Psh. Whatever!

How the hell do I write stuff? It just comes out, like poop, and the result is usually nearly indistinguishable.

Brad Pitt, in an interview, once said something like: "I don't know what the hell I'm doing up there in front of the camera. Really, I have no f---ing clue." He's become quite an actor, hasn't he? Maybe you've decided he'll never be Bogart (he's got a few years to go, though, doesn't he?), but you have to admit he's a lot better than various actors-who-always-play-themselves whose names rhyme with Rom Ruise.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply even indirectly that I'm a good writer; I know better. Don't ask me how I know — I'd have to think of seven words in the right order to explain it. I just know. I suck.

I do read my old entries occasionally, though, and I think: "Gosh, how the hell do I write that stuff? I could never do that! Well, er, I mean now, that is. Obviously I did it before. Just what are you trying to say, anyway? Do you think I'm some sorta dumbass?"

I wonder.

Dave

I learned to write from my brother Dave, who as far as I can tell wasn't a very good writer. He was a good Liver, to coin an utterly awful phrase; he lived, and that's always better than writing. Writing just tries to show you how people lived, and it never comes close, never gives you that rush of being there just when something wonderful is happening.

Dave died, you know. I've often thought that if I ever wrote a book, it'd be about Dave. He just kinda got sick one day. We golfed, we biked, we had long late-night discussions about his philosophy class, we reminisced about things you could never repeat, during the years we lived in different states, stuff happening mostly at parties, teenager sins you committed as a teenager. Fun stuff. Nothing you didn't do yourself, of course, but it's still unprintable.

He died. I've been dead ever since then, you know. I didn't close my eyes for a single night, for four years after he died, without thinking of offing myself, becaused I missed him so much. My brother Mike knows; my brother Kevin knows; my Dad and Mom both know. We were all there. It's like losing a limb, but worse. So much worse. I realized after Dave died that I'd glady have given both arms and both legs to have him back. I would.

Everyone loved Dave. Everyone wanted to be Dave. Dave had wine-tasting parties at his little apartment; he taught us all to golf and to keep aquariums and to mountain bike and to appreciate the fine points of football strategy. He had a soul-beagle, Bentley, who still misses him to this day.

He had a girlfriend, Nancy, who was more of a wife to him than any wife I know. My wife agrees, and she's only met Nancy once.

Dave just got sick one day. It happens. He didn't feel good. He was coughing. He had night sweats. You know, a cold. A fever. Bronchitis. Something nasty. Didn't want to get anyone else sick — I remember he would sit away from us on the couch so he wouldn't give it to anyone else. He was so considerate.

We didn't know it was a tumor. He was only 23; I mean, come on. He was an all-star football player in high school. You don't get tumors when you're 23.

His doctor mis-diagnosed him, twice. It's OK; we forgive him. It's been 8 years, and I think we all forgive him now. I had a friend in the Navy, back when I was in the Navy, who got mis-diagnosed. It happens. His doctor said he had, I dunno, a cold, something lame. He had leukemia. Doctor mis-diagnosed him twice, just like Dave. With Dave, the doc said it was bronchitis, nasty case, definitely needed bedrest.

The Navy friend got heli-lifted off the sub to a medical facility in Oregon. He didn't make it.

Dave didn't get to ride in a helicopter, but he did get an ambulance. On the 3rd visit to his doctor, the doc took his oxygen level and said: "Ooh, time for the ambulance." Dave trusted him. Turns out Dave had lymphoma, and pretty advanced. No reason. No family history. He just had it. Maybe the environment. Maybe too much coffee or nutra-sweet. Nobody knows. And like everything else in Dave's life, his lymphoma was world-class. It ate him up in a way that no other cancer could.

You really don't want to hear about that part. Trust me.

We trusted Dave. He had a sense of humor like you've never, ever seen or heard before. It would take up several chapters in my book. Dave could make people laugh who had obviously not laughed in years; he'd crack a joke, something made up on the spot, context-sensitive and all, and they'd HAW, HAW, *hack* *cough* HAW HAW HAW until we thought they were going to have a stroke. Dave was the only person I knew who could make someone laugh so hard that I thought they were physically uncomfortable.

So it goes.

I'm not going to make my blog about anything at all. You can peg me as a programming-language guy, or a would-be math guy, or an inconsiderate jerk who says bad things about the vehicle with which you earn your living. But that's not what I'm about. Because I appreciate that you're reading this, I really do, but I'm not writing it for you. I don't know you.

I'm writing for Dave. I sure miss him. We all do. Everyone from Geoworks misses him. They made him a big banner, back when we knew he was sick, but we didn't know it was that bad. I mean, I should have known. The first day in the hospital, after his ambulance trip, after he passed out from lack of oxygen at community college from climbing six flights of stairs from a broken elevator, with a tumor the size of your fist growing between his heart and lungs, and the nurses asked him what he'd been doing that day, and he said he passed out trying to go to class, and he said their eyes got all big and round, I should have known.

Because his doctor started crying. I've never seen that before, and I hope to God I never see it again. She was the visiting doctor, the resident, whatever they have at 10pm at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, Washington, the place Dave spent the next year and a half, the rest of his life. She looked at his chart that first day, and said some encouraging words to him, and then as we were walking down the hall, me and my mom and this strange doctor, she was crying. We thought that was kind of weird, because you don't cry in public, especially if you're a doctor, especially hanging around the family of someone you just saw.

