Silicon Valley / 1990-1992
The Professor and the Ants
March 22, 1990. I’m 44. Proctoring Tests.
God what a futuristic date! And it’s my forty-fourth birthday!
I’m proctoring an exam in my C Programming class.
Proctor. At Swarthmore there were boys called proctors and it was their
job to turn you in to student court if they saw you drinking.
Proctology. Proctoscopic, dude.
Four years ago I was an unemployed writer turning
forty in Lynchburg, Virginia. That was the day they offered me this job
at San Jose State. I’m enjoying teaching this semester. I guess I like
teaching after all. Swarthmore is raising their costs to $21K a year for
daughter Georgia, which is about the same that San Jose State gives me
for teaching halftime. I teach halftime this year because I’m also
working as a software designer for Autodesk of Sausalito, California.
It’s almost suppertime, and I’ve already driven
to Sausalito and back, seventy miles each way. James Gleick is here for
two days to talk about the interface for this commercial program we’re
developing at Autodesk, James Gleick’s Chaos: The Software.
Writing Chaos and teaching computer science is all I’ve done since last June when I finished my novel, The Hollow Earth. The Chaos
work has been quite a job, but incredibly rewarding. We’ve had many
amazing discoveries. Latest is a 3D perspective rendering of the Lorenz
attractor, looking like an alien squid. It’s based on three differential
equations. I really like wallowing in math, to tell the truth. Happy as
a pig in math. This glittering manic nerd joy at using the logical
tools to their ultimate abilities. Yes, the work is rewarding—but I want
it to be over.
So, yeah, it’s my birthday and, unlike most
birthdays, I’m not drunk. Today’s a work day. Yesterday I smoked pot all
day, mowed the lawn with our reel mower, went to the dentist, and drank
a bottle of wine and eight beers.
I’ve been going to a periodontist recently. I’m
going to lose many teeth. I have one which flared up and is killing me,
I’d let ’em pull it right now. That happens as you get truly
middle-aged, your teeth want to fall out. Nature’s way is to put a huge
suppurating abscess under the tooth to eat away the bone so the tooth
can fall out on its own. Who mumble needs damn teef anyway.
Our son Rudy got into Berkeley, and wants to go. All right! We’ll miss him, but there is
this feeling towards the end of their senior year that they’re
outgrowing the family nest. Yesterday I was hassling him about a car key
he’d lost, being an overbearing father. But in a way, I’m filled with
grief at the prospect of him leaving home.
Forty-four, as forty as you can be. I think Jack
Kerouac only made it to forty-seven. And Eddie Poe forty. My father and
grandfather had heart problems starting in their fifties. I’m not
looking forward to heart problems—that’s even worse than teeth. I should lose lots of weight. I weigh two hundred pounds all of a sudden. Maybe once I finish Chaos I can lose weight. And write science fiction or something.
My students are still working. I told them they
could have the whole hour and fifteen minutes of class time—I wish I’d
said just an hour, and then I could go get a beer and have supper.
Funniest question on my C Programming test: I defined an array of numbers called what, and showed them the code for a function called huh( ), and I asked them the value of huh(what). Huh? What?
It’s hard to eat with this bad tooth. I was clean
and sober for three days and yesterday I was loaded. These days, a
three-day clean and sober spell feels quite ample.
Sylvia is making Wiener schnitzel for supper
tonight, a big family favorite. Her family won me with schnitzel, back
in the mid-1960s, when I went to visit them in Geneva. Sylvia and I were
courting, and I was a college sophomore, and my future mother-in-law
made schnitzel several times. It was the best food I’d ever tasted. They
gave me the best wine I’d ever had, they were witty and international,
they had a great apartment with a view of the lake and a swimming pool
on the roof—it was wonderful.
Still in reminiscence mode, the other day I was
thinking about my last spring at dear Swarthmore College, and I could
summon up that same ungovernable and inconsolable sorrow I felt about
having my college years end, sorrow at having that last dance of youth
end, with all my friends to be scattered across the planet. I loved how
the breeze would waft blossom petals off the fruit trees on the
president’s long rolling lawn. I’d stand under those trees with my
future wife, shaking the branches to make the petals drift down on us,
and then we’d kiss. Like that old-time student song, Sic Semper In Flore, meaning something like, “We’ll always be in bloom like this.”
Each new section of the Chaos
program gets deep into my head and I see the shit everywhere. Latest
are Yorke’s quasiperiodic maps which consist of sine functions jamming
off each other. Yorke published the parameters that he used, eighteen
sets of twelve-place decimal numbers, and I typed them all into our Chaos source code, and zowie, there are the same gnarly pictures that Yorke had in his article!
