I felt like writing tonight, so…

It is unfashionable to express this, but I love New York City in the summer. Tonight I sat outside on the balcony and used our electric grill (less illegal than other grills) to make dinner. Our fancy electronic meat thermometer read 94 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s before I put it into any meat. I was just very happy out there, atop Coney Island Avenue, breathing in the soot and drinking a beer. The summer here is nothing like pleasant, and it smells bad and your clothes and lungs are covered in particulates. Lots of people try to leave every weekend, for beachy weekend places. We’ll go somewhere in late August but otherwise the whole family is here every weekday, every weekend.

In the winter, and fall, things are crisp, and the light falls softly and everything is in taupes and grays. In the spring the city looks like its most postcard self. But when it’s 101 degrees and you walk down a treeless and hot corridor of Madison Ave or 5th Ave, or go down Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn, every street becomes hypersaturated and hallucinatory. You feel the sun on your face, your clothes on your skin, your shoes on your feet, your hair on your head, and your phone in your pocket.

There’s no good way to dress. There are women in expensive gauzy outfits that would fold up to wallet size, and men who are great at suits. Shades of salmon come out of hiding. But the rest of us, who aren’t really summer dressers, have to make do with various draperies, with little chance of success. You’re judged for going for comfort and baring your legs or (if male) wearing sandals; you’re judged for choosing discomfort, too. You can never deal with the back of your neck, so you’re always at least a little burned, and you need blue aloe-vera goop steadily at hand. You become hot to the touch, and thus another source of heat.

You can go inside a subway or bus or store or office and be frozen. Or a movie. It’s pleasant but your body knows it’s temporary. Also, all of this cold is being dumped back onto the sidewalk, or into the subway tunnels, as exhaust. So when you step outside the blast will hit you. That city-defining blast.

The parks are green, jungly. Prospect Park is muddy and filled with people staking out tiny, temporary estates for parties and reunions. They have complex tents and dozens of rental chairs. Whole thousand-yard stretches of walkway are covered in a low-hanging gray barbecue haze that hurts your eyes and nostrils.

Sometimes you think you are going to die. Last year, during the office summer party, we went to a park in Bay Ridge and had to all cluster under one long branch for the shade. Then we walked to a bar at high noon and it was all uphill. It was bad going. At one point I broke off from the group and bought a half-gallon of water and sat outside and drank it. I felt sure that I was going to die right then, and I welcomed this. But then the shade and the hydration did their tricks and I made it to the bar, drank more water, and let many hours pass until I cooled down. I took a car home and slurred my words and slept like I was in a bed of gelatin.

When you go to the further parts of the outer boroughs, there’s still lots of color. I live pretty far out in a mixed Pakistani-Bangladeshi-Jewish-South-American-Mexican-Caribbean-Black-White-Other neighborhood so you see things like the big Bangladeshi banquet hall holding a quinceanera party with a man selling cologne outside while a mariachi band plays and the sign reads DELICIOUS KULFI. Neon signs are relatively rare, but they’ve been supplanted by super-candlewatt LED nightmare visual-screamy signs. I love this. I feel like I won the lottery, when I walk home past the light-up signs that say LOTTERY in wavy red-white-and-green.

You know how ancient Greek and Roman art, the sculptures in marble, were painted to be lifelike? This is one of those AMAZING HISTORY FACTS. The paint wears off and the marble remains, and that’s what gets dug up 1,500 years later. For example the arch in Washington Square Park could feature a brightly painted George Washington, but instead it’s yet more shades of marble, as if the sculptors wanted to make a ruin. If you want to see George Washington in color, you need to pay to see Hamilton. At least we have the Staten Island Ferries, named for lesser politicians, which bob around like tangerines, or the Statue of Liberty in tarnished key lime. When I walk around Manhattan sometimes it seems like Times Square is a pan into which all the color drained.

