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Music: Sophisticate By Marcus Shelby

This was the last year before tech came back again in a big way. This was the last year before most folks turned into Internet gabbing, auto-friending machines. I think it was the year that I would feel human for a very long time. E-mail wasn’t something I had to check everyday.

Jazz musicians would hang out in the Reverie late in the morning. Marcus Shelby used to compose some of his jazz pieces here.

This month Spinoza’s Coat ran into a lot of issues with Aristotle’s Poetics and group dynamics.

I think the argument had two sides: one side felt that we were analyzing to death Aristotle’s Poetics and going too slow, and the other side felt we weren’t going into things deep enough and lacked an agenda with deadlines.

Michelle Tea read at City Lights this month.

Brandon Brown put on the last Zeal. It was the best set of poetry events I ever went to. The sort of poetry read here made poets who had never read to the public in decades come out and read. I’m alluding to Larry Kearney.

I met K- at a bar in South Park. I introduced myself to her because of the orchid she put into her hair. The plan was to meet friends there and then go to Cirque du Soleil’s Allegria. I’m sure a friend of mine was setting the two of us up. He gave me a ticket with her last name in it.

This is what I wrote in my journal:

“16 December 2003

From the Nova to the tent set up for Cirque du Soleil, a young woman talked to me in an excited way. K- mentioned all sorts of places: Spain, Switzerland. She knows quite a few languages – enough to get by. She sat in my seat for a bit just to chat… She wrote her numbers and email on a sheet of paper.”

On New Year’s Eve K- just arrived by cab from the airport from a flight from New York at about eleven-thirty. At midnight she was my first ever New Year’s kiss. For one reason or another girlfriends in the past had been back East for the holidays, but here was someone who made every effort to see me.

This month, I also finished my translation of Plato’s Ion. After the translation, I appended a few of my poems.

Here is one of the poems:

Lips
 
   A gentle one 
   A nibble 
   Dry lips 
   Moist lips 
   A quick lick 
   With a tongue tip 
   That presses, caresses, 
   Another tongue tip 
   Surprised teeth 
   Bitten, licked lips 
   Tongue lash 
   Electric bliss 
   French kiss 
   Wet cheeks 
   Last kiss 
   "Later. Tonight." 
   Hurry. Quick. 
   Last Kiss 
   Last Kiss 
   Last Kiss 
   Raspy Breathe
   Last Kiss

There was lots of Perl and PHP coding for Motherjones.com at the first two weeks of this month. So much of that code is throw away. Our team’s task was to take 10,000 or so HTML pages and put them into a CMS with author, date, title and pagination all squared away. We got 9,000 from the web scraper but the other 1,000 articles had to be manually entered. I wrote a web tool for doing that.

We also had to make sure that all the new info was searchable. We used Atomz Search (now Visual Sciences for that.)

So this is how Friendster grew:

User 101 (Jonathan) signed on in April 2002.
 User 175 signed on in May 2002.
 User 250 signed on in June 2002.
 User 375 signed on in July 2002.
 User 500 signed on in August 2002.
 User 1000 signed on in September 2002.
 User 1250 signed on in October 2002.
 User 1500 signed on in November 2002.
 User 2500 signed on in December 2002.
 User 5000 signed on in January 2003.
 User 10,000 signed on in February 2003.
 User 25,000 signed on in February 2003.
 User 50,000 signed on in March 2003.
 User 100,000 signed on in April 2003.
 User 250,000 signed on in May 2003.
 User 500,000 signed on in June 2003.
 User 750,000 signed on in July 2003.
 User 1,000,000 signed on in August 2003.
 User 1,250,000 signed on in September 2003.
 User 1,500,000 signed on in October 2003.
 User 1,750,000 signed on in November 2003.

An artist from New York turned the Mission into one giant chess board:

I got to play one of the pieces.

The game was between Liina Vark and Charles Gelman. Gelman won as black and the game was won in about 71 moves.

“[T]he hidden linguistic universe of companianate couples… rests entirely on one generative phrase: ‘Would you please stop doing that.” — from Against Love by Laura Kipnis

I wasn’t in a relationship but this book set the bar high in terms of expectations. It made a relationship seem like a domestic gulag where folks would rather stay at work than have to come home to their spouses and kids.

