Jim Nelson
10 May 1997

This time, however, we were herded to a local pool hall. Programmers playing billiards exposes a wonderful irony in this world. Those who are mathematically gifted are generally granted by God less dexterity than an African elephant. So take heart; the guy in the front of the class who blew the curve in physics can barely get the cue ball to travel a straight vector.

Not that I'm one to talk. Even worse, I was one of the sorry saps at the other end of the Bell curve in physics class. But at least I don't chew your ear off explaining how the six ball should have travelled across the table -- as if missing the side pocket was some wild fluctuation in the laws of motion and not a shaky wrist.

In keeping with the Petersesque theme of team-building, we were broken into groups of two for an eight-ball tournament. My partner and I were eliminated quite quickly when I took what looked like a clean shot into the corner pocket, only for the cue to strike the eight-ball on the rebound, which sunk squarely in the opposing pocket. I would have spared myself some embarassment if I'd simply shown up with "I SUCK" written across my plaid shirt in black felt tip pen.

I hung up my cue and headed for the catered food. I sat, chewed on a breadstick, and dug into a battered copy of The San Jose Mercury News.

Hale-Bopp. When I first heard of it, I thought it was a new dance, something to replace the macarena -- I mean, they both share an inane moniker. Just another astral perturbation cluttering up the sky, really. A streak of frozen color across the black void ... hiding a UFO?

Police discover an amateur morgue of thirty-nine bodies, shrouded, castrated, peacefully dead. Dead from an overdose of applesauce, phenobarbitol, and vodka -- weren't they serving that at some frat party in college? -- and up they went to join the E.T.'s.

This was no Jonestown or Waco. This was an inbreeding of American sub-culture at it's worst. The UFO nuts using New Age mysticism and Scientological pseudo-babble to grant everyone the ability to become another transcendental Jesus ... with a dash of JFK-ish conspiracy logic to explain the many loose ends. Americans will be remembered for their combinatorical powers, if nothing else.

Billy Bob Thornton. Would you believe I'm related to him? I've never met the man, nor have I seen Sling Blade yet, but sure enough, I'm related to the guy. Which isn't something I spend a great deal of time pondering, but everytime I see his name in the papers it makes me think "dammit, it can't be that tough to star in movies, win Oscars, and be hailed a dramatic genius."

(To which Billy Bob can rightfully respond: "Shut up, geek.")

There's a funny story here. A few years ago, before Sling Blade and all of that, Billy Bob made a movie called One False Move. My grandparents were at my parent's house on vacation, and I was home for the weekend. We rented the movie.

Television is much more effective at beaming a shitload of signals right into your head, but the web browser is more faithful to the human experience.

It was kind of weird. Every time Billy Bob walked on camera my grandmother would elbow me in the ribs and go "that's him! We're related to him!" Her enthusiasm quickly wore down as Billy Bob revealed an astounding mastery of profanity and female anatomical terminology. As the ninety minutes progressed, my grandmother became less and less impressed with Billy Bob's acting abilities.

A year later or so, at a family reunion down in Arkansas, my grandmother ripped Billy Bob a new one. Right there in front of everyone, she let Billy Bob know exactly what she thought of his movie. She couldn't imagine where Billy Bob could have learned such language. (I do: my grandfather was retired Navy. So you can understand why Billy Bob swore like a sailor -- be all you can be.)

The whole time I was reading and thinking of Hale-Billy Bob, I noticed a fellow programmer across the hall sitting Indian-style in a bar chair and blissfully meditating. He'd been doing during most of the tournament. He would have been a Zen poseur if it wasn't for his Chinese heritage and devotion to Buddhism.

After a while he stood up to watch the final game. I walked over and asked him about his meditation. More than happy to oblige, he explained Zen as well as he could.

"The object of Zen Buddhism is to rid your mind of all limiting thoughts. We believe that the constant stream of consciousness buzzing through our heads is an obstacle to understanding. If you can acheive a perfect state of solitude, you have acheived enlightenment."

Or something like that. You know how it goes -- a lot of broad, sweeping statements that sound really deep but are damn hard to remember.

I chewed on that for a little bit. It seemed to me that television was probably the easiest way to reach enlightenment. Your mind instantly switches off during standard sitcom fare. But that can't be what he was talking about -- a hundred million Americans reach Zen enlightenment every night? Another twenty mil during sweeps week?

Maybe television's lure is not that it builds a comatose-like reaction to its programming. Maybe its universal appeal is the constant streaming audio-visual sensation that feeds right into some high-level mechanism in the brain. But instead of stimulating it, television overloads it, cancelling out external signals and suppressing independent thought.

Christ -- this is right out of some cheeseball Seventies conspiracy flick, like Network or Looker.

The pool tournament wrapped up and we all headed back to the grind. During the car ride back, I silently pondered my television theory and pounced on a greater possibility: the web browser is the ultimate stream-of-consciousness emulation device. True, television is much more effective at beaming a shitload of signals right into your head, but the web browser is more faithful to the human experience.

Starting at a page, you click on a link and step to the next page, the next thought. That next page might be directly related to the previous one or maybe just an adjacent topic. It might even be something entirely foreign to the previous thought. You can always go back and traverse a different route, or you can keep going and see what the next link brings to your attention.

So, enlightenment in the case of web browsing would have to be walking away from your PC and staring at a blank wall. No ... it's not like Zen dictates a scapelless lobotomy. They're talking about something different ... something like those koan teasers where the answers to everything are found by looking into a mirror. The web equivalent would be like staring into nothingness.

I walked into my company's office building and sat down in my cubicle. I didn't feel like programming, I didn't feel like going home, I just felt like sitting Indian-style on the floor and trying to halt all diversionary thoughts crossing through my mind. I was being called by some otherworldly entity. Maybe it was Buddha. Maybe it was Doh calling me from the spaceship behind Hale-Bopp.

My Zen-programmer friend walked in and handed me a small cloth-bound book. The cover was a deep blood red. "That book," he said, pointing to it, "explains everything you need to know about Zen." He nodded and walked off.

I flipped through it. Every page was blank.

Of course I should have seen it coming. It didn't matter. I took a felt-tip pen and scribbled Ad Nauseam's URL on some random inside page, walked back to his office, and handed it back with a knowing smile.