Slow night at the restaurant so it’s easy to accommodate the out of town party. Two couples, a little girl and her grandfather cluster around the table. Easy to seat, you should say, as they send a bottle of sparkling water back for being flat– you taste it and there’s nothing wrong with it at all. Great, slow night and the biggest party are a bunch of yuppie fucks, but that’s part of the job.

The two couples occupy one another leaving the little girl to be entertained by her grandfather. There’s something off about him, you notice, something inherently creepy in his face or bearing. “He looks like a child molester” you tell a co-worker, and it’s true that he does. The little girl, on the other hand, is pretty and precocious and better behaved than the adults who brought her here.

It’s a little surprising when she suddenly comes up to the counter, boxed in by the creepy grandfather. She holds a plate of bread out and the old man says, “Ask the nice lady for some butter”. The girl, obviously articulate enough to ask for butter on her own repeats as she has been told. “Of course, sweetheart,” you say, and pass a dish of butter over. The grandfather, meanwhile, stands behind the girl rubbing her face and hair; not in an affectionate caress along the cheek as might be expected, but across the face entirely. “Ask the nice lady to spread the butter on the bread” he insists to his grand-daughter. It makes your guts churn, the way he dictates, but worse still is the suffocating pawing. Still, you focus on the girl who deserves the attention, “Of course, sweetheart, I’ll do that for you.” You adorn the bread but all the while you’re distracted by his hands on her face, rubbing. You pass the bread back and the little girl is let down from the counter stool. “That’s a nice lady,” he tells the girl and they return to their table where the couples conversation consumes them.

They don’t stay long. Without any notice being taken by the other adults the grandfather leads the little girl outside. Normal behavior to pacify a fussy child when the food is long in arriving but the little girl’s an angel. Your stomach takes a dive as you see them leave view of the front window. You get shaky, and you can’t swallow. You take the phone and step outside, to make it look like you’re making a call. They aren’t in view anymore, corners equal distance away from the front door. You follow what you hope are their steps, to the corner overlooking a vacant lot, and follow the sidewalk down the dimly-lit street of warehouses and trash and old cars either abandoned or parked and forgotten. Down the block, cast in shadow, you see them. It’s far away and they’re indistinct but it looks as tho the little girl is standing face-first against the wall of a crumbling building, partially obscured by her grandfather and his long coat. It’s too dark and they’re too far away but you’d swear he’s pushing her into the building, pressing her face against the bricks. You’re standing with a phone to your ear straining to see what exactly is happening when the grandfather frees the little girl from the building, and she stands now clear of his body and long coat. He bends down to her height and removes a handkerchief from the recesses of some pocket which he uses to wipe her face. Then he stands upright and propels her further down the street, away from the restaurant. You could swear he’s crossing himself as they walk, forehead, mouth and heart, like when they read the gospel in church.

You go back to work and wait, guts churning, unsure but filled with a horrible sensation and certainty. When the grandfather returns with the little girl she walks in and seats herself at the table, once again consumed by the conversation which has continued unabated. You catch the grandfather’s eye as he walks past and he looks right back at you, then continues on to the bathroom. You tell the waitress that you’re going to the office but to call you when the table’s check is ready. You sit and you don’t know what has happened but you know deep inside exactly what has happened, what is happening, what will happen. You take a drink, you call a trusted friend, you implore them for advice and as you’re talking the office phone rings. The waitress tells you that the table is paying now, and you stand to return. So what do you do?

–
Completely unrelated is this clip of CNN mania from a year or so ago. A story on Richard Cohen, a formerly gay and now converted straight psychotherapist (of sorts) who aids gay men in reclaiming their straightness through unconventional means to say the least. It caps off at almost seven minutes but you should really watch all the way through because the action at the end is really worth it.

Popular among marketing executives who’ve reached that point in their career where the cocaine and booze can no longer create the necessary plasticity to do their jobs is having adults attempt to use hip-hop slang. This lazy tactic started in the 80’s and quickly spread through pop-culture sending titters through middle America and your parents. It should have died out and never been reborn but, because the gene pools have been diluted beyond repair, the hilarious grey-haired matron talking jive to the kids returns time and time again to sell you cell phones or Sunny Delight or whatever the fuck people buy. “Hahahahah! How clueless is she, that retard, trying to talk slang like she’s down?” thinks shiny happy white people holding remotes.

