100690.1100

     Wishing I could keep a more uniform journal.  Just think of 
the days lost already.  There's a scrap by the bed -- the last 
dream I actually wrote down -- and it's dated 073190.  A shame.
     Stick the letters of 091590 in here next.  In between, I was 
feverishly working on books.  A valiant endeavor, but more like a 
spiked pit and gravity once you get into it.  Flail those arms.
     Funny how optimistic those letters were.  Funny how I still 
haven't gotten my damned printer going, so they're still sitting 
on disk in magnetic limbo, and Marge especially, is probably 
wondering why.
     But it's the Curse of Optimism.  Everything seemed okay, and 
I told someone that, and ruined everything.  Within two days, 
brown rain started to fall (to coin a metaphor).  

1) JOB AND NO-JOB
     It was getting to be such a neat routine.  Go to Jon's at 
nine, watch some movie or other, eat ice cream, walk to work.  
(Over the highway, between the gas stations.)  Work: fat mylar 
bags of air waiting in cartons; sort them out and list them on 
the computer; stick em on the machine one by one, hit the button 
and nap for 7 minutes.  Or write book chapters.  Or read (PASCAL 
manuals, HYPERION and THE FALL OF HYPERION and CARRION COMFORT by 
Dan Simmons...), or eat vile squishy microwave burritos, drink 
can after can of water.  Not bad.  The calibrations took 3 hours, 
but I thought they were fun.  The night I brought Jon in briefly 
to see the place -- I was getting my paycheck -- Trung and his 
quiet telephone girlfriend were sitting around swinging legs.  He 
said the job was over.
     How did I get the job anyway?  Graham used to call me at 
weird hours and tease me.  He said he had the perfect job.  Just 
hit Alt-1 every 7 minutes and spend the rest of the time playing 
computer games in the other room, or doing homework.  Once he 
said someone had quit, and gave me the address.  The next day I 
was in the office, talking to someone named Patty (Hobson) for 
over an hour.  She was so pleasant and funny, and I could joke 
about carboxyhemoglobin and get a sensible reply.  Incidentally, 
she called me yesterday morning and said she was quitting the 
firm.  She sounded more relaxed than I'd heard before, but seemed 
also a bit defensive, as if expecting an okay.  I said it's 
always good to change one's routine, that it's no adventure if 
the clock screams at the same time every morning.  After 7 years 
with no significant vacation?  Do it!  I don't know why this 
episode is so memorable.  I only talked to her 5 times, but she 
left an impression.  It happens.
     The first two (training) nights at work, Graham and I played 
rummy.  Both GCs (gas chromatographs) were running, so there was 
a guy in the other room working, too.  Graham claimed he'd never 
played the game before, but he beat me 2550 to 2330 or so the 
first night.  The 2nd night I beat him by 10% out of 1700, after 
which he didn't like the game anymore.  But that night he brought 
in his TV and VCR and we watched "Crimes and Misdemeanors" by our 
favorite Woody Allen.  I've always enjoyed Martin Landau, and his 
lead role here was wonderful, though afterwards we wanted to see 
one of those weird SPACE:1999 episodes where he gazes off into 
space and talks to himself anyway.  I hope his age in this film 
was mostly make up -- his eyebrows still looked young.   
     Memories are some frightfully skewed things.  The importance 
we put on these trivial episodes!  (Funny how we see exclamation 
points coming in our peripheral vision, and our mental voices 
start Shatnerizing the sentence.)  I suppose the idea is to file 
the highlights on the surface, and hide all the boring crap 
underneath.  I could go back to the beginning here, and start 
writing anecdotes and notes beginning, "Which reminds me that 
...", and blow this recounting up to 40 or 50 pages, after which 
all readers would be sound asleep.  So nevermind, though I often 
walk around wishing I had the time to start at the beginning of 
the DIARY itself and fill in gaps with what I remember now.  
Always I resist, thinking it more important to do something new 
(but wouldn't the annotations be new material?)(life only FEELS 
infinite, you know).
     I worked alone two nights each week, and the other two 
nights there was a second guy there.  Usually, one machine would 
break down, which meant that, after 3 calibrations, our 
references were still not within 15% with r^2>.990.  Good.  With 
one guy per machine, the night was mellow.  When I had to run 
both machines, it was a nuisance, because they were in separate 
rooms/labs, which, though they were nextdoor, were annoying.  I'd 
roll my chair from room to room, and gouge the back of my foot a 
dozen times a night.  These were not happy chairs.  Conversely, 
when there were two people running a single machine, it was 
maddening.  Every 7 minutes, one guy would say, "Oo, I'll change 
the bag!", and the other guy would say, "Tell me when ..." and 
hit Alt-1, or somesuch nonsense.
     Aaron McCarthy liked microwave popcorn.  Alvin Shoemaker 
never made a shoe in his life.  That's a safe guess.  Quiet, 
furry-armed, scientist type.  I still can't 
believe that he isn't a grad student.  If ever somebody fit into 
one of my preconceptions.  I can't remember Trung's last name, 
but he was in my Physics class last semester.  I never said a 
word to him then.  Oh well.  He talks like a computer specialist, 
though he never actually uses a computer except to play games.  
James Oakley was the resident political debate-seeker.  A tired, 
slow-motion dude. I don't know how many hours we argued about 
Iraq, or even why, but I always like giving my speech on the 
Valhalla Effect (martyrdom causes fanaticism).
     Blah blah blah.  Sometimes I would drop by Palomar on the 
way back, and try to find Carmen.  I always saw David there, some 
kind of permanent fixture.  Otherwise just Jay (Herzog), Susan 
(who works where I do, but only on the nights that I don't), and 
Brigitt (the very pretty married one from Spanish I who works at 
Vons down the road).  Carmen and I have a routine for these days: 
I buy chocolate milk and freeze my teeth: she teases me saying it 
will just freeze my teeth and I say no no no, and of course it 
does.  It's supposed to do that.
     So the job is mostly done now.  An even $970 a month for 
doing nothing.  Forgive me if the spoiling of this dream upsets 
me briefly.  Patty challenged me to learn PASCAL and try for a 
job as a programmer after all the samples are done.  I learned it 
in about 2 weeks, but they hired someone else by then.  It was 
fun, though, in a futile kind of way.