I think that’s why I love NYC in the summer: Out the window of my bus is the East River and I can’t bear to look at it because it’s ceaseless white light; the rivers become light; the buildings turn white; the skyscrapers shine like torches, and why would torches burn in the afternoon; the playgrounds have signs warning people not to touch the rubber mats; and tourists trudge damply from sight to sight, whimpering, parched, holding on to scaffolding for support, only to find its metal rods are hot to the touch. Natives are faring no better. The city sometimes spins itself as a place that was dug up and preserved, a monument to itself, but the summer makes it obvious that it is still alive and corrupt, with that strange sour glow that, since everyone agrees it’s terrible, insufferable, exhausting, and awful, must at least somewhat represent the true face of this place.

NYC in the summers was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This afternoon I was coming back from the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. Near my apartment building I saw two people helping an old lady who fell down in the street. She was lying in the gutter and murmuring. I walked over and asked if I could help and they said yes.

There wasn’t much we could do. “911 told us not to move her,” said one of the people. But the sun was very bright. So we tried to make a shelter with our bodies. We took turns standing over her to give her shade and held her hands and talked to her.

A third person brought a pillow out of his house. We put the pillow under her head. She had orange hair and was in a housecoat.

We asked her name and she told us. We asked if she was in pain. She said her shoulder hurt.

We said that she should not be embarassed and that everyone falls down.

The man who made the 911 phone call was Black. He had stopped his car to help. The man with the pillow might have been Latino. He saw her fall. “She fell,” is how he explained it. I think the woman who was there was from Eastern Europe or the Ukraine. I am white, actually pink but whatever. I live in Ditmas. All we were missing was a Bangladeshi woman and an ultra-orthodox Jew and we would have had everybody.

We said that we would stay with her until more people came with an ambulance.

We said that we were glad to be there and glad to help her.

We live very close to a fire station. We said, do you hear the sirens? This will be over soon.

A man came by and offered to get us water. We asked if she wanted water. She said no. We asked where she lived. Five or six other people came over but there was nothing much to do so they would leave after a moment so as not to add complexity. They would have stayed if we’d asked.

Again this was just a few minutes.

The old lady suddenly said she was going to get her daughter who went to PS 139.

“Oh, Alexine Fenty,” I said. That is the elementary school where my kids will go next year. But if her daughter went to Alexine Fenty that was in the 1960s.

A fire engine came. Then an ambulance came. Four or five men.

They talked to her and took her away from us. They put her on a gurney and asked her the year.

She said the year was “19.”

When it was over we just nodded at each other and walked away. “Good job?” we asked. “I guess we did what we could?”

I realized I recognized the woman. I’ve seen her once or twice. She is the woman in the crumbling house who yells at everyone and calls the cops on everyone. My wife told me once that people try not to be angry with her because her daughter passed away.

This is probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve been in this circumstance since I moved to NYC. Sometimes someone is passed out in bushes. Sometimes someone wants to talk to you and pretend to be your friend because a man is chasing them. In different neighborhoods. There are a lot of people here.

These things are surprising but not unexpected. You remember them but they blur together too. The ambulance comes and you go home and have a drink and maybe blog about it. It helps to write it down.

Sometimes I’ve walked past similar situations but there have been enough people helping. And yet there are all the other people you do walk by who are sleeping on the sidewalk.

I’m writing it down because it is all very normal and I don’t see people writing it down a lot. Often people don’t help other people, but other times people do help other people. It’s not actually surprising when it happens. You just hold the old lady’s head and shield her from the sun. Then the ambulance comes and everyone goes on their ways, feeling weird, proud, and sad.

Pattern was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sure.

“We added your name to the list. Would you be interested in speaking, were we to vote for you?”

Sure.

(Time passes.)

“Will you abide by our code of conduct?”

Sure.

(A few months go by.)

“You weren’t selected.”

