do anything at all. Aren’t those two old brothers cute?”

The next morning the man and woman were quite subdued. Sakau hangover.

February 25, 2005. Mantas. Liduduhniap Waterfall.

This morning Embry and I went for a manta dive. We left early, and we were the first at the manta dive site. We glimpsed a manta in the water even before we jumped in. Our guide was Stahmp, a native of Chuuk who moved to Pohnpei to live with his local wife.

We dropped down to a sandy crushed-coral bottom at about fifty feet, crept up into a couple of coral heads, and there they were, two mantas, both of them dark on top, one light on the bottom, and the other dark on the bottom. They were hovering over some coral heads to be cleaned by wrasses—these are wriggly little-finger-sized fish with three stripes along their length. The wrasses make their living by nibbling the parasites off other fish and off mantas as well. The mantas and the fish like this, they seek out the wrasses, who tend to wait in one specific place.

The mantas were fully as alien as I’d hoped. Incredibly streamlined, all about curvature and torsion. The main part of a manta’s body is roughly the shape of a sea turtle’s. They have meaty triangular wings going out on either side, and with a rudder-type fin near the rear, plus a long spike at the very back. They have a wingspan of ten or twelve feet. Their eyes are in protruding knobs on the sides of their heads, not that their heads are really separate from their bodies.

Mantas have slit mouths they can open to be fairly big and round, so as to suck in water. They’re filter-feeders. They have a pair of little appendages sticking out of the sides of their heads—these are fleshy and oar-like, rather than fin-like. Sometimes one of the little oars will be rolled up, but usually they’re sticking out, gently adjusting themselves to the current, stabilizing the manta.

The mantas had five gill slits down either side of their chests. They opened up the slits like lipless mouths, and the cleaner-wrasses swam in and out of the slits, worrying the skin, also busy along the rear edges of the mantas’ bodies. Occasionally a wrasse would nip too hard, and the manta would twitch it loose.

The mantas raised up and lowered down several times. Once, while the white-bottomed one was up overhead, it released a nasty and alarmingly large cloud of poop. The nearby fish were all over that. The black one was close enough to me that I could have touched it, had my arm been twice as long.

A very, very satisfying experience.

Afterwards we did another long shallow dive along a reef of soft corals, loaded with fish, my last scuba dive in Micronesia. I was nostalgic for it already, saying goodbye to the corals and fish—the pale green and pale lavender plate corals with the fractally folded edges, the fish with their shades so lovely and watery and gleaming. A school of twenty tiny damselfish, each one a different size, like a line of carved ivory elephants, hovering over a chartreuse, flat-topped hedge of fire coral. The last nudibranch, with his yellow-edged black body, and red antennae, and a red tree-like gill growing out of his back. The last parrot fish. Goodbye, Micronesia, goodbye.

On this trip I did sixteen scuba dives in all.

The people with us on this dive were fascinating. Scott and Jeanette Johnson, biologists turned computer workers for the U.S. missile range at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands east of here. Scott found a nice empty “map cowrie” shell for me. And he and Jeanette knew all about cone shells.

Yes, the cones do live here, but I haven’t seen them because they spend most of the day buried under the seafloor sand. They come out to hunt at night. They talked about tent cones and textile cones—the names referring to the patterns on their shells.

Scott and Jeanette said that once they’d caught a tent cone, and they put it in a bucket, and then they bugged it so they could watch it furiously firing poison darts. They said that if you find an empty cowrie shell, that means a textile cone ate the poor cowrie mollusk inside.

The cone has a proboscis that sticks out from inside its mouth, and its stinger is in the proboscis. When eating a fellow mollusk, the cone shell slimes its mouth tube right inside the victim’s shell, engulfing it on the spot. And when a cone shell manages to eat a fish, what you find the next day is a little pack of bones wrapped in mucus.

What a great horrific image for Mathematicians in Love. A cone shell is hiding under the dirt in a character’s garden, and it creeps out at night and eats the guy. And the next day someone finds the skeleton all bundled up in mucus.

This afternoon, Embry and I rented a car and drove to Liduduhniap Falls near Kolonia. Not that near actually, it was up a long dirt road that was hard for us to find. The guidebook had said there was a store at the end of the road by the falls, and that you should pay a dollar to the storekeeper to use the falls.

So we get up there, and there’s not a soul in sight, just a pair of rudimentary Micronesian buildings, though neither of them looks particularly like a store. There’s the sound of a radio or TV from one of the buildings. We walk over there, and we see a bare-breasted, brown-skinned woman asleep on the ground. No matter how low you set your expectations of formality, the Micronesians continue to slip under it.

We made our way down some stone steps and went swimming in the waterfall pool. It was great—exciting to have the water beat down on us, a feeling of healing, a sense of timelessness. The two old brothers in the swimming hole.

It crossed my mind that, if I’m ever visiting Embry in the hospital, or vice versa, we might reminisce about this trip. Whatever comes down, we’ll always have our wonderful shared adventure to remember.

When we came back up, it was raining. We ran to the shelter of a pavilion across the street from the house where the woman had been sleeping on the ground. The pavilion had a raised U-shaped concrete platform, with tree trunks set into it holding up the slanting roof of corrugated tin. I’d thought it was a storage shed, but now it strikes me that it’s a house. Along one side is a counter holding pots and pans—a kitchen. On the rear side are some mattresses.

Some people come out of the walled house across the street, and now the sleeping woman is up and at ’em. She’s pulled her elastic-waisted flower-printed skirt up a couple of feet to cover her breasts.

These skirts are what all the women wear here, very brightly colored, usually with a zigzag edge at the bottom. Later I ended up buying two of them, one locally made by the cousin of the young woman I bought it from. When I asked if the skirt would fit my wife, the woman selling it to me said, “This size fits my auntie.”

Back at the falls, we paid the woman for the waterfall access, then talked to her for awhile. She was friendly. She said her son lives in Arlington, Texas. I didn’t have the heart to ask if he’s in the military, who seem to scooping up quite a few of the Micronesian youths. It’s one of their only paths out into the wider world.

February 26, 2005. Sokehs Ridge. Mwahnd Island.

I took today off from diving, and I climbed a high ridge overlooking town. I saw a bunch of Japanese anti-aircraft guns at the top, rusted amidst flowers. Had a nice view of the outer reefs and the lagoon—several tuna-fishing ships anchored there. The sound of some vast machine aboard one of them. A radio tower atop the ridge. I felt a little frantic, a little lonely, and a little melancholy. My time here is running out.

A bunch of red parrots were squawking at me from a papaya tree. I pushed into the undergrowth to see them better, then sat down and spent a half hour surrounded by the cries of birds. There were four different kinds, all aware of my presence and making noise about it. Coo-coo-coo, squawk-whistle, gahr-gahr. One bird flew down to get a really good look at me. He was black and gray with a fanned-out tail.

I drove across a little bridge to Sokehs island. Lots of people were out and about—a Saturday. Some of them were getting out of church. I saw some boys standing by a church drinking sakau out of wax-paper cups.

I saw more houses that looked like open pavilions. Talking to a Pohnpeian, I learned that these are cook-houses or summer-houses, and that each family also has an enclosed house, where they keep their valuables, and where they sleep when it’s wet.

Back at our hotel, I rented a kayak and paddled about a mile against the wind to get to Mwahnd Island, which is completely edged by mangroves. I paddled in through some breaks in the mangroves, which led to channels with native huts.

My kayak was quiet in the calm, silty water. Mangroves on either side of me, and quivering schools of tiny pale blue fish.

One hut sticks in my mind. It was painted dark blue on the bottom half, and light blue on the top. A roof of corrugated tin. Patches of red-painted corrugated metal in the walls. The lower part of the hill behind the house was covered with palms, with big leafy breadfruit trees on the top. Above the breadfruits, a fat white cloud echoed the shape of the forested hill. An extended family was outside the hut—a naked boy covering his crotch with both hands, the women in tropical skirts, the men working with their boats. The hut at the edge of the world.

Another channel led to what must have been the village center. I hear voices chanting in unison—church? Some girls peer at me from a porch screened by mangrove branches. I think of the parrots peering at me from the papaya tree, and the way they profiled their hooked beaks.

I wave to anyone I see. They wave back in a friendly fashion. I’m in a raspberry-pink plastic sea kayak, wearing swim-suit, print shirt, my constant Tilly hat, my shades. A total alien.

On the way back I tied up to a channel marker and wallowed into the water with my snorkel gear. Another farewell to the fish of Micronesia and to the pale green, pale lavender, pale pink, soft corals.

Embry bought some big black South Pacific pearls from a local guy, and he’s very proud of himself. I’m wishing I’d gotten some for Sylvia. Maybe I can still organize it by mail after I’m home.

It’s going to feel weird to be back home, back to the news media. But I can’t wait to see Sylvia. And it’ll be nice to be able to eat vegetables. It’s always hard to get vegetables in restaurants.

February 27, 2005. Sakau Party. Pohnpei.

Last night we went to a party at the house of Elizabeth, the Pompeian woman we met the other night. A couple of shirtless guys were sitting in the open pavilion of her cook-house with a big flat rock resting on a pair of old tires. They were pounding a large mound of pepper-root with rounded stones: sakau. The big flat stone must have been very hard, for it rang like metal.

I was of course fascinated by the drug preparations, so I talked to the main guy. He had a mustache, and he reminded me a bit of my Filipino friend Bataan with whom I got high at Naropa in Boulder some twenty years ago. I took a flash picture of this guy and he was, like, “Wow.” Grooving on the afterimage of the light. Fairly zonked.

He said the Pohnpeian sakau is better than Fijian kava—it’s the roots of a slightly different pepper plant. In Fiji, they dry the roots and grind them into a powder, which they squeeze in a cloth in a bowl of water. But in Pohnpei, they make their potion right from the fresh roots, moistening the roots with a cup or two of water.

“Bataan” (I forget his real name) pounded the big flat rock for a long time, utterly pulverizing the roots. The rock rang like a dinner bell, and a few people drifted into the cook-house. The others continued circulating in the yard, drinking wine, sodas and fresh coconuts. A long table of food was nearly ready to be served.

Bataan laid out a long strip of fabric-like hibiscus bark, mounded a couple of pounds of pulverized pepper root on it, and wrapped the bark around the mashed roots, making a kind of tamale the size of his arm. And then he twisted the bark to squeeze out some thick, slimy juice. He unwrapped the pepper pulp, mixed the first bit of juice back into it with a cup of water, then rewrapped and squeezed again, this time catching some of the juice in half a coconut shell.

And now he offered the juice to Embry, who was the oldest male guest. Embry had a sip, and a little later I had a couple of sips as well. I’d been wondering if I should have any, what with my commitment to staying sober, but, as with the betel nut, I just had to taste how it was.

Thankfully the effects weren’t super strong for me. I felt a little tired, a little more relaxed, and a shade zonked. Rather than wanting a whole lot more—as I would have in the old days—my reaction was to remember that I don’t really like feeling zonked anymore. And I left it at that.

But the guys doing the squeezing were goin’ for it, cup after cup. They said they would get visions. They continually pounded and resqueezed the roots for the next several hours. Two American ex-pat guests were really into the sakau as well. They said they’d been doing the stuff for years. They’d popped out of their house at the first sound of the sakau-pounding.

This American couple had the weathered, off-kilter vibe of long-term stoners. Their faces made me imagine some science-fictional humans who fly unaided through outer space—without a spaceship or a spacesuit. Their skins are pitted and etched by the dust and hard radiation of the spaceways. Putting it another way—these two had the quality of someone watching the world on instant replay. My people.

The sakau pounders had a repetitive chant playing on a boom-box. It was special music for a sakau party, and in fact the music was recorded by a local guy called Lorenzo, who’s said to have a chance of becoming the next king of the Nett district of Pohnpei.

A very dignified older native lady was there—she was the mother of this Lorenzo, it turned out. She’d regarded me with level eyes, not bothering to smile. Relative to her, I’m, like, a three-foot-tall green alien from a UFO, an interloper in her court. But eventually I managed to say a native word to her—kasalelei—which means hello or goodbye. And then she did smile.

I sat with our hostess Elizabeth and her cute friend Emmy while we ate. It was a treat to be hanging around with Pohnpeian women, not that I could think of much to say. The food was amazing: a suckling pig, a steamed fish half as big as a pizza, a mound of tuna sashimi, a mound of grilled chicken, white yams, taro, breadfruit, pineapple so ripe that even the centers of the slices were soft and sweet. Curried chicken, red and white rice, pickled cabbage, and three kinds of bananas (boiled in coconut milk, fried, and mashed). No green vegetables. Maybe they don’t matter after all.

I felt really tired after awhile, what with my hiking-kayaking-snorkeling triathlon, and my dose of sakau. That stuff stays with you. At first I’d thought I could drive our car back to the hotel, but then I realized it was better for Embry to do it.

Today Embry and I drove a road that goes all around the island. It was exceedingly hard to find the sights confidently enumerated in a booklet I got at the Pohnpei Tourism office. Pohnpei has no road signs of any sort whatsoever. Not a single road is marked in any way. Maybe they took the signs down because they’re rebuilding the road? The People’s Republic of China is paying to resurface the road around Pohnpei. Embry says China is giving aid to tiny countries to help their international clout.

Without any signs, we had to stop and ask questions over and over. It was fun to talk to the islanders, but after awhile I began to feel like an idiot, like that annoying three-foot-tall green alien from the UFO. In one spot, after I’d formed my question, the islanders just burst into wild laughter at me—so white and oddly dressed and solemn. Embarrassing.

At one point we found an enormous petroglyph rock. It was smooth to the feet, a hundred feet long, in the jungle beside an open field, with green interior mountains beyond the field, and heartbreakingly beautiful tree crowns against the pale blue sky. The rock is covered with little carved designs, quite old. Images of paddles or knives, a woman’s vagina or maybe a shield, some bow-tie shapes, the outline of a whole woman.

To find this rock, we’d asked at a house near it, and a betel-nut-chewing guy offered to guide us. We were glad to have him along for a few bucks. His name was Wiley. He banged one spot on the rock, and it sounded a bit hollow.

He said, “There is a door in the rock here, and the brothers went inside.”

“What brothers?” I ask.

“Two brothers came from far away—“ Wiley points toward the other side of the island, beyond the interior mountains, perhaps ten miles away, it’s the most distant spot that he knows. “From Kiti. They made these carvings. A giant came, and they hid inside the rock. See here, it’s a picture of a lock and a key.”

I told him that Embry and I were brothers. And then a little later I told him we were from Kiti, which got a good laugh out of him. It was fun to think of Embry and me as archetypes, from a legend, the brothers from Kiti.

In a field nearby, Wiley showed us a “woman rock” which had a crotch and slit like a vagina, really quite graphic. He touched it for good luck, and I did too. Hoping to see my woman soon.

There were other boulders in the field, and Wiley said they were people too. He said this was his land, and the land was a storyboard—which is the name of a wooden bas relief comic strip of one or more frames that Micronesians carve to preserve legends.

Wiley’s rocky field is a storyboard.

I love that. Living mythically and in depth.

Later Embry and I got lost trying to find some Japanese cannons in the jungle. Sweaty and on foot, we stumbled into a clearing with a woman sitting there on her steps. Two houses and a tiny graveyard with four raised mausoleums nearby. Perhaps this woman’s family had lived here for generations. It was like meeting Eve. She kindly pointed out the way to the “sight” we wanted to see.

Further around the island, I swam in a pool in a river by the road, with twenty small children. Embry just watched. The children stayed well clear of me. Like I was a crocodile. Their mothers were doing laundry the old-style way, beating the clothes with a stick on a rock. I thought of the pool as being a fountain of youth. But later I had a feeling the water had been none too clean, for surely there were many houses upstream.

We encountered a huge traffic jam, cars parked on both sides of the road, creeping along. The pickup in front of us held an enormous ball of roots and dirt attached to a carrying-pole. It was raining, and now we were at a standstill, I studied the object in the truck—it seemed to be a bundle of linked tubers. Finally I got out and asked the eight guys riding with it what it was.

“A yam.”

The eight guys parked their truck and walked off along the shoulder with the yam, straining at the carrying pole. I’d heard that Pohnpei is known for producing enormous yams—and this one must have been four hundred pounds. I’d visualized the giant yams as being oversized, perfectly-shaped, supermarket-style yams, but this big fella was a lumpy gnarly cluster.

As our car inched into the center of the action, we saw a pile of freshly slaughtered piglets, a mound of breadfruits, and hundreds of native guests, many of them carrying plastic plates with rice and roast pig.

“Is it a feast?” I asked someone.

“It’s a funeral.”

Embry and I had a nice dinner on our last evening, talking over old times, remembering our boyhoods and our parents. My brother and I.

It rained a lot in the night, but was sunny in the morning. Rain-fed Eden. We had a little time before we had to go to the airport, so I got a guide to show me the Pahn Takai (means Under Rock) waterfall just past a townlet called U. A one-letter name.

Our friendly hotelier Jamie had phoned the guide ahead. He was a short Pohnpeian named Danny, and he met me near the falls. Wearing mismatched flip-flops and an athletic shirt, he led me into the jungle. Sakau plants lined the path. They have knobby stalks and heart-shaped leaves. Danny said that although he himself didn’t like sakau, in Pohnpei they say if you drink sakau, you’re a real man. That same old line.

As we neared the cliffs, Danny told me that I would have to place a fresh leaf on an altar at the base the waterfall, for if I didn’t, the cliff would fall on me the next time I came. He broke off a fern for me to place. Completely serious about this.

The cliffs were a few hundred feet high, and we walked along a deep ledge halfway up, with the rocks above us beetling out. The caves in the cliff had fruit bats living in them. We came to a veil waterfall, weaving back and forth in the wind. I placed my fern on the altar. Thank you, Micronesia.

One more brother image. I think I mentioned that there’s two resident dogs at the Village resort. The two dogs always walk around together, and sometimes they sleep on my porch. One is slightly bigger than the other. And today I was feeling a little blue about our trip being nearly over, and I was patting them. And when I was patting the bigger one, the smaller one began to growl and nip at the bigger one for getting more attention. That’s me and Embry!

This trip’s been very good for my relationship with Embry. One of the great trips of my lifetime, right up there with the overland move to California, the trip to Tonga, and the time Sylvia and I did a train trip around Europe.

And it’s been very good for my head. I feel happy and relaxed. What an improvement over my state of mind at the start of the trip on February 9, 2005, when I wrote: “Oh hell, if I died in Micronesia it would be okay…who gives a fuck.”

As Melville says at the start of Moby Dick, when you start feeling like calling the undertaker, head for the sea!

February 28, 2005. Beyond Retirement

I’m in the midst of my three-day journey: Micronesia to Honolulu, Honolulu to L.A., and then L.A. to San Jose. Due to crossing the international dateline, my Monday, February 28, 2005, is lasting forty-eight hours. Like Groundhog Day, you might say.

Yesterday our plane did a hop-stop on the oddest island—Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands. Majuro is a quarter of a mile wide and thirty miles long, a mere sandbar somewhere near the dead center of the immense Pacific. I’d feel uneasy if I lived there. An agoraphobic wouldn’t be able to look out their window in such a place.

When we landed it was dusk, and we got out of the plane and looked around. An amazing, utterly unobstructed, technicolor tropical sunset covered the full dome of the sky. Exhilarating to be out at the furthest-flung corner of the world.

Embry and I came into Honolulu at 2 am and crashed in a cheap motel. And in the morning we said a warm farewell and split up—him flying to Louisville, and me waiting for a flight to L.A.

I passed an hour doing yoga on a backwater lagoon beach near our cheap airport motel. Homeless people in this neglected park, and outriggers lined up by the water. I’m so glad I do yoga, it’s always a pleasure-fix to stretch the ever-sore muscles, and I can do it anywhere.

When I got to the airport, I learned that my plane was leaving four hours later than I’d expected. I’d read the schedule wrong. So I took a cab to a restaurant for lunch.

Honolulu looked cute and interesting. The busy town, the big surf visible from the random, empty, old-school restaurant. Fishing-boats and surfers outside. A sense of being outside of normal time.

This three-day trip is like a metamorphosis. It’s the pupal stage between caterpillar and butterfly, between larva and imago, between grub and instar, between polyp and jellyfish. I’m in limbo, pleasantly so.

And now I’m finishing the “I Retire” series of my journal notes. Retiring was a hard transition. And I’m looking forward to seeing what develops as the theme of my next series of journal entries. I’m kind of hoping that the theme might be me hitting the big time, career-wise. Maybe Lifebox will be a hit. Or maybe that director Michel Gondry will make my novel Master of Space and Time into a movie—he bought the option from me last year.

Whatever happens, I’m done with retiring. And I did a big special trip I’ve always longed to do. Yeah, baby. What’s next?

SF Writer / 2005-2007

Writing Mathematicians in Love

March 4, 2005. Blogging. Yoga.

I just went to yoga class down in Los Gatos, I hadn’t been there in months, what with my mornings being eaten up by blogging. But today it’s raining and gray and the house is empty. I’m sitting in the good old Los Gatos Coffee Roasting, writing these notes.

Yoga felt like scuba diving today. I sometimes do yoga moves while diving—like the bow stretch, or the squat. In the actual yoga class there’s a vibe that makes the air feel like thick jelly, like water. We’re soft corals, swaying. I love the breathing, the stretching. Like getting high without having to be zonked.

Last night I dreamed I was sleeping by the ocean, with breadfruit trees low overhead. And I awoke in a land of late winter. Bare trees, gray skies.

The thought of taking up the blog again seemed onerous on my first couple of jet-lagged days back. Why not do nothing? But I need some activity other than writing. So I’ve begun parceling out my Micronesia notes and photos. They’ll last through maybe ten chunks.

March 15, 2005. Back to Susan Protter.

I need to get a deal for Mathematicians in Love pretty soon. It’s about half done.

I talked to a woman agent about representing this novel for me, and she wasn’t interested. She was like, “Tor is the only publisher open to diverse, idiosyncratic non-formula SF, so you might as well just sell it to them as usual. What I’m about is working with beginning writers and helping them craft commercial proposals. And you don’t fit into that mold.”

She suggested I try some guy at a big agency, so I asked around about his contact info, and by the time I called him, he knew I was looking for him. SF publishing is a small world. I had to goad myself to call the guy—I’m shy about these things. When we finally talked, I explained that I’d like to try for a different publisher than Tor. I have this perennial hope of doing the Vonnegut or Phil Dick thing and escaping the SF ghetto.

The guy says, “I’ll look at it, and if I think it’s just going to be a matter of selling it to Tor or John Oakes, then you might as well go on with Susan Protter. But I know some freakazoid editors at other houses who I might possibly approach. So I’ll look over the proposal and let you know.”

So I waited five days to hear from him, and tried to phone him and he kept not being there, and I was paranoid and imagining that I sensed condescension from his secretary. I was feeling myself once again to be an outsider, a pest, a reject. So I wrote the guy that if he didn’t have any special plan to offer, I’d go back to Susan, and he wrote back, maybe a little miffed at my impatience: “I read the proposal but don’t think it’s likely I could break it out for you in a big way, so fine.”

So I went back to La Protter, like crawling back to an abandoned lover, sigh, and she was agreeable to agenting me again, although quick to get in some digs, like, “I don’t know how your wife puts up with you.” Why does everyone say that?

Susan tells me that she plans never to retire, plans to eventually move out of her office and work out of her home. And as long as she won’t retire, another agent won’t really want me because Susan has these agency-clauses in my old book contracts saying that she has the right to represent those old books forever.

Actually, maybe even if I did have control of my old books, the other agents wouldn’t want me either. Publishers aren’t in fact interested in reprinting my old books, even though I like to fantasize that someday, someday, they will be. Me and Phil Dick, right?

At least Susan answers the phone when I call her. And she’s honest, and she’s on my side. And she noodges the editors as much or more than she noodges me.

But I do feel kind of trapped and let down. Like a boxer owned by the mob, hemmed in by the agents and promoters. Like Elvis with Colonel Parker.

But that’s reality. Be your own right size, Ru. Now I just hope that Tor is actually willing to buy Mathematicians in Love.

Relative to the novel, I recently got a big insight about this other world called La Hampa where my characters are going. I’d been wondering what it was like there. I didn’t have a mental image at all. But then I suddenly realized that, duh, La Hampa is like Micronesia!

I totally see a scene in Jellyfish Lake.

March 16, 2005. Guest of Honor Gig.

So here I am in an airplane again, flying to ICFA (International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts) near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’m the Guest of Honor, and the theme of the conference is my own pet style: transrealism.

I have a good speech written up for my keynote talk, not that I’ll read it. It’s called “Seed the Gnarl.” I have the ideas clear in my mind. And I made a PowerPoint for a more technical, science-type version of the talk that I’ll be giving as well.

I warmed up for this gig a couple of weeks ago by organizing a Transrealism panel at a small local SF con, Potlatch. I had John Shirley, Michael Blumlein, Richard Kadrey, and Terry Bisson on the panel with me, also an arty local guy Loren Means, and the transgender Charlie Jane Anders who publishes Other magazine and is working on a novel. At the panel, a writer called Howard Hendrix quoted a good line from the afterword of Phil Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, “I’m not in this novel, I am the novel.”

That’s kind of how I feel about Mathematicians in Love. Like I’m graduating to a less personal form of transrealism.

So onward to the con in Florida. I foresee intensely air-conditioned rooms with no windows—and with English professors giving talks about writers I’m completely uninterested in.

Really, I’m not that much of an SF reader. Sheckley, Dick, the cyberpunks—that’s about it. Forget the rest of them. I never go out and buy an SF book, and when I do, I find them unreadable. Dhalgren? China Mieville? Iain Banks? Can’t do it. Only William Gibson seems easy to read anymore. There’s this essential lack of lightness and wit in everyone else.

I’ve been a Guest of Honor two times before—at BayCon in San Jose, and at ReaderCon near Boston—and it’s not necessarily a big adulation session. Indeed at those last two gigs, it seemed like the vast majority of the people there hadn’t read any of my books. Typically a few people will have some faint memory of my story in Bruce Sterling’s twenty-year-old Mirrorshades anthology. And that’s about it. Yes, people do come up to me with stacks of my books to sign, but these people are used-book-dealers.

Why is it that the SF fans have so firmly and permanently banded against me? They must have some preconception about what I write. No matter what kind of book I turn out, they stand sturdily together, shoulder to shoulder, eyes averted, stubbornly ignoring my latest effusion. Anything that’s by Rudy Rucker makes them skittish and suspicious.

What is wrong with those stubborn, clannish people? Frek and the Elixir is exactly the kind of book they want, for heaven’s sake, it’s just like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or The Golden Compass! Frek is their piece of cake. And they won’t even look at it. One of the greatest books of my career. But Nebula or Hugo nominations—forget it.

The fans think I combine two things that put them off—I’m too demotic and too intellectual. Too vulgar and too sophisticated. Too dirty and too hard.

They think they’ve got my number—because of my Ware novels. Sex, drugs, sniggering nihilism. Cyberpunk. At some point I got tired of pushing that so hard. I cleaned up and began playing the avuncular sage. But I could still write about crazy druggies. If anyone wants. Like Pat Boone cutting a heavy metal record. Come to think of it, Mathematicians in Love is the closest I’ve come to cyberpunk in awhile.

With all this in my mind, I’m half-tempted to confront the audience at my keynote speech. Yelling angrily from the podium, “How many of you have read one of my novels? Okay, why not? You over there, tell me why not. And you, the one smiling, what’s your excuse?”

What a fucking waste of time to be taking this trip. Why am I doing this?

Better question: Why am I working myself up over nothing? Instead of being grateful I’m doing this trip. Is it that I’m anxious about my talk?

March 22, 2005. The Con. 59th Birthday. Proposal.

The con went quite well. As it turned out there were in fact lots of people there who’d read my work, and many of them said nice things. One guy, John Roche, even presented a paper about me and my Beat influences. Roche is a poet who teaches in Rochester. His wife just left him. He was sad. I took him for a walk on the Dania Beach Pier near the con site. Comfortable to hang out.

A man named Rob Latham gave the best intro I’ve ever had for my keynote speech. And he said exactly what I’d been kvetching to myself: “You guys need to take Rucker seriously. His writing is important.” I met a number of people who seemed to understand what I’ve been up to all along. And Charlie Brown finally interviewed me for Locus, probably with a picture on the cover. And I met this great older writer, Brian Aldiss, aged 80. We hit it off right away, which was nice.

The adulation got to the point where it was hard to walk down a hall. I’d be waylaid and talked to, or given books to sign. A nice change from being a bitter loner. I heard some writers talking about sales and advances, and realized that I’m in fact doing better than a number of people whom I always imagined to be more successful than me. I’ve kept at it for a long time, which makes a difference. It really is good for me to get out and have a more realistic assessment of the publishing scene and of my place in it.

The only bad thing about the con was, as I’d feared, the utterly ruthless air-conditioning in the hotel. And the room windows didn’t open. I made trouble about the comfort of my room, but they couldn’t find me a better one, even though they tried. And then I had a rueful image of myself as habitually spoiling things by being unpleasant when people want to be nice to me.

Like, I always complain when I get a book offer. So often I’m suspicious and bitter. Like a spoiled, wanton child. I gave my Mathematicians in Love proposal to David Hartwell for Tor, and he seemed happy and eager to get it. So why not be pleased if Dave makes a decent offer? Why try and switch agents and publishers? Know your place.

Sylvia flew out to meet me here. Wonderful to see her. To pick her up, I rented a cool, white, retro car like a 1930s coupe—a PT Cruiser. I was wearing shades and a black silk shirt. I introduced her to my new friends at the con, and then we took off on a Florida road trip.

We’re in the Everglades now. We went on a kayak tour today, in the cypress swamp, with cat-tails, and mangrove tunnels. We saw dozens of gators, including a nest with lively little ones.

And today is my 59th birthday. I was thinking this morning how remote the 1940s always seem to me, like some antediluvian epoch. But the Eden of the 1940s was, after all, just another decade.

I’ve been through seven decades now. With Mom in the 1940s, grade school Germany 1950s, high school & college 1960s, marriage & kids 1970s, Lynchburg & cyberpunk 1980s, San Jose State & Autodesk 1990s, writer & retiree 2000s. If I achieve my goal of living to eighty-four, which is twenty-five years from now, I’ll make through the ’10s, ’20s, and into the ’30s, thus hitting all the possible decades, ’00s through ’90s!

Big news today: our son Rudy asked Penny Thomas to marry him. Sylvia and I like Penny a lot. We’re very happy. We’d been waiting for this, and getting impatient, as geezers do, and Sylvia had been joking, “If Rudy won’t ask Penny to marry him, I’ll ask her myself!”

So things are moving on the third-generational front. Georgia’s expecting a baby in July, and Rudy’s getting married!

Life moves on.

April 14, 2005. Science Article. Against Quantum Mechanics

After I spoke on my Wolframite theory-of-computation ideas at that con last month, Sheila Williams of Asimov’s SF magazine asked for a science article. So I spent the last two days cobbling together a piece called “Adventures in Gnarly Computation.” It quotes generously from my Lifebox tome and from my con speech—which I titled, “Seek the Gnarl.”

“I’m honing my message,” as George W. Bush likes to say.

Writing the Asimov’s essay crystallized some philosophical things that I’d lost sight of—even if the article was only for an SF magazine.

In that vein, I think of the sentence that the nutty narrator of my short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” uses to begin his tale: “By rights, this should have been an important scientific paper…not a thrilling wonder tale in some lurid, mass-produced edition.”

With all my science ideas fresh in my mind, I’ve been rethinking the science in my novel-in-progress Mathematicians in Love. And I did a bunch of fixes.

In particular, I pretty much removed all the references to quantum mechanics. Doing this, I felt like these two guys who’ve been working this week on the carport under the deck of our house. The side walls and some of the beams were rotted out—so the workers ripped out the crumbling sections and put in solid new pressure-treated wood. That’s analogous to removing the wifty mystery-mongering of quantum mechanics.

I laid all that useless, rotten crap out in the driveway, and it’s waiting for a pickup truck to haul it to the dump where it belongs.

When I do get stuck advocating the ideas of quantum mechanics, I feel like a disenfranchised former land-owner singing the praises of Stalin. Or like an atheist teaching Sunday school. Or like a grad student hopelessly asking academic mandarins for a teaching job.

I always chuckle over my old mentor Martin Gardner’s line: “Quantum mechanics ruins everything.”

Of course one of these days I will get to the point of writing a quantum mechanics story. But it’s not worming its way into Mathematicians in Love. Gnarly cellular automata can generate all the strangeness that I need.

April 21, 2005. Castle Rock. Jellyfish.

Today I wanted some time to myself, also to be away from the ongoing repair work on our house. I went hiking alone at Castle Rock park for a day, which was great.

I got kind of lost, and the hike ended up having more phases than I’d expected. I went off course and ended up at the base of the Castle Rock Falls, deep in a canyon—a spot I wouldn’t normally have tried to hike into. But there I was.

I drew a moral from this: the landscape’s actual topography controls the course of an excursion. The advance plans fade away. A hike has its own agenda. Like the writing of a novel.

While I was walking, and drinking in the beauty, I became aware of a certain familiar thought rhythm: “This is perfect—now what?” I always have these desire-tendrils pushing out—like, desires for sweets, cigarettes, booze, travel, change.

Yet when I’m at a perfect spot, like perched on a boulder in the April woods, any change is gonna be a step down. That old slogan: Be here now.

I posted some pictures from my fellow Palau diver Safia Chen on my blog. They show me underwater in the jellies of Jellyfish Lake. And in the post I was talking about some of my new ideas for Mathematicians in Love.

I have this faint superstition that it’s not a good thing to talk about my novel plans on my blog—like it could be a jinx—but I keep doing it anyway. Like a sex offender unable to stop exposing himself.

Speaking of which, the other night I dreamed I was wearing lipstick, and that I had artificial breasts like a she-male, and that I was roller-skating naked around San Francisco with a growing sense of sexual excitement. Roller Girl! And then, in my dream, I got embarrassed and wanted to hide.

Maybe the dream stood for blogging.

I was at yoga class with my teacher Jan Hutchins the other day, and at the end of class when I’m lying on my back in the Savasana or corpse pose, Jan comes over and leans down and starts pushing on my breastbone in this very precise way, working his finger tips down towards my heart center. It feels good.

I think of a line that I used in, I think, my Freeware novel, when a character puts a Happy Cloak onto my character Willy’s neck. “He smiled to feel the hair-thin tendrils sink into his spine.”

And I think of a jellyfish-god sinking similar tendrils into my character Bela’s flesh in a lake, in La Hampa, in Mathematicians in Love.

April 24, 2005. Spend a Night in San Francisco.

On Friday I put Sylvia on the plane to visit Georgia for her baby shower in New York, and then I went up to San Francisco.

Whenever I’m in San Francisco, I like it so much. The buildings are interesting, but not too tall. You can see the sky. The people are different, and many of them look like people I’d like to talk to. In Los Gatos I mostly don’t feel that—instead I have that interloper feeling that I get among squares and straights.

In the afternoon I hung around North Beach by myself—I was at Caffe Trieste for an hour or two, working on Mathematicians in Love notes on my laptop. I always think that if I lived in San Francisco, I’d come to Caffe Trieste to work. It’s crawling with weirdoes, and very colorful. But maybe it’s a bit draining to continually have tourists flowing past. Maybe if I lived in San Francisco, I imagine I’d find non-touristed hangouts.

I think I’ve mentioned that Mathematicians in Love has a big scene at this place in Chinatown called the Tang Fat Hotel. Friday I walked over to the Tang Fat Hotel to check it out. I’d just written a scene where a giant flying cone shell from another dimension appears in a Tang Fat bedroom, so it felt very exciting to be there.

The Tang Fat has a locked glass door on the street, with stairs leading up. I was scared to take the stairs to the second floor—even though three five-foot-tall old women went in while I was standing there. I could have pushed in after them. I did try to ask the women a question, but they gave no sign of hearing me. Like I wasn’t even there. A cone shell from another dimension. The excitement all in my head.

Friday night I went to a party with Rudy and Penny at one of their friends’ apartments. It was fun hanging around with the young people. Rudy’s friends have always tolerated me pretty well. Great to see them close up, their clothes. Hear them talk.

It was a birthday party for a girl named August. After she blew out the candles she said, “That’s the second-longest blow-job I ever gave.”

And another girl goes, “You said that last year.”

I told August she had nice boots, she said, “Oh, these?” Mock self-deprecation.

A cheerful guy with a boyish face, long hair, and a watch cap was smoking pot. He had a glass pipe. After smoking a bowl, he coughed for several minutes, but then he said the stuff was “smooth.”

The whole group walked over to Delirium, a bar on 16th Street off Valencia. So many tattooed women there, it was impressive. Like—slender, fit, classy, blonde girls with calm, beautiful faces, and their arms are fully covered with ink. Most of the people were in their thirties. I was the only sixty-year-old in sight. The fly on the wall.

Penny is a wild and lively dancer. “It’s hard keeping up with her,” said Rudy, happy about it.

One of my fave Ramones songs was playing, “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” I was standing next to Mark, an artist who spent two years making a full-size replica of the Rube-Goldberg-style Mousetrap game. Sylvia and I saw it demoed on Halloween. I told Mark that I took Rudy to see the Ramones at a club in Santa Clara when he was in the ninth or tenth grade.

“You’re a great Dad,” said Mark, and I was glad.

I took Rudy and the other kids to see the Ramones several times. One of those nightclub visits was the first time Rudy ever saw me smoke pot—me having a joint across the room from him hoping he wouldn’t notice. A long time ago.

Friday night I slept at Rudy’s apartment. Rudy himself slept at Penny’s. At 6 am Rudy’s 150 pound dog Slug wanted to get in bed with me. I didn’t let him. He’s a cute dog though.

I was going to leave San Francisco after breakfast Saturday, wanting to get back into my work-harness, but Rudy seemed touchingly eager for me to stay. I always expect him to want to get rid of me, which is how I mostly tended to feel about my own parents. But Rudy’s not like that. Maybe I’m easier to be around than my parents were. Or maybe it’s the particular stages that Rudy and I are at just now.

We watched a video about the band Metallica that I’d brought along, figuring it would be up his alley, Some Kind of Monster. It was interesting, and now I finally get the band, which I never did when Rudy was into them in his early college years.

And then we went with Penny and Rudy’s friend Rafael to a free music concert in a park in the southern part of San Francisco, McLaren Park. I’d never been there, it has wooded hills with great views of the city and the bay. We came to an old-school psychedelic concert poster saying “Mindzap” in puffy letters. Free pot/hash brownies at the entrance. Rafael ate one. They had a giant fake joint with a cloud of dry-ice smoke.

The bands were awful, but in original ways. Weed Wolf: a girl who couldn’t sing, a girl who couldn’t play the accordion, and a guy playing a Kmart keyboard. They wore animal masks and ran their sounds through a distortion engine.

The next bunch performed a rap about the Dungeons and Dragons game. And then came an acoustic group that played a little like the old Incredible String Band. They ended their set with a series of Om chants.

Only about a hundred people there. We sat up on the grassy slope of the amphitheater, enjoying the clouds and sun. I asked Rafael if he was high. Just like the good old days. It reminded me of a Golden Gate Park music festival—also sparsely attended and low-key—that Sylvia and I attended when we were briefly in town in 1968.

It was relaxing to be at Mindzap, lolling with Rudy, Rafael and Penny. And me, for once, not compulsively doing anything—e.g., not typing into my laptop as I am right now, busy at 9:30 am on a Sunday morning, not a moment to lose!

Rudy has a nice diffuse style of living, does easy relaxing things, doesn’t stress. A role model for me. I really meant that in Frek and the Elixir when I had Frek’s father tell him, “I need you more than you need me.”

May 4, 2005. Elena’s Soul.

Our neighbor Elena Vialo died two and a half weeks ago. She was seventy, she had cancer. Sylvia and I saw her the day before she died. Her mouth was downcurved, and she was fairly unresponsive. Gray-skinned. Even if you haven’t seen many people dying, when you see it happening, you deep down know what it is. Needing some sense of ceremony, we read some poems to Elena from a book by Jelaluddin Rumi that was at hand. My favorite of these was “Say I Am You.” It seemed as if Elena was listening to it, digging it. But she was too spaced out, or too far down the tunnel, to talk back to us. Starting that final trip alone:

Say I Am You

by Jelaluddin Rumi

I am dust particles in sunlight,

I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.

To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,

and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a grove,

and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,

I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.

Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,

a spark of stone, a flickering

in metal. Both candle,

and the moth crazy around it.

Rose, and the nightingale

lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,

the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,

and the falling away. What is,

and what isn’t. You who know

Jelaluddin, You the one

in all, say who

I am. Say I

am You.

That night I woke up and puked around 4 am. I never do that. The phone rang at five, with nobody at the other end. And when we got up for the day, a neighbor came over and told us that Elena had died in the night.

We visited twice with her husband Gunnar at her house that day, Elena’s body stiff and gray right there on the rented hospital bed in the living room. Her eyes and mouth open. Deader than hell, dead as a doornail, stone cold dead. I read “Say I Am You” aloud another time, saying “Elena” instead of “Jelaluddin.” And now, reading it over to myself, I say “Rudy.” Tearful, beautiful, awesome poem.

The evening of the day that Elena died, Sylvia turned on one of her computers, which is coupled to an ink-jet printer that she rarely uses. And this one time, as the system powered up, the printer unexpectedly kicked into life and printed out a single sheet of paper.

And on the paper was a single heart symbol. Like a last message from Elena.



Do I really think that her spirit left her body, and then hung around for awhile and gave us this message? Not exactly. But I do think that our universe is patterned like a novel, with synchronistic and meaningful correspondences built in. By saying this, what I’m really doing, of course, is holding up my little magic talisman of science against the yawning uncertainties of the spirit world. Seeing that heart gave me goose bumps.

The next night I dreamed I saw Elena. We were out for a walk, and she fell into step with us and I was surprised because she was dead.

I had the same dream again about a week later.

And the day after that, which was yesterday, Sylvia and I went to her funeral at the Mount Madonna Center above Watsonville, California. It was a long Vedic ceremony, held outdoors by a waterfall. I sat cross-legged on the ground.

The man running the ceremony said we should think of Elena’s soul as leaving her body and flying south. It seems like funeral ceremonies always place emphasis on getting the soul to leave. I can see wanting to do that.

I was kind of tranced-out and sleepy in my cross-legged position in the bright sun, and I got into the meditation. I imagined leaving my body and following Elena’s soul.

We passed through Mexico. It was mellow there: the food, the slack, the colors, the heat, the beer and marijuana, the friendly Mexicans, the women. We traveled along the length of South America, like in the movie of Che’s Motorcycle Diaries that Elena liked so much. And down at the tip of South America, we hopped over to Antarctica. We drifted past Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness and entered the hole to the Hollow Earth. It felt so real.

I was very drained and tired for the rest of the day, after taking such a long spirit-journey with Elena’s departing soul.

It’s hard to believe she’s really gone.

More than ever, I understand that I, too, will die. Finally I start to see death as natural, as an organic part of life. Not some mysterioso Grim Reaper figure doing a magic trick. Just a human body growing cold and stiff.

May 18, 2005. Selling Mathematicians in Love. Big Sur.

David Hartwell called Susan Protter, and he’s offering me a relatively low advance for Mathematicians in Love. Now he’s started saying that Tor is taking a bath on Frek and the Elixir, which breaks my heart. But maybe he’s just saying that to drive down the advance.

Should I be upset that I’m with Susan and Tor again? I dunno. I have a feeling another agent couldn’t do any better on selling this.

Fear, fear, fear. In yoga class today they were talking about letting go of fear. Fear is about the future. Here I am today, and today everything is fine. I’m finishing Mathematicians in Love, and someone’s going to buy it and publish it.

Susan Protter called me back. She says Dave Hartwell went to Tom Doherty, the owner of Tor, and he begged for more money as if he needed a kidney transplant for his dying mother (as Susan put it) and Doherty was like, “Oh, all right, offer Rudy a little more.” So we inched up past the $10,000 advance level.

We’ll take it. Finish the book and mail it in. And then write another.

A couple of days later, I went alone to Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur. It was good to be there, good to know I had the Tor deal. Everyone I saw on Pfeiffer Beach was happy, not a little happy, but a lot happy. That’s Sur.

I was thinking about the ending for Mathematicians in Love, and I pretty much figured it out. I drew a diagram in the sand, a table with rows and columns. It was fun to be using so transient a medium, although I also knew I would photograph the table—and probably go on to blog the photo.

Getting the offer from Tor has really energized me.

On the beach, I even saw what looked like my novel’s characters Paul, Bela and Alma—going out into the surf. In the usual nature of magical apparitions, they disappeared after two or three minutes—that is, they weren’t there when I looked again.

At home, I’ve been working on a painting based on that dive I did in Jellyfish Lake in Micronesia. My painting shows my Mathematicians in Love character Bela meeting a giant jellyfish who’s the god of our world. The giant jellyfish does a complete rewrite of our world’s history once a week. The Great Author.

July 5, 2005. Going to See Georgia’s Baby.

Georgia is pregnant, and her due date was June 30, 2005. Sylvia was very eager to go be with her, very antsy. Finally Georgia told us she was having contractions, so we pulled the trigger on new plane tickets and room reservations, and we flew out.

As soon as we landed in New York, we got a text message that Georgia had entered the hospital, and on July 5, 2005, we went to see her and little Althea Pauline Lasseter. Georgia glowing, her husband Courtney exuberant, the very picture of happy young parents. The Holy Family. They were glad to see us. Georgia had a long, hard labor, but came through in good shape.

By now I’ve held the baby quite a bit. She’s no bigger than a fat cat or a rabbit, seven and a half pounds, respectable for a newborn, yes, but really a tiny person to hold.

Each day she unfolds a bit more, our tight-closed new rosebud, each day she looks around and sees more clearly, even fastening on my face with her eyes today. She doesn’t know to smile yet, and her motions are fairly random. She stretches her arms and legs alternately when lying on her diaper table. When crooked in my arm, she turns towards my chest and begins rooting for a nipple.

Today Georgia had already nursed Althea, and the baby still wanted to root, so I let her suck my finger, like I used to do with our three. It felt cozy. When the baby cries—which isn’t all that often so far—she starts with the same “word” our three always used: “LA! Llla!”

The tiny face. Her eyes are nearly along the equator of her head. When she’s waking up, she makes so many funny faces, moving her mouth around randomly, making it big and small, our kids used to do that—we called it “the wake-up act.” When I hold Althea, I feel as if light is streaming out of her and into my chest, warming my heart.

I keep marveling at how this Georgia-like child emerged from Georgia who emerged from Sylvia. Women are like onions, or like nested Russian dolls, with layers inside layers. We men are dead-end spurs in the tree of life.

I was singing to the baby today, which was fun. For a minute she noticed, little Althea. Though she quickly reverted to rooting. That’s job #1 for her in these early weeks. Eat!

I love her. It’s such a tender feeling to hold the baby. Pure light and love. A new life. For me, it’s like being back with baby Georgia. And it’s lovely to see Georgia so happy and excited.

Sylvia and I have been riding the subway a lot—we’re sleeping in Manhattan, and Georgia lives in Queens. Georgia says that you rarely see the same people twice on the subway. New York is such a big city, that even if you take the same train at the same time, you’re likely to see completely different people. Each carful is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I recently read a book of Rudy Jr.’s about the so-called mole people who live in subway tunnels. And today I was staring out of the subway window, wondering if one of the mole people might appear in a concrete niche like a grimy statue of a saint, or like those brangg-buzz, jump-up figures that scared me so much in the little Haunted House ride at the Cincinnati Zoo in the third grade, 1952, more than fifty years ago.

It’s interesting on the subway rides to see the different races at their ease, the Indians, Chinese, Middle-Easterners and blacks. Socializing among themselves, everyone of a rough and democratic equality. And how very white some of the Queens women are. I glimpsed a nice tableau of three Queens girls standing in the red light of a Thrift Store sign of a Saturday night, very perfectly Hopperesque.

Georgia says that New York is in a sense very rich in nature—provided that you view humans as part of the natural world. Being in the subway is like diving on a tropical reef, with its diverse creatures.

I saw my editors and my agent. John Oakes was encouraging but somewhat remote, and definitely not wanting to discuss my next book, whatever that might be. I think he first wants to gauge the success of the Lifebox tome. David Hartwell likes the idea of a Frek sequel, and I can see doing that. Yet again he showed me the numbers on Frek and the Elixir and on the Bruegel book As Above, So Below. And now Frek is doing a lot better than it was before. Dave says the book has legs.

But the Bruegel book only sold 1,500 in the paperback edition, which is terrible. So I won’t be doing a historical novel about Bosch after all. I miss that era, like around 1600 in the Lowlands, and Bosch would be a way to return. I could of course create a science-fictional world that touches on that era. Maybe something involving time travel.

I went to see Susan Protter in person for the first time since I rehired her as my agent. It felt nice. We sparred a little, but it was friendly and comfortable. I’m used to her, she’s good at what she does, and there’s no point in blaming her for the so-so state of my career. It is what it is.

Sylvia and I have longed so much to have grandchildren that I don’t really feel surprised at attaining this state. It’s like, “About time!” I was already used to the idea. So I don’t suddenly feel older. In some ways, Sylvia and I are still young.

“Look at granny run run—grandpa’s gettin’ serious.”

On the last morning here, I went to a recovery group meeting. Always such great characters. A skinny twenty-five-year old talking rapid mumbling New Yorkese—griping about a woman waking him up on the bus, “I felt like choking her brains out.” A dark-skinned guy with three kids, and they’re living in a single room: “I have to go outside to get dressed. I’m very gifted, it’s from god, I try and pass my skills on to my kids, from the heart.” A thirty-year-old girl talking about going to a doctor for a checkup—she throws her clothes in a heap in the corner, the woman doctor folds the clothes, touches her on the arm, and says, “You have to stop drinking, there’s a happy person inside you.” A man with the look of Marlon Brando, my age, with stark unhappiness on his face—he says he has depression and a bottle of Paxil in his fridge, but he’s still not quite ready to start taking them. A guy says he had a drug dream: “I was coked up, tied up, and ready to shoot up.” A pretty Puerto Rican girl with the California-girl accent—all the sentence ends damped down and almost swallowed—she said her boyfriend rolled up a blunt yesterday, and she managed not to smoke any of it. My people.

A last visit with Althea today. She’s getting to be more work for Georgia—wants to nurse almost every hour. Crying for more, squirming, uncomfortable in the ninety-degree heat.

Courtney babysat for an hour while Sylvia and I took Georgia out for lunch in a Greek restaurant. She grew tearful and touched over being a mother herself now, out with the parents. She’s walking stiffly, still sore from the delivery. It fills me with such aching sympathy to see my own dear little girl embarking upon the difficult, messy struggle of parenthood. Life’s hard for us all. I’d like somehow to protect my kids from it.

I remember years ago Pop said something like this about me. He wrote a poem about wanting to shelter me from the world as if covering me with a blanket. For some reason I was angered by the poem. Poor old Pop. I was a difficult son.

July 28, 2005. Mathematicians In Love is Done.

I finished writing the first draft of Mathematicians in Love today, speeding up the ending, eager to polish it off. To do it fast, I pasted in my outlines for the final scenes, then fleshed them out in place. It came out good.

And now I’ll print off a copy and send it to David Hartwell. And I’ll do a revise at the end of August when we get back from this trip to Europe that we’ve planned.

I read the book’s ending to Sylvia, and it made me cry.

Geneva and Hungary.

August 1, 2005. Writing by Hand.

We’re on the plane to visit Sylvia’s brother Henry and Sylvia’s stepmother Adèle in Geneva, then to go to Budapest to put some of her father’s ashes into the family crypt, and to scatter the rest of them into the Danube. These will be like extra funerals. Recall that we were back in Geneva for Arpad’s real funeral in September.

I mailed Mathematicians in Love to Tor on Friday, and on Saturday the hard drive on my laptop died. So now I’m writing in an analog notebook, spiral-bound. It cost 33¢ for a 70-pager at Walgreen’s, a real deal. My pen is my favorite kind that I’ve been using for the last few years—a Pilot P-700 fine gel roller, with a nib that looks like a hypodermic. That’s my word-processing system right now, pen and notebook. No battery to charge, easy file searches, water-resistant, crash-proof, low theft risk, instant off and on.

I had been wondering if I could physically write by hand anymore. It’s coming out a little jerky in this bouncing, jouncing, yawing and pitching plane. (Not much roll.) Writing by hand, the peak words per minute rate is lower. I love the keyboard for my bursts and effusions—when I’m, like, chording my thoughts. I don’t correct the hand-written text quite so readily, although, as time goes by, I do go back over my paper pages—penning in ballooned addenda, errata, and emenda (that is, emendations). And back home, I’ll type up these notes, word hoarder that I am. And even if I didn’t do that, the act of writing would remain pleasurable. Writing is an end in itself, not only a means to an end. I am a graphomaniac. Le graphomane.

In the plane, as we wait for takeoff, the video screens soothe us with images of gnarly computations: clouds, waterfalls, reflective ripples, flocks of birds. Paradoxically, once we’re in the air and in a position to look at gnarly soothing nature on our own, the steward requests that everyone close their window shades so as to bring into greater prominence the video screens, which begin showing CBS reruns. We’re to look at evil, farty consensus-reality consumerist propaganda instead of the gorgeous clouds right outside our winged tin-can. Ain’t it awful.

Nap time.

I’m already starting to wonder what book to write next. Right after finishing an SF novel, I feel reluctant to start another one. Reluctant to cast still more pearls before the swine. Before the very same swine, that is.

I like the idea of a memoir. Hell, I’ll be sixty this year. I don’t want to wait too long to write my memoir, as my authorial powers will decline, perhaps sharply, in the decade-and-a-half to come. I’ll be moving through the December of my life and into January—recall my theory that a human life runs from a birth in “March” to a death in “February.”

Today I was reminiscing about going camping with my friend Niles Schoening the summer after we graduated from high school. Our last outing. We didn’t even have any beer along. Splashing in the shallow, rocky Kentucky streams near Clifton Forge. Niles said I was splashing “with abandon.” It’s pleasant to bathe in the old memories, to gaze back across the long, rolling landscape of my life. I’ve never really written about my early childhood memories.

A lot of memoirs have an angle, a theme. What could I use? Witness to history, that is, birth of the internet age in Silicon Valley. Addiction and recovery. Education of a writer. Spiritual quest.

Possibly I might create a memoir as a kind of paste-up job. That is, I could interleave journal extracts, newly written memoir segments, photos, and essays. The danger is that it ends up half a million words long. Hard to print a book that long, and there’s not yet a reasonable channel for selling it as an electronic file.

It’s getting light over the Atlantic. We’re flying into Europe’s dawn. I didn’t really sleep. Near the end of a long airplane trip, I always think, “This is unbearable, I’ll never do this again.” But staying at home can feel unbearable too.

August 2, 2005. Rainy Day.

We’re here in Geneva and it’s raining. Landing here, I always remember coming to Geneva with my parents to marry Sylvia. Excited and proud. Pop had a drink of whiskey right before we landed. The whiskey was in a glass test-tube with a clip bracket like a pen, and he had it in his inside coat pocket. One of his parishioners had given it to him—as a joke, I’d thought—but here was Pop drinking it, nervous I guess, with my mother remonstrating, “Really, Ruck.” I thought nothing of it at the time. I thought it was cute.

Sylvia was sorting through old letters today. There was one written to her parents by me in grad school when Georgia was a baby. My tone in the letter was so fake—the kind of eager-to-please bullshit that a young man writes to his in-laws. Seeing it gives me sympathy for my own son-in-law.

Looking at these mounds of old papers really makes me think twice about organizing my old scraps and writing a memoir. Why bother? Maybe it’s better, after all, to fabulate, to entertain, to spin the dross of reality into the cotton-candy of fantastic tales.

August 3, 2005. Sore Back.

My back is unbelievably sore in the upper right quadrant and I’m doing yoga on the lawn as I write these notes, lying on a towel in my red Palau T-shirt and black bathing trunks. Also reading Charles Stross’s Accelerando novel, and writing notes in the margins. The best SF I’ve read in years.

I wonder if handwriting aggravates my chronic upper-right-back soreness. Usually I imagine it’s caused by using my right hand so much on the keyboard—for the arrow keys and so on. Or maybe the pain is from having spent about fifteen hours in planes—and from being at my inlaws.

If it hurts to write—then what? Yoga. Walking. Reading. Sightseeing. For today, I’m content to lie on a towel in the back yard. It’s so nice to be barefoot after the plane.

August 4, 2005. Woman in Geneva.

It’s raining linden blossoms on me in a cafe in the park-like campus of the University of Geneva, across a traffic circle from the opera house. A lovely mild blue-sky day, people of all ages here at 10:30 am, drinking tea, coffee, beer. I just ate a croissant with Art-Deco-style dough folds.

I saw an interesting woman on the main shopping street of Geneva. She was dressed in a chartreuse Middle-Eastern-type robe, hooded like a burnoose, with a veil over her face, lily-white with wisps of red-blonde. She held a wooden flute, and she stood motionless—the idea being that if you toss a coin into her begging-bowl she’ll come to life and maybe play the flute.

Later on a back street I see her walking along in front of me. In a novelistic world she’d be in fact tailing me in this fashion—by getting in front of me. I shoot a photo of her from behind, and then I step up my pace to pass her and get a good look at her. She goes up some stone steps to a little square where a bum is sitting on a bench with a battered guitar. She seems to know him, and she stops by him to talk. Her veil is off now, her skin is oily and unwashed, her lips are full and ripe. She’s unimaginably beautiful, a child of privilege who’s walking on the wild side. A hash-smoker, no doubt.

I imagine a character in one of my novels having this encounter. He strikes up a friendship with the girl and the man—their names are Ondine and Klaas. Or, no, maybe Nektar and Ond, like the people in this anti-nanomachine story that I’ve been thinking about. It’s always good to encounter my characters on the street.

August 7, 2005. Pécs, Hungary.

In about a week, we’ll all gather in Budapest for a ceremony commemorating Sylvia’s father. But Sylvia and I decided to fly to Budapest early and to rent a car there to take a little tour of Hungary—something she’s always wanted to do.

So yesterday we two drove from Budapest to Pécs, a city in the south of Hungary. Sylvia was incredibly excited, even tearful, when we got on the road in our car. We’re on the loose in Hungary at last.

The word Pécs makes me think of “peck,” which relates (in my head) to the many geese they raise here. Sylvia ate some great goose-liver last night. We had a good lunch today as well: those handmade little knöpfli dumplings with a creamy meat stew. The meals are cheap in the Hungarian boonies. All that we two can eat at a high-end restaurant is under thirty dollars.

We saw a fascinating museum devoted to the work of Pécs native Tivadar Csontváry. Like Ensor, also a bit fauve. A self-taught artist, a pharmacist by trade. Amazing work, some of it, with great scumbling, that is, lines of contrasting color lightly brushed over other colors. The guy was nuts, they say. I’m sorry to leave his pictures. A new mind to twink. The buildings in Pécs are superb, like crumbling cakes, coated with 19th century ornamentation and painted yellow, pink, and pistachio.

We’d expected hot weather, but it’s cold and rainy, and we have to work to put together warm outfits. Went into the Matrix Internet Cafe to plug in. It’s always relaxing to hit an internet cafe in Europe.

August 8, 2005. Roadtripping Southern Hungary.

There was one more little street in Pécs I wanted to walk down, but at this point we were in a hurry to get on the road and we didn’t stop. Now I’m haunted, ever-so-slightly, by that unvisited corner of warm old buildings I didn’t fully see.

Today’s itinerary: Pécs, Mohács, Nagybaracska, Baja, Kalocsa, Kecskemét.

Nagybaracsk = big peach = Sylvia. Glimpsed through the half-open bathroom door this morning, happy, singing.

The drive was fun, we got into the old road-trip rhythm. We broke for a rest in little Mohács on the narrow Danube, twelve kilometers north of the Croatian border. The streets had small, long-branched, leafy shade trees, maybe elms. A bearded squeegee guy haunted the parking lot, looking like a peddler from a fairy tale. They had pay toilets under the lot, guarded by a woman in a booth, collecting fifty forints per visit (about twenty-five cents).

None of the Hungarian ads or street signs is remotely legible to me. They’re gibberish with a thick paprika of accents, like the Vietnamese newspapers in San Jose. Or like an optometrist’s eye-chart, with evenly spaced random symbols. Zero pattern-recognition, so everything has to be sounded out—but even then there’s no cognates.

We got a rickety little ferry across the Danube at Mohács—I was proud that I could buy the tickets in Hungarian. I recalled riding a ferry across the Ohio River when I was four or five—on that ride I was awed and a little frightened. This ferry on the Danube was little more than a barge, and the ride didn’t seem long enough, not much more than a hundred yards.

We saw fields of finger-like Hungarian peppers destined to be ground into paprika, and we even visited a paprika museum. They only started using paprika in Hungary in the 1700s. The pepper came here from…Mexico!

We continue eating goose liver nearly every day. You get a huge portion—it’s soft as butter, and pink inside.

In the evening we hit Kecskemét—means goat-walk. They have an amazing Hungarian Art Nouveau museum with, like, Peter Max tiles on it, big Zhabotinsky scrolls. Plus a cathedral with a stained-glass window image of the ultimate, archetypal heart with a knife through it. So dramatic, so Hungarian.

August 9, 2005. To Debrecen.

We drove to Debrecen today, and we’re excited to be here. It’s at the far eastern end of Hungary, almost in Romania or in the Ukraine.

The drives have been idyllic. Country roads, green trees, fields of hay, corn, wheat and paprikas—the hay tidy in rolls. The skies have been pale watery blue with sweet cloud-puffs. Skies like this always remind me of when I was a young man in Heidelberg, learning to write science-fiction novels.

We noticed a lot of kinai bolt (Chinese stores) on the roads. I guess the Iron Curtain years encouraged exchanges with Red China. My Mathematicians in Love character Bela Kis is Hungarian-Chinese. I’m not actually seeing any Kinai on the street here, everyone is exceedingly white. Hungarian natives, with perhaps a few visitors their seven neighboring countries: Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I’m finding that I have better luck speaking German than English here.

The very end of the drive to Debrecen got intense—it was a heavily traveled two-laner with everyone going seventy mph, except for the occasional creeping truck that you were expected to pass. High-speed passing on a two-lane road is an all-but-lost art in most of the U.S.

I’m penning this in the big Calvin Square of Debrecen, at a table in the Gara Cukraszda, a cake and ice-cream shop. “Cukrasz” means “sugar.” The town has a single trolley which tools up and down the main street, Piac Ut, or Market Street.

Plenty of people out and about, although it’s surprisingly cool for August. The enormous yellow two-toned Calvinist church of Debrecen is at the end of the square. Most of the Hungarian churches are painted yellow. As I mentioned before, they love coloring their buildings, like yellow, pink and green.

This far-east region of Hungary is like the Wild West of the U.S. in that they used to have horsemen tending large herds of longhorn gray cows. Their open range is called the puszta. Big beautiful 1910 oil-paintings of horses and cowboys adorn the marble staircase of our grand hotel, Aranyi Bika, or Gold Bull. Huge, open sky. In a way, it’s like being in Billings, Montana.

Always amazing to roll into a burg at the ass-end of nowhere and find it full of people doing their thing. They’re into their soccer team today. Team Debrecen is playing a big-ass game against Manchester, England. It’s being televised on a giant screen set up in Calvin Square on the steps of that big yellow church tonight. We can see the action out of our bedroom window in the hotel, right above the Cukraszda pastry shop. A huge bedroom on the second floor. We have an haut-relief of a puszta longhorn on our bedroom wall.

I had puszta-style gulyasch, or goulash, for supper, with caraway seeds, meat from those very same longhorned, grass-fed, gray cattle, potatoes and dumplings. Unspeakably toothsome. Traditionally, gulyasch is made in an iron kettle hanging from a three-bar metal tripod over a fire. I told the waiter, “Holnap meg gulyasch,” meaning, “Tomorrow more goulash.”

Now it’s 10:30 pm and the freaking soccer game against Manchester is only half over. It’s not a special championship game—the Debrecenites do this for every away-game their team plays. There are a thousand people in the square, and the Hungarian commentary is being broadcast at rock-concert volume.

I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep till midnight.

A minute after writing that, I fell asleep, my head the filling of a pillow sandwich.

August 10, 2005. Touring Debrecen.

I dreamed I didn’t have a book to write and, gasp, it’s true. Strange to be between projects. Just living, instead of spinning the straw of daily life into literary gold.

I sit in a courtyard in Debrecen, a theology college, with dancing pine branches all around.

I compare the old library here to the nanomachine dreams of the extropians. The lovely quiet books, half a millennium old. Idiocy to turn trees into paper, perhaps. Even greater idiocy to turn the paper into nanomachines.

What are the thoughts of the nanomachine clouds? Like emergent cellular automata patterns: gliders and Zhabotinsky scrolls. John Walker: intelligence = memory. The fluttering leaf is forever saying the same things, or so it seems from the outside.

The Deri museum in Debrecen. Very bossy female guards, issuing guilt-provoking entreaties that we visit every room. They’re like aunts nagging you to take another helping of dessert. Age-browned, three-tined wooden pitchforks. The jewel of the museum is three large canvases by Mihály Munkácsy: Christ and Pilate, Ecce Homo, and Golgotha.

Kids at an outdoor restaurant play “Kö, papir, ollo,” meaning “Stone, paper, scissors.”

We enter yet another church. A fat man is just inside the door, inert, like a fish in the shadow of a rock, hanging there. A hunchbacked old man stares at the Virgin and Jesus in a glass case. Perhaps he’s praying for a miracle.

I’m getting more of a sense of how Hungarian Sylvia is.

In Debrecen we went to a handicrafts center, and two women Sylvia’s age were making cut-out felt appliqué items. Sylvia started talking Hungarian with them and they were so interested in her. They kept gently plying her with further questions—fascinated by this California Hungarian. As if she were an exotic, talking, bright-feathered macaw flown in through an open window to perch on the back of a chair.

August 13, 2005. Budapest Burial.

Yesterday we went to the Bogsch family crypt in a Buda graveyard. About twenty Hungarian relatives were there. First we sat in a dark, stone room, open to the air on one side, with two urns on a dais, one holding some of Sylvia’s father Arpad’s ashes, the other holding some of her mother Pauline’s. Sitting on the low platform side by side, the two urns looked macabre, like the bride and groom of a death-wedding.

Although the family crypt’s common headstone is above ground, the crypt proper is in a space below paved ground, accessible via a rectangular hole covered by a heavy concrete slab. The slab had been slid aside on wooden rollers, and a groundskeeper was down in the crypt standing on an aluminum ladder, with his head and arms sticking out of the ground. An undertaker carried over the urns, handing them down to the man on the ladder. A very graphic representation of the passage to the underworld. Passing the remains to Pluto.

