Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

There’s something very weird about expecting turnkey results from technology and having it back out on you.

Back in 1995, my high school friends and I saw “The Net” when it first came out. The internet was just a vague gleam in people’s eye and I’m not sure we’d even had the Re: re: fwd: fwd: Mail Delivery Failure experience (a long story, but basically one in which Gris and I were pioneers of the concept of spam with our Academy e-mail addresses) yet. People knew the internet was coming and that it had strong implications for the way people lived, and it was somehow related to ATMs and identity theft and such.

“The Net” was really a prescient film and did a great job of creating a scary scenario where life turns on you with the aid of inhuman technology that lacks compassion or any checks on its “objectivity”. And I think every time a password starts to reject on me, my mind goes straight back to this film and its elegant paranoia.

The most profound moment of this was something that happened late in my career at Glide, something that I guess was too spooky for me to even post about at the time, since I just went back and looked through the archives for it and I couldn’t find anything. (Maybe it’s been disappeared!) For some unknown and unnotified reason, my ATM card PIN had been suspended. I spent a frantic day running through San Francisco trying my PIN at different ATMs, trying to use my card at various stores, even having a burrito made for me at Herbert’s Mexican Grill that I had to leave uneaten and unbought because I was out of cash and had only the one card that was persona non grata.

Toward the end of this miserable day, I actually started to question my memory. Our faith in the objectivity of computers and machines is such that I started to believe my recollection of my own PIN number may be faulty, that it was actually something else. I remember having dialed the number for the Wells Fargo help line and actually putting down the receiver and heading back out to an ATM to try a transposition of my PIN, because I suddenly felt silly and had remembered that it was really something else. Of course, I had been right the first time and I was just trying to convince myself of an easier explanation than the one that was true. Humans have this tendency to blame themselves for phenomena, to feel that they must be the exception or the outlier. One’s mind is more likely to go to “I must be crazy/mistaken/misinformed/misremembering” than “the world has turned on me or made a major error”. Or at least that’s my mind, but I (ironically?) don’t think I’m alone on this.

In any case, I eventually called Wells Fargo and they were unable to tell me why my card had been locked initially (or why they hadn’t placed the standard courtesy call to verify that I was the one really using it), but they had a good time talking askance to me about my frantic attempts to use it once it had been locked. The unsettling reality was that my behavior did a pretty good job of mirroring what someone who had just stolen the card would have done, running from ATM to ATM trying to use the card as though different machines would somehow yield disparate results.

By far the most disturbing phenomenon, though, was the self-editing of memory, the fact that my on-the-ground experiences could so easily convince me that my steel-trap memory was faulty, that there was something wrong with me. Combined with the sort of frenzied panic I’d gotten into that afternoon, it was “The Net”-style eerie to realize how quickly I could go a little crazy and, obviously, how reliant I was on a plastic rectangle in my wallet for sustenance, travel, and everything that kept me from being one of the clients we were serving on a daily basis.

Fast-forward to this morning, when I try to update Duck and Cover, posting the 1,223rd comic in the series. I groggily log-in to my website as per the usual starts of my days, extra late in the afternoon since I was up writing till 6:30 this morning. The password rejects. Not surprising, really, since I’m barely awake. I recheck my fingering again and the password rejects again. Hm. I look for the keyboard lights – NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock. None are illuminated. Strange. I watch myself very carefully peck out each key of the password. Rejected.

And panic starts to ease in, settling itself comfortably like a wet blanket over my psyche. My website has been hacked again. It’s been stolen and erased and will have to be rebuilt from scratch somehow. All is lost.

I race to a new browser to check my site. Front page seems fine, so does my blog. It seems to be loading a little slowly, but maybe my heart’s just racing. What can explain this? I head back to the FTP login and try twice more. Rejection. And now I have to stop and think, because I could get a lockout triggered by too many failed attempts. Already I can feel myself questioning my own memory and I even think back to the frantic day at the San Francisco ATMs.

Maybe the webhost has been hacked. Maybe something has gone awry. I check my e-mail to see if there’s any notice. And… lo and behold, there’s a notice from the webhost about mandatory universal password resetting to force people to choose stronger passwords that are vetted for variation. Sigh of relief. Mild annoyance, but I guess there’s no other way to notify me. Breathe. Calm down. Everything’s totally fine.

But it occurs to me, as I reset the password, how much rides on these little things. I remember that one of the things that compelled me to draft a will in 2006 was the thought that if I passed away, no one would have my passwords to anything and all my online work, my archiving of e-mails and the like, would be lost. I wonder what e-mail account servers do with information like that… do they make accounts available to loved ones with proof of death and relation? I heard something about Facebook deciding to leave the pages of the deceased up as memorials, which makes sense, but does that mean loved ones can access said content without the password?