Dave made so many jokes that we couldn't even understand them all, there in the hospital. The nurses loved him. One nurse told him: "You were the best! Even Dr. Wasserman says so!" Dave kidded her for the next four months over that one. "Don't refer to me in the past tense!" I saw her blush every time he mumbled it through the morphine. But he knew and she knew and I knew that he was just messing with her, just having fun on his deathbed. Who else can do that? Not me, I don't think. I don't know.

I remember a road trip, one we did in our parents' van way back when, and our little brother Kevin was about seven years old. Dave taught Kevin to say: "Psh! Whatever!" It took him a little while to grok the concept. The idea was that any time someone said anything you disagreed with, or even if you just felt like it, you would reply: "Psh! Whatever!" You could substitute the socially acceptable variant "Tsk! Whatever!" as long as you could produce a suitably sardonic clicking sound with your tongue, a sound to make Zulu heads turn in envious surprise. Dave had mastered the depreciating tongue-click. For mere mortals, the acceptable default was "Psh!"

My stepmom Mindy was less than pleased. "Kevin, don't you listen to them!"

You wouldn't believe the cheering that me, Mike and Dave produced at 7-year-old Kevin's beautifully crafted response: "Psh, whatever!" (Hi, Min!)

Dave imparted me and everyone near him with a sense of humor, by osmosis, although we were all really just a pale shadow. He had his world-class sense of humor until the very very end. A few months before then, I was visiting him in his hospital room, and he told me in thick, steroid-induced tones (after having thrown up his esophagus the night before, which he recounted to me with some surprise as being like spitting up long filets of salmon) that he'd lost bowel control a few days back, because of the chemotherapy, and he'd had an incident "like the one in Trainspotting". I hadn't seen Trainspotting at the time, but I got the picture. I didn't know what to say, so he chimed in, almost unintelligibly:

"Look on the bright side: at least I didn't have to clean it up!"

How could I laugh? How could I not laugh?

I'll say some pretty strange or seemingly mean things in my time, in my blogs, but you have to keep it all in perspective. My brother was tortured to death. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but aside from the miracle of morphine, those folks in medieval torture chambers had nothing on him. His suffering lasted 18 months, during which he basically dissolved, for all intents and purposes, and in the end I think (not really knowing, myself, but guessing) that the worst part was psychological. Facing your own death at 23 years old is pretty scary. Especially when you're melting.

So I probably have a slightly different perspective than you do. To me, it doesn't matter all that much anymore. I just try to make people around me happy, and enjoy myself, until, you know, I have some sort of major Trainspotting incident. Hopefully one that I don't personally have to clean up.

I don't really mean to be mean, though. I hope you realize that.

Stuff

Despite my best intentions, my blood pressure occasionally rises when I blog. Or more precisely, after I blog, because no bowel movement is ever inspected as scrupulously as the articles posted to Reddit. Even when my blog tries to be innocuous, the comments always seem to get to me.

My doctor says I might have bronchitis. What the hell do they teach med school students, anyway? It's as bad as a Computer Science degree.

I wish there were a way to request, respectfully, that certain of my articles not be posted to Reddit, because even though I want people to read them, I want them to read them at the right time. And that's different for everyone. Probabilistically speaking, the right time for most people is not going to be the day after I post them.

Then of course there's Digg, the Reddit for... Digg people, I guess. Diggers. Duggers. Whatever! Lord help you if you get Dugg, or whatever it is they do over there. And del.icio.us, which in addition to being hard to type is no longer the sprightly young company it once was, ever since You-know-hoo! bought them. Sometimes I wish I could just never be posted there.

That's not nice to the folks looking for karma, though, I guess, so really I just mean this entry, today.

I'd like to blog more about non-technical stuff. I feel like blogging about technical stuff is, well, you know. Dirty? Incestuous? It's not like I'd be saying anything you don't already know, or won't already know at some point, from someone else.

On the other hand, I always feel the (few) bloggers I read ought to stick to the same topics. If I'm reading Bill de hÓra, the only blogger I read regularly, and he suddenly starts talking about his dog, then I feel ripped off, as if the Discovery Channel had started doing a chef competition, or the Food Channel started doing specials on wrestling alligators.

That's not entirely fair of me, I know. People are always broader than what they blog about, but we sort of expect the best bloggers to stay on topic, to keep blogging about whatever we liked last time we read them.

Well, I'm going to take a deep breath, a leap of faith, and see if I can broaden my blogging to include non-cs-technical topics. Yes, some people will whine and moan about it; people will whine and moan about anything and everything. I do it too. But I'd love to blog about the movies I like, and video games, and music, and books, and people, and just plain old good times I've had. Because you never know how long it'll last.

I'd like to ask you, just one person to another, not to post this blog entry to Reddit, Digg or similar. I'd prefer that people learn about my brother Dave through some mechanism other than a newsfeed full of karma modders. You know? So I've deliberately avoided tech topics in this entry, in the hope that it will somehow pass unnoticed.

We'll see.

If not, well... psh! Whatever.

Miss you, Dave.