The crypt area had lots of little compartments like post-office boxes, each covered by a square plate with someone’s name and dates. Many of the squares had fallen off. The concrete pavement covering the cellar with the more desirable underground crypt-boxes is crumbling and eaten-away. The gravediggers have laid wood planks over one particularly decayed area lest a mourner fall through the gaping, jagged hole. Everything is rotten, moldy, deliquescent, falling apart: an objective correlative of human decay.

And yet the Hungarian relatives were glowing with life, energized by their ongoing life-stories. We talked to them in a nearby inn for quite some time afterwards. A reunion. With Arpad already dead eleven months now, the grief wasn’t so sharp.

Arpad’s wish had been to have the bulk of his ashes cast into the Danube—just as had already been done with most of Pauline’s. So the next day we had stage two of Arpad’s burial. Seven of us boarded a rented boat which motored around the same Margaret Island where, some sixty years ago, Sylvia had been conceived on her father’s three-day leave from the Hungarian army during WW II.

I was worried about the boat pilot hassling us, as I’d heard it’s illegal to throw human remains into the Danube, but I think the pilot was in fact used to these burials, and I’m sure Sylvia’s relatives had tipped him well.

The ashes were in fact white chips of bone, perhaps three pounds’ worth. The bones survive the crematorium fire, and they’re crushed into flakes and chips. It’s horrible to see a human so utterly destroyed. Vernichtet: made into nothing.

Adele, Henry and Sylvia each threw in a handful of ashes. And I took part as well—I emptied out the rest of the bag. But then Sylvia’s niece Stella was upset that she hadn’t had a chance. There were quite a few bone chips on the deck, blown back by the wind. I gathered half a dozen of the bigger ones and gave them to Stella, she cried over them, then threw them in.

I kept seeing further, tinier chips on the deck, some already crushed to powder by our feet and our plastic chairs. I gathered more, and showed them to Aunt Emmi. She made an abrupt tossing gesture. I threw them in too. But there were still more tiny specks of bone on the deck—there was no getting rid of them all. They were ubiquitous.

A melancholy occasion. The wheel of life.

Talking it over with Sylvia later, it lifted our hearts a bit to think of our little granddaughter Althea—the new sprout coming up in the clearing left by the fallen redwood.

The long day wore on. We had a fancy lunch with the core relatives at Gundel, a Budapest institution in the park near the zoo. I made a little speech in Arpad’s honor, me being the only non-blood-relative at the table.

After the boat and before the lunch, Sylvia and I had walked past the statue of the heroes, that is, the nine horsemen who settled Hungary. They rode in from the Caucasus to muscle out the resident Slavs. They have great names: Arpad, Tetény, Ond, Kond, Elöd, Huba, and Tas. Arpad was the leader. The statues have beards, mustaches, long hair. They look like Hells Angels. Sylvia loves them.

A gypsy violinist was playing, I gave him too small a coin, he yelled, “Picsi, kicsi,” meaning “Tiny, little.”

In the late afternoon, Sylvia and I walked by the house where her father grew up. I visualized him running around the corner in shorts, a serious boy with a sharp tongue, a bit shy and spoiled, dutiful, sensitive to beauty, willful, sometimes enjoying a joke.

August 14, 2005. Gellért Baths.

We have a few more days in Budapest. Right now I’m lying on a towel at the Hotel Gellért’s thermal baths and swimming pools. I’m writing in my spiral notebook, planning an SF story that explores the extropian futurology of Charles Stross’s Accelerando. But wait—surf’s up in the Gellért pool! There’s exceedingly many ways to bathe at the Gellért:

• Heated outdoor soaking pool. This one feels a bit like Esalen, where you warm-soak in the sun.
• Large outdoor ocean-wave pool. I dive down to confirm that the water is alternately sucked into, and powered out of, large vents in the wall at the deep end. I love bobbing up and down in the deep end. Chest-high breakers form in the shallows, I even catch some short rides, but mainly stand there grinning, letting the waves splash out from my bod, big-chesting myself against the crests, spraying sparkling drops.
• A 38° C indoor thermal bath for men. Many of the men are nude. Some wear little dick-hiding aprons. I wear a bathing-suit. This is the real heart of the place, the water is naturally sulfured, continually refreshed from underground springs. I stretch and do yoga to my heart’s content. I take my suit off for awhile, then put it back on. Men in pairs and groups are talking Hungarian, the voices echoing off the old-timey tiled barrel vault ceiling. New, hot sulfur-water pours into the pools from gargoyle mouths, I get right under a stream, enjoying the heat on my tension-pained back. The railings around the pool have heavy brass balls on their ends. I crouch and rub my upper back against one of the balls.
• A 50° C steambath—it’s so hot that moving around in it comes alarmingly close to scalding my skin. I theorize that the motion causes me to contact more superheated droplets per second. It’s hard to breathe in here; I can barely see through the fog; it’s perfect.
• The heavy intense stream of the shower next to the thermal bath is like being peed upon by a divine, life-giving elephant.
• The indoor cool-water pool is an Art Nouveau temple, with a sliding roof open to the blue sky. A hot Sunday sun lays a square of gold on the blue water.
• Next to the long indoor cool-water pool is a co-ed, indoor, heated soaking pool. These two pools smell nasty, like chlorine and sweat, not like the outdoor pools or like the healing thermal baths.
• Back outside, I reenter the wave pool when it’s turned on again—seemingly it’s only on for the first ten minutes of every half hour. Again I end up grinning in the shallows, loving the paracomputation of the waves.
• And then I take an outdoor shower.

I went back to the Gellért the next morning and did a steambath and a thermal soak, then paid for a massage. The Hungarian masseur was as casual as a barber. He reminded me of Seymour Moskowitz—a hip, sarcastic college pal of mine. And the massage was wonderful. The guy kneaded me like dough, then sent me off with a friendly “go git ’em, big gaah,” slap on the butt.

August 15, 2005. Sylvia’s Birthplace.

We’re still in Budapest till Wednesday. Our hotel room isn’t a great place to hang out—its large bay window looks out at the opaque, gray-brown Danube, which seems like a river of death just now. The skies are gray, and there’s six busy lanes of traffic at the river’s edge.

But the breakfasts are great: croissants, juicy Hungarian peaches, and scrambled eggs made to order. We eat like geese being fattened for slaughter.

Today Sylvia and I went to the big indoor market building and bought salami, raspberries, and beigli pastry. She keeps talking Hungarian to people. Amazing.

We walked by the hospital where Sylvia was born, and the church where her parents were married. And then we found the house where little Szilvia (her birth-certificate name) lived from ages zero to five. It’s on Szentkirályi Ut across from the T-intersection with Muzeum Ut—Ut means street. Across the street is the little park where Szilvia learned to walk.

Sylvia peeked into her old house’s door and said, “I remember that courtyard.”

Nearby we came upon, of all things, a Frank Zappa Cafe. What a treat. The waiter played the whole Hot Rats album for us. Zappa performed at this cafe once or twice, so they named themselves after him. Big paintings of him on the wall. A block from Sylvia’s birth apartment! So synchronistic.

August 16, 2005. Aunt Emmi’s War Story.

I’m gathering favorite Hungarian words and phrases. Növer = big sister. Cékla = beet. Elefánt haz = Elephant house. Nöi WC = Women’s Room.

In the afternoon we had tea with Sylvia’s Aunt Emmi. She told a story about the war. When the Russians took over Budapest, they were raping all the women. Sylvia’s aunt and Sylvia’s mother made their way from one basement to what they deemed a safer basement, pushing along five children in two baby-carriages—with Sylvia and her brother in the mix. They went through Budapest’s big Calvin Square, and the buildings on each of the square’s four corners were on fire. Dead soldiers and horses lay everywhere. It was winter. Sylvia’s aunt said that later they would go out every day to cut meat from the dead horses. The meat stayed fresh, as the weather was so cold.

“Have you had horse meat?” she asked us then. “It’s good.”

August 19, 2005. Table Talk in Chambèsy.

Now we’re back in the family house in Chambèsy near Geneva, Switzerland. I tend to feel that Sylvia is too nice to her relatives—they wear her down, and then she’s unhappy. But she’s also too nice to me a lot of the time. That’s her sweet nature, and if Sylvia wasn’t way too nice, I, for one, would be in big trouble.

The lengthy family meals are getting to me. I feel like my normally rich and expressive conversation is reduced to handing back and forth some dingy, creased cards with smeared little pictures. Sun swim rain walk castle big dog leaf. My intellectual sallies meet blank, polite faces. My subtler jokes or verbal jeux d’esprit fall on deaf ears or, worse, spark a series of baffled requests for elucidation. My wit dies upon the vivisection table.

Day before yesterday, we spent the entire lunch discussing the differences between the words for “pumpkin” and “squash” in English, French and Hungarian, subtly sniping at each other, never reaching a firm conclusion, and out of propriety forbidding any mention of the salient interesting fact in this area (known to me) that the Hungarian word “tök” means both “pumpkin” and “scrotum,” with “tök jo” meaning something like “hella good.”

Yesterday, Sylvia took us all out for dinner at an expensive Swiss place—me and her, her stepmother, her brother and his wife. At dinner, Sylvia’s stepmother was insisting that a boxed exotic insect that I’d bought for son Rudy at a Geneva flea market wasn’t a beetle—because it doesn’t resemble a June bug. I assured her that there are very many species of beetles.

Taking my courage in hand, I related the well-known and genial anecdote about the celebrated biologist Lord Haldane’s response to the question, “What has your study of Nature taught you about the mind of the Creator?”

The answer: “He is inordinately fond of beetles.”

My brother-in-law impatiently twitched his neck and stared off into a far corner of the restaurant, fuming over some aspect of the staff’s service. My stepmother-in-law folded her face into a polite smile and said, “No, but…”

My sister-in-law scowled in fury and cried, “If there were a god, he should want to commit suicide because of what a mess he made!”

Sitting across from my sister-in-law at that dinner was very stressful. Her buzz-saw voice, her clonic, ugly grimaces. She was telling how, at year’s end when most businesses have holiday dinners for their employees, her self-employed brother likes to reserve a table for six people and then show up alone. And then he pretends that different facets of his fascinating, multifarious, polymathic personality are sitting in the other chairs, and he gives a little commendation/criticism to each of his imaginary alternate selves. My sister-in-law was drinking heavily, and she told the story three times in a row in rapid succession.

By now she’d put me down so many times that I was ready for revenge. After the third recitation, I stared at her stone-faced and said, “I’m surprised they ever let your brother come back into the same restaurant again.” Zing!

This morning I took a long walk, and saw some cows, which is always nice. Each cow wore a bell tuned to a different note. Wonderful aleatory music.

And now I’m sitting in a comfortable leather chair in the lobby of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the agency of the United Nations where my father-in-law Arpad was the director-general for many years. This building was his castle—he picked out nearly everything in this luxurious lobby, above all the rich marble floors. He assembled marbles of a dozen or so nations: gray, red, pink, beige, blue, green—and they’re inlaid in a spiral pattern leading to a trickling Euromoderne wall fountain. The Hungarian marble has pride of place.

My father-in-law was always happy and energetic in this building. Being here reminds me of his dynamic younger self.

August 20, 2005. Family Tree and Compost.

Sylvia was going through boxes and boxes of letters today, at first trying to select out the important stuff, and eventually just filling up giant garbage bags. Letters from Sylvia to her parents, from her parents to each other, from her parents to their parents. And mixed into the gangue were daguerreotypes of mid-nineteenth-century strangers, sepia and beige—all those lives in the endlessly ramifying family tree.

Do we let the past crush us? No, we dance upon the past like a deer trotting across the composted forest floor, gently treading the humus of prior generations. Death is a perennial reality, the portraits upon the walls of the ancestral halls are powerless.

It’s our world, just now, and within our small family, I’m the patriarch du jour, the king of our Los Gatos castle, the Duke of Earl. I have a few more years till stroke and senility bring me low. And meanwhile the new generations are sprouting up—our kids and now even a granddaughter. And our times will be unknown daguerreotypes in our grandchildren’s future.

“Who were those people?”

“Relatives. Humus.”

It’s good for me to get a bit of word music going—I’m soothed by the internally-heard sound. For me, writing is a form of speech. It’s all about the rhythm and the cadence. A nut scribbling in his notebook.

Once again I’m sitting in an armchair—this one is at my favorite Geneva hangout, the Cafe Restaurant du Parc des Bastions, among leafy green trees and lawns across Place Neuve from the little Geneva opera house. I mentioned this place before. The park holds the aged stone buildings of the University of Geneva.

The cafe itself is largely open-air. The indoor part is a well-worn pavilion of green-painted wrought iron and glass. I was here yesterday with Sylvia, it’s like being in an Impressionist painting such as, let us say, Renoir’s Dance at Bougival.

About twenty years ago, my family and I were visiting here, and I spent a day walking around Geneva alone, smoking pot and drinking Swiss white wine. I still remember being surprised at how very spun I got, almost as soon as I took my first hit off my smuggled-from-California joint in the street.

I was working on The Hollow Earth then, and looking up at a flock of gulls in the sky over Lake Geneva, I imagined a sea that’s jiggling in mid-air. That was the inspiration for my fictional Umpteen Seas that float at the hollow earth’s core. That day twenty years ago, growing more and more ripped, I made my way down to an unpopulated, grassy bank of the Rhone river, near a spot called La Jonction, and I went swimming in my underwear, a bit anxious about the very powerful current, but depressed enough to risk the chance of untimely death.

So today I walked again to La Jonction, or the Junction. The lower end of Lake Geneva turns into the Rhone river, see, and the Rhone meets up with the Arve river, and that’s La Jonction. The Rhone is clear and green and lovely, but the Arve—flowing from, ahem, France—is gray and it smells bad. The grayness is, actually, because it’s from the stony Alps. But the stink is pollution.

Lots of graffiti at La Jonction today. The grassy bank where I remembered sitting to slip off my clothes for swimming—and perhaps where I jotted down a note about the Umpteen Seas on my usual pocket-square of paper—today this grassy bank is covered with dog turds, the turds packed in like in an Escher tessellation, unspeakably foul.

Today the bridge above the river and a nearby turbine building reminded me of the Half Life videogame—especially with two kids on the bridge throwing rocks—the kids like non-player characters dropping Half Life barrel-bombs.

August 24, 2005. Georgia’s Birthday. Althea.

Sylvia and I interrupted our journey home to spend a wonderful day in New York City, visiting with Georgia and baby Althea. It was Georgia’s 36th birthday. Her husband Courtney was out of town on work, and we slept at Georgia’s apartment, me on the living-room couch, Sylvia on a pallet on the floor next to me, the two resident *ugh* black cats creeping around us all night long. Wonderful to awake in the morning with Georgia and Althea right there.

We four spent the day in Central Park, lunching at the Boathouse restaurant next to that famous rowboat-rental lake. Althea slept in my lap while Georgia ate—she was happy to be out in a fancy place. A perfect day, a reward for Sylvia and me after the long, draining trip. We have such an easy, open relationship with Georgia. My little twin. Isabel says Georgia and I are like two peas in a pod.

At Georgia’s in the evening, I was lying on my back on the couch in my PJs, almost ready for sleep, and Georgia parked baby Althea on my chest, on my heart, just where our own three babies had lain before. Althea tossed a bit, raising her heavy, sticky, damp head a few times—then settling in and dozing. I felt her as a field of energy, a glowing ingot. My granddaughter. How wonderful. It’s an ongoing pleasant surprise.

At Loose Ends

September 22, 2005. My Philosophy Course at San Jose State.

The last month I’ve mostly been working on the launch of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul—emailing people, making appearances, blogging, and working on my rather large website for the book. It’s in print now, and looks beautiful. So far it’s gotten two good reviews and one bad one. The bad one is posted on Amazon as their official summary. An unexpected first-round punch to the gut.

Even though I’m retired, I took it into my head to teach a course at San Jose State this semester. To make things easy for me, I wanted the class to meet for three hours, once a week. The Computer Science department wouldn’t go for this, so I’ll teach under the aegis of the Philosophy department, a course for a general audience: Philosophy and Computers.

We’re using my Lifebox tome for the textbook, which makes things pretty easy for me. But even so, I felt shy at first, as I always do starting up a class. And I worry quite a bit about my lectures, although it’s deadly to try and prepare them in too much detail. I’ve always liked that saying: On s’engage et puis on voit. “Dive in and see what happens.”

I have ten students—some are philosophy majors; some come from the art department; and there’s a couple of math majors. Plus I’ve got a professional programmer who heard about the class on my blog.

I’m recording my lectures, making them into audio files to post them on my website as “podcasts,” whatever the fuck that means. It’s always a crapshoot, deciding if I’ve actually managed to turn on my tiny memory-chip recorder.

I split the class into two halves and, just to make it fun, during the second half last week I read the latest draft of a new SF story I’m writing. It’s called “Chu and the Nants,” and it relates to some ideas from Charles Stross’s Accelerando. A nant is molecule-sized, flying nanomachine with the intelligence of a dog. The students liked the story.

I’m gearing up to write another Stross-related SF story called maybe “URL to Nowhere.” My sense right now is that, although I want to write more science fiction, I’m not quite ready to launch into a novel. So I’ll wade in by doing some stories. Accelerando arose as a series of stories as well.

September 29, 2005. William J. Craddock.

William J. Craddock is a writer I love. More than love—I worship his novel/memoir Be Not Content, which I first read in the 1970s. I lost my copy, and last year I bought a used copy for about $150.

Craddock’s life had some parallels to mine. He was born in 1946 like me, and he went to college at San Jose State where I worked. He was an early acidhead. And in later life he lived first in Los Gatos, and then in Santa Cruz, where he often wrote for their local free newspaper, Good Times. I remember seeing a column by him when I first moved to California in 1986, and I was excited, but somehow I never connected with the guy.

I recently learned that Craddock died about a year ago, on March 16, 2004. The way I heard this is that his widow put his motorcycle up for sale. And a San Jose biker called Andy Hyslop wanted to look at the bike, and when he Googled for Craddock, he found a mention of Craddock on my blog—and then I had some email with Hyslop, and eventually this led to me having a phone conversation with Craddock’s widow, Teresa Craddock.

The reason I wanted to talk to Teresa was that I hoped I might broker a deal where my agent Susan Protter clears up the rights situation for the out-of-print Be Not Content, and I get my editor John Oakes of Thunder’s Mouth to put the book back into print. Or maybe the old beatnik-publishing house of City Lights would do it. Craddock is said to have had five unpublished additional novel manuscripts kicking around, one of them supposedly a sequel to Be Not Content. It would be cool to get a few of these into print as well.

I went to the newly rebuilt San Jose State library to look up Craddock’s obit. It was on microfilm, in the San Jose Mercury News, March 20, 2004.

Finding the obit was eerie—the microfilms are down in the basement in a large, uncluttered room that resembles a mausoleum. The two facing side walls are covered with mirrors set into tiny arched openings like the doors to crypt boxes. It felt like being in Citizen Kane.

I pull open a huge flat metal drawer with ranks and ranks of microfilm boxes. My hand reaches in, and plucks out the box with Billy’s obit. I go to the microfilm reader—the same old big, clunky kind of machine they’ve used forever—and I grind forward to the obit. I’m looking for a big article, but it’s just a little tiny thing, written by Teresa Craddock, with a picture of Billy looking tired and sad, his eyes hidden in dark sockets. How little recognition the man died with.

How bum, how alien, how weird it would be for Craddock to see me today, like in a flash-forward, him walking careless and high around the campus forty years ago, and suddenly—whoah—he sees my hand pulling out the box of microfilm. His weary, suffering face.

When I go outside, the bell on Tower Hall is ringing an hour, tolling deep and reverberant, the sounds overlapping and forming beats. “It tolls for thee.” I myself really am going to die, and someone will walk around this campus marveling that Rudy Rucker once trod here, and now is no more. Nobody escapes. There is only the one trip, the true trip of life itself.

William Craddock knew this his whole life long.

I sent my rap from above to Teresa Craddock, and she liked it, and she said I should try and get Be Not Content back into print. But when I sent a copy to my publisher John Oakes, he wasn’t interested. And the guy I know at City Lights in San Francisco wasn’t interested either. Maybe try a smaller publisher? But, now, as the weeks go by, the intensity of my quest fades.

October 10, 2005. Great Bear Coffee Shop.

Today’s Monday, and I’ve been keeping an eye on some house-painters at our place for two weeks. And then I had to move a bunch of furniture back into place. And then I helped clean up our house for this weekend, when we entertained our prospective in-laws—Penny’s parents Frank and Zan. And in two days, Georgia is coming for a five-day visit with baby Althea.

So, without a second thought, I’d expect to be working on my blogging, my email, my journal, and my writing today. Of course that’s what I’d do on a free Monday morning in the midst of these busy weeks.

But Sylvia is off work today, and she had other plans for my day.

People don’t always understand that for me, blogging is both an art form and a way of promoting my books. I feel proud and creative when I post a cool blog entry, like the one yesterday, entitled, “Timing Attack on the Computational Ultrastructure of Spacetime,” featuring a somewhat disturbing picture of an overweight seventy-year-old white woman cheering wildly at a slot machine, with her hands clenched into little chipmunk fists, this image scanned from a black-and-white ad in the newspaper. My blog is art, and people see it, and it sells my books.

And, regarding my fiction writing, it’s not obvious to others that, in order to get my thousand words a day, I need to spend a lot of time during the day seemingly doing nothing. It’s in fact not always clear even to me when I’m working on my writing. But I do know that when I’m doing household chores, I’m generally not working on my writing, not even in my head.

The easy solution to skirmishes about how I spend my time is for me to leave the house. So on a day like today, I go to write in a coffee shop. All hail the laptop! As I’ve mentioned, I’m working on a series of short stories these days, inspired by Charles Stross’s Accelerando.

I sold “Chu and the Nants” to Asimov’s, and now I’m in the midst of a longer story, a sequel called “Postsingular.” What I’m trying to do in this new story is to visualize the so-called computational singularity—it’s when the world’s network of computing devices becomes as smart or smarter than us.

October 30, 2005. I’m Dramatized in Santa Cruz.

Sylvia and I went to Santa Cruz for a premier production of “Mamma Infinity UFO,” a musical reworking of my play “As Above So Below,” which was in turn based on my 1987 short story “As Above So Below.” I wrote the story soon after moving to California—it’s about a stoner Santa Cruz mathematician who encounters a UFO shaped like a three-dimensional Mandelbrot set.

The somewhat flaky Elsewhere Troupe producing my musical had asked me to prepare the songs and dialog for it, but in the end, they only produced about ten minutes of it. They performed as part of the Keep Santa Cruz Weird Festival, a variety show held in the funky old Rio Theater near the beach.

The bill also featured a ukulele band called the UkeAholics, a juggler, a cowboy psychedelic story-teller, experimental movies, a pretty woman in a bikini carrying cue cards, a woman singing rap-opera, etc.

Naturally the one act that was so weird that it left the audience temporarily speechless was mine. I’ve seen that effect so often—the stunned silence when my presentation stops.

And to me, what I’m offering always seems so clear and logical. A gentle extrapolation from familiar facts. In any case, it was nice seeing my personal psychic states being publicly dramatized.

November 2, 2005. Harvard & MIT. Wolfram.

I’m here in Massachusetts, to give a talk about The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul at the MIT Media Lab. Right now it’s early in the day and I’m in a bed and breakfast place in Cambridge. It’s a classic New England rooming house, my room almost like a dorm room. I’m a block away from Harvard Yard—that being the several-city-block-sized compound of buildings and quads making up the university’s classic core.

I see lovely red and yellow autumn leaves out the windows against a clear blue sky, reminding me of a day like this when I took the first of my handful of psychedelic trips. That first trip was on peyote cactus buds, and I was a junior at Swarthmore College. The trip never did fully wear off…

Harvard was my first choice for a college in 1963, and I didn’t get in, perhaps because of my I-want-to-be-a-beatnik application essay and the I-am-an-existentialist interview that I had with a disapproving stock-broker Harvard alum at his office in Louisville.

Me: “I admire Kerouac and Jean-Paul Sartre.”

He: “Have those fellows—have those fellows ever met a payroll?”

For years I carried a resentment of Harvard, the Ivy League, Boston, and even New England as a whole. But, really, it’s about time to let that one go. I did, after all, have a lot of fun at Swarthmore, not to mention finding my wife there. I’m glad Swarthmore is where I ended up.

In any case, Harvard is cute, the best, the platonic ideal of an East Coast university, and it’s exciting to be here. I walked into some of the classroom buildings, following the students up the stairs, getting glimpses of the genuine Harvard classrooms, with actual chalk blackboards. I wandered into a student dining hall with wood wainscoting and enormous chandeliers—and I was immediately evicted.

“But I’m a National Merit Scholar!”

“Outta here, you beatnik.”

Afterwards, sitting in Harvard’s old Memorial Church, I started happily thinking about my granddaughter Althea, about the prospects of Rudy and Penny having children, and about Isabel’s likelihood of marrying as well. Smiling into the distance, an old man peacefully dreaming of grandchildren. Sunny fields.

I did have the option of going to MIT for college—I’d applied and was accepted—but on my college tour, MIT had struck me as too—what word would I have used? The student who gave me my MIT campus tour said, “This is the dorm I live in, and some people call it the tool shed.” MIT was for tools. For Martians. At that point, people didn’t really say geek, nerd, or dweeb.

On that same campus tour when we visited MIT, we went to Swarthmore, and I saw wide-hipped long-haired girls in jeans sitting on the grassy lawns talking to boys. And I knew this was the place for me.

My host at the Media Lab is my old artificial-life-researcher friend Mitch Resnick. We met at the first-ever artificial life conference in Los Alamos in 1987. Mitch has been working with the Lego company over the years. These days he’s designing some Lego robotics kits that might appeal to girls as well as to boys.

One bittersweet thing about a place like MIT is that the cool projects I remember were often just thesis projects which, after a few years, are gone. Always new stuff coming up. One thing I wish I could see again was an early Media Lab demo in which a student was stacking up the frames of movies to make virtual 3D objects, sensuous spacetime trails.

These days the Media Lab is more hardware-oriented. Like there’s a Center for Bits and Atoms, focused on computational DNA. And some guys are making walker exoskeletons under a grant from the Department of Defense. And they have an insane water-jet lathe that carves shapes out of metal.

For lunch, Mitch and I went over to CSAIL, that is, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. They have a futuristic new building, and they’re today’s center of buzz. Mitch and I met with CSAIL director Rod Brooks, he of the Attila, Cog, Kismet, and Roomba robots. The man who coined the robot-liberation slogan, “Fast, cheap and out of control.” And the author of a great new book, Flesh and Machines.

The fact that I’m an SF writer impresses guys like Rodney Brooks much more than my small amount of research with cellular automata. Science-fiction writing is something they can’t do.

I saw a new humanoid robot under development in Rod Brooks’s lab. The robot was named Domo. Brooks got me to feel Domo’s hand. His fingers were gentle and responsive, like a human’s. Domo has a gazillion springs in his fingers and arms. Domo was learning to watch his hand with his eyes. When he wasn’t looking at me, he’d stare at his fingers like a stoned Deadhead, gently wiggling them.

My talk at Media Lab went well. I had a decent crowd, maybe fifty people. I held forth, told jokes, showed PowerPoint slides, and ran some cellular automata programs on a computer.

Afterwards three guys hung around to talk with me: a programmer who’d returned to academia to get a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, a sophomore math major, and a grad student studying philosophy. We went out for a good dinner at a nearby place called Legal Seafood. I had the New England dinner with chowder, mussels, and a steamed lobster, very satisfying.

The guys were chatting about the doings of famous Cambridge professors such as Gerry Sacks, Marvin Minsky, Gerry Sussman, Max Tegmark, and Rodney Brooks. Sacks, Minsky and Sussman have been at MIT for my whole academic life. I felt like a country priest come to visit Rome. He falls in with some friendly younger priests who break bread with him and gossip about the intrigues of the cardinals and the monsignors.

I had a somewhat discouraging book event at the MIT Coop bookstore, which wasn’t even what I’d call a real bookstore. It was more like a store in a mall, a concrete box with greeting cards and stationery and a handful of titles. They hadn’t publicized my event, and we had about six people there. I sold but two books. I have seen worse, but still.

My publicist for the Lifebox tome had claimed that she was going to do a “media blast” to promote this bookstore event. I have this image of her pulling up her New York office window, sticking her lean young butt into the airshaft and farting very loud. Closing the window and dusting off her hands. Media blast accomplished.

After my talk I went to the real Coop, the Harvard Coop bookshop where I was expecting to be booked, and I looked wistfully around. Couldn’t find a copy of any of my fiction or nonfiction books—although later Stephen Wolfram told me the Lifebox book is shelved in Siberia there, that is, with the math books. Full of self-pity, I felt like the pathetic Chinese beggar that I saw playing a one-stringed violin outside, collecting money in an empty Kleenex box at his feet. Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk.

And then I got a cell phone call from my Hollywood agent, enthused about the developments on the Master of Space and Time movie—Michel “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” Gondry is now working on a script with Dan “Ghost World” Clowes, and Gondry has said he plans to cast Jim Carrey and Jack Black in the film as my characters Fletcher and Harry. Fingers crossed.

I had dinner with—back to the country-priest-in-Rome analogy—Martin Luther, that is, with the iconoclastic Stephen Wolfram, a figure to be reckoned with, even though he’s definitely not a part of the academic inner circles. We had a really enjoyable talk.

I sometimes say that I’ve only hung out with five or six people who are as smart or smarter than me. Kurt Gödel definitely is the gold standard here, the smartest man I ever met, my guru, a demigod, and to hell with those who say he was nuts—they didn’t really know him.

Wolfram was the first person I met after Gödel who was at this level. And later John Walker of Autodesk was the third guy like this that I’ve encountered. I don’t include Benoit Mandelbrot—he was more like a demented twittering-machine than like a genius. Making yourself comprehensible is, after all, part of being smart.

Among the non-scientists, I would also add the poet Anselm Hollo to this exalted company. Gödel, Hollo, Wolfram, Walker—and certainly Allen Ginsberg, on the basis of the one enchanted half hour I spent with him in 1981, even though I was very drunk at the time. The SF writer William Gibson rates, too—definitely a fellow-genius. And of course, my dear old college pal Greg Gibson is, in his own blunted, crab-claw way, some kind of cockeyed genius as well. Etcetera, etcetera.

Anyway, my point is that Wolfram is up there where the air is rare. During our dinner, Wolfram hinted around about the possibility of us writing a book together, a kind of dialogue or prolonged interview, and I didn’t respond as I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. And after dinner he directly asked me if I’d do it, and I agreed that it could be a good project.

Right away I said the money would have to be split 50-50, and he was, like, “I thought you weren’t interested in business.” And I say, “Ah, but writing is my business,” and he was fine with that—he said he didn’t care about the money anyway, which is probably true, as he makes so much from, like, his computer algebra program Mathematica. I also specified that I wouldn’t want to be taking on the role of a ghost-writer or an interviewer—I’d want to do about as much talking as Wolfram, and he was good with that too.

With typical Wolfram self-assurance, he was already comparing our book to one of Plato’s dialogues. The book could be fun, and maybe it would sell reasonably well. But I don’t think it will actually happen. The problem would be the mechanics of getting it on paper. I prefer to write, and to repeatedly revise. But Stephen prefers to talk—with someone else transcribing and editing what he says.

The next morning, my good old SF writer buddy Paul Di Filippo came in from Providence, Rhode Island—that tiny, savage shrew of a state, as I was calling it. Paul and I went to look at Harvard’s little museum displaying their instrument collection. The instruments are basically scavenged from demo tools left over from earlier times at Harvard, which has been in the education biz for better than two hundred years.

The place was deserted of course, and the woman in charge of the instrument collection started didactically asking Paul and me if we could see what was “wrong” with a certain orrery model.

I told her, “We don’t know any science at all. We’re science-fiction writers.” Paul burst into laughter. The curator found our levity in poor taste.

There was a nice set of painted, plaster models of brains, mounted on sticks like lollipops or like sex-toys. Crocodile brain, pigeon brain, rat brain, dog brain.

And they had a table-top cyclotron.

November 25, 2005. Old Papers. The College Days.

Sitting in the sun on a Folsom Street stoop in San Francisco, waiting for Rudy Jr. I make these notes on my pocket-scrap of paper.

Like I keep saying, I don’t know what I want to write next. In a way, I’m enjoying not having a project. It’s like being unemployed. Or retired. Do that memoir?

Earlier this week, I was looking at some of my papers from the ’60s. In college, I stupidly thought the only interesting thing I did was to drink, so that’s what most of my college writings are about. Or maybe it was that, back then, I normally only got up the nerve to write when I was in fact drinking. And drinking seemed so romantic, so beatnik, so outlaw, so grown-up. I was gung-ho to enlist in the stumbling army of the spun.

The writing is fairly ghastly, full of bluster and pose. Maybe I didn’t even know I was lying? Oh, I knew I was lying, but I thought I could get away with it. I now know that if you pose or lie when you write, the readers can tell.

One poem I wrote was kind of fun—I was imitating Ferlinghetti’s poem, “Autobiography.” I was, like, “I have done this, I have done that, I have lived…” And I’m writing this at age nineteen, right.

Day before yesterday I sorted a box of my papers from the ’70s and early ’80s. The ’70s stuff is about my love of pot—and about infinity and the fourth dimension. My mind was opening like a flower. By the ’80s, I’m a complete addict. Fairly grim reading, although, at times, convulsively and blackly funny, in the manner of Burroughs’s letters from Tangiers—and there I go glamorizing myself again.

Some of the things I unearthed are so…outrageous. Like a heartfelt letter, written in 1969 to the late-night TV host Johnny Carson. My topic? The concepts of infinity and the fourth dimension, both of which I felt that Johnny had mentioned (albeit indirectly) on his show. I remember reading Sylvia my Carson letter, and kind of bragging to her.

“Johnny will think I’m nuts.”

“And he’ll be right,” said Sylvia.

One thing to keep in mind about my ’70s and ’80s papers is that, in those years, with my teaching job and the young kids keeping me busy all day, the one time I was likely to write was late in the evening, after everyone was in bed. And usually I’d be drinking or getting high, so, once again, that’s often what I wrote about. The dogfather who makes his way from the dog-den to a hilltop to howl at the moon.

Why didn’t I do something about my alcoholism and pot-addiction any earlier? Well, I wasn’t ready, that’s all. I drank from ages sixteen to fifty. Thirty-four years outta my life. I functioned fairly well: parenting, teaching, writing books. But what a millstone of regret I accumulated, and what a mass of rattling cans tied to my tail. A weight and clatter that only a psychic upheaval could remove.

While digging around in my compost, I took a shot at rehabbing a 1984 story of mine called “Pierrot.” It’s about a guy who’s an alcoholic, written in the minimalist style of Raymond Carver. It was painful to read and to relive this story. When I wrote it, the alcoholism didn’t quite jump out at me so strongly—I just thought the main character was cool. But now it’s like watching a man bleeding to death, and he’s not bothering to bandage his wound. Hard to believe I continued drinking and smoking pot for a full twelve years after that.

Possible theme for my memoir? “Look at my scabs, my leprous sores! I was lost, but now I’m found!” No, no, I don’t want to dwell on my alcoholism, and I don’t want the big climax of my autobio to be me getting sober. That shit happened, but it’s not the main thing. The main things are my family, my worldview, my writing—and all the things I heard and saw.

A different dead end would be to get into a comprehensive blow-by-blow day-by-day account. Don’t do that either. Transcend the downers and the details—both.

As long as I’ve got my gossamer wings to beat, I should be a glittering dragon-fly above the mud. Darting here and there. Sublimely entertaining.

November 28, 2005. How I Began.

So, after all this rooting in the basement, I’ve managed to organize and transfer all my papers into four brand-new plastic boxes equipped with hanging file holders.

At this point, I’ve physically touched every single piece of paper, and I know where nearly everything is. The sporadic drunken outpourings seem less important now—in the context of the whole thing. Being a drunk stoner was just one of the five or six main things that I did. I forgive myself.

Looking through the papers, it was exciting to see my writing career emerge.

One of the first pieces I was really enthused about was “Confessions of a Stag.” This was a parody of a porno story that Greg Gibson and I wrote—and then mimeographed to hand out to our friends. The story had the then-popular black humor vibe found in Terry Southern’s novel Candy and in Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern. Even from the start, my desire has been to épater les bourgeoisie, to transgress, to be outrageous.

Greg and I were, by handing out the mimeos of our story, publishing in our own small way—not that we dared think of it that way. “Mimeographing a parodistic porno story” was a less formal bar to hop over than, “Publishing in a literary magazine.”

I did in fact publish something in the Swarthmore student literary magazine senior year—it was a sensitive story called “Rainy Day,” concerning a young man’s ruminations while working a summer construction job with black people.

But the samizdat, not-for-the-light-of-day, “Confessions of a Stag” meant far more in terms of my career. In that story, I was writing what I really wanted to write.

And thus I hopped the bar and landed in the marble temple of the Muse, wherein I remain an unruly occupant to this day.

I also came across a pack of papers that I brought home from the second grade. Sheets of one-digit sums, little dictations, a few drawings. My writing is so hilariously sprawling. I was still tweaking my neural nets. So touching to see my little life emerging.

There’s no written record of what I was thinking during my earliest years. To some extent, younger children are inarticulate—they don’t express their inner states in lasting form. But they do have feelings. I can recall early periods of brooding, worrying, and so on. I just wasn’t writing about them yet.

I also found a little notebook that Mom’s mother Lily kept when Mom was born. Grandma Lily’s writing is cute, very matter of fact. The notebook is titled, 1916, Marianne von Bitter, and pressed into the first two pages are two of my dear mother’s curls. Blonder than I’d expect, and very fresh-looking, as if they’d been snipped yesterday—and not some ninety years ago. I kissed them.

December 1, 2005. My Year at a German Boarding School.

Organizing the basement, I found a sheaf of about fifty letters that I sent my parents from Germany when I went to boarding school over there. They date from April, 1958, though March, 1959—which covers the entire twelfth year of my life.

I’ve had a fever for the last three or four days. I wake up in the night around one am, and it’s hard to go back to sleep. Yesterday, and again today, I felt so weak, feverish, and tired in the morning that I lay in bed reading my old letters from Germany.

It almost seems like I’m having a nervous breakdown—I mean from the outside it might look that way, me in bed all day reading letters from forty-seven years ago. But it was fun reading those letters. More than fun, it was nourishing to my soul.

I really grew over the course of my year in Germany. Before I left, I’d been somewhat weak and beset. My brother was tormenting me in various ways. I wasn’t popular at school. Actually it got worse at my American school when I came back from Germany—with a foreign accent, and having missed the American rush-to-puberty year that the others had just undergone. But at that point, I didn’t care as much about the kids as I had before my trip.

Germany made me more independent. I got to have a taste of a normal childhood. During the weeks or months when I was on break from the boarding school, I stayed at my grandmother’s in Hanover. I’d play in the streets with a gang of boys and a few girls—I loved that. Riding my bike to the zoo and the swimming pool with my chums. Being a regular kid, not an outcast despised by the richer kids.

In Louisville, I’d been going to the private Louisville Country Day School, which was populated by snobs. How could those kids already think they were better than me in the fourth fucking grade? But they did. They’d formed their alliances in the third grade, before I’d arrived.

It was good to be away from that horrible school, and to be away from my somewhat hypochondriac mother, my distant father, and my rather cold brother. A new life. A free world. It was great.

It’s hard to describe the precise tone of my letters from Germany. I’m matter-of-fact, and frank, and opinionated, and heedless of causing worry. Grumbling if it’s hard to write a long letter. Quick to say things are crummy or lousy. Cheerful and energetic. Always writing about my little interests: coins, stamps, kit-models, photography. I was very worried about missing my first year of algebra in the U.S. and got I my parents to mail me an algebra book to study.

My boarding school, Zinzendorf Gymnasium, was rather Draconian. They were members of some minimalist puritanical Protestant sect called the “Herrnhüter Brüdergemine.” I fought a lot with the other boys at first, but then won my way in.

The first group of boys that I was with at the school had a strict counselor lady who confiscated my Time magazine as being pornographic (photo of a movie star in a negligee) and my Boy’s Life magazine as being a comic book—Boy’s Life did indeed have eight to ten pages of color comics. The lady’s name was Schwester Schütze.

She was high-strung, brittle, and prone to screaming fits during which we boys would sit stone-faced and frightened. There was one boy she’d always particularly pick on when we took our weekly shower. Dieter Gorlacher. I remember she sometimes had Dieter come into her room in the evening—all of us were glad that wasn’t us.

Later I moved up into a group of older boys and it was more easy-going. Lots of hikes, card games, songs, and yelling. I even had a little girlfriend with long blonde braids. Renate. We never actually talked to each other, but we knew we were a pair.

A great year.

Looking back, I see the big three events of my early adolescence as being that year in Germany, my splenectomy, and my car accident. Maybe in some way each of these made me more independent.

My splenectomy was in the tenth grade, when I’d just turned fifteen. I ruptured my spleen falling off a rusty old swing-set, and they had to cut it out. During this ordeal I became separated from ordinary people a bit more than before. To begin with, I narrowly escaped death by internal bleeding, then I experienced the death-like nothingness of the general anesthesia, and then I made my way through the largely solitary convalescence in the hospital.

The car accident was on Derby Day, when I was sixteen. It very clearly imprinted death on my mind. I was knocked unconscious when I drove my mother’s little VW into a tree. I was drunk, showing off for my friends by slaloming the car on a gravel road. When I came to, I was draped on a fence beside the tree we’d hit. I’d been thrown from the car—no seatbelt on. If I’d hit the tree with my head I probably would have died. So now I knew in my bones that death was real. Death would be a matter of going unconscious and not waking up.

Rooting in the past.

December 6, 2005. Postsingular Story. Loose Ends.

Happy news: today Asimov’s SF Magazine bought my long short story, “Postsingular.” And today I mailed in my short-short story “Panpsychism Proved” to Nature as per their invitation. So I’ve written and sold three stories in these last three months.

But I still don’t have a book project that I can really settle into.

Like I’ve mentioned in these notes, I’ve fooled around with the memoir idea, but for now I’m sick of that. This morning I was once again delving into my newly organized boxes of papers—and I was like, ugh, do I have to keep doing this?

I’m not sure it’s really good for me to be so inner-directed—what with my being alone most of the time anyway. Many days, Sylvia is the only person I talk to. Usually I’m busy, so I don’t notice if I don’t talk to anyone, but days like today, I have such a feeling of “What should I do today?”

Well, I guess the easiest thing for me to do next would be to go ahead and write a third story, following up on my stories “Chu and the Nants” and “Postsingular.” If I can keep this thing bouncing, I could end up with a Stross-style story-series that morphs into a novel like Accelerando.

Writing a series of stories is a harder than writing a novel. You have to do a big mental ramp-up for each story. And you have the repeated psychic deflation of coming off each story. It’s like a series of one-nighters—instead of a marriage.

December 16, 2005. Outing to San Francisco.

I’m on the train to San Francisco. I plan to meet Rudy and go to the annual Last Gasp Comix party. The first train car that I sat in made a lot of noise, but the second one smelled like piss, and the seats in the third train car were pointing backwards—so now I’m back in the first car. The guy across the aisle is on the nod. Whatever.

I love riding the train, it’s so much nicer than being in the car, especially on a Friday afternoon the week before Xmas. I relish this hour and a half of free time, time to myself. And I like the sense of going somewhere, with the train-track scenery scrolling by: the backs of things, the undersides, the alleys. And my laptop atop my lap.

En route like this, I’m more inclined to write a personal journal note than to key in the umpty-umpth revision of my burgeoning outline for that third story in my current series: “Chu and the Nants,” “Postsingular,” and now maybe “Bixie and Chu.”

One of my blog-readers sent me a link to the Realdoll.com website yesterday. They sell six-thousand-dollar, all-silicone love dolls. Or for fifteen hundred dollars you can get just the pelvis. The photo of that thing reminded me of the Babs creature in my novel The Sex Sphere. I can’t see getting a Realdoll product. The most exciting thing about making love to a woman is to give her pleasure, to witness her arousal, and to be embraced in return.

Suppose you owned a Realdoll pelvis. Would you leave it out in the living room? Freshly washed since the last usage, to be sure, but still. I’m glad to be married! A flesh-and-blood wife is so much more presentable.

We might suppose that, in the postsingular world of this story series I’m writing, when people talk, emoticons form around them, visible in the computeresque overlays that everyone has happening via their amped brains—the Smileys hopping out of a speaker’s mouth.

The fall’s gone by and I still don’t have a fresh book started. Oops! Gawrsh! Gulp! The yawning void of idleness, the prospect of becoming a puttering retiree.

I cleaned the basement even more this week. After watching Sylvia and her brother go through their father’s papers, I feel less compunction than ever about weeding out my crap. I still fantasize about clearing out an area for painting. But, realistically, I can get by fine with using a plastic table in our back yard for my studio.

God, it’s great riding on the train. For years I’ve meant to go to the Last Gasp Comix party. I so deeply relish my occasional tastes of hip San Francisco. But I don’t wanna look forward to the party too much, in case something goes wrong. Just being here right now is utterly satisfying.

The sun is low in the western sky, the sky bright and hazy blue. The evening sky is extra bright in California because a big sheaf of low-angled sunbeams angles down from the west and glances off the Pacific ocean and reflects up into the sky above our coast.

I love being in California. I can wear the ratty, green watch cap Georgia knit me, and the gay, striped-silk scarf I got in Brussels—and nobody’s gonna look at me twice.

I met Rudy at his Monkeybrains office on Folsom Street. He’s renting a whole floor, and he’s got extra tenants. The tenants’ rent covers his rent. His business is doing well, and I’m proud of him.

We went to the Atlas Cafe. The bright-red-dyed hair woman behind the counter was unusually talkative. Rudy said she’d never talked so much before. She looked a little like Poison Ivy, the guitarist with The Cramps. She was such a San Francisco type—great to see.

Then we picked up Rudy’s girlfriend Penny and went to the Last Gasp party. I should explain that Last Gasp is a comix and graphic novel publisher that’s been around since the days when the Zap-O-Saur thunder-lizards roamed the Earth.

I introduced myself to the host, Ron Turner. People were lining up to say hi to him, influential underground publisher that he is. Like a cross between Santa and the Godfather. Or the Pope. Ron has a braided beard. He knows who I am. He introduced me to some geezers my age and we chatted for awhile.

Rudy’s friend Linda works at Last Gasp. I asked her if she’s the one who braids Ron’s beard, and she said, no, his daughter-in-law does that.

Somehow I’d imagined I’d know a lot of people at the party, but I didn’t. Everyone’s gotten so young. Finally I ran into my cartoonist pal Paul Mavrides, which was good. Sardonic Paul.

Last Gasp has a large collection of original cloth side-show banners suspended on rollers. Rudy and I rooted around among them, and saw a giant anteater. Also vampire bats attacking a cow.

I went out in the alley to smoke a cigarette, and chatted with a bunch of evil smokers, one of them being Paul McEnery whom I know from the Mondo 2000 days. There was also a big line of geezer pot smokers passing along a jay, just like in a Zap comic. Touching to see. A nice evening all in all. Sweet to see my son, and fun to see the San Francisco hipsters doing their thing.

Riding back home alone on the train, I had a flash of a feeling which Edgar Allan Poe expresses in his poem “The Conqueror Worm”:

Lo! ’t is a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years.

December 22, 2005. Riding the Short Bus.

I rode the free bus from Los Gatos to the Acura dealer to pick up my car, which had been leaking rain through the sunroof now that the winter rains have started. The bus is half-sized, and my kids call it the short bus, in reminiscence of the short bus that would take handicapped or special-education students to school.

I’m always proud and excited when I manage to catch the Los Gatos short bus, it makes me feel efficient.

The skinny driver was reading a Chinese newspaper.

Sitting behind him was a Mexican day-laborer, probably a gardener. He was listening to some earphones, like for an iPod. He was friends with the driver.

“How much dollar?” the driver asked the laborer about his audio device.

“Fourteen.”

“Is a radio,” said the driver, a bit let down.

December 31, 2005. End of the Year.

Christmas is over, and we said good-bye to Isabel this morning. All the kiddies gone. It was great to have them all around. I’m so blessed and lucky. Our new granddaughter Althea was the big hit of the vacation.

Oh, Althea. She and her parents went hiking with me in rain-soaked Big Basin one day. I took a really cute picture of her sitting in the woods at the base of a redwood tree, wearing a little red cap that Grandma Sylvia knit for her. The Fairie Baby.

And now I’m back at my laptop, trying to figure out the details of the third story in that series I’ve been working on. Only now I’m seeing these stories congealing into a novel. If I don’t actually have to make the next piece a separate story, it’s gonna be a lot easier. Write a novel and let it flow. Yes!

And for the last three of months I’ve been all, “Duh, what book shall I write next?” And meanwhile I was already writing it. Things look so clear in retrospect.

I’ll call the book Postsingular, the same title as that second story. I like the word postsingular—I think maybe I made it up. Recently science-fiction writers have been fretting about how to write about the computational singularity, and I’m saying, “Go past it. Be postsingular.” Or, in layman’s terms, “Pile on the bullshit, and keep a straight face.”

I’m sitting in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe. I just changed seats to be away from a driven loser who was cellphoning all of his contacts, telling them to prepare for a meeting he’s organizing next Saturday, a week from today. Today is not only a Saturday but it’s New Year’s Eve. Five of the people that he called knew better than to answer him, so he left them messages. One guy talked to him for a few minutes, then managed to get off. Apparently a party was already in progress in the background at that guy’s house.

A half hour later, the driven loser comes over to me and asks “Are you a writer?” And then he gives me his business card, mentioning that his website isn’t quite ready yet. And then he tries to describe his product—it’s to be an online collaboration tool of some kind. Also he’s supposedly almost written a book himself. I bet he wants me to finish writing it for him. He looks gaunt and haunted. Poor guy.

“Happy New Year,” I tell him.

Love is the only answer.

It was storming like mad this morning, the wind blowing so hard that the rain was in horizontal sheets, the trees like seaweed in a furious torrent. Now it’s sunny. More storm tonight. I hope to go to Cruz for dinner and dancing with Jon Pearce and the Beesons. But Sylvia doesn’t feel well, so we’ll see. Whatever happens is okay.

This morning I posted a blog entry about a song I used to sing in Lynchburg with my punk band, the Dead Pigs. The song was called, “Year After Year.” I also posted a link to my story “The Men in the Back Room At the Country Club” which is, oh joy, online on Eileen Gunn’s Infinite Matrix webzine as of yesterday—finally published two and a half years after I wrote it, and some twenty years after I conceived it.

What if the day comes when I’ve written every single thing I ever dreamed of writing?

January 11, 2006. Gödel Quote on Time.

My philosopher friend Mark van Atten sent me a German quote from Kurt Gödel’s philosophical notebooks. Here’s my quick translation:

The difference between time and space is that I can see myself in the past. Either that is a contradiction (for if I myself am there in the past, and that’s not just a picture of me that I see, then there are two of me instead of one of me) or it means that I see myself in the past as in a mirror. So that, therefore, what I was doing (am doing) in the past is essentially the same as what I’m doing now (that is exercising my personality). The passage of time would be therefore an illusion in the sense that my surroundings are at all times really the same, and that this reality merely appears in different forms. (Not only is the passage of time an illusion, but the existence of this illusion is an illusion, and so on.)

Man—that’s some steep shit.

January 12, 2006. San Francisco, 1967. High IQ

I’ve been wondering about this alternate world called the “Hibrane” that I’m going to introduce into my novel Postsingular. The locale should be fun for me to think about, and it should be something I haven’t written about before. Maybe the Hibrane should be like San Francisco in 1967.

Speaking of that, the other day, Sylvia and I were at the San Jose Art Museum, and we revisited that amazing diorama by Michael McMillen, The Third Eye. You peek into through a hole in a door that’s set into the wall and you’re looking into a wonderfully accurate model of a Sixties head shop, with a fan turning on the ceiling, posters and a strobe light, Hendrix playing faintly today, and a whiff of incense coming out of a grill under the peephole. Oh, how I long to get through that door. To the Hibrane.

Yesterday I read an article in the New Yorker about some kid in, like, Nebraska. His parents fell into the orbit of a “gifted children” con-woman who convinced them their son had an IQ of 182—apparently the numbers don’t mean much when you get past 170. And the parents flipped out over that number, and they didn’t let him go to school with other kids, feeling it would be too slow for him, as if school were about learning facts instead of being about socialization and getting the hell out from under your parents’ eyes. And the poor kid got depressed and killed himself.

The relevance for my novel is that the article quotes some people nattering on about how very strange and different it is to have an unusually high IQ. My smart friend John Walker suggests that IQ might more likely be proportional to the logarithm of one’s brute processing power rather than being a linear function of it. So a thousandfold increase in processor power would make you only three times as smart. That sounds right. Just think of desktop machines. A gigaflop machine isn’t a thousand times as good as a megaflop, it’s more like three times as good. So it would take a hundred-thousand-fold increase in brain power to get to five times as high an IQ, that is, to jump from, say, IQ 200 to IQ 1000. KiloIQ.

I’ll call the kiloIQ people “kiqqies.” I like the word kiqqie. It’s kiddie, with some letters upside down. The kiqqie kiddies. Wow, Mom.

I asked my other smart friend, Stephen Wolfram, about the possible effects of high IQ on my kiqqies, and he said this:

With the high IQ, there’s a lot more that one can explore, quickly, so one investigates more, sees more connections, and can look more moves ahead. More things would seem to make sense. One gets to compute more before one loses attention on a particular issue. And now we have to wonder how it would feel if so much more made sense, and became predictable? By carrying out larger mental computations you could see the underlying patterns in more things.

In any case, I’ll give my kiqqies the full gamut of human foibles. Love affairs, jealousy, drug problems—the usual. Smart people do that stuff too.

January 24, 2006. Skiing Near Carson Pass.

Sylvia and I are spending a week in a cute log cabin at Sorensen’s Resort, altitude seven thousand feet, about twenty miles south of Lake Tahoe, near Carson Pass. There was a big snow storm the night we came up, very dramatic and hard to drive in, with the windshield freezing over. I had to stop every mile or two to scrape it off.

Our cabin has a wood stove that I have fun stoking. Rudy Jr. and his fiancée Penny visited us for two nights. It was fun and relaxing to have them around.

We go out to play in the snow every day. Sylvia rented snowshoes, and I rented some back-country-style cross-country skis—they have metal edges that make it easier to negotiate turns. I tend to fall down when I get going too fast, and feel like I’m losing control. Much of the time I’m slogging uphill. Seems like the gravity god pays back less than it takes in. Sylvia and I usually start out on a trail together, and after about forty-five minutes she turns back and I go on for another couple of hours.

I relish the peace of the woods, the intensely blue sky, the thin icy air, the deep breathing and steady muscular work, the solitude, the low-level problem-solving of picking my route, the boulders capped with snow, the reddish-barked pines with icicles dangling from their branch-tips, the views of the white Sierra peaks. I like it best when I’m in virgin snow, cutting my own trail—a nice metaphor for how I conduct my intellectual life.

Today was my fourth day of skiing, and I angled up a very deeply besnowed Sierra slope—above Red Lake near Carson Pass. Exquisite. Starting this excursion, I had the customary nosegay of small family worries in the back of my mind—like that Rudy had accidentally taken Sylvia’s car keys when he’d left, and that Sylvia had been unhappy with the narrow trail I was on and had turned back earlier than usual. And I was thinking, “Too bad I can’t be fully single-pointed and mindful about soaking up these quite exceptionally beautiful surroundings. Too bad I waste energy running tape loops of recent conversations.”

The snowy hillside sloped down to my left at a forty-five degree angle, with lone piñon pines projecting here and there. The slanting horizon cut nicely across my field of view, with a range of whipped-cream peaks beyond, and the sun blazing down from the absolutely clear high-altitude sky. And then I was thinking, “My usual petty concerns are part of me. It’s better to accept them than to bemoan them. Worrying about imperfection only adds an additional worry. Let the worries play, but don’t care about them too much—they’re part of me, like the bark on the trees.”

And then for awhile I fully lost myself in the physical effort, in the rhythm of my breath, and in the beauty, occasionally surfacing to think, “Thank you, god.” Prayer of this nature is a sure-fire way to amplify a natural high—I once heard an intelligent, though rough-spoken, biker at a recovery group meeting describe how, now and then, we happen to randomly get a super pleasure rush as good as a drug, and then, added the biker, “If you start saying, ‘Thank you, god,’ that’s a good way to milk the rush a little more, stretch it out another few seconds.” I love that practical, canny, addict way of looking at transcendence. Milk it for all it’s worth.

Skiing down from what must have been 8,500 feet, I caught a couple of long rides across pristine snow fields. With a few days experience on these latest-generation back-country skis, I’m staying upright longer than ever before. Ripping through the deep powder—aah. I felt like a knife cutting through whipped cream, like a joyous gnat glutting himself upon an ice-cream sundae.

I was way, way past worrying about anything now—the natural beauty and the exercise-endorphins were doing their thing. I didn’t even care when I did a face-plant into the snow. My tips dug into a deep drift covering a buried brook, and my face was literally the part of me to hit the powder. I was just glad I hadn’t hurt myself. I was glad I knew how to get up outta the whipped cream.

The day after that, I ascended the steep, woodsy Indian Head trail right behind our cabin. The ski-rental woman had given me some short skis so I’d have an easier time carving turns on the descent, but these skis weren’t actually very good for climbing. On the way up, I spent a lot of time grumbling to myself about the skis. It was exhausting. I went a couple of miles, climbing about a thousand feet.

At the top I found a bare rock, and I sat on it doing yoga for about half an hour, squeezing the pain and tension out of my sobbing back and leg muscles. What pleasure. As I worked on my body and breath, my mind emptied out, and once again I began to savor my surroundings. The single, huge, gray, snow-capped boulder beside me. The pointed trunk of a dead piñon sticking up beside it. The rock and the pine like Abbot and Costello, like yin and yang.

The descent was fantastic. The trail I’d come up was a snowshoe trail, quite icy and narrow, and, seeing a lovely whipped-cream slope to one side, I said, “Fuck the trail,” and went down the mountain direct. This is where the shortness of the skis really helped. I was making turns like crazy, and hardly falling down at all. The skis didn’t quite float like they did up at Red Lake on Carson Pass, but the ride was good. It was especially exciting to be threading my way through trees, bushes, rocks—really a rather dense hillside forest. Periodically I’d recross the switchbacks of the snowshoe trail that I’d ascended. And, over and over, I’d ditch the trail and take yet another short-cut—some of them excitingly hairy.

On the very last day I did some snowshoeing with Sylvia. Lovely and harmonious. We got onto the Winnemucca Trail at Carson Pass. It runs along the ridge, starting at 8,500 feet and staying fairly horizontal. The landscape seemed cartoon-like: all the shapes were smooth mounds of snow. The trees under the snow-caps were gorgeous pines. We came to a meadow and gazed out at those same whipped-cream mountains. Like the afterworld. Like the picture you’d see on a Swiss chocolates box.

It’s been a real vacation.

February 22, 2006. In NYC. Two Book Deals.

So now I’m cranking up for my next novel, which I’m definitely calling Postsingular. The novel is indeed growing out of those stories I wrote this fall, “Chu and the Nants,” and “Postsingular.” The fact that I got into this novel in a somewhat ass-backwards way means that I’m still having some trouble figuring out the plot.

Yesterday I met with John Oakes at Thunder’s Mouth Press, had lunch with David Hartwell at Tor, and visited my agent Susan Protter in her office. A real business day in the New York City publishing world.

John Oakes showed me the numbers for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. They’ve shipped five thousand copies and returns are very light, which is good. The publisher isn’t making a mint, but they’re not taking a bath. Of course I’d been dreaming of selling a hundred thousand copies, but oh well. “It’s pure chance,” says Oakes.

As a side project, I pitched a new story anthology to Oakes: Mad Professor. He likes the title, even though the other day I’d had some second thoughts, wondering if it’s too self-deprecatory. John thinks he might publish the anthology later this year, like in November, 2006. If I have the time, I might crank out another couple of stories to pad it out.

Tor has already made an offer for the Postsingular novel, and I discussed the details of my book outline with Dave Hartwell. He made some useful suggestions, tilting me towards leaving some of my story elements out of this volume so as to leave room for a sequel or even a trilogy.

Talking with Susan Protter afterwards, she mentioned again how enthused Dave is about Mathematicians in Love. She cautioned me that now that I’ve brought my skill up to a high level, I need to keep it there. I’ve moved into a new category. Like I’m not stressed-out enough about Postsingular already!

I told Susan that I hadn’t felt like Mathematicians in Love was all that different from my other books. It felt craftsmanlike and painstaking—and not like I’d gotten a thunderbolt of inspiration. Susan said that’s as it should be. She says that whenever a writer says to her, “This is my best book ever,” that means the words are just gushing out, and that the writer isn’t in control.

Susan says Tor really doesn’t want to move up from the initial $10,000 offer for Postsingular that they’ve made. That’s the same as the advance they gave me for Mathematicians in Love. Susan feels we should just accept it rather than badgering them for an extra thousand dollars.

So I said okay. Susan said she’d been worried I’d stamp my foot. I said I was resigned to my place in the great scheme of things.

Sometimes I brood over my inability to score a mainstream-market breakthrough. I pushed for that with the Lifebox nonfiction tome, and with the As Above, So Below historical novel about Bruegel, and with my young people’s novel Frek and the Elixir. No dice.

In this context, I think of a scene in the Ramones documentary movie, End of the Century. Johnny Ramone is talking about how the Ramones had the famed Phil Spector produce a record for them, and still nothing really happened in terms of airplay or in terms of reaching the mainstream audience.

And Johnny says something like, “So after that we kind of gave up. Accepted it. We said, fuck it, we’ll just go on doing what we do, do it as good as we can, as hard as we can, and we’ll take it to the end.”

I’m happy to be writing two cyberpunkish hard-SF books in a row, first Mathematicians in Love and now Postsingular. Getting out on the road and doing some concerts like Joey Ramone.

Turning Sixty

March 3, 2006. Westinghouse Yam in Alleyway.

That’s the subject line of a spam email I got today: “Westinghouse yam in alleyway.” How poetic. How evocative. Alleys are always poetic, no?

Maybe I can work that phrase into a street scene I’m writing for Postsingular today? Or, better, I’ll use it as the opener of my character Thuy’s so-called metanovel. A phrase out of the blue.

So, yeah, I’m back from vacation. Blogging, emailing, writing in my journal—and edging towards writing. Right now I’m in the coffee shop. It’s time to get down.

March 8, 2006. Cousin Hedwig.

My second cousin Hedwig von Sichart is visiting San Jose this month, so I took her along to San Francisco for my reading at the Booksmith—these days I’m promoting The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. Hedwig is a nice woman, about the same age as me. She comes to San Jose to visit her son Hans and his family, Hans being involved with web design.

In the afternoon, Hedwig and I went to the de Young Museum, to a greenhouse in Golden Gate Park, and to Haight Street.

Lots of orchids in that greenhouse, also some great pitcher plants. The pitchers and the orchids look almost like they can talk. Easy to imagine one of the orchids yelling in a mean Snow-White’s-mother kind of voice. Like the flowers in the 1951 Disney cartoon of Alice in Wonderland. That movie had a huge effect on me.

I always forget the details of how Hedwig is my second cousin, but for the moment I’m up to date from talking to Hedwig. And just the other day, I spent a few hours scanning and putting online a hand-drawn family tree that my uncle Rudolf von Bitter made before going off to die on the Russian front in WWII. It’s moving to think of all those generations, all those intense lives. Everyone always in their personal now moment.

On Haight Street I took Hedwig, my respectable German cousin, into one of the Haight Street shops selling cheap flashy party clothes: giant fake-fur hats, sequin miniskirts, clip-on feather scrunchies, skintight polyester tiger pants, like that. Well, actually I followed Hedwig in, rather than taking her in. Being a tourist, she wasn’t embarrassed to go into a store like that.

The women working in the rave-clothes store were these somewhat skanky, very lively, stoned hippie types. It struck me that exactly the same types were working there twenty or forty years ago. Even if you were born in 1986, you can still be an exact and archetypal Haight Street hippie. The persistence of certain niche roles.

It was pleasant going around with Hedwig, cozy. Her tastes are similar to Sylvia’s so it was easy to find things she liked: cappuccino, flowers, fabric stores. I was detached and patient with her—I wish I could always be so easy-going with Sylvia.

My reading went well and I had a good crowd. I read the part about my vision of nature as gnarly computation—the vision that I had the day I went kayaking in Palau. And I closed with my six suggestions on how to be happy, taken from the very end of the Lifebox tome. Lots of questions afterwards.

People are energized by the ongoing rumors that Michel Gondry will make a movie of my novel Master of Space and Time. Yesterday Gondry renewed his option with me for $10K.

And the buzz has gotten to the point where people are asking me for jobs.

One pinhead emailed me to ask if I’d send him $70K to attend film school—so he could direct Spaceland. He says he’s already written a great script for it.

An aspiring German actress who calls herself Ava Lanche emailed to ask if I could get her into the movie. As if. When would a producer ever listen to a novelist!?

A cute, hip young woman, Maggie Oh, from Industrial Light and Magic was at my reading. She gave me a business card and said I should ask Gondry to let her group do the effects.

March 20-23, 2006. 60th Birthday.

Turning sixty is twice as bad as turning thirty. Not only are you really old, but also you’re about to die. Pop had a heart attack and a coronary by-pass operation when he was sixty. I’m a little anxious.

One way to compensate has been buying a new car. I decided to go for a little dark green model with automatic transmission and leather seats. I skitter through tiny holes in traffic, nimble as a hockey puck on ice. The car makes it possible to drive like a maniac. It’s not that I’m an intrinsically bad person.

Sitting in my back yard. The mild blue sky and the puffy cartoon clouds. Spring. The start and the end of the zodiac, the singular point where the world-snake bites its tail. My birthday season.

Dear Sylvia organized a big birthday party for me on Saturday, March 18, 2006. I’d been worried I might not be able to have fun. At my fiftieth birthday party and Sylvia’s and my thirty-fifth anniversary party, both, I got mad at Rudy Jr. about the music—and at that anniversary party I was mad at Sylvia as well. I’m a terrible person. But this time around everything went well. The uptight geezer relaxes.

Guests were: Michael Blumlein & Hillary Valentine, John & Mickey Shirley, Terry Bisson & Judy Jensen, Jon Pearce & girlfriend Adele, Michael Beeson & Hennie Nijland, Nick Herbert & Beverly Rubik, David & Jamie Povilaitis, Paul Mavrides & Mimi Heft, Nathaniel Hellerstein, Isabel, Rudy Jr. and Penny. Five writers, three mathematicians, and two artists in the mix.

Sylvia got helium balloons for the party—fun and bouncy. The next day, we let the balloons sail into the sky. Liberation!

Isabel crafted me a kind of metal sculpture or art assemblage, shaped like a Swiss knife. It’s made of brass or copper, a case with seven unsharpened, knife-like blades that rotate in and out. Isabel riveted a different iconic shape of silver-colored metal to the tip of each blade. The icons represent seven things that I’m interested in.

