THE LAST TEMPTATION - I
Posted by Erik Frey Wed, 02 Jun 2004 04:02:00 GMT
i can only attribute so much of last week and this weekend to divine providence. the rest pours over – or maybe it just clumps and settles to the bottom, so i can process it on my own time. we’ll see.
last week was the expo of excess in sandango. i dropped my stuff off at the hotel and ran right back out to the zoo. the apes behaved so human. one might scratch his head, examine his fingernails, go for a stroll or sit with a leg crossed over like a lay philosopher. you could see, plain as day, that there was a level of awareness that even some teenagers don’t posess. and yet our disregard for anything not human struck me as increasingly odd as i watched these apes. what is the graduating line between them and us? i was feeling very jain, but then i remembered i love a good steak. internal compromise ensues.
i saw okapi. in all their splendor! and i crashed a swingin’ spider monkey party. a little girl put her finger up to the glass pane, at which point a monkey on the other side did exactly the same. hello, symbolism.
hippos move in slow motion. it’s hypnotic.
dad came out for a couple of days. that was a lot of fun. i might wonder why my family get-togethers are always doused in liquor. but i don’t. at one sushi place we went to, the toro was so good that i’ve tried about ten times now to find a proper sentence to describe it. words fail me. at the end of his visit, dad left me with two great gifts – a bottle of pitu (reinforcements!) and an abacus.
the conference itself was a mixed bag. technically (nerd nerdy mcnerdnerdly) there was some pretty exciting stuff on display. all of it so precisely crafted, symmetrical, and elegant. i attended a lecture given by anders hejlsberg, who has a professor-like countenance and near-celebrity status among c# developers. i was impressed, again, from a technical standpoint, and the proficiency and intellect of many of these folks.
one evening, they carted us off to sea-world. all the restaurants were open and serving free dinner. shamu did mid-air flips in front of a billboard-sized screen hocking whatever latest microsoft product. announcers gave away free smartphones. the crowd (influenced by all the free wine and beer kiosks) cheered raucously the whole time.
this is what i could buy into. this conference sold image as much as it did anything else. a lifestyle that is so removed from the real world, that a lot of what i saw left me feeling depressed. gentle, pleasant stimulus and response. elevator music. the maestro says it’s mozart, but it sounds like bubblegum.
so removed from the real world that ethics had disappeared altogether. at one point during the conference, i had in my head an image of a mass of people, all toppling over eachother in a surging, cresting wave. at the bottom of the wave were the murderes and mercenaries, bloody conquerers that slayed and mutilated and tortured. piled above them in something of a gradient were soldiers, clergy, government, the citizenry, and finally, emblazoned at the top of the cresting wave was the modern business executive. his head was held high as he peered off into an apocalyptic future, and his clothes were as impeccably spotless as his conscience. amoral intellectualism.
grace rescues a lack of intellect. but intellect does not rescue a lack of grace.