More importantly, perhaps, it still just seems too easy to keep me out. I guess this is why people get so jumpy about hacking, so nervous about viruses. A computer can make a couple mistakes and suddenly a decade’s work can disappear. Granted, the internet has a lot of checks on these things, like the Internet Archive, and I backup my site in its entirety pretty regularly. I probably have a lot more control and access to my site than to my money, when it comes down to it.

Probably for the best to have these slight reminders, though, of mechanical fallibility. If only for the sake of remembering what’s most important is upstairs and one’s faith in same, not what’s stored on the chips.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s been a bit of a weird week. It seems a lot of people are discombobulated. In flux. It’s hard to say how much of that revolves around the fact that my life is thoroughly immersed in people who rely on academic calendars these days. After all, both Princeton and Rutgers had midterms this week, with their Spring Break starting today. Nobody likes midterms.

The writing is going… fine. It’s not bad, but it’s not tearing up the charts either. It feels like the right project at the right time, but it’s settled into that slow steady groove that probably denotes most long-haul fiction work. That’s good, overall, really, especially since this project is taking shape more on-the-fly than either of the prior novels. But I probably won’t be maintaining the quick-burning fire I started out with a week ago. Wow, it’s only been a week working on The Best of All Possible Worlds. I’m going to relax a bit.

And honestly, one probably couldn’t keep the fire going throughout a 3-month project. I just don’t think it works that way. You can have a brushfire on a short story or a poem, but it’s unsustainable for a whole novel. It’s like expecting every day of a marriage to consist entirely of that white-hot first-days-of-love butterfly passion. You’ll go there periodically, but every day of marriage is not going to feel like the first day. And that’s not only okay, but good. Because otherwise it would burn itself out.

The M’s are gearing up for their most exciting season in years and I’m preparing to block out big chunks of time to follow that. I’m sort of grateful that I don’t like Spring Training, since it both gives me another month to not worry about this and I don’t have to follow every little up and down of who exactly makes the roster. Of course, this is kind of self-fulfilling – if I liked those kind of things, I’d enjoy Spring Training more. But it’s just impossible for me to get excited about games that don’t count in an environment where strategy is handicapped and the decisions are all about getting people practice. It’s just a month-long practice-round. If I were a player or a coach, I think I’d love Spring Training. But as a fan, it just leaves me (ironically) cold.

Maybe I should figure out a way to do Debate Spring Training next year. Of course, it would be Fall Training. I guess the Novice Retreat we did this year was kind of like that, now that I consider.

Of course the other sports issue in my life is the meteoric rise of the University of New Mexico men’s basketball program. At 29-3, the Lobos are poised to receive a 2- or 3-seed in the NCAA tournament, based on their performance in this weekend’s Mountain West championship. This UNM team is unlike every other that has ever played near the Frontier – they win clutch games, they overcome adversity, they find ways to win on the road. It’s a real personality change and one that is especially strange for a long-time Blazers and Mariners (and Lobos) fan to experience. I wonder if every fan has a mythology about their team’s ability to pull defeat from the jaws of victory – if this is just one of those things that everyone feels psychologically by focusing on the crushing and unexpected losses. Regardless, this is the first time the March Madness tournament has had a real role for UNM since I was sneaking peaks of the game on Sonia Roth’s TV during the 1998 tourney, so yeah. Pretty neat.

On the debate front, this weekend is Providence College, my first visit to the campus since the fabled origin of Mep in 2001. I’m not sure how completely I’ve ever told the story on this website, and I’m not sure this is the morning for it, but I was curious exactly how badly I spoke at that tournament. So I went and looked up our performance on the old back-archives of the APDA site.

The brief story, of course, is that Russ and I were debating together for our first and only time before he graduated during that, his senior year. As a double-LO attack, we expected to tear teams up, especially given the confidence we had in our cases. Fifth round, sailing into the 4-0 bracket on the wings of crushing the mighty “juice” (Yale OJ) on a dull-as-nails-and-possibly-tight case about insurance law, we hit my regular teammate, Zirkin, and his hybrid partner, another Yalie. We had an ugly round (as such rounds between regular partners often are, especially when said partners are hybriding) and lacked full confidence that we’d won. But we never questioned that we’d break, because we were sure we were speaking well.

Russ was, of course, scoring a 132 with ranks of 7 and ultimately taking home 4th speaker in a pretty remarkable field. I, however, was deemed unworthy of the field. I apparently spoke a 128 with ranks of 13, outspoken by Russ by a full 4 points and 6 ranks. I’m not sure any partner ever outspoke me by that much at any other tournament in my life. If I had more time this morning, I’d look up what an epic fail a 128/13 was in the context of the rest of my career at the time. It’s hard for non-debaters to contextualize this, or even for modern debaters who’ve grown up with half-points and a squashed speaker scale to understand (128’s pretty good these days – and not because people used to be better, but because the scores have fundamentally changed). But trust me, it was a disaster.