Unsolicited Rejection was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I try to email everyone back. It’ll take about 100–200 hours spread over the next six months to work through those, with past as source of estimate. I was never socially comfortable in my life in any way, so it’s not something where I have a natural facility. I don’t like to say “thanks for the kind words.” I don’t like canned responses. Someone wrote last week asking for advice for his son, who just graduated college. Of course I will answer that in detail. Someone wrote from Iran asking for a PDF. Of course I will answer that. And so forth. I like replying.

I’ve sent a bunch of unsolicited letters in my life. I worry about them. If I tell someone that I love their work, will I slip and somehow say something shitty? I’m often relieved when people don’t reply. But I will offer my correspondents no such relief. Also, I admire people who write others out of the blue, who send a memory or opinion. Sometimes they are critical of my life or choices, or think I am wrong, or see some flaw in my thinking, or have decided that I am racist or sexist, or take issue with my liberalism, or want me to sign up for something or give them something.

I keep a constant inventory of the failings that strangers account within me. I listen best I can but since I keep getting the same emails it’s clear that the criticism has failed to jar me into the state of awareness that some hope to achieve, or perhaps some critics are caught in a rhetorical loop. Whatever. Neither party is going to change.

I don’t like when people threaten violence. If people seem very weird or are just mean I don’t write them back. That seems fair. The vast majority just have some question.

Sometimes I meet people and they say, “I wrote you an email when I was 18.” And they are 25 or 30 now. I say: “I hope I wrote back.” I’m relieved to know if I did. I’m sure I’ve missed hundreds of emails over the years for various reasons. Sometimes it takes me a year to reply.

Some people think this is crazy. Other people propose strategies for dealing with emails, quick replies that cut off the thread. Canned responses. FAQs. Autoreplies. But people didn’t write to talk to some robot proxy. I don’t know. There really isn’t anything better for humans than communicating with other humans. I wish I could let the guilt out of it.

I guess that’s the next phase; rather than feeling an obligation, letting the world pile up, feeling instead just amusement. So glad to hear from you. I heard a joke today. Here is a question to which I do not know the answer. Send me a picture of your pets. That is, play.

Correspondence was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am teaching my class. My wife found this. I hope this doesn’t email to 10,000 people when I save it but it might. This is the cost of following me on Medium.

Hello! was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sometimes I like to revisit statistics and links. I like to do this months after something is in the world. Like walking through Times Square after New Years Eve and kicking the confetti. And then I think about what could have gone better. So I was going back and looking at how people reacted to a piece I wrote about death and old computers:

I can see a lot of places where editing would have benefited that piece—it slides around. It’s squishy. But it also has a gentle quality, and it’s filled with secrets and animated GIFs and setups that pay off a few thousand words later. I worked on it pretty steadily over a series of nights. I should have been working on other things. But in the end it does what it’s supposed to do, which is: It tells a story that no human being has ever told before. This sounds dramatic but it’s not actually that hard to do. It’s actually your job, as a writer, to go: Has anyone ever told this story before? No? Good.

If I ever decide to edit it, maybe to place it somewhere else, there are parts I’ll tighten, and I’d layer in more of a sense of place. It needs geography. The reader should understand Tom’s house was not far from my own home, and that a network built up porch-to-porch, with churches along the way. That would make it a less abstract piece.

It was published as part of my paid work at The Message (I’m obligated to produce 500 words every two weeks, but that one was 11 times longer than I’m obligated to produce) and got decent traffic (~240,000 readers). It sort of traveled on its own steam, from network to network, without a huge pickup from Facebook, much as in the ways of blog posts of yore. I noticed that many people who commented on it, on social networks or on their own Tumblrs (who has a website anymore?), would segment out their praise for their own audiences.

For example, some people would read that piece and write “might be of interest to Amiga fans” or “if you grew up with technology read this.” Other people are death people; they wrote things like, “this isn’t really about technology but about loss.” People zoomed in on specific details of technologies that interested them, or emotional details that felt relevant. Many readers spent their time deciding whether the essay is about feelings or whether it’s about technology.

