It was Monday, he couldn’t wait for Friday. The plan: leave work Thursday night, drive down to Burbank, get a few hours sleep, then attend the screen writing workshop. For too long he’d put off taking the class. It was time to stop procrastinating. Nothing was going to stop him.
This was the week everything would change.
Todd Bailey looked away from his screen and leaned forward in his chair to see if anyone was near the entrance of his cube. He looked over his left shoulder. Although Juan from facilities had recently changed the position of his desk so that his back was no longer to the entrance of his cube, there was always the chance that Chambers, the annoyance who sat on the other side of the cube wall, might pop his head over. He’d done this many times before, sometimes commenting loudly about what ‘Hemingway here’ was working on.
But Chambers wasn’t there, and Todd couldn’t hear him typing at his computer; he was probably flirting with the cute, new localization manager. Todd returned to his computer screen and clicked on a window that had been minimized, changing from what he should be working to what he wanted to work on.
Every time the seasons change, a new issue of the Patagonia catalog comes out, I get the same feeling of dissatisfaction, of longing. Pulling it from my mailbox, I see the Patagonia catalog cover, majestic and beckoning: an extreme skier made small by the scale of some monstrous peak in the Chugach mountains, a runner dwarfed by the plains of Mongolia, a surfer in the tube of a wave breaking on an empty, unknown beach. And this is just the cover; more vicariousness awaits inside. The catalog is a passport to exotic locations and enhanced identities. The Patagonia catalog brings home my dull, suburban, conventional life.
I want to be one of those people. I want to be a Patagoniac.
Todd heard someone walking towards his cube, minimized his writing project, and switched back to a technical manual he was working on—a fucking boring chore—configuration instructions for their software. He waited a moment, then went back to his own work:
What does it mean to be a Patagoniac? It means being in a place that is neither suburban nor urban; it is rural, remote, exotic. It is more Western than Eastern, more foreign than domestic. A fishing shack, an old barn, or a yurt are appropriate settings. By seasons the Patagoniac visits the Caribbean in the Spring, Bhutan in the Summer, Huahine in the Fall, and Montana in the Winter. A Patagoniac goes bonefishing, trekking, big wall climbing, surfing. If the activity is not a sport then it is unusual, a retro-job: a furrier, a tool forger, a nature photographer who shoots only large format film, a wildlife biologist tagging sea manatees. The Patagoniacs are mostly white, with slight bias towards women. Non-whites are usually crowds of dark skinned children, smiling and crowding the Patagoniac protagonist. Optional props include yaks, llamas, horses, third world trains, endangered species, piles of climbing rope, Japanese wood working tools, a cast iron stove.
A Patagoniac would never play softball in Tennessee, snowmobile in Wisconsin, or hunt turkey in Virginia. Other unacceptable activities for the Patagoniac are car camping and bowling.
A Patagoniac travels, treks, climbs, rides, paddles, and glissades, but never commutes.
A Patagoniac appears to be egalitarian, but is ultimately elitist. The pictures of the surfers at a secret location in the Central Coast of California are at a public beach, but instead a security guard protected property at the Hollister Ranch, where each of the 100 acre parcels are worth tens of millions of dollars.
Todd leaned back in his chair. He smiled—it was good, he liked it. How to make it better? He loved writing: getting an idea, then acting on it, working it over, making it come alive on the page. Where could he publish it? It wasn’t enough for the The New Yorker or The Paris Review or even Granta, but maybe the Sunday magazine insert of The Chronicle would publish it. The idea was from an old Doonesbury cartoons that had spoofed a pretentious clothing company, J. Peterman.
“Todd?”
He started in his chair—he had been too engrossed to hear Brenda, the writing manager and his boss, coming towards his cube. She stood leaning against the cube entrance, looking at him intently. He typed a quick ALT-TAB to hide what was on his screen, even though he was the only one who could see his screen.
“How’s the section on configuration coming along?” said Brenda. Her expression reminded him of the time he made the mistake of using the office printer to print a story he was writing. Six of the thirty pages printed when the printer stopped working; he wasn’t sure why, and he thought he had cancelled the remainder of the print job. However, when he came in the next morning, the last twenty-four pages were on his desk, along with a note from Brenda to please see the employee handbook about using company equipment and time for personal projects.
The company made software that converted faxes to email, then sent an email with the text of the fax to a recipients’ email application. This type of software was referred to as middleware, as it sat between two systems. No one was aware of the software’s existence except the technician who installed and configured the software. It was the most boring piece of software in the world. Todd thought writing about how to configure the software was the last thing he should be writing if he was going to be a successful author or screen writer. The only thing worse than writing about the software was testing it: the poor slobs over on the software test team always looked depressed.
