The events of November were fun, and I thought it would build momentum for the holiday season. I visitied family for two weeks; my sister underwent minor back surgery, and since mom is a shut-in, I wanted to be there for them if anything went wrong. I thought I would have time to engage some old friends, but time always gets away from me. I do what I want, but could not get it togther to add anything new. Tacid entropy strike two. 

I journeyed to Boston for Thanksgiving. Two friends moved there a few months ago, and it’s our second year of traveling together over the holiday. Last year we shared a condo in Amsterdam. Boston is not a slack city. The area is rich in American History and humanities. It seems somehow more real than the Emerald City that I live in now, San Francisco. Boston’s working class is actually able to live in Boston. Their are bad neighborhoods and good, like every city, except the average Norm on the street is friendly, if not hard to understand with the local loud compressed accent. The impatient tone is a gate to scare the faint of heart. Down in the train tunnels focus shifts to quick and efficient movement. Dallying, impeeding the flow is met with hyperbolic frustated sighs, and barely auddlbe profanit; even I could tell who were the tourists. On the surface, Boston is not as dirty; SF is covered in layer of wrappers, plastic bags, cigarrette butts, and worse. The SF locals can be judgemental; the city takes itself too seriously. We are extremely tolerant to your face, but mostly indifferent. I am guilty as the rest. It’s easy to maintain a good impression about Boston when exposure is ten days over a holiday, and baseball is out of season. I’ve heard Red Sox fans are the most obnoxious. We visited a reactment village, Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth MA, and spent one night in a small harbor town, Provincetown. We slept late, stayed up late, and made some most excellent brownies for a Thanksgiving treat. The trip was restful. Again I had hoped to hook up with some old friendships, but the timing was bad, entoropy strike three. 

Since my return to the EC SF, I’ve been so disinterested that even banging hours of gibberish on these keys can not break inertia. In process, I use it as a warm up, but all is incoherent stagnation. I love Christmas. I perform all of the Christmas traditions: I light the candle, hang the garland, and stir the punch; I sync desires with reality and give small gifts; and I match one for two on donations to my favorite charites. The excitment builds from All Hallows day to the final climax on New Years Eve, I can’t seem to find the spirit this year. Halloween begin better than expected, and then it all crashed down around me. I’ve not been able to pinpoint what happened? Am I disgusted with  my success this year? Have I spent too much time alone and accepted as normal a bad side effect of my choices? After projecting my pschye onto the wicker man, have I burned him too brightly? 

I wrote several poems and finished my first novella. I joined a writing group. I am well fed, and live in a beautiful city. I have my health. I am working on a sequel and have a queue of short story ideas. How do I escape this yearly wankery?  

As I hurtle through space and the existence in my life, I run into this pasenger every year. He waves, smiles, holds out his thumb as I pass. I don’t stop and then further out in time, there he is again. He tips his hat and smiles, winks and holds out his thumb. I pass. Is he a dangerous reflection or the future? If I pick him up, what will I learn? What am I afraid of? I know this malaise will pass, but every day is a long, long, lonely day, and I know I will see my friend again next Christmas.  

I consider myself a patient person, but the numbness of inactivity, and the loneliness moments that last too long and lead to guilt and anguish. It is a nonplus downward spiral to the precipice of despair. I’ve always been able to turn and disrupt the vortex, but this year is different. I keep loosing track of time, and my unconscious dreams manifest themselves more and more into reality. I can still tell the difference, but the edges are blearier.

Two nights ago, I was extremely tired. I got up early that day and went to a fair in Half-moon Bay, the Pumpkin Festival. It was free, the food was good, and although overcast, the temperature was perfect, around 65 degrees. We listened to music, saw lots of fall arts and crafts, and ate/drank lots of pumpkin inspired food and beverages. Braised with pumpkin seeds, the brussel sprouts were my favorite, and a local brew, Mavericks Pumpkin Harvest Ale.

I lay down on the covers that night, and fell into a semi-sleep. I think I am awake, but drowsy, extremely drowsy. I feel this energy enter the room. It is like static electricity, a frizzle, or increase in pressure. I feel it and my eyes open; I think my eyes open, but the bedroom is hazy. I turn my head to the door, and see nothing. I turn in the opposite direction and attempt to rise with no effect. I am frozen in bed, on my back, staring at the ceiling. It is my apartment ceiling with a fleeting glow from the CFL’s in the overhead fixture. I take a breath and try to move again, not possible.

The energy or pressure changes as it moves around the end of the bed to my side. I can feel it change positions. I can’t move my head, I can’t see it, but I know it is there. I think about the myth of “the old hag.” A nocturnal creature/spirit who sits on your chest at night and steels your spirit. She feeds on you.

PANIC. I can’t move and this energy or entity is standing next to me. Fear intensifies the energy’s presence. What do I do? How do I defeat it? I wiggle my hand and nudge my wife sleeping next to me. She doesn’t stir. I am awake; I can feel her leg as I furiously tap it with my fingers. HELP ME, I am screaming in my own head, and she doesn’t stir. WAKE UP, WAKE UP, I yell at the top of my thoughts, nothing. If this thing sits on my chest, I will not be able to escape. If it sits on my chest and syphons my soul, how will I survive? How I will I seek heaven or nirvana? I’ve read of victims going years, feeding “the old hag.” Years of insomnia and fear, never again achieving restful sleep. What do I do? WAKE UP, jump up, move, anything and this dream or energy or creature will flee.