2) THE PIT BULL
     Look, I live in a small cottage in the backyard of a real 
house, okay?  To get to the house, go up the uphill driveway, 
through the gate with the huge clanking NO TRESPASSING sign, past 
the garage and the shed and the weird open space with the rotting 
trellis-work, scattered lumber and broken furniture, and hang a 
left.
     Jim and Stefan still live in the main house.  Lowell moved 
out over a year ago.  Not 
long ago, Stefan declared that he was sick of his nowhere job.  
He said he was going to move up to Long Beach and learn 
underwater construction.  Real life is some ludicrous combination 
of Woody Allen and David Lynch, after all.  "But, Stefan," I 
said, "you know you can't read books underwater.  It's not good 
for the spine."
     I have no idea what I meant by that.  And which spine did I 
mean, anyway?  If I was Jesus, people would go to war over issues 
like these.  So let me cover my ass: "Forget petroleum!  Get a 
grip!"  There, now I feel a whole lot better.
     So those two guys were paying too much rent.  So their buddy 
Waz (Woz?  Also known as Mike.) moved in.  Temporary, they say.  
He and his wife Leslie are squooshed in Stefan's little old room 
now.  I've heard a baby crying but I've never seen one around the 
house.  Actually, I don't go nextdoor (outfront, whatever), 
because you never know who will walk in, and I don't get along 
with any of them.  Just Stefan.   
I'm not happy around TVs and smalltalk either.  Whoever's in the 
house on any given day, rest assured that Celtic folklore 
just doesn't fit into a conversation about football, horse 
racing, and skateboards.
     I walk one house down the hill, and Mike (Graham) and 
Christie live in the garage.  Chuck is frequently there.  The 
main house is rented by a guy named Dennis, and the guy's work 
for him as painters and such.  His wife, Jennifer, seems quiet 
enough to me, though I joked yesterday that most dartboards are 
more fun if you put up a picture of Joseph Stalin, and she asked 
me who he was.  Very interesting.  Anyway, here's another fun 
bunch of people.  At least in this bunch I can always be 
comfortable.  While I was mentioning Russian history to Jennifer, 
Mike was making some soy-mushroom-stuff burgers.  I always 
analyze the smell of this cooking, and never get a clue.  Anyway, 
Jennifer was worrying if the stuff would taste like hamburger or 
not, and Mike was saying, "Sure, sure, of course it will!  This 
stuff is great!"  This, coming from a guy who has no idea what 
hamburger tastes like.  He and Christie have been vegetarians 
since the time of Noah, as far as I can tell.  I'm a happy 
omnivore.  Yum.  They're a great bunch of people.
     Back to the pit bull.  Jim's family abandoned their dog a 
while back, so Jim put it in the yard.  It's a smelly, scabby, 
decaying thing, which he calls Zep (for Zephyr).  It's much 
better known to Carmen and I as Carpet Head (there's such no 
carpet on its leathery butt!), and simply Decay.  I've never at 
all liked having a dog in front of my house.  The damned thing 
barked at me and Carmen for most of a year, now it's too 
depressed to bother.  So Waz moves in, and poof! there's another 
dog in the yard.  A pit bull bitch from hell.  
     This creature is just not acceptable.  
     These dogs are made and bred to bark, bite, guard and be as 
rude as possible to people.  At least it has a purpose, though.  
What I can't understand is why anyone would want a dog around at 
all.   And when someone starts telling me how smart their dog is, 
I actually feel like vomiting.  Define smart.  Smart in what way?  
Oo, Fifi can find its food, wherever I hide it!  Oo, Dopey gets 
happy whenever it sees me with the leash, cuz he knows we're 
going to go for a walk!  Oo, Zep knows when you're talking about 
him, he knows alright!  If anything, a good dog is proof, not of 
the intelligence of dogs, but of the unintelligence of humans.
     So I'd come staggering home from work at 9 or 11 a.m., and 
this vicious bag of teeth starts bitching and barking at me.  
What, am I not allowed to go in my own house?  After a few days, 
I could deal with it on the level that yes, I expect misery, and 
this is right up my alley.  But when my sweetie comes over and 
walks all the way up the hill to see me, and even brings me a 
taco, and that beast starts barking at her, I get furious.
     I had a dream (more of a hypnogogic meandering) that I 
called UPS and had the dogs shipped off to Mongolia.  Actually, 
for a whole week, wherever I went, this was all I could think 
about.
     But I had another dream where the head (and beard) of George 
Bernard Shaw chased me around the house, yelling at me.
     So I went next door and told them how very little I wanted 
these disgusting carnivores in my yard.  They all looked at me 
like I was mad.  The underlying sentiment was, "Oh, go away.  
We're trying to watch tennis."
     That's enough about the pit bull, then.

[...]