My Time as a Human

I’ve safely arrived in New York with my large suction cups and extra videotape. While I can’t yet reveal the full nature of my mission here, I can say that I’m excited about seeking out the appropriate required black socks.

Already I’ve availed myself of the local robot construction facilities, and I’ve used a laser to fabricate custom gears for Bar Bot IV. Raph has officially taken the offloaded project from Adam Mayer, and the tuxedo sleeved robotic cherry placement arm is promising to bring a whole new level of class to the Bar Bot line.

Things are actually looking quite good for NYC Resister aka “The Lab”. The only thing lacking appears to be a reliable source of Club Matte, a mysterious beverage tasting of plumb juice and dry leaves, which fuels the hacker crew. Occasionally Austrians or Germans fly in to refresh the supply, and I got a chance to meet one of them yesterday, a tall guy with an appropriately thick accent and mohawk like hair. Apparently flying to the US to work in the lab is his idea of a vacation.

There are a number of artistic projects underway, including a dive bombing napkin that attempts to embrace you at the door and a squeezable calculator bear. There is also an attempt to build the first profitable contraption, the Makerbot Industries Cupcake CNC.

Makerbot is a CNC fabricator that can construct anything you describe for it in three dimensions out of plastic, and will ultimately be able to do the same with cupcake frosting. For the moment it can be set to adjust motor speeds so that it plays the Star Wars Imperial March theme while constructing a pile of little stormtrooper heads, which is what one machine was doing full time. The other Makerbots in the room were busily making parts for themselves, their little plates buzzing back and forth under the extruder and a dark blue or red glow in an ominous act of procreation. Of course the possibilities are already becoming clear to some. Makerbot is currently available both as a kit and fully assembled, and early adopting nerds across the country are buying them up like mad and, as the design is continually optimized, having their machines print out upgrades for themselves.

There is a saying that I’ve repeated countless times since I’ve been here: “the laser changes everything”. Suddenly everything you dream up can be made and cut to precision. Every part, tool, or laptop is emblazoned with a slick logo or design. Every sign looks professional and legit. When I needed to affix a gear to a stepper motor, I just took the motor to a grinder, flattened half of the shaft, and then told the laser to cut me a new, identical gear with a half hole in the center. It took about twenty minutes total.

This is a world I couldn’t even have imagined as a kid when I was building my robots out of inverted trash cans cut with kitchen knives and mounted on scrap wood platforms. I used rubber bands between my DC motors and the crude pulleys I’d hacked out of wood. I cut everything out of wood because it was all I could manipulate, and gears were something I had to order from surplus catalogs, wait for for weeks, and hope I could assemble into something useable once the hodgepodge arrived. Now if I screw up a part, or something is a bit too large, or small, or needs a couple of extra notches, I can grab a piece of scrap and in seconds I have a handful of perfect new parts.

That part of my long dormant geek brain is blinking in the light of a new world. The revolution is already here, and as we suspected, it’s all about robots again.

When I was but a wee lad, I once awoke unusually early one morning. Rubbing sleep from my eyes I stumbled into the dining room with my sisters and there before us was an incredible sight. The table was covered with orange juice, toast, cereal, and all manner of wonderful smelling and tasting breakfast delights. But it was so early, we thought! How could it be that such a spread, with the spoons and bowls so carefully placed, with the soft boiled egg cups laid out with such care, be available already? Surely this was not the work of human hands. Perplexed, we asked my father what ever could have happened. He assured us that it was the result of a visit by the breakfast elves.

Throughout my childhood I would wake up with excitement when the morning felt just right, wondering if the breakfast elves had come. Their visits were rare, and so that much more delightful. Sadly, today my dad swears he doesn’t remember any of this. I have to assume that it was one of those offhand comments parents make that, however small, eagerly fill the large space in a child’s head so ready for explanations. The most exciting stories grow the largest, filling that space like the smell of cooking pancakes fills a house of sleepers.

A few weeks ago we had one of our large theme parties, this one calling for Fractured Fairy Tales. I broke out a few of my favorite bits from my costume collection and created a Breakfast Elf.

Sarah McDonald, Ori Sofer, Kai Mantsch

While I did spend a fair amount of time explaining the story, it was all part of the fun. At some point I was speaking exclusively in a bad Russian accent after trying to show a Baba Yoga how it was done, based entirely on my memories of my Russian friend Kostya Akimov saying things like, “Vodka with really crispy pickles”.