As far as work goes I was focused on learning about search crawlers and content management systems.

I would go war driving whenever I could find somebody to drive. I didn’t have a driver’s license from 1999 – 2004.

Books:
Against Love
Poetics (Aristotle)

3 new members joined Spinoza’s Coat. I won’t talk about them much for out of respect of the 2 living and the 1 dead.

We were reading Greek tragedy because if we read enough of it, then we’d understand Aristotle’s Poetics.

Books:

1. Oedipus Rex
2. Antigone
3. The Bacchae

I felt depressed. I was getting used to working a regular job again. I felt sad because the year I got back from Italy I didn’t have a girlfriend while unemployed. In my journal I wrote about all the wonderful things I would’ve done for her.

The household on Frederick and Clayton that I spent so many wonderful days at was falling apart. Everybody wanted to move, and I couldn’t afford to take over the lease. I was coding for $20 an hour at this point – not bad, but not enough.

I left the place where I copied CDs and documents, and found work as a PHP coder again. In hindsight, anything was possible. I could’ve easily coded Facebook, or Twitter. All I really need is to time travel back to this time, and tell myself to be a really great coder.

This wasn’t my way. I worked everyday on my Greek. After work I would go to 2 cafes where I’d read philosophy in one and write at the other. Coding was still a means to an end for me. I believed philosophy would somehow pay out in this world and in this life time. Unconsciously, I was doing this philosophy because I hated what my mother told me when I was 5: “You’ll never be happy if you don’t have money.” I always thought in the back of my head, “My family has money. If that’s true, why isn’t my family happy? Why are dinners such drab, boring and painful affairs?”

At one cafe there was a Scottish woman with red hair who was friendly to me. I never asked her out…

Regret.

22 July 2003

Jose told me that some women told him that I was too serious.
“You need to think less because they can tell when and what you are thinking.”

Remember the crappy job where I got spit in my coffee and made next to no money? They put me up in Atlanta for a few weeks in June to work on cracking passwords on hard drives that used to belong to Enron.

My favorite part about Georgia was the coffee shop called Java Monkey in Decatur. It was super friendly and was the closest the South comes to the Reverie, or vice versa.

At the end of June I put on an event called the Lentil Lectures:

• Flyer for May’s Lentil Lectures
• Flyer for June’s Lentil Lectures

It was the 2nd month at the awful place where I copied CDs and paper documents.

There was a Windows web application that needed some fixing. It was a silly encoding issue which I identified pretty quickly. After that fix the hazing stopped.

More of my time was spent working with computers instead of menial labor.

But deep down, I hated technology. I wanted to be some sort of artist.

It’s ironic that the month I lose all my real life college friends, and then some, I get an invite to Friendster:

“It’s hotter than yam…. cooler than icb. Check it out. How are you? What’s
up? Do you still hang out at the cafe on cole? I was thinking of dropping by
there do some writing.” That’s what a friend wrote on my invite.

March of 2003 began a pattern of losing friends in a negative way that didn’t really stop until 2008.

Writing now, I see that I didn’t support all that killing. I was alienated and alone. I didn’t have anybody to really hang out with during the day.

I was frustrated. I would go to all these cafes and talk to all these people and never really made a connection. I had been back for a year, and didn’t even have a girlfriend. I felt worthless, but seeing things philosophically made me feel invaluable. I felt a toxic combination of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. If only someone understood me.

All my college friends that I held dear no longer talked to me. They gave me a chance to recant, but I didn’t. Why? Because if I did, it wouldn’t change the alienation that I felt. It wouldn’t change the fact that maybe they weren’t real friends.

In this depressed sort of mood, I took a job that I no longer felt beneath me, working at a copy center making copies of documents and CDs. Let’s face it. I needed the money. I had squandered the year pretending to be a writer and really had nothing to show for it except a few poems and one review of the Yoko Ono exhibit in print.

Looking back, I sort of regret all the idealism. It was misplaced. If instead of pursuing philosophy and poetry, I pursued building the website of my dreams, I would’ve been rich now. But I am pretty sure I would have inherited a different set of problems….

The new, menial job was the kind of place where you got hazed. I got spit in my coffee. They loved playing practical jokes on me. You’d never know that I worked with some of the best coders in the world when I lived in Italy.