In The Dark - A Techie's Journey

I am Jack Kerouac, I would think… as I sat outside the bedroom window with skeleton trees hanging over me. Gazing up at the stars, I’d take a drag off my Camel and wait for the coyotes. The cool harmonic breeze shadowed the feint sounds of far off crickets. The air was thin all around, the kind that bends the youth to their knees, in disbelief. Then the silence, the darkness, muzzling all impurity stood still. And through the night, with all the horror beside me, the flowers grew, ‘til dawn.

Upon my return, that was my first memorable impression, thickly left on me, of a sanctuary that proposed a diametrically different sort of life from the world I actually live in, the world of ones and zeros bouncing around like neurons in seemingly randomness only to subtly build to forms. I can sit at my computer endlessly if I didn’t have to eat or sleep. Thank goodness I have friends and family that don’t let me.

It was at that sanctuary in the hills where I became absorbed with the technological world and temporarily brushed aside some of my dreams. I wanted to write novels, live the writer’s cliché and move to Paris, struggle on the streets for ends meet and wake up with a day old cup of coffee and a half burnt cigarette. I once had lunch with James Joyce in Zurich, the place was called the Fluntern Cemetery. Yes he was dead, I know.

I got my first taste of tech as a child when my Dad came home with a TSR-80 in 1978. I was eight years old. But it was that week in Zurich, the summer of ‘92 when I realized the power of technology and knew I was going to be involved with it for the rest of my life.

When I first arrived off the train coming from Milan, I had no idea where I was going to stay. Wondering somewhat aimlessly around with my forty pound pack and about $60 dollars in my pocket, I happened upon an eloquent woman wearing a beige beret with little tufts of white hair sticking out both sides. I guess she knew I was American by the way I was dressed, with my black walking boots and cutoff baggy denims. She asked softly in a strong German accent if I needed a place to stay. I gratefully replied yes and she directed me to this old art school which supposedly was used as a hostel.

I realized that I had been traveling a while already but I guess I looked pretty beat up; she asked me if I had enough money and offered me a few Swiss francs. I politely declined her offer and thanked her for the directions to the school which was just around the bend.

When I got there and told of how I had come about their place, they welcomed me in immediately and lead me down into the basement. They showed me a bathroom and a cot in the most wonderful music room I had ever seen. They offered me food and told me that if I wanted to play anything at all to go ahead and have fun. The soundproofed room in the basement would hold all the noise in and I shouldn’t worry about bothering anyone, all the students were gone for the summer. I had the entire place to myself.

Wow, was I energized. I was well into my third month of traveling and I felt that I had my fair share of European museums and such, so being able to kick it in my own private space station music studio for a couple days and go nuts was very exciting. And that is exactly what I did, I tell you. And I made the most of it. For three days I played around all day in that music room with all the latest technology and computerized keyboards, guitars, synthesizers, and drums; then went out and partied all night.

It was on the fourth day that I decided to make the trek up the hill to the memorable Fluntern and sit with the old Dubliner, Mr. Joyce and have a sandwich and a scotch. And as I ate and had a few pulls off the Glenfidich, I looked over the city and thought how beautiful everything really was. Of all the eloquent words, the only one that came to mind to describe the beauty was “beauty” itself.

And regardless of how amazing the history and the romanticism all truly is, at that time I new, that my future did not rest in parallel with the historic papers of the Joyce’s, Kafka’s or Cocteau’s. My subjectivisms about life were leading me into a different realm of creativity; a realm that road along the wires and is seated in a language made up entirely of ones and zeros.

I occasionally pick up one of the many books that fill my garage and head back out into the hills to get a breath of fresh air, but to tell the truth, I feel perfectly at home here reading from my computer screen knowing that the historians create so we can remember how it was. And now I sit here writing and I realize every day, I am really looking forward to how it will be! I am not Jack Kerouac, have a nice day.

Greg Richburg is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and the owner of Netricks Inc. a network consulting, web design and hosting company located in Fresno, CA. Phone- 559-222-2500. All past articles written by Greg Richburg are available at http://www.netricks.com/news. Please address article suggestions to: info@netricks.com.