“Good, it’s coming along pretty well. I need to get some more information from development about the latest changes to support some email programs.” He looked at his notes. “Eudora and ccMail.”
“Okay. Once that’s done send it to Lisa to review. That’ll be done by this Friday, right? That’s when I’ve scheduled the doc review. We don’t want to be late again and certainly don’t want to hold up the product release.”
Friday he would be attending the screen writing workshop run by the creator of a famous television series: about a bunch of young people living in some apartments. Todd had planned to call in sick; he had already used up all his vacation time, although he hadn’t gone anywhere on these days off; he had just stayed in his apartment, writing.
Now he wasn’t sure what to do. Brenda wanted him at the doc review. Fuck it: he’d think about that later. After she left he went back to typing.
I want to be a Patagoniac. I don’t want to have a normal job, but instead travel by anything but a car to exotic locations: third world trains, wooden sailboat, or dog sled team. I want to live in a rammed earth home powered by solar energy, raise llamas, sell ostrich eggs. Never mind that the home cost $875,000 to build.
Todd went to lunch alone, eating a plate of black bean beef over chow-fun noodle’s at the local Chinese restaurant. After listening to the conversation about Ayn Rand at the next table, he made a couple of notes:
From the Archives of Where are They Now? Howard Roark, convicted rapist and domestic terrorist, was again denied parole. During his hearing he complained that he has been repeatedly sodomized by other prisoners. Also, today marks the anniversary of the Colorado cult compound suicides, when, after one last gang bang, Dagny Taggert, Hank Reardon, John Galt, and Francisco d’Ancoia killed themselves. It was thought that the men suffered from some form of paranoia and narcissistic disorder; the case of Taggert was thought to be much simpler: she never recovered from learning that her grandfather had built his railroad with government subsidies.
Libertarians didn’t have much of a sense of humor; he’d have to read more about laws around parody and satire.
As he ate he thought about Brenda: she also had writerly aspirations. Wasn’t every technical writer an English major or a graduate from some master of fine arts program, who, after attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, still found it impossible to find an agent to shop around their next great American novel? Thank god for the software industry which had created incredibly high paying jobs previously unavailable to English majors; he knew that some writers, early employees at companies that went public, now worth more than a million dollars. Tech writing was mind numbing, but he didn’t have a lot of choices, and he certainly didn’t want to go teach English to a bunch of twerps in some faceless middle school in Turlock.
When he first interviewed at the company, Brenda, after she saw on his resume the blurb about the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, mentioned she wrote poetry and lead an open mic poetry night at a small bookstore over in Pacifica. Todd wrote poetry, along with a novel, a novella, and he had even started a play, but nothing had come of that. Poetry and plays, though he still worked at them, were especially intense, sort of the assembly language of literature, the barest of bones of a story. Nothing had come of any of it, but he kept at it. And this week was going to be the week!
Writing articles in Writer’s Digest recommended writing about work, but the problem was that a software company was as dull as shit. It was hard to depict interior, intellectual processes in a dramatic manner: pale men typing at keyboards or marketing women writing flow charts on white boards. Other professions lent themselves better to stories: pilots, ambulance drivers, private eyes, literature professors, musketeers.
In his black notebook, which he always had with him, he made a list of successful television shows and their genres. At the top were law shows, polices shows, and doctors in emergency rooms. ‘Law and Order’, ‘The Shield’, ‘ER’, ‘House’. Crime and disease sprinkled with sex – these genres were always entertaining. He tried to imagine the ‘Law and Order’ style voice over, adapted to a software company:
At technology companies, the software is developed by two separate, but equally important groups: the developers who write the code, and the test engineers who ensure it works.
These are their stories.
Dunn-dunn.
Right.
There were some shows set in other work environments: there was the really old ‘WKRP’ and ‘Taxi’, and more recently ‘Mad Men’. Often television shows were about television workers: ’30Rock’ or the ancient ‘Dick Van Dyke’ show, a television show about television writers. Radio stations and advertising companies were more interesting than fax to email software makers.
There were shows about families in various situations or talking animals, usually a horse or a dog. There were single girl shows that had been around forever: ‘That Girl’, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’, ‘Murphy Brown’, as well as shows about people hanging around in their chic urban apartment or cafes. It seemed like all the good ideas were taken, everything that could be done, had been done.