• A Zhabotinsky scroll—for cellular automata.
• The Mandelbrot set—for fractals.
• A robot.
• The character A Square from Flatland—for the fourth dimension.
• The lazy-eight symbol for infinity.
• A flying-saucer UFO.
• A cone shell—for diving, gnarly computation, and science-fiction.

Wonderful.

For the entertainment, Sylvia suggested the guests read reminiscences about me—not necessarily true and, if possible, science-fictional. It was as good as being at my own funeral!

I feel a lot better now about turning sixty. I always love it when I have a birthday party and it’s time for the cake. The room lit by the warm glow of the candles, a crowd of faces smiling and singing to me, my loved ones close. The highpoint of my year.

My life’s turned out so much better than I’d expected.

In the daytime on my actual birthday, March 22, I took a hike at Castle Rock with a fifty-year-old programmer, Emilio Rojas, whom I got to know through my blog and who then attended my San Jose State class on the philosophy of computation class.

It was beautiful in the woods, so green. I felt like we were inside the Hollow Earth. And that night Sylvia made me a nice dinner. And afterwards we went to see the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo—soothing, spiritual, and maybe a little more boring than we’d expected.

I consulted the I Ching on March 23.

Q: So now I’m 60. I feel pretty together. I’m working on a new book, and trying to raise the level a bit. Any ideas about how to stay alive? And how to live in peace and harmony with Sylvia?

A: (Direct quote) Lake over Mountain: #31, Influence (Wooing). Perseverance furthers. The strong man (mountain) takes a position inferior to the weak woman (lake) and shows consideration for her. A mountain with a lake on its summit is stimulated by moisture from the lake. The mind should be kept humble and free, so that it may remain receptive to good advice.

March 24, 2006. Game Conference. Wheenk in a Metanovel.

I went to the Game Developers Conference in San Jose again yesterday, courtesy of a guest-pass from the original publisher of Infinity and the Mind, Klaus Peters, who now publishes a line of math, graphics, and game-related books. I didn’t run into anyone else I knew, and felt a bit lonely and out of the loop. Zillions of young game-biz guys there, only a few women.

Coming at games as a computer scientist, I get excited about the graphics, the hardware, the artificial intelligence. But the uses that these tools are put to seem so—tawdry and dull. I saw a guy using a 3D design tool to make a bazooka-like ray-gun. He had eleven million triangles on the screen. But it was a clunky, dumb-ass, non-ergonomic design.

Driving home, stopped at a downtown traffic light, I was looking at a beautiful tree. So much more interesting.

I had this hope that the game conference might somehow joggle me into insights about the gigantic metanovel that my character Thuy in Postsingular is supposed to be writing. Her abilities have been amped up by telepathic contact with the web. A metanovel might be, like, a million pages long—with intricate hyperlinked patterns.

To make it easier on myself, I’m supposing that Thuy’s metanovel is transreal, that is, it’s about her own life. She’s calling her metanovel Wheenk.

As I’ve mentioned before in these journals, wheenk is a code-word that I use for long-winded personal complaining. I often talk about wheenk when I’m enviously grumbling over the high sales figures of writers who are more overtly emotional and less intellectually challenging than I.

When I talk about wheenk, I’m thinking of books where, on every page, the main character is mentally going over their longings, their hopes, and their fears—an unceasing chorus of “wheenk, wheenk, wheenk,” as if from that proverbial rabbit whose foot is caught in the jaws of a trap, the trap being, dear reader, the pain and wonder of life itself. Wheenk books can be good or bad.

Two benchmark examples of bad wheenk books are House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Their main characters are too busy chanting “Does anyone love me?” to hear anything at all that anyone else says. Two examples of good wheenk books are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

My character Thuy Nguyen, whom I’m fond of, and who is in some aspects my clone, shares my disdain for gushing self-examination, so when she titles her metanovel Wheenk, it’s done somewhat ironically. My plan is that Thuy will in fact make her metanovel into a wheenk book, but even so she’ll make it a consummate work of art. And I need to figure out how she’s going to do this.

April 12, 2006. Tropicana Hotel in the Mission.

Sylvia and I are staying at the Tropicana Hotel on Valencia Street in the Mission for three nights, right next to the Elbo Room bar. Soaking up atmosphere.

I saw Mr. Peanut in a glass case in a store window. I’m gonna put him into my Postsingular novel. As a boy I was always frightened by Mr. Peanut’s grisly-internal-organ appearance and by his cane.

I had a reading with John Shirley at the New College down the street. John led off with a beautiful performance: excerpts of his apocalypse novel The Other End, which is coming out this summer. I read my story “Chu and the Nants” which will be in Asimov’s SF Magazine in June. This story is, as I’ve mentioned, an early chapter of the Postsingular novel I’m working on. The event was hosted by Adam Cornford and Terry Bisson. Terry billed it as “The Dread Lords of Cyberpunk.” John and I were proud of that. Dread Lords forever!

My reading was good. The audience laughed a lot at the story, maybe more than I wanted them too. That happens to me. People think I’m being funny, when I’m not in fact intending to be funny all the time. It’s more that I’m pointing out what I see to be the truth, albeit in a slightly satirical fashion.

Talking to Terry before the reading, he said that he’d worked as a farmer and as an auto mechanic, and that writing novels is like being a farmer—always the same damned field to tend, day after day. And writing short stories is like being an auto mechanic—you get the hulk into your garage and beat on it for a few days, and then you’re done, and you get a new one to work on.

I remarked that writing a novel takes a really high tolerance for discomfort and anxiety.

April 21, 2006. Final Math Department Talk. Fresno. BMW.

I’m in Fresno, California, it’s 6 am. I gave my canned talk on “Gnarly Computation” to the math department at Fresno State University yesterday. I was here about ten years ago to speak on, I imagine, cellular automata. Nobody here remembered my visit, nor the person who’d invited me then. But I recognized the buildings.

My hosts were the age of my children, mid-thirties. When some of them asked me questions from the audience, I couldn’t tell if they were teachers or grad students. I’m getting so old. It’s more like I’m living in a different world from the young people starting their careers.

After the talk, I had dinner in a Mexican restaurant with some of the math profs. They were cute, as math profs are. Although my talk went fine, the whole exercise felt kind of pointless. I’m not sure I’ll give any more academic-type talks in the future. I no longer have any career interest in promoting myself to math departments—I’m never gonna be looking for an academic job again. And at this point, I’ve somewhat lost interest in promulgating the Wolframite belief that reality is made of gnarly computations. I still think it’s true, but I’m tired of pointing it out.

I feel remote here. Like a robotically operated Martian lander.

The best thing about giving this talk is that I get to drive a hundred and fifty miles each way in my new racing-green BMW. The handling excitement of the car really kicks in when I’m on a winding, two-lane road. The car holds the road so well that I don’t need, strictly speaking, to slow down when I’m making a turn.

The day after I got the car, I took a pulse-pounding drive around the twisty and more-or-less deserted road that circles Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. If I drove like that all the time, I’d have an accident, or kill a pedestrian, or get a ticket. Fast driving on small roads isn’t really a thrill I’d want to regularly indulge in. But I’m going to seek out some country lanes for the drive home from Fresno. Look out, cows!

My other sixtieth-birthday toy is an iPod. On the way down, I listened to a shuffle drawn from the eight hundred or so songs from old CDs of mine that I’ve ripped so far. I’ll skip through songs looking for a good one. And then a song takes me away. If I wear the iPod with the earphones it’s almost like being high—that sense of not thinking about useful things, of idly spinning my mind.

May 16, 2006. Enjoying Being a Writer.

I feel excited about Postsingular, and about some short stories I’ve been writing with Paul Di Filippo, Terry Bisson, and Marc Laidlaw. I’m working at white heat. I’m happy when I wake up and there’s no plans or appointments, and I know I’m free to write all day.

I love to lie on my camping mat in the back yard going over my latest printouts of chapter, outline, and/or story, marking them up. And then I go inside and type the changes into my computer. I print that out, make a sandwich and eat lunch at the table in the back yard, reading over the latest. Maybe later I take my printouts and my laptop to the coffee shop. Moving slowly, doing things at my own pace.

The other day I wrote such a big hunk of Postsingular. And my current changes are propagating backwards into the earlier chapters of the novel. Roots growing back down the timeline from the latest seeds. Reverse causation is perfectly routine when you’re growing a novel.

I’m hoping tomorrow to tear another big raw chunk of flesh off the Muse, or, to put it in a more civilized fashion, quarry a another great rough slab of Parmenidean marble.

I was thinking today, writing on my camping mat, that this is one of the happiest times I’ve ever had. It’s sunny and peaceful this week, no rain, no noisy construction projects on the block. The grass is lovely and still a springy green. I’m healthy, calm, and the writing’s going so well. I’m lucky, and even if I lose it all tomorrow, I had today. Thank you, god.

I know from experience that my state of mind won’t necessarily stay good. When I work at high intensity, I sometimes go over the edge and get frantic and uptight. As I may have mentioned, I think of a piano where someone’s tightened the strings too much, and the frame is creaking and about to snap. Highly strung.

Or maybe tomorrow I won’t be able to get it together to write at all. On days like that, nothing is quite right. The grass is too wet to lie on, there’s too much noise outside, my chair is uncomfortable, and the so-wonderful-yesterday material seems somehow tedious. I never know what a day’s emotional weather will bring.

One thing that’s making the current chapter particularly fun and trippy is that, as I’ve mentioned, my character Thuy is a novelist, or rather a metanovelist, and she’s writing about her own life. And Thuy is really me, so in some sense I’m writing about the process of writing this particular chapter. It’s trans-transreal.

And I think I’m doing this in a sufficiently funky and tricky way so that it’s neither self-aggrandizing nor lifelessly schematic—those being the Scylla and Charybdis risks of dabbling with metafictional self-reference. It’s best if the readers don’t even notice that you’re doing it.

Another kick is that, stylistically, I’m doing risky things I don’t often dare try, like including Borgesian storylets, present-tense video sequences, and ranting Dada/surreal prose-poetry. I’m also excited about how deep into the science fiction I’m getting, and how extremely cutting-edge the book is. In short, I’m way out on the edge, outdoing myself.

Postsingular indeed.

This week I went to a dinner for the guests at a “Postsingularity Summit,” at Stanford, and I felt kind of lofty towards some of the shopworn ideas they were kicking around. I mean, the computational singularity isn’t just dinner conversation for me, dude, it’s my daily life, all day long.

As a side-project, I’m working on a surfing SF story with Marc Laidlaw once again. And, as I like to do, I’m thinking of surfing analogies to writing. Now that I’m blessedly retired from my day job, I’m like a guy who does nothing but surf every day. I feel that my skill is rising because of the constant practice. I’m out there in it all the time. I live in a tent on the beach.

Maybe I’ll drop dead tomorrow. So what? I’ve lived. I was lucky. I got to be a writer.

Rudy’s Wedding

July 5, 2006. In Virginia for Rudy’s Wedding.

We’re all in Orange, Virginia, for Rudy’s wedding to Penny Thomas—coming up on July 8, Saturday. We’re staying in a rather nice Holiday Inn on a knoll overlooking lovely rolling green pasture land or, no, they’re hay fields. Round rolls of last year’s hay rest by the field like giant pastries, and the landscape stretches on as far as the eye can see. Lines of woods, barns, more hills. I walked over to the woods and found some tasty wineberries. I remembered them from Lynchburg, they’re like raspberries but they grow in pods like hazelnuts.

We spent yesterday, the Fourth of July, visiting with Penny’s parents. They have sixteen horses and an old farmhouse, a bit like some of the farmhouses I saw as a boy. Georgia and her husband Courtney with their little Althea arrived in the afternoon. Our granddaughter.

Althea is doughy and pleasant to the touch. Soft as a little rabbit. A guileless face, lively and interested in novelty. She crows with pride when she walks. She got in the pool with her parents. The three of them were so thrilled—it was sweet. Today I took Althea in the pool by herself, and she was uneasy at first, not being with Mama or Papa, but soon she started enjoying it. I was zooming her along, skimming the surface of the water, and she was kicking. Like a dream of flight.

Isabel and her boyfriend Gus showed up today. Those two are so fond of each other. It’s a dream come true, to be hanging around the motel rooms with all three of our children, plus our granddaughter.

There’s a wall-sized projection-screen TV in the breakfast room, and today it was tuned to news, with the announcers braying lies and propaganda. One line caught my attention: “A five year old boy awoke to find a blood-covered burglar in his room…” Like the media is feeding this to people and their children at breakfast? Unbelievable to me that so many people accede to such hideous mind control.

I’m content to be sitting around admiring the kids, glad to be with my loved ones, happy to see them happy with each other and with me. It’s especially nice to see Sylvia’s joy at having her three chicks plus the “chicklet” as Isabel calls Althea in this context.

I should write or at least plan a toast for the wedding. I didn’t do that for Georgia’s wedding, and I kind of dropped the ball. But it’s hard to crank up the full emotion before the actual event.

July 7, 2006. Pop’s Grave.

On the day before the wedding, brother Embry and I visited our father’s grave in Herndon, Virginia. The trip was very satisfying. It brought me some long-wished-for closure regarding Pop’s death. At the funeral in 1994 they didn’t do a proper burial service at all. For some strange reason, Pop’s then-partner Priscilla didn’t bring in an Episcopal priest, and Embry and I were too stunned with grief to get into tweaking (or even finding out in advance) Priscilla’s plans. So instead of a service, there were just some Reston people making random speeches, patting themselves on the back about how great they were.

So Embry and I drove the eighty miles from Orange, Virginia, to Herndon. I brought the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and we read the official rite for the burial of the dead, taking turns on the prayers, and saying some of them together. It felt good. Such beautiful language.

If Pop was in any way able to notice it, he’d be glad. What more could a Dad ask than having his children sitting on his grave—praying for him and shedding tears?

Afterwards, Embry and I reminisced about Pop. Just before we left, I patted his gravestone and said, “You were right, Pop.” I was thinking about him always telling me to quit drinking.

Embry chimed in, “Right about everything, Pop.”

July 10, 2006. My Wedding Toast.

So many people showed up for Rudy and Penny’s wedding two days ago. At times I felt like a server experiencing a denial-of-service attack, with too many clients logging in for conversation.

It was wonderful how happy and confident Rudy Jr. looked. And when Penny threw the bouquet, Isabel caught it, and everyone was nudging Gus. Althea was hopping around on the dance floor—they had a great bluegrass-style band, The Hogwaller Ramblers.

After the party, I talked to the band’s long-haired leader, and it turned out he’d read my Ace paperback SF novels years ago, like White Light and Spacetime Donuts. Heavy Virginia accent. “I loved to read ’em when I was all tripped out.”

I’d drafted a wedding toast, but I didn’t end up using the draft. I tried to wing it, and I said something about Rudy being able to beat me at chess when he was five, and about how happy we were to have such a lovely woman as Penny in the family, and then I dug down and came up with something meant to express the idea that I’ve written out below—but I could only say a small part of that idea before I got too choked up to continue. So, as with Georgia’s wedding, writer that I am, I typed up my real toast afterwards and emailed it to the family. I’m better on paper than in person:

A wedding is an emotional peak. When you climb a peak you’re high enough to see the other peaks clearly, standing out from the foothills. And here at Rudy’s wedding, I can see my wedding with Sylvia, and our parents’ weddings, and our other children’s weddings. I see the funerals of our parents and the funerals yet to come. I see our births, and the births of our children and the births of our grandchildren. All these peaks are out there, visible from this exalted moment. And, oddly enough, each of those peaks is in some sense the same peak, and all the great events of our lives are here in this one moment. Life is a mystery. And so we celebrate, and we open our eyes to notice how touching and tragic and beautiful it is to live this life, with its weddings, its deaths, and its births, generation upon generation. Sweetest of all, this moment is real, all of us are here and now in this lovely grassy meadow beneath a wedding tent in Orange, Virginia. I love you, Rudy and Penny. God bless us all.

I wrote that toast late last night when I couldn’t sleep. It was the day after the wedding. After writing and revising and finalizing my toast, I felt exalted. I went outside to look at the moon from the tenth floor balcony of our hotel. I had a cigarette. I kept repeating, “The mystery of life.” In an odd way I felt close to death as well as close to life. Up on the peak.

After I emailed the toast to the family, I didn’t get much of a reaction. Georgia was maybe a little impatient: “That is so Da.” Writing the toast after the fact, I guess she meant, also the flight into metaphysics.

July 11, 2006. In D.C.

Now Sylvia and I are up in Washington, D.C. We’re staying in the Madera, a boutique hotel near Dupont circle. Seeing the fountain in Dupont circle brings back a big memory rush of the times I hung out in this neighborhood when I was in college and grad school, forty years ago. I used to come in here to see the art movies at the Dupont Cinema and to buy cool titles at Dupont Books.

After college, my first college roommate Kenny Turan lived near Dupont Circle. In 1968, I was visiting Kenny along with Greg Gibson, who’d also been a college roommate. A reunion. Kenny showed us a postcard he’d gotten from Charles Manson. Journalist that he was—he was already working for the Washington Post—Kenny had gotten Charlie’s prisoner number from a newspaper photo and had written him the question, “What IS the secret of your success with women?” and Charlie wrote back, “Kenneth: Just be real, real, REAL.”

Kenny, Greg and I wanted to get high. We started talking to a chatty gay guy our age in the small park that encircles the fountain at the center of Dupont Circle. The guy said he’d just gotten out of jail for dealing, but since we were so nice he’d take a chance and sell us some mescaline caps that he’d buried under a rock right near the fountain. We paid the guy, and he rooted up three gel caps of pink powder.

So we three ate our caps and went to see the movie Woodstock, which kind of made us forget we were high. But as soon as we left the movie theater, the trip came up and slobbered on us like a faithful dog that had been waiting outside.

Today, seeing the Dupont Circle fountain, and the streams forever cascading off its high marble bowl, I think of the water as being like time itself, flowing on and on whether or not I’m here to watch.

What if the mescaline never really wore off? What if the past forty years of my life have been a single, highly detailed hallucination? And I’m about to come down off my long, strange trip.

Sylvia and I went to the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall. It’s become shabby and run-down, and they had a boring, ugly show of supersized, kakaist canvases and assemblages by the bombastic, bullshit artist Anselm Kiefer. So as to add some gravitas to his excremental, speckled, Brobdignagian works, Kiefer sometimes invokes the Holocaust. Or the starry heavens. “Hey, this is serious stuff!”

The best work I saw at the Hirshhorn this time was Video Flag by the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik. It’s a wall-sized grid of TVs showing some synchronized tapes Paik made, and the garish patterns are arranged to resemble the stripes and star-block of the U.S. flag. In the star-block, Paik had a series of 3D models of recent U.S. presidents, the faces shiny and unblemished like plastic or, more to the point, like Silly Putty, for the faces were algorithmically morphing one into the other, LBJ into Bush into Reagan into Clinton and so on. “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The effect was unspeakably sinister, even though Paik presents the work as if it’s light-weight, mental junk-food. The display room has a big comfortable leather couch that you can veg out on, as if to watch the tube for a few minutes.

As an anti-terrorism measure, Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House is closed off to traffic now. It has a run-down deserted feel. And all the government buildings in D.C. are ringed with heavy-duty steel bollards anchored to cement—to keep out suicidal truck-bombers. It’s depressing to see us under siege like this. And of course it’s the “fault” of the terrorists. But, after 9/11, couldn’t we have asked even once what it is that the terrorists actually want? Couldn’t there be some way of finding peace with them instead of jumping into an eternally escalating tit-for-tat?

Sylvia and I popped into the Library of Congress. They have this beautiful ceiling with vaults and domes and spandrels, all painted with representations of authors and of branches of literature—along with golden quotes. A real hodgepodge. It’s so hopeless to categorize human knowledge.

What really cracked me up was that one of the muses depicted is the patron of “Erotica”—she’s a lush, pouting woman with her toga pulled off her shoulder.

Are our moral watchdogs in Congress aware of this outrage?

The heat and humidity in D.C. is astonishing. Even late at night, to walk a few blocks is to find yourself swimming in sweat. And in the mornings, crowds of people rush off to work in suits.

It’s nice to have all the black people around, and to hear their voices. Sylvia and I watched a pickup brass band of black youths playing on a traffic island beside Dupont Circle. Trombones mostly, and a tuba or two, inexpensive band instruments, shiny on the inside, dull on the outside. Nice to see the street lights sweeping across the reflective inner bells of the horns. Black hole dynamics.

We hit the Phillips Collection of art off Q Street, an old favorite. Sylvia and I used to go there when we were courting in the mid 1960s. One work that always catches my attention is Daumier’s painting of a barker touting a strong man. I love the frantic way the barker points at his star, and the way the strong man looks so cool and confident. The barker is like someone writing an introduction for a book.

Today they had a cool Kandinsky hung beside examples of Chinese calligraphy—the relevance being that the Kandinsky work showed an intriguing series of glyphs. I like the idea of a language of glyphs. I often imagine that’s how telepathy would be, that is, compound images or sensation-blocks, higher-order units representing constellations of thought.

I’m still playing with the idea that the last thirty-eight years of my life has, in reality, been a prolonged mescaline hallucination. I find this thought oddly cheering. I’m still watching Woodstock with Greg and Kenny. Greg will nudge me and we’ll walk out into the hot July night. It’ll be 1968 and I’ll still be 22. I won’t quite be able to remember all the things that I imagined—my life with Sylvia, the children, the books, the career, the ups and the downs. I’ll just have a fleeting sense of the flow, like bustling details within a snow-globe.

And then—I suppose I’ll start over and do my same life again. And snap out of it again. Infinitely many times—on down the regress towards the final vanishing point. The white light. And that brings me to the Now.

That faithful slobbering dog of a trip waiting outside the Woodstock theater—that dog was my life.

Maybe when I die, it’ll be like a hallucination ending. The world takes over again. When I die, it’s not so much a matter of me coming down, it’s in fact the world that’s coming down. Coming down off the Rudy hallucination.

I’m writing this entry by way of getting the Rudy hallucination going again. I’ve been on the long wedding trip—merged into my family and my marriage. Now, as once again I look inward, the sensation of being a writer snaps back into focus. A Promethean figure snatching fire from the heedless gods.

Wild West

August 20, 2006. Wild West Road Trip.

Sylvia and I just got back from our 17-night 3,300 mile road trip around the Wild West. We passed through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, California. We visited a bunch of national parks: Yosemite, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier. It was good.

Starting out, we went through Tioga Pass and we stayed in a funky state park campground called Big Bend near Mono Lake. Slept right by a waterfall. Then we took Route 6 across southern Nevada. What a great ride. Those “Empty Quarter” two-lane roads are the best.

Interstates are ugly because they have to terraform such a wide strip of land for the road, what with the shoulders and all. Counting the shoulders, a freeway is a couple of hundred yards wide. And all of the land in that strip has been dug and bulldozed and so on. You’re perpetually in an area of disturbed, artificial landscape. Plus you’ve got trucks, gravel pits, railings, poles, and signs.

I’d always wondered about Tonopah because of the Little Feat song “Willin’” with the line: “I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah / I’ve driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made / Driven the back road so I wouldn’t get weighed.”

Tonopah is some kind of dead. Although later I talked to a guy from there who claimed things are better just now because the price of gold is going up and the mines are kicking back into gear.

We spent a night in an old casino hotel in Ely. Rickety. They pronounce the town “Eely.” A great road goes through Ely, Route 50, and it’s sometimes called the loneliest road in America, but take it from me, Route 6 is lonelier.

We visited some caves east of Ely. I always think caves are gonna be more interesting than they are. Plants and clouds are so much more dynamic.

And then we got to Pinedale, and the news is that Isabel and Gus are getting married! Gus asked my permission, which was a nice gesture. I said yes. Gus is very loving towards Isabel. They’re a nice pair.

After Pinedale, Sylvia and I headed into the Tetons. We went backpacking on the first night, as the campgrounds were totally full. Hiked three or four miles into the wilderness, up the side of a Teton mountain. We slept okay, but there was a thunderstorm in the morning and Sylvia panicked and insisted we pack up right away instead of waiting out the rain in our tent.

I didn’t want to rush off into the rain—I wanted to enjoy the mountains. But Sylvia insisted. We had a terrible fight about this. But after a bit we made up—and the rest of the trip went great.

I had a dream where I go to the future and I meet a guy who wants to be an SF writer. He describes a story idea to me: A guy writes an SF story that turns out to be about an actual person in the future. And in the dream, I’m kind of dizzy, trying to sort this out. Am I the guy in his story? Or is he the guy in my story?

We ate hamburgers in Great Falls, Montana. I hadn’t had a burger in maybe seven years. I felt like I was taking some unknown drug. Fearful of the coming effects.

The pulsing bifurcating waterfall above Avalanche Lake resembles the graph of the logistic map. If a cascade were intelligent, would it move the rocks more?

In a sense, any natural object or process can see its surroundings.

At Yellowstone, outside a park grocery, I overhear a careworn, weathered biker introducing himself to a woman just off her shift. She’s Roxanne.

“I’m Wild Bill,” He tells her. “But you might better call me Mild Bill.” Such a hard life this man must have had. He looks almost like a bum. He pulls a two inch cigar stub out of his layers of clothes and chews it, ready to light up. Roxanne rises to leave.

Wild Bill says, “Didn’t mean to scare you off! Just kidding.”

She’s gone. He gets on his bike and circles around the parking lot before leaving, wobbly and alone.

Sylvia and I visit some boiling mud pots at Yellowstone. Plorp. The bubbles throw off small gobbets of hot mud. A gobbet occasionally forms a tiny bubble of its own. That bubble could be our universe. Yes, this is how the world arose.

Driving across the rolling, uncrowded northern part of Yellowstone, we listened to the Allman Brothers song “Ramblin’ Man.” I love the part at the end when the one guitarist repeats the same little ostinato figure ten, twenty, thirty times—he can’t stop—and the other guitarist plays a single long note soaring out of that, rising up, dying down.

Notes on a folded-in-four scrap of paper:

Hiking alone from Logan Pass toward Mount Reynolds in Glacier National Park. Walking the spine of the Continental Divide. I look over at Mount Reynolds, this huge single rock. Such a mass of rock and quanta.

What is reality? I have a rush of ontological wonder sickness. Why does anything exist?

The ubiquity of the familiar forms: trees, clouds, mountains, animals, my thoughts. Standard patterns that nature loves to grow.

I throw a raisin to a pika, a mountain rodent. She gets the raisin in her little paws and she wants to eat it—but she’s uneasy at still being fairly close to me—but she does want to bite into the delicious raisin right away. Torn by the opposing drives, the pika lets out a gorgeous, shrill, liquid squeek.

Sylvia and I visited Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho. It was in a small, ordinary graveyard by a busy road into town. Looking for it was a replay of looking for my father’s grave in Herndon, Virginia, in July. In both cases I asked a Mexican guy who was mowing the lawn, and he didn’t speak English. My father had a white beard and he liked it when people said he looked like Hemingway.

I found Hemingway’s slab, seven feet long, flat on the ground between two pines. For some reason people leave coins on the slab. Idiots. I cleaned off the letters of Hem’s name, blowing away the pine needles, shoving aside the coins. And then I saw his ghost. He told me that a lot of people came there looking for him, too many, but he was gonna say hi to me since I’m a writer.

Hemingway was about the first writer who I really “got” and admired—this was back in high school. I liked his conciseness, his haiku-like clarity.

But all the stuff about having a moral code and being a man, that’s all pretty much rotted away. Fuck the code. You have adventures, is all. Life is a wonderful adventure. It seems so teenage to formulate as code.

On the other hand, Hemingway was in the war, and he saw people getting killed—so I should cut him some slack about having a moral code. What would my own code be, if pressed?

• Seek the gnarl.
• See the divine.
• Love those around you.

I rented a mountain bike to ride down Mount Baldy in Ketchum. You take the bike up on a ski-lift, and then you careen down—a drop of four thousand feet over ten miles of single-track trail.

I’d thought it might feel like skiing, the way biking sometimes does—not that I’ve ever skied a trail like this. The required focus of attention was much, much tighter than anything I’d expected. I couldn’t look away from the path for even a second, or I’d sail off the edge. Indeed, the ride used every iota of the mountain-biking skills that I’ve acquired over the last twenty years of riding. At one point, my handlebars were jack-hammering so hard that my wristwatch flew off—and I didn’t even notice.

And the twenty-year-old boy who rented me the bike had said it would be easy!

San Francisco Bay Area

August 28, 2006. Flurb. Mathematicians in Love.

I haven’t really touched Postsingular since we got back from the road-trip. I still have to write the ending.

By way of putting off my return to the novel, I spent a lot of time this week editing and publishing a new webzine, Flurb, which had its own website, www.flurb.net.

The proximate cause was as follows. I’d just written a great new SF story with Paul Di Filippo, “Elves of the Subdimensions.” I wrote it because I needed another story to fill out my impending anthology, Mad Professor. But Paul and I also wanted to publish “Elves of the Subdimensions” somewhere before using it my antho. The print zines didn’t want it, but I figured we could get it into one of the new SF webzines. And then the snotty twerps at the Strange Horizons and Helix SF webzines rejected our “Elves.”

And then I was like, “Fuck these SF webzines! They don’t even pay their writers, and it costs them nothing extra to run a story, and they’re not going to print Rucker and Di Filippo? I’ll start my own webzine. How hard can it be?”

I emailed my writer friends, and the Flurb project mushroomed. Along with the story by Paul and me, I got stories by Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, Cory Doctorow, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Kris Saknussem, and John Shirley. I think I’ve started quite a nice webzine. I used my paintings and photos for the art. Issue #1 got good buzz and a lot of visits, like thousands a day. It’ll level out at fifteen thousand visits a month for awhile. A big success. Maybe I’ll tackle an issue #2 in November.

I’m also doing the very last revisions on Mathematicians in Love. Numbing, secretarial work. I’m haunted, during this final reread and revisions-entering, that maybe the book is no good. Too dorky and techy, not enough soul, and too complicated for the hog-fat SF fans—who want only a trough of familiar swill.

Am I ever going to write again? The more time goes by, the less likely it seems that I actually can write at all. Stepping outside of my histrionic panic, I can see that this is a good state to be in. I well know that I need a fever pitch of anxiety and desperation before actually getting my ass in gear to write.

September 12, 2006. Finishing Postsingular.

I thought I’d finished Postsingular yesterday.

But today of course I wasn’t happy with the last three pages. I felt uneasy all night with that slight flaw chafing at me. So this morning I rewrote them five, or six, or eight times, and now the book’s nice and shiny from stem to stern. Ready to launch. The book took me a year and a day, like in a fairy tale.

Done so soon? I miss it already.

Postsingular explores two questions:

• How can we get rid of machines? That is, how do we escape the digital age—but still keep the info goodies? Answer: Make everything be alive.
• How do you make art? In the novel, I have this whole deal about my character Jayjay trying to play a certain Lost Chord on a magic harp. The Lost Chord is an objective correlative for me trying to write the perfect scene. Jayjay playing the Lost Chord represents me trying to write about the Lost Chord. Answer: Finally you just go play it. Zonnng!

September 26, 2006. Bruce Sterling in San Francisco.

Bruce Sterling, who mostly lives in Belgrade with his new wife Jasmina, is in the U.S. for a tour of lecture and conference gigs. Bruce and Jasmina travel a lot together—fittingly they were married at the Los Angeles airport.

The two of them spent last night at our house, and today they drove up to San Francisco for a futurist consulting gig Bruce had at the Global Business Network. I rode up with them for the day.

Jasmina loves the internet, everywhere we went, she’d say, “Do you think they have free wireless here?” It got to be a joke over the day, and I started saying it all the time too.

At one point Jasmina was checking her blog for pugnacious, right-wing Serbian comments. She was doing this in a store with her laptop in midair. She expends a fair amount of energy on flame-war comment threads.

Bruce was nice to me all day. He was happy to have me helping him find his way around San Francisco, and sharing his experiences. He said it felt like having a body-guard. I’m kind of an older brother figure to him—eight years difference in our age. In the past I’ve sometimes envied his greater worldly success in the writing profession. But I can be big enough to let go of crazy resentments. At least for a little while. Now and then.

Actually even now I’m still grateful to Bruce for welcoming me into the cyberpunk fold, back in the day, like 1982, me the isolated nut writer in Lynchburg, Virginia.

In the car on the drive up to San Francisco, Bruce and I had a good talk about a story, “Hormiga Canyon,” that we’re thinking of writing. It would involve giant ants—a science-fictional power-chord dear to my heart. This will be our fourth story written together.

Our stories turn out well, but the collaborations seem to get more rancorous each time. Bruce can be beastly to collaborate with, often escalating to biting invective in our debates about what to do next. And of course I reply in kind, giving as good as I get. I’m no sweetie-pie either.

It’s good for us to have this day of face-to-face human contact. When we meet in person, I can see Bruce’s vulnerable, touching, and endearing qualities.

Today was fun in San Francisco, hanging around, letting events unfurl at their own pace. Turns out the Global Business Network consulting group rents out space on an upper floor of the Federal Reserve Bank. At first I didn’t grasp the impact of that. But the security cop in the building’s entrance hall was behind bullet-proof glass, and, mounted on the wall next to him, he had a submachine gun and a large caliber shotgun. When someone came down from the consulting group to escort us in, we had to go through airport metal detectors.

We were inside the security cordon now, so after Bruce’s meeting, he and I skulked down to the bank’s basement and managed to peer into a room where four or five employees were using machines to process and package hundreds of millions of dollars in paper currency. They were running bills through a hulking hi-tech counterfeit detector, physically washing bunches of bills, packaging the dried bills in plastic shrink wrap, and piling the wrapped bricks onto heavy carts.

I tried to take some pictures, but I blew the shots—as I was so uneasy about someone seeing my camera and scolding me, or even arresting me. Outside the building, we saw a homeless man wearing pajama pants, decorated with Happy Face men wearing Uncle Sam hats. Bruce said this was the man’s “considered mode of self-expression.”

Bruce had an afternoon gig to give a talk at the California College for the Arts, so I drove him and Jasmina over there early. We killed some time in their cafe. Hanging with Bruce and Jasmina, there was no social stigma about getting out my laptop, which is something I like to do. It was like being a stoner among other heavy users.

Bruce’s talk was titled “Design and Futurism.” He was using futurism as a synonym for futurology, that is, the profession of consulting with businesses about what they should do next. Bruce remarked that generally, the businesses who call in futurists are the ones that are in considerable danger of falling under the karmic hammer. You don’t call the doctor unless you’re sick.

Bruce says a futurist is like a psychiatrist who empowers the employees to say what they already know about their situation, but have been afraid to articulate. And it’s usually the middle managers who are the most emotionally invested in continuing business as usual. Things are always working fine for them. Middle managers don’t have to design the products, and they don’t have to manage the profits.

Later in the talk, Bruce went off on his idea about individualizing manufactured objects with what he calls arphids. Arphid is his word for the new RFIDs or “radio frequency ID tags.”

Actually, I already heard Bruce talking about arphids when he visited me last year, and I ended up repurposing, or plagiarizing, or one-upping his notion…the orphids in my novel Postsingular. My orphids are quantum-computing molecules with the intelligence of a dog. They communicate via quantum entanglement. They can see, they can hear, and they’re everywhere—one every few millimeters, floating around, and landing on things. They import our reality into cyberspace.

After Bruce’s talk, some of the faculty took us out for a nice dinner at a place near the train station. And then I rode the train home.

Nice to be out of my hermit’s cave today, out in the marketplace.

October 18, 2006. Dylan Again.

We saw Bob Dylan play in San Francisco last night—Sylvia, Michael Blumlein and me.

It’s great how Dylan keeps at his art, year after year. Out there performing. A good role model for any artist. The surfer who’s out on the waves every day. A few weeks ago I read an excerpt of an old interview with Dylan, and he was talking about his song “Mr. Tambourine Man” as depicting the quality of late afternoon light in certain parts of a city. Which reminded me that (duh) a musician isn’t just thinking about the words. His art is in the sound, like a painter piling up colors and shapes, and it may indeed synaesthetically evoke just about anything that’s on the musician’s mind.

Dylan and his band had a killer trio of songs for their encore: “Thunder on the Mountain,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “All Along the Watchtower.” That last song—I was remembering how, thirty years ago, I’d sometimes get out my big flat black plastic records, and repeatedly play the Dylan and the Jimi Hendrix versions of “Watchtower” back to back, gloating over their greatness.

Dylan reimagines his songs on every tour, tailoring them to his current band, and to the current state of his by now somewhat duck-like voice. Bob played some good guitar lines in “Watchtower” last night—not exactly mimicking Jimi, but taking the man into account. A postmodern, twenty-first-century sound, with a full awareness of the past thirty years, and of the dead friends and relatives, and of our own inevitable deaths to come. A full awareness of the human condition, transcended by the ecstasy of losing ourselves in the music in a crowd.

November 5, 2006. Revising Postsingular.

I heard back from Hartwell at Tor last month. He likes Postsingular fine, but he wants some changes, mostly to round out the secondary characters.

I’m so sick of working on Postsingular. The usual cognitive dissonance between my golden dreams at dawn, and what I’ve actually achieved by the end of the day. Wheenk wheenk. So, okay, I zapped in Hartwell’s fixes, rewrote the ending a couple of times, and now the book’s perfect. Another motherfucking masterpiece.

Mailed it in.

A few weeks ago, I had a nightmare about doing revisions. In the dream I keep having to go out of the sunshine into this dark basement-like place with broken things and a cement floor with dripping water, and I’m trying over and over to arrange some set of latches so that everything is tight. I have to unlock all the latches, and reach inside a box and adjust something. And then I have to lock everything back up in the correct order. I’m using keys from my keychain. I drop my keychain on the ground. The chain comes undone, and my keys scatter across the dank floor.

New Zealand

November 8, 2006. New Zealand.

We flew into Auckland at 5 am Friday morn, then looked around town until our hotel would let us in. Rode a ferry. Rode a bus. Cute parks. Giant plants. Strange accents. The people seem to say all the short e’s as long e’s. So better is beeter and best is beest and yes is yees.

The moon is like a C shape here instead of a D shape like it was back home a couple of days ago. Because we’re upside down. Down under.

The Maori or native name for New Zealand is Aotearoa, which means Long White Cloud, and when you’re off-shore, you do see a long white cloud over the land.

Let’s talk kiwis. Sylvia and I saw some kiwi birds at a roadside attraction called Kiwi House. We were driving south from Auckland. The kiwis are only active for about four hours a day, and that happens late at night. But Kiwi House had the kiwis in a day-for-night enclosure—dimly illuminated as if by moonlight during our daytime, and brightly illuminated during our night. Giving us a wonderful opportunity to see this rara avis in action.

One of the kiwis was quite peppy, trucking around his dimly lit, thirty-foot, glassed-in enclosure, probing into the loamy, leafy litter with his six-inch beak. Looking for grubs. The beak is surprisingly powerful, readily going deep into the ground, where the kiwi works it from side to side.

The kiwi’s motions are abrupt, hurried, efficient. Although they have tiny, rudimentary wings, I couldn’t see the wings at all. The kiwis totally looked like feather balls—with neck, feather-head and beak. They have heavy, large, three-toed, claw-like feet, located towards the rear of their bodies. You’d almost think that they’d fall forward, but they don’t—the mass of the ass holds them down as they pace around. Every now and then they take a big, abrupt hop forward, moving several feet in a sudden jump. I see kiwi-like aliens in my next book.

After Sylvia and I went to the Kiwi House, I began imitating a kiwi’s walk—doing this on public streets, much to Sylvia’s embarrassment/delight.

We drove from Auckland to Raglan on the western side of New Zealand, it’s a fairly deserted area on the Tasman Sea. The sand is black here. We saw some guys in what I guess you’d call sail cars, flying along the beach at forty or fifty miles an hour. Handmade metal cars with bicycle wheels and big sails. The wind quite intense off the Tasman Sea. The end of the world.

I immediately get lost in tiny Raglan. I study at an incredibly convoluted fractal on a sign—it’s a map of the intricate harbor and of the shoreline of the Tasman Sea. On the map, an arrow points to a dot. “You are here.” Inside a convoluted fractal.

The village of Raglan is cute, full of surfers, with cheap motels and some good cafes. One was called the Tongue And Groove. In NZ, a “cafe” is similar to a coffee shop where you order food at the counter, but the food goes beyond sandwiches to include things like chicken curry, mussels, or pasta. The Tongue and Groove was furnished with a half-dozen four-chair dinette sets in aluminum with colorful tops. Fifties style. We saw a number of cafes furnished like this.

Several times I thought of New Zealand as being like the U.S. in the fifties. Back before the population bomb started messing things up. There were only a third as many people in the U.S. back then. Enough stuff for everyone. Pollution not a problem yet.

Hanging out in the cafe, I leafed through Curl, an NZ women’s surfing magazine. Quote from a woman surfer talking about her surfer sister: “She’s a cruisy mal rider.” I love new slang.

One of the prettiest places we saw on the whole trip was the slopes of Mt. Karioi, which is on the coast, a little ways south of Raglan. It was like Big Sur dialed up to 11. Pristine green meadows running down to the sea, the slopes steeper and bigger than in Sur. Tree ferns on the jungly hills.

A caravan of insane New Zealand motorists sped past. Some kind of race or rally. It’s relaxing to have no idea what’s going on.

November 12, 2006. Mordor. Everything’s Alive. Wellington.

Now we’re at a resort hotel called the Chateau Tongariro, in a park in New Zealand where they shot some of the scenes for Lord of the Rings III. It’s raining, so hikes are a bit iffy. But, what the hey, I went ahead and hiked three hours in the rain this morning. I felt like Frodo struggling towards the mountain of Mordor. And now I’s sitting by a blazing fireplace.

The notion of an anima or spirit living in the fireplace comes naturally to my mind. How so? Well, my brain kicked back into novel-planning mode during my walk. I’ve been recovering from the last big push on Postsingular, and until today I didn’t feel like writing again. It’s been, what, all of ten days.

But now I, like our friend the kiwi, emerge from my burrow and begin poking the ground with my beak. My new kick is to write about a world where everything—every object, every process, every atom—everything is conscious and alive.

If there’s intelligent quantum computation inside a fire, you might see a fire with square flames? Or some subtler effect. Less smoke, maybe. The mind in the fire is tweaking its flames, making itself ever lovelier.

If objects control their own matter via quantum computation then, say, a drinking glass might be harder to break than before. The glass sheds off the vibration phonons in optimal ways so as to avoid catastrophic fracture. Or think of a bean that slyly rolls away to avoid being cooked. Sometimes in the kitchen, objects do seem to hide from me.

Does a log object to being burned? It would be a drag if you had to feel guilty about stoking your fire. Maybe objects aren’t all that bent on self-preservation. Animals like us have to be obsessed with survival—so we can live long enough to mate and to raise our young—otherwise our race goes extinct. But a log’s or rock’s individual survival doesn’t effect the survival of the race of logs or rocks. They’ll be around anyway.

We drove down to the city at the south end New Zealand’s upper island. Wellington. Rain like I’ve never seen it before. I splashed into a store in Wellington called Eyeball Kicks. They sell stickers and hot-rod style art objects. That phrase, “eyeball kicks,” is beloved by me, and is by way of being one of my aesthetic principles. It’s an old cartoonists’ catch-phrase relating to the idea of filling your frame with lots of cool little details to look at, as in a Will Elder drawing, or as in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. The store owner, Calvin Rowe, said he got the name from a book on Big Daddy Roth, a book with an introduction written by the cartoonist Chris “Coop” Cooper. Calvin was impressed that I’ve met Coop, and he said to say hi to him.

In the Te Papa museum in Wellington I saw an amazing, nine-minute abstract movie: Tusalava. It was handmade in 1928 by Len Lye, who drew all 4,400 frames of the film. He was inspired by a Maori dance where the dancers imitate the twitching of a wekahee grub worm. I read a part of a bio of Lye. The British censor didn’t want to approve Tusalava for public showing. “It seems to have no meaning, and if there is a meaning it’s surely unsuitable.” Love that.

Something else I learned in this museum: In New Zealand compasses, they have south at the top. Wow. The Pole.

While working on my hand-written notes in our hotel room in Wellington, I suddenly notice a large potted plant in the room with me—and it wasn’t here a few minutes ago. Green, shiny leaves, two meters high, like corn or, I guess, like a banana tree. It’s an alien in disguise. Straining with effort I lift it up—pot and all, for surely the thing’s brain is in the pot—and I hurl it through the plate glass window of this fifth floor room to the street below. Whew. Just in the nick of time.

November 23, 2006. Thanksgiving in NZ. Giant Ferns.

We abandoned our rented car in Wellington and took a ferry to the lower of New Zealand’s two main islands. I’d found us a spot at Lochmara Lodge, which is an eco resort off the Queen Charlotte Sound. A guy from the lodge met our ferry and took us to the lodge in his small boat. Such a big world it is. “You are here.”

Our room has a kitchenette, and we’re allowed to fetch our morning eggs from a hay-filled barn where the free-roaming hens cackle. They don’t seem to care about us taking the eggs. I made friends with a pig. She has a ring in her nose. Classic.

Today’s Thanksgiving, but when I asked the lodge’s cook about our chances of a special dinner, he tartly said, “This is New Zealand, mate. Not the U.S.”

Our dinner was veggie burgers! No alternative to the lodge’s fare, as we’re a goodly boat ride from the nearest village. It was a good veggie burger though, with shredded beets on it.

And to liven up our meal, Sylvia and I walked along the rocky Maine-like beach of Lochmara Bay and pulled about twenty mussels off the rocks. In Bruegel’s time mussels were what the poor people ate. You can always get mussels. We steamed ours in a pan for our appetizer. The water seems so clean in this unpopulated oasis that we had no second thoughts about them being safe to eat.

We felt nostalgic for the American Thanksgiving, and a little lonely—thinking of our three kids celebrating without us. Memories of the old Thanksgivings in Lynchburg and Louisville, with a bottle of 110 proof Wild Turkey on the kitchen counter, shared by me, my father and my big brother. Those were the days.

Last night I dreamed I’d gone to someone’s math colloquium talk on infinity while I was blacked-out drunk, and that I’d given the speaker a hard time. People kept mentioning it to me in my dream. They’d found my performance amusing, but I didn’t remember any of it.

And then I had a different dream, of children in costumes, as if for a parade. They start chanting for freedom—for my notion of freedom, whatever that is—and I’m exhilarated. The children are jumping up and down, chanting faster. They break into small colored shapes, moving about in the beautiful figures of a dance. Ecstatic joy.

I’m in a happy frame of mind here, and I’m thinking about myself in an unusually positive way. From boyhood on, my friends found it fun to be with me, as I’m a fount of new ideas. I recall my college friend Don smiling and saying, “You’re such a bode,” this being the slang for bohemian or beatnik in the pre-hippie days.

The big thing about the Lochmara area is the giant fern trees, which are called punga trees. They’re twenty feet tall, with a big frizz-bop of huge fern fronds on top. Their tree-like trunk is a mass of tubes that are aerial fern roots. They call it a rain forest. An awesome density of organic computation in the rain forest. The brimming brooks, and the punga trees swaying in the wind. A pristine jungle.

One day Sylvia and I take a huge hike and, fairly randomly, find a boat to give us a ride back. Paradise.

Sylvia and I saw some amanita muscaria—a divinatory mushroom that R. Gordon Wasson wrote about in his book, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. These guys are the mushrooms you see in illustrations in fairy tales—bright red caps with white dots. For awhile I had a copy of Gordon Wasson’s book, back in the ’70s. I’d bought it at Dupont Books. Sta-Hi Mooney’s real-world model Dennis Poague borrowed Wasson’s book from me and he never returned it. He lost it, or sold it, or gave it away.

Anyway, we found a whole family of these legendary shrooms growing beneath a punga tree. A baby bud; a blushing child; a rosy, bright-red youth, a mature crimson disk with dots; a yellowing, turned-up, spored-out senior, and a wilted, flattened, dead one flopped onto the ground. The cycle of mushroom life.

I wouldn’t dream of eating an amanita myself, but I was filled with fond memories of the story that Bruce Sterling and I wrote about these shrooms as connected to the Tunguska event in Siberia: “Storming the Cosmos.”

The amanitas are, it seems, as much poisonous as they are psychedelic. The best practice among Siberian natives is to have their shaman eat the amanitas—and to let the shaman suffer the ensuing fevers and raving convulsions. And then the natives drink the urine of the shaman to get high. This procedure played a key part in “Storming the Cosmos.” Bruce and I laughed a lot while we were writing that story.

November 26, 2006. Christchurch.

After Lochmara, Sylvia and I caught a train to Christchurch, which is a third of the way down New Zealand’s lower island. The train was more like an amusement park ride than like a serious railroad. We rode along the sunny Pacific; it’s color here is called New Zealand teal.

The rear car of our train was open on all sides—like a flatcar with railings and a roof. It was carefree, unsafe and highly un-American. Leaning there beside Sylvia, watching the sea, my heart leapt up.

“I’m on vacation! And I never have to go back to work at all. We’re pushing towards the southern hole that leads to the Hollow Earth!”

Christchurch is used as a base port for many Antarctic expeditions. It’s a largish city with a determinedly British look. A bit of a jolt, after being at Lochmara Lodge among the tree ferns.

We saw one of Charles F. Goldie’s paintings in the Christchurch museum. I saw several other Goldie paintings in Wellington and in Auckland. The guy is great. Goldie painted Maoris with full facial tattoos. These tattoos are called moko. Amazing designs, rich with the arching branches of fern fronds and the curled up spirals of fern fiddleheads. Goldie’s pictures made me understand that the tattoos were in fact carved into the skin. He’s a wonderful old-school academic painter.

The moko really took off after the Europeans showed up in the1830s, as after that, the Maori had metal chisels and scalpels so they could carve their moko much deeper. And there seems to be an on-going interest in moko. Some very tough-looking Maoris wear them. High street-fashion. A Maori woman noticed me photographing an image of moko in a Wellington museum, and she was telling me about some of this.

I don’t think a European could get away with wearing moko, at least not in New Zealand.

Last night Sylvia and I went to a giant outdoor Christmas concert in Christchurch. Still a month till Christmas, but here the show is. Sponsored by Coca Cola. About ten thousand people in a field with crooners and a slick 1950s-style announcer. A giant Coca Cola sign on stage, and an Xmas tree a hundred and fifty feet tall. And in the sky, the Southern hemisphere’s spring sunset is stretching out, in foundry colors of red and gold. So odd to be here. It’s like a parallel world, or a colony planet in the Galactic Empire.

Visiting the natural history museum in Christchurch set me to thinking about invasive species. Before the Polynesians arrived on New Zealand—which was only about seven hundred years ago—New Zealand was a kingdom of birds, including large, flightless species like the kiwi and the giant moa. The moas were like ostriches, about twelve feet tall. Destroyed by the Maori. Easy to catch, good to eat. And the Polynesians also brought pigs, dogs and, like it or not, stowed-away rats—all of these bad for the birds.

In a second wave of immigration, the Europeans arrived—first whalers and sealers, and then convicts—and they displaced many of the Maori. In a third wave, many Asians are moving to New Zealand now.

Invasion is happening worldwide on the level of memes as well. Even in New Zealand, the papers have gossip about Britney Spears’ “inelegant expanse of bare bosom.”

Are there some races or species or ideas which settle in and never get displaced at all? I think of kudzu, of roaches and rats—and of memetic forces, such as religions, that are very hard to oust. Invasions that quell any further novelty. But eventually even a Communist dictator or a Republican president can fall from power.

Thinking about my fledgling plans for my next SF novel, I consider the idea of some aliens who are very dull as well as being very hard to get rid of. A lowest-common-denominator kind of race. But it might be dull to read about dull aliens. Well, I can have the dull aliens look cute—like kiwi birds, maybe. And I’ll counterbalance them with some novelty-enhancing good aliens who are misleadingly ugly, like flying stingrays, say.

I feel like I keep having the same dream, or rather, extensions of a single on-going dream. Looking for a room, a restaurant, a train. It’s like reporting to work every night. The “dream work.” This often happens on vacation—my incessant daytime planning sloshes over into travel dreams at night.

I really get the concept of SFictional colony worlds, now that I’m down under. Think of planet Earth itself as like a remote little island relative to the big Galactic civilization. We humans and mammals are perhaps like the unfortunate moas and kiwis, as innocent and defenseless as flightless birds. And the invading, destructive Polynesian rats are meme eaters.

If aliens show up, we should do what the moas or the Maori might best have done: eradicate the visitors as quickly as they arrive. But that’s rarely feasible.

December 1, 2006. Frigid Scuba. Giant Trees.

We flew up from Christchurch to Auckland. We rented another car and drove up into the northern, and warmer, part of the upper island—moving closer to the equator.

We stayed three nights in a cheap cottage on a farm near Tutukaka, amid cows, who’ve been loudly mooing. Yesterday their year-old calves were sold and trucked away for fattening. I’d moo too!

We went diving, me doing scuba and Sylvia snorkeling, both of us in double-thick wet suits. The trip involved a fifteen-mile boat ride to the Poor Knights Islands. The water was insanely cold, about forty degrees. The website where I’d reserved for this dive claimed that the water is “gin clear” in the summer—whenever the hell summer is down here—but we could only see about ten feet. I did see some sting rays and scorpion fish. And then my dive partner and I got lost in murky weeds.

When I got out of the water, I was chilled to the bone, with cramps in my muscles and my heart pounding. I felt like I was about to die. I lay motionless on the boat’s deck. The younger people stood around me, looking worried. “It’s okay, guys. Give me a minute. I’m just old.”

We saw a giant kauri tree at Tutukaka—these trees are a big deal to New Zealanders. They’re fat like redwoods, but with smoother bark, and they only go up about sixty or a hundred feet, where they split into a bunch of fat branches. They’re shaped like giant broccoli stalks. Most of them were felled in the old days, first by the Maori for their waka canoes, then by the pakeha (Europeans) for houses and such.

We made our way a bit further north to Russell, a former whaling-crew hangout in the Bay of Islands. I saw a whaling ship’s rowboat that set me to thinking again about Antarctic expeditions and the Hollow Earth.

As a last sight, we visited a large Maori meeting house, or marae, at Paihia near Russell. The Maori builders had chiseled faces on the wooden posts holding up the building. The faces are asymmetric, tilted to one side, with their tongues sticking out—this is a stylized gesture that’s part of a battle dance called a haka.

The support poles were all over, so every part of the inside of the marae was covered with the faces. It was like a realization of the panpsychic notion that everything is alive.

We also saw a Maori waka canoe painted with stylized fern patterns. The fern is indeed the dominant shape in the original New Zealand bush. The fiddle heads, the scrolls, and the arching fronds. Zhabotinsky scrolls. They’re everywhere in Maori art.

While we were in New Zealand, I got hold of an Antarctic fiction anthology called The Wide White Page. The antho had a story by Ursula LeGuin called “Sur,” about some women who clandestinely trek to the South Pole before any men. But, being women, they don’t bother registering their priority.

Ursula’s writing always makes me feel like a diseased, cringing rat baring his fangs in an alley. I’m so unlike her relentlessly noble and well-balanced characters. That doesn’t mean I feel “less than.” It means I think Ursula’s characters aren’t true to life.

It’s good to be a rat. We’re hard to dislodge.

Where there’s filth, there’s life.

Starting Hylozoic

December 20, 2006. The Third Bomb, Flurb #2.

I wrote up a countercultural short story “The Third Bomb.” It seemed very unlikely that I could sell it, so I started up a new issue of Flurb to run it in. Flurb #2. My story has a guy blowing off a George-Bush-like President’s head with a shotgun. But this doesn’t actually kill the George-Bush-like President—because he’s an alien sea cucumber in disguise.

Putting Flurb #2 together took a certain amount of work. I couldn’t get many new contributors—just Charles Stross and Charlie Anders—otherwise it’s the same neo-cyber core who were in #1. I may end up featuring the same authors over and over in Flurb—think of Zap comix or, for that matter, Mad magazine which always featured, “The usual gang of idiots.” Having a Flurb coterie could be fine. Easier for me than reading dozens of over-the-transom efforts and then having to write those painful “Alas” rejections.

One good thing I’m expecting from Flurb is that it frees up the core contributors to write whatever they want. I wouldn’t have even written “The Third Bomb” if I hadn’t known that Flurb was there for me.

December 26, 2006. Christmas at Georgia’s.

Sylvia and I spent Christmas week in New York. We stayed in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment belonging to Georgia’s Unitarian Church. We were with her for Christmas day—Georgia and her husband Courtney, and our sweet granddaughter, baby Althea. Courtney’s adoptive father Bob Lasseter was there as well, with his wife Lucy.

It was a jolt to not be with all three of our children for Christmas—this was the first time ever without Isabel, although for the last couple of years Rudy Jr. has been spending Xmas with his wife Penny’s parents. But this was the first fully fragmented family Xmas—after more than thirty years with all of us together at our home. We felt a little wistful.

We all went to a Christmas Eve service at the Unitarian church. The assistant minister spoke about, of all things, the inspiring lessons to be found in that obnoxious, commercial ditty, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” The minister spoke about an episode of The Twilight Zone. They used almost no formal liturgy—a Unitarian service seems to be a construct of the ministers’ passing whims.

Later that evening, Sylvia and I ducked into an Episcopal church and got a hit of the old hymns and prayers, plugging into an intellectual spacetime edifice built by a multitude of minds over hundreds of years, a tapestry of thought passed from person to person down the stream of time, the codified liturgy smoothed and polished by use. My parents’ religion.

Georgia and Courtney were so happy to have us there, and so proud to be entertaining their parents in their own apartment. It meant a lot to them. Baby Althea was lovely. And it’s always heart-melting to put my arm around my dear Georgia. My little twin. Thanks to Georgia, I have a life beyond my own.

At this point it strikes me that perhaps my parents and Sylvia’s parents weren’t really all that thrilled to have their Christmases at our house. I’d always thought it was a big treat for them—I never realized it was an effort. And now I’m entering that same bleak, old-age zone. Sliding down the snowy hill. Far ahead, I see a black stream at the bottom, currents roiling its stygian surface. My waiting grave.

Ah, but granddaughter Althea is a lovely green shoot, stretching up towards the sun as I glide by. On the last day, I had an especially fun evening with Althea and Georgia—I was watching Georgia reading books to Althea before bed, in the nursery room. Georgia is so womanly and rounded, so kind and warm. I love her voice so. And the alert babe on her lap, so perfect. It was worth coming here, yes. And I know Georgia feels the warmth of the love in my eyes. So in the end, I got my Christmas glow.

January 20, 2007. Start Hylozoic.

I’ve mentioned that the gimmick for my new novel will be that every object and natural process on Earth becomes intelligent and conscious. I have a quantum mechanical mumbo-jumbo explanation, but really it’s just a goof. There’s an individual little soul or mind in everything you see—in a candle flame, in a dripping faucet, in a fluttering leaf, and—for that matter—even a mind in every atom. I like this way of thinking about the world.

I’m calling the novel Hylozoic. “Hylozoism” is an actual word, and it means “pertaining to the doctrine that every object is alive.” And that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Hylozoism is similar to panpsychism—everything is alive, everything has a mind. And everything is in touch with everything else via telepathy, which I called teep for short.

And now I have to start writing the first page of the actual novel—as opposed to puttering around with plans. Eeek! The painter’s fear of the blank canvas, the writer’s anxiety before the blank page. No problem, Ru, it’s like with a painting, you just load up the brush and make a mark. Maybe I’ll start with the point of view of a rock? Or a bird? No problem, no problem, no problem, please help me, dear Cosmos, I’m so scared, I’ll never write a novel again, I’m doomed, my career is over, I might as well be senile or dead.

Finally I reach a fever-pitch of anxiety, and I write a start:

Jayjay woke before Thuy; comfortably he molded himself against his wife. Early sunlight filtered in through the redwood trees. The newlyweds were in sleeping bags, lying tentless on a bed of bark and boughs. They’d teleported to their new-bought mountain acreage to build a house.

A big blue-jay perched on a thin branch overhead, cocking his head. Jayjay teeped into the bird’s mind, experiencing the creature’s thoughts.

The gentle jouncing of the branch, the minute adjustments of his fine strong claws, the breeze in his comfortable plumage, his strong beak, caw caw, animals on the ground, large and alive, some promising scraps on the ground near them, a smell of fruit, better not to land, they had long arms, come back later, caw caw, release the branch and, ah, glide free and flap away. Caw.

“Caw,” echoed Thuy, waking, turning her face towards Jayjay, giving him a kiss, teeping him a Pop art image of a comic book woman saying, “Good morning…darling!”

January 24, 2007. Scary Big Basin Hike

Yesterday I went for a big hike in the woods at Big Basin State Park, a good hour’s drive from my house. I’d planned to walk up the so-called King Trail to a small peak called Mount McAbee overlook, but I missed a turn or something and I stemmed off into a smaller trail that dead-ended on an old logging road with trees across it blocking the way.

I picked my way around the trees and kept going. At first I thought I was still on the right trail, and that it was just poorly maintained. And then I realized I wasn’t on a trail at all, but I figured that as long as I headed uphill, I’d reach the top of Mount McAbee all the same.

I was enjoying being in the wilderness, thinking about all of those hylozoic-type minds in the trees and leaves and air. Recently I’d been reading about the genii loci or “spirits of place” that inhabit certain spots. In particular I’d been reading up on Papua New Guinea spirit boards, wherein the natives hope to house local spirits of place. So the spirit boards are, in a way, like bird houses.

As chance would have it, last week I saw a documentary TV show about a tribe in a jungle. They also believed in spirits of place. It was raining too much, and an elder man said the rain was because the spirit of the sacred bend in the river was angry because people were disturbing him, and then the film cuts to a scene of some kids playing in the water.

The kids are laughing, and they shout, “We like playing in the sacred bend of the river!”

When we read about another society’s religion, we reflexively imagine that those people take their religion very seriously and robotically. But in any society there are jokey, agnostic, practical-minded people—or kids—who view religion as just another input in the mix. The tribal children ignore their elders’ injunctions as readily as do the kids in a Christian society.

Anyway, I’m walking along, getting lost in the Big Basin woods, and suddenly the spirits of place start harshing on me. I encounter a stand of tough-to-get-through manzanita, with branches like stern claws. I fight my way through, expecting to find a saddle ridge leading up to my targeted peak, but damn, here’s a really deep gorge with scary slopes.

Studying my folded paper map—and finally understanding it—I realize that the correct trail is way over on my left, and the gorge is between me and my goal. The good news is that the map-image of the unexpected gorge has a blue line running along its center. And the line must be a stream leading down to the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail—which runs the length of the Big Basin Park.

I decide to clamber down the slope into the gorge, follow the stream to the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail and take that trail up the basin to the park headquarters where I parked my car.

As I make my way down the gorge’s slope, more and more mental danger signals go off. The thick humus of leaves and sticks slips beneath my feet. Most of the branches that I might grab onto are dead and brittle. I’m encountering giant boulders with sheer drops on their downhill sides. I focus on planning my route—a mental process which I enjoy when tramping the woods and mountains. I’d be doing a lot of route-planning today.

For now, the best path seems to lead around the side of one of those giant boulders. As I work my way forward, a hostile spirit—that is a branch—plucks off my beloved, new, expensive, perfected-via-many-readjustment-trips-to-the-optician bifocals—and sends them skittering down the slope. There’s no knowing how far the glasses travel—because I can’t see!

I dig out my prescription shades from my knapsack, but it’s hard to see through the shades—it’s gloomy and dim in the gorge. I search a half hour for my lost glasses with no success.

And then I’m finally at the woodsy bottom of the canyon. In retrospect—and I did a lot of retrospection in the next three hours—it would have been easier to retrace my steps and go back the way I’d come. I was seriously underestimating the distance that I’d be following that stream along the bottom of this gorge—it turned out to be, like, three miles.

On a good day—with my regular glasses, and with the sun shining, and with a walking stick, and without the worry of nightfall approaching—I would have found the scramble along the creek exhilarating. As it was, the passage was a strenuous ordeal. The canyon was so steep and so overgrown that in many spots, I had to walk in the creek itself.

And the trek up the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail to the headquarters was hella long. It was indeed dark when I finally reached my car. Me wet, bruised, exhausted, and functionally blind. I kept putting my shades on and off while I drove home, mentally averaging my visual inputs.

It wasn’t exactly fun, but it was a memorable adventure. And I got some insights. For one thing, it’s always salutary for me to be reminded that I’m not in control. For another, while I was struggling on the steep, slippery banks of that rock-and-log-choked stream, I came to revise some of my notions about intelligent objects and spirits of place.

Previously I’d been laboring under a lazy, default, happy-hippie conviction that nature is our friend. In the wilderness I was reminded that, in truth, nature is utterly indifferent to us. Each object is placidly doing its own thing. They have no feelings towards me whatsoever. And the stark disinterest can feel like hostility.

I now see that if, for the purposes of my novel, I do want to ascribe minds and personal feelings to the spirits of place, then these elemental minds are just as likely to appear hostile—as in stealing my glasses and making me slip. As opposed to being helpful—as in extending a solid branch for me to grab.

In other words, it’s not realistic to expect the local spirits to be smiling, and dancing around, and helping my novel’s characters to build their cabin in the woods—I’d been thinking of an Amish barn-raising kind of vibe. The experience will be more like what we’re already accustomed to. The local objects will be making them stumble, breaking their fingernails and being sure that nothing fits. Acting like hostile, xenophobic neighbors jeering at immigrants who are trying to fashion themselves an ethnic little dwelling.

A brick flies through the window, wrapped with a paper saying, “No Humans Here!”

And that’s fine—it’s more interesting that way for my story. One of the basic tricks for story-telling is to have your characters’ plans go awry.

January 26, 2007. Stalking the Wily Spectacles

So today I drove back to Big Basin Redwoods State Park. On the way it started raining. But I felt happy to be in the primeval woods for the second time in a week. The air has a special clean woodsy quality. And it’s so utterly quiet and still. I thought of that song lyric: “Beastie Boys always on vacation.”

It took me about two hours to walk to the general neighborhood of the spot where I lost my glasses. And I couldn’t find that same side-path into the gorge. It was like in those fairy tales where a certain door or path appears only occasionally. The woods are big.

Eventually I made it onto a spot somewhere on the slope of that big, woodsy canyon. And I began working my way sideways along the slope, looking for that same stand of manzanita and those same boulders. But, you know, my legs are still sore from three days ago. I’m not gonna be able to endlessly hunt back and forth across the sloping terrain of a canyon the size of Manhattan. Not with that walk back to the car still ahead of me. A two-hour walk in the rain.

So I gave up. On my way back out of the park, visions of new glasses danced in my head. I can pay for some quality specs with my half of the money for that story “Hormiga Canyon” that I just finished with Bruce Sterling—a story set, as chance would have it, in a canyon very much like this one, but populated by ants with legs the size of redwoods.

March 21, 2007. Twins?

So, huzzah, I finished writing a first chapter for Hylozoic today. I emailed it to Dave Hartwell to help get him and his colleagues stoked about making me an offer.