The whole thing reminds me of one of the objectives that’s emerged for my children’s song projects. Feeding small humans incomplete ideas and images allows them to fabricate something wonderful to fill in all of the gaps in understanding. “Pass the Sleepy Stick” is a great example. I never really explain what a sleepy stick might be, but I sing about it in context and give the general impression that it’s some kind of baton passed from sleepers on one part of the world to those next in line as the earth rotates away from the sun. I love the idea that kids who hear this song will create their own ideas of how this thing looks and acts and carry that with them for the rest of their lives, puzzling years later as to how they created and believed such a fantastical image.

For some reason I’ve never quite stopped putting together these crazy explanations for my world. My eagerness to jump to the most illogical, fantastic, explanation for things has earned me all kinds of hassle through the years. I was getting a ride with an older friend in jr. high school and he was trying to explain album rock radio to me. “When most radio stations are playing the single from an album”, he said, “album rock stations play something else off the same album.”

My mind boggled at how this could be true. How could all of those other stations know exactly when the singles were going to start? And what about songs that were different lengths? Did they just cut them off so they could start the next one at exactly the right time? I started imagining all kinds of elaborate schemes for keeping everything in perfect sync, and started asking bizarre questions until my friend, after a lot of confusion, realized how far out I had gone and looked at me in total disbelief.

I’m lucky these days to have found a great group of people who still revel in exploring the absurdities of how things might work or what life could be. I think that having these sorts of wild, impossible ideas about what could be is at the root of beginning to ask why other ideas aren’t already, or why there’s no reason they couldn’t be. Maybe the next step in my songwriting, as I begin my next round in a few weeks, is to create the space for adults to start thinking this way again too.

Every year my Pink Palace housemates and I scatter across the globe for our various New Years adventures, and miss the opportunity to welcome the new year together. We now have a tradition of gathering in late January to re-celebrate with an event we call “Re-New Years”. We get dressed up in our finest, stroll out to fancy hotel bars, and do countdowns from twelve to negative two before shouting, “Happy New Years!” and then heading to the next place to repeat the ceremony.

This year Delia insisted that we all add hats to the usual snappy attire. This resulted in a variety of interpretations, including vintage hats and beautiful peacock-like plumage formed from a pasty. I thought we all looked pretty sharp, although not that unusual, but as we strode into the Driscol necks were snapping all around us. We gathered around the piano and within minutes a security guard with a cable dangling from his ear appeared as if by magic, suddenly standing stiffly and silently beside us as though trying to blend in with the wooden post behind him. We were quick to order a round of vintage cocktails, if nothing else to assure them that we were just common folks here to, at a minimum, finance the repairs of any potential shenanigans with our purchases.

At the piano an ancient but lively and brightly adorned woman returned to running her fingers up and down the keys, swinging piano hammers into the old metal strings with great enthusiasm. As the jazz bounced and tapped its way back into the room, just as in any old cowboy film, the patrons slowly turned their heads back to their conversations and the general mumbling ambiance rose up to join the musical background.

Damien Di Fede quickly set about taking photographs of cocktail glasses at odd angles, squinting into his tiny camera from below the piano. As the minutes passed without our having done anything more spectacularly dangerous, people began approaching us to ask what this, “was all about”. We were happy to tell them about Re-New Years and people really loved the idea. I’m always a little surprised when people still find my friends’ antics unusual in this town, but it would be even more surprising to me if we weren’t always then met with friendly, curious inquiry. There’s a folksy friendliness that’s one of the best parts of the Texas side of Austin, even among the most hardened of republicans.

Always one to mix with the help, it didn’t take long before I was chatting up the feisty old woman at the piano and she was daring me to come up with a song challenge. “Anything from 1940 on, I can do it.” I started out easy with Misty and then convinced her to tear it up on Take the A Train, just to give her jazz improv spirit some room to move. In between she poured out stories. She told me about how that particular song was written by two guys on opposite coasts (Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington) over the telephone. She told me about a time when she was playing a gig and a nice young man walked up, said he loved her playing, and asked if he could sit in on drums. She was skeptical at first, and from the moment they started they were in perfect sync. He was following her every move and tempo change and the chemistry was amazing. They played for several hours until finally she turned and pointed at him and said, “OK, that’s it, who are you?!” He laughed and turned out to be one of Duke Ellington’s drummers.