Tuesday. He spent the morning finishing up the configuration manual, then put the final touches on his Patagonia essay. That afternoon he started on a new piece: romantic comedies often end with predictable and silly chase scenes. Todd thought audience appreciation would greatly increase if movie makers took a page from the script of action movies. A funny mashup would be to rewrite well known romantic comedies that end with a chase scene substituted with a more interesting scene taken from an action movie.
Diary of Bridget Jones meets Gone in 60 Seconds. A porked-out Renee Zellewenger chases Colin Firth through the snowy streets of London. She catches up to him, but when he goes to cross the street to rejoin her, Firth is run over by a 1967 Ford Mustang driven by Nicholas Cage, who is in London for the first time, and mistakenly drives on the wrong side of the road. Movie ends as Zellewenger later replaces Fergie as spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.
Must Love Dogs meets Waterworld. Diane Lane is chasing after a despondent John Cusack who’s out sculling in a shell he made from exotic wood. Mutant Kevin Costner in his post-apocalyptic catamaran intercepts Lane, kidnaps her, and they sail off. Cusack doesn’t notice anything. Note: maybe a Jaws style ending would be better, but who should be eaten?
When Harry Met Sally meets Die Hard. Billy Crystal is chasing after Meg Ryan on New Year’s Eve in New York City. She’s out on the balcony of a high rise where the New Year’s Eve Party is interrupted by some terrorists who got the wrong address. Crystal tries to save Ryan, struggles with (Hans) Alan Rickman, and both goes over the edge of the balcony. Note: maybe use this ending for Sleepless in Seattle, also with Meg Ryan, and in the last scene on top of the Empire State Building, something goes horribly wrong and little Jonah, clutching his stuffed animal, Howard, plummets to his death. Too grim? Doesn’t Richard Gere walk on the outside of a building in Pretty Woman – maybe better to finish him off.
Notting Hill meets Conan The Barbarian. Hugh Grant tries to leave his bookstore to find Julia Roberts, when Thulsa Dune (James Earl Jones) appears, wanting to return Portrait of A Lady to Grant’s bookstore. A fight ensues, Thulsa Dune turns himself into a big snake, but Grant pummels him to death with an unabridged version of the OED. By then, too late, Roberts has left the country. A despondent Grant returns to his townhouse to find that Conan has moved in, sharing the bedroom of Spike, the Welsh guy .
Brenda was in his cube again. “Sorry Todd, but there’s been another change. Marketing wants to add support for a few more email applications. Development is working on the code now. Ron is updating the specification. He’ll go over it with you later this week.”
Todd sighed, and closed his work. Brenda was still there. “Look, I know you’ve been working hard on this, so I put for a bonus for you, and all of the writing team. Finance okayed it, so I should be able to get you a check as soon as Friday. These late changes suck, but it really should help sales.”
Wednesday was poetry day. Poetry, like writing plays, was a genre apart from novels, essays, and short stories. There was something pure and hard about poetry, and while he didn’t think he’d ever be a good poet, he forced himself to write weekly poems, like an athlete cross training in another sport.
Who are you…
Santa Cruz highway 17,
sunglasses pushed up on your blond hair,
happy, smiling, the wind around you
in your convertible
Low angle sunlight in Stockholm,
Ingrid Bergmanns everywhere,
my neck breaks from whiplash
The Atlantic at Bethany,
teak brown skin cuts the green waves
i’ve talked to you: beautiful
more so by being smart
The poem was a bit of a rip off of Valery Larbaud’s ‘Images’. It was made up from observations of women in the two years he travelled after college; he had spent several evenings going through old travel journals, pulling out excerpts to use in the poem. He would be too embarrassed to show it to anyone, but he enjoyed writing it and reading it.
He frowned, remembering all the traveling he used to do. Since buying the condo in Foster City, he had been tied down, and needed the income of a steady job to make the mortgage payment. The condo had appreciated, he could sell it, but he didn’t want to go back to renting, and he did not want to leave the Bay Area.
Thursday was novel day. His current project was set in Germany. In his reading of all travel novels, many were stories of women from northern Europe, usually England, going to a Mediterranean country, getting laid or liberated, maybe both. He wanted to do something contrarian, not a retread of what had already been done. No one ever wrote about traveling to Germany: E.M. Forster set A Room With A View in Florence, not Berlin. The frustrated English ladies of Enchanted April rent a villa in Portifino, not Hamburg. Even the heavy Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) describes a German travelling to Venice, not Dusseldorf, only to find out he’s a pedophile, but fortunately he dies of cholera before harm is done. The whole Year in Provence and its derivatives had worked over the south of France, and there was nothing new there to mine.