It’s fun to be writing a sequel for a change. By the end of most of my novels, I’ve got all the amps turned up to 11 and feedback is filling the air—and then I walk off the stage. But this time, writing this sequel, I get to come back onto that same vibe-laden stage and pick up my still-pulsing instrument and take it even higher. Why stop at 11? Why not 111?

Forget about the business of writing and enjoy the fun.

The other day a fan of mine who works at the San Francisco Ballet offered me free tickets to a matinee performance, so on Saturday, Sylvia and I are going for that. And after the ballet we’ll have dinner with Penny and Rudy. That’ll be fun and easy. I love seeing those two, especially these days, with Penny pregnant. They’re so excited and happy. They’re expecting twin girls in July!

Rochester

April 5, 2007. Rochester

Back in October, 2004, I gave a talk at the state college in Geneseo, New York—and now I’ve been invited back to upstate New York. This time I’ll give a talk on my Lifebox stuff at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

While I was in Rochester, I connected with two old students of mine from my Geneseo days—Thom Metzger and Amylouise Donnely. They were both in that interdisciplinary class on math and philosophy that I taught with the philosophy professor Bill Edgar at Geneseo in 1977. I emailed to Thom before coming, as he’s become a pro writer—and Amylouise noticed the announcement of my talk on my blog.

Amylouise is a big fan of mine—I mentioned earlier that, on the very day when I retired from teaching at San Jose State, she happened to send me an admiring reminiscence of my days as a professor at Geneseo. She cares!

Thom and Amylouise showed me some good Rochester spots. Amylouise escorted us to a coffee shop called Java’s, next to the Eastman School of Music, hipper than any cafe in San Jose, believe it or not.

And Thom led us to a monument to the Spiritualist religion and to the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York. The Fox sisters were the mediums who got Spiritualism off the ground. Even now, Spiritualism is a viable religion in Rochester, with two competing churches. The plaque on the monument:

Erected December 4, 1929, by the

SPIRITUALISTS OF THE WORLD

In Commemoration of the

ADVENT OF

MODERN SPIRITUALISM

At Hydesville, New York, March 31, 1848

And in Tribute to Mediumship, the Rock

Upon Which Demonstrable Spiritualism

Forever Stands

THERE IS NO DEATH.

THERE ARE NO DEAD.

Kind of synchronistic to see this, as I’ve just now been thinking about mediums as a channel for alien invaders in my novel Hylozoic.

After my talk at the Rochester Institute, they gave me a formal dinner. The woman sitting next to me was a member of one of the local Spiritualist churches. She said there was in fact talk among Spiritualists about the possibility of alien invaders entering our world via mediums. It all fits.

During my outing with Thom, he took me into a subway tunnel that runs under the Rochester library—which happens to be a spot where, in my Geneseo years, I sometimes attended meetings for followers of the mystical occultist G. I. Gurdjieff.

This subway tunnel was also a bridge. The inside was covered with exuberant graffiti, and the walls had ragged holes. Thom and I were looking down at the rushing, opaque Genesee River. Like a scene from a complex nightmare.

We also hit a Unitarian Church designed by the architect Claude Bragdon—known to me and to Metzger for his slim, elegantly illustrated volumes about the fourth dimension. Thom stole two books from the church’s reading room, and when we got to his car he had a parking ticket. Instant karma. He said it was okay, he needed those books as he’s writing something involving Bragdon’s sister.

I peeled off from my two old friends and kicked it alone in a second cool coffee shop that Amylouise showed me—this one had been converted from the showroom of a Chevy dealership. So big that it felt like a furniture store. You get an unusual range of options in a seedy old burg like Rochester. Plenty of inexpensive niches for off-beat enterprises.

I received a quadruple introduction for my Rochester Institute talk. A computer science guy spoke about me being one of the first academics to use computer game projects to teach software engineering; my friend the Rochester poet John Roche talked about my transreal style and my literary relations to Beat literature; my Geneseo math-professor friend Jeff Johannes spoke about how much I’d done to popularize our field, and a cartoonist talked about my drawings.

Even now, I’m still hungry for recognition from the mathematics community, so it was especially good to hear Jeff Johannes. He used a projector to show the covers of my five general-audience mathematics books, and he projected images of the technical math papers I published while a junior professor at Geneseo: “Undefinable Sets,” and “Truth and Infinity.”

And then I gave a version of my Lifebox talk on gnarly computation. This time I ended with a slide of advice about writing:

• Writing is a gnarly computation. The outcome is unpredictable. Let it grow.
• Reality is gnarlier than anything you’ve heard. Use your life. Go transreal.
• When you’re in the zone, the cosmos dances with you.

That last point was inspired by seeing that cool spiritualist monument yesterday, just when I’d been thinking about mediums helping to bring in alien invaders.

The cosmos gave me an additional nudge on my way out of the lecture hall. Someone had used a marker-pen to write “GOD IS WITHIN” on the side of a four-way aluminum electrical socket. I took this as a message that even a socket is conscious and alive—just like everything else. Hylozoic, man.

Thank you, cosmos.

When I check out of my motel in Rochester the next morning, the plump, attractive, dim girl behind the counter is busy with personal text messages on her cell phone. She has a lot of trouble grasping that I’m checking out, not in.

I think of the Hungarian word for “stupid,” hüje, and of my Hungarian friend Imre’s gesture of miming this quality by making his eyes wide and blank while passing his hand slowly up and down in front of his face.

But I’m in no rush, and glad for any kind of human interaction. I smile kindly upon the bumbling girl. For purposes of narration, let’s call her the peasant.

She summons a co-worker from behind the partition to help her navigate the computer interface. Another upstate type, small and energetic, plain but cute, with a faint dark mustache. She speaks in the clipped Great Lakes style with flat vowels. Although unsmiling, she’s competent and friendly. Let’s call her the ant.

The ant scolds the peasant. And then, as soon as the ant looks down at the motel computer, the peasant sticks out her tongue at the ant and merrily rolls her eyes.

I like the ant and the peasant both. They remind me of my old Geneseo students and I feel like I understand them a little bit. Being around them is comfortable, cozy.

Amsterdam and the Netherlands

April 7, 2007. Welcome to Amsterdam.

I’m in Amsterdam to give a talk for the Waag Society—Waag is Dutch for “weigh,” and the Waag building used to be a customs house. It’s a massively turreted stone pile in a market square, the oldest building in Amsterdam that’s not a church. The Waag Society sponsors research and cultural events involving the electronic arts, health care, and cyberculture—I can’t think of a similar group in the U.S. They’ve paid my way here to reminisce with R.U. Sirius about the 1980s cyber scene in San Francisco.

I hope R.U. shows—last week he was still in the midst of a big hassle about getting his passport. This was complicated by the fact that R.U. thinks his Social Security number changed a couple of years ago. He took a heavy acid trip, and supposedly the trip bumped him into a parallel world where his number is different. That’s our world he’s talking about—we’re a parallel R.U. Sirius world.

Having been sober for some years now, I’ve learned to walk past bars and liquor stores without a second thought. But, jeez, in Amsterdam, people are sitting in open-air coffeeshop cafes rolling joints and smoking pipes of pot, and I’m seeing so-called smart shops with windows displaying not only weed, but fresh-pack grocery-store-style boxes of psychedelic shrooms: Thai, Mexican, and Colombian breeds of psilocybin.

People here tell me that the authorities are thinking of somehow limiting the sale of shrooms, for last week a young French tourist woman freaked out on some shrooms that she’d bought here, and she jumped to her death from the roof of a building. The classic psychedelic danger.

I visualize the woman as seeing the air so crowded with glowing Zhabotinsky scrolls that it looks almost solid. The air like a gelatinous medium you might tread water in. Narrow-eyed angels hover in midair beyond the building’s rooftop parapet, beckoning. They’re not nearly so friendly as they seem.

There’s more bicycles in Amsterdam than in any city I’ve ever seen. And more natural blondes. The Lowlanders have a distinct national look. Many of them have very vivid features, familiar to me from the armies of faces I’ve studied in Bruegel and Bosch paintings. I love that they resemble those paintings from five hundred years ago.

The one big thing I’ve learned from studying the history of art is that people haven’t changed all that much. Even in the year million, people won’t be the bland, humorless logicians that populate the worlds of bad SF.

I’m writing this at 3 am. Jet lag. I didn’t sleep at all last night, on the plane trip. That’s okay. I’ve read that if you have depression, going for a night without sleep is a good way to jolt yourself out of it. I wasn’t even depressed to begin with, so I feel extra good. I slept yesterday afternoon for four hours, then I slept another three hours tonight, and now I’m up again. It’s fine. Feels wild and crazy to be awake and active at totally odd times. Fortunately I don’t have any particular duties for the next few days. I’ll just sleep when I’m tired, whenever that is.

I ended up sleeping till one in the afternoon, when I was awakened by Amsterdam impresario and man-about-town Luc Sala. He was connected to the old Mondo scene, and, hearing I was in town, he came to my door and brought me a cell phone and a bicycle to use. What a guy!

Luc invited me to drive to a fire dance in Breda with him, where he and seventy friends were going to get drunk and stoned and dance around a bonfire until the sun came up. And he gave me a beginners guide to shroom-tripping that he wrote and published. Sigh.

I biked through town to the van Gogh museum. The galleries were insanely crowded, but I wormed over to my favorite wall, the one with the pictures he painted in 1890 during the weeks before he killed himself. Could the despondent, suicidal van Gogh have imagined crowds like this wanting to see his work?

My favorite of these last pictures is Landscape with the Chateau of Auvers at Sunset. Yet another last one I like is Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky. And the Tree Roots, or Boomwortels—what a great language Dutch is. In these final, highly-evolved paintings, van Gogh uses just a few strokes to limn nature’s most complex forms: trees and clouds.

I was thinking that when the aliens in my novel Hylozoic start draining away Earth’s gnarl by siphoning off a lot of nature’s quantum computation, it might be cool if the world started looking like a van Gogh painting.

Looking back, I see that I wrote in my journals about visiting this museum in July 25, 1994, with Sylvia and our daughter Isabel. And it turns out that I once before thought of using SF to turn the world into a van Gogh painting. I have a limited number of obsessions.

April 9, 2007. Amsterdam Zoo.

Today I rode my bike, that is, Luc Sala’s bike from my apartment to what looked like a nearby park on my map. Turned out the place was a zoo called Artis, the oldest zoo in the Netherlands.

They had a little patch of very nice tulips, and I pretended it was a giant field. Near the tulips was a statue of a dinosaur. He looked so ecstatic, so punk rock. I mean, he looked like Joey Ramone or Joe Strummer! Or like a happy kid. Roar!

Archeologists might imagine that we worship dinosaurs—given that we’re prone to building idols of them. And in a way we do worship them. It’s just that we’re not that serious about it.

I think I’ve mentioned before that often we imagine that everyone is solemn and robotic in civilizations other than the one that we’re living in. But people in other societies aren’t necessarily any more serious about religion than we are. Why be serious? We’re all gonna die, just the same. And everyone always knows that. People want to have fun while life lasts.

I saw a nice elephant at the Artis zoo. As I learned in Brussels, they call an elephant an oliphant here. A man and his son were yelling, “Dicke oude oliphant,” meaning “Fat old elephant,” but in a friendly way. Maybe it’s not insulting to call an elephant old and fat.

In the zoo, I found a good model for my Hylozoic aliens—even better than kiwi birds. I’m talking about great rheas. They’re a little like ostriches. Big, mild eyes with long lashes. Their expression is bland and world-weary, but if you hold something close to them, they’re quick to peck and gobble. They have a dark, skunky, stripe in their feathers. And bald-man tufts of feathers above the ear tympani in the sides of their heads. Very large nostrils in the beak, and whiskers around the beak. So gnarly. Constantly twitching their wings—no doubt they have alien lice.

I had to change apartments in Amsterdam when I got back from the zoo. The Waag Society is giving my rather primo apartment to R.U. Sirius, and they’re finding another place for me. I can’t really complain, as I opportunistically signed up for eight free nights here.

My new place is a bit further out—it’s an extra room in some guy’s apartment on a street off Van Wou Street. The street name is pronounced like “von vaow,” which name amuses me. I see it as being like an intense form of “wow.”

Personal, semi-Tourette-syndrome fun: Potato is “aardappel,” or earth apple, and I keep imagining the old doo-wop group The Penguins singing, “Aard appel, aard appel—will you ever be mine?” To the tune of their hit, “Earth Angel.”

I don’t mind moving to the new room, as the street cars are good and I’ve got Luc’s bike. I love biking here. Real, no-kidding, separate bike-lanes. And the car-drivers aren’t, like, shocked to see you. And the land is flat. Bicycling along the many canals is wonderful.

I’ve been having a slight problem using up my time. So hard to just relax and soak in the beauty. The eternal “What next?” nipping at my heels. Starting tomorrow I have a series of duties and meetings, which I look forward to.

I can’t wait to show R.U. Sirius the smart shop on Staalstraat. They sell a brand of shroom called Psylocibe McKennaii, named after our mutual friend Terence McKenna.

April 11, 2007. The Irritable Dutch.

The Dutch can be unpleasant. On my second day, a waitress yelled at me for pointing out that the shrimp in my soup weren’t fresh. The other day a street-car conductor started screaming at me simply because I handed him the change for my ticket without saying, “Good evening.” A street-cleaner unleashed a tirade at me as I walked past him to my apartment building door.

And worst of all, I got into a feud with a guy I’ll call Bengt. A drunken oaf. He was a functionary for the Waag Society people who invited me to lecture. I met Bengt at dinner the night before my lecture, and he laughingly told me that he’d just now gotten around to posting some publicity for our show, and that he’d used the tag-line “FS Is Dead.”

Apparently he’d meant to say SF. But why dead? Vibrantly living science fiction is what I’m all about. Where does a guy get off calling SF dead if he can’t even remember a frikking two letter name for it?

I got very angry. Bengt thought what he’d done was funny. To goad me the more, he said he should have said “Cyberpunk Is Dead.” He spoke sneeringly of my blog. And then he said it would be impossible for me to jack in my laptop to show cellular automata graphics during my talk. He said he’d decided to show Hollywood SF movie videos for my background.

I had the sense that he was tormenting and insulting me on purpose. A bully from the same mold as those who picked on me as a boy.

I brooded over it, and the next morning I blogged about my problems with Bengt, knowing that some of the locals would see my post. I was being a squeaky wheel, in other words. Drumming up support so I could give my talk the way I wanted. Immediately one of Bengt’s buddies put insulting comments on my blog, saying that I was rude and ungrateful to my hosts. But, upside, all this was generating publicity. And ultimately I took my post down.

The night of the event, Bengt was sullen, and not speaking to me, and drinking even more heavily than the night before. Supposedly he was in charge of making a video of the talk, but during the first part of my talk he kept talking loudly and continuously in the back of the room. I complained to the crowd, and one of the organizers went back to tell Bengt to be quiet.

At this point I was angry and tense. Rather than relaxing and extemporizing as I normally do, I read my talk from a version I’d written up in advance. The talk was about something I was calling psipunk, supposedly a step beyond cyberpunk—using biotech and telepathy instead of computers and the web.

Not only was I reading my talk from a manuscript, I was warping the words with a weird, sarcastic accent. This, plus the fact that the listeners weren’t native English speakers, exacerbated my usual problem of people not understanding what the fuck I was talking about.

But then R.U. talked for awhile, and we set my cellular automata Zhabotinsky scrolls to pulsing on the screen. Then R.U. and I got into a discussion, and we took some questions. The scene mellowed out, and the show was a success. Naturally Bengt did something to render the video unusable—but the next day a friendly Dutch programmer fixed that for us.

At the dinner after our show, I made an effort to smooth things out with Bengt, but that wasn’t ever going to work. Oh well. He can be an inspiration for Hieronymus Bosch’s argumentative neighbor in a scene I’m planning for Hylozoic. Transmuting the dross of life into the gold of art.

April 13, 2007. Pot and Tulips.

One night Luc Sala took me to meet a stoner called Soma. Soma is a pot cultivator, and he markets so-called Soma seeds for his specially hybridized strain of pot. He has dreadlocks nearly to the floor. Hanging around his place was like being in California, only more so. One of Soma’s friends had painted an awesome Art Nouveau pot and mushroom frieze along his banister.

After he found out I was an SF writer, Soma told me that he saw a UFO before dawn on Easter morning after a night of tripping. It sounded to me like what he saw was Venus, the morning star.

“Did the aliens say anything to you?” I asked.

“Just…hi,’” said Soma. “A pulse. A wink.”

It’s always good to get transreal first-hand input on my themes.

Another day, Luc drove me down to see the big tulip fields. They’re near the seashore, as tulips like sandy soil. A lot of these fields are for producing bulbs rather than flowers. The farmers pick off the tulip flowers and discard them in a gorgeous heap.

Luc and I brought our bicycles along and we went riding among the fields. An amazing, sweet smell coming off the fields. Tulips in stores don’t seem to have much of a smell, at least not in the U.S. These tulips were sweet as honeysuckle.

Luc was on his cellphone during most of our outing, doing a business deal which, over the course of the day, worked out well for him. I told him it was because he was with Het Magische Varken. That’s me. The Magic Pig.

April 14, 2007. Visiting Bosch’s Home Town.

I took a day off from Amsterdam and spent the night in Hieronymus Bosch’s home town. Doing research for my novel Hylozoic. As it turns out, I’m using Hieronymus Bosch as a secondary character in the book. I’ve always wanted to write about him, and I’ll probably never do a whole Bosch novel, so here we go.

The little town has the unlikely name of s’Hertogenbosch, which means something like “The Duke’s Woods.” It’s called Den Bosch for short. And, from 1450 to 1516, it was the stomping ground of Jeroen van Aken, also known as Hieronymus Bosch.

As always in the Lowlands, the train ride was like a Bosch or Bruegel landscape, with rows of trees along the edges of the green fields. Milky sky. Willow stumps with fresh April shoots.

Den Bosch has a triangular town center, with a marketplace in the middle. It’s triangular because it’s wedged into a delta formed by the intersection of two small rivers.

Walking around Den Bosch, I keep having those flashes that the people here are the same as in old Flemish paintings, particularly when I see them in silhouette.

Two Hieronymus Bosch houses stand on the town’s marketplace: the house where he was born, and the house where he lived as an adult. After dark I sat on the edge of an old well in that marketplace, looking from one house to the other, imagining our Jeroen running around as a serious boy, and him walking around as a confident grown-up.

Bosch moved into that big, second house when he got married, around age thirty-one. It belonged to the family of his wealthy wife. It now houses a shoe store. The people running the shop weren’t at all interested in the topic of Bosch. But it was interesting to hear them say his name. They pronounce it like, “Yeroon Bos.”

There exists a painting of this triangular marketplace area in Bosch’s time, with tents on it for the merchants, and in the morning those same market tents were there.

I visited the building of the Swan Brotherhood or Zwaanbroederschap, founded 1318. Bosch became a member when he was about forty. It was a big deal for him. Not all that many painters got to join this upper-crust group. In Bosch’s time, as in ours, a painter was pretty far down the social scale.

I took a guided tour of the place, and the tour was in Dutch. I was the youngest guy on the tour. We visited a small meeting room and a paneled banquet room. The walls had columns with statues of swans bending their necks down to menace with their beaks. The fat birds resembled bagpipes.

Coats of arms were embroidered on the backs of the chairs in the banquet room—these were the insignia of current members of the Swan Brotherhood. It’s still active, invitation only, packed with local nobles. I had the impression that people touring with me were happy to be breathing this rarified air.

Much of our small amount of info about Bosch’s life comes from the records of the Swan Brotherhood. They showed us a copy of the page mentioning the funeral expenses of Jeroen van Aken, “van Aken” being our man’s local surname. Bosch was his public name, based on the name of the town.

After the tour, I talked to one of the guides in English. A big feature of the Swan Brotherhood used to be their annual swan banquet. Bosch himself is known to have paid for the swan one year. I asked if they still do that, but she said no, the swan is now a protected species.

I found a newly opened Hieronymus Bosch Art Center, housed in a deconsecrated church. In the basement they have a reconstruction of Bosch’s studio with a fake window, with a copy of that old painting of the market place on the other side of the window, and—great touch—with a tape of marketplace sounds playing. Church bells, geese honking, wooden cartwheels on cobblestones, pigs squealing, children shouting, cows mooing, people talking, sheep baaing, a smith hammering an anvil. Wonderful.

I was alone in the mock studio for half an hour, just me and—Jeroen. A mannequin of him stands before a canvas, wearing a robe and a hat with earflaps. I sat at his work table watching him, listening to the sounds through the window, talking to him a bit. Like, “Hello, Master.”

On the table were copies of Bosch drawings, also bowls of berries, a bowl of eggshells, a peacock feather in a glass jar, gourds. A cow skull on the wall. A stuffed heron and a stuffed owl. A lute.

Upstairs I introduced myself to one of the art center’s managers, Thomas Vriens. He’s a young art historian, currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on Bosch. He was interested to hear about my plan to put Bosch into my SF novel, and he walked around the building with me.

They have full-size photographic copies of twenty-five of the main paintings attributed to Bosch, although some of the attributions are dicey. Thomas and I went through the whole collection, discussing each picture. It was like walking through a book, wonderful.

I really enjoyed Thomas’s comments on The Peddler. I love this painting. A few years ago, I saw it in Rotterdam. The man in the painting is white-haired, intelligent, worn. People think he might be Bosch himself. He’s on a narrow path approaching a gate. Thomas said the gate stands for a transition—one might say the peddler is approaching death.

The peddler is fending off a nasty dog with a stick. The dog is the devil, and the stick is his faith. He’s looking back over his shoulder—at his past life, perhaps, or perhaps at the worldly things he’s avoided. We see an inn with pigeons flying in and out, which, in medieval iconography, indicates that the inn is a brothel. The good news is that an ox or a cow stands beyond the gate that the traveler is approaching—the ox is a symbol of Christ. The peddler is bound for greener pastures!

I identify with the peddler, I feel like I’m him. I’m on the narrow path, avoiding evil, and death is indeed closer than before. I avoided Amsterdam’s marijuana stores, and her smiling, beckoning prostitutes. I fended off my enemy Bengt with my language-stick.

I’m worn down from life’s long journey. I’m tired of putting myself on the line. I’m happy to imagine that when I cross that gate I’ll be safe in heaven with the Holy Cow. Mur! Maybe heaven is real. Maybe heaven is California.

We discussed the question of why Bosch had no children, and how this might have related to his feelings about sex. Did Bosch dislike having sex with his wife? Thomas remarked that in his paintings, one never sees real intimacy. There’s no love or passion, even in the sex scenes. Those toothy, red mouths in the Hell pictures suggest a fear of the vagina dentata—the toothed vagina of primitive folklore.

But one might also say that Bosch was obsessed with sex. All those bursting seed pods speak of fertility. And, whether or not his characters seem to be enjoying their fetishistic orgies—they’re having them a lot. Like in The Garden of Earthly Delights.

What about Bosch and drugs? One of his greatest works is the Temptation of Saint Anthony, which now hangs in Lisbon. It’s a triptych showing three torments of Saint Anthony—on the left the devil lifts him high into the sky, on the right he’s besieged by lustful women, and in the middle he’s surrounded by monsters.

Thomas Vriens informed me that in the Middle Ages, Saint Anthony was known as the patron saint for those afflicted by ergotism—which is a cumulative poisoning from repeated doses of a black fungus called ergot, which in some years grew upon the fields of rye. As many will know, one of the compounds found in ergot is lysergic acid, a.k.a. LSD. Ergotism was accompanied by powerful hallucinations and was frequently lethal.

It took many doses to produce the strongest effects of ergotism, but eventually your skin would blister up and your limbs would rot off. Thus—the tripped-out, limbless beggars so often seen in Bosch’s works.

Weirdly enough, the medievals had no clue about what caused ergotism. They just assumed you got it because the devil was tormenting you.

People sometimes like to propose psychedelic explanations for Bosch’s visions of hell. In one sense this is stupidly reductionistic—certainly I’m annoyed if someone’s reflexive reaction to one of my weird tales is, “What were you on when you wrote that?” Most writers and artists are already crazy on their own.

But if you did suffer a mild attack of ergotism, for sure you’d never forgot it. It could be that Bosch had a few long, strange nights under the influence of ergot-tainted rye.

I closely studied the center’s copies of Bosch’s drawings. I saw two full pages of limbless beggars, most of them with devilish smiles.

Another drawing shows a dog bemusedly looking back at his butt, which has turned into a legless warty lump. As we’d say in German, “Ach du lieber, wo ist mein Arsch?” Oh my goodness, where’s my ass?

My favorite drawing was of a lizard man, also with a warty, hairy gross butt. He’s posed with his butt towards you, looking back at you over his shoulder, which makes me laugh, as this is such a shopworn come-hither pose for models, and for women in ads.

“Hey there. Like what you see?”

I also visited the St. Janskerk, where some of Bosch’s saint paintings hung during his life. High on the ceiling above the transept is a triangle with the eye of god—staring down, watching your every move, continually assessing whether you’re bound for heaven or hell.

The medieval people were really and truly under the thumb of religion. They were endlessly obsessed with sin and punishment, and with the notion that god was always ready to judge you. A strange way to live.

April 15, 2007. De Melkweg with R.U. Sirius.

My very last night in Amsterdam was fun. I had dinner outside a trattoria on cobblestones by a pair of intersecting canals with Ken Goffman, that is, R.U. Sirius. Just the two of us, it was relaxing. The water and cobblestones and the crenellated stair-step gables. So perfectly European, like a theme park almost, but with actual dirt and with relaxed locals puttering by in little boats drinking wine and beer. One of Amsterdam’s many perfected urban spaces. After dinner, R.U. and I walked along the canals, ending up at De Melkweg, or The Milky Way, which is a night club I’ve always wanted to check out.

Last time I was in Amsterdam, in 1994, I bought pot at the “R. Crumb Coffeeshop.” Their business card bore, on one side, Crumb’s classic “Stoned Agin” drawing of a man with a melting face, and on the other side it had a map of how to get back and forth between the Melkweg and the R. Crumb Coffeeshop.

Also, parts of the great, live Rolling Stones album Stripped was recorded at the Melkweg, as was Michel Gondry’s video of “Like a Rolling Stone” for that album. Totally awesome video by the way. I think of the Melkweg as being a very cool place.

R.U. and I happened upon the Melkweg in the dusk. It’s not a big building at all. It holds a cinema, a theater space and small rock club. We went into the rock club and saw a couple of ska bands play. In a way, ska is perfect for Europeans. It gives them an excuse to sing “Ya, ya, ya,” to a band featuring an accordion—which is what they like to do in the first place.

Actually, the second ska band, Mala Vita, had guitars, and they rocked. One song’s chorus was: “Nobody knows, nobody knows.” R.U. and I could relate to that. We were shouting that phrase.

Dancing to the music felt good. My hips and back get sore after a few days of walking around cities, also I was still sore from the stress surrounding our show. Let your backbone slip. Work it on out. Yubba.

Between bands, Ken and I sat on the ground outside. Neither of us was getting high, and neither were most of the kids there for the concert, which seemed incongruous. In the U.S. pot is illegal, and everyone is smoking it at concerts. In Holland it’s effectively legal, and they don’t bother to smoke. Been there, done that.

By now I felt worn down from the road. Bosch’s Peddler in his tattered clothes.

Editing and Painting

April 26, 2007. Flurb. Postsingular Cover. Hype.

Basically as a way to avoid getting back to writing, I spent a lot of time this week putting together Flurb #3. It was a double issue, twelve stories, about 40,000 words, illustrated by 84 of my photos and three of my paintings.

I’d accumulated so much material for Flurb that it was high time to put it out. But unlike the first two issues, I didn’t have any weird and commercially unpublishable stories of mine on hand.

So, just to have something in Flurb #3, I collaged together a bunch of the items from the “Deleted Fragments” section of my booklength Notes for Postsingular. I called the collage “Postsingular Outtakes.” It’s not a cohesive piece, but there’s a few chuckles in there, and the bite-size quality works on the web. The stuff should seem fresh and crispy to those who haven’t (like me) spent the last year and a half with Postsingular.

Flurb is doing well. My authors are happy with the look, and we got five thousand visits in the first three days after releasing Flurb #3, with a long tail to come. Yaar.

While I was poking around on the web to see how Flurb is doing, I Googled my story title “Postsingular Outtakes,” and ended up at Amazon where, lo and behold, they already have a cover for my novel Postsingular. Great cover: a green hole in space with a purple cuttlefish emerging from it. And they’re using a wonderful blurb that Bill Gibson wrote for me, where he says, “Rucker should be declared a national treasure of American science fiction.”

Yeah, baby.

I reread that first chapter I wrote for Hylozoic last month, and I marked it up, working slowly. And now I’m slowly typing the changes in. My fiction muscles are creaky and out of shape.

I feel like I’ve been lost in a fog of hype—what with the readings for Mathematicians in Love, the Rochester and Amsterdam appearances with my psipunk speech and video, also the blogging I did on the road, the Flurb promotion, and the Postsingular push to come.

It’s nice to get away from the hype and back to the actual work. Out of the marketplace and into the cave. The Hylozoic material is better than I remembered. Funnier.

I have a character delivering some stoner humor. I live for that stuff, sober or not. Stoner humor is a way of giving the finger to consensus reality. That’s what I always liked in William Burroughs or in Phil Dick’s Scanner Darkly, or in William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content.

May 14, 2007. Visit Nick Herbert.

I went to see my far-out physicist friend Nick Herbert in Boulder Creek—as I so often do when I’m starting a novel. I think I’ve mentioned that Nick was one of the models for my Frank Shook character in Saucer Wisdom.

He has a cactus on his porch looking at itself in a mirror.

Nick knows a lot about quantum mechanics. He has an abiding hope or dream that people will some day learn how to communicate directly with matter. He calls this quantum tantra. As Nick puts it, our standard scientific experiments are ways of interrogating matter; and our brains are complex quantum-influenced systems as well; so why can’t the twain meet? Get it on with objects.

This matches my dreams of hylozoism and of telepathy. We two see eye-to-eye. And for Nick this is more than SF fodder. It’s a serious quest.

Nick showed me what he called a Heisentoy, which was a small hand-made fired-clay sculpture that one Arne Olafson of Denham Island in British Columbia, had mailed him. As it happened, Nick first opened the box at night, and he touched the object without looking at it—and then he got the idea that it would be fun to leave the object’s appearance in a permanently uncertain state. So he “showed” it to me by handing it to me swathed inside an “anti-viewer” made up of the spandex sleeve of one of his neighbor’s shirts—she likes to cut off her sleeves. The object felt like a cube with the edges finger-pinched out like petals in an irregular pattern.

Nick and I had lunch at the La Joya cafe in Boulder Creek, formerly known as the Blue Sun. They were playing the Beatles White Album on the sound system. I can’t recall having heard that album played in a public place since the summer of the Manson murders.

After lunch synchronicity kicked in. Nick and I ran into a Boulder Creek guy who’d worked for Doubleday Books years ago, promoting William Craddock’s Be Not Content. And, as I’ve mentioned, that’s one of my favorite books. The promo guy told me that Billy was barely twenty-one when his masterpiece was published.

May 31, 2007. Nothing in My Head. Pfeiffer Beach.

I was in Big Sur camping by myself for the last couple of days. Sitting on a hillock looking at the sea, I had a nice feeling of not thinking. The things going on around me didn’t need any embellishment. The reality around me was exactly what I like.

Usually I’m adding ideas, like the little robots commenting on bad movies in Mystery Science Theater 3000, or like Beavis and Butthead joking about cheesy videos while they play. That’s consciousness, isn’t it, the little comment-bot. The bot takes a break if the show is fab.

A quote from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

…and now, in the Zone,…after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of the pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…

I went to my beloved Pfeiffer Beach, and I spent about half an hour rolling crossways on a log, face up, massaging my back in this fashion, groaning with pleasure. The log was off the beaten path, in a little gully off the beach.

I like this particular gully. A few years ago, I made a little YouTube video there called What is Gnarl? It shows a tiny water eddy in a stream, and the ocean waves, and a driftwood log, and the chaotic oscillations of a wind-blown plant. And in the video I’m singing, and throwing a piece of kelp in the air, and yelling weird things in a foreign accent.

Today when I was done rolling on my log, I sat up, feeling drunk with chi energy. A couple walked over, and the woman spoke to me, “I don’t have my glasses with me, and at first when I saw you, I thought you were a mammal.”

“I am a mammal,” I replied.

“I mean like a bobcat or a bear,” she amplified.

Walking back along the beach, I remembered having had a big insight about the plot for Mathematicians in Love at Pfeiffer Beach two years ago. I’d drawn a diagram for my book on the sand. So this time, for good luck, even though I didn’t have any big insight, I drew a sketch for Hylozoic with a stick. The drawing included a bird-like Peng alien, a Magic Harp, and a manta-ray-like Hrull alien, nicely framed by a kelp stalk.

That same couple who’d seen me rolling on my back came walking by just then. By now they’d decided I was nuts. I could see it in their faces.

“Val fisk,” I said to them, as if by way of explanation, secretly amusing myself.

That’s Swedish for whale fish.

Now, writing this up, I check the translation on Google, and I learn there also happen to be some women named Val Fisk. One of them is a teaching assistant in Suffolk, England. How great is that?

Swarthmore and France

June 11, 2007. Reunion at Swarthmore College.

Sylvia and I are going to a painting workshop in the south of France. On the way we went by Swarthmore College for my 40th class reunion. I wrote my notes on the reunion in the form of a ghost story.

It’s comfortable being on the same hall as the others. Everyone’s room the same. Individualism is worn away. No more cliques. The bathroom is run-down, lit by milky windows with leafy tossing trees outside. I know everyone’s name. I know it is safe to be around them. I have no regrets. I’m filled with the warm lymph of undifferentiated love. I used to be different, but now I’m the same. No modesty, no shame. Walking down the hall in a wet towel.

The voices of old friends and lovers, all of us swaddled in age-skins—white hair, wrinkles, limps. Our gestures the same. None of us is much changed inside.

Sylvia is with me. We fell in love at Swarthmore. Kissing under the flowering spring trees.

We did an alumni parade, and they herded us into our lovely old commencement amphitheater for a meeting. The programming was in the hands of money-grubbing morons. The Alumni Association works hand in glove with the many-layered, ever-expanding college bureaucracy. They use the college to generate money for hiring more administrators.

The traditional Quaker silence at the start of a meeting is supposed to be incredibly, uncomfortably long. The outgoing president of the Alumni Association cut it short after ten seconds. A no-nonsense twerp. He and his ilk spent half an hour giving each other awards, with the discourse uniformly conducted by people so unintelligent that they believed their audience to consist of people like themselves.

And then a mutual-fund-managing alum spoke about the virtues of his investment company. He informed us that he was a born-again Christian, as if unaware that many Swarthmoreans are Jews. Supposedly his company gives a great deal of his profits to charity—but it was obvious to our class of 1967 that the smarmy hustler’s spiel was a tissue of deception.

My classmates and I wondered if we were the only class perennially in the grip of rebelliousness. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that when we graduated, the government wanted to send us to the slaughtering-fields of Vietnam. They said we were cowards not to go. One of us did go. He returned intact, and he haunts the dorms with us.

Perhaps my classmates and I can materialize for a future reunion. Drive the money-changers from the temple. Usurp the stage and speak of art, science, and philosophy. Play music. Dance and tell jokes. Be silly and sentimental. Give the finger to the pig one more time.

At our class dinner, I talked with a fellow science major about whether consciousness is something distinct from matter. He said the world is made of the seen and the unseen. When you become aware that other people have thoughts, it’s your first contact with the unseen. Higher levels, any possible afterlife, and even the physical past and the future—all are part of the unseen.

In the dorm where we live, a woman calls to me from across the hall, “Rudy! Leave your and Sylvia’s door open so I get some breeze.” Her room is empty. Our room is empty as well.

The days go by. Every morning we awake in this dorm. Other guests pass through. They don’t see us, always here.

Part of the unseen.

June 20, 2007. To Carcasonne in France.

After Swarthmore, Sylvia and I visited Georgia, and then we flew to Paris, rented a car and drove to the southwest of France for our two-week painting workshop.

On the drive down we spent nights in Chartres, Tours, Rocamandour, Toulouse, and Carcasonne.

The windows at Chartres are wonderful, dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century. A thousand years old. We took a little tour, and the guide remarked that in the Middle Ages most people didn’t read, so the cathedral itself was like a book, with the key facts of the religion on display. The ultimate Sunday funnies. He said they’d read the windows from the bottom row to the top row, reading each row from left to right.

Stained glass windows are a great medium, a heavy, intense channel. And highly psychedelic. Later, in a church in Toulouse, I sat with the sun shining through a stained glass window and onto my face. As the sun inched across the sky, the colors against my eyes slowly changed.

In Tours we had a nice cheap room overlooking a square. The big thing here was to drive out and see some castles of the Loire. Chenonceau was the best castle. It stretches across the Loire River, which is shallow and not very wide. The castle has a long ballroom set onto what was once a bridge.

It was very romantic being there with Sylvia. She looked so cute and eager in her white raincoat. We’re not getting any younger. There aren’t so very many more trips we’ll be able to take. I want so much for this trip to be fun for Sylvia.

Rocamandour was a wild-card that I found in the guidebook—a bunch of chapels set into a cliff, with a castle on top and a little town at the base. Thousands of swallows are in the air at any time—they nest on the cliffs. For dinner we feasted on goose liver and truffles. And we had a great night in our cheap, rickety, old-fashioned room.

And then we got to Carcasonne, a small town which is near the village of Caunes—our ultimate goal. Carcasonne has two parts: a functioning country town below, and above it a medieval walled fortress.

The fortress was heavily altered and restored in the nineteenth century by the architect Eugène Violett-le-Duc, who also worked on reconstructing the Notre Dame. It felt kind of fake, like Disneyland, and in the daytime it was crawling with tourists.

The more interesting part of Carcasonne was the lower town, very French. We hung out there today, buying some food—we’ll be living in an apartment in Caunes. And we bought some paper and canvas to paint on.

The town of Carcasonne has lots of red marble in its sidewalks and walls. The marble comes from Caunes, where the workshop will be.

June 26, 2007. In Caunes.

The days are sliding by, and time is as shapeless as sand. We eat any old time, nothing is punctual. I’ve finished two paintings, and they’re a little different from the ones I’ve done before.

The six other students are friendly. They unquestioningly accept Sylvia and me as being painters. It’s like when I started being a science-fiction writer. All the other writers were, like, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

Sylvia and I are in a big, dusty, furnished apartment in the village of Caunes, and the workshop meets in a big, old stone building a kilometer out in the countryside. That’s our studio. Each of us gets a corner. A hundred years ago, the building was being used as a sawmill or something. But now the estate feels like a farm. A clear strong creek runs through the property. Some evenings we go out to restaurants with the teacher Glen Moriwaki, his wife Pat, and the other students.

After a potluck dinner on the first evening we gathered in the studio and showed each other slides of our work. Glen gave me a really hard time about how big I sign my name. I’ve done nineteen paintings so far, and somehow I’d thought it was funny, or maybe a good promo gimmick, to sign them with my first name in capital letters, as if I were signing a painting in kindergarten. RUDY.

The size of my signature was all that Glen wanted to talk about vis-a-vis my paintings. And nobody else commented on my slides at all. It was annoying and embarrassing, and it made me feel ashamed. Later, Sylvia kindly said the problem was that Glen and the others were flabbergasted by my pictures, and they simply couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I guess I’m an outsider,” I said.

“So what else is new?” said Sylvia.

But I’m prepared to like Glen anyway. He’s a character, an artist full of ideas. And I guess I will start signing my name smaller. I mean, as an artist, I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m at this workshop to get tuned in.

Initially Sylvia was having trouble getting started with her painting here. She was a little stressed about it, and kind of avoiding it. But then she got in the groove and she’s having fun with it. Right now she’s painting a picture of a gnarly old tree in Carcasonne.

I have one of those damned weeks-long viruses that keep me in a bubble all day and sweaty at night, with big racking coughs to clear my chest in the morning. I’m making the best of it, enjoying myself despite the disease. Pounding aspirin to keep the fever bubble down. I really wish I could smoke some cigarettes—that would teach my lungs a lesson. But, no, I’d get all wheezy.

It’s very beautiful here in the south of France. Exquisite. Rocky and scrubby. The cypresses. The vineyards. Villages of piled yellow stones with red tile roofs. The locals—like a guy we met who’s the watchman at the marble quarry—they talk French so that it sounds like Spanish. Sylvia says the dialect down here is called langue d’oc—because they say oc instead of oui.

It’s been very windy the whole time, as windy as in Big Sur. It can get on your nerves. A steady, fitful wind is, by its very essence, in your face.

We’re fully off the web here, which is great. I’m hardly even keeping journal notes. Just letting the experiences flow by. It’s all about painting these days. I wake up at night and think about what I’ll paint the next day.

For my first painting, I did a simple picture, Yellow Couch, a realistic image of a piece of lawn furniture that sits outside the studio. I was thinking of the West Coast Pop artist Mel Ramos. For my second, I did one called The Old Marrieds.

For my second painting, I wanted to depict an amazing, huge, bushy fig tree here, but I couldn’t think of the right way to do it. Finally I picked two big leaves from the fig tree and traced their shapes onto some thick paper, and I painted some shades of green inside the leaves. For the background, I mixed some local red marble dust with acrylic medium to make a kind of pink paint. And I used some aquamarine for the sky. Experimental, work-shop type techniques.

When it came to do the foreground of this painting, I got to thinking about how entwined Sylvia and I are with each other. Sometimes bickering, sometimes billing and cooing. So in the foreground, I painted a pair of creatures in conical shells with eyestalks, and each of them has a zillion nautilus-like tentacles, and they’re grappling with each other—reaching into each other’s shit. The Old Marrieds.

June 24-July 2, 2007. Painting in Caunes.

Sylvia and I went into Carcasonne for some shopping. We saw a group of local bagpipers whose instruments were inside-out goatskins—the tanned skin of a goat with his head and his feet cut off. You blow into the neck hole, and finger a kind of a flute coming out of one front leg, and there’s a drone coming out the other front leg. I think you have some kind of squealer coming out of one of the back legs too, and the fourth leg is just sewn shut.

Naturally a simple SF scenario comes to mind. Some aliens are using the skin of a human explorer as a bagpipe. The fear and outrage of the surviving spacefarers.

I’ve finished four paintings now, working six or more hours a day, for eight days in our studio. Like I said, it’s a big old building in a field by a wide stream. I’d heard the building had been a sawmill, and it turns out it was where they’d saw up the blocks of the local red marble from the Caunes quarry. Le Carrière du Roi, or the Quarry of the King. Only four more days to go here. We’ll miss this idyllic life.

Glen Moriwaki has been giving me really good practical advice about my paintings. He never talks about the content, just about the composition. Tricks to push things forward, or to avoid triple points where too many lines come together. I keep worrying about how we’re going to get our paintings onto the plane home—this isn’t a topic that engages Glen at all. Oh well. Be here now.

Today I finished the central panel of my planned triptych, Hylozoic. I’m beginning to imagine everything to be color and gesture. Like, riding my borrowed bike from the studio back to our apartment, I was mesmerized by the alternating shutters and doors in the yellow stone houses by the road. And on our apartment’s balcony, the strong wind feels like a paintbrush against my skin, a sweep of color. And in the tub this morning, rubbing my back with a washcloth, it felt like I was painting myself with blue-white paint.

I wake up with sore muscles from all the painting. And when I do yoga, I see my muscle pains as colors. I don’t mean that I’m intellectually imagining this, I mean that I’m viscerally feeling washes of color in my brain. The forever-sore muscle along the right side of my spine oozes a pale cobalt blue when I squeeze it. The perennial sharp pain in my upper right shoulder is a triangle of orange—mixed from vermillion and cadmium yellow. My legs are a dark mix of Mars black and cadmium red. The pain down in the lower parts of my back is an acid green that’s a mixture of cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and titanium white—with veins of phthalo green creeping in.

I was dreaming that I might complete a Bosch-style triptych of three Hylozoic paintings here—a square one in the middle, with a pair of vertical rectangles on the sides. I bought enough canvas for this, and, like I said, I’ve finished the middle one—it’s a full square meter, a nice round number for a size. The subtitle of the central panel is Jayjay and the Hrull.

The painting shows my character Thuy Nguyen in the lower right corner. You see Thuy from behind, with her parted hair, her pigtails, and her bare neck. To her left stands a painter holding up a brush and looking towards her. He has a hat like the one Hieronymus Bosch wears in a drawing that’s sometimes said to represent him. Also he has a halo. I think of him as a mixture of Bosch and my character Jayjay. Another layer of meaning is that my image of the painter ended up resembling my daughter Isabel’s husband Gus, and Isabel often wears pigtails.

Our teacher Glen’s cute twelve-year-old daughter has long hair, and she likes me. I got her to put her hair up in pigtails so I could have a model for how Thuy Nguyen’s hair would look from behind. And this adds yet another layer of subtext to the painting. And, finally, of course, at some transreal level the painter in the painting is me.

The largest and brightest thing in my painting is a flying manta ray, one of the aliens that I call Hrulls. This Hrull’s mouth is open and you can see someone inside her mouth—I was thinking the people inside the body of the tree-man in the hell panel of Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The person inside the Hrull’s mouth is my character Chu, who’s slated to take a ride inside the Hrull.

This scene doesn’t precisely match any of the action that I’ve planned for the still-unwritten chapters of my Hylozoic novel. But, who knows, maybe in the end the book will match.

When I paint an imagined scene for a novel before I actually write the scene, I’m using my painting to uncover possibilities. Delving into my left brain. In doing this painting, I’m learning that my character Jayjay will become Bosch’s apprentice, and that he’ll learn to be a painter himself.

Our teacher Glen says that he dreams of making a breakthrough, and coming up with some new angle on painting. He’s a very gifted artist, capable of painting in any style. He can paint realistically if he likes, and he’s had an abstract-expressionist phase. But in the art market it helps to have a recognizable trademark-type angle.

At this point, I don’t worry much about making a breakthrough in my writing. I’m happy to be able to write at all, and to get my work published. Maybe I made my breakthrough some time ago, when I took up transrealism. And I’m now enjoying my mature style.

This said, I do try and break through to new ideas each time out. But my characters and my obsessions remain much the same. For me, trying for a breakthrough might not be a good idea. It’s hard enough to write at all. Swing for the stands, and you might whiff. My Saucer Wisdom novel had an unusual style—in that it resembled a nonfiction book. It was meant to be a breakthrough. And it didn’t do at all well in the marketplace. Nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. Like I always say.

For my last painting, I finished a very nice landscape, Caunes Vineyards. I started it en plein air, looking out over a valley with fields, vineyards and trees. And after that I worked on it in the studio. I finished it one night, putting on the final touches, and then I went outside. It was still a little bit light outside, even though it was 10 pm. I had my brush in my hand and I was reaching out towards the trees and clouds and the house, moving my brush in the air, imagining I was painting the things in place. Ecstasy.

Glen said I’d used a multi-perspective style, and that’s a good way to put it. He said it was a very personal take on Wayne Thiebaud, a painter I greatly admire. He also remarked that even though it was painted from nature, it was a fantasy landscape, and with a lot of rhythm.

I suggested adding a UFO to the painting, as I often do. Pep it up.

Glen advised, “Don’t do that. Don’t do Blue Dog art. Leave it as it is. With a painting like this, you can reach a new audience of people who aren’t even interested in your books or in science fiction.”

When we’re not at the studio, Sylvia and I are walking around the little medieval village of Caunes. It’s so tiny. And on most of the streets you can’t see the horizon, or even any trees. You just see the walls. It’s like being inside a stone maze. A confined village life. When we get out into the green fields it’s something of a relief.

We get wonderful croissants from the bakery every morning—rubbery and yeasty and doughy and multi-layered. Apple tarts from the bakery, too. And hard, chewy salami from the butcher. Serrano ham, semi-soft Cantal cheese, olives.

The most memorable meal that we had was a simple coq au vin that we made in our apartment—with local chicken, wine, garlic and olives. Perfection. The south of France.

Most nights we have these four-hour-long dinners in restaurants with the group. The gang goes through bottle after bottle of wine. Everyone gets giddy except me and the twelve-year-old daughter of Glen and Pat. Artists partying. It’s fun up to a point, but eventually it’s a strain for me. When people drink a lot they get boring. At home, I’m able to avoid drinking parties.

We’re having a little group show at the local museum here. Glen’s picture isn’t yet finished. Last night he was going to do a big push, but he had some trouble getting it together. He was drinking a lot. As we left the studio in the evening, he was telling us to be sure to come back at nine am sharp to get ready to hang the show—even though it only goes up at 3 pm.

When I got to the studio this morning, of course nobody else was around. Sylvia had stayed back at our apartment for a couple more hours, but I’m so compulsive that I felt like I really did have to be there at 9 am.

Feeling annoyed with Glen, I threw out a half bottle of clear fruit brandy that was sitting by the metal sink. Poured it down the drain. That brandy was bothering me. Yesterday I’d in fact rinsed my mouth out with it, tasting it. It tasted like I needed a recovery group meeting. Insane of me to taste it. I didn’t swallow any, and I ran water though my mouth to flush out the alcohol, but obviously I’m on the brink of losing my sobriety.

Being around alcohol makes me crazy. This morning, after pouring Glen’s bottle of clear brandy into the sink, I realized that I really didn’t want anyone to know I’d done this. So I carried away the empty bottle and threw it into a ditch by the main road. I didn’t want to put the empty into the trash at the studio where someone might see it. I figured that, with the bottle missing, there might be some confusion over what had happened to the brandy. Actually, it’s just as likely that nobody will notice or care. Not everyone’s as nuts as I am.

So we hung our show in a room at the local museum. I have two of my pictures up, modestly in a dark corner. And Sylvia has a couple of nice works up as well. The official opening of our group show was fun and the dinner was cheerful. Glen was in a good mood.

As I mentioned, in the days before the show Glen had been very tense, as he still hadn’t finished his picture. But, at the very last minute, he’d made a piece about 8 feet by 4 feet, on paper, in his apartment, an irregular pattern of black dots with white rings around them, painted in acrylic. For the final touch he laid the giant piece of paper on the floor and drizzled a mug of black tea over it, letting the tea slowly dry.

The effect was excellent. The work had a leopard-skin quality. Glen called it Magellanic Clouds, as if it were a telescopic photo of deep space. Glen was happy and we students were happy for him.

To get my paintings home, I rolled up my unstretched Hylozoic canvas and my paper Caunes Vineyards with a cushioning layer of foam. My other paintings and Sylvia’s paintings fit inside our suitcases.

An epic trip.

Selling Hylozoic

August 8, 2007. Black Point.

Back at home now, writing and painting. I finished a draft of a painting of the left wing of my Hylozoic triptych today, I call this panel, Thuy and the Subbies.

Regarding my novel, I’m at that frightening black point that I always reach in the middle. Confusion and despair. I fantasize that I can stave this off by outlining, but the black point crops up anyway, heedless as a meteorite. It’s where reality meets dream, where the rubber hits the road. As Dante famously put it in The Divine Comedy:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi retrovai per una selva oscura,

che la diritta via era smarrita.

I found an interesting web page exploring lots of ways to translate this. One version reads like this: “Midway in life’s journey / I found myself in a dark wood, and the straight way was lost.” A translation more applicable to my present situation would be this:

Halfway through my novel

I know I don’t know

What the hell I’m doing.

What the hey—today I’m going to the beach. Sooner or later, the Muse is bound to show up and jolt me. She always does. Thus far, anyway.

August 24, 2007. Offer from Tor. Spook Country.

So now I have an offer for Hylozoic. They’re offering the same advance as for Mathematicians in Love. Not all that much money, but I’m tired of ranting about that. It’s good to know I can sell this book at all.

So I’m half done writing the first draft, and it’s been eight months since I started writing, and I figure I’ll need another eight months.

I recently read William Gibson’s Spook Country. It’s humbling. The work is so polished. The dialog, the descriptions and the apercus. Good characterization. Hip. Lots of brand names—that’s a popular quirk these days that I’m not willing to do.

You’re rooting for all the characters—they aren’t contemptible, as my Hylozoic characters Jayjay and Thuy threaten to become. And Spook Country has a simple clear climax that the whole book builds towards. It’s not a fucked-up mess.

Don’t worry about it, Ru. Go ahead and write Hylozoic out through the ending, and then you’ll know the plot, and then you can foreshadow it. And you’ll have time later to polish up the dialog, dial up the descriptions, and thicken the characterization.

Gibson takes about four years to write a book. Maybe if I took that long, I’d get to his level. Oh well. Maybe some other time I’ll polish a book for four years. I’ll be doing this one in a year and a half, as usual.

Nice line in Spook Country about classic SF: “It had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting.” Love that word staccato.

I notice a really large number of overlaps between Gibson’s and my obsessions—as revealed in Spook Country and Hylozoic. Computer maps of reality, giant squids and cuttlefish, ants, Bosch, tulpas (that is, projected thought forms that appear as humans), specters in the woods, cellular automata. Not that he’s in any way cribbing from me or vice-versa. It’s just that we’re on the same wavelength—an esoteric 21st century transreal post-cyberpunk mind-channel that few others see.

September 12, 2007. Finished A Bosch Chapter

I had been buffaloed about how to depict Bosch, and then, somehow I was able to write a chapter about him. At least for now, he’s a mix of Kurt Gödel, my mother, and me.

The day after I finished the Bosch chapter I started feeling sick. Weak and feverish. Maybe it’s a virus. Or maybe I depleted myself working on this chapter so hard. I really dug down deep into my psyche for it.

Maybe it’s not good for your head to twink a mad, dead genius like Bosch. I conjured him up, and I’ve been dancing with his shade. And I’m not being all that respectful to him, either. Teasing him, arguing with him, trying to rile him up.

So, yeah, for forty-five years, I couldn’t get into Bosch’s world, and now I’m in it. It’s like Bosch’s world was hidden inside one of those of shiny seedpods he likes to paint. I gnawed a little hole, and I crawled in. The seeds in here are intoxicatingly sweet upon the eldritch mandibles of my mouth-parts.

I’m sad to be done with this chapter. I love being in Bosch’s world, and I feel like I’m just getting to know him. Well, I’ll come back to him. Give him a few more scenes in Hylozoic.

Kyoto

October 13-22, 2007. Kyoto. What Is Life?

Sylvia and I went to Kyoto for a conference called “What is Life?” They paid all our expenses. I didn’t exactly keep a travel journal this time around. Instead I took a lot of photos, and made them into blog posts, drawing text from things I wrote on scraps of paper from my pocket. And I’m constructing this journal entry from those same scraps.

There aren’t many other Westerners in Kyoto. When our paths cross, we exchange haunted, hang-dog looks. It would take years for me to have the faintest notion of what’s going on here.

It’s entertaining to sit and watch the river of humanity stream by. Many of the Japanese are extremely beautiful, both women and men—with faces symmetrized around refreshingly unusual norms. Full lips abound. You still see some women in kimonos. Lots of the men are in black suits, but some younger guys wear ratty hipster garb. The women shoppers are drop-dead chic.

A lot of teenage and twenty-year old girls are into an eye-catching hooker look: high-heeled shoes or boots with black socks running up to the knees, worn with a microskirt or with hotpants. Many have bleached their hair to shades of orange.

A lot of Japanese women use a traditional walking gait in which the hips don’t move, it’s sort of the opposite of a model’s runway wriggle. Instead they hold their hips rigid and they crouch a little, moving with bent knees. When you cross this walk with high-heel hooker boots, you get a really strange effect, it’s like seeing a predatory alien, gliding along like Groucho Marx.

Sylvia and I get lost every single time we take the bus, invariably getting off at the incorrect squiggle or random-string-of-etceteras.

At one point, we ended up in a sprawling graveyard for grown-ups. It was like a little city of its own. Identically narrow rectangular blocks of stone rise like miniature office towers above each stone cache for ashes. A sign advertising for a monument-maintenance service showed sad-face and happy-face gravestones.

There’s a great blocks-long roofed market that we walk through every day. Amazing pickles. They pickle just about anything in Kyoto, especially the long vegetables like cukes, eggplants and daikon radishes. They set them into a salty muddy bean paste and massage them all day long.

Lots of dried fish, and beautiful fresh fish. Great mounds of octopi. Tentacle frenzy. Not much meat on show. Some nice looking fruit, selected and polished like art works, and priced accordingly. I saw three mushrooms going for—I’m not kidding—five hundred dollars.

Our room has a giant air-conditioning unit right outside it, and it sounds like there’s a car engine inside the unit. When it starts up, it makes that starter-sound just like a car.

Machines encrust every visible surface in many parts of town. And the cabbies read sports magazines as they wait in traffic.

The “What Is Life?” conference was kind of odd. A very eclectic mix of people in attendance. You might even say that some of the speakers seemed to be out and out charlatans. Much more so than what you’d ordinarily expect for an academic con.

I worked with the vibe and presented a not-fully-serious proof that everything is alive, drawing on at least one tech move that I invented for my SF novel Hylozoic.

I had a good audience, and everyone was lively and friendly.

A few days later, I went to speak at the Cybermedia Center of Osaka University. I was the guest of Makoto Kikuchi, a physicist and an SF-lover who translated a couple of my stories some years back.

I slanted this talk more towards describing my style of writing. The audience was small, and a number of them were SF readers. After the talk, we walked through some back streets to a restaurant. No place looks as cyberpunk as Japan. Schoolgirls waiting for a commuter train to pass, a freeway overhead.

At dinner, one young man stood up to give a toast. He was an incredibly devoted fan of my novels—he’d read them in Japanese, and he didn’t speak English at all. As he started his toast, he became so overwhelmed with emotion that he started crying. Heartbreaking. I’m not worthy.

The river through Kyoto comes right out of the mountains and is wonderfully clear. Great Japanese cranes fishing in it and flying from spot to spot. I recognize them from ancient ink paintings on scrolls.

For our last day of sightseeing, we went to the Toji temple in southern Kyoto. They have a flea market on the temple grounds on the twenty-first of every month—the date has to do with the number of buddhas, bodhisattvas, fierce kings, and guardian kings that figure in this sect’s heavenly cosmology.

At the temple I’m getting a deep feeling of melting into the throngs of humanity. Even though I’m different. Actually, I’m starting to wish I was Japanese. They’re such beautiful people. When I see another Westerner I’m reminded of how big and awkward I am. The crowd at the temple is like lava. On the steps, a censer burns incense. People lean into incense smoke, purifying themselves with it. There’s a steady patter of small coins being tossed into the alms bin at the top of the steps.

We buy a ticket to go inside the temple, and there he is, the infinitely compassionate Buddha. I get this rising feeling inside me like I’m coming apart, dissolving into the temple, merging into the bars of sunlight in the scrolls of smoke, the scuff of feet, the murmur of voices, the dust, the antiquity, the dry wood. I feel like crying. I’ve found what I came for. I’m seeing god. The ecstasy of travel. It’s like being a monk starving in a cell and after ten days the visions come, only the other way around, that is, you’re glutting yourself with sensation until, blessedly, you snap.

Outside is a pagoda in a garden. So beautiful. Fall just coming on Kyoto. In another couple of weeks the Japanese maples will turn red and we tourists will go absolutely daffy! Already you can buy red maple leaves in the market’s pricy fruit stores. Saw a bunch of grapes for $12. A Platonic bunch of grapes, each grape large and round and plump. I settled for a Platonic Asian pear at $3. The pear is god.

Beside the pagoda, I see a pair of women whom I take to be apprentice geisha or maikos. I have this idea maikos might be country girls who are kind of roped into this not-so-desirable or pleasant kind of life. Having to be polite to businessmen. But today they’re taking pictures like everyone else. On an outing?

Later someone tells me the women were Japanese tourists who rent maiko outfits for the day.

Still outside the Toji temple. Sylvia and I get udon soup under a tent in the flea market. Probably not something I’d do in many other countries. But the Japanese seem so clean and tidy, you feel safe with the street food. The cooks are working over burners, and guys are washing the bowls off in a tub in back. Shared pots of tea on every table. I really feel like part of it all, like a cell in an organism, with the crowd flowing past the tent. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti suggests that “darshan”—an Indian word for the vision or experience of the divine—is really the pleasure of being part of a large crowd.

The guy my age sitting on the next table with his son and granddaughters keeps refilling my cup with tea, never meeting my eyes. I think in Japan it’s not polite to look strangers in the face. He’s wearing a brown suit and one of those stingy-brim rain-hats they like here. When he leaves he finally looks over, smiles at me and says “Good-bye.” I realize he’s been having fun filling my cup. Darshan.

In the afternoon of the last day, after the Toji temple, I took a cab alone, seeking one last rock garden, at the Nanzenji Zen temple on the east of Kyoto up against the green hills.

By now Sylvia and I had already revisited the famous Ryoanji Zen garden that we’d seen in 1993—the one with stones amid raked gravel. I’d been thinking about the place ever since, but now, in 2007, it wasn’t so mellow anymore. There were steady streams of school tours coming through, and now and then a loudspeaker would kick into life with an informational speech in Japanese. Phew.

The Nanzenji temple has a different style of rock garden, with a few little plants growing in it. I sit there for quite some time, taking in the clumps of leaves, the moss in the gravel, the aches in my tour-worn old body, and noticed the slow passage of time, with everything so perfectly in place. My usual worries about the things to come are simply more rocks in the garden. I rake around them. I sit back, let the air drift, and feel the moss grow. For the second time in the day, I feel a welling up of religious excitement.

Moving deeper into the Nansenzi complex of gardens, I follow an artful path of stones and wood, leading across a pond, with everything off-handedly just where it should be. Wu wei, no sweat, no matter, never mind.

I come to a magical Zen fountain that’s dripping one or two drops every second or so into a rock basin. The drops are thoughts, souls, instants. Above the fountain is an unbelievably crooked tree, supported on two crutches. By now my psychic weather is like the rising orchestral tide of music in that old Beatles song, “A Day in the Life.” Perhaps this is like the aura that an epileptic experiences before a fit.

But—wait. What’s that bright green spot in the rock basin? My god, some pinhead has submerged a plastic bonsai tree here in this utterly natural and authentic Zen fountain! A tourist? A Japanese Beavis and Butthead? A monk? What does this bright green plastic object mean?

For sure it’s a discordant honk in my garden of serenity. I rake my thoughts around it, doing my best to fit the object in. But, dude, it’s busting my rush. I fish the plastic tree out of the basin and examine it with contempt. Rigid, bristly, and a particularly nasty shade of green.

Should I hurl the bogus bonsai into the nearby koi pond? But—it’s hardly my place to come here and rearrange things during the tiny duration of my visit, is it?

And now, distracted by the bogus bonsai, I forget all about my rising tide of enlightenment, and any potential experience of satori.

Instead I start fretting over whether I should have bought that expensive Kyoto-silk shirt with the perhaps too-flashy koi patterns that I saw last night. Maybe there’s still time to run and buy it?

What it is—I’m coming down again.

I put the bonsai back where I found it and I go back to that first Nanzenji rock garden with the plants in it. And it’s cool and mellow and vibey. And I’m back in the groove.

But then I begin worrying I should see more. The grounds of the Nanzenji temple go on and on. There are in fact any number of rock gardens here. So I go haring off after them.

And eventually I come to my fifth or sixth Nanzenji rock garden and—it has a loudspeaker talking like at Ryoanji.

So what do I know? Nothing. Ah…nothing, yes, yes, that’s what I wanted to know. To not know. To knot now.

Zen aside, a lot of the Japan I saw looks more like the inside of a computer case than like a Zen garden. I’m glad I have fairly easy access to nature at home. Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz is a really big Zen rock garden. The art of the Japanese Zen garden is to squeeze Four Mile Beach into your back yard. The small size makes it manageable, and you can really focus on it. But I do like the big nature I can walk around in—the big Nature that’s not roped off.

Sunset glints off the Kyoto canals.

And now the trip’s over, another milestone come and gone, whoosh, the train across the hidden valley and into another tunnel. Nothing is ever quite what I expected.

Sayonara, y’all.

My Art Show

November 10, 2007. Gallery Show in North Beach.

This weekend I realized a dream of mine—I showed my paintings in an art gallery. The show was for three days in the Live Worms gallery on funky Grant Avenue in the North Beach district of San Francisco. A hip venue.

I met the gallery owner, Kevin Brown, at that art workshop in France this summer. We hit it off. Kevin is an extremely productive artist—mostly large, abstract works. Good stuff. He uses the Live Worms gallery as a studio, and as a place to sell his paintings. He covers his rent by renting out his gallery space to other artists. You can rent it for a three-day weekend, and put up your own show.

So I formed the plan of putting on a show here. The rent isn’t terribly high, and to make it better, I got my publishers, Tor Books, to pay for the rental. We’re using the show to help launch my new book Postsingular. To that end, I set up a joint reading with fellow Tor author Kage Baker in the gallery for Saturday.

For the last week I’ve been working my butt off, putting out a mass emailing about the show, getting it listed on various online calendars, and framing my two or three paintings that were on paper instead of canvas. I numbered the paintings in order painted, and organized a list. I was a little surprised to realize I’ve done thirty paintings by now. I took photos of all the paintings, wrote up descriptions of them, and made up a little catalog to post online and to print for the show. I figured out which paintings I don’t want to sell and set prices for the others. Carted my paintings up to North Beach, and hung them. While Sylvia and I were hanging them, someone was playing electric blues guitar in the bar next door. Great to hear that music through the wall.

With the paintings up, the gallery space looks beautiful to me. A garden of earthly delights. On the back wall is my Hylozoic triptych, refulgent in its glory. And lining the two long white side walls are twenty other paintings, ten on each side. Like a cathedral with a rose window!

The paintings light up the room. They’re warm. Looking at them all together—for the first time ever!—I see that I have a fairly consistent palette. Lots of cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and shades of green (usually made by mixing blue and yellow, though recently I’ve gotten to like mixing cad yellow with phthalo blue or phthalo green). Wonderful to see them mingling, talking to each other, breathing the air of the gallery.

And I put one painting in the big, glass, storefront window—it’s the personal logo painting that I put on my new artist’s business card. Da Nha Duc. He’s a character from Hylozoic. I based him on a classic Carl Barks comic book image of Donald Duck, and added a UFO. Sylvia came up with the idea of giving the duck a Vietnamese name.

The reception on Friday night went well. A lot of my friends showed up—maybe two hundred people over the evening. It was gratifying to have a few artist friends here too, saying nice things about the work: my painter pal Paul Mavrides, my teacher Glen Moriwaki, Rudy’s painter friend Nicholas Cole, my Los Gatos painter friend Vernon Head.

Late Friday evening, the crowd degenerated—party night in North Beach—and I closed down the gallery at 10:30. The crowd had dwindled to a speed-fueled Hungry I nightclub stripper in goth-clown makeup, plus three intimidating 6’ 2” soccer-hooligan British types itching for a fistfight.

