Monday 5/8/2000 Plodding through things that painful, having a hard time, but there is a lot happening. This is an important point in the process. Painful, but important. Anyone want to do Dante's Divene Comedy with shadow puppets?

Morning I would hate myself if it wasn't so much work.

I really would.

The weekend passed in a blur of wretchedness. Wretchedness but the kids are really cute.

Sunday morning I took a shower with both Maddy and Spencer, maybe Saturday. They were each sitting in my lap. Heather wanted to take a picture, what with them being cute and all.

Saturday: we took a massive, but not too heavy, load to the dump. The dump lady who I always talk to said "Don't bother filling that check out, you'll just have to void it..." and she let us in for free. Psyche!

We bought hay, bought good times hamburgers, and went home. I fixed the well, and then fixed the two leaks in the piping. One of them was caused by the new sewer line, the other by a frost heaved rock! I couldn't get the rock out, so I beat the hell out of it with my sledge hammer.

Beating the hell out of things with a sledge hammer can be a remarkably effective strategy.

Sunday the well was broken, again, and remains broken. Win some, lose some.

Heather did a lot of work in the workshop, so it is cleaner than it has been in years. Still work to do, but it is getting there!

I went to the Hornet restaurant and had wonderful pad thai and two good beers, and then went to the Mayan, next door, and watched Sofia Coppola's _The Virgin Suicides_.

Not a cheerful flick.

Sunday was a slow start day, but we worked on the red storage building- and have it almost finished except for the bottles, and then did more work on the front storage building.

Linda and Marty took the greenhouse away. The spaces are opening up. Really. I feel the need for reassurance, but I am the only one who I trust to give it to myself, and I don't trust myself.

I have been trying to get a floppy drive to work on my server, Puck, 5 1/4 inch. Finally got one to work, and then broke the damn control board while taking off the cable in order to reposition the drive where it belonged. Bummer.

Then I got another drive to work. I used to charge $150 for a floppy, and installation... Then $125, and then it got so it wasn't worth it.

I worked until midnight on sorting through floppy disks. We have too much, too many, and it all hurts. I see a random disk filled with shareware downloads and I get spazzed about how important it is. Fuck.

Then I hit the muck of Dick's disks. Oh the humanity of it all. Reading little flakes of personality in his work. Seeing his attempts at learning this and that, all of the legal research, and the resumes, and his attempts to convince the Bar that in spite of being a rather extreme train wreck that he should be allowed in.

I am grateful, since the attempt to get into the bar prodded him into producing what might be the only self referring document that he ever wrote, well, that, and the resumes.

Client "Here is a stack of disks that were found in his apartment, who was he?"

Me "man, oh man, oh man."

I spent a horrid night. Horrid. Spencer woke, so I lay with him and tried to sleep, and I couldn't for more than 15 minutes, and I came back to our room, and read two pages of harry potter and that helped a bit, and had a small bowl of ice cream, and got another 20 minutes, and finally about 3:30 I slipped into troubled sleep. Desperate dreams of preserving the past.

Heather keeps saying that we only have 'another day like this one' of the painful stuff, and then it will get easy. I feel more pessemistic than that, but the truth is that it does have to stop. We do not have an infinite amount of stuff. In fact, we truly have dealt with a huge amount, and we have laid the psychological groundwork/established the precedent, for dealing with a lot more.

If I sold Herb Wittow's working 386 computer for $3 at the garage sale, and gave away three PS2's to the Salvation Army, then how much effort is a 386SX worth? That is missing the cover (well, it is somewhere...), no video card, not really working system? God! I feel this spike of pain. I have left that precious computer out in the fucking rain to rot, but it is important! It was Molly's game machine! It has her games!

Oh the pain of possessions, of craving, of want.

But truly-it doesn't fucking matter. Repeat after me, it doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't fucking matter.

So if that is worth nothing, and it has a hard drive, an st238, 30 mb RLL, and the working system is worth $3, what is MY first 386 worth? I pulled the floppy drive (since I have actually needed one, and the one I was using wasn't working), and the video card (why?), and the 8-1mb 30 pin simms, and threw the rest away.

I took a picture of Maddy and Spence sitting on the pile of debris, computers, monitors, and tires, that is trash.