Growl. GROWL, if I growl I can scare it away. I know I am awake, this is not a dream, if i growl, I can chase it way. It has to work. I focus my effort and a shallow rumble emanates from my throat. It takes all my strength to focus my thoughts on a “grrrr,” and its little louder. The entity is bending over my torso; I feel its energy ruffle the edge of the bed. “Growwwl,” I almost there. I feel it on my face, “GROWL, GRRRROWL, GROWWWL.”

I rise up straight out of bed with my eyes wide open. I look around, and my wife asks if I am OK.

“I heard you growling,” she says, sits up, and grabs my arm. “it was really loud. I’ve never you heard you make that noise before?”

Phew, it was a dream after all. It seemed so real, the details of the room, time passing, and I couldn’t control its direction. Was I awake or was I dreaming? Perhaps a little of both, I can’t go back to sleep. It’s 5 A.M. I’ve been wanting to start my day earlier, so today is as good as any day. I get up, move to the living room, and open my laptop to a blank page.

“It was an amazing sequence of the most confusing events…” _____

At this time, keithecho.com is infested with something similar to bed bugs, spambot comments. They are not harmful, but are a time-nuisance and propagate rapidly with no benefit. In the comments section on this blog, I am responsible for succumbing to vain flattery from these bots. Traffic on my site dipped, and the idea that these comments may prop-up my numbers caught my naïveté hook, line, and sinker. The result is that my view numbers are worse, and I receive 20 or more new spambot comments a day. The bots do not view my sight, but fill my comment queue, and attract more bots. It takes significant time to administer and clear these pointless comments.

Flattery is extremely seductive, and I did not developed adequate filters in my “open-source” psyche to respond appropriately. I have remedied this weakness. I will no longer approve comments from spam bots or other non-verifiable sources. All spambots will be blocked, and all previous spam comments will be promptly deleted.

Thanks Steve, your vision–the Macintosh, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad–changed my life and I am sincerely grateful. In 1984, my father helped me purchase my first one; it had 64k memory and a floppy drive. I had a bag to carry it around, as portable as one could get in its time. The GUI was fantastic. Before it, I worked with command line on mainframes, including cardpunch stations and COBOL in college. Never drop 1500 hundred punch cards without a page number on each.

In the early days the other bit-heads and Macintosh enthusiasts, collected and traded software like it was baseball cards. I never got into baseball or other sports; I was more interested in cars and hardware. My Macintosh gave me access to a community/camaraderie that I never had before. Piracy was a honourable hobby; we didn’t sell the software, we just traded it. Manuals were more valuable than the content itself. My first upgrade included an external dual-side floppy drive and memory soldered to the motherboard. The early OS ran off a 400k single side floppy, and with two drives, the user could run a fat system, one application, and store data on the 2nd. Two drives made coping software easier as well. [Note: piracy is not acceptable today. Don’t do it.]

I created my first desktop publishing documents on the Mac with MacWrite, a dot matrix printer, and a photocopier. It was the program notes for a college poetry reading. To add a little flare, I used script fonts and color paper. The organizers couldn’t believe that I had created it myself. I used my 2nd Mac Classic for low-res/low-budget typesetting in a quick print shop, WSIWYG–what you see is what you get.

At the print shop, I worked my way through college and earned a B.S. in Math. I found a job in college textbook publishing. I started as an ancillary editor, and my primary tool was an IBM Selectric typewriter. I was luckily to work with managers whose vision could see the future of desktop publishing. They adopted the Mac to replace the IBM’s. Standard forms and data collection soon followed. I moved to the in-house desktop publishing group as a tech specialist. I have a strong aptitude to troubleshoot difficult computer and software problems. Data collection led to a shared internal network; email communication replaced faxes and letters; while bulletin boards replaced paper file shipping, databases retired file cabinets. I moved again to a site-wide system administration group. As a senior analyst, I created techniques to manage our hardware/software assets, studying ROI and data warehousing. Harcourt Brace experimented with Adobe’s PDF and digital books. With PDF and the Internet the publishing’s future was obvious.

I accidentally met Mr. Jobs at MacWorld in San Francisco. Apple was rolling out five colors of iMac, and he was firmly in control of Apple recreating the brand. He was on his way to a non-Apple vendor who was selling logo watches. Jobs was visibly upset, and from his facial expressions, he must have been having a terse discussion with a marketing or merchandising manager in tow. I think the watches were one of the last vestiges of Gil Amelio’s (Apple’s previous CEO) merchandising schemes. Almost running across the exhibit hall, he stepped on my foot and almost knocked me down. He blushed, apologized, and shook my hand. His smile let out some of the steam, and I heard the two giggle as they went on their way.

Since 1984, I’ve owned two classic Macs, one Quadra, one PowerMac, one iMac, three Newtons, one Duo Doc, three iPods, four Powerbooks, and an iPad. My success with the Mac provided the opportunity to pursue my life-long dream to write fiction fulltime. I pursue this dream from a Mac Powerbook at home and an iPad on the road. I am tearful, grateful, and happy to remember a life well lived. Steve Jobs had a significant impact on my life. His vision and drive facilitated the freedom I have to chase my dreams. Thank you Steve Jobs. I will miss you.

As the sun seeks the equator,
last long shadows of summer
and grasses fade for sustenance,
how wide the dull drums
flatten random asymmetry
and absence tricks the heart.
barley nears its providence,
bread and malt and mash,
hulls in the hold of the Balclutha.
toast the toil of a season passing;
pumpkin and dried corn waltz
the lure of the harvest moon.
a black crow flutters its new down;
bitter is the mirror that cannot lie.
illusion throws its coat into the fire;
warms the first few breaths of autumn.