That leads to two thoughts:

First thought: I’m horrible at perceiving any difference between technology and “other” parts of life. This has been a source of difficulty in my life when I work for places, like magazines, that see the Internet as something “separate.” So it’s so weird to me that readers felt they had to choose one or the other. “Technology” and “emotion” are broad, meaningless categories and in no actual opposition—but man do people put a lot of store in them.

Second thought: If people are reading what I’m writing and dividing it into “tech” on one hand or “emotion” on another, then I must be doing the same thing in other categories of my life. There is some range of human experience that I am not perceiving because I can’t imagine that anything could—well, what? What meaningless threshold am I upholding as sacred? I wonder what nonsense categories I’m utterly committed to. And how do you even begin to perceive that part of yourself?

Now the postscript. Not long after I published that essay about retro-computing I learned that a memorial service would be held.

I went down to West Chester. I stayed with my friends Jim and Stacy and we drove around town and talked. The mid-1980s were a different time than the 2010s; crumbling brick has been replaced by vegan bakeries and things have changed enough that places I perceive as new already have the patina of age upon them—sun-bleached awnings, floor-tile worn down by customers.

A big Instagram filter was put over my memories. And since I was there for a wake this was very comforting. Tom was at rest. And so was a part of my childhood that wasn’t happy or fulfilling, that was anxious, angry, and scary, if I’m honest.

Then we went into the memorial service, which was at the Elks’ Club. His long-time partner Sandy was there, and she remembered me after I introduced myself — I hadn’t seen her in 20 years—and said, Oh my, he was so proud of you. It’s so good to see you. I’m so glad you came. He was so proud of you. So those are the words that will echo. Which is why you always go to the memorial service. You fill in the loss.

At the reception there were photos of Tom projected from an old slide carousel. There were Amish people in attendance, because he always had lots of Amish friends, and former students, and a big thing of popcorn. A video of the Dalai Lama played in the corner and people ate cold cuts. No one gave any speeches. We just milled, chaotic, bouncing into one another. This was an accurate representation of his life. I was overcome by shyness. All the smalltalk was gone right out me. But I was there, too.

They gave away his books—take a book in Tom’s memory, said a sign. So I lingered at the books, paging through stacks, and then I opened one and out fell a note in Tom’s handwriting. The note was at least 20 years old. It was nothing remarkable, no secret message. It was a to-do list: A list of people to call and a list of software to pirate. He’d written down the names of programs, Deluxe Paint III among them—as well as the name of a disk-cracking program, to ease piracy. There was a note to call my grandfather Bill, and that he’d need some milk and eggs. And the name Paul was written there, too. Could refer to me, or not.

But what a gift. Tom was religious; I’m not. But I’m not above a mystical intake of breath before my knowledge of statistics settles back in. I showed Sandy the to-do list and she said, Keep it! It’s for you! I signed the condolence book at length and used the word love, love, love, love.

And that was it. My friends Jim and Stacy and I trundled around and reminisced. We drove back to their home. We went out to dinner. Their home is warm and full of love and they are well. I went home on the train the next morning.

I’d already said my goodbyes. I’ve already lost that little hand-written list, somewhere in my office. I went looking for it to take a picture with my phone to include here at the end of this postscript. I’m sure it will appear again. Then again perhaps it’s gone, which is okay, because it wasn’t what matters.

Revisiting an Old Piece was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I realized that my digital life was getting too complex, so I turned off chat. Then I removed myself from a bunch of Slacks. I filtered a number of mailing lists into automated folders, muted some conversations in Gmail, and switched from Gmail to mutt to do some basic inbox management. I unsubscribed from some Dropbox folders, and altered Flux to darken my screen at more appropriate times. I unsubscribed from Twitter’s automatic emails, erased some spare Twitter accounts, and unfollowed or muted some people and organizations. I organized my passwords a little and unsubscribed from some Box folders. I turned off Bluetooth and location mode on my phone. I erased all the songs in my Spotify playlist and erased a few hundred old tweets, with the idea that I will erase all of them.