These commercials always, without fail, cause extreme embarrassment for me. I don’t know why, I’ve never done the market research to unearth what deep-rooted trauma lurks in my past to cause such discomfort when some nameless day-actress says something like “keep it on the DL” on national television. Okay, my mother has probably humiliated me in this fashion but I can’t think of a specific instance except for one wonderful Thanksgiving where she was conversing with a younger cousin and it popped out onto the table and began infesting the Turkey with tapeworm. She wonders why I always loved working holidays.

Well, perhaps my horror at witnessing these displays of out of touch adults is an issue of empathy. I don’t understand many of the popular trends currently corrupting society as a whole and the greatest wormhole of confusion can be found here on the internet. The very fact that within a short period of time computers went from being something that, if you knew how to turn one on, could get you physically attacked and verbally ridiculed to being an indispensable daily asset baffles me; I distinctly recall them as being a very uncool thing that labeled users as insufferable nerds and caused my dad to think I was gay. Now he knows about youtube and rappers have websites and myspace pages. Myspace baffles me. I’ve seen people lurk on it for hours at a time, posting comments and trolling through profiles. There’s people who pimp other people’s myspace pages. This is making me feel very much like a clueless adult.

But the truth depths of modern perversion were, until quite recently, hidden from me. I thought that myspace was the ultimate in hyperactive media saturation until livejournal came into view. Message boards have changed significantly from the times of BBSs, although fundamentally they remain populated by geeky recluses who know that appearing at the local mall will elicit mockery and death by being pelted with pennies or small, hard candies. Yet they’re sleek and snazzy and in color with pictures and wobbling icons and, most horrifying, their own slang. In a way it’s a natural evolution of shorthand. You’re typing and you’re excited about the exchange– you need to relate the thoughts bursting from your head as quickly as possible. OMG has been with us for a long time and most of the western world can understand the implications. Kewl has, blessedly, disappeared entirely from usage.

It goes beyond a simple matter of slang, tho. There’s an entire generation coming up that has successfully integrated the internet into their mannerisms and interests and, unfortunately, their lives. A perfect symbiosis has occurred and millions of little wingnuts the world over have been fucking sold on the concept. Little shits posting video diaries of themselves on youtube capture the attention of nations while disaster, fire and brimstone reign supreme unnoticed. There’s a level of humour solely dedicated to online chat and postings. There’s memes. Imagine being airlifted from your safe hovel where you can walk through the room with no light and not bang your knee and being dropped in the middle of a Krystal Meyers concert. Then replace everyone with computers and give them programs designed to allow their unabashed inflation of personality present itself in technicolor with streaming video and audio.

Fortunately there’s an oasis out there where you can kick back for a spell and follow the links, absorbing the terms and cultural fads which populate this hinterlands we’ve created. Last week at work we were busy speculating as to what this new room across the hall was being used for. Actually, those of us who’ve not been in a coma or terminally stupid know exactly what is going on in there but we were speculating all the same. When they first began using it I taped a picture of an alien autopsy on the window which had, for the sake of privacy, been spray-painted opaque. This did not suffice. They’re growing pot in there, someone said. What is this, the 20’s? It must be something sinister. Someone brought up the fact that all employees in the new room must sign confidentiality waivers. This same someone also invoked the memory of a former owner/manager who had been bought out and removed after incurring repeated accusations of sexual harassment and general leering creepiness, suggesting they were being brought back into the fold to run this new top secret department. That’s right, my friends, they’ve put a production studio in at Amoeba and they’ve begun producing and streaming child porn.

We needed to do something about it. Posters, we must make posters and cover their door and its opaque window with evidence of our knowledge. But how do you communicate child porn besides writing on a piece of paper, “We make child porn in here”? Why, you find pictures of pedobear on the internet.

WTF? Pedobear is a pedophile bear that crawls through the internet in search of lolis. Pedobear is an unstoppable force lurking in online forums and virtual worlds hunting for underaged girls. Pedobear can be seen on youtube dancing with bananas. Pedobear became the poster child for the new room across the hall from us. I fired the first salvo finding a suitable image and scribbling a clever caption underneath and taping the shit out of it all over their door. Some prissy fucktard tore it down. I found a more disturbing image and someone devised an even more clever caption which I taped the shit out of all over their door. Some prissy fucktard tore that down too. Someone realized we had a lot of label paper on hand and soon were were populating whatever surfaced were handy with pedobear stickers. The denizens across the hall tried to fight back by taking our own posters and sticking them on our own door. We were not amused but responded by more posters, more stickers, more clever captions. We totally pwnd them, is what I’m saying.

