At an early point in my professional life, there was a near-parable floating around the Internet. According to this tale, there was a programmer at a job interview. This programmer told his potential employer, “I dream in code.” Those four words were said to have set him apart from his competition and won him the job.
I have been pushing myself to remember things. These things were lost to the day-to-day life of being a grown-up. They were lost to my regrets of having not acted in favor of what I believed was a more patient, long-term commitment to myself. So I have been trying to remember.
I remember one year, the thing I wanted more than anything else for Christmas a copy of Borland’s C+ Compiler. I lost many Friday nights to a beat up, cigarette-stained computer and learned to chip away pieces of code, one function at a time. I remember the pile of books from outlet stores, or from the computer show (on opposing weekends to the gun and knife show) at the Gibraltar Trade Center. The books were outdated but not yet obsolete. I remember coding by the light of a CRT monitor, augmented sometimes by a scented candle or a dim fluorescent light from around the corner.
Was that what I loved? I loved doing it very dearly. It was still a means to a bigger end.
I loved building worlds and telling stories. I loved telling the machine what to do so that the machine might some day immerse an audience in a work of fiction that I had built. This was a passion started in 1984 that began to find its maturity in 1993. This was another tool, such as my drums and my paintbrushes and the scraps of fiction that filled my bedroom. They were all tools for something wonderful with a unified theory that I only believe I only recently learned to name.
This all stayed with me all the way up until the day I became a full-time wage slave. “I have made it,” I thought on that day. Then, I had two jobs. One was working on almost all levels of web design and the other writing creatively for a video game. “Hell, yes.” I shouted to myself. It was a literal shout. It was a cry of joy. I was creating. I was blazing forward in life. Then, it stopped.
It atrophed. The details aren’t important. It atrophed and I bear the full responsibility for it.
I wrote a horror podcast for a while, and will probably start it up again soon if only for Halloween. I even made contact with some heroes of mine in ghastly arts. I used to admire them for their work, and still do. They have put a second layer of being really awesome people on top of that admiration.
I’m trying to remember the punk I was at 20. Not just the one with technicolor hair who, one night, would see Lords of Acid play a concert and the next cruise around a parking lot blasting Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos to irritate the neighbors. The lonely, angry, bitter punk who saw his future in a blank IDE. It’s not difficult to remember that sense of bitter hope. Atrophe torments a soul in ways that stagnation could never touch.
So, here I go again. Pumpkin scented incense, bad lighting, and two not-stained CRT monitors. My five years as a smoker are eight years in the past. I am learning to take fuller advantage of HTML5, stuff we used to call DHTML, and databases. I am coding a tool that will help me tell fantastic stories. It will help other people tell their wild tales.
Horror movies, Zombina and the Skeletones, ghouls made of fabric hanging from the walls, a five cup coffee maker, <canvas>, javascript and MySQL queries. Perhaps, even, an expression of the unified theory I couldn’t name in high school.
Screaming in code. Hopefully, again, in triumph.
He has worked as a level designer for a small online video game, as the grim reaper in a haunted house, and traded web design for concert tickets and tattoos.In years past, he could be found performing improvised comedy or stage magic in the south side of Austin, Texas.
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