Todd looked over the opening pages of the novel, about how on his first trip to Europe, he came to the German language by the charms of Austria:
We left Venice early, hung-over, not well rested. A nauseating ride through the mountains, over many passes between Italy and Austria. Between Venice and Innsbruck we had crossed over into another country, another climate, and another language. Everything was now delightful. The air was cool and fresh, the beer was cold. The beds at our pensione had hard mattresses, goose feather duvets, the showers ran hot water and enough water pressure to rinse off the soap. That night after a heavy Austrian dinner, we stayed late in the Gasthaus drinking mass quantities of beer, learning songs from the proprietor.
Should he write in the first person? He decided to continue with it until he finished the first draft of the novel. The problem was getting momentum behind the damn story. He had read an interview with a successful horror writer who said writers should produce at least two thousand words a day, but Todd felt lucky if he got down five hundred. Still, he kept at it, and now he was nearing the thirty thousand word mark. He continued reading:
Learning German was hard. No one in my family spoke any foreign languages. My mother’s (French) and father’s (Scottish) families had been in the United States forever. My parents had lived abroad, including in Japan and Germany, but beyond “mushi mushi” and “Wo ist der Bahnhof?”, they had nothing to pass along to their children. Latin studies had prepared me for the structure of learning a foreign, if dead, language. Decline nouns, conjugate verbs. Active voice, passive voice, subjunctive, the pluperfect tense, the ablative absolute.
Latin was reading and translating. The hardest task was extemporaneously translating unfamiliar passages in class. One teacher, the Oxford educated and much feared Mr. Jones, would call on one of us to translate a particular passage, as he paced the front of the room, sometimes strolling out of the room, into the hall for a quick look around to make sure nothing was amiss, then back into the room. We were expected to translate quickly and accurately, but why? There was no conversing in Latin, no need to say hello, ask where the train station was.
I came to German relatively late – my first year at the university. Sentence structure was subject-verb-object-time-manner-place. Article and adjective endings varied greatly depending on the gender, case, and number of the noun: eine kleine Nachtmusik (a little night music: nominative case, plural, neuter). Numbers were said not as ninety-nine, but rather nine and ninety: neunundneunzig Luftaballons. There were weak verbs, sagen (to say), strong verbs, fahren (to ride), and mixed verbs, denken (to think). Nouns were capitalized, but the word for “I”, “ich” was not, unless it started a sentence. There were prepositions that took different cases, verb tenses, and noun cases.
Most of all there were those long German words that Twain so famously described: a Wissenschaftler is a scientist, Musikantenknochen translates as your funny bone, Geschwindigkeitbegrenzung meant speed limit
Was this interesting? Was this just information dumping, trying to jack up the word count? He’d need to get an editor to help him work through it, hone it into a polished story. If, when he finished the story.
Later Thursday there was a meeting; the latest software changes were almost done. He sat at the conference table next to Ron, not looking at anyone, his eyes on the paper in front of him. It was insane: meeting at six-thirty at night, to talk about late changes that marketing should have thought of a long time ago. He bit his tongue to keep from screaming. He couldn’t believe this was happening: he was supposed to start driving to southern California, and tomorrow morning he planned to leave a message on Brenda’s phone saying he was sick.
Todd sat with the developer going over all the new changes. The testing team would install the additional email applications, then Todd could take screen shots. He’d have to wait until the final coding was done before he could write out the step by step instructions for each new application.
He should just quit, right there right now, walk out the door, go do something else. Fuck the money, this job was eating his brain. When he was in Los Angeles he could give the screen writer his card and share with him some of his ideas, and start looking for a place to live down there. What was stopping him?
Friday. He had worked until 1:00 AM. By four in the afternoon, he had finished making all the changes to the technical manuals, and sent them over to Lisa. On his computer screen was the latest version of the fax software configuration manual and a draft of a another document: an outline for the Society of Technical Communications newsletter; he’d been contacted by the editor at the STC, asking if he’d be interested in writing an article about the problems when converting files from one application format to another: Word to FrameMaker, or FrameMaker to PageMaker, and so on. He started on an outline of the article, and after he finished that he began reading the project plan for the next software release, due out in a few months.
Next to Todd’s keyboard was a company envelope, unopened. There was a check inside, well into four figures. The black notebook was left at home.
“What are you working today?” Chambers was looking over the cube wall, his eyebrows raised, expecting to see some prose on Todd’s screen. Todd didn’t say anything, just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“Nothing?”
Todd nodded his head slowly.
Chambers disappeared. Todd heard him sit back down and start typing. The typing stopped for a moment. “Too bad, buddy. That’s really too bad.”