Yet where did pedobear creep in to our collective consciousness and begin to fondle us inappropriately? Our source material came from The Encyclopedia Dramatica. As the Onion is the cool-kids lampoon of American news, politics and general going-ons ED is the internet’s bastion of in-jokes, snideness and being horribly offensive for the lulz. It’s toilet humor for people that are smart enough to see the joke in the fuck you but geeky enough to appreciate painstakingly photoshopped pictures of cartoon bears and young girls. It completely consumed our entire Thursday and left everyone following each random link lustily, laughing hysterically and calling one another to our computers. Friday saw a resurgence of fascination as well as a continued assault on the neighbors. It also saw someone figuring out that you can have animated gifs as your desktop’s background. It’s the perfect distraction for whiling away the idle hours at work, it’s horribly addictive and it may be the greatest summation of today’s internet culture that has been pointed out to me.

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The elevators in the thirty-floor building where I work run on a scheme designed to save energy. What this means in practical terms is that there are four elevators with an average ten minute wait. People from my office embrace the universal slacker dodge of the smoke break to stand next to the snack machines and look at “girls”.

Today I received a cheery farewell from my coworker. Last week we had a bit of a dustup. The argument was getting heated, which was frustrating because this was ships passing in the night stuff. Eventually he grew quiet and seemed to be listening to my point of view. A few moments later he expelled a crackling fart from the depths of a deskside nap. When he woke up it was like night and day.

I may fault him on his methods, but results-wise he’s got the golden touch.

They sell beer in the vending machines and I think about it every single time I go to the office.

The heat has been stunning. My collar is a science project and collapse seemed imminent throughout the unairconditioned day.

Once I caught the elevator I tried to explain to another coworker that I was on my way to buy the second half of the sixth season of the Sopranos.

Where are you going?

“Mafia television.”

Uncomfortable grinning.

“I’m going to buy organized crime television, you know?”

You will go home now?

“I’m going to buy mob TV season and then go home.”

Have a nice weekend . . .

Crossing a major traffic artery I noticed trees that had been planted in the past week. Their sudden appearance was explained by an electronic billboard (sponsored by Omega watches OMG!) declaring an even year until the ballyhooed Olympics finally kick off and everyone can start thinking about FIFA World Cup South Africa 2010.

Cumulonimbus clouds stood stacked in a blue sky. Last week at 9pm, every night like clockwork, powerful thunder and lightning storms would appear, followed by a blessed ten minutes of cooling rain. Most people attribute this to the government controlling the weather, including myself. I saw something about local scientists mastering nuclear fusion on TV. “This miniature sun will supply unlimited energy and change human life on earth.” It’s hard to know what to think, however, as folks here open a new coal plant on a daily basis.

A fetid river moves beneath another bridge. A perching club of capped swimmers I can never join are valiantly braving industrial chemicals and horrifying fauna to cool off in the river’s waters. They are resting beneath trees across the river and their laughter laps up at me.

To my left I pass once again the Embassy of the Republic of Iran and a moment later a street walker with all her womanly arms bared. She’s shapely, walks like a baseball player in his uniform, and though pretty, looks like she’s taken a few punches in her day. I wear a backpack, so working girls generally take me as too poor to be worth their time. Next come a beer house, an auto mechanic and now the low rent embassies of countries like Bolivia, stacked tightly within something resembling a housing project apartment building.

Men with mustaches and brief cases and bad skin and the weight of open state secrets officially cross the street. There is a buzzing evading bugging and its peaks and valleys describe plans to end AIDS and end lives, start companies and wars, cooperate and develop. Cicadas shriek from the trees and the river keeps rolling.

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Here in the west coast, the youngest outpost of civilization the world knows, there is no collision of the past and the future. It is undeniably a modern place where the culture, the technology and the culture operate in a particular harmony of now. You would have to travel east to find any example of the gulf of time, to Boston where Paul Revere lies at the Granary Burial Ground down the street from a Radio Shack improbably manhandled into the basement of a three hundred year old brick building. Philadelphia is home to Elfreth’s Alley, the longest continuously inhabited street in America. You can walk down the cobbled street lined with narrow homes before turning the corner onto a busy street lined by boutique galleries. Travel farther east and you find the most severe dissonance of all, Japan, where the most advanced vending machine ever developed will sell hot coffee and cold soda to people living in houses that have stood since the middle ages.

