Are my eyes really blue?

…but I can’t choose between this Iran business (the next 24-48 hours are the most critical bit yet), the new iPhone (no, I’m not taking the plunge – my old one could stop a bullet and certain people would still think I’d done it deliberately ;] ), the impending chaos in my life (long-awaited guests, long-awaited camping trip, major system transition at work), the jackhole who decided it was a good idea to push his car across the Caltrain tracks at rush hour (car, foot or bike, makes no difference – Caltrain is still undefeated), Maker’s Mark Mint Julep (don’t know whether it’s a pre-mix, a cordial, or what, but it’s bazilly), or the ongoing reclamation of my high-school-era life and memory (still wearing the old ring).

Maybe a trip into town will give me some ideas. At the very least, it might mean gelato and coffee. =)

…for the first time in a long, long time. The class before me had their 20th reunion, but it seems like one big rolling reunion is ongoing over in Pastebook. People are appearing who knew me when – some of whom knew me WAY back when, too.

And looking at the pictures, and the signatures, and the general record of events – I don’t know how so much of this has stayed walled off for so long. It may be for the best – God knows I don’t want to be one of those people whose best years were in high school and won’t shut up about them – but there’s no getting around the fact that twenty years ago, we were the princes of the universe. Here we are, born to be kings…

That DNA is all still there. Two decades on, the kid who won two state titles, MVP at Auburn in ’89, two-time all-county, ringer for the math team, bright star of the Constitution competition (state winner in 1989), Hearst scholar – that was me. That is me. If I feel like I haven’t changed since high school, well, so what – if the boy I was is the man I am, I’m doing pretty damn good. And if I’m trading my usual class ring for the one from two decades ago for a while, it’s because that same blue stone that once held the answer to the universe deep beneath it now winks at me as if to say remember who you were? remember who you are.

From the blog at staggerlee.org, June 12, 1999:

I wasn’t supposed to go into work yesterday. I was going to take the day off for just the reasons you can read below. I asked to have that day off about three weeks ago because work is getting more stressful all the time and I needed a little time to myself, especially since I was almost guaranteed to be depressed all week. Sure enough, this was as rough a week as we’ve had in a while–they insist on treating our team as the red-headed stepchildren. They ignore us, act like our advice and opinion is worthless–and then things turn out exactly like we warned them and then they almost act as if it’s our fault. I was VERY glad I wasn’t going to be in on Friday.

Then Thursday about 5:45 I got a call from Priit Vesilind, our number-one gun. Senior writer, close friend of Bob Ballard, the man who goes where the action is for the National G. He’s off to Albania and assorted places and bought a new laptop and wanted to know if I could set him up for AOL dial-up from Europe on it. I said sure, I can do that, I’ll just set it up Friday.

Well, I figured I’d come in on Friday and it’d take a half-hour and I could slip out. Ha. It’s a Micron PC laptop and it had hardware problems. I’m a Mac software guy. This contraption is the exact opposite of what I was hired to work with. But a promise is a promise, so I started in on it.

I didn’t get away from work until 7 PM. On my day off, I spent over nine hours in the office getting the thing to work. And ultimately I did, with the help of another guy and a couple of phone calls. Priit had a laptop that would do nothing at 10 AM and at 7, he had one that would dial in and get his mail from Rome, Athens or Zurich.

And I thought about all the times I heard someone getting up at 2 AM to go shovel coal into the furnace at Fultondale Elementary, and I didn’t think anymore about the leave I wasted or the time to myself I didn’t get. I thought that I had done a great job that I–and others–could be proud of.

That kind of week this week. Instead of being at WWDC, I’m covering for the folks who are. Aggravated by a left knee that’s worse now than it was before the surgery, and made worse by a sudden crisis project that came about specifically because somebody chose to ignore me rather than deal with the problem I warned them about. Leaving me holding the bag with a very tricky needle to thread technically and politically.

And yet.

Tomorrow I’m going into my weekly meeting with everything topped up, all projects done or documented, and a sheaf of grateful emails from people I bailed out at 6 PM. Some days, it’s just your day to shovel coal. And I’m never prouder – and I know some others who are probably the same – than when I go home late, grinning through the exhaustion, because I know that shit got shovelled.

And so I will close, as I did a decade ago, with the same toast…to absent friends.

The problem is, I am unfortunately gripped by the conviction that if you are the good guys, you have to be the good guys. Which means you don’t torture, you don’t carry out reprisals against civilians, you don’t engage in wildly disproportionate attacks – you wear the white hat and you play the thing fair and square, and your Texas-moron Stone Cold Steve Austin types be damned.

But the problem is, you can’t always live up to being the good guys. And when you can’t live up to it as an irate blogger, that’s one thing, but if one were President of the United States, one could get in a good deal of trouble saying things like “Tonight we’re going to turn the DMZ into a river of radioactive glass. And tomorrow after breakfast, we’re going to pick names of North Korean cities out of a hat and take turns dropping a hydrogen bomb on a random city, one every twelve hours, until you give us our two Americans back alive and unharmed. And if we never get them back, if we have to bomb and burn the entire Democratic People’s Republic of Korea until no stone sits atop another, if we have to snuff out twenty-four million lives because of somebody’s foolishness in kidnapping two American citizens – then fuck ’em. Sucks to be North Korea.”