Saturday morning I had a lot of walk-ins—including nearly a dozen North Beach painters. I think they figured there’d be free wine. Shabby guys, these painters. There’s a fine line between being a painter and a homeless bum. This said, the painters had a freshness and innocence about them. Some of them were high, some of them wearing berets. Most of them were unshaven, and they had paint on their hands. Some made wise-cracks, but mostly they were slow on the uptake. My favorite two were a pair called Joe and Eddy. I felt right on their wavelength, discussing the craft, joking with them, happy to be accepted as a peer. Joe was kind of obsessive-compulsive, and kept wanting to pull off brush-hairs that were stuck in the paint of my canvases.

I thought of the end of the Tod Browning movie Freaks when a trapeze artist marries a midget, and she’s accepted by other sideshow performers. At the wedding feast, they pass a goblet around the table, chanting: “We accept her, we accept her. One of us, one of us. Gooba-gobble, gooba-gobble.”

I’m so used to being a writer, and to hanging out with writers, that I don’t see being a writer as a big deal, or as commanding any elite-cadre-type status. But I’m enough of an newcomer to painting that I still feel excited at the thought of being a painter. And, at the same time, I feel a bit like a charlatan.

I can hardly believe that I had an art show in San Francisco. I’m lucky. The world’s been kind to me.

Saturday afternoon I held the reading. It had turned rainy, with the streets shiny. I got my guest-reader Kage Baker to read first. She read a humorous story featuring old-time England prostitutes, and she did a good job on the Cockney accents. Her sister was in the audience with a large green parrot.

The audience started out small, but people kept trickling in, and by the time I read, the place was full. I read from the part in Postsingular where my character Ond releases the orphid nanomachines upon the world.

It was nice to read in the chapel of my paintings. When I mentioned a cuttlefish, I could point to my painting of the cuttlefish under Frek’s bed. The reliable Jude Feldman of Borderlands Books was there selling books by me and by Kage.

Several of my old students were at the reading—they’ve been successful in the world: a Pixar programmer, the head of a philosophy department, a programmer at IBM—it made me proud to see them.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the younger writer Cory Doctorow convinced me it would be a good promotional move to give away free electronic copies of Postsingular online—to drum up buzz and interest. And Tor Books had grudgingly given me permission to do this. A guy at the reading told me he’d read Postsingular online this week—things had been slow at work—and now he wanted to buy a paperback copy. Proof positive of Cory’s new marketing concept!

It’s nice to think of people reading my book on their computer at work. Perfect for those days when all you’re really doing at your desk is serving time.

Writing this up, on Sunday morning, I’m in the gallery, stone cold alone. Sylvia’s been in and out, helping to make the place look civilized, and giving me moral support. Right now she’s off getting a breakfast bowl of pho in Chinatown.

Sunday is slow for walk-ins. A wino who’s an unemployed carpenter. A stoned beatnik wearing yellow glasses, a three-piece suit, and a beret. He kept saying “far out.” A tourist couple—a woman and her impatient husband. I understood how he felt. You go into a gallery and as soon as you’re in there the artist is begging you for money. Not that I’m doing a hard sell.

I’d fantasized about selling all thirty paintings in three days, but realistically, most of my friends don’t have much money. And for the average person, actually buying a picture is not within the compass of possible behaviors. I did sell one painting anyway—Yellow Couch—sold it to my programming wizard pal Emilio.

So I’m not quitting my day job.

“What’s your day job?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh.”

This morning I went around and put SOLD dots on a couple of pictures that my kids had said they wanted. Makes the show look more successful.

On Saturday evening, Sylvia and I went to babysit our twin granddaughters, Jasper and Zimry, at Rudy’s house in Berkeley. We slept on Rudy’s couch. The nursery is like a treasure-room, with those two perfect babies warm and clean in their cribs.

What a year this has been. Three new grandchildren, a new book, a trip to Japan, an art show—and next week I’m doing a cellular-automata light-show for a chamber-music quartet. Thank you, god.

January 11, 2008. A Hood At Yoga.

Yesterday morning I went to yoga class in Los Gatos, and the teacher, Jan Hutchins, was talking about styles of breathing. I always like class with Jan, he’s a hip and funny guy who often coaxes me into a deep meditative zone.

The yoga room has mirrors all along one wall. Jan often asks questions of the class at large, and often nobody answers. So today he says, “Sometimes I imagine I’m under observation in a psychiatric hospital, and those are one-way mirrors with doctors on the other side, and there aren’t really any students here at all, I’m only hallucinating them, and the doctors are watching this crazy guy who thinks he’s teaching a yoga class.”

I had a hallucination a little like that in 1965 when I was a college student. An upperclassman, who was our campus’s first druggie, had given me a couple of peyote cactus buds he’d gotten by mail-order from a Texas garden supply company. I’d eaten the buds and puked them up, and I was tripping heavily, over at some friends’ house, and I imagined that their kitchen was an amphitheater-like classroom full of students, and that I was giving a lecture on the theory of relativity—a subject about which, at that point, I knew almost nothing.

It was in fact a precognitive hallucination—for in 1977 I was a professor lecturing on the theory of relativity in an amphitheater-like classroom at SUNY Geneseo. The wisdom of the spiny bud.

Near the end of Jan’s class today, I was tired, and so was the guy next to me. We were off in the furthest corner of the yoga room, and we were slacking, lying on our mats instead of doing yet another pose, and Jan walks over and says, “What are you guys—the hoods?”

And then it was time for everyone to lie still. Savasana. Lying on the floor with my eyes closed, I saw a beautiful spreading patch of blue.

February 12, 2008. Imprisoned by Success?

I finished the first draft of Hylozoic. My latest strand of spider silk reaches across the void! Yeah, baby!

I revised the ending of the first draft while I was lying on a hilltop in Almaden Quicksilver Park near Guadalupe Reservoir. I’m tired of staying inside on these nice spring days. I feel nostalgic for the freedom I felt I had earlier in my retirement, or when I wasn’t working on books all the time.

I gave Bosch a line to this effect in Hylozoic when he’s leaving his home town: “It’s refreshing to put my life into upheaval. As a youth I dreamed of being a penniless wanderer. My small success has imprisoned me.”

And now I’m going through Hylozoic from beginning to end before mailing it to Tor. I’m always surprised by how very many things I find to correct. It feels good, like picking scabs off your skin or sanding a peeling wall. But there’s also an element of anxiety. Is everything fixable? Are my changes ever going to converge?

I correct at various levels. Here’s a list of some of the things I think about:

• Avoid using the same word twice in a row.
• Make it clear who’s talking.
• Mentally read each sentence aloud, making nice rhythms and sounds.
• Use smooth segues so the reading flows without a hitch.
• Give reasonable motivations to the characters, and make the motivations clear.
• Don’t explain too stingily or too extensively.
• Liven up the dialog so it’s fun.
• Tone down the preaching of my idiosyncratic personal options.
• Foreshadow the events to come—without spoiling the surprises.
• Patch any logical or scientific inconsistencies.
• Check on the temporal sequence of events, and on the locations of the characters for the events.
• Include ambient descriptions of smells, sights, and sounds.
• Eliminate stereotypes and received ideas.
• Make sure the jokes are startling and funny.

Last night someone asked me how it feels to finish a novel. I said, “It’s like I was in a concentration camp, and the war ended, and the guards left, and now I can just walk out.”

Vacation time, Ru. Ride your bike. Paint a little. Be with your family.

May 16, 2008. Writing Short Stories.

Three months later.

I’ve been easing back into writing, working on some short stories.

When I don’t write, I miss “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” That’s a phrase used by a painter played by John Malkovich in the movie Art School Confidential.

On the queue these days:

• “Tangier Routines,” for Flurb. This is a pastiche of Wm. Burroughs letters that serves as a sequel to my earlier story, “The Imitation Game.”
• A new five-thousand word story, “Qlone,” which I sent to Asimov’s.
• A thousand-word short-short story, “Message Found in a Gravity Wave” which I sold to Nature Physics.
• A story with Bruce Sterling, still underway, with working title “Colliding Branes.”
• A story called “To See Infinity Bare” with Paul Di Filippo.

I’m coming out from under the cloud of a cold that I’ve had for four weeks—I don’t know why I get these horrible six-week colds twice a year. I like to complain wildly about my health to my seventy-five-year-old neighbor friend Gunnar. Like I’ll claim that I have AIDS. Or I’ll say that I have such intense postviral depression that I’m going to hang myself.

Gunnar just laughs. He’s used to me.

June 10, 2008. No Sequel to Hylozoic

Yesterday I phoned my editor David Hartwell to see what he thinks about Hylozoic. He didn’t seem to think the book was too complicated, as I’ve been worrying. He likes my Chu character—he said he was surprised how well Chu worked, and that it was very rare to find an autistic character in an adventure novel where stuff is happening—as opposed to being in a family-relationship novel.

He sympathized with my anxiety that if Hylozoic bombs, then I won’t be able to publish a third in the series. My stock isn’t all that high at Tor these days. Dave agreed it would be wise to round off Hylozoic so that it can stand with Postsingular as a completed whole—with no need for a third volume.

I’ll add a chapter to the end of Hylozoic, filling in the missing stuff that I’d thought might appear in a third book of the series. I’ll have my character Thuy experience a bunch of stuff off camera—a trip past infinity that I’d planned for the perhaps-never-to-be-written third book. And at the end of Hylozoic, I’ll have Thuy rapidly telling about this trip.

Thuy is supposed to be a writer herself, and she’s been working on a so-called metanovel that in some ways parallels Hylozoic. So now she’ll be telling about this experience that she had out past infinity, and saying that she’d planned to write it up as a new metanovel, but now she’s not going to. Instead she’s just telling her adventure to another character—a kid called Chu:

“It’s all tangled up,” protested Chu when Thuy was done. “It doesn’t make enough sense.”

“It’s what it is,” said Thuy. “And now that I’ve told you this part, I’m not gonna bother writing it up as a separate metanovel. This story’s done right now, just as it is.”

Bam! Outta there.

Death’s Door / 2008-2012

Cerebral Hemorrhage

July 8, 2008. I Have a Stroke.

I was just in Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Gatos for seven nights with a hemorrhagic stroke—what they used to call apoplexy.

The way it came down was that I had a seizure while lying on the couch in my living room on July 1. It hit pretty much out of the blue. According to Sylvia, I got stiff and made a weird face and foamed at the mouth and was unresponsive. She called 911. Two police cars, a fire truck and an ambulance showed up. The ambulance took me to the Good Sam hospital—a good choice as they specialize in strokes.

It wasn’t the more common “ischemic” stroke in which part of the blood supply to your brain gets blocked. This was, as I say, the “hemorrhagic” kind of stroke, where a blood vessel bursts in your head, and you later get a big clot of blood in the frontal lobe.

In the hospital they tested me with a bunch of CAT Scans and MRIs and even an angiogram with iodine in my brain arteries, trying to pinpoint the cause of the burst blood vessel—not that I really remember these tests. All they could see was the left-over clotted blood. It was probably a small rupture in a brain artery that will heal itself as the clot dissolves. They didn’t see any other spots that are likely to blow. They’ll scan me again in about a month.

I’ve had very intense headaches this week, maybe the strongest headaches of my life. They gave me several drugs: two opiates, two antinflamation drugs, an antiseizure drug called Keppra, and regular old Tylenol. The headaches seem to be dropping down now, maybe the pressure from the clot is already less. I later learned that at one point they almost cut my skull open, but fortunately it didn’t come to that.

I shared the room with a non-English-speaking Asian-Indian guy over here to visit his son’s baby. I think the son is a Silicon Valley engineer. The poor old man had to get open-heart surgery while he was here. He seemed to be feeling better than me. A leathery guy. After awhile he left.

The nurses kept not giving me a bath. Finally after five days, I unplugged the IV-drip from my arm and took a shower on my own—dribbling blood on the floor. One of the nurses scolded me, but another nurse said she liked to see patients show spirit. Really, I had no idea what I was doing. Totally out of it.

I’m supposed to go see my regular doctor and my newly acquired neurologist, a New Yorker, next week. In the hospital, I said to the neurologist, wanting this to be true, “I’m glad this was relatively benign.”

He looked sad and serious and said, “It’s not benign. It’s a very big deal.”

Damn. I’d thought I was so healthy, what with being sober and riding my bike and doing yoga. I feel wistful and confused. Lost in the fog.

I’d had my heart set on living to 84—I have this notion that I should live to a multiple of twelve, so if it’s not 72 it should be 84 or 96. But 84 doesn’t look like such a gimme anymore. I think that if you’ve had one stroke you’re likely to have another. Maybe I’ve almost run out my thread. Oh well—I guess it might be okay to get off the hook a little sooner. Cozy up under that six-foot-deep dirt quilt.

Saying that, I’m whistling in the dark. In reality I’m having a general sense of the hopelessness and pointlessness of life. I’d thought I had so many twilight years left to enjoy—and now it seems like it might be almost over. I feel sorry for myself.

But I’m already hoping to start writing again. It’s what I do. Write an autobiography. I’ve been putting that off for years, but if I’m going to start having strokes maybe I need to gather ye rosebuds while I may.

I should live so long.

Lost in the fog.

July 10, 2008. Dealing With It.

So I’m settling into my new regimen. I take a Tylenol every four or six hours for my headache. I take Keppra twice a day lest I have another seizure. The Keppra makes me dizzy and sleepy. I hate it.

Little Leda Marritz wrote a nice note that I should let her know if there was anything she could do, so I jokingly suggested that we meet at the hospital and switch bodies, my brain in her skull, her brain in mine. I’d still be in trouble, though, as it’s the brain arteries themselves that are my weakness, it seems.

I keep having these hallucinatory dreams where there’s some specific object of importance. And I’ll even wake up and walk around, looking for the object—day before yesterday, it was a basket of garlic buds and some artichoke-shaped squash. I propped open our bedroom door so these invisible mystery-veggies wouldn’t rot. And yesterday the object was a newspaper-like magazine in Sylvia’s purse that was somehow slowing down time. I’ll think I’m doing fine, and then I’ll have one of these waking hallucinations. At this point I really can’t trust my judgment at all.

I managed to mail my final edit of Hylozoic to Tor, just to get it out of my life. I’d pretty much finished work on it the very afternoon before my stroke, and I looked it over a couple of times during the last few days—for what little that’s worth in my current state.

July 12, 2008. Rebooting

Today I’m starting to feel like myself again. At least that’s what I like to say.

Off and on I have this sense of rebooting. Today I was looking at the brake light on the back of my car. And I’m like, “Ah, yes, the brake light. An electrical filament illuminating a hard plastic lens.”

I mean, I knew what the light was, sure, but I’d dropped the maintenance routines of mentally rehearsing the daily facts like that—preoccupied as I was by hospital thoughts of death.

But all the little niggling objects are still here, all wanting their share of attention: the radio remote control, the knitting basket, the glasses cases, my three pairs of glasses, my hair, my clothes, the pillow, the lamps, the food in the fridge. It’s like the world is this array of fastener snaps, and I’m a plastic sheet of snaps that need to be matched up with and clicked into the reality array. The lights flow through me, and my piezoplastic body wriggles.

My mind is a giant warehouse where an earthquake knocked everything off the racks. I have to reshelve things one by one. “Oh, yes, that’s a steam shovel, that’s a potty, that’s a quartz crystal, that’s my first day of nursery school.”

Repeatedly I remember marrying Sylvia, and how cute she was in her white hat and veil.

July 16, 2008. Starting to Write Again.

I’m feeling a little frazzled from all the visits, emails and phone calls from family and friends. Everyone is sympathetic about my stroke. I long to return to my normal vegged-out, low-key, under-the-radar lifestyle. I’m still weak, and I’m napping more than usual. Also I’m eating more, as if to make up for the week of near-fast in the hospital. Maybe my appetite-control brain-circuits were destroyed.

There ought to be some riddle whose answer I’d be seeking by writing a memoir. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write?

Looking around Borders Books today, I was thinking about what kinds of memoirs get published. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have a thing going with rueful tales of personal dysfunction. Back in the 1930s, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker were doing something similar.

Or maybe I could cast my memoir as an evocation of a bygone era. Like a tale of the vanished Wild West. A cyberpunk in Silicon Valley.

More immediately, the point of writing a memoir would be to entertain myself, and to gain a bit more self-knowledge. To brag. And to have some fun. In certain lights, doing a memoir seems easier than grinding away on another novel.

Mainly I want to write.

I’m working on these notes in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe. The guy at the next table has an ascetically shaved head, and he’s eating an abstemious salad of greens and goat cheese. Thoroughly, carefully, he chews a single wafer-thin slice of tomato. I hate him.

“It’s foggy every day in San Francisco this July,” my wife reports, studying the paper.

A young woman at another table shakes her head, smiling. No health problems for her, not yet. I used to feel that way. Potentially immortal. Now I feel like a doddering old man. On the point of being cut down in my prime.

July 19, 2008. Random Writing.

I’m in Los Gatos Coffee Roasting again. On my own. Sylvia is out running errands. I should laundry-marker “Call 911” onto my forehead in case I suddenly keel over.

Yesterday I had an office visit with my regular doctor. He’s a nice guy, talkative and optimistic, well-informed. He thinks I’m likely to recover and be free of brain trouble for a couple of decades. They’ll have a better idea in about a month, after the scab in my brain dissolves and they can scan in there to see what exactly happened. The hopeful theory is that it was a fluke, an isolated weak vein or artery that just happened to burst, something that had lurked like a time-bomb for many years.

I’m still having trouble believing I’m going through all this hassle.

Today I actually wrote a thousand words on my story with Paul Di Filippo, “To See Infinity Bare.” It wasn’t too hard. It felt good. But when I was done, around noon, I was so tired that I lay down for a nap.

It’s so terrible when people have words appliquéd onto the butts of their sweat pants. Like the back of a van. Like the woman I’m looking at right now in the coffee shop. Pale blue sweat pants with “H O L L I S T E R” on the backside. That’s the name of a small town south of here. But of course, to her, the pants are fresh fashion.

If I weren’t going to write a memoir, what might I write instead? I could scootch back just a bit, and write a novel that’s close to my actual life. My character is convalescing, and he’s working on a memoir. He feels tired a lot of the time. The naps hit him like sandbags—boom, he’s out. At times it’s even like there are bags of sand sewn into his body cavities, weighing him down.

Or I go further afield. A boy in 1959, he’s been at boarding school in Germany worrying about fallout. And he comes back to the U.S. and, oh-oh, NYC and/or D.C. are gone. Especially Texas could be gone.

A frikkin’ Texas-shaped hole in the surface of the globe, a thousand-mile deep shaft with a giant orange blup-blup lava lake at the bottom. A fence around the edge, and you can buy little baskets of bread and throw in the crumbs for the Gnomes of the Hollow Earth. Tiny cowhand gnomes down there in tiny hats, shooting tiny pistols.

You can rent time on an ion-beam destruction ray and fry the Texas Gnomes that you’ve lured out with the bread crumbs. The Gnome Cracklins drift up and people munch ’em down.

“One less Texan! Yaar!”

What sensual pleasure, to describe the massive particle beam weapon that the onlookers use to shoot the little Texans. George W. Bush has pushed some of us over the edge.

I have another, less well-defined, SF idea. It’s about what I call Oinkness. An alternate world or mindscape that’s made of pig. It’s not like encountering a single pig, it’s pure pigness. Pink skin, pig ears, perhaps an eye here and there, the stench, the squeal, layer upon layer of skin and meat—an endlessly cloned pig surface, folding back on itself.

How about a trip to Oinkness? Maybe combine it with that German fallout and Texas hole story.

It’s the land of Oinkness down there in the hole where Texas sank.

The Texan boys are clambering down there, wanting to have sex with pigs.

Or maybe a UFO novel, kind of in the young adult mode. I have this eidetic vision of a scene with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, and he’s frantically humping a chunk of cow liver in the UFO, he’s imagining that it’s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess.

Cute Sue Pohler is laughing at Denny. Our hero, Tim Bruno, helps Denny out of the saucer, shielding him from Sue’s ridicule. It’s like an after-school special.

They learn that the President of the U.S. has sold us out to the UFO aliens.

Reset. Our hero Tim comes back from Germany, and his father is dead from some mysterious fallout. The giant worms. The oinkness. Tim goes to bed with a cow liver shaped like Weena Wesson. And suddenly he’s President of the Senior Class! He marries Sue Pohler and she gives birth to an alien.

Flap copy: A young man’s lasting relationship with an intelligent, human-sized cow liver that he meets in a UFO.

Am I writing crazier than usual? Or is it just that I give less of a fuck?

A big thing about the stroke is that I’m very keenly aware of my mortality now. I don’t think I’ve been so aware of the reality of death since, jeez, since I was in that car accident at age sixteen.

I keep pondering the fact that, if Sylvia hadn’t gotten me to the hospital, I might well have stayed in my seizure until, like, my brain stopped for good.

I wouldn’t have noticed. I was already gone.

Dying is as simple as a leaf falling off a tree.

And it’s okay. Well, actually, it’s not okay. But it’s gonna happen.

July 20, 2008. A Hole. Painting.

I’ve started seeing the daily street scenes without any “me” at the center. I used to see the world as if it had a big reflecting ball in the middle. The shiny ball was me and my feelings.

But this week it feels like the ball is gone. I’m just seeing a sidewalk with people. I’m not there at all. It’s like there’s a hole in the scene.

A disturbing after-effect of the stroke is that I find myself having really unreasonable trains of thought, and sometimes not immediately realizing how out of the question they are.

My dreams are terribly tangled every night. I get hung up on nonsensical tasks that, even in the dream, I know to be pointless, but I worry about them just the same. The other night I thought I had to eat a towel-sized section of my blanket.

I don’t sleep very well.

I’m moving slower than usual, which has the upside that I’m more able to enjoy the moment. Downside: I can’t believe how tired I get, and how weak I still am. I think of a Skip James blues verse:

The doctor came in mumblin very low.

He said, “You may get some better, son,

But you’ll never be well no mo.”

Today I painted a little, finishing up a new picture I call Collaborators. A painting of two men sitting on the ground, with unnaturally long, insect-like arms, choking each other. It’s quite primitive now, which is, in a way, charming, but I have that usual yen to polish it. Also I’d like to enhance how the foreground pops out from the background. Also the guys’ expressions could be more interesting. Maybe the arms should be squid tentacles with suckers.

It might be an image of the collaboration style between Bruce Sterling and me. Or maybe the guy in the painting with me is my stroke, personified.

Synchronistically enough, today I attached a wire to Collaborators, and hung it near my desk, still unfinished—and then I got an email from Sheila Williams at Asimov’s saying she was accepting the new story by Bruce and me that I snail-mailed her last week, “Colliding Branes.”

Working on that story with Bruce gave me my brain hemorrhage. My fit of apoplexy. At least that’s what I plan to tell Bruce. Of course he’ll just say it’s my own fault. Gotta love the guy.

Because of my horrible anti-seizure medication, Keppra, I have to nap a lot. I gather that Keppra dials down the electrical activity of my brain. Makes me dumb. An possible side effect of the drug is suicidal impulses. Great, just great. I hope I can get off it soon, or at least start tapering down.

Today started out all gray and fogged over, but now the sky has a clear blue California-summer look to it. Sylvia’s being very nice. I know she’d like to be out more, but she’s mostly staying home to keep an eye on me. I haven’t felt up for any big outings. It’s really not so bad lying around the house staring at the trees. Especially now that the sky’s blue again.

The experience of waking up in the hospital room deflated the mysterioso horror of death. If I’d died, the only thing different is that I wouldn’t have woken up.

You’re not inevitably gonna see the White Light and the pearly gates and the dead relatives. What you see has, I’m guessing, a lot to do with the biochemical states you’re going through. Some paths go straight into the dark.

Being at home, I’m overwhelmed by the richness of life. Today I went for my first bicycle ride, around the loop here, up to the Jesuits’ residence. My friend Gunnar rode along to keep an eye on me and to chat. I walked my bike on the steep parts. I felt a little dizzy when I was done. I’ve still got this big-ass scab or blood-clot in my brain ventricle.

I’m still plugging back in, still repairing my interface to the giant reality computation. So much of what you think of as happening inside your head is really going on outside. It’s just that you get used to picking up on it, and you start to think that it’s inside you. But it’s not.

July 23, 2008. Visit From the Twins.

Rudy Jr. is visiting today, along with his wife, Penny, and our twin granddaughters, Zimry and Jasper. The little ones are so sincere, so guileless, so intensely involved. They turned one year old a couple of weeks ago. We were supposed to go a beach vacation with them and Penny’s parents at the start of July, but I was in the hospital, sigh.

While the babies were napping this afternoon, Rudy and I played with YouTube on the living-room TV. He plugged his tiny Unix mini laptop into our TV and he got YouTube over my local wireless network. We saw a good tornado video.

And now the twins are awake. Cranky but cheering up. We’ll take them for a walk downtown.

I’m really starting to feel like myself now. I keep saying that, and then a week later, I realize I was only kidding myself before. Maybe I’m still kidding myself. After all, how can you really tell when you feel like yourself?

Rudy and his family are gone now, and I’m sitting on the deck outside Borders Books, one of my favorite spots in downtown Los Gatos. I’m under a huge live oak, looking at a high, virgin, wooded ridge called Monte Sereno. The shapes of the trees and shrubs along the ridge-line always make me think of the border of a cubic Mandelbrot set.

In this connection, I think of a guy I met at the Almaden IBM research lab near San Jose, around 1988. We’d been in his office talking about science, and then we walked outside together and we were looking at a wooded ridge-line. And he was telling me that the ridge’s patterns were—I don’t remember his exact phrase—some manifestation of a type of fractal, or of some Fourier series that he was studying. He thought everything in the world was a reflection of what he was doing in his lab. He was thinking this with a complete lack of irony, which is dangerous. I wonder what ever became of him.

I gave a great Christmas talk on cellular automata at that same lab—this was in 1988 as well. I lugged my suitcase-like, beige-box, early IBM PC to the talk. I had a special cellular-automata card inside my PC. The box was my axe. I connected it to a monster projector that the IBM guys had in their auditorium. Nobody else had projectors like that back then. It was incredibly exciting to be blasting a movie screen with giant, moving, real-time images of my lava-lamp-style cellular automata.

Two young teenage girls are cheerfully jabbering together on the deck behind me. Like birds. Nice to hear the rhythms, although I’m not exactly comprehending what they say.

July 25, 2008. Cruz.

This morning, waking up, I feel good. The world outside looks green and lively. Maybe we can go to the beach today. If I have the energy. My energy drops a lot as soon as I get out of bed.

Right now Sylvia is out for breakfast in a local cafe with three of her women friends, so I’m peacefully typing journal notes in bed. She left me a list of tasks relating to my health insurance. I think I’ll let those wait till she gets back. Going outside to stretch on my yoga mat sounds better. I’ll do that now.

So Sylvia and I did spend the day in Santa Cruz, my first day away from home since I got back from the hospital two and a half weeks ago. It was really good to be out seeing different stuff. The sunny sea was aqua. We ate nice food, and looked at bookstores. I bought a sweater on sale. Living like a regular person—what a treat.

I’m still circling back to my big insight that the interesting thing is the world itself—as opposed to the interesting thing being my individual mind. This is in some sense obvious, but somehow it’s not a fact that I really internalized until this month. Sorry to keep harping on it.

July 26, 2008. Again With the Cow Liver?

I’m writing almost at random in these notes. I’ve heard it said that writers are at their best when they have no idea what they’re doing.

Write a story mostly from the point-of-view of a person who’s going to die. Say it’s Tim Bruno, a saucer abductee. And he’s worried about death, and viewing it in the hysterical-grim-finale kind of way that mortality is commonly presented in Romantic mass media adventures. And Tim goes down, saving the world from alien domination.

In the last chapter, Tim’s kind-of friend Denny Allaway is reflecting about Tim. Denny realizes that it doesn’t really matter that Tim is dead, any more than it matters when a pinecone falls off a tree. If Tim hadn’t saved the world, someone else would have, maybe even Denny himself—if Denny hadn’t of been so busy humping that hundred-and-twenty pound chunk of cow liver that’s made up to look like Weena Wesson.

The cow liver is sitting next to Denny. They’re sharing a bottle of hard lemonade.

“Muuur,” says the liver.

“I love you, Weena,” says Denny.

Could I really put the part about the cow liver and Weena Wesson into a novel? Maybe. I see another scene where the liver is hiding under Denny’s bed. She whispers to him through the mattress. Only Denny can hear her.

What is Weena Wesson like? I see her as a Native American, or perhaps she’s from India.

Of course I realize that the novel that I eventually manage to write might not be about a talking alien cow-liver at all. It’s just a goof to start with. Even in my addled state, I can still grasp that.

August 2, 2008. I Want To Be Well.

I like to imagine that I have a rich spiritual life but, to my surprise, I had very few religious thoughts during my hospital crisis. And I felt essentially no impulse to pray.

When I’m going to recovery meetings, or doing yoga in the back yard, I imagine that I have this rich relationship with the cosmic One. And then, bam, when the chips were down, I didn’t even think about god.

No, in the hospital, I was thinking about really basic things like cessation of pain or how to take a shower. Like a dog that had been hit by a car. Lying there, taking whatever comforts were offered to me. Or like a man watching the pages tumble from the calendar, with no thought of any life beyond the moment.

It’s so easy, in advance, when I’m healthy, to imagine all these brave and spiritual things I’ll do if I hit a medical crisis. And then, when the karmic hammer comes down, I’m a stunned sheep.

There’s still time, brother. Say a prayer. “Please help me, dear god. Take care of me. I’m tiny and lost. I want to be well.”

And, yes, I’m thinking of the Ramones song too, “I Wanna Be Well.”

My daughter Georgia and her daughter Althea were visiting for the last four days, and we went and saw my son and his twin daughters today. I love my family, it’s nice to be around them: the music of their voices, the play of their personalities, the hugs.

And I think they enjoy having the pater familias around. I still have a role to play. We soothe each other. With my personality at such a low ebb, it’s certainly not like I’m giving them a lot of advice or trying to boss them around.

They really would miss me, just as I miss my parents. But I now realize, more deeply than ever before, that I’m not going to be in the kids’ lives forever.

Days go by when I don’t think about my parents at all. My Dad’s been dead fourteen years, and my Mom seventeen. I miss them, but I accept that they’re dead. I used to feel a little guilty that I lived on after them, but now I see it all balances out.

Before too many more years, I’ll die just like they did—and my kids will get their own few decades of extra time—with their own kids growing up to replace them. The endlessly rolling wheel.

I want to be well.

August 7, 2008. Out of the Gray.

In the hospital, I was lost in the gray.

It’s been five weeks now since the brain hemorrhage and each day I still feel like I’m a notch more “there” than the day before. I really didn’t realize how out of it I was at the start. I was thinking about sex a lot. Like—that’s one of the first facts about the world that came back to me. Zero and one! Aha! I could hardly believe it—and even now I still feel a little surprised about reproduction.

And how about that big realization I had—that the world will go on without me after I die? I still can feel a whiff of surprise around that, although to some extent it’s starting to fade. That’s the fate of big revelations. Like at a certain moment, “All is One” can seem like the most profound thought imaginable. And then your head moves on to another place, and you’re like, so what. But you remember the feeling of being surprised and amazed.

In the mornings I sit in my back yard and look at the clouds in the sky. They drift along, changing shapes, with the golden sunlight on them. The leaves of the walnut tree wobble chaotically in the gentle airs, their shapes clear against the marbled blue and white heavens. And all of this good stuff comes in from the outside. For free. And—yes, yes, we’re tired of hearing this, Rudy—I’m not creating it.

It’s a beautiful world.

I have this worry that there’s a hole in my consciousness. A burned-out spot in my brain. Maybe it was the lobe that promotes prayer, and the desire to get high, and the ability to imagine other people’s minds? Is my empathy gone? I keep pretending to have empathy—smiling at Sylvia, being patient with the children—and slowly it’s seeming to work. I’m feeling it. Regenerating my cosmic-mind lobe.

On the writing front, I wrote some catalog copy for an Austrian art-kid named Ralo Mayer who was having a show in Vienna. And the organizers decided not to run my piece, or maybe it was Ralo who changed his mind about it. But they’re going to pay me anyway, supposedly. Kind of annoying to have someone seek me out for a completely random gig and then have the nerve to turn me down. But maybe what I wrote made no sense. Maybe it was scary gibberish. I’m not the most reliable guy these days.

Today’s title for my next book is Nested Scrolls, a phrase I like because it describes the chaotic, self-organizing, artificially alive Belousov-Zhabotinsky simulations that I love. And scroll is good, as it refers to a document or even a sacred text, and if the scrolls are nested that means you have a fractal. A book that’s self-referential and meta and heavy.

I still don’t know if Nested Scrolls is a memoir or a novel. I’m kind of enjoying the ambiguity.

If it were to be SF, I could get literal with the title. Have it be an SF novel in the form of a memoir that an aging man is trying to write, and he begins finding extra stuff in the document. Maybe he can somehow zoom in—it’s an electronic document—and he sees details that he doesn’t remember writing. And then he flips into time-travel flashbacks. And maybe some characters from his past show up in the flesh. Nested Scrolls.

And don’t forget the climactic Weena Wesson scene!

It’s hard at this point to distinguish between my notes for my novel, versus my notes for my memoir, versus my plain old journal notes. The thing is—I’m imagining a book named Nested Scrolls, and it’s a transreal novel about a man in my present situation, possibly he’s even an SF writer. He’s had something like a stroke and he’s getting it together and writing notes about his recovery.

I enjoy that I have such complicated ways of coping with my life and of processing the incoming information. My mind is like an anthill, carting each twig of experience into this or that midden pile. I enjoy thinking of myself as a character in a transreal novel. Because then my life becomes more bearable—more mythic, less raw and painful and horrible. It’s a way of amusing myself, a source of comfort.

I’ve also been blogging some of this new material as well—but in my blog, I’m presenting everything as being about my “strictly fictional” novel character, Jim Oster, rather than about me. I’m paranoid that some people might in fact be checking my blog to see if I’m healthy.

There has been a small amount of confused publicity about my condition. This month the Locus SF-business magazine reported that I’d had a heart attack. But I don’t think I’ll send a correction to Locus. If I say that I had a cerebral hemorrhage, that makes me sound like I’m bad off, and out of it—and not like someone who’s able to write something that you might want to read.

“Yeah, lately I’ve been fingerpainting the wall with my own shit. So just wait till you see my new book!”

I’ve been taking a lot of photos of, essentially, nothing. Just little things around my yard or house, or sights in the streets of Berkeley. I’m not good at shooting journalistic pictures of people in passionate states—I’ve always wanted to do that, but I’m too shy. Instead I pick out color and light patterns, or narrative nodes of physical meaning. I could take pictures of the sky forever.

After shooting my photos, I pick the winners, then Photoshop them and upload them to the web for use as random illos on my blog. Mr. Retiree. Mr. Convalescent.

Sylvia and I spent the day on the beach at Santa Cruz. It was gray and foggy. Relaxing to see and hear the sea, shiny and monochrome as mercury.

I started thinking about how neutral I felt after my stroke, and it occurred to me that it really was as if I’d been in the underworld. And I was, for a time, still under its spell. My initial feeling, the first few weeks, was that it wouldn’t have mattered all that much if I’d died. Ordinarily I wouldn’t feel that way. But I was so grayed out that I’d lost the lust for life. And yet I was under the impression that I was my same old self. From the inside, you don’t necessarily notice when part of your personality goes missing.

Looking at the gray waves, I was thinking about my dead father and my dead mother, and about how their health problems beat them down at the end—wearing them small, draining their vitality.

A doomed oldster meekly follows Death down the ramp into the underworld. Relieved to have the suffering over with.

Horrible.

September 4, 2008. Reminiscing.

7 pm, in the Great Bear Cafe in Los Gatos, listening to Jimi Hendrix sing “All Along the Watchtower.” I’m drawing strength from the music. Earlier tonight I listened to Lou Reed and the Velvets singing “Heroin,” on their 1967 album, The Velvet Underground and Nico.

“Heroin” was one of the very last songs we played in our empty house in Lynchburg, Virginia, the rooms bare and echoing, all of our worldly goods in the rental van at the curb. At that time I was kind of laughing with our friend Mike Gambone over the negativity of the song, but at the same time loving the swoop of its sound and the imagined glamour of the outlaw lifestyle. In reality, I was moving my family to California to take a job teaching the then-new field of Computer Science.

Today I heard GOP Presidential candidate John McCain’s wife introducing him at the Republican convention on TV, her voice slow and simple as if talking to school-children. A woman so deeply stupid that she imagines that we, the public, are even dumber than her.

When he was about my present age, my father wrote an autobiography called Being Raised. Pop was a good guy, a human, a thinker. It’s an interesting book, and he even put in some fairly wild stories, although of course I kind of hunger for whatever he left out. Certainly it’s inhibiting if you imagine that you’re writing your memoir “for your children and grandchildren.” Though, really, by now I’d forgive my father for any imaginable sin. He didn’t really need to hold back on my account.

But—still—if I were, like, writing my memoir, would I really want to include stories about crummy things I’d done when I was drunk or high? Well, maybe just a few, so as to give the illusion that I’m being frank and forthcoming, but, really, I’d rather write about the events in the mainstream of my life: family, teaching, writing, and philosophical investigations.

And, aside from any purposeful sorts of recollections, I’d like to drift back and muse over some of the earlier memories, the things that an old man misses the most.

Like the handful of times my father took me fishing—I think of Sleepy Hollow near Prospect, Kentucky. Catching my first fish on a fly line. A bluegill, naturally. Pop had invented a device called the Retrieve-O-Ring to rescue an expensive lure when it got snagged on an underwater log, he even sold a few Retrieve-O-Rings via ads in sporting magazines.

Thinking of those times, I remember the Graves family who lived in a shiny log cabin in the country near Harrods Creek. Mr. Graves was the church organist, quite a musician, and Mrs. Graves was my second-grade teacher. Cultured, pure people. They had an open-house party once and my family was there, enjoying ourselves. I was talking to some big kids, telling them I was in the second grade, and one of the older girls said she was in the tenth grade. I was stunned. I had no idea the grades went up that high.

Mr. Graves got my brother and me to come to choir camp one summer, and before each meal we had to sing this song, “Hey-ho, nobody home. Food, nor drink, nor money have we none. Fill the pot, Hannah!” I wondered if the cook was named Hannah. Soon we boys began thinking of “fill the pot” in a vulgar way, first to our great amusement, but eventually to our disgust, and for me it became a terrible way to start a meal, thinking of that chamberpot image.

I definitely want to write about fireworks and rockets, not to mention our dogs and our white mice. And the canteen of bourbon that Willie Faversham fetched for me when he was pledging for my high-school fraternity Chevalier. And my little friend Barbie who got me to play a game where we were separated lovers who’d been looking for each other for years and we walked right by each other in a snow storm, missing each other by only a foot, but not seeing each other in the torrent of ice-crystals. This enactment was taking place in a pasture on a sunny September afternoon on her farm, you understand. Barbie had two older brothers and they had an amazing toy circus upstairs in the play room. I used to dream about that circus a lot—the dream even made its way into my novel, The Secret of Life.

And of course I want to expatiate upon life and death. Why, whence, and what’s it all for? When my father was on his last legs, finding his way towards death through a maze of heart attacks, hospitals, strokes, and nursing homes—my brother and my son and I were visiting my father in a sickroom, and that afternoon I’d bought my son a black suit, just in case.

“Why…why’d you get him a suit?” asked my father.

“Funeral!” said my brother in a stage whisper, pitched too low for the old man to hear. We cracked up.

Times like that—what do you do? Laugh or cry?

Seeing my grandchildren is a counterweight to having seen my parents die. The other day, I was visiting my son and his twin girls, and one of them was toddling out the front door to the porch—she’s only just learned to walk—and I was cheering her on, and she got this proud, happy, shy look on her face, for all the world like a great lady entering a ballroom and being announced.

September 18, 2008. A Dream of the Multiverse.

I recently read a novel, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, in which time has a branching quality, and the characters have an ability to sniff out the best universe for them to be moving into next.

Half an hour ago I was having a dream about selecting particular paths through the multiverse. I was standing before a painting on an easel, or maybe I was in a whole studio room of unfinished paintings, touching up scene after scene. As I painted, I could look out into the world, and I could see the realities changing as I altered my paintings of what had gone (or would go) down.

Near the end of my dream, I was working on an actual acrylic painting that is in my actual studio, a painting called The Wanderer, in which a white-haired man resembling me is finding his way along a mountain path. He glances over his shoulder at a cliff of odd-shaped rocks where perhaps some possibly demonic figures lurk, figures that I haven’t yet had time to paint in yet.

And then I awoke in a sweat, came upstairs, and wrote this note at 1:23 am. Having woken from that dream of a multiverse, it strikes me that if it really were possible to surf one’s way among the alternate worlds, then that’s exactly what I did this summer. Instead of dying, I dodged the coffin and, against the odds, I got well.

November 2, 2008. I’m Well.

I saw the neurosurgeon this weekend, and he said my brain is fine, and that I’m out of danger, with no particular likelihood of dying anytime soon, nor is there any likelihood of having a second stroke. The blood clot in my brain is clearing up. And the doctors are letting me taper off that enervating anti-seizure drug, Keppra.

A new lease on life.

December 10, 2008. My Memoir is Nearly Done

In September, I decided that my Nested Scrolls project would be a straight memoir. An autobio. So I got moving on it, and it went really fast. I wasn’t having to invent everything. I was eager to be writing fast. Getting everything down while there’s time. I went into overdrive. Even though the doctor says I’m fine, I still have an emotional sense that death is near.

And now it’s three months later, and I’ve finished eleven out of the twelve chapters that I’ve planned for Nested Scrolls. Ninety-five thousand words. It was fun to write, and—like life itself—over all too soon.

I’d thought it would be hard to select which incidents to include—especially after I moved beyond childhood and into the eras about which I remember lots and lots of things. But it was okay. Certain main incidents push themselves forward. And if some left-out bit was nagging me, I went back and worked it in.

At this point, I’ve covered my life up to 2002, and I just need to write a final “Still Kicking” or “All in All” chapter to bring the thing up to 2008.

Writing my autobiography gave me a chance to step back and see my life story as a whole. Like a novel. What did I learn? What was it about? Teaching was never very important to me. I write compulsively. I love my family. I worship nature. I have trouble being idle. I complain and fret. I’m not very scared of death anymore. I like looking at things and seeing shapes and colors. I believe that a higher reality underlies what we see.

Now I have to see about getting Nested Scrolls published. That’s going to be hard.

January 7, 2009. Starting Jim and the Flims.

At some point during the big family Christmas reunion at our house, I had a few spare minutes and I managed to write a start for my next book, the book after my memoir. This new one will be an SF novel called Jim and the Flims.

I’m pushing myself to write two books in a row so fast because I want to prove to myself that I haven’t lost my abilities.

In order to seed the novel, I collaged together the semi-demented bits that I wrote in those warm-up raps after my stroke. And then I began smoothing this material. Massaging it. And dreaming up characters, and groping for a story arc. And now I can feel a little pulse in the novel. It’s coming to life.

I had to fight back my longing to start Jim and the Flims with a sentence about an alien who’s a sentient cow-liver named Weena Wesson.

“Jim Oster and the giant cow liver sat side by side, sharing a bottle of hard lemonade.”

I’ll keep Weena Wesson—love her name—but she’s not a cow liver. She’s a Santa Cruz woman who might also be a flim—whatever that turns out to mean. She’s working as a waitress, and she moves in with my main character Jim. And he learns that she’s involved with aliens. But then what?

At that point, as is my wont, I’ll have my main character make a trip to the aliens’ land—call it Flimsy. I’ll have to think about what Jim sees and does over there.

What I’m looking for in Jim and the Flims is—wait for it—a breakthrough book. An exploration of new possibilities. A fresh myth. I want to write like SF authors who wrote about aliens in the 1940s and 1950s—before the numbing, moronic fog of consensus, mass-media UFOlogy settled in. Stop making sense.

I wonder if I could get away with having my characters Jim and Weena be old. Like in their sixties. And I wonder about pursuing an eschatological route. That is, maybe Jim is dead and hasn’t quite noticed. Which kind of matches my current sense of the world. Like, maybe I’m actually dead. Maybe the flims are ghosts, and Flimsy, the land of the flims, is the afterworld.

As always, the essential desideratum is that my story has to be about something that I’m excited about. Two geezers who aren’t sure if they’re crazy. They’re in love. They see underworld demons. Is it madness—or the unveiling of a hidden world? This is all stuff that I like.

January 21, 2009. Trip to Louisville

I went alone to New York to visit Georgia and her family, and then I spent a week visiting brother Embry and his wife Noreen on their farm in Skylight, Kentucky. A rural area near Louisville. It seemed easier for Sylvia not to come along on this trip, and I’m guessing she didn’t mind the break from me.

In Skylight, I was exploring some overgrown swampy land beside the Ohio River, my only companion being Embry’s dog Ziggy. The empty woods at dusk. And now I was starting up a hill leading to the high ground where Embry’s farm lies.

Looking at the faint trail rising ahead of me, I saw, or imagined, a terrible, black beast the size of a horse standing in the path. Broader and more low-slung than a horse. A sleek ruthless animal—a diabolical creature so dangerous that, if you see him, you know that within seconds you’ll die.

This becomes material for Jim and the Flims. I’ll call these creatures yuels. Jim will escape a yuel, perhaps by racing through a quick maze of trees and rocks that leads him out of the yuels’ world and back to Santa Cruz.

I watched Barack Obama’s inauguration on a giant TV at the Kentucky Center theater in downtown Louisville. Embry was doing some errand downtown. I’d come along, but for an hour or two I was one my own. The well-off white people were watching the inauguration on TV at their homes, and the Kentucky Center was mostly for black people. They were in a solemn, festive, joyful mood. Quiet pride. Like at a wedding or a graduation. The people around me were friendly—not glad-handing me or anything, but with that usual race barrier not so strong for me or for them. It was great to be there witnessing the event.

On the screen, sober officials carried an enormous bible down a flight of stairs—the very bible used by Abraham Lincoln. I had an image of the book as a fleshy mass, slowly coming to wakefulness, twitching and meaty, a kind of minor god that normally slumbers in the hidden Chamber of Wonders. A rheumy eye opening up in its cover.

Afterwards, washing up before hitting the chilly streets, I noticed a black guy with an ear-mounted cell phone like I’ve never seen. Like electronic jewelry—a pointed black claw with glowing red lights. He had a goatee, a real hipster. We were sliding our eyes over to look at each other. We’re in this together now. At least for today.

I’m reading a book of my brother’s, Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter, written by the Englishman W. D. M. Bell around 1910, and republished in 1989 by the Safari Press. The book has marvelous accounts of safaris through unknown lands, and of encounters with tribes who’ve never seen Europeans before. The excitement of geographical exploration and of the hunt. Each safari’s personnel included a chronicler—a native who composes an epic poem about the journey. Every evening, around the campfire, he’d recite the poem thus far—and add a new verse.

April 12, 2009. William Burroughs, The Soft Machine.

Easter Sunday! Sylvia and I are spending a couple of nights in San Francisco.

Old people doing Tai Chi in Yerba Buena park across from the Museum of Modern Art. They wear cheap dull clothes and play shrill Tai Chi music on a boom box. They jabber incomprehensibly. They never smile at me, nor do they acknowledge my presence. Their gestures are beautiful.

A bird. Its eye is a pale blue-gray-aqua disk with a black dot in the center. Black beak, slightly iridescent feathers.

I pick up a copy of the esteemed Wm. Burroughs’s book, The Soft Machine, at City Lights Books. A nice pink cover. Long time no see. I was reading this book the night before Sylvia and I got married. In 1967.

The chapters seem fairly independent of each other. Some aren’t too badly cut-up. One chapter I read is like dada pulp SF: “The Mayan Caper.” It gives me some ideas for how things might be in this imaginary world I’m writing about for Jim and the Flims. Some quotes:

• This character is setting up for time travel to Mayan times. “Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns—from a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor…”
• After the transition. “Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan—The word curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils—I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel…” Burroughs uses that same phrase in Yage Letters, when describing the effects of the drug yage: “the motion sickness of time travel.”
• “I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt the stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation.”
• “I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields.”

That last quote dovetails with a talk I had this weekend with an old friend, Jack Vad, who’s a sound tech for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Sometimes Jack gets free concert tickets for Sylvia and me, and I talk to him at intermission.

This time he remarked, “Being a sound tech can be like being a dental hygienist or like being a sculptor.” Sometimes he’s just tweaking and cleaning, sometimes he’s molding sounds. Part of Jack’s job is to create a definitive recording of each performance.

He has really good software. He says it got a lot better in the last two years. He uses the word “detune” to mean “change the pitch.” For fixing a sour note for a recording, you used to have to detune all the instruments at once—and you had trade-offs, where fixing one instrument’s sound was messing up the others. But now the soundware lets you isolate a particular line of music, an individual instrument, and detune that alone.

Controlling reality via cut-up sound and video…

April 23, 2009. Still Busy.

So, like I said, I wrote my memoir, Nested Scrolls, this winter over a period of about three months. I haven’t revised it nor have I quite finished the final chapter. I got it nearly done and decided to send it out. It’s been turned down by a couple of publishers and it’s at another one now. I may end up self-publishing it as a print-on-demand book. If I do that I’ll probably include photos.

The issue of the memoir doesn’t feel that important now, although for awhile it did. Writing it was a way of kickstarting my personality after my brain hemorrhage, a way to wake up inside my old life. I’m not as important a public figure as I sometimes imagine myself to be, and there may not be a market for my autobiography.

So I’m working on my new SF novel, Jim and the Flims. It was going very slowly for awhile, but recently I loosened up, and it’s coming now in a nice surreal flow. My characters have left Santa Cruz for the fantasy land of Flimsy. One of the characters is a ghost. And I’ve got some surf zombies waiting back in Cruz. Ça promêt—it looks promising.

Since my stroke I’ve been painting more than before. I’m doing a painting a month, I’d say, maybe more. I feel like I’m getting better at it, although sometimes I’ll look back at an old one and think I’ll never do anything that good again. I’m blending the colors more than before, and putting on more layers. Also I’m learning when to stop—so that a given passage stays fresh.

I haven’t pushed for gallery shows or for being in exhibits—it’s enough hassle and heartbreak to be marketing my writing. But I do put images of my paintings online, just in case, and deep down I think there will someday be a demand for the canvases. I sell a dozen or so prints a year, give some of the paintings to the kids, and very occasionally I sell an original via my website. The rest of the paintings are accumulating on these big, chromed-wire shelves like you’d see in a retail store. I got a bunch of them second-hand from a supplier, and I installed them in our basement. My art archive.

Painting takes me out of myself. It gives me some of the same creative bliss as writing. Often I can paint when I don’t feel able to write. Working on this latest novel, the writing has been slow at times, perhaps because it’s been hard figuring out the story, and the nature of the world that I’m setting it in. And perhaps I’m tired of sitting at a computer typing words—while the great bustling outer world rolls on.

I still have a basic sense of gratitude to be alive at all, and an enhanced appreciation of the natural world and of my family. I’m moving a little slower, taking things a little easier.

Maybe I’m happy.

April 27, 2009. Another Burroughs Dream.

Last night I dreamed I was hanging around with William Burroughs. We were inventing a science fiction story together. And to some extent we were living in our story. It was a great dream, very trippy in spots, and fortunately quite long. I liked the dream so much that I managed to keep circling back to it and extending it. But I don’t remember many details.

Something about being in the basement of my boyhood home at 620 Rudy Lane in Louisville. Yes, that was my street’s real name: Rudy Lane. I remember a large and somewhat creepy deep freezer from my childhood home’s basement, and a pottery jar of fruit and brandy that my mother once put down there in hopes of making some preserves that would ripen into an ice cream topping. But one of our maids drank all the brandy out of the crock. That freezer and jar were SFictional for sure.

And what were Burroughs and I doing in that basement? I think, letting alien parasites into our bodies, and then pushing the parasites out. In doing this, we were using the aliens to get us high.

May 19-24, 2009. Trolls on the Boing Boing Guestblog.

I’ve been the guestblogger on the Boing Boing website for the last few days, I’m supposed to do this for two weeks. My motivation is that the exposure will help promote Hylozoic, which goes on sale next week.

My blogging got off to a horrible start. My very first day on Boing Boing, I put up a “Neck Wrinkle” post, joking about how so many young people these days shave their whole heads as soon as they get a thin spot on top. I said, “If you’re at all overweight, you’re going to have a lipless slit-mouth wrinkle on your nape. So the back of your head is like an eyeless alien face.” I accompanied my post by two street photos of the backs of fat, shaved guys’ heads.

I imagined I was kidding around to loosen up the audience, but people can be so touchy and humorless and PC. I got over a hundred comments on this post—most people thought it was funny, but a few of them are scolding me for mocking the fat and the bald. And the people who do have neck wrinkles are furious. I felt a little bad about this.

And then I made it worse by posting a comment where I joked that someone should post a photo of a bald neck-wrinkle head with a pair of shades on backwards so that it looked like a face. I mean, people really do wear their shades backwards, don’t ask me why.

And then the commenters were hassling me about how insensitive that was, so I took away my comment, and then some choleric witch-hunter put up further comments recounting what I’d said in my (now deleted) comment. By this point I was of course feeling sorry for the bald guys with neck wrinkles, and feeling guilty for joking about them. And then, to hell with it, I deleted the whole post and comment thread.

Really a horrible way to start out my run. I realized I have to be more careful when addressing a really wide audience like the Boing Boing readers—it’s not like the generally more friendly and intimate audience of my own blog.

Why, oh why, am I doing this?

My next few Boing Boing posts were quite mild, about things like art and science, and they weren’t getting all that many comments. But then I loosened up again, and put up an “Everything is Alive” post with a photo of a rock, and a brief argument that the rock is alive. That one garnered over a hundred comments.

Reading these comments, I started to imagine that—no matter what a given post of mine is like—a certain number of the comments are going to be nasty, probably because I have an unconventional mind-set. One guy pityingly and insultingly wondered if I was a heavy user of psychedelics. Several pompous, trembling-with-fury, mini-profs took me to task for “bad philosophy”—which felt like being back in academia getting critiqued by small-minded lamers.

Just to get in my critics’ faces—and to capitalize on the general interest—I put up a related post that I called “Panpsychism and Hylozoism,” and this one also attracted such a crop of argumentative, hostile comments that I recoiled from reading them at all.

I’ve done fifteen posts now, with about ten more to go. I really shouldn’t read any of the comments at all. It’s not worth the aggravation, having all those virtual voices in my head. Many of the comments are nice, or interesting, but of course it’s always the negative ones that stick with me.

Death to all trolls.

Denmark and Norway

June 18, 2009. Copenhagen. Settling in.

The local name of this city is København, which means “buy” plus “harbor.”

Sylvia and I just ate a big breakfast at the Hotel Kong Arthur buffet. Great stuff. The eggs and butter are from this green glove of a peninsula in the North/Baltic seas. From the name, I’d thought maybe the hotel was Chinese-run, but it turns out that “kong” means “king” in Danish.

It’s raining, that’s okay. We have raincoats. The best thing we saw yesterday—we got into town at four in the afternoon, local time—was four men our age playing jazz in a cobblestone square: sax, bass, a vocalist with a banjo, and a percussion geezer. People walking by, or sitting at cafe tables with coffee, wine, soda, ice-cream.

The old guy playing percussion was using his…bicycle as his drum kit, ting-ting on the handlebars, a more resonant konk from the crossbar, thip-thip from the seat. The musicians looked happy. The honeyed flow of their music was like the sun itself, or like time. Standing there with our roller-suitcases, Sylvia and I got our first moment of respite after the twenty hours of our trip.

We looked around town today, beautiful. Pale blue sky with fluffy clouds, a Vermeer View of Delft sky. Windy—we’re in a flat country by the sea. We went on a scenic barge cruise and saw a steeple-like tower on the old stock exchange building. This tower consists of four dragons with their heads down low and their tails twined all the way to the tower’s top. The dragons are said to protect Copenhagen from fire. On the top of the steeple are three crowns: Dansk, Norsk, and Svensk.

The churches are quite Protestant—no stained glass, and no colorful paintings, although there is gilding and some white stone statues. A Danish sculptor, Thorvaldsen, made life-size sculptures of all the apostles and disciples. Weird to limit your artistic output to so narrow a range of motifs.

Yet classic SF does much the same—repeatedly treating a small and fixed number of themes, themes which encode certain notions of how the world should be. For that matter, I myself focus on a narrow range of situations, such as the misfit loner who travels to another world.

I’d like to write a story that gives space travel to the people. Maybe there’s an individual biotweak that turns people into free-flying “spacebugs.” Or maybe everyone becomes capable of teleportation. Or we might encounter some seemingly-friendly aliens who can act as personal UFOs. Perhaps they slime over us like spacesuits and shoot ion-jets from their heels—or they’re like space snails, and they carry us within their air-filled shells.

Call those live-UFO-aliens gubbers. My character has been warned away from the gubbers, but s/he pooh-poohs the warnings. But, yes, the gubbers do in fact exact an ultimately devastating cost from their human users. The plot is that my character overcomes personal gubber-damage and finds a way for individuals to “gubberize” themselves without resorting to the not-so-friendly-after-all gubber aliens.

June 19, 2000. København. Freetown Christiana.

In the morning we toured this great palace called Rosenborg Slot—“slot” means “castle.” One room was paneled in wood, with an oil painting on each panel, good little Bruegelesque pictures. In the display cases of treasures, they had some gubber, I mean, nautilus shells that had been carved away in spots to reveal the inner surfaces, which were in turn pierced like the iron lace of a knight’s helmet.

In the afternoon, Sylvia rested in the room for an hour or two while I went for a walk with a local fan of my science writing—an artist named Mogens Jacobsen. Mogens brought along his art-curator friend Morten Søndergaard.

Mogens is a likeable, reserved man. His artworks take the form of multimedia, web-mediated projects. He once made a vinyl record turntable attached to a desktop computer in such a way that people on the web could remotely move the tone-arm of the record player, and listen to a song. Currently he’s making five art videos to be shown in a high-end Danish shopping mall. He has quite a bit of freedom regarding what he puts into the videos.

“Can you film a man having sex with a barnyard pig?” I asked him, kind of kidding around.

“Well, I don’t work with pigs,” Mogens demurred.

Mogens and Morten showed me a so-called freetown known as Christiania. Since the ’60s or ’70s, people have been settling in this formerly deserted area near Copenhagen, seemingly with a minimum of red tape such as deeds and building codes. I gather that many of the settlers are potheads.

Mogens, Morten and I took a water taxi across the harbor, and entered Christiania from a marshy area that felt like the countryside—ponds, reeds, trees, a barn or two, gravel roads. Before long we were seeing small, hand-built houses, brightly colored, some with fanciful roofs.

We passed two kids who were gently and sympathetically leading a staggering-drunk woman away from the roadside where she’d passed out. They were taking her towards the village center, presumably to her room. It wasn’t like the U.S. at all. Back home, you hardly ever see individuals helping or even touching a drunk street person. Instead we call in the authorities.

The gravel roads and pathways of Christiania were immaculately clean—no litter, and none of the broken glass you’d see back home. I marveled at this, and Mogens said, “We maintain a certain level of order on our own.”

“That’s something we’re unable to do in America,” I said ruefully.

There’s some friction with the Danish police in any case. The Christiania cafe had a sign saying something like, “This is the safest cafe in Copenhagen. We’ve had six thousand police raids since 1974.”

A sudden rainstorm hit, and we stood under some eaves. A guy near us was smoking a blunt. Nearby someone was playing an AC/DC album. The band was in fact slated to give a concert at a Copenhagen soccer stadium that night.

“Are you ready to rock and roll?” I screeched in my Angus and Brian voice.

“I find this a little bit exhilarating,” remarked Morten, looking around. “Do you realize that we’ve just walked the exact same route that Søren Kierkegaard used to take in the 1840s, wandering through Christiania? This is the very same philosopher who called himself a fly on Hegel’s nose. And you’re Hegel’s great-great-great-grandson, no?”

June 20, 2009. Tivoli. In a Bergman Movie.

I’m sitting in a public square at a street cafe under an umbrella, rain showers taking turns with the sun. The cafe gives the customers blankets to huddle in. A steeple in front of me, church name unknown, but I’m tired of looking up names on the map. Just being here is enough, adrift in unnamed Danishness. The blonde women wear their hair pinned into updos.

The fountain on my left has big bronze statues of storks in it. Long beaks. The square is tiled with polygonal stones, in red and shades of gray, five shapes in all, a regular but unorthodox tessellation, deserving of an illustration in any comprehensive volume on the Tilings of the Plane. Here comes the rain again.

Score! I snagged one of those free blankets, wrapping myself up in my cafe chair—looking bumlike, I’m sure, wearing a striped Rastafarian watchcap that I just bought on the street. Sipping hot tea. This is the life.

Later in the day we went to the famous Copenhagen amusement park called Tivoli. It’s sweet, cozy, European. I only went on one ride, a small roller coaster. No point giving myself a new stroke.

Still inside Tivoli, we had a late lunch of smørrebrod, that is, buttered bread with…whatever topping you want. Like herring, maybe, or ham—or fjordrejer, that is, local shrimp. Fjord ragers.

The Tivoli cafe was called Grøften, meaning Ditch. One of the guys I met the other day, Morten—he told me that his country grandparents used to take the train into town for a big day at Tivoli, ending with a great beer-drinking, cigar-smoking dinner at Grøften.

In the evening Sylvia and I took a bus to a residential part of town. To start with, we took a walk in a gorgeous park called Frederiksberg Have. It was like an anthology of gardens, with introductory walls and hedges enclosing the flowerbeds and fountains.

A wedding party was in full swing in a clearing. Passing a shadowed bench, I saw a bridesmaid lying on her back with her pale silk skirt hiked up, and an urgent black-suited groomsman atop of her.

“People fucking!” I whispered to Sylvia, who somehow hadn’t noticed them.

“Oh stop it,” she said, taking my remark for a random lie or Tourette-style outbursts.

We had dinner on a garden-tabled lawn that was a restaurant, then went to a nearby Baroque music concert. It was set in an ancient, octagonal, wooden church—an elderly, spindly structure. We arrived fifteen minutes late, so we had to wait in the vestibule with a lone Scandinavian usher. He looked like the actor Max von Sydow, who so often appeared in Ingmar Bergman’s films. And indeed the experience felt cinematic.

The walls of the vestibule were pale green with dry flaking paint. We were able to see the musicians through peepholes in the closed double doors. The music seemed unutterably rich and sweet. It felt as if we were waiting in the wings of Paradise. Hearing the first song this way made it the most beautiful of the evening.

When Sylvia and I went inside the church proper, it looked even more like a Bergman film—set in 1910. I focused on a line of idiosyncratic faces visible above the balcony railing. And as the music played, my mind spun out a sequence of movie scenes, unveiling the inner passions behind these specific visages—the dark-haired woman with vivid eyes is unhappily married to the lean short-haired man with a striped tie; she seduces the youth in the windbreaker; and then she’s being scolded by the aging beauty with her white hair tightened into a Danish-pastry updo.

June 21, 2009. Tour Bus Mermaid.

All day the sun alternates with the rain squalls. So far it’s never rained longer than half an hour. It’s like the rapidly changing weather on an island.

Sylvia and I unwisely got on a tour-the-town bus this afternoon, a bus stinking of diesel fumes, waddling like a crippled hippo, filled with numb or voluble tourists. It drove straight to a row of desolate souvenir shops along the cruise-liner dock, and then to…the Little Mermaid, a small and undistinguished statue, forlorn in a remote corner of the waterfront, surrounded by parking lots, and mobbed by tourists. Ugh. The Disney Version. Locals have twice sawn off the Little Mermaid’s head. Now I understand why.

We hung out by the harbor in the afternoon, the waters alive with boats: water taxis, moored restaurants, kayakers, sightseeing barges and even a submarine. And after supper we walked along the river. At 10 pm, the sun was still on the horizon. I longed to paint the patterns the sun was making on the undulating water. Rings of whitish blue around hearts of beige-yellow. I first began admiring these kinds of watery light blobs in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, forty years ago.

June 23 2009. Bergen, Norway. Midsummer.

We’re in Bergen now, in Norway. Colorful, clapboard houses on hilly narrow streets around a port. Charming. Unbelievably beautiful women and handsome guys—all of them clean-featured as models, with shocks of naturally blond hair and interesting double-bowed lips. Vaow!

A young woman at the hotel desk told us that the locals have a bonfire somewhere near town, and a big Midsummer’s Eve party, with many people coming by boat.

“The party starts after dark?” I ask, not getting it.

“It doesn’t get dark,” she says. Oh, right!

We’re far enough north that we have twenty-four hours of light. For a couple of hours around midnight the sun might dip a little below the horizon, but it never gets darker than twilight. And the sun was in fact brightly shining when Sylvia and I went to bed at 11 pm. Too tired to stay up, but feeling like kids who have to turn in before the grown-ups.

June 24-25, 2009. Flåm. Fjord. Biking.

Today we rode a tourist train from Bergen to Flåm—you pronounce that funny letter like “oh.” Our train climbed a valley to Norway’s central plateau, and rode along that for a bit, seeing mountains, and then we trundled down a different valley that led to a fjord and the village of Flåm. The fjords are long fingers of water that come in from the ocean—they’re like narrow bays or wide rivers. The whole coast of Norway is fjords, one after another.

In Flåm, we found a stark room at a pension, that is, a rooming house that serves meals. Every surface of our room is covered by linoleum, even the ceiling. Like I’d imagine a homeless shelter to be. But the place has a great view of the tip-ass end of the local fjord—the Sognefjord. On either side of the fjord, steep, wooded cliffs plunge into the impossibly deep, blue-green water.

For awhile, there was a cruise ship the size of a really large hotel docked in the fjord, corrupting the view, roaring like an idling bus, spewing a steady plume of diesel smoke—but just now it honked to alert the passengers, and lumbered off. Sweet silence.

And now Sylvia and I are sitting at a picnic table on the lawn in front of the pension, enjoying the evening. It’s our forty-second wedding anniversary. Dear Sylvia.

The next day I borrowed a bike from the pension and rode up into the valley, getting deep into the countryside. The landscape was everything that I wanted. Tiny roads with farms and weird Nordic cattle. I rode along a wild river with huge rocks and footbridges. I came to a tiny church with a fresh grave for a woman with a surname the same as the local village: Flåm.

In the afternoon, Sylvia and I rode a ferry into an even narrower side-branch of the fjord—reaching a spot called Gudvangen. This narrow fjord had extremely steep walls. At one spot we were chugging along in the shadow of a sheer mass of stone cliff that was two kilometers high. It’s hard to grasp how big something like that is. In the clear Norwegian air, your eyes can’t quite assess it. But sometimes we’d see a single mad farmhouse teetering on a brink up there, or a lone hiker—and the scene would snap into its gargantuan scale.

Most of the fjord walls are at least partially wooded. And up above them is that central, undulating highland of gray-brown mountains. It’s like Norway has only two main elevations: the banks of the fjords—and a jigsawed plateau, two kilometers above sea level. The two levels are connected by the cliffs along the edges of the fjord, and by the narrow valleys sloping up from the tips of the fjords.