But that’s just part of why Japan is a curiosity for the world. Somehow the ancient and the modern blend into a mysterious whole of wafer-thin cell phones and shinto shrines. Just as in San Francisco where internet use in coffee shops in as ubiquitous now as seeing two old men silently wage war across a chess-board once was ten years ago. Cafes have long been a place for the cutting edge, from the social rejects who became Bohemians to the folkies and art-fags who exhibited their talents and personalities in the corners and on the walls. Somehow it’s less an surprise to see two people sharing a table yet completely absorbed in the separate world of their laptops then seeing a cluster of people debate the merits of cubism or a person quietly reading a book of poems over a cappuccino. If advertisements are hip to the trend laptops are flooding the world, leveling the playing field for people everywhere, but it’s still hard to imagine the saffron-robed Dali Lama checking e-mail.

Odd as it may seem recent efforts by a disparate cluster of people have made the internet a reality for an ancient people normally considered to shun the modern era and the trappings that come along with it. Since the Chinese absorbed Tibet in 1950 a large immigrant population has found homes in the northern mountains of India. Many found placement in Dharamsala where a population of over 100,000 Tibetan exiles now live and who have been working to rebuild their shattered community since the Dali Lama arrived at the end of the 50’s. It’s a small city in the harsh frontier where running water and electricity can’t be relied on so much as hoped for on any given day. Yet somehow it is here that a major technological coup has taken place.

Israeli ex-patriot Yahel Ben-David came to visit a friend who was on a spiritual quest and found himself leaving behind his high-paying position with a Silicon Valley linux firm to begin life anew among the refugee population. Finding the plight of the Tibetan people unconscionable Ben-David began to formulate a method of providing some service to help them advance beyond subsistence. He knew networking so he scoured the city for old computers, fax machines, modems, phones– anything linux oriented that he could take apart to rebuild. Over time he began to have prototypes which he would have to take back to Israel in order to test; India originally forbid open wireless networks. He introduced his ideas to others, he accepted donations of old parts from abroad, he waited.

And when India finally opened a limited amount of bandwidth for WiFi he was ready, manually placing his first antennae that same day. They sprung up in trees, off balconies, from the spires of buildings and the roofs of temples. Adjustments, repairs, re-placement, checks, tests– day by day searching for the signal and trying to keep the monkeys from fucking everything up. Then there was the wireless mesh. From his efforts there is now a grid of over thirty satellite relays spreading a blanket of connection over Dharamsala, reserved exclusively for the Tibetan people. Temples and schools host the server computers and the antennae and a small fee for maintenance, everything operated from the Tibetan Technology Center, housed by the venerable and long-standing charity the Tibetan Children’s Village. Now the kids, some of whom are third generation exiles, can learn network administration and web design along with their culture, traditions and history.

It’s not perfect– they had to block porn sites almost immediately because the network couldn’t support the interest and Tibetan script isn’t something that keyboards recognize just yet– but the Wireless Mesh Project has effectively provided internet access to over two thousand computers in Dharamsala alone by recycling technology and sharing knowledge. The relays operate on solar panels making them more reliable then any of the utilities provided by the local government. When one tower drops there are others all around keeping the signal strong. Something has been created in a rural Indian mountain town that hasn’t been effectively achieved in the heart of Silicon Valley by industry leaders. There’s been efforts to improve upon the technology- a telephony expert has travelled from Australia to work on incorporating VoIP connecting settlements spread out along the Indian/Tibetan border- and it has spread to other refugee communities. The Dharamsala mesh has been joined by three others all built and maintained by a team of Tibetan and foreign geeks. The exiles hope this window to the outside world can help them grow economically (there’s unfortunately talk of developing call-centers like in other Indian cities as well as online cultural curiosities for sale ala’ arrowhead necklaces and turquoise statues off the res) while strengthening their connection to their history and displaced communities. As the Chinese have repeatedly made attempts to destroy anything historically Tibetan in the occupied land ancient texts have been smuggled out where they’re being preserved digitally and passed from computer to computer. There’s hope that becoming a presence online can help bring the plight of the Tibetans back into the public-eye and exert pressure politically without having to deal with any Beastie Boys. The hard work seemed to pay off with Boingboing writer and globe-trotting internet personality Xeni Jardin introducing the world of NPR to the world of Tibet online.

