nirgle.net - spring 2008

So let's say that tomorrow I am suddenly told that I am surplus to labour requirements at work and will soon be laid off. Or the site just can't afford to stay open any longer, due to higher operating costs, or the client found a cheaper outsourcer, something like that. Who knows. Anything could happen. I meet the love of my life in another city and move out there. Fat chance, but never say never. Or in the morning, in the middle of cereal, I get an urgent cable to shut my safehouse down and get yourself out of the country--NOW.

What then? What else could I possibly do if I weren't doing what I'm doing?

Well, I have been gently easing into my master plan to launch a series of increasingly addictive web projects that explode in popularity and end up generating enough revenue to cover operating costs and make me a ton of cash at the same time, with no further work on my part needing to be done. I took a couple weeks off from work about a month ago and wrote the first thousand lines of code for the first project (which will remain under wraps until its alpha period is over of course.) Now that I am back from my vacation, the time I spend advancing this first project toward reality has become rare again. So if I suddenly found myself unemployed, I would be able to throw myself fully into these projects once again, thereby bringing my early retirement date even earlier.

Of course, this wouldn't mean for me what it would mean for most other people. Sure, I would relax, worry a lot less, and work out a lot more, but I would still stay engaged with day-to-day project affairs: making a morning stroll to the server monitoring room to check on various graphs, trim the bonsai trees, etc. That will really be the apogee of my existence as a geek: strolling into the server room, having a peek at a couple graphs, admiring my steadily increasing revenue chart, and then taking the rest of the day off.

But let's be practical here: pretty much everything has been done already for the web (hasn't it?). Things are just copies of old things, and you know, with the law of diminishing returns, that sort of thing, each copycat project is less popular than the one before. So let's assume I don't start an internet revolution (I will, but let's assume I don't), then we'll need to talk about other real life jobs.

I wouldn't mind working at the casino in some capacity, either as a dealer or security guard or cashier in the cage/bank, or even just as a janitor, cleaning the place up for ridiculous amounts of money. I reluctantly admit that I already spend a certain portion of my leisure time there, sitting nondescript at the blackjack tables. And in my tenure as a casual gambler I have observed how much fun the dealers seem to have as they keep the spirit alive at their tables. I think it would an enjoyable job. I would be a trick dealer, too, flipping cards around, spinning chips, and riverdancing on all natural blackjacks. I could definitely dig a card dealing job, even if meant the occasional bout of standing.

I think I also have the capacity to be some sort of lab rat. If I went back to college for a few years and got a diploma (perhaps later a degree, if it didn't require that much more work) in chemical engineering technology, I'm sure there would be plenty of opportunity in the chemical valley for a mind like mine. If word on the street can be trusted, the valley currently consists of an aging workforce that will soon retire, and the freshly emptied positions will need to be filled with new people. I don't consider myself much of a physical person, i.e.: I'm not somebody who would crawl into tanks and pipes and install/repair things, or do anything else requiring being on my feet for that matter. But I could see myself sitting in a monitoring room all day, making surprise glances at the gauges on the panels in front of me, trying to catch them sneaking past their limits. I would be a hard worker like that. What?! Fire in tank 21?! That's a blackjack in the oil section, boys! Move out of the way... give me some leg room... watch these moves!

But the self-profiting web project thing. The graph-watching idea. Code that generates money. That's where my future is.

I need to talk to you for a second. Over here, by the California pomegranate stand, we won't be bothered here. Listen, I'm concerned that the Large Hadron Collider is going to swallow up Europe and create a general feeling of nausea in the rest of us shortly after it is activated this fall. Seems like a rather big risk to take in the name of hard-to-pronounce science when you think about it. It's nice that we're searching for a Grand Unified Theory, but I would rather concentrate our planet's resources on other things.

Actually let's forget the pomegranates, let's go over to the banana stand and wonder how much money we have wasted on blemish medication and hair colour that has been all for nothing anyway, when we could have been spending it on smear campaigns against the Higgs boson, also known as the harbinger of our destruction. Curiosity killed the cation. We have no right to be messing with God's particles, or even mentioning them in public. Let's grab this bunch of yellow bananas here and call it a day.

