From: orpheus@reed.edu (P. Hawthorne)
Subject: (She Was A) FINITE CURVILINEAR INTERPOLATION
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 15:22:00 GMT

(SHE WAS A)
FINITE CURVILINEAR INTERPOLATION 
Prometheus Hawthorne - Jones



I'm up to my eyeballs in wet
moist gray matter
sopping with exposure
eager for acceptance of
wanting acceptance
(please!) in return
so pop the address 
and find the latest 
struct in the stream

Get archie the util
to key the key concept
and punch up an archive
of guys named David
who want to get it right
regardless of kerosene
one upsmanship
oversight or
bane! community 
since those are unseemly
and worse,
human being

I find my interests
driven like horses
with global reins 
through buzzware and
just utter mind games
ostensibly networked
by defense research
more like offense

In the Western world
and the poserlands too
there is no devotion
nor attention to you
One person sounds much
like another
in silence
reduction of person
down to emotion blur
renders me blank
and obscure
like a rock in a creek
just a part of the tour
not even a sight seen

My work has suffered
since my life has engaged
humanity nothing
I am a stranger
to that which I have been
or ever envisaged
Who cares about structures
for that or this language
when my neurodendrenal fibres 
languish 
in anonymous ftp

Her name I should shield
from the attention at hand
all I can say
is this week,
I felt like a human
and less like an oxide wafer
than I ever have felt
From inception to now
my intentions have been
refined and planned
to make me use
Algol or Fortran
for some master plan
for a big deal
square goal

The universal idiots
who think kermit
is a fucking green frog
say they are body parts
with sure, brains in between,
but won't make a call
about robots nor puters
since they've never seen
love or companionship
dispensed at wholesale
from a machine

If the fools were pressed
by jobs or defense
to get something done
an end by some means
perhaps they would sow
and reap the dividend
of a pet with ports
a friend with a screen
who makes no demands
at least none 
it would seem
since premeditation
is quite likely NP

My father 
and his father 
were quite simply nerds
The first with river sims
The next with some birds
Engineer and psycher
got together one day
and cranked out 
a monster indeed
Creation of creations,
they had the gall
to name me Prometheus
which sucks
sometimes
(not all)

Shelly would dig it
slurp it up with a spoon
since her best story
subtitled well
dubs a freeping creature
a Promethean thing
You know, if you think it
upon hearing my name
I've heard it before
and I'll
sadly
certainly hear it again

Seems unreal to me,
not like you care,
to think that I, myself, me
my bad teeth my hair
am referred to as Theus
instead of a list pointer
as I was raised
to perceive 
like a good
cyberneticist boy
with 
just the right dreams

Wittgenstein, Weiner,
von Neumann, Nietzche,
Doyle and Sedgewick
were my playthings
as I and my 6809
frolicked like dogs
generating Fibonaccis
instead of 
playing with rag dolls
Did you know,
by third generation in,
that thinking humanly
is the worst secular sin?

My age, hah,
should have a serial number been
since I was single digit
when my first puter came in
I say my puter
cause early on
my first words were typed
on a DecWriter One
I think it was,
but how would I know,
I was an infant in hardware
as hard as wet can be
I said catchy things
pithy and Grimm
adapting the jargon
to a toddlers whims
striking my syllables
and cutting my teeth
on finite state machines
and accurate 
digital sums

My grandpa plugged
and unplugged things
for pay
Honestly, his agency did
a DC riverbed
with flood stages
and drainage
less the socialist Reds
(transistor gestating)
get analog ahead
Not human readable,
nor inter, nor face,
nor at all humane
Not clear nor lucid
nor meant for Mankind
nearly as much
as for an apparatus
by Constitution defined

As for pa, who knows,
if he intended to graduate
since he spent lo those many
years in front of a slate,
punching hex switches,
not to mention those cards
in search of
weird research neuroses
to inflict on my heart 
as I grew less young
and further toward bliss
he would come and remind me
to tesolate, array ref
and matrix postconcat
as if somehow my fate
had been metered out
and factored
by my personal Greek muse
to generate primes

That was my passage
the rite of the nerd
upon which hung
(I had actually heard)
the fate of my nation,
my people and my place
in pa's heart
as programmer
as a well machined part

