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that one little elusive aspect
Friday, August 27 1999
In the afternoon, the director of web development took most of the engineering department to the horse races in Delmar as a sort of company-sponsored post-deadlines celebration. I could have complacently gone along, probably stayed late and eventually had a big fight with my girlfriend, all for doing something I had no interest in doing. But I ignored the pressure applied by my boss and my colleagues and spent my time doing something far more interesting than watching horses run around a track to the idiotic cheers of compulsive gamblers. Instead I built and honed website administrative tools. It may sound dull to you, but to me it's one of the most rewarding workplace things I do.
The corporation for which I work is riding a wave of interest in its particular form of internet startup. It's received a huge transfusion of investor cash and, what with its ever-growing staff, is now burning seven digits worth of bank each month. When I started working for the company eleven months ago, I was offered stock options at sixty some cents each. Now they're being offered at something like $8 each.
As with any rapidly-expanding corporation, there's always at least one aspect of the company that seems to be growing too quickly to receive adequate support from other aspects of the company which aren't growing nearly as fast. For a long time, for example, the sales and marketing staffs have been growing too rapidly to have their latest capitalist schemes translated into actual products by the engineering department. The functional engineering department (that is, engineers who work on day-to-day maintenance of the site and its database) hasn't been expanding much at all. It's even worse in the graphics department; we have only one person doing web graphics full time.
Then there are the physical limits of the building itself. On any one floor, walls come up and are ripped away with phenomenal speed and arbitrariness. As John the editor was saying only today, for all the flexible advantage websites supposedly have over "brick and mortar" stores, he's awfully impressed by how quickly alterations are deployed on the structures around us. It definitely seems that a wall can go up and be torn down a lot easier than an HTML web page. Still, the actual core structure of the building imposes very real limits to office space. Already we've expanded into a large suite of offices downstairs. But this creates its own set of problems. With a fraction of the staff isolated on another floor, who's ensuring that they aren't wasting away their hours chatting at water coolers, surfing the web, and playing Tetris? (The Grand Pooh Bah once said that seeing his employees idled in this way made his "blood boil." He also frequently says things like, "If you take lunch, you are lunch," implying that if we go out to lunch we're not working hard enough for the company. Thankfully, his messages on such matters are routinely ignored by the overworked, poorly-paid engineering department.)
When 5:30pm rolled around and it was time for the weekly motivational ritual known as Energy, the cultural flaws inherent in a two-floor work place were fully in evidence. Karin, the zealously over-involved membersupport girl has recently moved her workstation down to the second floor and it's the space around her that is the new home for Energy. The problem now is how to get the bulk of the staff working on the third floor to stop what they're doing and go down to the second to receive their weekly motivation. Like many of my third-floor colleagues, in the aftermath of Karin's second Energy recruitment tour of the third floor (during which she shrieks "Energy!" at the top of her lungs), I was preparing to sneak out via the back stair well. But Courtney (who is a bit more cynical about such things but nonetheless Karin's membersupport partner in crime) stopped me and told me that there was free beer. Now it just so happened that I was a nice cold beer at just about that same moment. So I tossed my cynicism to the wind and went to Energy.
I have to say, with a few beers in you, it's not so easy to simply disregard Energy as a yet another cynical show of corporate fakery and asskissing (though whenever anyone gives Energy to the Grand Pooh Bah II, it's rather difficult to think anything else). Today I really got into Energy, even helping people out with their "penalty" when they gave Energy to more than one person. The penalty was to sing a 70s song, and I did so without any of the reserve I normally show in my workplace. Not only that, but I was loud and obnoxious at other times, even (completely for the hell of it) verbally disagreeing with the premise by which the fancy-lady Director of Corporate Development gave her Energy to the younger, less Dixie of the two VPs of Marketing.
Energy delayed my arrival at home, and by the time I came through the door I was weakened by low blood sugar. I proceeded to wolf down an entire bag of sesame corn chips while simultaneously fighting with my girlfriend about the usual things. It could have been worse, of course. I could have gone to the race track and not made it home until eight.
As arranged earlier today, my co-worker Scott and Kim's co-worker Renee joined us around dinnertime for wine and bong hits. I would have said cheese but I don't recall there being any. We argued for a rather long time about what to do tonight and eventually agreed to go to Sushi on the Rock in La Jolla. Kim did all the driving.
We found ourselves in a corner table by the door. It seems Kim is never satisfied with the seating arrangements made by the waitstaff at a crowded restaurant, and immediately after we'd nestled into our seats, Kim was demanding another table. The hostess was a bit more acidic than your typical La Jolla waitress and it was amusing for a moment to watch them patronizing one another. But Kim had enough respect for the girl to come away from the experience without any hard feelings. Indeed, in a few minutes (as expected), Kim decided she liked this table after all.
The sushi was excellent, of course, but there was this one hunk of raw fish that seemed to change everything for me. One moment I was wolfing down roll after roll with occasional chopsticks of seaweed salad, and then the next I felt completely, dangerously full. It wasn't that the fish was bad or that I'd actually eaten too much. It was simply a realization of its overwhelmingly raw flavour. I went to the bathroom, I walked around outside. My guts churned. Kim was concerned but not alarmed. Eventually I made my contribution to the pleasant seaside breezes and my misery faded.
Back at our place, Kim and I took Sophie for a walk and left the lovers to do whatever they wanted to do unsupervised.
Before going to bed, Kim and I smoked a bunch of pot by ourselves in the bedroom. This put us in a perfect mood for love. I've noticed occasionally that pot has the power to greatly intensify the experience of both masturbation and sex, but never so much as it did tonight. Tonight, you see, I felt as though I had complete control over the emotional content and multi-camera visual imagery of my sexual experience. I could get to a certain wonderful pre-orgastic state and focus my mind on the one little elusive aspect of that state that is so completely pleasurable and maintain the thought and the actions associated therewith for as long as I wanted. Normally, of course, that glorious moment arrives and it's so good that it's already too late and it's time to just get it over with. But tonight I had incredible mental control. It was sort of a self-discovered tantric technique I suppose, though I definitely must give credit to the marijuana I'd just smoked. The only real limits to this sort of sex seems to arise from the damage which accumulates when two bodies rub together for too long. For example, there were two little spot just above my hips that started getting sore just from the accumulated damage of all the light scratching of Kim's fingernails whenever she'd happen back to that part of my body.
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