I was outbid on eBay last night at the last moment on an auction for a positive emotional response to an abstract experience. I was highest bidder for several hours to acquire this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and passed most of it refreshing the page in eager anticipation, only to be sniped at the last second by some grumpy asshole with mad not3pad sk1llz. Reactionary emotional experiences in the positive end of the spectrum get more and more rare as you move on in life, and to continue them past about twelve years of age is a distinction reserved only for the emotionally enlightened, which clearly I am not. So when I was browsing randomly through Everything Else and found a low price on such a rare item I entered my highest bid of way too much and began the F5 game.

As a kid, I used to have these experiences all the time, while waking up, while lying down, while spacing out in the classroom, etc. I remember them clearly and want them again. Only now they seem to be spreading increasingly thin and can only be found here and there during ectopic bursts of happiness, on the bus, on the dancefloor, or while browsing internet auction sites.

Some nostalgia today caused me to document some life events with Google Maps:

Places I've Lived
School's I Attended

<nirgle> poll:
<nirgle> i just opened one of those mr noodels thing
<nirgle> and the instructions say to empty the flavour packet into the noodels and add hot water
<nirgle> boiling water
<nirgle> but... there's no flavour packet... but the contents are already mixed in with the noodels
<nirgle> is this an attempt to kill me or are the instructions just outdated?
<moose> attempt to kill
<nirgle> ok well this is my written record that i have begun consuming a beef mr noodles from lot code UMTK00 A

The dreams, they're becoming more frequent, the ones about purity, of internal cleansing, of reaching higher levels of everything. This morning, I re-entered the scene during post-production of a Mastercard commercial. Not promoting the use of credit, but resisting it. The pomp and rush of the retail season, the senseless spending, the jovial circus atmosphere dies and dies and dies, and finally just dies off completely, and on the right side of the silent, black screen, the Mastercard logo, then on the left, in plain font: Tenses Curve. Not an exact syntactic rendition of the dream-feeling but intellectually I know precisely what I mean for it to mean: bad tendencies in time just die away, if only you last long enough.

Those transparent 8" cake domes they put over cakes to keep them fresh. The hit of this Christmas retail season (everybody's getting one) are objects which look like those domes, only these are fully enclosed and watertight. Instead of cake, there is an inch or so of water along the bottom and a swiftly rotating glass disk above with a small hole in the middle. As the disk turns, the water shoots up through the hole, creating what appears from the outside to be a refreshing light mist which mushrooms up and inside the dome, a pristine waterfall of absolutely clear water that erases the flaws in everything it touches.

From the outside that's what it appears to be, but in this dream, in the time of this dream, people have reached a high enough level of existence that, as easily as they once simply drank water, they are now able to introject the purifying essence of this object directly into their soul, and their very nature is renewed, their spirit flushed of all ailments. This is coming, this is far far away, but it is coming. For now, it is still something you have to wake up from. But I know this is where we are all heading, if only we last long enough.

My new theory of dreaming will change pretty much everything, except of course the bedsheets which will still need to be done by hand. This new theory came to me rather suddenly, but ironically not while I was sleeping, like my theories usually do. I was actually just lying absolutely still on my couch after breakfast on Thursday, imagining myself freshly abducted onto an alien spaceship, right at the part where they defragment my brain in order to make the stealing of my thoughts and feelings a more efficient task. While strapped to the gurney under a floodlight, a big scientist alien leans over me and whispers the following...

The brain, like every organism, attempts to achieve a state in which the most amount of work can be done with the least amount of effort. You can certainly understand the concept of least amount of effort, can't you? Anyway, in the case of the brain, the "work" is simply the task of storing as much information about the environment as possible and accessing it as quickly as possible when the information is needed. How efficiently your brain meets these goals is the primary responsibility of the dreaming mind.

There is a general scientific agreement that there are two forms of memory: short-term, and long-term. The transferring of information into long-term memory is understood and documented enough. The dreaming mind takes over after a fresh wave of short-term information has been filed into long-term memory during non-REM sleep; that is, the period before dreaming.

The function of dreaming is to re-code information in long-term memory in order to keep the storage "footprint" as small as possible, which in turn minimizes the amount of energy required to keep the same amount of information remembered, and which speeds recall of the information. When you dream, your mind temporarily brings components of your past experiences into consciousness, mixes recent experiences with them, and sends them back into long-term storage. Every time your mind can encode new experiences on top of old ones, it is saving space and energy by storing more than one piece of information in approximately the same topographical area of memory. This is closely related to Freud's concept of condensation.