Water from melting snow gushes down the fjord-cliffs in cataracts, bedizening the precipices with white skeins, some of them free-falling for a hundred meters. One particular waterfall was striking a slanted rock with such force that a steady geyser shot upwards—like a backwards waterfall.

Our steel boat was huge—a car-ferry with gratifyingly few passengers. We saw some smaller boats that were packed like sardines—these had been chartered by the big cruise ships. We’re glad to be freelancing our vacation, patching it together with trains, buses, and ferries, and staying at random hotels and inns.

In the tiny hamlet Gudvangen at the end of the narrow fjord, we found a tourist restaurant with a funny sculpture of a troll with a long, dick-like nose. I took a bawdy picture of Sylvia with the troll, laughing.

Before riding the ferry back to our rooming-house, Sylvia and I went for a little hike along the fjord. It was an unseasonably hot day—we’ve been very lucky with the weather—and after awhile I jumped naked into the fjord, not far from where a glacial waterfall was falling in.

It was so cold that the instant I hit the water I was scrambling to get out—moving fast before my limbs seized up, or my heart stopped, or I sank to the bottom of the kilometer-deep gulf. Clawing at the rocks. The water was so cold that it seemed to sizzle. As if I were an onion ring in a deep-fat fryer. Refreshing—if you don’t die.

June 26-27. 2009. Balestrand. Dreamscape. Lighters.

This morning we took a boat from Flåm to Balestrand, a slightly larger resort spot that’s a bit closer to the ocean end of the fjord. The boat left at 6 am, but, in a way, this didn’t feel that early, as the sun had already been up for hours and hours.

Riding the little boat up the long fjord, I was sitting in a plastic chair on the back deck, still sleepy. I closed my eyes to rest, and I became aware of the air currents around me—flapping my trouser legs, waving my tufts of hair, buffeting my cheek. The whole atmosphere alive with currents and waves, an ocean of air around me. I was fully in the now. Paradise.

Now it’s about 9 am. We’re on the front porch of Kviknes Hotel, a grand old place, with endless lobbies and parlors, full of vintage furniture and Norwegian impressionist paintings. Wood floors and ceilings. No cruise boats here, no highway—utterly still.

The mountains across the fjord stand in layers, like a theater’s curtains. A panoramic view like this might be easier to paint than to photograph. I’d love to have my paint kit here. Well, I’ll make a pen sketch, and I’ll do the painting at home: Fjord at Balestrand.

I can hardly believe we made it here. It’s like a waking dream.

I bought a cheap bathing suit at the local supermarket, one of those nasty, tight, bikini-bottom suits you see on old men in Europe and Russia. I went swimming for a fairly long time off the steps in front of the hotel. The fjord is wide here, and much warmer than at Gudvangen. I love being in living water. Although the fjord is, strictly speaking, a hundred-and-fifty-mile-long estuary of the sea, it tastes only slightly salty here. Brackish.

They serve enormous buffet dinners at the hotel, with, like, two dozen kinds of cured fish and dried meat as appetizers, not to mention the hot roasted or fried meats and fish—and the formidable array of puddings. Sylvia and I sit by the window, with the fjord twenty feet below.

It’s preternaturally quiet outdoors. Two or three seagulls circle nearby squawking, just as they’ve squawked for thousands of years. Nobody analyzes a seagull squawk, and I don’t suppose the bird premeditates it.

Writer: “Squawk.”

Critic: “But what does the squawk mean?”

It’s good being on vacation, away from my usual concerns about my writing career. My attention is either in the ongoing Now or in the What Next, that is, in the plans for our free-form itinerary.

We’re running out of days—we’ve spent ten nights in Scandinavia thus far, with six more to come. Precious treasure, these slow days. Each vacation day dilates, filled with new sights and experiences. At home, a week or more can go by before I’ve noticed.

“What? It’s Sunday again?”

“I can’t believe it’s time for Christmas.”

My arthritic left hip is hurting a lot—it’s wise to walk slowly and sit down a lot and take elevators when I can. Last year a doctor said my hip joint is deteriorating and eventually I might have it replaced.

For now, I tend to avoid going on long hikes or on scrambles up the mountains. We rented a canoe yesterday, and I’ve been biking. But today, what the hell, Sylvia and I went for it, and we managed a three mile walk. It was lovely to be up in those trees and meadows with the fjord and the toy village below.

When we got back, we saw a new ship, Stril Challenger, being christened—funny that we use so liturgical a word in this context. Apparently the ship belongs to an oil-drilling outfit, and is designed for emplacing anchors for the immense off-shore oil-rigs of Norway. Lots of oil drilling here just now.

For the ship’s christening, the high-school brass band played a few numbers, including the Norwegian national anthem and Happy Birthday. The musician kids were pale-skinned blondes and redheads. An official made a short speech, a woman in a Norwegian folk dress broke a bottle of champagne against the hull, and we joined a stream of locals filing up the gangplank to inspect the huge Stril Challenger.

And then the ship took off for an extemporaneous cruise across the fjord and back, although Sylvia and I had gotten off by then. We were unsure about how long the cruise might be.

Later, after the passengers came back, the Stril Challenger cavorted around the fjord, with smaller launches buzzing around it. I remembered the word, “lighter,” which is used to mean a smaller boat that you use to unload a bigger one. Big ships use the smaller boats as extensions of themselves. And then I imagined still smaller shuttle pods emerging from the lighters. A fractal regress of ships.

This set me to thinking about a starship launch ceremony. I imagined a great mothership with smaller ships circling it—the lighters. And one of the lighters darts down to a boy’s house—the lighter zooms into the room of our young hero, Gunnar, to take him on a trip. As the lighter carries Gunnar off, Gunnar cries out for some precious object that he forgot—and a lower-level lighter the size of a basketball goes back to Gunnar’s room to scoop up his pet: a soft plastic robot that Gunnar calls a shoon.

Sitting by the fjord at the edge of the grand hotel’s green lawn. I could stay here for months. It feels like the afterlife, like heaven. The air is slightly hazy, drenched in light. The flat water, and the mountain ranges doubled within it.

June 29, 2009. Fjærland. Twilight Zone.

Today we rode a boat from Balestrand to Fjærland, which is a sweet, quiet hamlet between the Fjærland fjord and the Jostedalsbreen glacier.

When Sylvia and I got off the ferry in Fjærland, it felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone. The other passengers on our boat squeezed into a tour bus that had ridden aboard the ferry. The tour bus grinds by, I wave, nobody seems to see me. The ferry chugs off. Sylvia and I are alone in this utterly silent, deserted, Sunday-morning Norwegian village, the fjord beside us and snow-capped mountains all around. Anything I can say feels superficial, overly dramatic, here in the core of this uncanny beauty. I feel like a fly on a freshly frosted cake.

Sylvia had been talking about finding a book to read and, lo and behold, there’s an unmanned shelf of books by the road, with a sign reading “Honest Books, 10 Kr. each.”

Sylvia and I are both wearing shades, very California. I light a cigarette. I’m a noisy wise-guy. It’s a Twilight Zone opening scene. I’m a city slicker in a black suit, and my consort is a sexy blonde on spike heels—our voices overly loud amid the silent mountains.

The Hotel Mundal is like a large house, vintage 1891, with a fresh-faced young woman at the desk. Perhaps she’s from the hotel-founder’s family. Across the street is a wooden church. Some first names in the churchyard across the street from our little hotel: Gurid, Ingvald, Ingebrigt, Ola, Kjell, Mikkel, Anggar, Brynhild. There’s a Swanhild Aarskog in the mix.

Many of the gravestones bear the epitaph, “Takk for Alt,” meaning “Thanks for Everything.” Some stones just say Takk. I love this. What a great sentiment with which to leave life’s rich panoply.

“Thanks for everything, world, it’s been great—you really went all out.”

And forget about, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Go out happy. Why not?

I rent a bike and ride a country road along a raging river. Nobody in sight for miles. At one point a single vehicle drives by: a blue tractor. I notice a gray wood footbridge over the river that’s too rickety to walk upon.

In the evening an older woman, the manager of the hotel, tells us about its history. She pours out a single tot of sherry for any guest who’s so inclined—using the smallest glasses I’ve ever seen.

In the front yard of the hotel is a vertical stone plinth, like a mini-version of the 2001 slab. It’s covered, not with writing, but with lichen-like spots. I imagine that that the spots are glyphs in an unknown tongue used by the Great Old Ones who live beneath the placid surface of the fjord. Ancient eel creatures.

And now the idea for a story takes form. “Fjaerland.” (Don’t try for the merged a and e symbol.) I can write it with Paul Di Filippo when I get home. Right up his alley. I see a moonlit clearing or a grotto beneath the hotel. The proposed human sacrifice of a beautiful Norwegian girl—it’s blocked by an offbeat couple who debarked from the ferry boat. The couple has power because they’ve deciphered the blotch-runes they saw on that stone plinth. In order to decode those runes, they used a God Bøk that they bought from an unattended roadside book stall, you understand.

June 30, 2009. Geiranger. Cliff Hike.

We caught an overland bus from Fjærland to Hellesylt, and then a ferry from Hellesylt to Geiranger. I was, as usual, anxious about our connections, but we found the bus stop, and the bus was on time to the second. It was very comfortable. Great views as we labored over the ridges separating one fjord from the next. In many stretches the road was what we in America would call single-lane. Nevertheless, the road had heavy traffic in both directions.

The cruise from Hellesylt to Geiranger was the most beautiful yet. We saw dozens of extremely large cataracts—any one of which would be a major sight back in the continental U.S. And here they’re in profusion, lined up on both sides of the fjord, writhing down tree-studded cliffs three thousand feet high.

I saw some more of those abandoned farmhouses perched on the nearly vertical meadows—what kind of maniac builds his farm in a place like that? You’d have to tether your children to you with a rope.

Arthritic hip or not, I managed to hike to the top of a thousand foot bluff this morning. It felt like being back in Zermatt. I saw lots of ferns and rushing streams. A field with a perfect barn, and a cliff in the background just so. Some bell-collared sheep in the thickets, suspicious of me. At the summit, goats lolled recklessly at the edge of a towering drop.

The climb made me happy, and I started singing a song that I heard on the Mickey Mouse Club show forty years ago, a song about Donald Duck’s global fame. The song, as I recall it, was presented in what may well have been a Norwegian accent.

So at the top of the bluff, I videoed myself performing this number, gesturing, marching back and forth, twirling my walking stick, and with many, many repetitions of the single verse that I knew:

Kvak kvak kvak, Donald Duck,

Watch him do his stuff.

Kvak kvak kvak, Donald Duck,

Now he’s had enough!

Later I’ll upload it to YouTube. Bound to be a big, big hit.

Sylvia and I are waiting on the dock for a lighter to carry us to a large Hurtigruten ship, which we plan to board for a five hour ride up the length of this fjord to the coastal city of Ålesund.

And now, great excitement riding the lighter. A hatch in the vast Hurtigruten ship’s hull opens for us at water level, and we enter via a gangplank. I feel like Han Solo landing in a hatch of the giant ship in Star Wars.

One deck up we found a desk, like at a hotel, the resepsjon. We paid for our travel ticket, and now we’re in the panoramic view lounge on Deck 8, very comfortable, and—you know? This cruise ship isn’t looking so bad from the inside.

After a couple of hours, we reach the coastal mouth of the fjord. The view opens up to resemble the coastline of, say, Maine or Vancouver, with low islands and peninsulas on every side. Vaster, mistier, and calmer than any seascape I’ve ever seen.

The Happy Isles of Ultima Thule.

July 3, 2009. Ålesund. Jugendstil.

It’s been about a year since I nearly died. I’m talking about July 1, 2008, when I had that brain hemorrhage. After a few days in the hospital it pretty much cleared up on its own. I’m grateful to have had this extra year—and this trip. Life is a continual gift.

Nothing much on the agenda for our final two days, other than wandering around this pretty town. Ålesund has canals, and many of the buildings are Scandinavian takes on the Art Nouveau style, more commonly called Jugendstil here. This style happened to be in fashion in 1904, when the town burnt to the ground and was rebuilt.

We toured a little Jugendstil museum here, learning about the Baltic and Scandinavian versions of this style. The museum had recreated one particular Jugendstil dining room, and they deemed it a work of total art—in which every detail is designed to act as a voice in the ecstatic chorus of the whole. Gesamtkunstwerk in German. I like the concept. Have your life be total art.

I just ate the best piece of pastry in years, a dry mille-feuille puff croissant wrapped around almond paste. To intensify the sensation, I pushed the whole second half into my mouth at once, then fell choking to the floor, knocking over my table and my chair. Just kidding about that last part.

A tender, fair baby in a carriage beside me is topped by a white mound—whipped cream? No, it’s a cotton-covered, feather-bed comforter. All of the beds here have these fat comforters, and no sheets or blankets. Given the unusual heat during our stay—70 or even 80 Fahrenheit—we’re hot at night, steaming in the midnight sun. Last night I saw the sunrise at 2 am. As I’ve mentioned, the sun dips barely below the horizon for an hour or two around midnight, but it never actually gets dark.

Looking out the window last night at 2 am, I saw a lot of people on the streets and sidewalks. Were they drunk and partying? No, they were strolling, chatting, bicycling, rowing boats, sitting on benches, eating in cafes—carrying on as if it were daytime.

Hard to imagine the flipside, that is, this scene in January, when it’s dark all the time. I got to talking with a local guy about this, and he was like, “Oh, it’s fine, we still get a couple of hours of light in the sky in the middle of the day. It’s normal, really. Now, those guys up north in Tromsø, they’ve got it bad.”

Quite a few of the Norwegian women have platinum blonde hair, fine and nearly white—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen women with this as their natural hair color. Some of these Norwegian blondes are punks with cropped hair and tattoos. Others, more traditional, wear their hair in a long braid that they wrap around across their brow in an old-school hair-crown.

It’s unusual for me to be touring in a place where the locals are so much whiter than me. Compared to the Norwegians, I’m swarthy. Ethnic. Like I was in Ireland.

Looming over the town is another one of those bloated cruise starships that we saw before. It’s filled with alien invaders of a sort, that is, my swarthy American countrymen.

“I’m not one of them,” said the bespectacled, well-heeled alien, his face suspiciously tan. “My wife and I came here on public transport from Alpha Centauri, just like you natives do.”

“Oorck!” cried the rabble of pale street urchins surrounding the intruder. “Oorck, Oorck!” The first stone struck the alien square upon the forehead. He tottered and fell…

I bought a souvenir Norwegian wool cap, absurdly overpriced, but one of a kind (I’d like to think). It has tassels on it.

Today we go home. I already scoped out the spot where the airport busses leave.

This morning we took a last walk out to the lighthouse on the jetty near our hotel. Morning mists over the fjord and the open sea. Already it feels like we’ve been in Ålesund a long time.

July 13, 2009. Back to Jim and the Flims.

Sylvia and I are spending a couple of nights in San Francisco. Early Sunday morning, looking out our hotel window at Valencia Street, I see a guy skateboarding past, listening to his iPod, grinning as if receiving a continuing stream of revelations. This is the 21st century.

I’ve written about half of the first draft of Jim and the Flims. I keep wondering if it’s a mistake to be writing about the afterworld. Like—it’s corny? Keep in mind that I don’t believe in the traditional religious notions of immortality at all. But I do think the notion of a science-fictional afterworld has some promise, as it’s sort of fun to think about, a ray of hope, if you will.

As a youth, I was fascinated by Robert Sheckley’s Immortality Inc., which verged on being about the afterlife. Not to mention my absorption with Dante’s Inferno. And of course my early novel White Light was set in the afterworld.

It would be nice to invent an ontology, a cosmogony, an eschatology, and a science of heaven—a complete and original explanation for what exists and why, an explanation for how and why we have souls, and a detailed map of an afterworld. And to do this without falling back on the crutch of a God, or using the expedient of god-like aliens.

In short, I’d like my character Jim to find out all the answers. I’ve always dreamed of getting all the answers or, even better, the single core Answer.

It shouldn’t be absolutely impossible for me to deliver a simulacrum of the big answers to the readers—by having Jim learn something plausible about how his world works. Peddle fake answers, in other words. I take this task seriously and I won’t settle for obvious parody, or for nonsense.

Including a quest for the answers makes this half-done book alluring to me. I’ll find a crowning philosophy, yes, create a parable worthy of becoming the source text for a new scientific religion. L. Ron Hubbard, move over!

I’m exaggerating here. Kidding. I know by now to avoid that writers’ pitfall: “I’m gonna hit this one outta the park.” It’s enough if Jim and the Flims is witty and fun to read. A page-turner. Even simpler: It’s enough if I can finish it and sell it.

Clarion and Canada

August 4, 2009. Clarion. Canada. Ballard.

Sylvia and I are nearing the tail end of a two-week trip. To start with, I came in to teach the final week of a six-week SF writing workshop in Seattle. It’s called Clarion West, they hold it every year. On the last day of my sessions, I led my students into a basement room that had an Aladdin-like oil lamp which I’d lit, and we chanted the following for about fifteen minutes:

Time, saucers, sex and goo

Elves, mutants, robots too

Muse of strangeness old and new

My blank pages call to you.

We really got into the sing-song of my verse—chanting it mantra style, Gregorian style, and then, near the end, as a sweet chorus. It was one of those experiences that sticks in my mind, a milepost. I think it’ll stay with some of the students, too. I wanted them to understand about the Muse. The Muse is what you have to count on. The Muse is the missing piece of the puzzle. That’s the most important thing I could teach these young writers—although I told them some other things too. Like these two slogans:

You’re not doing your job as a fantasy or SF writer unless your readers wonder if you’re crazy.

Initially, don’t worry about making sense. Get your effects and eyeball kicks from spontaneous mental images—you want a surrealist’s direct pipeline to the subconscious. Once you have a good image, you can always make up some kind of explanation for it.

After my Clarion gig, Sylvia and I rented a car and drove partway across Canada—to the Canadian Rockies.

Yesterday we went boating on Pyramid Lake near Jasper. The little lake has a big pyramid-like mountain peak right next to it, with meadows and bogs and forests all around. A lovely place. Sylvia and I were the only ones there. We went swimming naked on a beach.

Our boat had a quiet electric motor, and we were gliding through some water no more than a foot or two deep, with aquatic plants all around—it reminded me of the sea in the Narnia novel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Narnia sea is at the edge of their world—I’ve always wanted to go there. It crossed my mind that this would be a nice setting for a closing chapter of Jim and the Flims. I might focus on some curious growths that appear in the calm, glassy waters. And there’s some kind of central anomaly.

Imagine black-gloved cartoon hands on long, skinny, multiply-jointed arms—reaching out from the anomaly and grabbing people. Scabs and tattoos on the arms. Their zigzag sequences of elbows fold up like lazy-tongs.

Click to the next slide. We’re at a lodge on Moraine Lake, an even prettier spot, although now the weather’s cloudy with hints of rain. My arthritic left hip hurts a lot, which is frustrating, as I’d love to go for an all-day hike tomorrow. Well, at least I can go canoeing.

Over the last few days I read J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life—he wrote it in the last year or so of his life—he was dying of cancer at age 77. It reminded me of how my own brush with death galvanized me into writing the first draft of Nested Scrolls, at age 62. Comparing my memoir to Ballard’s (this mental exercise can be found in How To Make Yourself Miserable, Chapter #701,435,) I worry that Ballard’s life was more interesting than mine—all that stuff with Shanghai and the prison camp. And the Chinese beggar at his boyhood house’s front steps dying beneath an “eiderdown” blanket of snow. Oh well—I have to work with what I have.

I was particularly interested in Ballard’s remarks about science fiction. I hardly know his SF—I’ve read bits of The Atrocity Exhibition and of Crash, but that’s about it. I did enjoy his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun.

Ballard remarks that SF is “far closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the day,” and that it’s “often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka.” He says he’s more interested in “What now?” than in “What if?” He used SF as a lens to understand the present, “Looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race.” Shading into transrealism here.

He speaks of SF as having tremendous vitality, and being original, fresh, optimistic and positive. “It was a visionary engine…a hot rod…propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.”

He wasn’t interested in space travel. “It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space,’ was where science fiction should be heading.”

I’m realizing that I should put more of my own thoughts about SF writing into Nested Scrolls—when next I revise it.

My Autobiography

August 28, 2009. Hope for Nested Scrolls.

Things are looking up. I sent the manuscript of Nested Scrolls, to PS Publishing in England. They’re a small publisher, producing high-end SF-related books. They made me an offer to do a limited edition and a short-run trade edition.

PS Publishing might later share their book design files with Tor, if I can get Tor to do a regular U.S. trade edition. Everything might come together. It’s just taking longer than I’d hoped.

So now I’m starting a revision of Nested Scrolls, reading through it and patching things that seem too roughly phrased or too flat. I hadn’t looked at it for eight months. I’d been a little uneasy that the manuscript might prove to be really weak—given that I started writing it only three months after my brain hemorrhage. I worried that back then I’d still been half in a bag. I’d been almost scared to reread it. But it’s good. There’s some great stuff.

September 15, 2009. Writing About Infinity.

On another front, I have a deal to write a six-thousand-word introduction for Infinity: New Research Frontiers, edited by Michael Heller and W. Hugh Woodin. It’s a collection of essays about infinity. The book is to be published by the Templeton Foundation, a group interested in promoting scientific discussions that relate to theology. They’re paying me to write the intro.

This started when the Templeton Foundation offered to pay me to write an essay for this anthology. I felt uneasy about that. By now I’m way out-of-the-loop regarding the mathematics of infinity—my Ph.D. in this field is from 1972. The last century. So, instead of an essay, I wrote an SF story: “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory.” The mathematician-editor Hugh Woodin dug my piece. But the book’s intended publisher, Cambridge University Press, freaked out about having an *ugh* SF tale in our erudite tome.

The Templeton guys were nice about this twist—they paid me for the story anyway, and I sold the story to the Tor.com online SF zine. And then the Templeton people said I could write an introduction for their anthology, and they’d pay me a second time. I’m happy about that. It’s nice to be welcomed back into my old academic field—the transfinite. A homecoming.

Of course then twenty or thirty academic papers showed up at my house—I had to read them before writing my introduction. And I put off reading them for a couple of months, even though I’d said I’d read them and write my intro by mid-September.

So earlier this week the Templeton people emailed me, like, “Where’s the intro?” And finally I tore into reading the papers. Some were weaker than the others, but the good ones were quite strong—some heavy math ones, some cool papers about physics and infinity, and a couple of awesome theology papers about god and infinity.

The philosophy papers are written in a jargon just this side of incomprehensibility, but they were fun to read—it felt like listening to the twittering of alien beetles. For most people the math papers would be alien beetle-twitters, but for me, reading the math is like hearing jazz that’s switched (over the years since I left grad school) to a newer bebop. But as an academic researcher, you learn to skate across a document’s surface.

In the end I managed to read all the papers, and I wrote the whole six-thousand-word introduction during yesterday and especially today. I can’t quite understand how I did that so fast. I could never write six thousand words of a novel in one day. Of course for my intro, I was partly able to recycle stuff that I already know—and, having written Infinity and the Mind, I do know a lot about infinity.

October 11, 2009. Surf Pilgrim.

We went to visit Georgia and her family in Madison. I picked up a cold, and now, back home, far from being on one of my accustomed writing binges, I’m having trouble doing any solid work along those lines.

Instead I’ve been painting this week, working on a large (40 inch by 30 inch) acrylic painting that I started three weeks ago at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz. On that day I trekked down there from the parking lot with my painter friend Vernon Head, and I got my canvas covered with a light underpainting. When I’m en plein air, it’s about getting the composition blocked out, and about finding some of the colors. Back home I’ll dial up the colors to match my memories and my aesthetics, which tend to be brighter and more saturated than reality.

It was kind of a big canvas to carry to the beach. Some of the passing surfers noticed me painting, and they were friendly about it. A certain amount of blowing sand got stuck to the paint, which was nice, as it adds physical texture and a you-are-there quality. When my mother painted en plein air, she’d often bring back a little baggie of dirt or sand and mix it in with her paint.

I’m calling my picture Surf Pilgrim, because there’s a surfer in the foreground with a faint gold halo around him. And he’s got a determined look about him.

I saw the title phrase as a graffito on the sea wall near Ocean Beach in San Francisco, only it was written “Serf Pilgrims” there. And then Marc Laidlaw and I used a variation of the phrase, “Stoke Pilgrims,” as the name of a gang of surfers in our Zep-and-Del surfing-SF story, “Probability Pipeline.”

I’m not sure if my new Surf Pilgrim has anything to do with Jim and the Flims—but you never know. I could have a “Surf Zombies” chapter. Or Jim might encounter some beings like surfers in the afterworld. Buddha on a standing wave.

October 20, 2009. Tor: Scrolls Yes, Jim No.

So Tor doesn’t want to publish Jim and the Flims. On the positive side, they do want to publish Nested Scrolls.

Although it’s great that Tor will do my memoir, I have this paranoid, bitter feeling that it’s a gesture. Like the gold watch they award you when you’re laid off. A farewell dinner before they put you on the train to Siberia. The scrimshaw tooth the Inuits give you to take on the ice-floe with your final hunk of blubber.

Oh, don’t think that way, Rudy, that’s too How to Make Yourself Miserable. I really am happy about my memoir reaching the market. And I’m sure Tor isn’t publishing it as a favor, that’s not at all how a big company thinks. Maybe they figure that, since the memoir is a different kind of book than my novels, there’s a chance of it catching on.

But now—sigh—what to do with Jim and the Flims? I feel like an aging ball-player sent down to the minor leagues. To the small presses, in other words.

I’m not sure what’s the problem with Jim and the Flims. It could be the uninspiring sales-figures for my last few novels. Or it could be something specific to the theme and execution of this particular book.

My agent Susan Protter says it would be fruitless to pitch Jim and the Flims to, like, Ace or Bantam, as all the publishers look at the same sales-figures database. They want rising writers who can sell fifty thousand or a hundred thousand copies of a novel.

So now I’m looking at a hat-in-hand routine with the smaller publishers. Well, I’ve seen it happen to other aging SF writers or, for that matter, to bands, or to visual artists. If a group makes eighteen albums—who’s gonna buy the nineteenth one? The public loses interest. I’ve had eighteen novels in a row from major publishers, and I can be grateful for that.

Rucker marks time in cow town—dreams of big-league comeback.

Meanwhile, Dave Hartwell is requesting some revisions to my Nested Scrolls autobio. I should tag the events with dates, which is reasonable. He also suggested that I should put in a scene, or at least a vivid mention of, sigh, my quondam alcoholic misery—so as to motivate the event of my getting sober.

“And then I shit my pants.”

“Great stuff, R.R. Pure box-office.”

I wouldn’t want to take that route. I mean—I did a lot of other stuff besides drink and smoke pot. But I’ll see what I can do.

November 2, 2009. King Tut and Unfurling.

So of course I went into demonic writer mode and I polished off the latest Nested Scrolls revisions in a week or so. And as requested, I added a few prefigurings to set the stage for my decision to get sober in 1996. I sent this version to Harwell, and I’ll do yet another round of changes in a couple of months.

With Nested Scrolls out of the way for now, I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off, making wild changes to Jim and the Flims—with a chain saw and a blowtorch. Hoping to make it publishable. I was thinking that at some point in the novel, maybe in the first chapter, I need for Jim to say something about death. Here’s a remark I emailed to Marc Laidlaw yesterday:

I have to confess there’s a part of me that feels a twinge of envy whenever I hear of someone dying. They get to quit striving and take a rest. The Big Sleep. Enough’s enough. Off the hook. Free at last. Gone to a better world. Merged. I realize that this is a dangerous line of thought.

Sylvia and I went to see the King Tut show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend. It was a great show, with gorgeous things. I loved a pectoral, or necklace, with a winged scarab, and even better was a big gold coffin for Tut’s grandmother Tjuya. A boat to heaven.

When I look at Egyptian art, I feel the cultural associations with the 1920s and 1960s. Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in the 1920s—I just read Carter’s fascinating account of it in a Dover reprint called The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen. I think Tut sparked the 1920s fad for Deco and Egyptian stuff. And the psychedelic rock posters and cartoons of the 1960s often used to feature flying scarabs—I think particularly of Rick Griffin’s work.

It felt so weird to come out of the tomb-like Tut exhibition into the museum shop—three thousand years later and a half a world away from Tut’s tomb. Everyone in the gift shop was imitating Tut—putting on plastic Tut hats and taking pictures of each other with their cell phones.

On Sunday, Sylvia and I were at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and it was All Saints Day, and they sang a somewhat creepy hymn about the saints. There’s a massed glowing horde of saints in the hymn, and they’re streaming down to Earth through the pearly gates.

I was thinking it might be cool in Jim and the Flims if a lot of ghosts mass into in a luminous cloud—and invade Earth.

We went to San Francisco for three nights for a family reunion on the occasion of daughter Isabel’s art show in the SOMArts gallery. She was displaying her four-hundred-foot-long graphic novel or cartoon strip—entitled Unfurling. She inked the thing onto a long roll of paper, and now she’s unrolled it and mounted it in the gallery. A big crowd, much joy and awe. A great occasion.

One of the interesting things in Isabel’s vast piece is her re-invention of hieroglyphics. In some of the panels she put hieroglyphics into the speech balloons to depict the native tongue of the restless street-people known as tweakers. One of her friends suggested the language might be called Tweakenese.

The tweakers’ hieroglyphic speech balloons even have glyphs for cigarettes and for shopping carts. And not all that many different glyphs are in use. The same as in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph carvings. It’s like they’re always talking about the same dozen or so things. Just like tweakers.

Australia

November 20, 2009. Entering Melbourne.

So now I have a gig to give some talks in Melbourne, on the south side of Australia. Since it’s so far, Sylvia and I will be staying in Australia for about a month. For the first leg of the trip, we flew into L.A. at night. Impressive. It’s an image I’ve seen in films, the great grid of lights—but to be there in person felt epic. In a plane you can also look straight down and sense your height—it’s not just a panoramic view. You’re embedded and, to some extent, at risk. I was thinking of all the things people were doing down there at that very moment—eating, watching TV, fucking, getting high, and arguing in L.A. With one or two even in the process of dying or being born.

We hit Melbourne and became busy Turing ants, leaving trails hither and yon, scavenging scraps of food, culture, shopping. In the downtown part of Melbourne, there’s quite a few impressive stone buildings, and an old shopping arcade with a tiled floor and a fancy ceiling. Many of the blocks have interesting little alleys—called laneways—cutting the block in half, often with cafes on the laneways.

The doorknobs here are higher. They drive on the left side of the road. The accent is hard to understand.

The city of Melbourne is over three million. Many fair British types, but lots of Chinese and Vietnamese, and some Indians and Indonesians as well. In the 1940s Australia had a policy of excluding non-white immigrants, but they opened the gates to all in the mid-1950s. I haven’t yet seen any Australian Aborigines—I gather they live more in the center of the country and up north.

The heart of Melbourne is a large art museum complex in Federation Square, with all the buildings patterned with irregular Penrose tiles on the outside. We saw some galleries of wonderful Aboriginal paintings inside the National Gallery of Victoria here. Many of these are super-pointillist and somewhat abstract-looking, they’re made from dots which are sometimes painted on with sticks or with Q-tips with the cotton torn off.

Many of these pictures have a story or a so-called Dreaming associated with them. But the story isn’t at all apparent to the untutored eye. Other Aboriginal paintings are in some sense topographical—mapping out the geographical patterns, the practical uses and the spiritual vibes of regions where the painters live.

One topographical painting that I liked was by “Bill Whiskey” Tjalpaltjarri (1920-2008), Country and Rockholes near the Olgas. Painted in 2007, when Tjalpaltjarri was 87 years old. The dots bunch up here and space apart there, like windblown fog, several layers deep. He does subtle things with the colors, like having dark blue dots upon black ones. It’s a rather large painting, considerably wider than it is tall. Reminiscent, in its own way, of David Hockney’s Mulholland Drive.

I’d like to make a topographical-style map of my own neighborhood seen from above, using patterns and colors to show some of the things I’ve experienced there. I don’t think I’d have the patience to use dots, but maybe I could use some other kinds of small patterns. About five months later, I did make a painting like this: First Contact, April 2010.

Today Sylvia and I screwed up our courage and rode a streetcar to a funky beach suburb of Melbourne: St. Kilda.

It wasn’t an ocean beach, as I’d ignorantly thought it might be—it was a bay beach, with the bay water listless and utterly flat, and with dead blue jellyfish on the shore. The temperature was 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We got a nice seafood lunch in a beachfront place, glad to be in some air conditioning. I had some Pacific fish called trevally, very good. I saw big schools of these guys when I was diving in Micronesia.

After lunch Sylvia and I went wading and suddenly a squall was whipping up waves and blasting us with gritty sand. The wind was literally seventy miles-per-hour. Some rain in the wind, and everyone took cover. And then the squall was over. In a half hour, the temperature had dropped from a 100 to 70. The Australians didn’t seem at all surprised. I guess they’re close enough to Antarctica that sudden, violent weather is a regular event.

November 21-23, 2009. At Leon’s.

We’re staying for two nights at the house of Leon Marvell. He’s the head of the film program at a branch of Deakin University here. He’s the one who got me the grant money for my trip. I’ll be giving a talk at a conference on media art, and a talk or two at Deakin.

Leon and his partner Yolande live in an area that’s slightly like the Santa Cruz mountains, in that there’s lots of eucalyptus trees. One difference here is that wild parrots come and land on the railing of the deck, very colorful and loud. Leon and Yolande feed them seeds. Our first morning there it was raining, and we played Scrabble in Leon’s house, very cozy. He and Yolande refrained from using unfamiliar Australian expressions on the board, but they did teach us a few:

• A jock type guy drinking beer with his friends is a boofy or a boofhead.
• A redneck is a bogan or a westie.
• A pie floater is a meat pie set into a bowl of green pea soup, with some bright red tomato sauce on top of the pie. When Leon was a boy in Adelaide, his grandfather would take him to town and the big treat would be a pie floater.
• Leon claims a baby platypus is called a puggle.
• Yolande, who grew up in Adelaide, says that city is jokingly known as Addlebrain.

In the evening, Leon cooked us some kangaroo, which wasn’t bad, more or less like venison. And the next day, Leon and Yolande drove us to a mountainous rain forest. We saw a really big kookaburra bird, the size of a chicken—it was perched in a tree. And a lyre bird with an extravagant tail.

In the forest we walked among tree ferns and saw some enormous mountain ash trees, easily as large as our redwoods, with peeling bark and pocked with clumps of moss. The mountain ash is actually a type of eucalyptus—they have about sixty different kinds of eucalypts here. The original British settlers just called this kind of tree an “ash” because they were homesick.

On Monday, Leon and Yolande took us to a kind of zoo near their house. We saw all the canonical Australian animals: kangaroo, koala, echidna, and the platypus. The kangaroos were underwhelming. Rolling in the dust and scratching themselves like dogs. The platypuses were awesome. A male and a female, in separate tanks—very large tanks, dimly lit to simulate night, with leafy branches and rocks and worms and fresh-water shrimp called yabbbies.

The furry little platypuses swam constantly. Underwater, they close their eyes, nostrils and ear-holes. They find their way by using their soft, electrosensitive bills. Truly a sixth sense. The bills pick up the oscillating electrical fields of living objects, although I suppose there might be some fields coming off inanimate objects as well. What a great way to perceive the world.

Naturally I’m imagining an SF story where someone gets a platypus bill implant—and how they then see the world. A guy with a soft, velvety beak in place of his mouth. He can sense the presence of a wet pussy, or a wad of money, or drugs. Obviously the other characters should call him the Platypus.

Yolande’s mother and brother are taking part in a platypus-counting program in Adelaide—each person goes out at night and tries to spot one in a certain area. As things stand, platypuses are so shy that nobody knows how many of them there are.

November 24, 2009. Stay Haunted House. Tiny Talk. Aussie Slang.

After staying with Leon, Sylvia and I settled into the Casey House. It’s an elegant 1864 townhouse in the Fitzroy Park district of Melbourne. The place was originally built by an eminent Melbourne painter, and passed into the hands of Lord Richard Casey (1890-1976). Casey was born rich, and active in Australian politics. In the 1960s he was the Governor-General, that is the local representative of the Queen of England.

The present owner of the townhouse is Lord Casey’s daughter, an 80-year-old woman who lives in Sydney. The old family furniture, books, art, and knickknacks have remained in place. And the old lady owner has instructed her property manager to rent the rooms only to artists, always on a short-term basis. Leon and Yolande reasoned that, since I paint, I’m an artist—and they got us in here.

The rent is low. It’s like living inside an old movie here. I have a wonderfully complex shaving mirror mounted on an arm with three hinges, and the arm sticks out of a movable stand on my night table. The bedroom doors don’t lock. The artist-woman in the next door bedroom snores.

The cupboard in Sylvia’s and my room has a shelf filled with various personal possessions of Lord Casey. An ivory-handled hairbrush, a pair of small mustache brushes, a silver egg cup, a marvelously intricate brass cigarette lighter with green lizard hide wrapped around it. I’m half-tempted to lift the lighter as a souvenir, but it would be too risky to presume upon the hospitality of the dead. The house definitely has a haunted feel. One night Sylvia and I felt a very creepy cold draft coming down the gloomy stairs. And then a cool patch in the air beside us. An unseen presence. We sleep very close together in our bed.

I can see using this place in Jim and the Flims. I want to put in a scene where Jim finds the golden sarcophagus of Amenhotep the First—with the hibernating bodies of my characters Weena Wesson and Charles Hinton inside it. I figure the sarcophagus might as well be on the locked third floor of Lord Casey’s uninhabited home, in the abandoned painting studio, beneath a skylight, the sarcophagus’s gold surfaces reflecting the slow play of the sky.

I had a nice romantic dinner with Sylvia in one of Melbourne’s chic and funky laneways, at the Cafe Segovia, run by Tunisians. Sylvia looked happy and cute, with her sweet voice chirping her casual thoughts.

Today I’m sightseeing, having a chai latte tea at the Riverland pub terrace between the Yarra River and Federation Square. The teapot is full of pods and seeds and leaves floating in steamed milk. I have a special sieve for straining this invigorating ichor into my cup.

All in all, this is one of those trips when I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing here. It’s all kind of pointless and random. Like—why these talks, and why Melbourne? I’ve never heard of the group putting on the conference where I’m giving my main talk.

Today I’m going to give a smaller talk on “My Life as a Writer.” This one is at Leon’s branch of Deakin University. I’m a little worried about finding the venue. The branch campus is an hour-long tram ride from downtown Melbourne. Sylvia’s riding along to give me moral support. In a few days, I go back out there to give a second talk.

The audience for the first talk was dauntingly small. At the first one, we had nine people: Sylvia, our two old Melbourne friends Robert and Margaret Mrongovius, Leon and his partner Yolande, two of Leon’s English Department colleagues, a Chinese computer scientist, and a local fan named Tony—he saw the announcement of the talk on my blog. Good old Tony came to all three of my talks—I inscribed a book to him with “My only fan!” Too true—in Melbourne, anyway.

The talk was pretty good. I’d already done the planning for it by writing Nested Scrolls. One of Leon’s colleagues videotaped the talk, and eventually they’ll strip out the soundtrack and send it to me as an audio file that I can podcast. When I give a talk to a tiny audience, I cheer myself by thinking the talk is like a studio session where I’m recording a track for the wider world.

After the talk, Sylvia and I had a great evening with our friends the Mrongoviuses, who had us over for dinner at their house. We know them because they lived in the neighboring apartment when we were visiting scholars at the University in Heidelberg, back in 1979, thirty years ago.

I got two further tidbits of info about idiomatic Australian from the Mrongoviuses:

• A group of kangaroos is called a mob of roos.
• A dag is a clot of crap on the wool near a sheep’s butt, and daggy means gross or gnarly. But sometimes, dag will be used fondly, as in “You’re a dag,” which has the same force as “You’re a nut.” I later mentioned this usage to Leon, and it turned out he once dated a woman who’d say that to him. “You are such a dag.” And it had annoyed him when she said that. So of course I started saying this to him, and even applying it to myself. Loudly declaring on the Melbourne night sidewalks, “I am a dag!”

Two days later, by the way, I gave my second talk at Deakin, “Life is a Gnarly Computation.” Even smaller audience.

November 27, 2009. Lifebox Talk.

Yesterday morning, Sylvia and I went to some galleries selling Aboriginal art. One of them, the Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, was particularly good, up on the third floor of a downtown Melbourne building like a classy New York gallery. The pictures were selling for about $10K. The painters live in the middle of Australia, east of Ayers Rock. One work, by Kim Napurrula, impressed me particularly. It was like a great abstract painting, but with a vital sense of there being an underlying story. Wonderful colors, all in shades of red, orange, beige, yellow, brown, and black. Kim is from a family of Aboriginal painters. It seems to be a passed-on craft, as painting was in Europe in the Middle Ages.

Yesterday afternoon, I gave my conference talk with Leon, about “Lifebox Immortality…and How We Got There.” It was a joint talk. Basically I did “Lifebox Immortality,” and Leon did “How We Got There.” Leon’s part had a passionate, mystical tone. And we had a good Q&A session.

Maybe I should reiterate that by a “lifebox” I mean something like a website that’s able to emulate a given person’s conversation. You might, for instance, emulate the experience of interviewing an author by repeatedly combing through a database of his or her written texts to find appropriate answers for the questions you ask. I’ve already made a low-end lifebox version of myself that uses the search-my-writings trick.

Sylvia pointed out that a lifebox would be more engaging if it remembered you after you talk to it. That’s feasible—the lifebox could create profiles of the people it talks to, remembering their interests, and never accidentally telling them the same story twice. All this is doable with today’s tech. I don’t understand why lifeboxes aren’t on the market yet. Of course it’s a lot harder to make a lifebox of someone who hasn’t written a lot of documents that you can draw on for the answers.

In the end, none of my three talks ended up with big audiences. I’m not well-known in Australia. And there wasn’t any publicity for my events. It’s always painful to experience the cognitive dissonance between harsh reality and my image of how famous I imagine myself to be.

November 27, 2009. Melbourne Arts.

Sylvia and I wandered around Melbourne today, and we came upon a group show by a graduating class of art students—the show happened to be near the building where I gave my conference talk. The Mrongoviuses’ daughter Alice had some drawings and a pair of milk cartons with slip covers in the show.

Looking around the halls, I observed that not many of the young people seemed to be into painting. It’s mostly photos, videos, collages, or assemblages. Maybe painting is too hard, too slow, too much trouble? Another factor is that it’s easier to tell at a glance if a painting isn’t very good—meaning that, if you paint, you’re wide-open to criticism. If you put a pile of dirt on the floor, then it’s not so clear whether your work is worse than or better than the other piles of dirt on the floor that people have seen on display in museums and art galleries. With a pile of dirt, an artist is less exposed.

Speaking of dirt, there was one dashed-off work in the show that was kind of witty. It was a cheap oriental-patterned rug with a lumpy surface—the lumps are the result, the viewer slowly realizes, of a great deal of random paper trash having been hidden under the rug. The work, by Ilie Rosli, is called Swept Under.

I’ve been reading the Australian writer Peter Carey’s 2001 historical novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, written in the persona of the nineteenth century Australian outlaw—or “bushranger”—Ned Kelly. It’s a wonderful book, written in dialect, as if transcribed from papers that Ned left behind.

What inspired me to read this book was that we saw Ned Kelly’s armor on display at the huge old stone State Library of Victoria, which is where we go to check our email. And after the email, we like to look around the library—it’s quite a handsome Victorian pile, with numerous exhibits, including the one on Ned Kelly. He made his armor from quarter-inch-thick steel for his final showdown with the cops.

I continue to feel that it’s odd to be frittering away my time so aimlessly. But maybe it’s good for me, to be doing nothing.

November 29, 2009. Last Day in Melbourne.

When I planned this trip, I’d mistakenly imagined that my commitments to Deakin University would be quite time-consuming. So I arranged to spend eleven nights here—which, by now, feels like too many.

But, yes, it is interesting to keep on digging. Cities are like fractals, or like Nature herself—as you delve deeper, you keep on finding new details. Being here so long, it starts to feel like when I spent a semester in Brussels a few years ago. It moves beyond sight-seeing and becomes a matter of living in a new place.

Sylvia and I went again to see the Aboriginal art in the big Federation Square museum. I was struck by some large drawings done with dirt on eucalyptus bark in Marrkolidjban, in the Northern Territory. One of them reminded me of a drawing our daughter Isabel did some years ago to show herself being mad.

It’s a truism that it’s hard for adults to draw in the loose, diagrammatic style that we use as children. It takes psychic work to regain that clarity. Looking at work by Aboriginal artists, I feel like they’ve short-circuited the whole process of primitive-to-advanced-to-primitive. They stay where they start. In the Garden of Eden. But I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

We went to a science-fiction party at the house of Russell and Jenny Blackford, stalwart members of the Melbourne SF scene. For a time they published a semiprozine, Australian SF Studies, which included SF essays as well as squabbling letters in the back. They’d heard of my visit through Damien Broderick, an Australian SF writer and scholar who actually published an academic book about my preferred personal style—which I call transrealism. It was good to be with the local SF people. I felt safe.

December 1, 2009. Sydney.

So now we’re in Sydney. The people in Melbourne kept trying to express the difference between the two cities. Maybe it’s like the difference between San Jose and San Francisco. That is, Sydney and San Francisco feel sophisticated and happening—and they’re on the ocean instead of on the shallow ass-end of a bay. Poor old San Jose.

We’re staying in the Russell Hotel, a relatively inexpensive place near a bunch of ferry slips on what’s called the Circular Quay.

The famous Sydney Opera House just a short walk along the waterfront from our room. It turns out to be one of those rare buildings that fully lives up to one’s expectations. I never quite understood how it was shaped until I came here in person. The Opera House roof is made of shapes like hollow claws. Although cast from cement, the roof sections are covered with white and beige tiles, so they’re pleasant to the touch. You can walk all around the outside of the building, and in many spots the roof comes down to the ground.

I’d like to see a show there, but the Opera House’s big halls are sold out, and the shows in its two small halls aren’t inviting—they have a one-man show by a British guy lamenting about losing his apartment, and a show of drag queens singing Christmas carols.

Sylvia and I visited the main art museum of Sydney—it’s in a huge city park that has giant fruit bats living in giant banyan-like trees. The big thing I wanted to see was, once again, the Aboriginal art. Amazing stuff here. Some of the more recent indigenous artists whose work I saw were Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Dr David Malangi, and Munggurrawuy Yunupingu. Like I said before, these artists stuck with a primitive mode…and they got really good at it.

Later I learned more about Aboriginal art from a guy called Austin, the owner of the Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery in the Bondi Beach neighborhood of Sydney. He travels to Western Australia to visit with the artists, and to buy work directly from them.

The Aborigines are maybe the oldest continuous civilization on Earth. They went along doing more or less the same thing for sixty thousand years. They have some very elaborate belief systems. Their art is still very much alive.

I’m reading three books about the art right now. The first book is art-historical: Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art. The second is journalistic: Benjamin Genocchio, Dollar Dreaming. This second one is about the recent uptick in the market for Aboriginal art, and is about the odd ways in which it’s produced and marketed. The sociology of the Aboriginal art scene is very different from, say, that of the U.S. art market. The third book is a memoir/investigation/near-novel: Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines. Chatwin’s book is the most literary of the three, and is very highly regarded by everyone I’ve talked to.

I find it very cool that these pictures, which look so abstract are, in a sense, representational. They depict, as I mentioned earlier, specific home territories of the artists. According to the Aboriginal notion of the Dreaming, supernatural beings emerged from nature, and are still emerging. The supernatural beings follow specific paths across the length and breadth of Australia. These paths are called songlines, in part because different tribes at different spots along a given line will have an actual song about a part of the supernatural being’s history. As the Aborigines used no written language, the songs and the graphic designs serve as their only recorded history.

We had a roasted fresh fish for dinner—it was called a jewfish, of all things. This was in an outdoor restaurant near the Opera House with a full moon rising over the building’s Mohawk-hairdo white roofs. The Sydney Bridge all lit up, tall buildings reflected in the water, and the lights of the Luna Park amusement park in the distance. The park’s entrance is a classic huge face with a red-lipped open mouth.

I like it here.

December 3, 2009. Manly Beach in Sydney

Sydney is entirely inside a harbor, with a mouth like San Francisco’s Golden Gate—with steep cliffs on either side—but with no bridge. The beaches are on the outside of this strait, edging the open sea—the two best-known ones are Manly Beach to the north, and Bondi Beach to the south.

We took a ferry to Manly Beach to the north yesterday—you land on the bay side, and walk across a narrow strip of land to the ocean side. Quite a few surfers there on a beach break, and on a point break that’s a little further out. Really big waves, coming off the Tasman Sea.

I went swimming, and I had to keep ducking under the huge breakers. We walked along the beach to a cute neighborhood called, get this, Fairy Bower. So British. Great tidepools there, and a man-made saltwater swimming pool by the ocean, refilled daily by the sea, with a ladder and a little walk around it.

Still in Sydney, we saw Les Claypool of Primus at an old movie theater in the Valencia-Street-like neighborhood of Newtown. He was playing with a quartet: an electric cello, a drummer, a vibes player—and Les on various kinds of bass guitars or bass-guitar-like instruments. The musicians wore tuxedos and masks.

The group rocked. At one point the vibes player switched to drums and did a dual drum solo with the main drummer, incredible, like a conversation, and near the end, Les came back onstage, dressed up in an ape suit and playing a one-string instrument by whacking it. The lights were beautiful colored cones, filled with stage fog. The theater had the feel of a Wild West music-hall at the edge of civilization. Dawdling, idle, unwatched, unsupervised, off the grid. A relaxing vibe.

It was good to see the grungers at the concert and in the neighborhood. Sydneysiders, as the locals call themselves. We overheard a woman on six-inch platform boots telling a friend, “I’m angry at everyone all the time.” And I saw a guy in a T-shirt saying “Dag Nasty” with a picture of a sheep’s butt—remember that a dag is a sheep’s dingleberry.

In the train back from Newtown we sat near a weathered Aussie couple who were sharing a half-pint of gin, the woman maundering on and on, the two of them somewhat fitter-looking than their U.S. counterparts. Looking out the train window I saw an excavating machine at work beneath an underpass, one of those jointed arms with claws. I had the sudden feeling of being on another planet.

I’m still haunted by that persistent feeling of “What the fuck am I doing here?”

December 4, 2009. Doctor John.

We’re two weeks and a day into our month-long trip. My legs are sore all over and I’m exhausted. I still have that arthritic left hip, too—I’m on a steady diet of aspirin or Aleve to keep the pain down. A month is a long time for a trip. I guess I figured I might not ever make it to Australia again. Even with all this time, we still haven’t made it out of the cities. The whole desert interior remains unseen, not to mention, say, the Bungle Bungle mountains, or tropical Darwin, or Uluru.

I looked on the web and found a recovery group meeting. I was struck by how the people at the meeting were saying exactly the same kinds of things as they say back home. Like: pray for help, try to be less self-centered, let go of your resentments. Halfway through the meeting I started feeling very relaxed, almost high. It was good for me to be there.

Afterwards I started talking to a fellow American, a cool guy with tattoos on both arms. He said he came from New Orleans, and that he was a musician, with some gigs in Australia, moving from town to town. I was impressed. Like meeting a shaman, or an indestructible cartoon character.

For his part, the guy was happy to chat to me. He said that he’d been feeling uptight, and that he’d dreamed a friend told him he needed to talk to Dr. John, the New Orleans musician—whom he’d never actually met.

“Dr. John the Night Tripper?” I said, getting the reference.

“Yeah, and you turned up,” said the guy.

“I’m Dr. John’s representative,” I told him, both of us happy in the moment.

There’s a pub downstairs from our hotel room called “the oldest pub in Sydney” and it’s constantly full of beefy Australians. Sometimes you even see guys wearing kilts. After Sylvia and I went to bed on Friday, these guys sang songs until midnight—in massive beefy tearful unison.

December 5-7, 2009. Queensland.

Sylvia and I flew to Cairns in Queensland yesterday, and we’re spending two nights in a low-end resort area north of town called Palm Cove. It’s fabulous countryside, a little like Fiji, with palm trees, weird birds, gnarled little grape-leaf trees, islands, ibis birds yodeling in trees, and a whole different set of stars in the sky.

Tomorrow we get on a live-aboard dive boat and go on a three-day trip along the Great Barrier Reef. I’ll be scuba diving and Sylvia was planning to snorkel, although now she’s having second thoughts.

It seems there’s these things called box jellyfish, the size of your head, and with twenty-foot-long, stinger-laden tendrils. If you get stung by one, you might actually die. That shouldn’t impact our dive trip, as there aren’t many box jellies out in the open sea—and keep in mind that the Great Barrier Reef is about twenty or even fifty miles offshore. Also we’ll be wearing dive skins or wetsuits, so we won’t really have any skin exposed.

But the box jellies do drift in to the beaches—and we’ve just learned that nobody swims on the beaches this time of year. October through May is box jellyfish season. This is a bit inconvenient, as it’s ninety to a hundred degrees here, totally humid, and very tropical. There’s warning signs about crocodiles as well. What a wild place.

We’re in a motel-like place at this resort, right on the beach. They have a tiny area of the beach fenced in with underwater nets to keep out the box jellyfish—which they just call stingers for short. But the pen is very small, and the water’s a bit muddy right at the shore, and in any case the water’s full of groover tourist women wearing huge floppy-brim anti-sun hats, so—naw. In any case, the motel has a nice pool. And today we took a swim in the Mossman River.

The town of Mossman is about an hour’s drive north of here. It’s at the southern edge of the Daintree tropical rain forest. We drove our rented car up there today and went to a gorge in the rain forest. It was a little crowded with locals—this being Sunday—but we found a spot along the Mossman River that was pretty empty. The river was twenty feet deep in the middle, with an interesting jumble of automobile-sized smooth granite boulders. Jungle on either side.

I’m talking true jungle, with vines up and down the gnarled, alien trees. Wads of fern growing in the crotches of the branches. A green parrot feather on the ground. It was great to be there. Sylvia and I spent a half hour in the clear, flowing water.

Later we stopped in at this classic outback Australian pub in Mossman proper. It’s a sugarcane town. The pub had three people in its cavernous interior. They were watching a cricket game on TV, and they were quite drunk. The bartender, a skinny guy with a frightening stare, started telling us about crocodiles in the Mossman River.

“Not that they’d be up where you were swimming—they don’t crawl up past the rocks. But here in town there’s some spots where the river’s very deep, with dark holes. You’d be making a mistake to swim down here. Last year a croc ate a boy and his dog.” He pressed his hands against his lean stomach, his eyes haunted.

“I ate crocodile for dinner last night,” I told him, which was true. “Getting the jump on them.”

“How was it prepared?”

“In a Malaysian curry. It was good. Firmer than I’d expected.”

“Lovely.”

After the outback bar, we went into Port Douglas, a hip town. We saw a bunch of local freaks with dreadlocks having a picnic and playing Frisbee. We got supper in a cafe at the wharf, the tip-ass end of nowhere, the edge of the world. All through the meal we heard the squawking of a flock of maybe a thousand lorikeets—large birds like parrots—settling down for the evening in a grove of palms nearby. Yeah, baby.

December 8-10, 2009. Dive Great Barrier Reef.

So yesterday we made our way into downtown Cairns, returned our rental car, and hooked up with our live-aboard dive boat, the Spirit of Freedom. It’s nice and big. About ten divers. Sylvia and I have a room with a private bathroom, a double bed, and four portholes. Good stuff. I’ll be doing scuba dives, and she’ll do some snorkeling.

I was anxious about diving again, as it’s been two years. And in the mean time I had that brain hemorrhage. My brain guy assured me it would be okay, but I was a little uneasy anyway. I paired up with a guy about my age for my dive partner. He has a comparable amount of dive experience—something like sixty dives—and it worked out fine.

There’s some standard behaviors that arise when I dive. Often, at the start of a dive, I’ll be rushing, swimming fast, as if I was going to find something different around the next coral head. But really, everything you want to see is pretty much everywhere. The reefs and the undersea environment are a fractal. If you look twice as hard at a given spot, you see three times as much.

Another common thing is that, after about ten minutes, I’ll think, “Okay, I’ve seen it all, I’m done, can I get out now?” But really, you want to stay in about forty minutes and empty out your air tank. You have to relax in order to stay that long. Become absorbed; get involved. A scuba dive is more like listening to a long symphony than it is like having sex. You don’t rush to a peak.

I always worry about my air supply, but over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at stretching it out. You lose face if you run out of air way before all the others in your party.

A discombobulating thing about diving is that you can’t stop still in one place. On land, if I really want to study something, I hunker down and stare for as long as I like. But in the water, I’m always drifting—propelled by currents, by the motions of my limbs, and by the bobbing of my body as I breathe in and out. It’s bad form to grab onto the coral, as this damages it.

To start off our trip, we tooled out about thirty miles to the Saxon Reef and did two dives. We saw sharks, a turtle and some giant clams—I mean giant as in four feet across. I worship these creatures, they’re like yonic gods, embodiments of the female creative force, each of their cracks veiled by a mantle bearing an elegant, one-of-a-kind, leopard-spot Turing pattern, and with fringed holes in the mantle displaying the clam-goddesses secret innards—disks and fringes of a creamy white.

And then we steamed all night to the vicinity of Ribbon Reef #10, maybe a hundred miles from Cairns. It was raining most of the time.

The rocking of the boat got to me over the evening, and when they set a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes in front of me for supper, I went up to our room and filled two sickbags with puke. They told us the bags are of rice-paper, which disintegrates quickly in the water, and that we should throw them overboard after filling them.

“The fish all come. For them, it’s Christmas.”

I slept badly as my left hip is paining me. I woke every hour on the hour like a cuckoo clock. Outside the portholes, the clouds had cleared up, and the moon was laying down a wrinkled highway of light upon the sea. The boat wallowed along. With my stomach empty it felt okay.

In the morning at 7 am we dived a so-called bommie by the name of Pixie Pinnacle. Bommie is from an Aboriginal word bomara that means underwater mountain. I’d thought I might not be out of bed in time for the dive, but I’d gone to bed around 8:30 pm and I was more than ready leave my uneasy bed at 6:30 am.

The underwater Pixie Peak is a ninety-foot high tower of coral, about thirty feet across, kind of a butte. We dropped down to the bottom, and wound our way upwards around the bommie, our path like a barber-pole stripe.

My dive buddy and I got down to ninety feet before the others, and the very first thing I saw was a large cuttlefish. Be still my heart. I’ve wanted to see a cuttle for years—Australia is one of the few places you’re likely to find them.

This particular cephalopod was easily three feet long, just like one I put into my painting Under My Bed. I did that painting in 2001 as a preliminary to imagining my space-cuttlefish character Professor Bumby for Frek and the Elixir. The cuttle I saw today had a facial squid-bunch of tentacles demurely gathered into a cone pointing my way. His eyes had an unfathomable expression, due to the pupils being shaped like the letter W. The hula-skirt frill-fin that circled the bulk of his body was in constant motion, easing him backwards away from me, his eldritch eyes tracking my movements. And then he was gone.

Looking at some of the bright little damsel fish along the wall of the bommie, I was struck by how awkward they are. Their only tools for delicate maneuvers are these two little paddle fins on their sides by their gills. And at any time, random tendrils of current are canting them to one side or the other. I feel an affinity for the damsel fish—I imagine that I’m in control of my life, but really all I have are a pair of ungainly fins, flailing away at the sea of reality—richly braided with intricate currents that I can’t see.

I skipped the second scuba dive today, and took Sylvia snorkeling instead. This was in Challenger Bay, a great snorkel spot, where the reef lies just below the surface, forming acres of shallows. Sylvia and I snorkeled along in waters ten feet deep, feasting our eyes on the wacky corals: staghorn heads filled with clans of damsel fish, shelf corals with flower-spotted cod hiding in their shade, dozens of giant clams. And thick pimply sea hares—like sea cucumbers, but bigger, and creamy white with brown spots. Since Sylvia and I were doing most of our swimming with our big flipper fins, we held hands or linked arms. It was nice to be together with her, flying over this alien, jumbled paradise.

In the evening I went for a night dive—this was the first really good night dive I ever had. We came back to the same relatively shallow reef where Sylvia and I had snorkeled. Each diver had a flashlight in hand and a glowstick mounted on his or her tank. The guides had mentioned that the coral might be spawning—they usually do it a few days after the full moon in November or December, and we’d just had a full moon the other day. We did indeed find some spawning coral.

Keep in mind that a coral reef is a colony of individual polyps, each in its own little stony niche. When they spawn, some of the polyps send out clouds of sperm, and others push out little pink eggs the size of BBs, or a bit smaller. Worms, fairy shrimp, small fry, and sea lice crowd around the spawning reef, eating as much of the bounty as they can. Some of the sea lice were nipping my scalp and my hands.

Each little spot on the reef was a scene of great activity—like a zillion tiny replicas of Times Square on New Years Eve. There were dozens of big trevally fish around us, each of them two or three feet long, maybe twenty pounds—they were fascinated by our flashlight beams, and hoping to eat any smaller fish that we highlighted.

In the coral I saw bright red beads shining in the light. Looking closely I could see these were the eyes of tiny little red shrimp nestled in nooks. Some large purple nudibranchs or sea slugs were on the crawl, out to mate with each other as well. They were like big velvety washrags or dishtowels, with a soft pair of feelers at one end. A night of sex on the reef.

After the dive we ate brownies with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. There’s a sense that you can eat any amount of food if your diving. I got up with insomnia around 3:00 am and did yoga on the deck for awhile. It feels extraterrestrial to have all those different constellations in the sky. I think I saw the Southern Cross.

The next morning we had another 7 am dive, which really is kind of brutal. On a live-aboard, the idea is to give you as many dives as you can possibly handle. Typically I’d only do one two-dive session every other day. But on this trip, I did eight dives in three days, plus two snorkel sessions with Sylvia. Not enough snorkeling.

My very last dive was scary. For this one, I partnered with a talkative young wise-guy from New York, a bond trader named Marc. I wanted to prove that I was up to diving with him, and I proposed that we try to complete an ambitious route around three or four bommies, swimming rather deep. I swam lead, and I was kicking my fins too hard, and I ran out of air before we could finish our plan. And by then we were lost—that is, we didn’t know which way the boat was.

So we surfaced, and we saw we were a couple of hundred yards from our ship. Marc still had plenty of air, but since he was my dive buddy, he stayed on the surface with me. We wallowed along just under the surface, breathing through snorkels, heading for the ship. The closer we got to the ship, the stronger the currents got. The water very rough. My strength gave out. I couldn’t swim the last fifty yards.

An inflatable boat from the ship was buzzing around, keeping an eye on us all. I signaled to him and he came over to pick us up—drama. When he got us back near the ship, the surf had grown so high that the inflatable boat couldn’t fasten to the ship itself. So Marc and I had to jump back out again and swim the last few feet, waves crashing all around. I was totally wiped out.

December 11, 2009. Final Days in Cairns.

The dive boat dropped a bunch of us on Lizard Island, a desert island that holds an airstrip and a small, posh, thousand-dollar-a-night resort. The first European to live on Lizard Island was a guy called Watson. He was trying to make a living by harvesting sea cucumbers, also known as bêches-de-mer. The idea was to sell them to the China trade as virility enhancers. Any animal product that’s shaped at all like a penis seems to be marketable for this purpose. Think of the stiff quills within shark fins. Not that you’d really want your dick to look like a shark fin or a sea cucumber…

Our little group hiked through some bush and over a ridge to get to the deserted asphalt airstrip. The hike was interesting, a touch of the real Australia, all weird plants and red rocks, the sun implacably beating down, our bodies bathed in sweat. I saw a four-foot-long lizard amid the scrubby rocks.

And then we flew back to Cairns in a tiny plane, low above the water. I felt dizzy and off-kilter from all those dives.

Sylvia and I spent the last two nights of our trip in Cairns, killing time and soaking up Australian vibes.

One night we walked into a random live performance in an art center near our hotel, and they were doing a freak show, kind of like they do in San Francisco—eating razor blades, putting their elbows into bear traps, shocking themselves with a car battery, and a guy standing on the belly of a dwarf woman who’d arched herself into a bow above a bed of nails. The Mad Max type Australian vibe here.

It was gray, drizzly, and over a hundred degrees each day in Cairns. It was so hot that we didn’t really care if it rained on us. We’d walk around looking at stuff, and when the steady heat started killing us, we’d go back to our hotel and sit in the shallow lukewarm water of the pool, me reading Henry Miller’s collection, The Cosmological Eye—an old edition that I lifted from the Casey House.

Cairns is on a mud flat that’s heavily inhabited by crocodiles. They don’t have a beach. Instead they have a strip of grassy park along the water for about a mile. I rented a bike and rode along the waterfront a couple of times. At the north end, the mangroves start up, totally dense, and full of birds—such as white pelicans with long, sharp beaks. At the south end of the waterfront, Cairns features a yacht harbor and some docks for heavy-duty ships, including oil tankers. I liked the shipyard. It felt like another aspect of the real Australia.

There was a holiday vibe in the air, and the town’s slogan was “SumMerry Christmas.” They had a big Christmas tree decorated with images of kangaroos. Closer to our hotel, however, a whole city block was lined with trees filled with giant fruit bats, who showered the sidewalks with slick guano. Amazing to see those bats flapping around, bigger than any bird I ever saw.

As a souvenir, I bought an expensive Aboriginal-made boomerang. I’ve had a thing for boomerangs ever since I sent in my savings to buy one from an ad in Boy’s Life magazine, fifty years ago.

A fair number of Aboriginal people live around Cairns—I didn’t really see any of them in Melbourne or in Sydney, other than the guys selling didgeridoos on the Circular Quay in Sydney. I sat for awhile in the Cairns town square near the bus station, digging the Aboriginals. The ones who noticed me were friendly, although mostly I was invisible to them.

One couple was having a prolonged argument, a man and a woman, a yelling match, with the woman repeating, “You don’t know me.” I think they were drunk. As if by prearranged signal, they stopped quarrelling and walked off just before a couple of security guards appeared. Down near the water I saw a number of more cheerful Aboriginal families having picnics.

On our very last evening we saw a guy—either he was a park ranger or a crazy bum—doing a kind of performance down by the water. He showed us a quoll, which is one of three carnivorous marsupials native to the Australian continent, the other two being the Tasmanian devil and the Tasmanian tiger.

The quoll is about the size of a cat, but it’s not like a cat. And, despite the sound of its name, it’s not like a koala bear either. The quoll had a weird-shaped head with a long snout. It’s fur was dark brown with big white spots, and, as we watched, the keeper fed this guy an entire rat, a piece of chicken, and the tip of a kangaroo tail. The quoll was all business, very self-possessed, ignoring us.

For a final treat, the animal impresario produced a two-foot-long baby crocodile for us to hold and to pose with. The little guy’s mouth was taped shut. I was happy to touch him—he was smooth and slightly warm, soft and supple.