So we missed the break – as it turned out by only a point, despite my glaring apparent incompetence. We even outranked the two 4-1 teams who broke over us, just a slim point behind either of them. If I’d been deemed only mildly incompetent, we still would’ve made the semifinals. (To say nothing of a 36-team tourney breaking to semifinals being pretty skimpy as well.) It wasn’t till we received our ballots that we realized I was to blame for our near-miss – neither Russ nor I felt I’d performed poorly that weekend, but the proof was on the paper.

In long retrospect, of course, I’m grateful for the outcome, both because it made a great story and it spawned my spontaneous apology to Russ for unseating the emu who’d asked him to debate with him instead, from which all Mep lore was borne. As I squatted down and craned my neck around to the dulcet sounds of a monosyllabic flightless bird, I had no idea my self-flagellation would be creating this monster. But I’m glad it did.

Interestingly, looking through some of those results from the past, I hadn’t realized that PC was the weekend before NorthAms that year. Somehow I’d thought it was later in the year, after Zirk and I had already secured the title that would define my career. It somehow makes it all the more amazing that we overcame the frustration of that fifth round, that my last round before our tear through the title tourney was an adversarial match against each other. Of course we both long attributed our success in that tourney to my yelling at Zirkin after octofinals and the self-examination that such produced (he’d been over-coaching me from his desk during my PMR for the Lottery case, something I knew I had in hand and could give in my sleep and I ranted at him after the round about how we had to trust each other if we were going to survive the marathon of break rounds we were facing at the time… the rest is history). But it’s interesting to note how much extra acrimony there was going into that tournament. Ah, memories, mythology, madness.

For context, I’ve been looking up a few other scores I received, and I got all 130+’s everywhere I look, including at Wellesley, a tournament with a notoriously low speaker scale and where I received the last of my only two career losing records. It’s almost as though the fates aligned to give us the emu. One might even say it was… Providence.

Makes you wonder what Providence College will offer us this year. I’ll find out.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Two days ago, I was falling apart. Now I’m putting it all back together.

In fact, I started writing a post called “Disintegration” around this time on 3 March. All I could get through was a single line. It read: “I am falling apart.”

There were a number of additional places the post might have gone, but by the very nature of the veracity of its opening salvo, I was unable to complete more than said preamble. And while I’m all for honesty and forthrightness with this blog and all my projects, I know a bit better than to post a one-liner saying “I am falling apart.” in the wee hours of a Wednesday in March. It’s like begging for misinterpretation, paranoia, and panic.

None of which, surprisingly, help those who feel they are falling apart.

I hasten to add that the issue was nothing personal, nor anything really all that dramatic. There was some roughness around the edges, some bleeding into arenas of feeling like I might be unable to control my mental state. But mostly it was about writing, about figuring out what to write and when to write it and arguably, though less so, a little bit how. And now I’ve pretty much put it all together, or at least I think so, enough to feel good about it, to get going and not look back until I have a setback of this kind of magnitude again. If I have that. Which I’m hoping to avoid.

I’ve been working for a month on Good God, my first serious foray into non-fiction. I have concluded, after writing ~42 pages in a month, that this foray is not optimally timed. I am putting the project on the shelf. In its stead, I will begin working tonight on The Best of All Possible Worlds, another novel. If successful, it will be my third novel to be completed and my second this year (by which I mean the academic-ish [plus summer] year of 2009-10 in which I still aspire to complete three books).

The Best of All Possible Worlds is jumping in line, not just over Good God, but over another novel whose idea is older, namely that tentatively titled We the Purple. There are four more novels in the queue behind it, and they’re staying there for now. When and where any of these will be written is largely becoming up for grabs, but for tonight and the foreseeable, it’s TBoAPW’s job to lose. Sadly, this work doesn’t devolve into an easy acronym like my first two novels, but I’ll probably shorthand it “Best of” or similar.

Unlike the originally slated nonfic project, I can’t reveal anything about Best of, as per my personal protocol on fiction. So this may be a less exciting development for you. But given that I’m tentatively trying to stick with my original deadline of 17 May 2010 to complete the first draft, there may be excitement yet for my fiction fans. To say nothing of the shortness of this wait in comparison to the near-decade it took to finally complete ADO.

17 May may prove unreasonable, though, since that deadline presumed a 1 February start-date and it’s currently 5 March. In which case, I could push it to sometime in the first couple weeks of June. I’m hoping not to have to, but I’m also not about to set up a deadline which is guaranteed to fail. It’ll probably take a month to make a good determination about that.

The larger point is that I’m opening this project with the fresh energy and excitement a new project deserves. Which is not to say that I didn’t feel that way about Good God, but 40 pages in, that was starting to look like a flightless bird. I wasn’t sure it worked. It wasn’t turning over, but rather coughing and sputtering. And rather than continue down the path of trying to right a potentially sinking ship, I’m tabling it in favor of something I know functions on its basic premises. I still hope to write GG, and soon, but it’s not the project for this Spring.

And so it begins. Again.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.