It reminded me of a scene in Heinlein’s Starman Jones—they’ve
lost their star atlas, the boy hero remembers the numbers they need to
hyperjump back to Terra, and he types in these hundreds of digits.
Yesterday I saw a goose in one of the Yorke
patterns, a long neck goose, and yesterday evening I could hear the
goose in my music too. Chaos is where it’s at.
Turns out there’s a four-dimensional Mandelbrot set and I found it with our Chaos
program. That was such a strange thing to actually find it—I already
knew from my science-fiction what it would look like. I like it better
than the three-dimensional Mandelbrot set I found with Mathematica a couple of years ago—that one is very hard to compute.
Last night someone was asking me why I’m so driven, like why I work so hard. I think it’s because of the idiosyncrasy credit.
I found out about that growing up in the Fifties when the only oddball
publically tolerated—at least in hideous smug Louisville—was the holy
Einstein. He had long hair and wore a sweatshirt and no socks and
everyone thought it was okay because he was a genius.
So maybe I do all this work so I have enough
idiosyncrasy credit to get drunk and stoned the rest of the time and to
not give a shit about politics. Lately I’ve been reading the paper too
much though, we get it delivered, and every morning my mind’s invaded by
all these bad trips—ozone, Middle East, homelessness, Republicans, etc.
We were at a big St. Patrick’s day bash last
week. There’s a local bar, Hannegan’s, where if you give them
twenty-five dollars you can come and eat all you want all day, although
you have to buy your own beer and shots—there’s bottles of whiskey on
the counters everywhere. Irish bands, scads of people, everyone getting
really tanked, it was great, man, I had such a good time, I danced so
much that my shoulders were all sore. One guy tried to start a fistfight
with me, but I stayed out of the fight. I walked home without drunk
driving—Hannegan’s is that close to where we live.
The students still laboring on huh(what). I don’t like the way Mustafa A. is leaning over Tom S. in the billed cap there.
I had this class work on an ants program here last week, that’s the next thing I’ll work on at Autodesk after the Chaos program finally ships, Autodesk Ants,
it’s an artificial life idea we think could be cool. You can program
your ants, and put them on a disk and go over to your friend’s house and
he’s got Autodesk Ants too, so you put
your ants in his system and they fight it out with his ants. May the
best ant win! What do they eat? Computation cycles and memory. I already
have some ants that grow lace.
A kind of humorous and common problem with ants
programs is sometimes the ants get loose and crawl out of the memory
area where you are growing them, and they get into your operating system
and crash your machine. Like viruses, really. The whole artificial life
field is deliciously louche. There’s nothing that the media fears more
than computer viruses, and we a-life types are working to make
self-reproducing bits of computer code that can evolve to become more
and more autonomous. A little like what I wrote about with the evolving
bopper robots in Software. I’d like to write a novel about these kinds of ants.
Okay, almost time to collect the papers. huh(what)? The answer is 2.5.
And then I’ll get a tallboy can of beer at the 7-11 by the San Jose State parking lot, and drive home and have yaaay Wiener schnitzel and asparagus with Sylvia and kids. What a great life!
April 27, 1990. Losing My Teeth.
Today I went to the oral surgeon and had seven
teeth pulled out. Both back teeth on either side on the top, and one of
the back molars on the bottom, and two wisdom teeth on the bottom. The
periodontist wanted me to get the two second to last molars on the
bottom pulled, too, but I managed to stave him off by the simple
expedient of telling him in truthful Californese that I couldn’t handle
the stress. They gave me nitrous oxide and some intravenous Demerol, so I
was figuring at least I’ll get high, but it was just a hangoverless blackout.
My mouth feels odd, the tongue-familiar row of
teeth so abbreviated on top. Yet those ousted teeth were constantly
irritating the gums, heating them and wrinkling them. I asked them to
give me the teeth to take home, but they only handed over three of them,
the unborn wisdoms too gross I guess, and two of the regular ones broke
off at the roots and they had to pull the roots out separately with
special pinchers—I planed up into wakefulness as they were doing that,
the remarkable thing being the complete lack of affect I felt knowing he was pulling three broken roots out of my jaw, hail the poppy.
This afternoon I got out a pocketknife and
scraped off all the lowdown big black deposits on those brought-home
teeth, the deposits having formed because of deep gum pockets and being
the source of endless incurable irritation and further gum loss, leading
to bone loss, leading to extraction.
In William Golding’s Pincher Martin