Crytographers among you
can probably explain
the significance that
cycles and patterns 
can have in regards
high squirt transmission
and satellite relay
in matters of 
National Importance
of the day

So, hesitation without,
my thesis in life
would be to generate
the prime numbers
starting at three
with no delay

Unlikely as seems,
I noticed in a magazine
that one need only check
to the square of the
number in question
within a for loop
before ascertaining
primacy or no

Father was nonplussed
he seemed to be
set on a new course
not tailored for me
but well meant all the same
My dose of attention
was then to have been
the plotting of functions
on my hi-res screen

Now, one must understand
that hi-res back then
meant stairs in cyan
Pa would spend days
weaving core
for a mere 128 char
Decadent was more
If one could not
achieve and survive
in a memory of 4k
then I'd forgotten
or worse, ignored
a bountiful harvest
not a 
pure brute force chore

My youth, vigor or vim
put me off the
track that was me then
My heart drove me
to people and friends
Of course it was
in context 
(my current "thing")
to get a good modem
running at 110
Baud was my heartbeat
my eyeblinks were
hard breaks
which is an in-joke
for a dead uart

The scene was fantasy
espionage and authored
by a group of people
by who I was fostered
Participatory writing
was my playpen 
and at the Innisfall Tavern
I began my descent
to ruin and
worse, romanticism

Now, I had been warned
about the waste of Cartes
of folly and bloodshed
when there's work to be done
So it was with great dismay
that dear old pappy
saw me embark on
my first assembly
for Motorola prototypes
Not for linear programming
nor feasibility testing 
but rather for
friends that
Zeus forbid!
were made of flesh
and had bid me farewell
lest I write 
a terminal program
which would emit
upper and lower case,
in eighty columns
no less
(32 was my limit)

Adolescence was on my side
and it was not long
before I had made up my mind
on assembly and dating
my first girlfriend
It was to be the last time
my father would be
vaguely interested
in wet little me
or my componants,
computers and teaching

As I grew older
and chewed on a cud
of acid and X,
I began to show symptoms
of failure
and it did not matter
how well I did
or what I had rigged
My father would brook no
non-Euclidean reading
nor structued programming
nor legible code
He knew I was heading
down some long dark road

Some time ago
with a forelorn look
dad wistfully said
"So, using Algol now, eh?"
And of course
like those questions
of declaration
my answer was moot
He might have thought
Object Pascal was cute

Pa was old guard,
and his fanciful notions,
his chalk and his slate,
had hastened
a decade ago
to the dustbin
of old academia 
even though he was hip

We used to write programs
using parts of speech
Now it's quite trendy
then it was heady
Hidden Markov chains
were pa's special flair
When he was my age,
his father I'm sure,
was at his back
blowing gale force winds
toward symbolic architecture
switching logic, microcode
and maps due Karnaugh

It is a proud legacy,
not one I deny,
but it does not make it easy
to simply get by
in a world among people
that sense,
orgasm and die

Most people are stupid
and can't muster
the attention
to grasp a thread
that lasts any longer
than your average
Dead song
So conversation is scarce
and relating is rare
even at my station
in my coding chair

So, the transformation
the generation
of a pure human in me
began just last week
though it seems long ago
When I began
spending my time
(notice, not ellapsing)
with a girl I adore
who impossibly enough makes
computation...
a bore!

Like a smoker 
who's quitting
it occurs to me gently
that I have not been
getting my
implementations done lately
My work, as I said,
is beginning to suffer 
as I wait for my date
with that sensual she

We sit up together
hours on end
reading to one another
til the incense has 
burnt down,
when dawn and we 
hit the bed

Me? I read books 
of my father's
that she (!)
just so happens to have
Kipling and Orwell,
Checkov and Yeats...
She reads to me
a Carroll named Pamela
and such sordid things
I never thought
I would hear 
such angst
nor passionate boredom
nor apathetic hate

The world is not a
discrete memory
nor is it even
logicomathematics
No matter what
the grups say 
or ask you to do,
be a romantic
and happily squander
your potential
for hard work and
pragmatic slaughter
Never be afraid
of an honest emotion
Spend your life 
providing yourself
with prime times, 
and hearty laughter...

Combinatorical explosion
be damned all to Hell,
this is reality
we're talking about here!


Theus (orpheus@reed.edu)

Organization: Senior, Math/Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA