Stories
Sunday, March 18th, 2012: Jobs, Stories.
(The carefree Dotcom Boom: Partying like there's no tomorrow!)
After years of poverty, debt, and frustration, I entered the Web industry at the point when the swell begins rising and you realize it’s going to be a big wave. It was such a heady time that I temporarily lost touch with who I was. Many people in the industry believed that the Web was their generation’s revolution that would solve the world’s problems through technology. There was an internet collective called Cyborganic that courted me from the beginning. They were all young, arty and over-educated and trying to use the new technology to spread knowledge democratically. Amazingly, they got venture capital and leased a flashy building in the heart of downtown San Francisco where they threw massive parties and exhibited Web art.
After a full-day interview, including a presentation to staff that I had cobbled together the night before out of photos of my old art work, I was shortlisted for the position of director of IDEO Product Design’s new interactive division. For years, IDEO had been the most celebrated design firm in the world. But at the same time, the hippest web agency in the industry, vivid studios, offered me a job as information designer. I took the latter because although IDEO was more prestigious, vivid seemed to represent the future, and their culture seemed more idealistic and less corporate.
I excelled in this new field, learning by trial and error and helping invent a new profession that would rapidly become a foundation of the Web industry. The first project I was given leadership of was a big hit, with rave reviews in the national press. But a few months later, I was fired under mysterious circumstances which I attributed once again to the hothouse environment, excessive ambition and insecurity. Ironically, a few weeks after firing me, management begged me to come back to lead a project that I’d pitched before being fired. My pitch had won the contract and now they needed me after all!
After finishing this project, which won an international award, I quit again and started my own business. The Fortune 500 clients I had worked for at vivid now brought their design projects directly to me. I opened an office in North Beach, hired an assistant and recruited hot young designers and coders for the challenging, high-profile projects that kept flowing my way. All of downtown San Francisco hummed with energy; dotcommers met for cocktails in trendy bars then went back to the office to work all night. Twenty-somethings were paying cash for hot city property and becoming slumlords. I worked on one project with a kid who had his own NASCAR team.
On warm evenings in my neighborhood, you could hear laughter and the tinkle of drinks at rooftop industry parties overhead. I was flying all over the country, advising billionaire investors and CEOs. Again and again, powerful companies offered me prestigious positions which I turned down. I had so much work I was blowing off new contracts, and I believed that I had finally found a solution to life’s financial rollercoaster. I would grow my business, meet my soulmate, get married and have a family, sell the business for a fortune and retire early, and figure out what to do about all my frustrated dreams and passions.
But of course the wave had to break, the boom had to end. Everyone knew that, but we were all going to ride the wave as long as we could. Instead of a soulmate, I met an idealistic neo-hippie girl who cared nothing for the Web industry lifestyle and had no respect for what I was doing. And as the dotcom crash unfolded, a strange thing happened. Although the girl and I were traumatically incompatible, she shocked me out of the megalomaniacal Web industry delusion and back onto my own true idealistic life path.
What little I had saved ran out quickly, and more years of struggle followed, with even longer periods of unemployment and deeper credit card debt, living in dramatically reduced circumstances. I started a new art project, looked into organic farming and other idealistic careers, did backbreaking habitat restoration as a community volunteer, chopping acres of invasive plants out of nature preserves. I fell into depression and my health began to deteriorate. But eventually, after three years, the Web industry revived, and the few old colleagues who had survived the crash started calling me with new projects, bless their hearts.
This time, I had a more realistic long-term plan. Instead of using my profits to live the dotcom lifestyle, I would continue to live cheaply, save money, and look for a place far from the rat race, with low cost of living, which would allow me to work less on the Web and more on my dreams.
That brought me to where I am today.
And yes, I quit again!
Business Trip Snapshots, 2006-2010
Thursday, April 19th, 2012: Stories, Travel.
During a five-year period, my design business took me to random parts of the US and Canada, both urban and rural, where I was sometimes a witness to strange, beautiful, or emblematic visions.
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012: Stories, Trouble.
After years of avoiding or being dismissed from jury duty, I was finally selected yesterday as a juror on a trial in which our county sheriff’s department had filed a criminal charge of assault on a peace officer, naming a 20-year-old man I will call Brady as defendent.
Brady is a convicted felon who at the time of the incident was living in a single-wide trailer in a trailer park on the outskirts of town with his mother and two 10-year-old boys, Brady’s brother and a cousin. Brady looks a bit like Justin Timberlake with the crewcut and stubble beard. We never learned the nature of his felony, since it wasn’t pertinent to the current charge. He was on probation for the felony conviction and has an admitted drinking problem, for which he was in a program called Drug Court, entailing daily monitoring and testing by county officers.
The night before the incident, Brady’s mother had left for the state capital to accompany a friend who was having a medical procedure. She had left Brady in charge of the little boys. On the day of the incident, Brady got up early, woke the boys and made sure they had what they needed, and left for his construction job at the historic downtown hotel which is being refurbished.
The boys went to school that day and returned home in the afternoon, where Brady met them after getting off work, again making sure they had what they needed for the evening. Then he went to the gym, where he regularly tried to work out the stress of his probation and all that micromanagement of his life by the county. In early evening, the sheriff’s department got a call from someone at the school, expressing concern that the boys were unsupervised at home, and a junior officer was dispatched to the trailer to make a “welfare check.” He found the boys alone and was told Brady was taking care of them. His superior, a sargeant, arrived a few minutes later.
At the gym, Brady got a call from a neighbor who said the trailer was surrounded by cops, so Brady raced home and skidded to a stop behind the junior officer’s vehicle. He saw the two officers standing outside the door of the trailer and shouted “What the fuck are you doing here?”
The junior officer, standing at the door, on a small porch at the top of three steps, said they were conducting a welfare check on the two boys, and Brady, now at the bottom of the steps and increasingly agitated, responded “Show me your warrant!” The officer mentioned the welfare check again, and Brady started up the steps.
The officer, who was larger than Brady, shoved Brady in the chest, and they both fell backward onto a small cement landing containing a large rock. The officer, on top of Brady, turned him over and cuffed his hands behind his back. The two officers pulled him to his feet, marched him to the nearest patrol car, and pushed him into the back.
While the sheriff’s officers waited “for Brady to calm down,” the junior officer went into the trailer “to make sure the boys had something to eat,” despite the fact that the primary goal of the welfare check – to ensure that the boys had supervision – had been met. When the officers returned to the patrol car, Brady apologized for his initial hostility, and they released him from the car and the cuffs. Then Brady’s mother arrived, back from her trip, and the officers explained why they were there and departed.
That night, the junior officer opened a report describing the welfare check, but omitting the incident with Brady.
Brady had bruised a rib in his fall on the rock, and the next day he and his mother filed a complaint at the sheriff’s office.
Finally, four days later, the junior officer completed his report, claiming that Brady had “charged up the stairs at him in a threatening manner” and he feared imminent physical harm, and the department filed a criminal charge of assault.
In the trial, the only witnesses to the incident were the two officers and Brady. The boys had been inside the trailer and only came to the windows after they heard the men crashing to the ground. But the officers’ testimony was vague and conflicting. Neither could remember precise dates or times, and the sargeant admitted under defense examination that when he thought Brady was “charging” the junior officer, Brady could equally likely have been trying to get into the trailer to make sure the boys were okay. During the incident, both officers had recorders on their belts which they had failed to turn on, so there was no objective evidence of the exchange between the three men.
Both the boys and their mother were brought in as witnesses for the defense. It was clear the boys idolized Brady, and they both seemed like good boys, but it also became clear that Brady’s younger brother had been coached by his elders on what to say, so their testimony didn’t do us any good. The mother was nervous, flustered and inarticulate, her voice seemingly ravaged by cigarettes, whiskey, or worse, so she couldn’t do much good either.
Brady had been serious and subdued throughout the proceedings, but when the boys were brought in, you could tell he was concerned for them. His own testimony was articulated simply and straightforwardly, with concentration and apparent sincerity. He said he wasn’t threatening the officer, he was just trying to get into the trailer to see the boys.
The judge in the case was a pleasant, mild-mannered woman who mostly just let things roll. Both the prosecuting and defense attorneys were big men with huge bellies; the defense attorney resembled 1950s TV personality Captain Kangaroo and had a distinctive rocking gait and dramatic gestures. The state prosecutor – our paid servant – repeatedly misrepresented the facts we had been shown and the testimony we had heard, in an obvious attempt to cloud our judgment. His voice and arrogant presentation reminded me of Agent Smith in The Matrix movie. The defense attorney, on the other hand, overstated his case so much that we were kept hours beyond the expected close of the trial.
After the opening testimony of the two officers, I had made up my mind that there was ample reasonable doubt about what happened at the steps of the trailer. But during the hours that remained, I agonized a bit about what the other jurors – all women, all strangers – where thinking. What if a majority believed Brady guilty? Would I have to sacrifice my convictions for a unanimous verdict?
Finally we found ourselves alone in the jury room. One of the women laid a notepad with notes on the table in front of her, looked at me and said “You’re the foreman!” The other women all chimed in “Yes!” I sighed, considered for a few minutes and agreed, always unwilling to shirk responsibility. I asked the woman across from me to share her notes. They turned out to be points of doubt that we all agreed with. I signed the Not Guilty form and we returned to the courtroom, where the judge read our verdict, Brady and his attorney rejoiced, and we jurors were quickly led out of the building into the mountain sunshine, where the cottony clouds of monsoon season were mustering around us in the sky, their bellies darkening under the weight of impending rain.