The pianists name was Patricia Griffin and she had along with her a slightly younger friend who’d brought her a present and was sitting beside the piano for the gig. At one point this friend was putting on a coat and leaving and I said goodbye, but when I turned back she was back at her seat. “I thought you were leaving,” I said, “not that I wanted to see you go.” “Oh,” she said, “Patricia convinced me to stay. Said she should walk me to my car.” Patricia assured me that it wasn’t safe for a woman to be walking to her car alone after dark. She convinced her friend to wait until the gig was over.

A little while later someone came over with a walker. This enthusiastic chaperone, while plenty willing and able to tear it up at the piano for hours, could hardly stand up! I laughed to myself. Who, exactly, was waiting to walk whom safely home? I silently promised to be even half as cool as Patricia when I got to her age.

Soon enough I’d spun enough women through swing dancing moves and we’d gathered plenty of artsy photographs of cocktail glasses. We declared it time and all loudly called out the countdown to negative two. We hugged and cheered and replaced the words to Auld Lang Syne with the traditional, much more memorable, and much more fun, “Matt Shaw”. Singing, “Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaw, Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaaaaaaaaawwww…” we gathered our coats and headed off to the Stephen F. Austin, pausing only briefly at the door to extract Leo Evette as his stunning good looks and simple, “hello” almost picked up a girl on the way out.

This last Wednesday my friend Shawn Dodd faltered in a long fight with an old demon, one that at times seemed beaten only to sneak back out after lying dormant long enough to be forgotten. His demon was depression and it did what it does best in creating a cloud so dark one loses context and forgets one’s innumerable talents, dreams and friends. Without the ability to see the beauty that was so clear to the rest of us, he ended his life.

I met Shawn working at a software startup, pcOrder, where we spent many long nights together hacking out code like enthusiastic little monkeys. He was very sharp and had an ability to pick up new technical skills at amazing speed, but he wasn’t one to promote himself or sing his own praises. He liked being in the background, making things happen. I remember a time when David Howard and I were worried that our manager, Gordon, didn’t realize everything that Shawn regularly contributed. The two of them were in a meeting one day discussing using a new technology and Gordon turned to David and ended our concern by saying, “Just ask Shawn. He’ll know, and if he doesn’t, he’ll get it within the hour.”

A lot of people have talked about his brilliance and about his love of technology and interfaces and what made things work. All of these things are true, but he was so much more than that. I learned a lot about kindness and about being a gentleman from Shawn. He had a way of doing things with style and would forever be finding subtle ways to make me feel good about myself. I remember wearing a new shirt and having him tell me, “you wear that really well,” with such sincerity that I genuinely felt like I was making the shirt look good.

He was enthusiastic about so many things. When I last saw Shawn, he rolled up to my house blasting Indian Bhangra music, the music of the region of India where I spent time earlier this year. He was loving it and was eager to tell me what he knew and share the story about finding himself accidentally dropped into the middle of an Indian wedding afterparty to hear it for the first time. He stayed grooving with the happy crowd for the rest of the night and spent the next day digging up whatever he could about the music.

When I got into the Austin swing scene, Shawn was always down to get dressed up and head out to hear great bands with me, although he preferred to sip a cocktail and look good while I fumbled around the dance floor. In much the same way, when he later dove into electronic music, he had a friend build an amazing wooden case for his decks so that he could learn to DJ despite never being interested in dancing.

He was someone who loved creating and facilitating great experiences for other people. When he decided to become a great bartender, he made the most amazing Mexican Martinis I’ve ever had. We had a regular group gathering every Monday night at Josh Hildebrand’s house where we would all gather to watch our favorite TV show. Our free jazz band would play as the little crew gathered and then we’d pile into the living room to watch catch the show and rant about the social politics woven within. No evening was complete without one of those frosted glasses kissed with fresh squeezed limes and filled with the hand shaken mixture Shawn created, and I’ve tried unsuccessfully over the years to find anyone who can produce anything close to the one cocktail I’ve ever liked.

I have so many memories of Shawn. Juggling pins at four in the morning as we excitedly brainstormed new ideas. Going out for great dinners and talking about life. His laughter and his joy at the absurdity of the stories I’d share from places like Burning Man. I very much wish we could have spent some more time together in the years I have remaining, but I’m learning to love and appreciate what we can all manage to squeeze into our short span as humans together instead of regretting what we can’t. Despite the way he had to go, I hope that he enjoyed the better times as much as I did. I’ll miss you Shawn.

Other sites:

In Memoriam: Shawn C. Dodd

David Howard’s Blog