Maybe I should put a crocodile into that novel I was working on before I left home—um, what was that novel called?

Heart Trouble

February 22, 2010. Finish Jim and the Flims

I’ve been doing yet another round of revisions on Nested Scrolls. And working hard on Jim and the Flims. We still don’t have a publisher for it. Susan Protter is trying Orbit Books, and I’m asking Hartwell at Tor to reconsider.

Yesterday I worked all morning on a painting called At the Core of the World—it’s a visualization of a scene near the end of Jim and the Flims. And in the afternoon, I finished writing the book’s ending—wrote it on my laptop in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting coffee shop, with Sylvia there reading the newspaper next to me. I had my character Jim bring his wife back from the afterworld. Wonderful scene. I’ll be fleshing out the ending a little more, but at this point, yes, the whole of Jim and the Flims is in some kind of finished form.

Cloud on the horizon: I’m having a problem with pains in my heart. Could be I’m about to drop dead?

Hey, I should relax! My nineteenth novel is done. And I like how it turned out.

Thank you, Muse.

March 1, 2010. Heart Operation Ahead.

Sitting here in the coffee shop as usual, trying to collect my thoughts.

A month ago I started getting a pain in my chest when bicycling up a hill or even when climbing steep stairs. And I’d also get the pain when I was angry or sad.

I took a guess that I have what they call angina—a condition that my father had before he got his coronary by-pass operation at age sixty. So I went to my doctor, who sent me to a cardiologist, a young Chinese guy. I think he went to Berkeley.

He gave me some tests, and it turns out that some of the arteries that bring blood to the muscle of my heart are to some extent clogged. Heart disease. So in a couple of days I go into the hospital and the cardiologist will run a bunch of tubes and feelers into the big femoral artery in my groin, and reach up inside me to do stuff in my heart. Look inside my heart and examine things—what you call an angiogram. Maybe while he’s at it, he’ll nudge my arteries open, or put in some stents—little tubes to prop the arteries open.

So, yeah, day after tomorrow, it’s gonna be a whole Swiss-knife-style toolkit going inside my heart: camera, balloons, collapsed stent tubes…

Sylvia’s very anxious, maybe even more so than me, at least she talks about it more. I’m more like—quietly paralyzed with fear.

Even in the face of this procedure, I haven’t been able to stop smoking, I’m still kicking along at one or two cigs a day. Crazy. My mother kept on smoking even after she’d had a couple of strokes. She was stubborn about it. She had an ashtray in her room in the rest home. Good old Mom.

It’s kind of striking that the writing of Jim and the Flims is bookended by my brain hemorrhage and my heart procedure. It’s not inconceivable that Jim is the last novel I’ll write. So it’s fitting that most of Jim and the Flims is set in the afterworld.

I do know what I’m doing—even though I don’t generally explain myself, and even though my partial explanations aren’t generally understood. The situation is under control, yes, yes. I’m trekking through the valley of death.

Two attractive fifty-year-old women are sitting at the table in front of me, engaged in an animated conversation in Japanese. I like the way that Japanese and Chinese speech seems to include expressive sounds. Sounds that might play a role like our “uh, hmmm, huh, aha, heh, yum, ugh, er, yay, groan, oho, whee,” and so on. And I don’t think those sounds are in fact words that simply sound odd to me—I think they’re what you might call emotive interjections.

I remember in 1972, when I was talking a lot with the cool old professor, Gaisi Takeuti, who helped me with my thesis work in set theory. Takeuti would intersperse his somewhat rickety English with deeply informative sounds.

The last five days have been intense. Our daughter Georgia flew in from Wisconsin with her two children, Althea and Desmond. Georgia doesn’t really know much about my heart problem She was here to spend two nights with a couple of her old college girl pals in Big Sur, leaving her kids with us.

Sylvia and I were thrilled to have the quality time with Althea and Desmond—we don’t get to see these two as much as we’d like to. There was lots of fun, and good bonding. They got very comfortable with us over the stay. I joked a lot with Althea, jollying her out of any ill humor. She and I had a lot of fun drawing pictures together.

I started seeing Desmond as an image of what I myself was like at age two. His tidily barbered little head reminded me of the photos of me when I was that age. And in some sense I could start seeing through his eyes.

This happens when I’m around any of my children or grandchildren—I flash back to seeing the world through younger eyes. But it’s especially intense with a two-year-old. Takes you back to the dawn of consciousness.

My heart was especially full of joy when walking Desmond to the top of a spring-green hill near our house that we call the donkey hill. There was just joy in my heart, no angina. It’s amazing how a richly positive emotion can blot out your self-circling worries about disease.

Anyway, slowly climbing the hill with Desmond, all the others were already at the top, and I had an impulse to rush and catch up, but I pushed that down, realizing that, at this moment, walking slowly up the hill with Desmond was absolutely the main event for me. I revelled in his little hand and his little head—with the world so big around him, Desmond climbing the hill with Grandpa to meet his mother, grandmother, sister, uncle, aunt, and two cousins. Ah, to be two—back when life made sense.

To thicken the jamboree, Rudy Jr. came down from Berkeley for a couple of days, bringing along his wife Penny, and our two other grandchildren, the twin two-year-old girls, Zimry and Jasper.

I had a second Desmond interlude that I really treasured on Sunday morning. Rudy and I took Desmond down to a tiny rain-filled rivulet or stream in a green gully behind our house. We spent about an hour playing there, mostly helping Desmond throw rocks in the water. I proposed names for the rocks, and Dez would plop them. Names for the rocks: “The Georgia-bomb rock, the Althea-bomb, the Poppa-bomb…” on through all the members of the extended family several times.

It felt like an initiation ceremony, a do-it-yourself welcoming ritual, the lovely little boy there by the living water with his uncle and his grandfather, naming the relatives, and turning them into splashes in the flowing stream. The quasi-ceremonial nature of it was important to me, given my enhanced sense of mortality just now. And for the last rock, I had him throw a Grandpa rock higher upstream than the others, a nice big splash. Time is a stream, life is a river, we’re ripples that fan out and die away.

We three were hunkered under a large, slanting mossy tree beside the rill. And as I got to my feet to go, I bumped against a large shelf mushroom at the base of the trunk. The mushroom snapped off, freeing the tree of its parasitic growth. Auspicious sign! Rudy and I picked some very large roly-poly bugs out from the exposed, crumbly wood, showing them to Desmond. He liked the bugs, but he didn’t care to touch them.

Georgia came home from her Big Sur outing very upbeat and relaxed, it was great to see. One night, after everyone went to bed, I sat up for a half hour with Georgia, quietly talking, catching up, sharing some of our thoughts. It was wonderful to have that time with her. I love her voice and her face.

March 2, 2010. In the Aether.

That angiogram heart procedure is tomorrow morning at 10 am. Today I was working on amassing photos to accompany my autobiography, Nested Scrolls. My digital photos only go back to 2002, so I hauled out some of our old photo albums and scanned pictures out of them. This process was very nostalgic, kind of a good place for me to be, here on the eve of my next step into geezerhood.

When I’m on the brink of doom, daily life seems precious. The threat of death zaps me into a higher level of awareness. I relish sounds and colors, and people’s shapes, and their voices.

Typing this at the Roaster, I see the cafe as a lovely reef beneath the water. We patrons are anemones, mollusks, crustaceans, fish. We’re splashes of life and color in an eddying and all-pervading fluid that happens to be air, not water.

And our innards are aglow with luminiferous aether, yas.

Other than my travel notes, I haven’t written much in these journals since the summer of 2008, back when I was getting it together in the wake of my brain hemorrhage. One reason is that I got so heavily into the twinned projects of the Nested Scrolls memoir, and the Jim and the Flims novel. Those books were written out of the same impulse, that is, a wish to come to terms with the ineluctability of death. I wanted to prove to myself that I could in fact still write a book—so I wrote two books.

The difference between journal notes and travel notes is that the journal notes aren’t necessarily about anything significant in the outer world. They’re more like the free play of thought. A way for me to find out what I think and feel.

March 7, 2010. In Limbo.

So last week I went in for the heart thing, and my cardiologist didn’t actually put in any stents. I don’t quite understand why. He’s not very good at verbal communication. I guess my problem is so bad that he wanted to discuss our strategy before going further.

The thing is, two out of my three main coronary arteries are completely blocked, which is worse news than expected. The good news is that I have quite a few writhing little collateral pathways that are taking up the slack, which is why my heart muscle isn’t starving for oxygen and hurting all the time. But we really need to take action.

I talked to my San Francisco friend Michael Blumlein about it. He’s a doctor and an SF writer. Michael kept coming back to the fact that I only have one working coronary artery out of three.

“So if the third one clogs up, I’m in trouble,” I said, finally getting the picture.

“If it clogs up you’re dead,” said Blumlein patiently.

My cardiologist thinks he can poke through the blockages and put in metal stent-tubes. He’s all set to go back in. One catch is that after a stent, you have to take an anti-clotting drug for a year. And, on an anti-clotting drug, I might have a heightened chance of a brain hemorrhage similar to the one I had two years ago. But now we did an MRI scan of my brain, and my brain surgeon says the anti-clotting drug shouldn’t be a problem.

An alternate option would be to have open-heart surgery and to get three or four arteries grafted onto my heart to bypass the blocked arteries. They’d get the arteries from the muscles in my chest. A cardiac surgeon talked to me about this. He was giving his strategy a very hard sell. He was overbearing. I didn’t like him.

The downside of a bypass is that they saw your breastbone in half, you’re in the hospital for five days, and you’re convalescing for six weeks. A deeper objection on my part is that, after seeing what Pop’s bypass operation did to him, I have a phobia about that procedure.

My post-bypass father was the transreal model for the character Cobb Anderson in my novel Software. In my novel, Cobb has been replaced by a robot copy of him. That’s a little how Pop seemed after his bypass, at least for awhile.

In any case, my cardiologist is still pushing for the stents. I had to take what the two doctors said with a slight grain of salt. Each of them believes in his own technique. And each of them is looking to get the job.

I was, in a way, surprised that the doctors were leaving the choice up to me. But that’s how it is. So I talked to some people about the stent vs. bypass choice, and I did quite a bit of research on the web, with Wikipedia and its links being the must useful.

So, to make a long, anguished, and soul-searching story short, I’m getting the stents in a week or two. As soon as the guy can fit me in. Meanwhile I feel fragile. Like a water-balloon that could easily burst. Living in the shadow of death.

Friday, Sylvia and I went to Berkeley and walked about half a mile to a playground with Jasper and Zimry. On Saturday, we drove down to Santa Cruz and had dinner with our old friends the Beesons and the Pearces. It was so good to be with my friends, making jokes, being silly, singing, getting away from this last month’s morbid worries. Today we went to church, and now I’m—where else but in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting company, typing and drinking a gunpowder green tea.

To distract myself over the last few days, I put together issue #9 of my webzine, Flurb. It looks great.

This time around, I mostly published over-the-transom pieces mailed to me by strangers. I received about thirty stories like this, and published eight of them. Three really stand out—tales by Kek, Christopher Shay, and Adam Callaway. Each of these three was surrealistic, and in some way loosely connected to the spirit world. I got into an intense series of revisions on Shay’s story with him, wanting to bring out its full potential. I think this one could get an award. If anyone notices it.

I solicited three good stories from pros as well, with my biggest score being a story from Danny Rubin, the screen-writer of my favorite SF movie ever: Groundhog Day. I rounded out the issue with an excerpt from Jim and the Flims, and a collage-cartoon from Paul Di Filippo.

Flurb has a really large readership, over a hundred thousand. Over the last half year or so, the zine has made its way onto some lists that beginning writers use to find markets, and I worry this could balloon out of control. I have to read the submissions and, as a writer myself, I feel duty-bound to write helpful notes to the authors of the stories I don’t publish.

I really couldn’t handle it if I got sixty or a hundred stories. So I’m backing off from open submissions for now. Issue #10 will be by invitation only.

Typing this, I’m half-watching the Oscars in the living room, and right now they’re showing a collage of images of all the Hollywood people who died this year. I’m sure I’ve got a few years to go.

I’d like to start writing something, but it’s hard to get into that, with the heart procedure coming this week or next week. I’ll be glad to get that done. I’ll feel safer then, more robust. Day to day, I feel quite normal.

I finally did quit smoking three or four days ago, and my heart feels a little better. I’d noticed the last few months that I got a pain in my chest whenever I had a cigarette, and I’d thought that was something in my lungs. But now I realize that a cigarette constricts my coronary arteries and causes oxygen deprivation in the heart muscle with concomitant pain. Jeez.

This afternoon and evening, I spent a couple of hours tweaking the design of my art book, Better Worlds. I have color pictures of about sixty of my paintings in there. Making the book is fairly time-consuming, as the image files are large and unwieldy. Also I don’t really know what I’m doing. The book currently exists as a print-on-demand title on a website called Lulu. You order one, and then Lulu prints it, mails it to you, and pays me a cut. It’s a new channel. I don’t think I’ll sell many copies of Better Worlds—but I want to order a stash of ten or twenty copies for myself. I’ll give some of these away, and try to sell some at the art show I have coming up in April.

Blank slate.

“Learn to walk away from stress,” as my hospital cardiac guide pamphlet says. Not that I ever remember good advice for long.

I got some fertilizer for the palm tree and for the lawn. And today I spent a half hour saddle-soaping a dirty and torn old leather jacket that Sylvia was urging me to throw away.

I’d like to relax and have fun, now that I’m done with my latest long stint in the writing cave. This evening I’m listening to some of my old vinyl records. I should be paying attention to the world while I can. Enjoying it. Doing nothing.

That was something that getting drunk and stoned used to help me do—to sit around doing nothing. Maybe now, after nearly fourteen years of continuous sobriety, I can finally figure out how to relax and do nothing on my own.

March 9, 2010. Anomie in Frisco.

Today Sylvia and I went to the MOMA in San Francisco, we’d been wanting to go into town. They have a 75th anniversary show on, featuring pictures from their permanent collection, not all of which I’ve seen on their walls before. I admired a really nice painting from Baker Beach by Robert Weeks and a wonderfully red pre-figurative California abstract painting by Elmer Bischoff.

Afterwards, Sylvia went up to Union Square, and I walked through the back streets to the Hobart Building on Market Street. There’s a space on the ground floor in there called the Variety Club Preview Room. It’s like a small film theater. It’s used by various charity and arts groups, including my pals who run the “SF in SF” series of talks, that is, Science Fiction in San Francisco.

I’ve read at SF in SF several times, and recently we arranged for me to have a two-month art show during April and May, 2010. The show will be in the smallish lobby and bar area off the Varsity screening room. So today I wanted to go there and think about how to hang my show. The place looks somewhat grotty in the daytime, but in the evening, with a crowd of people and drinks on sale, it warms up. I don’t think it’s overly likely I’ll sell any pictures there—but you always hope.

It was a cold, windy gray day, and my arthritic left hip was hurting a lot—to the point of dominating my thoughts. I have a deep, lingering chest cold, my usual winter special. And I’m worried off and on about the precarious situation of my heart.

Walking to the Hobart Building and then on towards Union Square, I felt weary and doomed. I’m old and feeble. My body is falling apart. Looking at the clusters of pedestrians, I imagined their dead selves as mirror-images walking upside-down underground. Our ghosts shadow us, all of us barely afloat on a quicksand of death—especially me, more than half-dead. The flame of life flickers; we fret and strut for naught.

This isn’t exactly depression—as there are some very real and objective medical problems that I’m worried about. But the net effect is the same. Call it sadness. Walking around the city, I felt exhausted and lost. I wanted to be home lying on the couch, nursing my heart, waiting for my operation.

On a whim, I walked into the Mechanics’ Institute Library, a San Francisco institution I’d heard of but never visited. It’s on Post Street near Market. Jim Flack, a friend from college, is the director there, and he’d mentioned in a recent email that I should come see him. He was friendly and glad to see me.

Being at a psychic low-point, I was glad for a chance to reach out to an old friend.

March 14, 2010. Slow Days.

I’m supposed to get my stents on Wednesday, March 17, St. Paddy’s Day. Sylvia and I had planned a trip to Venice for this month. I’d been invited to give a conference talk on mathematics and art—and the organizers were going to pay all our expenses. But now that’s cancelled and I’m not being paid anything.

Meanwhile I’d already bought our plane tickets, and I can’t get a refund for them. All I can do is reschedule the flights for some random time in the future, to some other random spot in Europe, so I’m doing that. Lisbon in April, 2011, why not. I should live so long.

Waiting for the stent operation is wearing me down, I can feel myself becoming more and more snappish and self-centered. I’m dour, joyless, unlovable, a burden. My days seem long and empty. I can’t find anything I want to read, and I’m not writing.

I feel uneasy about going out and exercising—taking big bike rides like I used to do. Because I get that pain in my heart. Yesterday, I went ahead and hiked up to the pond on St. Joseph’s hill, and I took a nitroglycerin pill on that first steep slope when my heart started to hurt.

My hip’s still hurting all the time, sometimes the hip is all I can think about. Quite possibly the increase in pain is a side-effect of my stress over the heart thing. The other day I remembered that you can get an orthopedic surgeon to inject cortisone down into your hip joint to damp the inflammation for a few months at a time, so I’m thinking about doing that. If I go through with the stents, I wouldn’t be able to get an actual hip replacement for about a year. So I’ll look into the cortisone.

Christ, I’m old; this entry is horrible; I’m maundering on about doctors and disease.

I’ve been painting with oils this last week, switching over from the acrylic paints I’ve been using for the last year or two. The mixing qualities of oil paints are different than those of acrylic paints. Oils pack more pigment and cover more. With oils, the paint stays quite wet for two or three days, and you can wipe things off with a cloth, if you want to. And there’s this interesting thing that you can jiggle the borders between two differently colored regions—you nudge the paint back and forth, rather than painting over, as you do with acrylics. And it’s easier to blend colors with oils—the new colors mix in with the old ones instead of sitting on top.

I finished Heart Exam the other day, it shows my face in profile, me lying on my back with a curtain of blood in the upper right hand corner. I used a whole tube of metallic gold oil paint to get an icon effect—I underpainted with gold, and I left the gold exposed for a lot of the background. Yes, it’s rather self-dramatizing, but, hey, one’s worries come out in the art.

And now I’m working on the seemingly more upbeat Giant Octopus Wearing a Silly Hat. The oversized red cephalopod is wearing a lampshade, or maybe it’s a wash tub. He’s on a beach near a tree with a guy under the tree making friends with him. I have this big fascination with red paint right now. Blood.

I’m using some nice reds: a medium cadmium red, a dark cadmium red, and an alizarin crimson, which is a lovely deep shade with a touch of blue. I used them all on my octopus.

And—doh!—I just realized that the octopus represents my heart, and the tentacles are my arteries. Is the silly hat a stent? I’m in a sad state. But I do like working on this picture. Maybe it’s a psychic turning point. And now I painted an image of a little man in a bathing suit—that’s me—and he’s shaking hands with the behatted octopus. Making friends with my heart.

I’ll be okay.

Today is Sunday, an extra-long, extra-slow day. I’ve done yoga, painted, and biked down to Los Gatos Coffee Roasting. I’m in the coffee roaster right now and—it’s only three in the afternoon. What the hell do I do with the rest of the day?

Sylvia just turned up here and, good news, I’d forgotten that daylight savings time starts today, so it’s actually four in the afternoon. Yes! Before long it’ll be suppertime and soon after, sweet relief, I can go to bed.

Aside from the heart worries, I’m totally jonesing for the endorphin high of creative bliss that I get when I’m writing. Pretty soon I’m going to have to start working on a short story, I guess. But I feel too scattered to do that as yet. I’m not quite ready to get back onto the fiction treadmill.

When I finish a book, I’m always thinking that this time, with no work to do, I’m going to enjoy doing nothing. As I mentioned the other day, I’d really like to get the hang of that. I’m such a workaholic Puritan.

Writing in this diary is a half measure. That is, it gives me a slight trickle of writing bliss, and it’s pointless enough to be close to doing nothing. A synthesis of creativity and idleness.

But painting is better. When I’m painting, I shut down that eternal inner monologue, a.k.a. The Voice In My Head.

March 19, 2009. Whew.

So on March 17, 2010, I got two overlapping stents put into one of the blocked arteries. I was in a dim, cold windowless room. Videoscreens, hovering machinery, and several people wearing masks. They shaved me, poked me, and began dripping anaesthetic into my veins. That’s an odd moment, knowing that in seconds you’ll be gone.

Afterwards the doctor said it was a “very difficult case,” and that he was in there for almost three hours. Maybe he’ll do my other coronary artery next month. He didn’t get to it today. At this point the main thing is that my heart doesn’t hurt anymore.

Life is an amazing gift.

Selling Jim and the Flims

March 30, 2010. Virtualization.

I’m feeling pretty lively this week. Improved circulation. Blood coursing through my brain. I’m riding my bike and feeling no pain.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of virtualization. What got me started on this kick was reading some SF in which characters are living, or might be living, in a virtual world that might be a subprocess of our own reality. I’m thinking both of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Chronic City and of Christopher Shay’s great Flurb story “IntheBeginning.”

The notion took on another aspect when I heard son Rudy talking about how his internet company Monkeybrains can set up virtual machines for their clients to use as their servers. But the seemingly separate server machines are virtual constructs that share one physical box.

Looked at in another sense when, you build a house, you’re making a virtual world for yourself. A place where it’s warm and dry and the bugs and dogs can’t come in—unlike the “real” world. A beaver dam is a virtual world, and so is an anthill.

When Peter Lamborn Wilson writes about congenial gatherings as “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” he’s writing about virtualization. Sometimes you manage to fall into a scene that’s out of this world. An alternate world to live in, an all-meat VR. No computers involved.

Why do we always think we need computers for interesting things? It’s a temporary fad, like mankind’s earlier obsessions with radiation, or electricity, or alchemy.

Travel to new places, or simply a visit to a new part of town, or even to a fresh neighbor’s house—it’s always about exploring virtual worlds. I’m groping for an SF concept here.

These days, with no particular writing project in mind, more and more things are spontaneously taking on the look of SF stories. It’s how I see the world, especially when I’m casting about for something to write about.

The other day, I was watching a 1964 concert movie called The T.A.M.I. Show. It shows a very wide range of acts, including, near the end, James Brown followed by the Rolling Stones.

I like the idea of James Brown, but his music had never done much for me—not even when I saw him live at the Louisville State Fairgrounds in 1962. Self-absorbed yelps. It doesn’t seem like he actually sees the audience.

Surely James Brown was a role model for Mick. Certainly their shoes are similar. But the Mick of 1964’s dance moves are lackadaisical, quasi-ironic, more like sketches of things he might do. Meta-dance. At that time, many thought Mick inferior to James, but Mick was in fact doing something new and different.

What impressed me the most was Mick’s eyes—he’s so alert, watching the audience and the other band members, continually aware of his surroundings, although at certain points he too goes into the chanting trance of the singer.

And now we get back to virtualization.

In one cross-stage shot I could see the big-ass Electronovision cameras they were using to simulcast the T.A.M.I. concert to movie theaters—as well as to record it for posterity. And here I had an SF feeling. The trope of the new transmission device. For 3D, or maybe for feelies, or telepathy, or matter transmission.

I’d like to have been at that concert. Suppose we assume that time-travel is impossible. So then, the only way to go is to virtualize the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium of 1964, and go into that VR. Assume that I want the musicians and the go-go dancers to look exactly like in the film. And maybe I’ll go ahead and have it be in silvery shades of black and white. How do I get there?

The traditional way is to plug wires into my brain and jack me into a computer simulation. But I tend to think computer-based VR is never going to be all that convincing. The simulation would have to be in some sense physical, analog, perhaps based on quantum-computers.

But if you’re going physical like that, why screw around with wires in your brain. Make a damned tunnel to a bubble world. That’s the way to do it. I’m going there now.

I’ll catch a buzz with Mick and Teri Garr—she’s the go-go dancer throwing her head around and doing zombie moves behind Chuck Berry. Terri will be my date, and Mick will have Leslie “It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To” Gore. We four stroll down to the Santa Monica beach—and ride off in a chrome-gray UFO.

April 6-10, 2010. Art Show in the Hobart Building.

As I mentioned before, I have an art show coming up in the Hobart Building on Market Street in San Francisco. The gallery is a small space, but it has a bar. And I think I can squeeze in twenty paintings. I’ve been figuring out the selection and the prices. And planning the opening party.

To have some stuff to sell besides paintings, I produced twenty-five copies of my paperback book, Better Worlds, which has my sixty-six paintings in it. The books cost me $20 each, and I’m hoping to sell them for $25. Promo, not profit. I’m also planning to sell a few prints of my paintings. I made up twenty large, high-quality prints, using my new, high-end, ten-color, inkjet printer and some classy rag art paper. With the price of the ink and the paper, it costs me about $10 per print. I might charge $15 or $20 each.

Two bright spots on the art front. A lady in Herndon, Virginia—she bought The Sex Sphere last year—is buying all three paintings in my Hylozoic triptych. And a young rapper/philosopher-of-science/inventor that I know, Eamon Carrig, the son of my dear, sadly deceased, grad-school friend Jim Carrig, is buying my old cuttlefish painting, Under My Bed, plus my latest, Giant Octopus With Silly Hat. Yeah, baby.

What with paying the non-insurance-covered share of the bills for my heart stent work, and with paying for the new kickass Windows 7 computer that my son Rudy built me, my bank account is down in the red zone, so these sales arrive just in time.

I was telling brother Embry on the phone that what I’m getting for the Hylozoic triptych is about what I get for a novel these days. I was exaggerating. But it would be cool if I could keep inching the art biz upward. Or not. Just painting for fun is okay, too.

Whether or not it pays, turning painter seems like a good move for an aging writer. As a teenager, I remember being impressed when I learned that the old geezer Henry Miller was able to sell his dashed-off paintings. Forget the words, just smear the colors around!

About seventy people came to the opening of my show. SF fans, young people from Rudy’s crowd, San Jose State colleagues and former students, backers of the charity that runs the exhibition space, fellow SF writers, and my artist friends Paul Mavrides and David Povilaitis. Povilaitis did the drawings for my nonfiction book, The Fourth Dimension.

I now feel a little abashed about how lathered up I was about this show—ferrying in my newly printed Better Worlds book, and making those high-quality prints. I sold four books and only one print, although people kept pawing through them. Fortunately I had the prints in big glassine envelopes, so they’re not smudged.

Nobody showed the slightest interest in buying a painting. Maybe I marked their prices too high—I was feeling confident from selling those five paintings earlier this month. It’s very hard to set the prices of your art. The vast majority of people won’t buy art no matter how cheap it is—so there’s some logic to making the prices medium-to-high so you do get decent money from those exceedingly rare, gotta-have-it buyers.

I didn’t get to discuss the paintings as much as I would have liked to. An opening is more scene than exhibition. My mathematician friend Nathaniel Hellerstein was perhaps the most attentive. He noticed the sadness in the eyes of the octopus in Octopus Wearing a Silly Hat, and, regarding my Summer Day, he was struck by the contradiction between the infinitely rapid flying saucer and the slowness of alien snails who travel within it. Nat and my other mathematician friends appreciated the Escherian resonance of Topology of the Afterworld, which has an infinite space squeezed into the center. Like about six of my recent paintings, Topology has a connection with my novel Jim and the Flims.

So now the pictures are on their own for six weeks. The space isn’t a true gallery with a custodian, it’s more like a lounge or lobby. A lot of people pass through there, which is good, I guess, but I do worry about the paintings.

In the wake of the show, Sylvia and I are staying in San Francisco for a couple of nights. Today I walked over to North Beach and spent at least an hour in City Lights Books. What a feast of literature there. And I was looking at Jaime Hernandez’s graphic novels about Maggie, Hopey and Isabel.

I also spent some time in Caffe Trieste—that good old beatnik lair—writing down ideas for stories. I’m thinking I’d like to write some short stories for now. I can’t face any kind of long writing project.

June 17, 2010. After Noreen’s Funeral.

My brother Embry’s wife Noreen died on June 6, 2014. I went to Louisville the next day to be with Embry, and I stayed a week. Sylvia, our kids, Embry’s kids and grandchildren, and Noreen’s seven brothers and sisters came as well. A big family reunion.

The funeral was in the old St. Francis Church where Embry and I were baptized, sang in the choir, and were confirmed. Pop was the assistant minister there in the early 1960s. Mom’s funeral was there too. Noreen was cremated, and her ashes went into a box we buried in a spot of grass down the hill from the church, near where my nursery-school playground was. Right near where we put Mom’s ashes. It was terrible to see Noreen’s box go into the ground.

They had a receiving line in the parish hall. I shook hands with several hundred people. Some of them were unexpected faces from the past. A woman I’d admired from afar in high school. The doctor who had my spleen removed after I ruptured it in 1960. This doctor’s son, who’d been in my boy scout troop at St. Francis. One of my brother’s old friends Corky, telling a story about how they’d drag-raced Corky’s Corvette on River Road in 1958. A slightly-older-than-me woman, Sherry Keith, who was about the first girl I ever admired, back in 1949 when I was three.

Before and after the funeral, the assembled family ate endless meals, sitting on the front porch of Embry’s farmhouse. Talking, reminiscing, sometimes laughing, finding our way towards resolution. Noreen’s death leaves a hole in the lives of Embry and his kids—a hole that is, for now, too big to take the measure of, too big and ragged to explore.

We had six of the grandchildren there in all, two of mine and four of Embry’s. It’s comforting to see the new shoots starting up, the saplings beside the fallen tree.

Within my family, Noreen is the first of our generation to die. At times I’d mentally confuse this funeral with my mother’s. It’s hard to grasp that the Reaper has moved down to our tier.

Louisville was lovelier than I’d remembered. The evening sun on the rolling pastures with their tidy fences, the glare of light on the early morning dew, the burgeoning density of the plants. I took a few walks in the woods, astounded at the huge, floppy leaves, pumped up with rain. In California, where it hardly rains, the plants are fibrous, woody, glazed. In Kentucky, the plants are almost like water balloons.

Nearly every day we had a thunderstorm, often at night. The flash and boom, with the rain falling in sheets.

A ghost story. Sylvia and I were sleeping in a bedroom on the second floor of Embry’s house. Noreen had a work table in the hall outside our bedroom—she made drawings and paintings there. At some point during the night after her funeral, I awoke. A storm in full swing. Without knowing why, I got out of bed and went into the hall. Down at the other end of the hall, Noreen’s work table was glowing with light. The lamp light on the table was turned on—and it had been dark when we went to bed. I walked over to the table, feeling a very strong presence of Noreen’s spirit. I looked at the art on table for awhile, then turned off the light and went back to bed, with the lightning still flickering outside.

After Louisville, Sylvia and I flew to Madison, Wisconsin, to visit some more with Georgia and her family. Last night, I was talking to Georgia, and she said, “What do you want your funeral to be like?”

My spontaneous answer: “I don’t give a fuck.”

For some reason this delighted her, I think she felt liberated from having to worry about having some plan. I used to think I’d care about my funeral, but it’s become increasingly clear to me that I’m not going to be there.

As always I had fun with little Althea and Desmond. Althea likes a good joke, and she makes wonderful faces to illustrate her moods. Desmond gave me sunny smiles when I’d play with him. We spent a lot of time building sand castles, Lego towers, and surreal Tinkertoy assemblages.

I’m a mastodon compared to these kids, an ice-age behemoth.

August 20, 2010. Nibble for Jim and the Flims. Turing Chronicles?

I just heard from Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books that they hope to make an offer for Jim and the Flims. This gives me a lot of energy towards writing another novel. I’m not washed up after all, not adrift on an ice floe like a toothless superannuated Eskimo!

“And lo, the stone was rolled from the entrance to his tomb.”

I’ve been thinking about treating two of my short stories—“The Imitation Game” and “Tangier Routines”—as chapters of a novel about the beleaguered and kinky computer pioneer, Alan Turing. I can see the novel emerging as a fix-up, that is, as a smoothed-over series of stories. I might call it The Turing Chronicles.

So I wrote another Turing story, “The Skug.” A skug is living glob of undifferentiated tissue, and Turing learns how to turn himself into one, thereby becoming a shapeshifting telepath.

I picked that word because my granddaughters Jasper and Zimry say “skug” for “slug.” The little girls and I like to open up Rudy’s composting bin and look at the worms and count the big fat slugs who live in there as well. We got to eleven the other day, and Jasper said, “Yeven skug,” and Zimry agreed. “Eyeven skug.”

At this point I need to pause and focus and think about why I want to write this Turing novel. What does it mean to me? Where do I want it to take me? And—a related question—how can I grow my three-chapter stub into a book?

I relate to Turing. His oddness, his love of logic, his interest in physical experimentation, his fascination with the nature of the mind, his messiness, his otherworldliness, his rebellious streak.

Turing’s gayness interests me as it was a concrete and specific way of violating the accepted social norms. It’s a humanizing challenge for me to internalize the gay worldview and to handle it in a believable way. I did write the gay character Ortelius in my Bruegel novel, and I think I can get back into that head space. Writing the Ortelius character was enlightening for me.

The key is to avoid becoming so embarrassed or uneasy or homophobic that I start camping it up or being parodistic—although some camping is good, and I will be doing this in my Burroughs pastiche chapters. That was Burroughs’s style. You don’t want to get all solemn and hushed about homosexuality. It’s not some tragic, deadly disease.

Regarding the story arc for my Turing novel, I’m leaning towards a three-act structure like I’ve used in so many of my novels. It’s the old Monomyth pattern: Departure, Initiation, Return. Alan meets the skugs; Alan goes to Skugland; Alan comes home and kicks butt.

Even more concisely, I might call the pattern zzt-shine-zzt, where the first zzt suggests a rolling forward to encounter something, the shine is the encounter, and the second zzt is the rolling back.

Going way off topic now. In the early 1980s I was using the zzt-shine-zzt phrase with my kids to describe the motions of the groundhog in Punxsutawney Phil, in Pennsylvania, who supposedly comes out of his hole on February 2, and, if he sees his shadow, retreats, thereby predicting six more weeks of winter. I was bitter because the predictions seemed nearly always to be for more winter, and I felt this was a hoax perpetrated upon us by evil forces who wanted us to believe it would be winter, knowing that the back-reaction of society’s massed mentation upon mutable reality would in fact make the prophecy come true. I argued that Punxsutawney Phil was in fact a robot, a stuffed groundhog on wheels—and not a live animal at all. The reality-manipulating authorities simply roll him out, flash a light, and roll him back. Zzt-shine-zzt! The kids loved this rant of mine, they were amused by how passionate and bitter I would get.

August 22, 2010. I Sell Jim and the Flims.

It’s about 11:30 am, I’m on a commuter train riding up to San Francisco with my bicycle, there to cycle over to Richard Kadrey’s house for a potluck afternoon party. I’m on my own, hoping to have fun, alternately looking out the train-car window and scribbling this by hand in a notebook.

Sylvia had a health scare of her own this month. Last week, we two took a break from the doctors by spending a couple of nights at a B&B in Olema, near the Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. On the second morning, I woke before her, and I watched her sleeping, listening to her steady breathing, enjoying the gentle rise and fall of her chest, and thinking how much I treasure her.

I myself still have some lingering worries about my heart—my (can I say asshole?) cardiologist failed in his attempt to put stents into my second blocked heart artery. But there seem to be a lot of collateral side arteries around that one, so I won’t have him try again.

I have increasingly severe arthritis in my left hip, and nearly constant pain from it, the pain rising and falling all day long, and even in the night. Like I keep saying, next year sometime I’ll get a new hip. But not right now.

I’m turning old. Feeling a little down.

Lately the achievements that I strive and scheme towards haven’t felt so rewarding—an art show in San Francisco, a couple of short stories sold to magazines this summer, being guest of honor at a small SF con in Pasadena, doing a reading at Borderlands Books, drawing close to selling Jim and the Flims, anticipating the publication of Nested Scrolls next year, planning a novel about Alan Turing and the Beats, angling for a third art show…

But in my current state of mind, nothing seems quite good enough. I begin to wonder why I get so worked up about my small victories. It’s not like I make much money off the books anymore, or that I’ll ever make much off the art. Yes, I have a moderate number of fans, who send emails and post kind comments on my blog. But it seems likely that my work will fade into obscurity after I die. I’m not going to make that giant jump into stardom that I used to assume was my due. I’m going to fade away.

The true reason for painting and writing remains the same: I enjoy the process. I relish the craft, the discovery, the self-exploration, the surprises brought by the Muse, the intoxicating immersion in the world of the current work. Even so, I’m conditioned to think that I need an audience, lest my efforts seem somehow foolish.

Like I’m always saying, I wish I could stop trying to accomplish things, and frikkin’ relax. So—I’m off to Kadrey’s party.

Riding back on the train at 6:30 pm.

It was a kick to ride my bike across the city, although I was at times worried about getting lost, or about being flattened by the traffic. Cycling through the empty quarters of SoMa where the city’s grid turns, I saw a bum with two presumably stolen bicycles, one on his shoulders, the other being rolled along.

Heading up towards Market, I was briefly riding side by side with a Hells Angel on a motorcycle. And then we came to a gathering of a hundred more Hells Angels, gathered outside some kind of motorcycle store. A few of them good-humoredly jeered at me. The old professor bicycling past with his safety-yellow windbreaker flapping.

Richard lives near Rudy Jr.’s old neighborhood on lower Haight Street, between Webster and Steiner. I was a little too early for the party, so I walked my bicycle along the sidewalk, looking things over.

One of the stores had posters saying Lazertits, and showing images of women with rays of light shooting out of their breasts. They have a Lazertits website—I think it’s about women who dance on stage with literal lasers in their bras.

When I got to Kadrey’s party, I initially thought I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone—this is part of the reason why I used to immediately get drunk at parties. But, as it happened, I ended up in a series of interesting conversations. I’ve slowly, slowly learned that it helps to walk up to people and introduce myself…as opposed to just staring fishily at them from across the room.

I met a gilder, that is, a man who hammers thin sheets of gold onto things like picture frames or cornices. The sheets are very thin—a folder with fifty sheets only weighs about an eighth of an ounce.

I met an electronic musician who agreed with me that it’s criminal to use a repetitive-wallpaper rhythm loop—like you hear in most rave music. With today’s software tools, it’s really so easy to put in a little procedural randomness and texture—and give your beats some grit and some gnarl.

I met a leather-clad pair of women who said they’d been partying for two days, first at the Drag King party, and then at the Drag Queen party. One of them said, with a laugh, “There were even some bio women competing to be the biggest Drag Queen.” It took me a second to grasp that she meant regular, non-transgendered women.

Then Richard took the two women and me aside and showed us some of the fetish photos that he takes for his online Kaos Beauty Klinik site.

Richard is such a trip, so San Francisco, so wholesome and matter-of-fact about his obsessions—things like tattoos, the naïve artist Henry Darger, serial killers, obscure films, and erotic photography. His two novels about Sandman Slim are doing really well, and he has a third in the works. I’m glad to see him getting some rewards from the publishing world. He’s been at it for nearly thirty years.

Shortly before I left the party, a big guy was talking to Richard about publishing. And the guy happened to mention my Tor editor, David Hartwell. And I was like, “That’s my editor.”

It turned out the big guy was Jason Williams of Night Shade Books. He handles the publishing end of things, and Jeremy Lassen, who I already know, handles the acquisitions and the editorial work. I mentioned to Jason that Jeremy had told me he’d make me an offer for Jim and the Flims next week. Jason confirmed this, and was in fact enthusiastic about the deal, and he said Night Shade would, in principle, like to publish a number of books by me.

That’s the news I’ve been needing to hear all summer! So, yeah, it was a great day. I got away from it all, and then, in the end, the business end of things came back at me, on its own schedule and in a positive way.

October 21, 2010. Art in San Francisco.

Sylvia and I were up in San Francisco again. I visited with my artist friend Paul Mavrides, and then the three of us went to see the show “Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay” at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Always great to look at art with Paul. Some really nice Dutch pointillists today.

That evening Sylvia and I went to a reading at Booksmith on Haight Street, and I checked out some vintage cartoon collections. One book included “Death Sentence,” a selection from Tales of Terror #14, March, 1954, with art by Sid Check.

A scientist grows some protoplasmic slime in a glass bottle, much like Alan Turing culturing his skug in my novel. By tweaking his culture with, I think, radiation, the scientist gets the stuff to undergo “a forced rapid evolution of 1,000,000 years,” effectively becoming a creature typical of the far future. Some of the goo gets into a cut on the scientist’s finger and then, “He was a changing, shapeless mass of ulcerative protoplasm.” The goo splits and redivides, eating everyone in sight. Perfect.

It was great being in San Francisco at night in the fog. Such a sense of promise and excitement.

I hadn’t been on Haight Street for about a year, and it looked a little better than I’d remembered. These days I always go to Valencia Street. But there really are some good clothes stores on the Haight, the restaurants aren’t bad, and there weren’t as many gutterpunk panhandlers as usual.

January 25, 2011. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

For whatever reason, most people don’t think of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch as science-fiction, but really it is. More precisely, it’s transreal SF. Remember that transrealism is my name for a form of autobiography in which one’s experiences are made more vivid by transmuting them into SFictional tropes.

Burroughs often wrote admiringly about SF in his letters, and said that’s what he was indeed writing. But people ignore this. Perhaps it’s that so few SF works aspire to such a high literary level, or that Naked Lunch doesn’t have a straight-through plot-line. But if you look at the tropes in the book, it really is SF. Aliens, imaginary drugs, telepathy, talking objects—the gang’s all here.

I’m thinking about Naked Lunch because Burroughs is a character in my novel-in-progress The Turing Chronicles, and because I watched David Cronenberg’s movie of the book last night.

It’s great cinematography—the framing, the colors, the segues, the simple but telling effects. The acting is terrific too. It’s understated, which is important—it’s easy to go over into gauche, hammy stuff when portraying legendary figures like the Beats.

For the purposes of his film, Cronenberg created what some critics call a “metatexual adaptation.” To make Naked Lunch even more transreal, he blends elements of the novel with the by-now-legendary story of Burroughs’s life. The drunken, reckless shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer. The expatriate years in Tangier. Burroughs typing routines for Naked Lunch, high in his Tangier room. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helping Bill arrange his pages into a book manuscript. All of this material is outlined in Burroughs’s letters, and in the reminiscences of his Beat friends. And Cronenberg folds the full transreal oeuvre into his film.

One of my favorite bits in the film is when the Burroughs character is talking to the Paul Bowles character, and the older man is confiding a bunch of shocking intimate things about himself.

And Bill says, “I’m surprised you’re telling me all this.”

And Bowles says, “Well, I’m not saying it out loud. The conversation you’re hearing is telepathic. If you look closely, you can see that the words you’re hearing don’t match the motions of my lips.”

Another great bit is when Bill is passed-out on the beach with, he thinks, his broken typewriter in a gunny-sack. And Jack and Allen show up to rouse him, and Bill mumbles, “A little trouble with my typewriter.” And the boys look in the sack, and all that’s in there is trash—empty pill tubes, cans, bottles.

The whole thing of having weird SFictional events impinging on Bill’s real life will be a key part of The Turing Chronicles. Cronenberg’s movie gives me the feeling that I’m on the right track. Definitely I should give Bill a typewriter in the book.

I found the ending of the Cronenberg movie a downer—he has Bill repeating the same dreadful mistake that he’d made near the start—he semi-accidentally shoots Joan again. For my taste, it’s cheap and obvious to give a novel or a movie a serious feel by using a hard, downbeat climax.

“Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard.”

I’d prefer to end with some upbeat, off-kilter transcendence.

Cronenberg’s ending might be inspired by Burroughs’s remark in one of his introductions that, if he hadn’t shot Joan, then he might not have become a writer. But that’s crap.

I feel that I owe it to the memory of Joan Vollmer to resurrect her in my novel. I don’t like the way that some of the Beats spoke of her afterwards, almost like she was asking for it, or that she didn’t matter.

But Allen Ginsberg didn’t go for that. He wrote a great poem memorializing Joan, and in the poem he asks, “Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead?” I’m seeing some SF inspiration in there. I’ll figure out a way to make Joan’s resurrection work.

If I’m going to write this book, I can’t sidestep the death of Joan.

I emailed my old writer pal Greg Gibson yesterday:

“Getting deeper into the Turing & Burroughs novel. Turing has an affair with Burroughs, I think, and then they try to resurrect Joan—what a horrible disgusting idea, but it seems somehow unavoidable. It’s like a tar-baby, this novel, it just keeps glopping more filth onto me. I’m anxious about figuring out the plot. There’s still some big holes.”

Greg’s answer: “Nice to be busy, iddnt?”

Basque Country

February 15, 2011. Bilbao.

Sylvia and I flew to Bilbao, in the Basque region in northern Spain, near the Atlantic and the border with France. Basque is a separate language, not even a romance language—odd-looking with lots of k’s and x’s.

A group called the Garum Foundation paid our way to come here. I’m supposed to give a talk tomorrow. I’m a little uneasy about the talk, as I’m not fully clear on what’s expected. But I wrote out something and I made some slides. To some extent it’s enough for them that I’m here on the roster. All I really have to do is make them think a little, make them laugh, and leave them with a sense of transcendence. I’ve done gigs like this before.

Our hotel is across the street from the famous Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry. Amazing structure. Sylvia and I walked around the outside of it right away. Down by the river behind the museum, its eldritch buttresses seem like titanium castle walls. We made a quick foray inside as well. A good piece by Jenny Holtzer, with columns of moving words rising hundreds of feet to the great, arched ceiling of the atrium. And a large room filled with movie projectors showing loops of Merce Cunningham sitting in a chair, blinking every now and then. This being shown by about eight projectors, each one with a loop filmed from a different angle. Interesting contrast between the postmodern notion of video art and the clickety-clack, old-school projectors.

We had an haute cuisine dinner with the con’s organizer, a Jose Ignacio, who seems to be a wealthy ex-banker with a desire to help disadvantaged areas such as Spain and Latin America. He wants to encourage them to take advantage of web entrepreneurship. He’s a nice guy, very personable, and seemingly with good motives. But I’m not really in a position to advise him about his plans. I can never get much mental traction when I try to think about finance.

The writer Douglas Rushkoff is here as a guest, too. He’s a nice chatty guy, about fifty. Twenty years ago, he edited the GenX Reader and he wrote a novel, The Ecstasy Club, about the rave scene. He knew Georgia in New York back then. Now he’s morphed into a media critic writing business-related books. He has theories about money and the internet. He says we should cut the bankers out of the loop—and go back to barter. He gave me some good tips about working these fat speaking gigs.

February 16, 2011. The Con.

The talks were in a huge, brand-new auditorium on the second floor of the local university’s business college, right beside the Guggenheim museum. Two or three thousand people were there, mostly men wearing dark suits.

My contact here is this guy David de Ugarte. He’s the cult-leader-like head of a kind of commune called Las Indias, or the Indians. They did the legwork of organizing this conference for Jose Ignacio, the multimillionaire banker. Ugarte says he’s a fan of my writing, although it’s not clear to me that he’s read a single word of it. He says that his Indians are greatly influenced by 1980s cyberpunk. Very strange to have a group like this collaborating with a big-time financier.

When David de Ugarte first contacted me a couple of months ago, I’d proposed that I talk on what I call lifebox immortality—that is, my notion of making a virtual model of yourself in the form of an interactive website. One of de Ugarte’s Indians told me that they’d prefer something that was more about my “inspiring” career, about how I’ve consistently changed paths and found new ways towards self-expression.

I’d told them that I couldn’t see any reasonable way to give a “how great I am” talk. But, to throw the Indians a bone, I said I could talk about my brief career as a professional programmer at Autodesk. And they seemed to like that.

But then, when I got here and learned more about the thrust of Garum Day, it seemed fatuous to just talk about something that I’d done twenty years ago. So the night before the talk, I crafted a new talk that I called, with some measure of irony, “Selling Yourself.” My idea being to talk about how a person like me makes a living by selling different kinds of information. And at the end of my talk, I’d bring in my lifebox immortality routine—saying I could use that to, in some sense, sell a model of my personality. I figured this talk would be a good synthesis, as it has some autobiographical elements, but also has the virtue of containing actual ideas.

This morning I posted my slides and my draft text of “Selling Yourself” online. I like to put a talk’s info out there in advance, so the audience can follow along on their laptops or smart phones if they want to.

Big mistake. An hour before my talk, David de Ugarte corners me and starts going on and on about his inchoate notion of me giving a talk about my “inspiring career.” Who could even tell what he meant by this? What does he know about my career? I tried to explain to him that a talk needs to have content, but he continued pressing and wheedling, not really hearing what I said. Finally I cut him off.

“Stop it. You’re really making me uptight,” I walked away, and didn’t speak to him again till after the talk.

Rushkoff observed this, and he later told me he liked how curt and frank and matter-of-fact I’d been.

Talking the podium, I was indeed uptight, not just because of David, but because I was looking out at two thousand Spanish businessmen and biz-school students—which was what the crowd had turned out to be. But the talk went well. I talked slowly, ad-libbed anecdotes, put in joke lines that got laughs, and led it up to an “inspiring” climax.

The Indians said they’d liked the talk. I made peace with David de Ugarte, and, after a certain amount of pressure on my part—well, a lot of pressure—they paid me my honorarium in cash.

February 21, 2011. Two Power Dreams.

On the night after my talk on Garum Day. I had a couple of hours of insomnia, and finally fell asleep at dawn. And then I had some intense dreams, repeatedly diving deeper into the Land of Nod.

I was with my freaky old California friend Nick Herbert, on a rocky slope by a beach. We were carrying and dragging a large wooden chair with rockers. We came to a stream running downhill in a concrete channel. Along the far side of the stream was a wall with barbed wire on top.

Leaving the chair behind, Nick and I crossed the stream. Nick showed me how to lift out a piece of the wall on the other side. It was like peeling a layer of reality off the wall—revealing a hole like a ventilation duct, big enough for us to crawl through.

Then I was in Nick’s Boulder Creek living room with him, and we were going to take acid. In the dream I had a memory of having taken acid the day before as well—getting high with some underground cartoonists in a mansion overlooking the Lake of Geneva. Was this an invented-on-the-spot microdream, fractally embedded in my main dream? Was this a memory of an actual dream that I’d had earlier that night? Or perhaps a memory of a dream that I’d had weeks before but had never yet remembered? Perhaps I have a buried memory-record of all my dreams, a memory-bank that I can only access when I’m dreaming.

Anyway, back in my main dream, I’m with Nick and he hands me this overly large transparent gelatin capsule with traces of white powder in it. The capsule has a hole in its side, like it’s a rotting seedpod in a Bosch painting. I eat it.

Nick and I are sitting on his floor. He advises that I pick a painting to look at, so as to set the tone of my trip to my liking. There are three lovely paintings, or parts of paintings—they’re long dangling canvas strips perhaps a foot wide, each of them patterned with wonderful patches of color, just the shades and hues that I myself like to paint.

The rug on the floor is lovely as well. I’m half on and half off, and Nick gets me to move fully onto the rug, and at that moment I start to trip. We’re outside, walking down an icy winter road. I tell Nick that we should really be staying in his house lest we get into some kind of trouble. We turn back. Nick says he has a gun, which isn’t good news to me at all, but I let it slide.

As we walk, I’m seeing metalevels of resemblances. For instance, each house is overlaid with an image of the Matterhorn peak. A house roof is a symbol of a mountain. Turning my head, I see a cylindrical play of bright red, and I wonder, amused, what mundane object underlies this metaimage. Turns out it’s a clothes-drying rack like my mother had in our back yard on Rudy Lane when I was a boy.

Nick ducks into a stranger’s barn and lights up a joint. Worried about getting busted, I skeeve off alone through a narrow space behind the barn. And I end up in the home of an unfamiliar couple. They’re hard-bitten, stoner, Santa Cruz types, and it’s no big deal to them that I’m tripping.

I lean back and hover in the air, as I do sometimes in my dreams—I’m floating on my back as if I were floating on water. I ask the Santa Cruz couple if they’re impressed, and they aren’t.

They guy pulls out an air-gun and fires it at me. A couple of crooked nails strike my chest. Fortunately I’m protected by a heavy bib like you wear for an x-ray at the dentist’s.

It’s not unusual for me to have that limited kind of flying dream—where I’m floating above the heads of my peers. And the others always fail to recognize that I’m doing something unusual. I see these dreams as presenting an objective correlative image for me being at a higher mental level than the people around me. Certainly this fits in with giving a talk about software immortality to an audience of business types! And the guy shooting at me—that’s my con contact hassling me.

As for the fun, trippy part of the dream—I see that as a dramatization of my interactions with the Muse.

I had another heavy dream on the night of February 19, 2011, while Sylvia and I were visiting the beach resort of San Sebastian, not too far from Bilbao. A lovely crescent of a beach. We were in a little room in an narrow old wooden hotel on the waterfront.

They have amazing tapas in San Sebastian—they call it pintxos. You stand in a crowded pintxos bar, eating tapas off a long counter like you were at a party, unbelievably tasty morsels of ham and seafood and vegetables, and at the end the guys somehow know how much you ate. Everyone throws their paper napkins on the floor—it’s like falling white leaves on a forest floor. Really jolly.

In this second dream I want to record, I see an odd porcelain shape on the floor near Sylvia. It’s shiny pale brown, with mandalic spots of color. I recognize it as a teapot that we once owned. But now the pot’s bottom is gone, and the pot’s been flattened into an annular ring. That is, it’s shaped like a washer, the kind of washer that you’d put on a bolt.

My son, Rudy, is there, and he says that the pot has been turned inside-out. He shoves a random vase into a dimple in space. The vase reappears from a neighboring dimple, with its design on the inside.

“It’s a hole that goes into the fourth dimension,” Rudy tells me. “You can turn something inside-out there. They call this kind of hole a yena.”

I repeat the word to myself, wanting to remember it so I can write about it in a science-fiction story. And then, still in the dream, I take a cup in my hands, and I learn to turn it inside-out without using a yena. If I push the cup in just the right direction, and with a certain precise amount of force. The cup gives way and flows, inertialess as a virtual image. I stretch and mold it, even making a hole in the bottom, and smoothing out the hole’s ragged, liquid edge.

Thanks to me posting about this trip on my blog, Sylvia and I met up with a fan of mine in San Sebastian. We took a nice walk with him and his wife, and we had a good lunch together. They taught us a new word. Txirimiri, pronounced, “shirrymirry” is a Basque word for a light drizzle of rain.

Still Writing

March 29, 2011. Near End of Turing Chronicles.

It’s a nice warm day, and, as chance would have it, I’m typing this entry at a table on the porch of the Caffe Pergolesi in Santa Cruz, looking down on the very spot where I depicted a scene with my characters Jim and Weena in Jim and the Flims. I feel a nice moiré overlap of the trans and the real.

I’m still working on The Turing Chronicles. Recently I got myself cranked up for a scene with a battle between Turing and the cops by making a large painting called A Skugger’s Point of View. A skugger is someone who, like Turing, can shapeshift themselves into a slug-like skug.

The latest development in the novel is that I’m just about done with the chapter where I resurrect Burroughs’s slain wife, Joan Vollmer.

As I’ve mentioned, I knew all along that if I was going to use William Burroughs as a character I’d have to deal with the Joan thing. And I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to carry it off. But I think I’ve nailed it. I went right to the core, and confronted the crime. Bill raises Joan from the dead, and then she shoots him in the head. But since by now he’s a skugger it doesn’t kill him. Perfect.

I’m feeling like this chapter is one of the more powerful things I’ve ever written. It’s very intense and creepy. Funny in spots, spooky and scary in others, very dark and abandoned and transgressive. Heavy in the best 1960s sense of the word. At times, while writing it, I really did have that feeling of taking dictation from the Muse. Writing it as fast as I could type.

And now I feel like I’ve broken the back of the book. It’s an easy coast home from here. I could even start thinking about sending it out to some editors.

Lisbon, Geneva, and Munich

April 3, 2011. Return to Lisbon.

So here Sylvia and I are in Lisbon, only six weeks after the trip to Bilbao. How we ended up doing this trip is kind of random. Initially, we were going to Venice in the spring of 2010. And then suddenly I needed a heart operation, and I had to reschedule our flights—so we ended up moving the trip to April, 2011, with the target now being Lisbon. And points beyond.

This trip is just for fun, not for any kind of gig. We’re excited. I was in Lisbon alone for four or five days in 1994. I was in a surrealist movie, Manual of Evasion: LX94, directed by Edgar Pêra and featuring a number of great Portuguese actors plus me, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. It was a wild, happy time, and I’ve always had fond memories of it. And I’ve wanted to bring Sylvia to Lisbon so she could enjoy this city too.

I got in touch with Edgar Pêra, and he’s still in Lisbon making films, and getting plenty of work. He’s happy we’re coming, and we’ll get together. After Lisbon, we’ll go see Sylvia’s relatives in Geneva, and then she’ll go on to Budapest and I’ll stem off to visit my cousin Rudolf von Bitter in Munich.

Sylvia and I are in a cozy, quiet room at the York House, the same place where I stayed in 1994. It’s a retrofitted convent, about two kilometers east of downtown Lisbon. Our room looks across a courtyard at a hillside filled with the city’s red roofs. One of the closest buildings looks like a monkey’s face. Once I started seeing the face, I couldn’t unsee it, but that’s fine. The monkey is my friend, and every morning the sun lights him up. We’re staying in Lisbon eight nights in all.

At first I had a little trouble readjusting to Lisbon. It’s always difficult—and sometimes disappointing—to revisit the places where you had good times in the past. Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson are both dead. Initially I felt wistfully haunted by their ghosts, and I missed them. Also, in Lisbon 1994, I was high on the local hashish much of the time. Even though I’ve now been clean for fifteen years, I still feel the strain of living life just as it is.

Many of the buildings are covered with beautiful tiles, called azulejos in Portuguese. There’s a rich mathematical element to the tiles, with interesting patterns to contemplate. They come in bright and striking colors. Frequently washed by the rain, the tiles are shiny and clean.

I got so into the tiles that I visited the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, or the National Museum of Tiles. It’s a smallish building, a bit out of the way, but with a nice cafeteria. They had some great nineteenth-century tile murals.

It occurred to me that my favorite contemporary artist, David Hockney, has used tiling in two different ways. Some years ago, he was creating large images as irregular collages of Polaroid photos. And, more recently, he’s been assembling mural-sized works from grids of small canvases, placed in columns and rows.

Most mornings Sylvia and I hike up a long hill to a cathedral, the Basilica da Estrela, which happens to be a place where you can catch a tram into town. Yesterday we ate some wonderful and unfamiliar pastries at a pasteleria along the way up the hill, and we saw a wedding at the cathedral. We hop on the 28 tram, which is by way of being the favorite tram in Lisbon. It rattles up and down the hills like a slalom rollercoaster, and passes through some of the most interesting districts.

The Lisbon trams are single cars—streamlined, painted a bright yellow, and shorter than most tram-cars. On the steeper hills, the tracks are laid down in zigzags to slow the pace. And on the tighter turns, those wacky trolley tracks swoop completely across the street to make the curve.

One of the pleasures of the trams is that the windows open all the way. You can ride along fully immersed in the environment. You’re part of the 3D spectacle of Lisboa street-life with hundreds of little scenes playing as you trundle by—not to mention the mini-dramas within the space of the tram itself.

Downtown, we wander the zillion quaint narrow streets, sometimes drifting down into the hilly old Alfama neighborhood. In the lanes of Alfama, with the numerous arches and alleyways, the tiled walls, the staircases, the flapping laundry, and the perspectives above and below, the scenes take on the quality of Escher etchings, with the dimensions looping back on themselves and bending around corners to shake hands.

Another notable aspect of the street scenes is the very large amount of graffiti. In addition to the dull, standardized name tags, there’s a lot of really large and Mediterranean-feeling splashes of color. Some nice stencil work as well.

Sometimes Sylvia and I sit in a cafe, people-watching, with great characters walking by: intense Portuguese, Euro-hipsters, Africans, old people, parents with babies—everyone seeming mellow and tolerant.

Even more so than in Spain, going out to dinner in Portugal takes patience. You can’t really go into a restaurant before 9 pm. If you break down and go at 8, you’ll be completely alone or—if you go to a restaurant listed in the guidebooks—at the mercy of chatty fellow-American tourists.

We got together with my old director, Edgar Pêra. He met us at the hotel and escorted us to the art museum down the block, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. It’s the biggest art museum in Portugal. As it was Monday, the museum was closed. But Edgar’s production company had gotten permission to film there. As planned, he took me to Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony triptych—where a film-crew of six awaited, with lights set up, ready to film me with the Bosch masterpiece in high-def video. Now that’s the kind of welcome I like!

Edgar asked me a few leading questions, and I ended up talking about the painting for forty-five minutes. The reason we’d set up this shoot is that, a couple of years ago, I thought a lot about this particular Bosch triptych. I’d studied a very good copy of it in the museum in Brussels. And it appears in my novel Hylozoic, where my main character Jayjay is working as an assistant to Hieronymus Bosch while Bosch is painting the Saint Anthony triptych. I see Saint Anthony as Bosch’s transreal representation of himself.

One night Sylvia and I had a fancy dinner with Edgar and his friend Joana Amaral Dias. They drove us to a place on a hill overlook Lisbon and the Castelo de São Jorge. Joana is beautiful and witty, a sometime member of the Portuguese parliament, and the author of a best-selling Portuguese book Maníacos de Qualidade, or Quality Maniacs, describing eight odd-ball characters in Portuguese history.

Edgar put me in touch with a Portuguese writer, Rui Zink. He took Sylvia and me for a walk along the street where he was born, in a neighborhood near the central Rossio square. He was proud that the most famous of the Portuguese fado singers, Amalia Rodrigues, was born in his neighborhood, and he showed us her house. Like many Portuguese authors, Rui has trouble getting translated—his only book available in English is a children’s book, The Boy Who Did Not Like Television.

In conversation, both Rui Zink and Edgar were critical of Spain, Portugal’s big and powerful neighbor. They had nothing good to say about Spaniards or even the Spanish language itself.

“They use flat, simple vowels, all the same. That’s why they can’t learn Portuguese.”

The Portuguese language has a lot of vowel sounds with a slide in the middle or at the end, also it has many sibilant sounds. It’s often remarked that spoken Portuguese sounds a little like Russian. It’s taken considerable determination and individualization for Portugal to stay independent of Spain all these years. And having their language sound so unusual probably helped.

April 6, 2011. Another Satori.

Sylvia and I visited a lot of churches in Lisbon. If nothing else, a church is always a shady spot where you can comfortably sit down. And then you can stare up at the great, high vault. And study the quirky religious art. It’s odd how much energy people have put into obsessively and repetitively depicting that one little constellation of possibly mythical events—the life of Christ.

One of the more striking churches was the Igreja de São Roque in the Bairro Alto district of Lisbon, one of the elevated areas that surround the low Baixa downtown. The São Roque church had side chapels with sculptures and haut-reliefs encrusting their walls and ceilings. Several of the chapels were infested with angel babies, teeming and pullulating—like meal worms in flour, like maggots in decaying flesh, like thousand-headed litters of rats. Disturbing, and even a little nauseating.

In the center of one of these infested chapels was a statue of—the Virgin, with a heap of freshly hatched angel-babies accumulating in mounds beneath the hem of her robe. Why don’t we call Mary the Mother instead of the Virgin? That would make so much more sense. Why does the church want to have reproduction without sex?

Christianity is hella strange. But, of course, all religions are. Weird doctrines serve as hooks to make a faith stick in your mind.

At one point we saw a funeral go by with a brass band, the horns long-winded and melancholy, in a gorgeous way. They played that funeral march that you hear in old-school cartoons: dah-dah-di-dah-dinh-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-daaaah. Across the street, two old ladies in a window prayed over the cortege.

At Edgar’s urging, Sylvia and I visited an old city graveyard, the Cemitério dos Prazeres, or Cemetery of Pleasures. Very scenic, with rows of cypresses and crooked marble mausoleums with rusted-out metal doors. The graveyard cats were deeply creepy. I mean, these cats are eating the rats that feed on the bodies in the crumbling crypts. Ick.

When Sylvia and I were younger, graveyards seemed funky and fun. But we’re reaching a point where we’d rather not spend any time in them at all. We’ll be in a graveyard soon enough. The Cemitério dos Prazeres was rife with carved icons of winged hourglasses.

“Time flies!”

“So what the fuck am I doing here?”

Seeing so many babies and old people, not to mention that wedding and a couple of funerals, and all the tombs in the churches, I started thinking about the wheel of life, and how things change. Walking along I’d sometimes ask myself: Am I deliriously happy? Why not? Well, my legs are increasingly tired. And I have that slight, nagging desire to get high. Like I did the last time I was in Lisbon—with Terence McKenna.

One afternoon, off on my own, I thought all this through. I was having a mug of tea at a casual cafe in an ancient building near a cathedral called the Sé. Sitting there, I remembered something that I tend to forget: I can in fact be high at any time—if I focus on the now moment. Preachy word-mongering or profound truth?

I look at the chairs and tables, just so. The light on their surfaces. The logo on the truck outside. I’m loving the sensory impact of the colors. Digging the tiles on a wall across the narrow street. Bam. I’m high.

What did smoking pot and hash do for me in the old days? It detached me from my worries, got me to see the world as shapes and colors, and put me into the now. But, aha, I can do all of that without taking anything. All I need to do is pay attention to the world.

In the cafe I’m relieved to be sitting down. Every part of my body is awake, sweaty, and throbbing from my wanderings around town. I take off my shoes and savor the coolness of the rough, ancient, haphazardly assembled stones beneath my feet. Digging this high-ceilinged room. Centuries ago it was a workshop or a stable.

Scribbling down a realtime journal note like this helps me center myself. It helps me be high. It’s great to be without a cellphone, off the grid, beyond intervention. Whatever I’m up to is all there is.

“It is what it is.”

I learned this catch-phrase in 1988 from our Mill Valley friend Faustin Bray. A fellow devotee of the divine herb. At first hearing, the phrase struck me as mystically profound, like the first hearing of “All is one,” or “Be here now,” or “Let it come down.” It’s all about turning off the gerbil-wheel of carking, swinking care.

The next day I was resting on a park bench with Sylvia, wearing my floppy blue wool beret against the intense southern sun, and I took off my shoes and even my socks. A woman gave me a look.

A beat barefoot bum in a beret!

April 10-14, 2011. Reunion in Geneva.

It’s intensely nostalgic to revisit Geneva with Sylvia. I see ghosts all over the city. Re-encountering some of my old selves makes me wince. I could be pretty callow and selfish back then, and spending a couple of weeks with my in-laws would make me antsy.

The family’s larder was always stocked with an essentially endless supply of beer, wine, and liquor. In my thirties and forties, I drank fairly heavily during the visits. I hate to remember how troublesome I could be. And I feel some pity for my unhappy old self too.

I first visited Sylvia at her parents’ Geneva apartment in 1964, the summer after my freshman year at Swarthmore. From then on, Sylvia and I visited Geneva once or sometimes twice a year—call it forty trips for me.