The amount and extent of dream activity will vary proportionally with the amount of new information you have taken in since the last time you dreamed. If you have had a particularly frantic day intellectually, whether because of studying hard in school or training for a new job, etc., you will likely have vivid, frantic dreams of the new experiences mixed in with prior experience, as your mind naturally locates the best configuration of the new information within the old.

Sorry, I need to get this. Yes? Oh, just got a new human, telling him some things. No, nothing classified. Well, not really. Oh, um, I don't know. Pepperoni, sausage, the usual. Yeah that's good. Oh wait, can one be vegetarian? Wonderful, thanks. Ok, thanks. Yes, bye.

It's late, and all I have are my thoughts and this stack of poker chips to shuffle until my hand hurts. Somebody crashed their vehicle into the local Harvey's last night, my place of daily grocery shopping about 200 meters north of here. Just last evening all was in perfect order with the southeast corner of the store, which forms the farthest point of the shortest line between my apartment building's lobby and tasty long-pickle goodness.

Then tonight, just before reaching the door, I looked up and froze at the sight of a chain-link fence surrounding a wooden plank placed against the entrance where a black set of tire tracks came screeching to a halt presumably sometime late last night. My first worry was that somebody had just been killed and I would not have my cheeseburger today. But after noticing people standing at the counter and sitting down at the tables, the panic subsided and I simply took the side door.

You probably have about a year left, my organs tell me, despite my brain insisting that I have at least 30 left to go. I got this awkward and frustrating news in an email from my body right before breakfast on Saturday. I was reading the back of the cereal box when my gmail notifier beeped, and there it was, right under my word of the day: Don't be upset but your days are rather numbered. You probably have about a year left. Bold, twelve-point font, gently indented, signed "Heart muscle."

I have known about my impending demise for some time now, but was expecting at least to be formally told about it in a quiet room in a hospital one evening. Actually, this news doesn't really bother me, since for months I have been living in fear that the elevator cables would break while I was stepping on or off the elevator car, causing it to plunge down at the exact moment I am halfway out the elevator, thereby shearing my body in half vertically.

This would be a much less elegant death than, say, being consumed by a massive nuclear fireball, but since it seems one of these nights my body is simply going to shut down while sleeping anyway, I should consider the shutdown to be a more frustrating and awkward way to go than the elevator thing. They say you should listen to your body but if you have a reliable internet connection gmail can do it for you.

Fortunately boredom is not something I've ever experienced to any terrible extent. I could use another ten or so hours in every day, in fact, to accomplish all the things I want to get accomplished. There are languages to learn (Python is the current object of interest), games to play, websites to develop, songs to write, training to be done, research to be performed, and all sorts of other nouns to be verbed. I was last bored on Monday, August 13 at 7:15pm for about four minutes, according to written record.

There is something tantalizingly interesting about a person stuck in the throes of boredom. What's it like always to be bored? Are you really so perfect that there is not something you could be practicing right now? Have you so discovered and unraveled the mysteries of the universe that there is no interesting fact you could be in pursuit of? Or is it that there is something to do, that very thing you should be doing at this very moment, and you just don't want to do it?

If you're not going to be doing anything with that hour, do you mind if I have it? Do you realize how much I have queued up to do, and there you are, pacing around frantically stating that there is nothing to do?

Oh how I wish I could slip the surly bonds of Earth! If not slip, then at least threaten to temporarily break free. You know, from the oppressive shackles of gravity and these ceaseless laps around the sun. The escape velocity of Earth when standing on its surface is 11.2 km/s, which means that any leap upwards any slower than that, although certainly considered a good try (worthy of mention in the Toronto Star for example), would be ultimately doomed by math and physics to conclude in an anti-climactic re-entry into the gravity field, and (depending on how high up you got) an anti-climactic re-entry into a freefall, albeit a pretty one (imagine the view). Ultimately you would end up back where you started from, likely dead from the attempt, or at least suffering from a small spell of hypoxia for your troubles.