We can never know exactly what happened between Brady and the officer, but it had become clear to us jurors that the junior officer had been the aggressor in the incident, that he had exceeded his duty by entering the trailer against Brady’s wishes, as a form of intimidation, and that days later, after Brady filed a complaint, the sheriff’s department had decided to retaliate with a criminal charge, seeing Brady the convicted felon as an easy target. We, on the other hand, saw Brady as someone working hard to turn his life around and be a responsible caregiver for the boys. If the sheriff’s department had its way, Brady would have ended up in prison, and the boys would be left with a broken family and a discouraging experience of an unfair society.
And I was reminded again that the people who are paid to serve us sometimes try to harm us instead. It was only the incompetence of these officers that betrayed them in their shameful mission.
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012: Stories, Trouble.
Last night I watched Never Let Me Go for the second time. Again, I cried at the ending. I cried gloriously for fifteen minutes, in waves of convulsive sobbing that propelled me staggering through the house, blindly clutching doorways and furniture.
I never know how much pain of loss I’m bottling up inside until something like this opens the gates of grieving, and, unfortunately, my hands have more fingers than my life has moments of true release. I suppose it’s how I was raised, my midwestern reserve.
I’ll never forget that night, alone in bed, my first year in San Francisco. I was in my 20s, making good money at an easy job, and I was a creative powerhouse, turning out experimental art, music and writing every day, circulating in the vibrant creative underground, meeting new people every week. But in the near-suicidal aftermath of a 6-year relationship, I’d been single and unloved for three years, I was living alone, and that night I couldn’t get to sleep because I couldn’t find my heart. It was sinking out of sight, shrunken and black, into bottomless depths. My chest felt empty and although my mind was filled with images of loss, no tears would flow. All I felt was a terrifying numbness, and I wondered if I would ever be able to cry again.
That question was answered the following year, just after I’d moved into the Loft. I was sleeping with an art student from Brooklyn who was nearly a decade younger than me. One night after making love, sensitive to our age difference, she tried to pick away at my perceived maturity by probing for old memories of loss, rejection, injustice or cruelty. Very cleverly she trapped me in a downward spiral of memories I’d been avoiding, until I was broken, sobbing and moaning in her arms.
Grieving can assume an epic scale in the desert. Twenty years ago, I was living and working on a remote ecological preserve in the Mojave, staying in touch with my city girlfriend via an old pay phone in a lab trailer, when one night she announced that she’d been sleeping with the bass player in her band for the past couple of months.
The cabin I was sharing with co-workers was at the high end of a valley ringed with low cliffs, and from the cabin an old trail led out of the valley into an empty, isolated basin. Under the full moon I walked that trail away from the company of men, until I got to a circular clearing surrounded by Larrea clones, the stark, moonshadowed shrubs my only company, still and silent, ranks of them standing off into the distance where granite cliffs rose up white as bone.
There, I went down to the ground and howled and pounded the gravel, thrashing like a mad man, wearing myself out in a frenzy of raw pain. Night after night I had fallen asleep watching the moon moving slowly through the sky, imagining that she was my distant girlfriend. And now, like the girl who had attached herself to someone else, the moon seemed cold and pitiless, shining clinically on my suffering.
Do some of us feel things more deeply? Or is it just that we bottle up our feelings until they get out of hand? You’d think that those of us who work in the expressive arts would have plenty of outlets for grief and loss, but that probably works better for some – actors, maybe? – than for others.
All I know is that I owe a debt of gratitude to those artists who give me random moments of release – like the creators of Never Let Me Go.
Thursday, November 29th, 2012: Dreams, Stories.
I was in an ultramodern exhibition room, white walls and floor-to-ceiling glass, filled with people, mostly fashionably dressed men, excitedly waiting for our hosts to begin their presentation.
Our hosts, the representatives of this biotech firm, were about to demonstrate the results of their breakthrough program in human cloning. Though most of the audience were young technology workers, strangers to me, three people I knew were present: a web engineer colleague and two old friends from the arts. The company had cloned the engineer and one of the artists, whose specialty was performance art.
The crowd hushed as the company brought out the engineer clone. He gave a confident, flawless exhibition of engineering expertise, to unanimous applause.
Then they brought out the clone of the performance artist. Although he looked exactly like my old friend, he shuffled out shyly, fumbling with sheets of note paper, looking down at the floor and mumbling incoherently.
A company rep came over, put his arm around the clone, and gently ushered him out of the spotlight, all the while smiling and explaining that the process had not been perfected, but they were committed to transparency and would continue to share their failures as well as their successes. Again, unanimous applause, even from my friend the performance artist, who seemed untroubled by his failed clone.
What followed was a social mixer in the company’s spotless lobby, absent the clones. The young technology workers sank into long white leather sofas, my older friends in the midst of them, gravitating toward their youthful energy and enthusiasm, seeming to share their uncritical embrace of the new technology as they raved about the potential of what they had seen today. Repelled and alienated, I walked outside, into the sterile lanes of the corporate office park, where perfectly flat, perfectly trimmed lawns of genetically modified grass separated the minimalist white towers of the cloning company – white, a symbol of purity.
I wondered, what was to become of the failed clones?
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