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crystal clear recovery Sunday, July 30 2000
Kim and I felt shitty most of the day. And while we felt as though we hadn't slept in many many hours, we were completely unable to fall asleep. In fact, Kim hadn't slept at all last night. At least I'd gotten in three hours. There was nothing much I wanted to do except read Salon summaries of the recent episodes of Big Brother (the show is completely unwatchable, but this account, as told by skilled writers, is fascinating). While I read, Kim was reading over my shoulder. It was the first time we'd ever surfed the web together, and it went amazingly well. "It's sort of like watching television," she observed. It seemed that maybe our love was finally healing after a month of nearly constant warfare.
Later we struggled down to the Taco Plus, sitting for a long time patiently out in front, waiting for our tacos to get made. We would have sat there for hours had someone not knocked on the window to tell us our burritos were done.
We rented two flicks tonight. The first we watched was Man on the Moon, that recently-produced biography of Andy Kaufman. Amusingly (for us, anyway), one of the more obscure actors in the movie, the guy playing Andy's Indian guru, was our friend Cash, the guy whose house we stayed at for that first tantric seminar.
Man on the Moon is a wonderful movie. It seemed to breathe renewed justification into my subversive pranksterishness. Sometimes you have to fuck with people just because it's fun to do. Keeping people guessing, uncertain and afraid, that's the only way to get ordinary folks to use their minds. Otherwise they just sit there with the laugh track telling them what is funny, passively being turned into the Gummy Dude.
Kim and I barely paid any attention to the next movie. Instead we argued with one another about whether or not the staff at Dr. Susan Block thought I'd been the one responsible for some "hacking" that took place a couple days ago. Some idiot, it seems, replaced a picture or two and proclaimed that he'd "hacked" the site. I'd seen the "hacking," and it had looked like the sort of thing a fourteen year old social reject might do. Kim was trying to tell me that my rowdy, uncontrollable readers (the people with the nerve to tell her that it's okay for me to masturbate in the bathtub) were probably responsible. But this made no sense to me; I don't think I had any 14 year old readers, at least none who send me email. Indeed, the average reader of this site is a college-educated urban professional in his or her mid-30s, not some idiot self-proclaimed hacker using numbers in place of vowels.
Prior to the Democratic Sex show, Kim's reaction to the discourse within my message board system had been growing increasingly strident and psychotic, with her making one irrational demand after another, any one of which would have required a massive programming effort on my part. So I'd decided to do some programming alright, the sort that would filter the boards and strip out anything she might find offensive. But I didn't want this filter to affect the actual board experience, I just wanted it to affect Kim's computer, her IP address. So I wrote an ASP function called Insanity, and whenever it noticed that the IP address was that of an Earthlink DSL account, it would strip out all posts containing the word Kim. This worked for awhile, and the boards calmed down as Kim quit over-reacting to everything being posted about her. This caused posters to move on to other, more interesting topics. Perhaps, I thought, we'd get a chance for our relationship to heal.
But then tonight Kim noticed that some posts that she'd remembered were missing. She demanded to know what I'd done. So I was forced to tell her the truth, that I'd been filtering posts to avoid her insane over-reactions. She was offended that I would do such a thing of course, but, more than that, she was interested in seeing what she'd been missing. She even promised not to react so long as I removed the Insanity filter. So I did (what else could I do, spend the night at work?) and everything seemed to be cool. I went off to bed.
Kim was still wide awake, however, and it seemed likely that this would be another sleepless night for her.
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