The past shit on the present.

I am getting through it. I really am. Heather called this morning, Del faxed a listing, $480k for a nice house near sepbastopol on Cunningham road.

There is hope.

12:25 pm The story so far: I have fixed the complicted URI issue, and surfed the web. If one were strictly accurate, they could include the observation that I also spent quite an interval trying to fix the 'add to bad list' problem.

Last night I went through my father's files. Doing so pushed me over the edge, something fierce, and now I feel dodgy and disconnected.

I have been feeling bad a lot, lately, doing this sorting, and throwing things out. Last night I came to the thought that the emotional reaction has been connected to my knowledge of what the storage buildings contain, and a fear of dealing with them, of confronting my past.

Throwing away Poor Richard's Computers. Throwing away Pont. Throwing away my past, in a sense. Confronting the artifacts, limited, of my father. Facing the memory triggers of all the pain of missed opportunity.

After Lunch 2:52 The world lays down at our feet. I was thinking about things while walking through the rain back to the office. Why am I unhappy? What do I get from this? Do I live some sort of tragic life, and being fully tragic feeds something in my soul? Certainly being depressed is nice, it relieves me of the responsibility to create new and great things.

3:46 pm I looked at the clock, 3:38. I went to the bathroom, another five minutes down.

How can we be looking at $450-500K houses? And how can a starting lawyer with a 'good pedigree' be making $120k? The world is mad. And so be it.

Fundamentally, I want to get through this process. I want to get my shit organized-I want what matters to me to live in file drawers and tidy directories. I want my memories of my father safely trapped in d:\rich\richold\dick. I don't want my father's legacy to be a $59.99 ultra precise triple beam fucking dope scale.

We don't get what we want.

The past took a dump on the present, laying he foundation for the future. I'm on pooper scoooper patrol for the future.

"Tied her to the bed and eatin' dinner off of her." Marilyn Monroe should have married Henry (not Arthur) Miller.

4:04 Learning about 'IFRAME.' And still wanting to be gone. Oh the humanity. I know that home is no better. I don't want to be in the normal places that constrain my current life. Feeling very unsettled, unhoused, uncommited to the new place, severing ties to the old, and then when the universe whacks my ass I feel resentful. We got the letter from Foothills that there is no room for Molly for next year. Well, we wern't planning to be here, but still, still, it is a kick in the ass. The 5/6 are off on a week long outing this week. And that feels yucky. Everywhere I turn it feels that my community has been severed with no matching weaving of cords of connection on the other side. Well, that is how it feels on this rainy post-dead dad disk sorting orgy of immersion in the bathetic details of a life wasted.

4:22 pm We are going to meet at 4:30 and review the 'dragon list.' Meanwhile, wandering towards the bathroom I encountered the stunning search phrase 'plane crashes killing goats.' I have no commentary.

The whole "I love you" virus makes me want to laugh or scream or hide in a fucking hole. First, the whole fucking thing is the direct result of specific deeply flawed decisions made by Microsoft in their quest to control the whole world. Then there are all the hacking issues... But here is a quote:

" The true culprits, Atkinson says, are a 23-year-old named Michael and his girlfriend Ajnabi, who is believed to be between 15-17 years old. Anjabi, he said, is probably the person who actually wrote the virus. "

Michael and Anjabi? 23 year old with a 15-17 year old hacker girlfriend. It is delicious. Fucking delicious. Makes me want to write a VBS virus and a screenplay. Put the virus on a web site as a text file, and let people do what they want with it, and then sell the fucking screenplay. In the stock market they call it insider trading when you take a market position in a security that you are an active party in controlling. I don't think that hollywood operates under the same moral and legal controls. So, create a major computer security brouhah, and then be ready with a completed movie of the week or feature script. Fucking delicious. All these sanctimonous editorials about 'bad apples' and 'incomprehensible behavior. The better question, what keeps almost everyone from blowing up their school, tower shooting, and writing virii? It doesn't make it better, or easier, that I am reasonably well paid to pretend I care.

9:30 pm Called Tom, we talked, etc, blah blah. take away: shadow puppets! puppets for the russian canibal. David as only live actor, voices of guard, journalist, etc, then puppets for the cannibalism scenes.

Next: the divine comedy in shadow puppets.