For the remaining Slacks, I turned off Slack desktop notifications. Anything that integrated with my calendar I dis-integrated, and anything that I didn’t use that authorized via my Twitter account I dis-authorized. I turned off the services that help me organize my calendar and the services that help me manage my inbox. I turned off things that notify me when particular Google spreadsheets are updated. I erased most of my TODO list since I really only need to stay alive and listen to people and everything else is a lie. I closed the IRC and chat windows that were bothering me.

Then I unfollowed a number of Github projects, erased some Tinyletter accounts, and tried but failed to find a way to keep random people from trying to call me with Facetime. I removed Skype from the Dock. I went into Facebook and unliked some deaths, closed my torrenting app, and opened my /etc/hosts file and blocked Reddit, Y Combinator, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as Mlkshk. Actually I let myself keep Mlkshk because it doesn’t do harm.

I cut the Times down to one day a week (may unsubscribe). Let Wired, Esquire, New Yorker, and New York lapse. I erased the fitness network and lifestyle tracking tools.

I cancelled my account for my automated billing system, unsubscribed from text notifications from New York City, especially silver alerts, which describe old people out wandering, and unsubscribed from weather emails. I tried to figure out how to stop my phone from giving me the weather, film times, and restaurant suggestions unsolicited. I failed at that. I unsubscribed from all mailing lists that claimed to discuss the future of anything, because the only honest discussions are about the past. I made a list of people with whom to have coffee and wistfully threw it into the garbage and poured water on top of it and watched the ink smear.

I put both printers into the closet along with a number of hard drives, DVDs, and cables. I turned off the netbook in the closet, and the Raspberry Pi, and turned off the old computer that was supposed to be a server but never got there. I tried but could not remove Google Plus app from phone, and then thought I’d block Google Plus in /etc/hosts, too, and realized it didn’t matter too much.

I unsubscribed from all non-billing Google emails and from all MeetUp notifications and filtered Medium reply notification emails into a folder, then unsubscribed from LinkedIn notifications and set LinkedIn to stop sending me emails when someone messages me, and did the same sort of thing with Facebook email. I then cancelled emails from credit card companies announcing events that might interest me. I unsubscribed also from emails from Mint.com and Google Calendar.

I removed WhatsApp and Group.me from my phone, and also Snapchat and Whisper, and put the Fitbit in a box and removed the Fitbit app. I erased Flappy Bird from my phone, along with a number of book-reading apps and the app that lets me control my router, and a number of games with in-app purchases, as well as the IRC phone app. I removed Earth, Game Dev Story, IF, iPrint&Scan, Keep, Lantern (moved off of Campfire), MTA UPS&Downs, myAT&T, MyFitnessPal (never used), One Medical (no longer supported by my health insurer), Optimum (cancelled the TV part of cable so no use), Playboard (don’t need more apps), Softcard (wouldn’t erase, but such is life), SpaceChem (never played), Spotlight (who knows), Tumblr (all whining or porn), Twisty (I don’t play interactive fiction any more), Uber (prefer the bus), Visual Voicemail (wouldn’t erase either), and Yahoo! Weather (remember when everyone was like, Yahoo’s BACK, they made little windmills). Erased movies from movie folder. Turned off Twitter phone notifications. Turned off voice mail. Cancelled the Google Voice line. Got rid of the alternative mapping tools for cities and the transit notification apps, and the NYTimes app. Got rid of the Usenet account and newsreaders. Uninstalled Instagram. Erased Seamless and Soundcloud.

I stepped back and took a look and thought: I’m maybe a quarter of the way there? This is just the top-level annoying stuff that is always popping up and making clicky noises.

As I was writing this this morning, I kept wanting to turn it into a more surreal piece — unsubscribing from the heartbeats of strangers, muting imaginary restaurant brands — but I couldn’t get past the reality. Which felt unusual.

