AWACS

Space is big, space is dark, it’s hard to find a place to park

– unknown

Parking along the canals is now so expensive that you can fit a bus in the empty spots.

For those who can afford it, it is convenient. I saw a Porsche Cayenna Turbo S with a license plate from Monaco the other day. Creamy white it was.

One of the strongest forces of social progress - one of the most democratic, most emancipatory, most liberating forces of the twentieth century - has once again been reduced to a plaything for the rich.

Over the weekend, AWACS died.

AWACS was my first “PC” (as opposed to the Macs and Atari’s I used before), and the first and last computer I ever built from parts.

I bought it as a set of parts from Overseas Computing, perhaps the shadiest, but certainly the unfriendly computer equipment retailer ever.

Sure enough, when I got home, it didn’t work. I read the manual and tried a few jumper settings, then spent the rest of the night staring at the dead box.

When I took it back the next day, the store clerk replaced what turned out to be a broken power supply. Instead of apologizing, he gave me a reprimand. “You shouldn’t be doing this if you haven’t done it before!” I still remember this because it struck me as illogical and frankly indefensible at the time, a shining example of everything that is wrong with people in particular and the whole world in general.

But he may have been right in a sense.

I bought a dual Pentium II motherboard. The Pentium II was quite expensive, so I got a single one, with the idea to upgrade to a dual CPU setup later. Of course that never happened. By the time I was looking to upgrade the CPU they were no longer easily available, and the CPUs that were available wouldn’t fit in the motherboard.

I ended up spending a lot more money, buying a new motherboard and two new Pentium III CPUs in Slot 1 packaging, big heavy slabs of silicon and plastic not unlike old game cartridges. The old motherboard I gave to an old friend, someone I first met through the dial-up BBS “Archie” run by the VPRO in the late eighties/early nineties.

AWACS was the last computer my father gave to me. Now after more than a decade of uninterrupted service the plastics have become yellow and brittle and the efficient whirr-click of the drives has turned into a laborious whine. The optical drives died a long time ago.

And this weekend, one of the hard drives died. After some gentle prodding I managed to bring it back to life, sort of. Then I went out and bought a new machine - just the first thing that seemed decent and wasn’t too expensive.

I copied across a decade worth of files, rebooted, and logged in. Everything was there, like nothing ever happened. Machines have no sense of ceremony.

I’ve called the new machine Ripley, after the greatest female character in popular culture ever. And with a new name comes new resolve.

If AWACS was about command and control at a distance, about detachment and the view from thirty-thousand feet, then Ripley is about being there and getting your ass kicked. And still not giving up.

I noticed him standing in front of me in the checkout line of the supermarket. He was buying some bread rolls and a couple of cans of catfood. As the cashier scanned them the prices flashed blue across the display. Fifty-nine cents, fifty-nine cents, fifty-nine cents, eighty-seven cents…

I recognized his face. He’s a street musician who often stands at the crossroads near the market square. He plays tunes on a standing bass, mostly golden oldies and folk songs. The enormous instrument sways gently to and fro as his hands carress the strings and neck, almost as if he is dancing with it. He stamps his feet on a wooden box for a beat. His voice is hoarse, the words almost shouted.

The man is an absolute gentleman, always dressed in a dark suit with polished black shoes. But his trademark is the hat, which he raises or at least touches for every donation, no matter how small. He does this without exception, regardless of whether he receives a single donation or ten in a row - he will raise his hat for every single person, continuining to play the bass and muttering “thanks, thank you, thanks” to each person individually, with a smile that betrays only gratitude and grace.

He works the bass, and the bass works him. Sweating and singing, he bangs out basslines, day in day out, raising his hat and smiling his smile.

And now here he is, with the same smile, the same gentle demeanour, the same suit and hat, buying bread rolls and catfood.

I wondered about the catfood. I had never seen him with a cat, or any kind of pet for that matter. I had a hard time imagining it - this man was so humane that there seemed something inappropriate about the image of him roaming the city with an animal in tow. It just seemed … below him.

Then I realized the catfood was for him.

This from a friend:

Did you find my weed?

About half a gram of tasman haze from de Tweede Kamer.

I left it in a phone booth at Waterloo square, Amsterdam on Sunday 28 June, at 03:44 in the morning.

Did you find it?

I hope you like it.

I left it there for you.

You’re not a good person because you don’t drink, or because you don’t eat meat, or because you recycle your garbage. It’s not as simple as getting rid of bad habits or being true to doctrine.

This endless parade of experts dishing out well intended advice on how to optimize your performance in bed, how to maximize your productivity at work, how to stay fit at any age - but for what? A life of neverending self-improvement, full of furious potential, signifying nothing?

~

Late last night, slouched on the couch, remote control in hand, I zapped through the TV landscape. There were a couple of options: Discovery channel was showing a documentary on Future Weapons, Fashion TV had the latest swimwear trends for 2009, and then there was Turner Classic Movies. I switched back and forth, but kept coming back to TCM. The color and atmosphere in these old movies is enchanting. You just have to catch another glimpse, like at a beautiful woman passing by on the street.

That night TCM broadcast the 1958 movie “Cat on a hot tin roof“, with the glorious Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, pictured above in a scene of marital crisis. Newman plays son Brick, who is destined to inherit his father’s massive estate. But Brick is a troubled soul, who fights his demons with large quantities of whiskey. Worse, he snubs his wife in the bedroom and seems hesitant to establish a family of his own.

The inevitable confrontation between Brick and his father, Big Daddy, plays out during a get-together at the family ranch. With Brick drunk and Big Daddy suffering from “spastic bowels” (a euphemism for cancer), they chase eachother around the house, pleading, confessing, trading accusations and insults, thrusting and parrying like bulls. The son lectures his father on hypocrisy and sincerity, the father ridicules his son for his refusal to accept responsibility.

The father is a fat hulking tyrant, the son a hopeless drunk. But they don’t argue about diets and 12-step detox programs. They argue about what it means to live a good life. They argue about purity and sacrifice and love. And they understand that being useful means allowing yourself to be used.

~

We do not need more experts to tell us how to indefinitely preserve ourselves, like pickles. We need experts like Big Daddy and Brick. Flawed experts, who argue with us and confuse us and convince us, about what it means to be a good person, and who remind us of our duty towards ourselves, our families, & our fellow man.

We need experts who remind us that the expiration date on our packaging is not a threat. Instead it is a promise - a promise of freshness and fitness for purpose.