Not everyone is pleased. Soon after an article was published about the wireless mesh project a DDoS attack temporarily disabled the network; although the evidence wouldn’t stand up in court (or courts without executions taking place on the roof) it does suggest the attack originated in China. So after struggling with bitter cold, savage mountain winds, poverty, out-dated technology and primates Ben-David and his band squared off with monkeys of another breed. Fortunately friends have been made around the world, the global computing community seems pretty on board.

If we were still living in a world where Tibet was like the opening of “The Golden Child” you would have trouble believing someone named Oxblood Ruffin installed encryption software for the Dali Lama but we’ve left that and debates about Cubism behind. Hackers and phreaks have found common cause and it seems the roots of Hacktivism can be traced to the implementation of The Great Firewall of China. In addition to helping set-up and secure the Tibetan grid there have been concerted efforts to tackle the Chinese directly. Applications such as Torpark, which randomizes the IP address visible to a network administrator while encrypting the user end of the signal, and methods of encryption such as steganography which hides sensitive data within, eh, insensitive data are now out there helping people achieve something very basic– an unrestricted access to information. In the states this is some big-money shit, this is an entire industry that works with budgets that use the world billions. In Tibet it took a sense of what was right, some left-of-center thinking and a way of keeping the damn monkeys from fucking shit up.

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After a difficult internal debate the votes were tabulated and it was decided that attendence was unavoidable. The walk down Townsend, left on 4th, right on Bryant was made, ending in a small doorway concealed from the street by a small sickly tree. Two windows on either side, choked with neon lights looking more like fire hazards then enticing adverts. Inside the darkness that only real despair can achieve– a dim sallow light accenting the filth and decay instead of chasing it from the room. An odd place for a company holiday party, but then again it was an odd company.

It was a small bar that never felt full. The door leads to a short bar on one side,one bathroom and a wall directly across. Three beers draft but one was Beamish and since there were drinks already paid for (for the first hour) and they didn’t seem interested in how old I was Beamish was the drink. A jukebox past the bar in the corner hanging off a partition had been plugged full of quarters and Myrna, the company founder, had selected every Eagles and Bee Gees song she unearthed. This was not irony, it was sad. In quieter times the jukebox was cheaper than most but the selection reflected this and many times the same songs were played.

Past the jukebox, behind the partition it hung from, was a small raised platform with a couple dartboards and a couple small tables making a game of darts impossible. They had a sushi spread that day, pizza showed up later, and the writing staff held court looking down their noses at the tech staff who seemed to dress in the dark every day. Across from the platform was the pool table, cheaper than most, about a foot shorter than most. Five or so booths stretched back from the table to the end of the room, two more dartboards hung amidst Budweiser banners and sad little pennants.

So we sat, milled about, talked about work or the latest internet gossip. Myrna wittled away her sobriety and staggered thought the proceedings with flushed face and began singing along to the soundtrack. I sat at the bar with two of the bitter tech staff talking shit. The bartender seemed bewildered by this flood of people and tried her best but her ability to work in such a fast paced environment was not quite enough to make her seem comfortable.

This place was great, even crowded with the social retards and fashion wannabees I worked with at the time. Bars were never places I wanted to be but this wasn’t a bar so much as a clubhouse for people that had been kicked out of the more reputable clubs. On a normal night you may find a couple quiet drunks at the bar watching TV, whatever game might be on, or talking their non-conversations with the bartender. Occasionally a pool game, occasionally a couple at a booth playing Scrabble. It was a neighborhood bar in a part of town that was predominantly commercial and industrial, a part of town that was desolate at night except for the periodic rattling of a shopping cart or roar of a rice rocket headed towards the freeway. It was a half hour walk from my house but one I made eagerly.

A friend used to work swing shift and I would swing by when the crew got off. Everyone would caravan down Bryant as fast as possible and order two or three drinks upon arrival. The bartender passed out makeshift ashtrays and wandered around the motley collection trading jokes or just milling about. She would make last call at two and seemed to appreciate the business if not the company. Of course it was just as likely to be closed on any given night, without warning and often without any indication it had been closed forever.

It’s been closed forever, gutted and gone. No more Eagles Drift In Lounge. Just another casualty.

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