Next I need to erase all of my tweets.

Notifications & Alerts was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am going to cut and paste my portion from an email discussion about overcoming party shyness and call that my daily post. But let’s see if I can keep posting every day. I mean this is day three, this counts as a streak. I like the italics on Medium.

One thing I’ve found in busy social settings is how it’s totally okay to sit for a minute and nurse a drink quietly and confidently while observing the proceedings. You are not a pariah. You’re just somewhere between weird and mysterious. If someone comes up to you, you go “Oh, just getting my breath.”

Also, the real key to social situations is in making introductions. I spend a lot of my time at events learning who people are and rapid-fire introducing them. Everyone seems to like that. “What brings you here?” Etc. Aggressively introducing people you’ve just met to other people you’ve just met is really sanity-making if you’ve like, just given a reading or done something on a stage or given a talk. You want to flee so bad. You’ve just been judged by so many people.

But you can actually hang out and go, “Hey! What’s your name? Jim? And you! What’s your name? Sue? Jim have you met Sue? What do you guys do?” Etc. I actually like making intros whereas actually talking about myself to strangers is the stuff of nightmares because I’m chubby and boring and need a haircut and I have five stories total.

Busy social settings was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I was 22 and the Internet was new and everyone was sitting around a table chatting and laughing,” Ford told me. “Who went to parties where no one knew each other?”

Which is fine for the purposes of the story—“Internet” and “Web” are now interchangeable in common speech—but also off, because the Internet was not new in 1996/1997; the Internet started in 1969. The World Wide Web, which was built on top of the Internet—and not just any Internet, but the cheaply available Internet on commodity hardware and free software—was only a few years old.

All new to me, though. New to people in their 20s. Just as New York City was also new to me. They’re all bundled together in my head, the Web and the city. I’ve been comparing one to the other for decades.

Once you see one network you see them everywhere. WhiskerNet, for example. WhiskerNet is when you visit someone’s home, or one of the more progressive offices, and their cat nuzzles your shoes. Then you go home—maybe with a train or plane, maybe by walking—and your cats also nuzzle your shoes, sensing the other, distant cat by its smell.

The remote cat, you realize, was picking up your cats when it was nuzzling your shoes. They have exchanged cat packets. Allow me to illustrate:

WhiskerNet is very slow, totally asynchronous and there is no guaranteed cat packet delivery. It is a side-effect of cats being territorial, smell-driven creatures, but also domesticated, so that when you walk in the door smelling of some other cat they realize that they must grab that information and make sense of it. Consider this from the Humane Society’s helpful page, “Cat Chat”:

When your cat gets a whiff of something really fascinating, he opens his mouth and inhales so that the scent molecules flow over the Jacobson’s organ. This intensifies the odor and provides more information about the object he’s sniffing. What he does with that information, well, we’ll never know.

This is called the Flehmen response and it is among the better-illustrated of Wikipedia pages, trust me.

In any case I just wanted to tell you about WhiskerNet because I like remembering that there is an enormous amount of information flying around me at all times and whole big crazy networks that exist that you can’t even see when you’re 22, wandering around the city feeling a little sorry for yourself while you make weird websites. Every year I discover new networks. Sometimes it’s like, “rich people,” sometimes it’s “women’s hair products.” Like, when Venture Capital people tell you how you can pitch them, all those relentless blog posts about how to ask for coffee or how to make a compelling pitch deck, they are just defining the protocols for information exchange in their network. Follow the rules and you can get your information into the network. (What they do with that information, well, we’ll never know.)

Then there’s the other level, the dogwhistles. VC blogs are basically two things: Instructions on how to ask a VC for coffee, and talking their book via dogwhistle. I guess we can talk about that later though, I’m timing out.

WhiskerNet was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first thing I do when I wake up and get the children dressed—which, my God. Getting the… was originally published in Ford’s Sensorium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.