We were in Geneva with our children as newborns, as toddlers, as teens, as twenty-year-olds—over and over, year after year. Sylvia’s parents eventually moved into a luxurious rented home. I think I’ve mentioned that it was Sylvia’s family’s unalterable custom that all of us would gather for formal meals both at lunch and at suppertime. So it wasn’t easy for Sylvia and me to get into town for prolonged outings. But we managed anyway, either taking the bus, borrowing a family car, or even being driven by Sylvia’s father’s intimidating Italian chauffeur, Giorgio. And sometimes I’d split off from the family and spend a few hours wandering the downtown alone.

This time around, Sylvia and I stayed, for the first time ever, in a Geneva hotel. An inexpensive place called La Bel’Espérance, and run by, of all people, the Salvation Army. Not that the hotel guests were street people—they were low-end business types and frugal tourists like ourselves. The hotel is on a quiet side-street in the heart of the cute medieval part of Geneva called the Vielle-Ville.

One thing that strikes me about Geneva was how many things have remained unchanged over the forty years I’ve been going there. Although it seems as if they’re continually doing construction on the city, a lot of this work involves retrofitting or refurbishing the same stuff that’s always been in place.

Not much graffiti in Geneva. Although I’d gotten to enjoy the tiles and scrawls in Lisbon, it was kind of relaxing to see the unblemished gray and beige walls of Genève. The doughty Swiss.

Our daughter Isabel and her husband Gus turned up in Geneva the same day as us, and we had fun walking around with them, showing them some of our favorite spots. At every turn, more memories came floating up.

One particular evening Sylvia and I ate in a bistro with four of the young people: Isabel, Gus, Sylvia’s niece Dini, and Dini’s husband Jerome. Gus had a horse meat steak, wanting a full Swiss experience. And I had ice-cream flambé. It was warm and cozy in the cafe, a magical evening, one of those times that stands forever as an oasis along one’s long journey through life.

Dini told us that when Swiss kids are in bands they sometimes sing a fake English that they call “Yogurt.” I guess Yogurt is akin to the fake French that the waiters speak in the Cafe Boeuf segments of the American Prairie Home Companion radio show.

We got together with Sylvia’s brother Henry, her nieces Diana and Stella, and her stepmother Adèle as well. Lots of warm family visiting, and I was on my best behavior, friendly and polite. Adèle took us to see the tulip festival in the lakeside village of Morges. It wasn’t a “festival” in the sense of crowds or an admission fee. It was simply bed after bed of incredibly gorgeous tulips in a green park at the edge of Lake Geneva. With towering mountains plunging into the lake on the other side. Hardly anyone there. We wandered around, gorging on beauty.

By the time we hit Geneva, Sylvia and I had entered a zone of exponentially enhanced physical exhaustion. I’m walking slower and slower, like a watch running down. There’s something exquisitely pleasurable about being so tired out. I’m very aware of my body, and I deeply savor each moment that I can sit down. The fatigue is like a cushion that I recline upon.

During my afternoon rests and my idle evening hours, I spend hours playing with my photos in my Lightroom program on my laptop, tweaking my new memories in real time: clarity, contrast, vibrance, exposure, brightness, blacks.

While in Geneva, Sylvia and I went to the Museum of Art and History, and visited our favorite rooms there. Works by the Geneva artist, Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918). He has several styles. He did a lot of historical murals for the city, with meticulously accurate perspective. In his more interesting style, he paints amazing scenes of lakes and mountains, modern and impressionistic, with wonderful hues. The paintings have an abstract, symbolic energy. Hodler uses one particular shade of blue that I wish I knew how to mix.

The guard told me not to take photos, but I snuck a photo of Hodler’s celestial Lac de Thoune. And I bagged shots of three of his late-life self-portraits. These works are wonderfully expressive, and remarkably differentiated from each other. They speak intimately to me, given that Hodler painted them in 1916 and 1917, shortly before his death at age 65. Vigor, self-knowledge, and irony—right to the end.

The days of our long vacation roll on, each day with its own little tasks and hurdles. Even after years of travel, I have tendencies towards fear and worry. But really it’s just one step at a time. Walk to the tram stop. Get the tram to the train station. Find the train track. Etcetera. If you miss a connection—you can always find a room.

One aspect of using public transport is that we spend a fair amount of time waiting in public places. I didn’t bring my smartphone on this trip. So how to use the time? Look around, duh. Like you used to do.

And, if overly restless, I pull out the folded square of paper I carry in my back pocket and write down what I see, for later incorporation into my travel notes.

April 11-19. Alone in Munich.

On the platform in Geneva, waiting for the train to Munich, I noticed that the people in Europe are thinner than Americans. Nobody wears a baseball cap. Nobody shaves their head. They wear leather shoes.

Sylvia, Isabel, and Gus are heading for Budapest, to see Sylvia’s aunt and cousins there. For my part, instead of visiting my Hungarian in-laws, I’m branching off to visit my cousin Rudolf von Bitter in Munich. Same name as me.

I miss Sylvia already. We’ve been less than two meters apart for the last two weeks solid.

Munich is a beautiful city. Most of its buildings were bombed in the war, but the Germans have restored it out the wazoo. In spots, Munich is almost like a theme park, albeit one built from solid metal and stone. And there are some great old Jugendstil or Art Nouveau buildings that survived the war. My cousin Rudolf lives with his family on the fourth floor of a Jugendstil apartment block. There’s a sizable carved bear on the bannister’s newel post by the entrance. Very 1910. I love this stuff. Will we ever find the way back to the wonders of heavily ornamented architecture? Or are we stuck with cheap-ass blank walls for the rest of time?

I like Germany. My mother was German. Her father was a Rudolf von Bitter like me. And she had yet another Rudolf von Bitter as her brother. My cousin Rudolf’s father was a different brother—Uncle Franz.

Cousin Rudolf is a lively, witty guy. He met me at the train-station in his beat-up, old-style VW beetle. I called it a dreckige Käfer, or dirty beetle. His manner of talking is a little like Bruce Sterling’s—you can never quite tell when they’re being sarcastic.

At some point we were making dinner plans, for instance, and cousin Rudolf exclaimed, “Schweinebraten um sechs!” (Roast pork at six o’clock!) I assumed he was mocking the eating habits of the average German, but that night he did in fact order Schweinebraten, albeit at seven. He does something, but he mocks it at the same time.

The restaurant where we ate Schweinebraten had a life-sized bronze sculpture of a pig outside. I posed with it, and a drunk Bavarian, smoking a cigarette outside the restaurant, says to me, “Schweine gehören zusammen.” (“Pigs belong together.”) Thanks a lot.

It turned out that Rudolf and his wife Christina and their two children were about to drive to Italy for a family vacation. But they’ll let me stay on alone in their apartment. Talking about the forthcoming car trip, Rudolf said they like to listen to audio books on CDs to pass the time. His wife had gotten an Agatha Christie novel in German. Rudolf’s pick?

“I have gotten CDs of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess. It’s really very funny.”

Although I was sympathetic to this choice, it’s incongruity cracked me up. It seemed like something a Woody Allen character would do—“Uh, yeah, I like to play a tape of Kafka’s The Trial when I’m a long trip with my family.” Rudolf is truly my cousin.

Unlike me, Rudolf has actually read the whole of The Phenomenology of Mind, written by our common great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel. Rudolf suggests a tactic for plowing through it. “Read it like a novel. Even better, follow the advice of the Hegel scholar Ernst Bloch, and read the Phenomenology in parallel with Goethe’s Faust.” Right!

Rudolf’s wife Christina is an artist—she makes sculptures of whimsical large constructions from wire, paper and paste, some pink, but mostly white. Their two children are very well-bred and pleasant. His seventeen-year-old daughter looks like my mother looks in a photo taken when she was that age. There’s a certain shape of nose that my mother, and I, and cousin Rudolf have, the von Bitter nose, and I see a little of that in Rudolf’s daughter too. How touching to come to Germany and find an echo of my mother. Touching and a bit uncanny.

It was good sitting with Rudolf’s family, enjoying the glow of their home, and listening to them talk.

Munich is Beer City, and it takes some effort on my part to maintain a sane frame of mind. I saw a group of ten guys pedaling a bar down the street, a man-powered trolley, complete with a giant wooden keg of beer, big steins on the bar-top, and rowdy singing.

I had one non-alcoholic Lowenbrau in a beer garden, just for old times’ sake, but that was enough. For the rest of the time, I’ve been having a pleasant drink that Christina von Bitter steered me to: Apfelshorle, which is plain apple juice with sparkling water mixed in.

I enjoy seeing German words written out everywhere. Sometimes I smile at the odd German surnames I spot, such as “Pfnür,” which sounds a bit like my SF word, “fnoor.” And it’s great hearing German spoken aloud. My Muttersprache, my mother-tongue. Everything sounds somewhat humorous to me in German. At one point a woman was complaining about an acquaintance. “Die blöde Kuh! Sie ruft mich ewig an.” (“The foolish cow. She’s phones me eternally up.”) Love it.

I’d almost forgotten that I can speak German, but the skill returned. Like remembering how to ride a bike. One thing I have to keep in mind is that I need to push the German accent so hard that, from the inside, it feels like I’m parodistically overdoing it. But if I don’t overdo the accent, nobody can understand me. Certainly the locals treat me better if I talk German. They think it’s cute to hear an American talk their language. Like seeing a dog walk on his hind legs.

After Rudolf and his family left for their trip, I was on my own, into my own head. It was fun, although at times lonely. In the mornings I’d lie on Rudolf’s couch for awhile. Like I was saying before, this far into a trip, being motionless feels so good that it’s hard to get up. And sitting yoga-style with my legs crossed is an active sensual pleasure. Every day I want to walk a little less than the day before. I’m using Rudolf’s bicycle. And spending a lot of time in cafes.

I feel like I’m having an extra inning of vacation here, a bonus round.

Yesterday I saw five or six guys surfing on a standing wave—it’s where a piped surge of water flows into a park meadow, an artificial stream called the Ice Canal. There’s a little bridge over the canal. A big crowd was watching the surfers. Each guy would manage a minute or two on the wobbly wave, and then he’d eat it and be swept downstream. Surf München!

Later on, walking into a mineralogical museum run by the local university, I flashed back to when we were living in Heidelberg in 1979. Here in Munich, I was looking at a display case of crystals—and it was exactly like a display that had been near my Heidelberg office in the university there. In those days I was working on my nonfiction book Infinity and the Mind, and on my novel White Light, which was also about infinity. The two endeavors were feeding each other. Here’s a quote about this time from my autobiography Nested Scrolls:

I got into a very pleasant and exalted mental state in Heidelberg. I remember having a magical dream in which I was scrambling up the ridge of a mountain. The stone underfoot was slippery pieces of shale, and among the stones I was finding wonderful polyhedral crystals the size of chestnuts or hedgehogs. Even within the dream, I knew that these treasures represented my wonderful new ideas.

Today I was listening to an ensemble of classical musicians on the street, complete with grand piano. I started thinking about my life, and feeling good about Nested Scrolls, and about how much better things have turned out for me than I’d ever hoped. The sweet music of the street musicians filled my throat, overcoming me with emotion.

The Germans are, as is well known, very thorough, and very attentive to rules. One doesn’t cross an empty street if the pedestrian Walk light isn’t on. If I show my ID to a museum ticket-seller to get the senior rate, she’s actually going to read the month, day and year of my birthday. When the woman in the grocery-store hands me my bag of food, she admonishes me to hold both handles of the bag lest I spill my purchases. Another woman at the market advised me about how to heat up a Munich-style white hotdog without (horrors!) bursting it. To my eyes, there’s a cheerful, agreeable quality to all this. Like we’re all playing a game together.

Walking around, I had to admire how attractive, tidy and cultured the Germans are. Over the course of my life, I’ve lived in Germany for about three years, and I’m comfortable here. But, having been away for so long now, I’m also sensitive to the sinister side of Germany—I’m referring of course to the Nazis.

I do have a resentment about how Hollywood so often casts Germans as villains in their films. In Inglourious Basterds, just for one example, it’s presented as admirable for the Brad Pitt character to massacre relatively innocent German enlisted men and to sadistically torture the officers.

All three of my uncles were officers in the German army—they had no choice but to enlist. Uncle Rudolf died on the Russian front. Uncle Conrad and Uncle Franz were captured and served time in Russian and English prison camps. My grandfather Rudolf von Bitter is said to have helped the underground resistance against the Nazis.

The family sent my mother to America in 1937 so that at least one member of the family would survive the coming war. I’m not blindly on the Germans’ side in all respects. We have a few Jewish ancestors in our German family tree, and if the Third Reich had gone on indefinitely, my relatives might have ended up in the death camps.

I’m just saying that it’s unreasonable to assume that all Germans are racists and heartless killers—any more than it’s reasonable to think the same about all Americans in the wake of Hiroshima, My Lai or Abu Ghraib.

But still. Why did the Germans have to act so terribly in the Second World War? It’s undeniable that the Nazis had huge popular support. I found myself wishing that it were somehow possible to change history so that the horror had never happened. I was wishing that my race could be cleared of blood-guilt.

I talked this over with my cousin Rudolf. He, of course, has thought about these questions quite a bit. After all, the first Nazi rally ever was in Munich. I’ll condense and paraphrase his somewhat cryptic remarks:

If you are accused of a crime, or if the group you belong to is accused, it’s better to begin by admitting your guilt. Denial leads nowhere. Hitler is part of the German character. And, yes, we have our fine culture as well. For instance we have Goethe. But it is a lie to imagine that we could somehow keep the Goethe and get rid of the Hitler. G and H. Next to each other in the alphabet. I also think of Goethe’s ballad “Der Zauberlehrling.” The original version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” A meditation on the dark side of intellectual and technological power.

Looking for things to do that didn’t involve walking, I went to a concert in a former imperial church, a sequence of seven Haydn sonatas based on Jesus’s “Seven Last Words,” these being the seven direct quotes that appear in the Gospel of St. Luke. My favorite of these is where the Good Thief says, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you, today you shall be with me in paradise.”

I once had an interesting discussion of this passage with my old science-writer mentor, Martin Gardner. Some religious sects take the exchange between Jesus and the Good Thief to mean that your soul isn’t in fact immortal on its own. The soul is, rather, a pattern of information which god stores in his memory so that he can resurrect you. Putting it differently, the Thief/Jesus exchange suggests that the soul can in fact be represented as software. Just like in my novel of the same name.

Another outing was to see the Münchner Volkstheater production of the Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill musical, Die Dreigroschenoper, that is, The Three-Penny Opera. It was cool to be in the crowds at the concert and the musical. I had trouble understanding the rapid-fire dialog at the musical, but they had a seven-piece live band, and they did an amazing rendition of the original “Mackie Messer,” a song that we know as the pop standard “Mack the Knife”

The actor singing “Mackie Messer” really tore it up. He was sleazy, unshaven, in a powder blue suit with no tie—like an on-the-skids lounge singer, but German as well. I’d almost forgotten this side of the Germans, that is, the expressionist, Grimm-Brothers, Cabinet-of-Doctor-Caligari, freak-show, heavy-metal aspect.

I left the musical before it was over. I wanted to lie on cousin Rudolf’s couch. Or ride the tram. Or look at people on the street. I’ve noticed this before—when I go out to shows alone, I find it hard to sit through the whole thing. It’s not as much fun without someone to share your enjoyment. I recall Jon Pearce telling me that, after his wife left him, he was unable to sit through an entire movie in a theater. We’re such herd creatures that when we’re alone, we feel impelled to range about in hopes of talking to someone.

On my last day, I rode Rudolf’s bike to the Neue Pinakothek, a museum with nineteenth and early twentieth century art. I noticed an Honore Daumier painting of some excited folks goggling at an onstage drama.

In his book The Feeling of What Happens, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that the essence of consciousness is to have, get this, a three-layer mental image of watching yourself watching yourself watching your life unfold. At the lowest level, you’re simply embedded in life, doing stuff. Like the actors on Daumier’s stage. At the second level, you stand aside a bit and watch life from afar. Like watching a play. At the top level you have an image of yourself as a detached observer of life’s passing scene. And the third level is where consciousness kicks in. You’re looking at the Daumier painting of yourself watching the show that you’re acting in.

Okay, fine. A lot of time on my hands.

After the museum, I sat in their very pleasant outdoor cafe for a long time, eating an excellent lunch and reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. A paperback I found in Rudolf’s apartment. His son had to read it for his English class in school.

After two and a half weeks on the road, I’m done with doing something touristic every minute. I’m edging towards the next level—which is simply living abroad.

It had been awhile since I’d read Chandler, and I’d forgotten just how wonderful a writer he is. His use of language is exquisite. And his dialog is rife with odd-ball 1930s slang.

Chandler’s slang set me to thinking about how I invent a slang for each of my SFictional worlds. It works best if the words are short, easily spelled, and easy to say—like the well-polished words in actual human speech. It’s usually better to invent a previously unused word—if you scratch around a bit, you’ll find there’s really quite a few good and usable syllables that don’t happen to be standard English.

Anyway, my time in Munich finally ran out and, next step, next step, next step, I called a taxi to pick me up at 5 am to take me to the station to catch a suburban train to the airport, and so on. And now polishing these notes, I’m above the Atlantic, flying home, back to our cozy back yard, my desk, our bed, and my reunion with Sylvia, who’s flying back from Budapest on a different plane.

Another good trip. Thank you, cosmos.

Seizures

May 29, 2011. In the Fog.

On May 4, 2011, I had a series of seizures. I don’t remember anything about the seizures at all. I had to go into the hospital for a week or so. Apparently the scar tissue remaining from my brain hemorrhage sparked the seizures. And then I had pneumonia from inhaling spit when I fell on my face when the first seizure hit. I’d been out walking with Sylvia with the time. Awful. So now I’m on anti-seizure meds, probably for the rest of my life.

To make things harder, I had a total hip replacement on May 24. We’d already scheduled it, and we went ahead with it anyway. Despite the seizures. I lost twenty percent of my blood in the hip operation, and I’m weak from that, and a little stunned and staggered by the pain from the wound around my hip. Thanks to the antiseizure meds, I conk out for a nap once or twice an afternoon, and I wake up in a pool of sweat several times a night.

Today, Sunday, I went down to the farmer’s market with Sylvia, and a group was playing for tips, a black family: a young woman saxophonist, a grizzled singer/keyboardist, and an older guy on congas. The grizzled guy was singing laconically and sweetly, the woman was running sweet riffs on her sax. The sun splashed down on them and the green lawn.

“I’m so glad to be alive,” I told Sylvia, and I burst into tears, with her crying too.

We’ve been through such a hard month.

June 9, 2011. Back to Work.

I finished a rewrite of my little essay, Surfing the Gnarl, written for the “Outspoken Authors” series at PM Press, edited by Terry Bisson. The first version, which I wrote shortly after my seizures at the start of May, was a paste-up, somewhat stereotyped and impaired. Written like I did it in a rehab room in a church basement. The new version is, I think, three times as good. I’m getting witty again. I’d hate to lose my ability to write. But if I did lose it, I wouldn’t fully notice. I’d still think I was writing, but it would be stiff, self-aggrandizing, old-man crap.

Actually there’s a level below even that. I dipped down there this last month. I’m talking about the level of not even being able to properly type, with the error rate up to heretofore unseen levels. Even today I’m getting more typos than usual, in particular from my right hand, which seems a little sinister. Non-dexterous?

As I write this, I’m writing on my back on the living-room couch, my legs up on two couch cushions, resting my thigh muscles. I walked ten blocks yesterday. My hip is healing. And the doctors are fine-tuning my antiseizure meds.

July 6-12, 2011. Bloodlust Writing Frenzy.

I wrote a lot in the past week, working out kinks in my outline for the ending of The Turing Chronicles, weaving fixes into the book, and writing maybe five thousand words of new material. I feel like I’m around the corner and into the home stretch.

To use a more colorful and accurate metaphor, I feel like a primitive hunter in the woods. It’s like I’ve been on the trail of this shaggy beast of a novel for five years—it started when I wrote the first two chapters as stories. My quarry is wounded now, I can see its spoor on the leaves, I can hear it in the underbrush ahead. I’m pushing forward, heedless of the branches scratching my face. My whole being is focused on the task of taking down the novel at last. I want to bring it to the ground, and tear out its throat, and see it shudder and lie still. And then I’ll bathe my face in its ink, finishing my hunt at last.

My computer programmer friend John Walker used to speak of a “bloodlust hacking frenzy” when pulling long hours to finish a project. Bloodlust writing frenzy, yeah.

Off topic here, I like this line from Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo: “Everyday life is an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams.”

I’m going up to San Francisco tonight, seeing John Shirley read. I’ll just stay up there, as I’m reading at Borderlands Books tomorrow. I’ll sleep at Rudy Jr.’s house. He and the family are out of town.

In the morning, alone in Rudy’s house, I fired up my laptop and did some work on The Turing Chronicles. I finished the second-to-last chapter, the one about the so-called V-Bomb. As powerful as an H-bomb, but in a different way.

At first I had a false-start idea. But I realized that wouldn’t work. And then I wrote the V-Bomb chapter right through to the ending. Hooray! I’m basically done. I just have to add a “Last Word” chapter, supposedly by William Burroughs. I’m really glad.

I walked to the BART stop and a homeless guy looked at me and said, “You the happiest man I see today!”

And he was right. I was grinning, aglow, joyful.

One more thought I had later that day. For Alan to effectively modulate the bomb’s V-rays, and to not hamper the explosion, he should dematerialize into matter waves right before the explosion.

In the afternoon, I was hanging out on Valencia Street in San Francisco with my artist friend Paul Mavrides, telling him about the plot of my novel, and about the new twist I’d just thought of. Paul was laughing in a friendly way.

“So that’s the perfect way for you to distribute your ideas from now on. Dematerialize into matter waves and modulate the V-rays.”

Okay, it’s a few days later. I wrote “Last Word,” the last little chapter of the book on the evening of July 11, sitting in my California-Craftsman-style La-Z-Boy recliner armchair in my living room with Sylvia reading on the couch. The first draft of The Turing Chronicles is done.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

On the morning of July 12, I lay on my yoga mat in the back yard and marked up the last two chapters twice, retyped them twice, then went over them onscreen one more time, fixed one last item, and emailed the manuscript to an editor and to my new agent.

Finis coronat opus.

August 19, 2011. Fretting About Health.

I’m tired of writing about my health—and I know any readers of these journal notes are tired of hearing about it. I already wrote a lot about my brain hemorrhage back in 2008. Three years ago. So I didn’t write all that much about my seizures in May of this year. Or about how horrible it feels to come to in a hospital bed, not knowing how you got there.

I recently thought of a phrase that’s useful for describing that particular experience. Jump-cut.

Each time—after the hemorrhage and after the seizure—I had no sense at all of the intervening time period before I woke up. The interval when I was unconscious was like a jump-cut. With nothing in between.

It seems fairly clear that it would be entirely possible to never wake up at all. A jump cut with nothing after it.

The new antiseizure med I’m taking, Vimpat, is much better than that drug Keppra which they had me on before. Vimpat doesn’t make me sluggish or sleepy. But it comes with a fairly intense “risk of suicidal ideation” warning. Having reread the warning last week, I got concerned. For awhile, several times a day, I would wonder, “Do I feel suicidal.” Really the answer is no. But how can I be sure?

I have a somewhat hypochondriac worry that my dream life doesn’t feel quite like it used to. This week I’ve been dreaming vividly every night, but the dreams are boring. Repetitious loops. Like in my dream last night I was waiting in line for something, for two or three hours, and the whole time I was worrying that I’d forgotten the name of the thing I was waiting in line for.

On the other hand, a couple of days ago I felt like I was in paradise, sitting in a wading pool in the back yard. My granddaughters Jasper and Zimry were trotting around, filling big plastic watering cans and splashing me. The sun lovely in the trees.

And now we’re in Pinedale, Wyoming, visiting daughter Isabel. This afternoon was paradise, sitting with Sylvia by the babbling creek behind our motel. And it was yet another paradise earlier in the afternoon, having Isabel show us how she does things in her jewelry shop, all three of us so friendly and smiling.

Relax, Rudy, you’re fine. You’re well, you’re not suicidal, and you’ll still have interesting dreams.

Popping My Hip

August 25, 2011. Dude Ranch in Wyoming.

We spent four nights with daughter Isabel and her husband Gus at the Darwin Ranch, which is a 160 acre resort along the Gros Ventre River in the midst of the Bridger National Forest, between Pinedale and Jackson, Wyoming, not far from the Grand Tetons. “Grand Tetons” means “large breasts,” and “Gros Ventre” means “plump belly.” One thinks of lonely French explorers.

The Darwin Ranch has log cabins, and a lodge house where the twenty guests meet for cocktail hour, meals, and after-dinner hanging out. It’s located in a valley gouged out by the narrow and snaky Gros Ventre River—more of a creek than a river. Two sides of the valley are lined with sheer red bluffs. The upstream end of the valley slopes up into a forest with a waterfall. The downstream end narrows into a gorge beneath the ten thousand foot high Bacon Ridge. The ranch has about twenty horses for the guests to ride—it’s a dude ranch, in a mellow way. The place has a bit of a hippie feel, even though all of the guests (other than Isabel and her husband) looked to be in their fifties, sixties or even seventies. Several of them were rumored to be multimillionaires.

As it happens, Loring, the man who owns the Darwin Ranch, is a cousin of my friend Howard Swann—a colorful and voluble mathematician with whom I worked at San Jose State. Howard and his wife Anita were at the ranch with us. It was good to have some comfortable old friends to chat with. Howard has an extravagant, playful style of speech. He goes for odd phrasings, recondite words, and unusual rhythms, sounding a bit like W. C. Fields.

I had been worried that, being somewhat antisocial, I’d have trouble mingling with the other guests at the group meals and other diversions. But it was easy. We saw the others over and over again—at breakfast and dinner, in the sauna and on the trails, and they became familiar to me, almost like friends.

Our host Loring is a bohemian type, and a soft-spoken intellectual. In the 1970s he worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley for a couple of years, and that’s where he met his wife Melody, an extravagantly vivacious woman from Taiwan.

Melody is an anomaly in lily-white Wyoming. She’s tanned as dark as a Native American. She talks constantly, and although her English is imperfect, she makes the words fit her thoughts. She likes to be the center of attention, is quite a gossip, and, when the occasion demands, can be bossy.

Isabel and Gus actually worked as the winter caretakers at the Darwin Ranch some years ago, and since then they’ve stopped by for visits a number of times. For them it was a treat to be here as guests.

On the first day, we four hiked along the top of Sportsman’s Ridge, a chain of slanting red bluffs that bounds the north side of the valley. We had an amazing view of the Gros Ventre River, which meanders across the valley. The stream’s shape is in every way like that of a rivulet of water you might see flowing down your car windshield. As above, so below.

The second day, I went on a four hour horse-riding expedition with Gus, Isabel, and Howard Swann. I’d never ridden a horse before, but the others coached me. My horse Alice was docile, and not particularly interested in me as an individual. She carries riders several times a week.

Heading up the two-thousand-foot rise to the top of Bacon Ridge, I noticed a large raven in a tree. I remembered a particular fairy tale scene that I loved when I was growing up. Here’s a summary of how I remember it:

A boy is the helper of a wizard. They’re travelling across the countryside, and the wizard manages to shoot a particular raven with his bow. The wizard tells the boy to build a fire and roast the raven’s heart for him, giving the boy particular instructions that he mustn’t taste the tiniest fragment of the heart until the wizard has had the first bite. The wizard lies down for a nap and the boy gets to work. The raven’s heart sizzles over the flame, and piece of hot fat lands on they boy’s finger, burning it. The boy puts the finger to his mouth, licking it to soothe the pain. And in that instant he receives the magic power that lay in the raven’s heart: he can understand the speech of birds and animals. Awakening, the wizard takes one look at the boy and knows that the boy has stolen the power that was to be the wizard’s. The boy takes off on his own, aided by advice and guidance from the birds and animals he passes.

Somehow this episode has always held a special meaning for me. When my Rudy Jr. was young, I discussed this story with him several times. As a result, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, Rudy and I would compete to be the first to tear off and devour a scrap of the turkey’s golden skin—so we could say to the other, “Now I understand the speech of birds and animals.”

We rode up through pines and aspens, up through the late-summer-yellow fields, up to the bare windy peak of Bacon Ridge. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. My horse Alice kept grabbing bites of the trailside vegetation. She was particularly fond of the enormous thistle plants, heedless of their prickers.

It wasn’t all that hard to stay on the horse, although I was definitely clutching the saddle-horn, and sometimes bracing my feet against the stirrups—particularly on the way back downhill. The whole process of riding a saddle on a large animal felt very ancient.

The third day on the ranch, Sylvia, Isabel and I hiked through the forest along the base of the Sportsman’s Ridge bluffs while Gus went fly-fishing. Eventually we three reached Ouzel Falls, which is a steeply slanting rapids rather than a proper waterfall—like a hundred-yard water slide, seething with white foam. Some small diving birds called water ouzels frequent the pool at the falls’ base.

Before we’d set out on our hike, Loring had urged us to make a loop of it by clambering to the top of Sportsman’s Ridge near Ouzel Falls, and then taking the high road home. Sylvia didn’t want to add on the extra climbing. She and Isabel took the low road back to the ranch. But I went for the loop, assuring Sylvia that I’d be okay.

Climbing to the top of the ridge was in fact very hard. I was already tired, in part due to the thin air at this nine thousand foot altitude. I was hot, and my water supply was fairly low—even though Isabel had kindly given me the rest of her own water. Making my way up the steep path, I worried that my heart or my brain or my new hip might suddenly malfunction, leaving me to die alone in the wilderness. But I was determined to press on. Having my fake new hip was a plus—as now my hip wasn’t hurting me.

In the old days, I very often took long and risky hikes alone. But now I hadn’t done a hike like this for something like five years—I think the last one was in August, 2006, in Glacier National Park.

I lost the trail twice in gullies, found it again both times, and after an hour I was on the top of the bluff. The high path. I felt wonderful. On top of the world. Just like old times. Once again I’d pushed past my fear and I’d done something physically audacious.

I felt more wholly well than I’d felt in quite some time. A wonderful day.

August 28, 2011. Cozy in Madison. Dislocated Hip.

I’m writing this in the bed I’m borrowing in my granddaughter Althea’s room in Madison, Wisconsin. My son-in-law Courtney is downstairs with the kids. Daughter Georgia is still asleep. I’m not quite ready to face the day. Lying low. Trying not to be much trouble.

I played with my grandson Desmond (a.k.a. Dez) for half an hour just now. I read him his favorite (for today) book, Hogwash. No words, just lots of pictures of little pigs being herded and washed by slightly sinister pig-mothers. And I gave him a little race car that I bought for him yesterday at a local gift store. He wasn’t allowed to get his toy yesterday because he’d bitten his sister Althea rather hard.

I’ve played with Dez every morning. He’s a cuddly bundle. I’m exceedingly fond of him and Althea.

Here comes Althea into her room to get a fleece jacket, blue with white snowflakes. I help her zip it.

“Shell Grandma gave this to me,” she says.

To differentiate us from their other grandparents, these two always refer to us as Shell Grandma and Shell Grandpa. When they come to our house, I always show them our collection of seashells. And I even gave Althea a large painting of our shells that I’d made.

Yesterday Althea was dancing to her Taylor Swift CD in her room. So cute. Twirling and posing.

Not sure what we’ll do today. It feels a bit cool, and the kids are sneezing, so maybe no swimming. And church isn’t in the cards. There’s an art fair downtown. Or possibly we ride bikes to Picnic Point by one of the lakes.

In the afternoon, I was sitting on a sloping bit of ground with my leg tucked under, watching the Wisconsin marching band practice. And suddenly, horribly, the ball of my new left hip popped out of its socket. The elasticity of my leg muscles immediately pulled the ball up to a position about two inches higher than the socket. So now my leg was two inches shorter—and ickily floppy. The pain level was a solid nine out of ten. It hurt so much that I didn’t even groan or scream. The pain was beyond that.

Conveniently enough, we happened to be about three hundred yards from a big hospital. Courtney and Georgia drove up onto the lawn and ferried me to the emergency room. The medics put me on a bed in a side room, and I was alone there with Georgia for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe I was back in the hospital again—coming back to this scene over and over and over. I never wanted to be leading that kind of old-person life. I just about broke down in tears. Georgia was kindly comforting me.

After awhile, a doctor and some nurses came in. They said they wouldn’t have to cut me open, because they could tug my leg back into position. They gave me a shot of Dilaudid, an opiate pain-killer. It felt really good, but pretty soon the pain was coming back, and they wouldn’t give me another shot.

About an hour went by, and then this guy who had biceps muscles the size of my thighs came in. They shot me up with something that knocked me out completely. The strong guy stood on my bed and pulled so hard on my leg that the hip bone’s ball popped back into the socket. I heard about this last part second-hand from Georgia, who stayed by my bed to watch.

Georgia said that, while waking up afterwards, I was muttering things. Like, I said, “Fuckin’ A!” because I was glad to have my hip back in place. The nurses giggled at me. Georgia said she wanted to tell them, “You need to understand that this is a great and famous man!” Loyal Georgia.

Anyway, it’s all okay now. My leg feels the same as ever, no lingering pain. The only catch is that they gave me this incredibly uncomfortable plastic ultraorthopedic brace to wear around my waist and my left thigh—to keep me from bending my leg into any danger zone. They say I’m at a high risk of re-dislocating my hip for the next month. When I get home, I’ll check with my Los Gatos hip doctor about the bullshit brace.

There was some question about whether I could still ride on my plane tomorrow. Georgia said, “Just stay for an extra month, Da, it’ll be fun.” And Courtney was like, “He can always take the train!” But then I called my airline, and they said they’d give me an aisle seat in the roomy front row. Would have been fun to stay a month at Georgia’s, actually. How often does a parent ever get to sponge for that long?

Boy did that Dilaudid feel good. When I got home, I was talking about this to my recovery step group. I told them that if I ever really needed to get a lift, I’d drive straight to the hospital and pop out my hip, right by the entrance to the Emergency Room, and they’d put me on a wheelchair and wheel me in for a fix.

They all laughed. They think like me.

October 14, 2011. Quantum Tantra. The Big Aha.

I visited Nick Herbert last month and once again we discussed his notion of quantum tantra. It was 2002 when Nick first started talking about quantum tantra to me, and I’ve repeatedly read his brilliant essay, “Holistic Physics: An Introduction to Quantum Tantra.” I used Nick’s ideas a bit in Frek and the Elixir and now I want to use them a lot more in my next novel.

Nick’s starting point is that the brain is, like any physical object, a quantum system. He feels that quantum mechanics accounts for our consciousness. Quantum systems can evolve in two modes, smooth and chunky. Smooth when nobody’s measuring them, and chunky when you ask them a question. Nick feels that the smooth mode is closer to how our inner mental experience feels. But when you have to verbalize an answer to something, you drop into the chunky mode.

Regarding telepathy, Nick says you should be able to couple your smooth mental state to the smooth state of another person, and thus attain a unique relationship that Nick terms “rapprochement.”

For certain theoretical reasons, the rapprochement link between the two systems can’t leave memory traces. It isn’t like a phone conversation. But it’s a link nonetheless. Nick speaks of these unremembered rapprochements as oblivious links. Maybe like a conversation that you had with someone when you were stoned—or when you were making love. You remember how it felt, but you don’t remember exactly what you said.

Whether you remember it or not, your brain’s state will have changed from the interaction. And your behavior will show a different probability spectrum of outputs than it would have before the rapprochement.

Like me, Nick is a hylozoist. He believes that objects are alive and conscious. He proposes that the smooth and chunky consciousness modes can be found, not only in human brains, but in every physical system.

Thinking at a higher level, he remarks that synchronicity might be evidence that we’re all parts of some higher being. The higher mind’s ideas filter down into remote oblivious links.

Where I’m going with this is that I’m feeling around for the basic ideas for my next novel, which has the working title The Big Aha.

As usual, my main character is a flaky scientist/inventor coming up with an oddball physics device. He finds a way to stay in the smooth mind groove for long periods of time—without having to collapse his consciousness into the clunky, chunky mode. He’s not using a drug, mind you. He’s expanding his consciousness by getting his brain into an unusual physical state.

He calls his gimmick the Big Aha. At this point, the precise flimflam of my bogosity-generating Big Aha is unclear to me. But I’ll get there. And then in retrospect it’ll seem obvious.

Thanks to hylozoism and the Big Aha, my guy learns to edit the physics of the objects around him. He talks to things, and he makes them act weird. Wacky matter. You don’t get high, your house gets high for you.

I hear the buzz of the aether’s vibrations. The faint squeak of the Pigg boson’s curly tail.

November 3, 2011. Kesey Magic Trip.

Last night Sylvia and I saw the Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters movie, Magic Trip. The material was quite familiar to me from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and from Kesey’s Garage Sale anthology. Unsettling to view snippets of Neal Cassady doing motor-mouth speed rapping.

“We’re 4D minds in 3D bodies in a 2D world.”

The vastness of cultural change depicted in the movie is exciting—the flow from the early Sixties beatniks, to Tim Leary’s high-minded proselytizing, to the Pranksters’ street psychedelia—and thence to the mass fad for acid, including the birth of light shows and the Grateful Dead. I liked the shots of the early Dead noodling on their instruments for the trippers at an informal 1964 acid test.

I liked the scenes where Kesey and his Pranksters meet Kerouac, and then when they meet Leary. The street surrealists meet the alkie sentimentalist and the Harvard mandarin. The meetings don’t click at all. Mutual incomprehension. So near yet so far.

Later in the film, apropos of his reduced role as a writer, Kesey says—with touches of sadness, shyness, embarrassment, humor, and acceptance: “Maybe I fried my marbles.”

The other day Sylvia and I watched another movie, Limitless. It’s about a guy who gets hold of a new drug which is a somewhat speedy smart drug that’s also a bit psychedelic. In a sad reflection of our present times, the drug helps the main character change from being a writer to being a big-time stock trader and then to a candidate for the Senate. Ugh. In the 1970s, it would have been the opposite. A big drug trip would have shown a stock trader politician the light—and he would have become a writer! To me, that’s what makes sense!

What if the hero of my new novel liberates the Big Aha and gives it to the people?

Ebooks From the Ice Floe

December 4, 2011. TEDx Talk in Brussels. Berlin.

We made yet another trip to Europe this year. I got invited to give a TEDx talk in Brussels on November 24, 2011. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design.” It’s a group that’s been organizing two annual conferences since 1984, with the talks becoming popular videos. The talks are eighteen minutes long. A speaker really needs to plan what to say. In recent times TED has authorized “TEDx” talks in which independent groups can organize their own TED-like conferences.

The TEDx guys in Brussels paid me a really substantial speaker’s fee. It went so high because I wasn’t all that eager to make the trip. So I ended up pushing them farther than I’d imagined possible. Indeed, I got more than I normally get for a book advance—which also says something about the kinds of advances I’ve been getting.

Sylvia and I made a two-week vacation of it, a week in good old Brussels, and a week in Berlin as well.

My talk was the best of my life, and I don’t expect to ever give a better one. You can see it online if you search YouTube. They had a huge crowd, like two or three thousand people. I was calm on the big stage, with no paper notes. For slides I used images of my paintings and drawings and computer graphics—rather than text. My theme was digital immortality—ranging from my novel Software through my Lifebox tome. And I ended with the hylozoic notion that everything is alive. Hylozoism is the future of computation—no chips, no biotech, just the innate quantum-computations of the things around you.

My cyberpunk writer friend John Shirley spoke at the con as well and he’d brought wife Micky. We four often see each other in the Bay Area. So we went out for dinner and to cafes a few times. Being veterans of Brussels, Sylvia and I acted as guides. At one point we went to La Fleur en Papier Doré, which is a grotty, low-class, insanely authentic old cafe where René Magritte and his Surrealist buddies used to hang out. We played a few rounds of the surrealist drawing game, Exquisite Corpse.

One day Sylvia and I made an excursion from Brussels to nearby Bruges. A backwater town, authentic and untouched, with many canals. The early winter sunset over the canals was stunningly beautiful. Studying the reflections, I imagined walking down some old stone stairs into the wobbly mirrorworld beneath the ancient water.

I’ve always loved the god’s-eye icons you see in churches and on walls in places like Bruges. An eye inside a triangle inside a set of rays. The point at infinity. And I love the medieval ornamentation. Like a railing might be designed to look like a long, thin dog. It’s that great old notion of viewing objects as animals. Yes, yes, everything’s is alive.

And after Brussels, Sylvia and I went on to Berlin. My mother grew up in Berlin, but I’d never been there before. It’s a fascinating city, ungodly big, with a palpable divide between the east and west halves. Despite the WW II bombing, there’s still a lot of nice old buildings—as in Munich, many of them have in fact been rebuilt by the industrious Germans.

I was using my camera a lot. Fun to be on a trip with a feast of new things to shoot. Old stone arches, and wobbly reflections in the windows. I blogged a lot of the images. These days it’s mostly about my blog.

We stayed in a great hotel in the so-called Mitte area. A Radisson of all things. We were right next to the Spree River, in the former east zone. Looking down at the Spree from our balcony we’d see barges chuffing by. The so-called museum island was right there in the river, with a classically designed complex of buildings—a maze of columns and porticos adding up to, like, four or five Met museums in one spot.

The museum island also holds a nineteenth century Protestant cathedral—the Berliner Dom. Great flocks of crows wheeled around the Dom every night, flocking and cawing. And the setting sun made wild silhouettes of the statues atop the Dom. Sylvia liked this one particular angel on the roof, blowing a long, thin horn.

Naturally we went inside the Dom. Intricate stained glass windows, one of them with ferny fractal designs and the Kaiser’s hat. The basement of the Dom is like a living room—or like a non-living room—filled with giant, ornate nineteenth-century caskets for members of the erstwhile ruling families. A horrible place, really. Deeply creepy. A statue of Death perches at the foot of one casket, writing in a book with a quill. Like he’s a maitre d’.

“Oh, here’s your name. Got your spot all set for you.”

Sylvia and I went and saw a stretch of the Berlin Wall in a funky part of the east side called Friederichshain. Lots of younger people there, hanging at a hip spot called the Michelsberger Hotel.

About twenty years ago, a bunch of artists drew semi-permanent graffiti on the Berlin Wall—each of them got about twenty meters worth to paint on—and, this being Germany, the murals are intact—as they’ve been systematically restored. I especially liked an image of Uncle Scrooge on the Berlin Wall. He’s confronting a videogame warrior emerging from a black hole.

My cousin Christian von Bitter met us in Berlin—his father Conrad was the brother of my mother Marianne von Bitter. Christian drove us out to the old suburban mansion where Mom’s family lived when she was a teenager. I could sense her ghostly presence. Hurrying off to school.

Christian also steered us to our great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel’s grave. I was glad to see Hegel’s spot. Very heavy to touch my great ancestor’s stone. We found it around dusk—it got dark about 4:30 pm at this time of year here. We were even a little worried about getting locked into the graveyard.

Really getting on a genealogical roll, Christian led us to a portrait of my great-grandfather Carl Julius Rudolf von Bitter as well. This Rudolf was a judge for a court for administrative workers. He lived on the top floor of the giant Verwaltungsgericht court building.

The judge’s father, my great-great-grandfather Hans Rudolf von Bitter, was the President of the Prussian State Bank. And the judge’s son, Rudolf von Bitter, was my grandfather, that is, my mother’s father. He was a banker and a government administrator as well.

Oh, sorry, am I boring you?

The Bitters were ennobled and given the “von” in front of their name in 1880. Christian said that a lot of the nineteenth century Bitters had worked in the Prussian government, which wasn’t really how I’d thought of my family background! I always thought of them as philosophers and artists. But Hegel is in a different branch—the line that goes back through my grandfather’s mother Marie Elise Hegel.

Back to my roots…too much information! Like I realized when we were cleaning out Sylvia’s parents’ papers—we walk on a forest floor of humus from our uncountable ancestors’ lives.

All around the city were Christmas markets, some with giant Ferris wheels. Sylvia and I actually rode on one, sitting in a little gondola car—like a train compartment. We were in there with a cheerful six year old girl and her parents. The little girl said she wasn’t scared, but Sylvia and I were, a little bit.

Wandering around town, Sylvia and I passed a weathered old Amerikahaus or “America House.” These are libraries with American books and magazines in English. They were set up in the late 1940s by the U.S. Information Agency to promote a sense of unity between Germany and the U.S. When I was a boy visiting my grandmother in Hannover, Germany, in 1959, I liked to go to the local Amerikahaus to get science-fiction books. And that building looked exactly like the one I saw in Berlin.

I still remember finding an SF story anthology in the Hanover Amerikahaus. It had a tale about a guy who goes to a lecture on the fourth dimension, and he dozes off during the lecture to find himself surrounded by sentient higher-dimensional spheres. I don’t remember exactly how that story ends.

Maybe the guy gets a Ph.D. in mathematics and becomes an SF writer!

Off and on during the trip I continued thinking about my plans for The Big Aha. Somewhere beneath the surface, they’re ripening. In this vein, consider the haiku by Issa:

Climb Mount Fuji,

O snail,

but slowly, slowly.

January 21, 2012. Starting The Big Aha.

On January 16, 2012, sitting in the Great Bear cafe, I managed to write a first draft of a first page for The Big Aha. I’ve slapped my brush onto the canvas.

I’d recently read the Paris Review interview with William Gibson, and Bill is like, “I don’t write outlines. All I need for starting a book is a good first sentence.” And naturally I began obscurely brooding over this. Instead of a first sentence, I came up with a first scene:

“What do you think of this guy?” asked my old pal Carlo. He was holding something he called a qwet rat, pretty much shoving the thing into my face. Gray fur, yellow teeth and a naked pink tail.

“He’s skungy,” I said, laughing a little. “Who’d ever buy that?”

So now, five days later, I have about 1,500 words done, and the rickety outlines that I’d been writing up don’t seem very relevant. I’m breaking out of the scrum and getting into open field. Putting it differently, I’m already lost. And happy about it. I just want to write.

Beginning to write again, I remember that I have some skill at weaving lines of dialog together, and I know the craft of developing characters. It’s fun to be writing—as opposed to worrying about what I’ll write. I’ll get some characters onto the page and let them talk. And trust them to be interesting.

March 10, 2012. Epublishing. Flurb.

I haven’t been writing much on The Big Aha the last two or three weeks. I’ve been hung-up on making ebook editions of my Complete Stories and The Hollow Earth, and selling them via Amazon and my own online site, Transreal Books.

Like any process involving computers, this has involved many steps, with many gotchas. Fiddling and repetitive work, with a sense of blundering back and forth amid mud and thickets. In a frenzy, with sharp twigs scratching at my face near my eyes. And with nasty web denizens darting out to bite fifty-dollar chunks out of my butt.

Before long, I want to make yet another ebook—before I forget how. Grooving the technique into my brain. It’s just the first couple of times that are a full-bore nightmare. On the next outing I’ll be able to develop a more streamlined work flow. And after that I hope to lay out a series of blog posts that comprise a useful description of “How To Make An Ebook.” Gospel to the grateful throngs of less computeresque auto-epublisher wannabes. As a self-referential joke, I might even paste the notes into one file and publish them as an ebook called How To Make An Ebook. I’ll sell dozens of copies.

For the next eproject after that, I’m thinking about putting together my Collected Essays. And maybe All the Interviews. And I’d definitely like to republish my early, little-known, memoir novel, All the Visions. Out on the horizon, are ebooks of my science books, The Fourth Dimension and Infinity and the Mind—although these, with the figures and sidebars, would be a lot of work. Maybe someone else can do those.

I’ve also been busy winnowing and editing story submissions for my webzine Flurb, issue #13. Tidily enough, I ended up with 13 stories for #13, including one by me—a chapter that I wrote for The Big Aha.

Sometimes Flurb feels like too much work and I want to close it down, but then I’ll get an interesting story and a responsive author who’s willing to revise his or her work in the ways that I suggest. I’m getting much more proactive about the editing than before. Putting the Rucker stamp on the tales. A real editor. Generally the authors are more than glad for my suggestions—they’re grateful that I care. Even though they won’t always do the fixes that I ask for.

Doing the editing, I had the agreeable sense that I know something about how to put together a story. I’d say that the biggest continuing problem with stories is the lack of a strong ending. In a high-lit mainstream story, it’s okay to trail off at the end. But in the SF genre, readers expect a final sky-rocket at the end. A twist, a reward, a big aha.

April 21, 2012. Lost the Thread. Transreal Books.

So now six weeks have gone by. Sylvia and I went to New York, which was great. I gave a reading there, we hit all the museums and stores, ate great meals. I met with my old Tor editor, David Hartwell, and with my new agent, John Silbersack. My old agent Susan Protter has finally retired.

Hartwell more or less told me that I’m through at Tor. The sales numbers are squeezing out the mid-list authors. There’s this death-spiral thing, where they set the print-run of each of your new titles to match the net sales of your previous title. So by now the print-runs of my books are too small to be worthwhile.

The hoped-for mainstream breakout of Nested Scrolls isn’t happening. And definitely no hope for The Turing Chronicles at Tor. After all, it’s about giant slugs and a homosexual love affair. The greatest story ever told.

I had an autumnal feeling leaving the Tor offices—which are housed in the old Flatiron building on Madison Square. Pop showed me that building when I was a boy of 12, on my way to Germany for a year at boarding school. Who would have thought I’d end up publishing eight books at Tor.

The next day I had a nice lunch with Silbersack—whose deluxe office is on the other side of Madison Square from Tor. Silbersack is a good guy, very cultured and knowledgeable. He thinks he has some hope of selling The Turing Chronicles directly to Amazon—they’re getting into publishing now. They have deep pockets and are paying out some good advances. My book’s also with some other publishers, but by now I’m not optimistic about any of them. It’s been nine months since I first sent the manuscript to Silbersack.

It’s hard to go all gung-ho on my new novel, what’s it called? Oh, yeah, The Big Aha. I’ve lost the thread. Hard to get gung-ho when I can’t sell the last novel, hell, I can’t even get my most recent novel rejected. It’s like I’m a noob languishing in slush piles.

Sometimes it starts to feel futile. So much scheming and fretting, only to sell a couple of thousand books. But the process of writing does amuse me.

While the mute months drift past, I’ve been going ape with the epublishing thing. I converted Flurb issue #13 into a free ebook. And I developed what I consider to be a more correct workflow while turning my Collected Essays into an ebook. I won’t describe the process here, but I found it kind of satisfying to think it through. That old blood-lust computer-hacking frenzy.

My new ebooks are for sale on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble, and I sell them directly from my Transreal Books page. I’m getting a few orders every day. Boing Boing reviewed Collected Essays, which gave me a nice spike in sales.

I’ve sold about eight hundred copies of the various books now, and I’ve earned something close to two thousand dollars, which isn’t bad, at least by the beggarly standards I’ve grown accustomed to. If my ebooks keep selling for a year, I’d be making as much as a publisher’s book advance.

Quarters clink into the street-performer’s hat. There’s a feeling of liberation about this. I have my own publishing company! I’m ready for the future. I’m a flower pushing up from the dirt and into the air. Let the bookstores go bankrupt, let the publishers crumble—I’m set for the next few years. Until the kaleidoscope turns and the whole thing changes again.

One more twist. I’ve always worshipped this one particular Sixties novel, Be Not Content, by William J. Craddock. And now, thanks to my having posted a long blog post about the guy a few years back, I’ve connected with his widow, Teresa Craddock, who lives in Santa Cruz. I met up with her a couple of weeks ago, and she signed a contract giving Transreal Books the right to publish Be Not Content. So my next project is to scan this book and turn it into an electronic file that I can make into ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks. I’ll be giving Teresa a good royalty, and I even gave her an advance check. Very weird to be on the other side of the table.

One thing I picked up from working on Be Not Content is some fresh enthusiasm about my Big Aha book.

My young layabouts will get hold of a cosmic mind-expansion tool. But the tool isn’t a drug. And the tool really and truly works—in some more concrete and literal way than acid ever did.

May 11, 2012. How To Make An Ebook.

So now I’ve got Be Not Content ready to epublish. The scanning process itself was easy—it only took a couple of hours, and I got a fairly decent text file out of it, albeit with typos, missing line breaks, and weird formats scattered throughout. The ensuing correcting, formatting, proofreading, and ebook conversion—that part was a lot more work than I expected.

But now it’s done, and it looks great, although I’m still dicking around with the cover—I only managed to get one photo of Billy Craddock from his widow Teresa. She was going to lend me more photos, but that never happened. And she insisted that I change some things in the introduction I wrote. And she hired a lawyer to renegotiate our contract. As if there was any money in this.

I really got into Billy’s head while I was proofing his book and writing the intro. And Teresa even gave me the phone number of the real-life model for one of the characters in the book. The guy is now retired from a career as, of all things, a math professor at a college in Tallahassee, Florida. It was interesting to talk to him. I would have loved to hang out with this guy, back in the day.

The night after I proofed the harrowing final chapters of Be Not Content—where he takes acid about twenty times in four or five days—I had an all-night dream where I was an acidhead. And in the dream I somehow got sober, or I imagined longingly in the dream that I was sober, and in the dream I was so eager to be clean and I was hoping that my getting sober was true—and that the sobriety wasn’t just a dream within the dream.

In the morning, I was like, whoah, I really am sober, and it’s easy. Hallelujah.

Today is Friday, and I epublished How To Make An Ebook last night. I’ll post my ebook of Be Not Content over the weekend, and I’ll announce it on Monday morning, as there’s more people on the web then.

And then I’ll get started working on another book while I’m still waiting to see what happens to The Turing Chronicles. I think I’ll get started on a book of my Journals—wherein I’m writing this very note. The Journals will be a big project, with a lot of proofing and editing to do. I’ll have to go over them two or three or four times. It’ll take me a couple of years, working on the journals off and on. But I won’t just stay on this project all the time. I’ll work on some other books too.

And as soon as my head’s in the right place, I’ll jump back into my dreamy, creative, non-robotic, novel-writing mode. I’ll get fully into The Big Aha. At this point, I’ve only written, like, two chapters of it.

My obsessive blood-lust hacking frenzy of producing ebooks has been growing since February, and while working on this last pair of them at the same time, I began getting heart palpitations. I had the same thing in 2002 when Sylvia was out of town and I did nothing but program for three weeks, porting my Pop game framework software to 3D graphics. Ten years ago.

I hope the palpitations are just from stress. But at this point, I truly cannot face another doctor. I noticed that cutting off my caffeine consumption eliminates the palpitations. But when I do that I miss the brain joy of the caffeine molecules running down the corridors of my brain, kicking doors open and flipping on every light-switch they pass.

I’m in fact drinking a pot of green tea right now, at the Borderlands bookstore on Valencia Street in San Francisco. Borderlands is a familiar hang-out for me, it’s the one place where I always do a reading when a new book comes out. And now, sitting here I’m feeling the pleasant white light of caffeine in my head and the unpleasant quiver in my chest.

Sylvia drove up here to be an aide at our twin granddaughters’ pre-school for the day. I came along and brought my bicycle in the car’s trunk—so as to cruise around the Mission District. Coming to the Mission is like visiting another country. It’s good to get away from the ebook hacking.

May 22, 2012. Eclipse. Transition.

There was a cool partial annular eclipse of the sun in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. It was about 6:30 pm, and the sun was going behind the hill that we live on. So I walked up the street to get a better view.

I’d been using the safe method of studying tiny crescents via a pin-hole-punched sheet of paper, projecting the crescents onto the black back of a book. Wearing shades and walking up our tree-crowned hill, I noticed that the patches of shadow-light cast by the trees and bushes were strangely warped as well, with each dapple-blob molded into a crescent.

I looked up and I saw the eclipsed sun directly with my eyes.

And, yes, I know you’re not supposed to stare at the sun, and I didn’t. But I could see it, via quick, raking side-long glances. The suddenly huge-seeming sun was a strange crescent, just above the horizon, filtered through the scrim of oak trees, archaic and mythical. The horned sun.

It felt like a weird sign, a signal from on high.

This is a strange time in writing and publishing. It seems like there’s hardly any bookstores anymore. The publishers are on the skids. Ebooks are starting to matter. Especially to me. Tor won’t have me anymore, and my new guys, Night Shade Books—they’re on the verge of bankruptcy. Jim and the Flims got no distribution at all, and there won’t be a paperback.

No offers on The Turing Chronicles at all. Rejected by the big houses and the small publishers both. I myself believe that The Turing Chronicles is as good a novel as I’ve ever written. But possibly the gay romance, the Burroughs junkie routines, the Beat humor, the cop-killing, and my usual bad attitude put off the editors. Guys—it’s supposed to be funny.

I’ve already mentioned the apocryphal story that in hard times, the Inuit used to set aging tribe members onto ice-floes and let them drift out to sea. Towards the midnight sun. I think about this a lot these days.

I’ve been building up my new publishing venture, Transreal Books. Like a guy digging a fallout shelter. Transreal Books gives me direct, unmediated access to my readers. I can sell ebooks myself, and I’ve learned how to sell printed books online as well. I am so relieved that I have Transreal Books in place. I got it together just in time. I’ll publish the Turing novel via Transreal Books. And I’ll give it a title I really like. Not something to mollify a publisher. I’ll call it Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel.

Yes, self-publishing carries a whiff of being a literary leper. But I’d rather publish the book myself than go around begging the truly tiny publishers. Right out of the box, I have a better web presence than many small publishers. And if I self-publish, I earn about twice as much per copy.

Fresh-caught fish on my ice floe.

Drifting towards the great horned sun.

May 24, 2012. Hypershadows from Hyperspace.

Isabel sent me a link to a video of the shadows of skateboarders. Their arms seem to grow or extrude from their chests, amoeba-style. I think of a 4D version, with hyperskaters, and we perceive their hypershadows as being ghostly, hologram-like blobs that are somewhat human in shape. Now and then a sudden arm or tentacle can push out a hypershadow. The hypershadows are cast by a 4D sun in hyperspace.

Normally our space is filled with the divine beams of the 4D sun, and we don’t know about it. The 4D sun shines upon us even during our nights, and even if we’re buried beneath the ground. The 4D sun shines everywhere.

It’s not exactly light that’s coming off the 4D sun. It’s more like an All-is-One vibe. Or it’s like the immediacy and vivacity of daily reality.

And the hypershadows of the hyperskaters aren’t exactly darkness. The hypershadow of a hyperskater is more like a moving zone of despair and unreality. You don’t like it when you’re in a hypershadow.

Think of regular skater kids rolling across a 2D Flatland. The squares in Flatland don’t perceive the skateboard wheels, but they notice the shadows. The Flatlanders sense these shadows not as darkness, but as a—chill. The skaters roll on and the glow returns.

The eternal glow within us all.

June 12, 2013. Back from Hawaii

I published Turing and Burroughs myself in the fall of 2012, and it did okay. I made a little money. I’m writing less and less in my journal. It’s all going into my writing, and into my blog. And now it’s the summer of 2013.

My family and I were on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii for a week, fourteen of us in all, including the three children and five grandchildren, staying at some funky old bungalows near Haleiwa. Great fun, and wonderful landscapes, locals, plants, animals, and experiences. Almost like live SF.

Tor isn’t going to buy The Big Aha. I’d thought Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing might do it, but that’s not gonna happen either. I may take the Transreal Books route for The Big Aha. It’s better than trudging the weary round of publishers, hat in hand, eyes downcast…and that could take as much as a year.

“Who vants hear my fiddle and make happy dance?”

Grizzled gypsy flat on his back on the sidewalk, a damp stain of urine on the pavement near his crotch. Tries to stand up, but falls heavily onto his side, landing on his fiddle with a crunch.

“Vhy not be happy some more?”

Empty bottle of Tokay rolls across the sidewalk into the gutter. He holds up the fiddle, examining the long crack along one side, keeping one eye closed to counteract double vision. Fumbles up the bow and draws a tentative chord from the strings.

Vheeeenk!

This is all metaphor of course. I’m still sober. Thirteen years now.

Locus magazine has a cover-story interview with me in the June, 2013 issue, which might help me to push my Transreal Books titles. I’m very happy with how the interview came out. I struck a pleasant tone.

November 13, 2013. Kickstarted Big Aha. Lewis Carroll.

When I finished writing The Big Aha, I didn’t even bother sending it to the publishers. I was, like, fuck that shit.

The one missing part of the self-publishing puzzle had been: How do I get a cash advance? Rudy Jr. and my young writer friend Tim Pratt encouraged me to solve this by doing a Kickstarter crowdfunding number. I raised $12K for The Big Aha this summer. Better than any advance I’ve gotten from Tor Books in years.

And today I published The Big Aha in ebook, paperback, and hardback—via Transreal Books. Another fuckin’ masterpiece. I’m writing as well as I ever have, maybe better.

Last month, Sylvia and I took a trip to London and Oxford for two weeks. It was fun, although the specific individual parts didn’t matter as much as the overall gestalt. Part of the joy was simply the rush of, “I’m here!” Riding on the regular double-decker buses in London was a particular treat. Not tour busses, you understand, regular city busses.

I was surprised how crowded London was—I have this nostalgic tendency to think of London as lonely and foggy like in an old black and white movie, with echoing footsteps on the damp pavements. But many of the sidewalks were filled to capacity with people.

I’ve pretty much stopped writing up extensive travel notes. Nowadays my self-documenting energy goes into my blog. I post my trip pictures with short comments on them.

In Oxford I took a long, solitary walk around Christ Church college—which is where my man Lewis Carroll, a.k.a. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, spent most of his life. He went to the college there, then stayed on, teaching mathematics. His Alice came out in 1865, when he was 33.

On its spacious grounds, Christ Church College has a very large meadow that runs down to the Thames on one side and to the River Cherwell on the other, both streams rather narrow here. I spent an hour walking slowly around the edge of the meadow, filled with joy, thinking about Carroll being at this particular spot, and imagining his creatures among the cows. I sat on a stump which was in some way symbolic of the now-missing Carroll. I sat there drawing sketches of Wonderland creatures in the field.

I ate an apple, and fed the core to a greedy goose. Birds landing and taking off in the Thames. Looking around me, I was highly alert to transformations in the plants and animals. I saw a tree with a doughy, dowager, pfumpf-pfumpf face.

Reaching the other edge of the meadow, I sat by the Cherwell for a peaceful half hour there, looking at the leaves on the passing stream, thinking of them as being galaxies in deep space. I focus on a drop of water borne on the back of one leaf—it’s a home for thousands of microbes, just like us, aboard our Earth that rides the Milky Way. Yeah.

The Christ Church cows and the dreaming spires of Oxford.

Story idea: I find a secret door in the college wall and Lewis Carroll is inside, weirdly immortal. We drink tea, do logic puzzles, and recite nonsense verses to each other. And then—

March 7, 2014. Drifting Along.

I’ve been putting quite a bit of energy into my Transreal Books trip. Right now I’m reverting the rights to some of my out-of-print titles and republishing them. I have moments of doubt about the whole endeavor. Foolish old man, pottering around, making a pest of himself, not understanding that his party is over, repeating his stories, puffing himself up, vainglorious, fretful and resentful—shut up already, Rudy. One of these days I might stop. Or maybe not. If I don’t write for six months or so, I miss it so much that I start up again.

But at this point—not that I like to admit it—my writing career is more like a hobby than being something mainstream that large numbers of people care about. And what about that old writer/artist fantasy of posthumous glory? Maybe it’s not in the cards and never was, and even if it were, what diff would it make today?

Well I guess the prospective and potentially delusional foreglow of the posthumous glory can be a comfort, but it could well be a false comfort, goading me to an excess of fruitless striving—when really it might finally, finally, be time to relax. Believing in the posthumous glory is a little like buying into some fabu Heaven up ahead, and meanwhile slaving for the preachers. Better to be here now, and to enjoy the scraps that remain, and to relish the really quite substantial success that I’ve had.

Ah, the phantom of inner peace. Staring at the grass or the clouds or the trees, mind empty. Taking a walk, going biking, cooking a meal. Breathing slowly. Relaxation can be had.

As for my perennial treadmill, in the near future I’m reissuing some things—that 1983 memoir novel All the Visions, plus a fat omnibus of three of my old transreal novels: Secret of Life, White Light and Saucer Wisdom. I did a Kickstarter for this project too.

My next plan is that in the spring of 2015, I’ll publish a fat compendium of my journals from these past twenty-five years. It’s something I’ve mentioned in here before. Journals 1990-2014. Also I’m writing some new SF stories, collaborating with a series of old friends, puttering old geezers that we are.

I’m still having fun with Sylvia. And the children and grandchildren are an ongoing joy. As my friend Hellerstein once said of his daughter, “She’s the one thing in this modern world that I approve of.”

Of course I forever worry about this or that aspect of my children’s lives. Or even about the grandchildren. But what can I do about any of this? And how much did my own parents’ activities or opinions matter to me when I was in my forties? Hardly a whit. Let go, Rudy. Focus on the spaces between your thoughts. Let go, old man.

My health has been fine for about a year, no drama. Well, okay, I got my other hip replaced, but let’s not talk about that. My shoddy bod. Heart and brain working fine. As I’ve said before, when I think about my inevitable and ever-closer death, I say this mantra: “Off the hook. I’ll be off the hook.” Rest in peace.

After my various descents into the shadowlands, I’m rather certain that there won’t be an afterlife of any kind. And I won’t mind that—because I won’t be there. Song over, movie’s end, the lightbulb burns out, the room is dark, and you’re off the hook.

I’ve had a good run. And at this point nobody can say, “He died too young.” Not young anymore. Old. Fine.

I’m grateful for each new day I get, and for each slightly-difficult thing I can do, even if it’s picking the eucalyptus bark off the steep bank of our yard like I did today—and doing that without having a seizure, or losing my footing and popping out the sockets of my artificial hips, or having a stroke or a heart attack.

None of that today, my friend, and now the garden waste bin is full of bark, and out on the curb. And I’m noodling with writing projects, at peace, the housework done, my feet up on a stool. Yeah, baby.

Let’s say these journals are done.

Buy ebook or print editions via
Amazon or B&N or Transreal Books

Transreal Books, Los Gatos, California.

More info on the Journals home page: www.rudyrucker.com/journals

Series	Title	Dates
I	Silicon Valley	March, 1990 - Aug, 1992
II	Struggle	Aug, 1992 - Feb, 1996
III	A New Life	June, 1996 - Dec, 1999
IV	The Millennium	Jan, 2000 - Sept, 2002
V	The Brussels Illuminations	Sept, 2002 - Aug, 2003
VI	Done Teaching	Aug, 2003 - Feb, 2005
VII	SF Writer	March, 2005 - June, 2008
VIII	Death’s Door	July, 2008 - Nov, 2011
IX	Endgame	Dec, 2011 - March, 2014

Buy ebook or print editions via Amazon or B&N or Transreal Books

Buy ebook or print editions via Amazon or B&N or Transreal Books

Buy ebook or print editions via
Amazon or B&N or Transreal Books

Buy ebook or print editions via
Amazon or B&N or Transreal Books