My mother used to lose me a lot when I was an infant. I don't mean lose in the sense that she would bet wrong when gambling me at the horse races; I mean lose in the sense that she would realize I had not been making any noise for several hours and should be checked upon for possible physical maladies such as getting stuck under another bookslide of encyclopedias in the next room. She would pace around the house frantically searching for me only to find me fast asleep half-way up the stairs. In prose they call this foreshadowing: this is where the world got a quick glimpse at things to come in the future life of me. But did anybody interpret this as symptomatic of impending psychological inclinations? Probably not.

Since these events happened during my toddler years, I consider them to be my earliest experiments with escape velocity. Just old enough to crawl, I would see if I could make it all the way up the stairs without falling asleep, oh what an achievement for a one-year old! Up the stairs and off this rock, on to things more exciting and more stimulating than rolling around on the carpet with spittle dribbling slowly from my mouth. Surely I was not simply going upstairs to take a nap? What with so much else to do? But in the end I would get carried up the rest of the way and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed anyway, tucked under the blankets with my glowworm. How I miss that glowworm so.

Zoom to the present time, pan the camera up a bit. I said up. Up here. No, here. Has it been more than twelve hours since my last sleep? Likely not. At around ten hours of heroic alertness, that's when I start to feel the gravity of sleep again, and then I'm back in the battle: trying to muster up a sufficiently energetic launch from laziness, enough to finally slip the crotchety bonds of my nature, even just for one full orbit of one fully animated day; oh what a treat that would be!

My constant attempts to demote myself at work are nothing fundamentally new, but just the most recent of several manifestations of a certain issue, what a behavioural psychologist would call the "acting out" of my guilt. You know, for being me. One minute I am saving the day for some CEO I have never met in some other country, and the next I am eyeing the janitor's mop and thinking that certainly I could do the floor much more efficiently than she could, perhaps a little switcheroo at the right time would be the best thing for the company (translation: best thing for me). I never think or feel I deserve the limelight; most of the time, receding into the darkness of anonymity is a much more appealing idea to my neurotic self than stepping out onto a podium to receive whatever award it is that I have won now.

Shouldn't effort be rewarded, not natural talent? Recognize the piano player who has spent decades mastering a song, not the player who sat down one afternoon and just started playing it. Secretly I am in love with most naturals of history through some form of displaced narcissism. I project my feelings of self-pride onto them, love them for it, and leave myself only with the guilt for being born the way I was born. Two things I have never been able to do well are playing Quake CTF multiplayer and axe-kicking higher than my head. The rest seems to come naturally.

Thankfully money does not interest me and never has. I would rather go back to less pay and more privacy; I'll hide myself from the world, that's what I'll do. The world wants me, but I don't want the world. "Why are you working here, Hooper? You could do anything, you could have anything?" Fortunately I don't want anything. I want a key to the rooftop of my apartment building so at 2:00am in the morning when the door is locked I can sneak up there and watch the storms rolling in over the lake with Beethoven still vibrating in my fingertips.

Dare to compare the difference in demeanor between the employee who is entering the bathroom to take a piss and the employee who is entering the bathroom to take a dump. It is truly fascinating, especially when it is the same person, and only mere hours apart. Happy, jovial, frolicking into the bathroom at roughly the same time, the piss-bound patron is chatting up a storm today, "Hey Jay, how's it going, are you in LRP again today?" This type of bathroom enthusiasm begs to be matched, so I do, and then we're off into a hearty conversation about this and that, followed by hand-washing, drying, holding the door for each other, parting words.

A couple hours later I am walking into the bathroom again at roughly the same time as they are, only now they are walking very slowly, as though concentrating very intently on a difficult problem of some sort. They don't offer up any sort of greeting and when, upon seeing my bathroom buddy from mere hours before, I yell, "Hey man! How's it going!" they continue to stare dead-pan straight ahead and mumble an empty "good" on their slow march toward the toilets. I closely watch the dread and disappointment in their every step, as if walking the last few feet of a plank. "Man are you all right?" No response, just a timid closing of the door, a latch of a lock, and the unbuckling of a belt that is my signal to leave right away, or at least to start making some sort of cover noise like repeatedly flushing the nearest urinal or loudly crumpling the paper I am using to dry my hands. I live across the street from work and therefore never have to endure this mental inconvenience, but I like to think I would have the strength to blast into the bathroom with my hands in the air, beaming with happiness, "Hey guys, I guess it's crapping time!"

