Subject: [crackmonkey] Dr. Sobriety
From: Nick Moffitt <[email-masked]>
To: CrackEsel <[email-masked]>

So I was up working late at SuSE trying to make an RPM package
out of the nwrite software (which is installed on zork.net, by the
way).  I stayed until about 8pm, and only snapped out of it when Bodo
started getting ready to go.  

Well, those blasted Oakland busses are $1.25 and I had only
just hit the cash machine, so all I had were those yuppie food
vouchers (about half-and-half old and new style).  I walked to a used
bookstore on Grand Avenue and poked around for a bit, finally dropping
$10 on a hardcover copy of Songs of the Doomed.

So I started reading the first short story in it, and was
getting really into it.  I read through the bus ride, and then got off
at the 19th st Oakland BART station, went down, added $5 to my ticket,
and headed down to the southbound platform, where a Fremont train was
just leaving.  Now, I know that the Fremont train comes like 5 minutes
atfer the San Francisco train, and that the SF trains come 20 minutes
apart, but I had the book and I was really enjoying it, so I figured
the wait wasn't so bad.

So I'm engrossed in the tale of Thompson spending a drunken
morning in this crazy law library at 4am with a convict who's supposed
to clean the place with this hideous beeping ankle band keeping him in
line.  It's reaching this fervor pitch while HST is shoving crank up
both their noses and smashing the convict against the executive
washroom mirror to snap some sense into him:

        He hurled the whiskey bottle at me, but it missed and went
        into the stalls, where it exploded against a wall and left
        glass all over the floor . . . Jesus, I thought.  This place
        will be a bitch to clean up in the morning--or even explain.
        Well, I guess I can't rightly explain the mess.  Don't ask ME
        how it happened.  I swear.  This place is normally so CLEAN
        this time of the morning...We have convicts at night, you
        know.  They clean the whole library spic and span.  But good
        God almighty.  It's so ugly and horrible now that i can't
        stand to even see it!

Anyway, so the convict is plagiarising HST's articles right to
his face, not knowing who he is, and the whole situation is so
engrossing and so horrible, like salt&vinegar potato chips.  It's a
classic bit of Thompson, and the perfect way to open the book, but I'm
suddenly interrupted by a man who wants to know if he missed the train
to Hayward.

I looked up to see a man in a puffy Mariner's jacket (I'm
amazed at the layers people wear in this part of the country, given
how warm it is.  Ruediger was startled at how warm the evening was,
"In Germany, we might have evenings like this in the _Summer_.").  I
took note of it as a conversational escape tactic--sometimes the best
way to deal with talkative crazies is to simply out-talk them with
whatever nonsense you can dig up (I usually give the RMS party line,
because Stallman usually gives it as one long stream-of-consciousness
rant).

I didn't even get a chance.  The man had be floored before I
could even react.  He was coming from an AA graduation or something,
and was so proud to be 8 months sober, and so happy that his friend
graduated.  He was proud of his ATM card, his apartment, and his
security guard job.  He was elated to be living a life of
predictability and stability.  At any other point in time, I could
have sympathized.

But right now my mind was in that law library full of smashed
bottles of old crow and crank-addled convicts and Doctors of
journalism.  It was cruel.  Had the man come last week instead of the
self-indignant wino who seemed to think that I owed him $4, I would
have been overjoyed, but this time I was on the outside looking in.

I felt the book in my hand get heavier and heavier as I
worried about what to do with it.  Do I hide the gonzo-sword symbol on
the cover, lest its very sight send him back into an evening of
binging and debauchery, or do I just keep reading and deny sobriety
for the 12 minutes until my train arrives?

I sat there, paralyzed, escapism faced with an admittedly
benevolent reality, nodding and smiling and being encouraging, until
the man stood up and, grinning ear to ear, said he had to make a phone
call.  It was obvious that his heart was thrilled to read BART
timetables and travel about the bay and see the sights
(although...Hayward??--nevermind.  I'm not one to belittle his
goals.).

I exhaled deeply and slumped down on the bench, my finger red
with the indentations where the corners of the pages I had been
bookmarking cut into it.  I stared at the page for fully two minutes
until my brain clicked back out of reality, and I read the thing
without stopping until I had reached the CoffeeNet.

-- 
 * Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from
   smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of
   smart terminals.  -- [email-masked] (obscurity)
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