The challenge in being the good guys is being the good guys, even when you’d so, so, so rather not.

It was another world. Williamsburg, Virginia, out on the green at sunset, trying out a box of Altoids for the first time. Princeton, watching on TV as history collided in Iran and in Beijing. On the way to the first stage of That Month, though I had no idea that’s what it would turn out to be.

The United States Military Academy, at West Point, is way up on the bluff overlooking the Hudson. The dropoff from the back balcony of Eisenhower Hall is precipitous. It’s green and foggy and gray and full of ghosts, and it’s just an amazing place to spend a week – even if you’re just one donkey in the Academic Workshop Battalion, Bravo Company, Second Platoon, squad 2. Whatever – it was enough for me to turn on Navy and pull for the Black and Gold ever since when first Saturday in December comes around. From there, it was on to Orlando, Disney World, received by my teammates like a conquering hero as we swept out to do to the rest of the country what we’d done to Alabama. From there, Alabama Governor’s School, two weeks in one of the leafiest parts of the campus of Jesus A&M, somewhat back to Earth but still definitely not the drudgery of high school.

I know what most people think I mean when I talk about what happened in June 1989. I know what I used to mean, anyway, and I’m not proud of the fact that a lot of people had to compete with a ghost. But twenty years on, I’ve long since realized that the actual flesh-and-blood person who had that name was long gone before even a year had passed, and isn’t a part of the story in the way the ghost was. And in reality, the ghost was only a tiny reflection of the whole of what really happened and what I really obsessed over.

Because the whole was this: I was everywhere, flying between New York and Florida and constantly on the move. I was surrounded by new and amazing things. I had interesting people all around. Some of them were even girls. Who were interested in me. Which was a completely new and unfamiliar experience. And most important of all: these people were all like me. I wasn’t the Black Swan anymore. I wasn’t the weirdo, or the space freak, or the person who sat there in the parking lot of Piggly Wiggly and thought “This can’t possibly be the place I should be.” I belonged, in every way that mattered. I had found my place in the world. Everything I’d ever dreamed of, wished for, cried over – it was all right there, every bit of it. And if the devil had appeared right then, in his oily Rupert Everett pompadour and posh accent and arched eyebrow, and said “for the low, low price, today only, of a mere ONE soul–” I would have bitten the tip off my own finger to sign in blood before he could finish. And then…

There’s an old joke in Silicon Valley. Bill Gates dies, and St Peter is looking at a clipboard and says “Gosh, we don’t know what to do. The Foundation on one hand, but Windows ME on the other…tell you what, we’ll let you pick.” So they look at Heaven – nice, white, cool, airy, a bit dull perhaps. Then they look at Hell – wild, noisy, casino games, dance music, lights flashing, hot chicks gyrating, Vegas on acid – and Bill Gates says “Let’s go with Hell.” Instantly – dark, sulfur, lava, red-hot poker up the anus, and he screams “WTF, this is nothing like the Hell you showed me!!”

“Sorry, Bill,” says St Peter, “that was the demo.”

to be continued…

…but while we have an interlude, I give you Han Solo, P.I. – enjoy.

Never forget. Never forgive.

I forgot who Chicago was playing in the Eastern finals – maybe Cleveland? – but it was definitely Utah and Portland in the West. I watched Johnny Carson’s last episode of the Tonight Show from a hotel room in Panama City in the company of my then-girlfriend and her roommate. School was out, classes done, nothing left but to log some beach time and watch basketball – but then, I wasn’t interested in the beach and she wasn’t interested in the basketball.

To boost the new guy, NBC did something they hadn’t done in ages: the first week of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno went out live, following the conference finals games. And – I remember this clearly – the third night or so, they had Blue Man Group, who did an amazing routine with drums and PVC and Captain Crunch, and the crowd went batshit, and Jay was half-sheepish as he chimed in, “This is not your father’s Tonight Show.”

It didn’t last, of course. Leno became about as edgy and entertaining as 1% milk sometime around the fifteenth Judge Ito Dancers appearance, and even a bad night on Letterman entertains me more than the best of Leno. But all these years later, I feel like I should at least give the new guy a chance.

David Gerrold, the sci-fi author, famously said that when you get right down to it there are only three occupations in the world: Producer, Servicer, and Salesman. (He contemplated Godhood as a fourth but decided that fell under Services.)

Maker Faire is for the Producers. The people who turn old typewriter keys into cufflinks. The ones who use old bookcovers to produce spiral-bound notebooks. The ones who make huge plush porkchops and felt bomb pops. The ones with giant mechanical snail cars that breathe fire and Victorian mansions on wheels and four kinds of hand-roasted coffee and a hand-wired 8-bit CPU of their own design and silver earrings shaped like theobromine molecules and 1/144 scale battleships that blast the bejaysus out of each other and PVC marshmallow blowguns and a 10,000-year clock and brass-rimmed leather goggles and the Bellagio fountains executed in Diet Coke and Mentos and…

…well, I would say “you get the picture” but it’s really hard to explain unless you’re there. It’s like music festivals, I guess – all these artists you’ve never heard of, working in a thousand different genres, things you just have to see to believe.

If you don’t think I’m going to be there from the minute the gates open every day of next year’s edition, you’re crazy.