This apartment building is a big sitcom in progress, it could be the next biggest thing on TV if the right directors and film crews were brought in, and especially if it had an effective title, something catchy like George Street Geriatrics, or Age-Shackled Octogenarians. I am not a big fan of staring too closely at background faces, and indeed at first I passed off the resident population as little more than dynamic scenery... rather slowly moving dynamic scenery. But then as time wore on and the faces imprinting on my retina became inextricably linked with their associated behavioural patterns, the local cast changed from casual visual distractions on my daily trip to work into actual internalized components of my everyday reality, hence my new obsession with retirement and a very early one at that.

If I had a TV I would likely keep it tuned to the security cameras all day as a nonstop episode of this so-called sitcom, which when you think about it is a good way to label it, since these actors are rather well situated in their seats in the downstairs lobby from morning to night, unable to easily move around, a sedentary method of living which seems to lend itself naturally to a comedic group discussion and agreement of the last 24 hours of weather patterns. "Oh it's raining again! How about that rain!" "She's calling for snow again!"

When I grow up I shall heartily volunteer to assist the lady who cleans the mall fountain every morning, you should see the beaming smile on her face as she dons her galoshes and twists her squeegee together for another morning's collection of coins tossed in by the hopeful well-wishers of the previous day. You laugh but really this is quite a worthy aspiration for a young buck like myself. If it falls through I've also given some thought to becoming the greeter person at Walmart, which is not at all a thankless job and would fit a man like me quite well, even though I'm under eighty years of age and am turned off by frocks, blue ones most of all.

My project for August is going to be locating my apartment building's dumpster. On day one I had nothing to begin with, and therefore had nothing to throw out. But as the days went on and my collection of small surplus material started building up, I ventured out of my apartment in hopes of finding the garbage chute. It turned out to be right there behind the door outside the elevator, how many mornings had I stood right beside this door, grunting and twitching as the garbage piled up under my sink?

This deep, black portal to nowhere scared the crap out of me at first, but I forced myself to begin using it. The obsession became exceedingly bad the day I turned the light on in the garbage chute room and saw the sign on the inside of the door that warns you that a real live person is handling your garbage at the other end of the chute. Of course I panicked and ran back to my apartment and locked myself in, how could they conveniently forget to put this in the contract? Which scientists and analysts had all along been untying and placing my carelessly folded napkins and dirty razors on a moving conveyer belt on the bottom floor, studying me intensely, trying to determine what nefarious projects I had on the go?

I could only emerge for another try after starting my ritual of doing the initial tie really tight as I normally would, then stuffing the tied bag upside down into another bag and tying it again really tight, hoping they'll just harmlessly pass by my refuse as a waste of their time. How embarassing would it be if a bag got lodged halfway down? Nobody could honestly expect you to fess up to something like this. Nobody would own up, somebody one day would just open the garbage chute and place their bag atop the tower of stuck bags that had been building up to finally reach their floor, and would realize something was up and call the maintenance man immediately. It is absolutely crucial that I find out where the dumpster is before this happens to me.

Every day it gets harder and harder for me to talk in public, mostly at work. The other day I was standing around in a smoking circle outside when all eyes and ears suddenly focused on me. Usually my attempts at joining in on conversations are rudely trumped by those who are already speaking, or those higher in the social structure who have more of a right to speak than me, and especially those who actually smoke and therefore have a reason to be standing there. Who is this guy who stands around with an empty coffee mug, trying to fit in? No matter. I usually get a few words into my verbal contribution before somebody else talks right over me, going off talking about their kids, or their movie date from the night before, or how much they hate work or how hot a day it is outside. Wasn't it going to rain? I thought they'd called for rain.

But then the other day rather suddenly they just happened to tune in to the fact that I was standing there at the exact same time I was opening my mouth to start a new sentence, and then Bam!, just like that, like a deer caught in a set of headlights, the gaze of my work peers speared me to the center of my consciousness and I was utterly unable to mumble a single word, and this at a time when they had paused to let me talk! At these times I can't do much other than cover my eyes with my hands and slowly exhale a drawn-out, raspy breath, as though excusing myself from my conversational duties in order to concentrate on a gas bubble percolating somewhere inside. The group giggles and laughs, ahah, look at him, the reticent fool! What I was trying to tell everybody was that I had finally joined Facebook, which was probably better left unsaid anyway.