At an early point in my professional life, there was a near-parable floating around the Internet. \u00a0According to this tale, there was a programmer at a job interview. \u00a0This programmer told his potential employer, “I dream in code.” \u00a0Those four words were said to have set him apart from his competition and won him the job.<\/p>\n
I have been pushing myself to remember things. \u00a0These things were lost to the day-to-day life of being a grown-up. \u00a0They were lost to my regrets of having not acted in favor of what I believed was a more patient, long-term commitment to myself. \u00a0So I have been trying to remember.<\/p>\n
I remember one year, the thing I wanted more than anything else for Christmas a copy of Borland’s C+ Compiler. \u00a0I lost many Friday nights to a beat up, cigarette-stained computer and learned to chip away pieces of code, one function at a time. \u00a0I 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<\/a>. \u00a0The books were outdated but not yet obsolete. \u00a0I remember coding by the light of a CRT monitor, augmented sometimes by a scented candle or a dim fluorescent light from around the corner.<\/p>\n Was that what I loved? \u00a0I loved doing it very dearly. \u00a0It was still a means to a bigger end.<\/p>\n I loved building worlds and telling stories. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0This was a passion started in 1984 that began to find its maturity in 1993. \u00a0This was another tool, such as my drums and my paintbrushes and the scraps of fiction that filled my bedroom. \u00a0They were all tools for something wonderful with a unified theory that I only believe I only recently learned to name.<\/p>\n This all stayed with me all the way up until the day I became a full-time wage slave. \u00a0“I have made it,” I thought on that day. \u00a0 Then, I had two jobs. \u00a0One was working on almost all levels of web design and the other writing creatively for a video game. \u00a0“Hell, yes.” I shouted to myself. \u00a0It was a literal shout. \u00a0It was a cry of joy. \u00a0I was creating. \u00a0I was blazing forward in life. \u00a0Then, it stopped.<\/p>\n It atrophed. \u00a0The details aren’t important. \u00a0It atrophed and I bear the full responsibility for it.<\/p>\n I wrote a horror podcast for a while, and will probably start it up again soon if only for Halloween. \u00a0I even made contact with some heroes of mine in ghastly arts. \u00a0I used to admire them for their work, and still do. \u00a0They have put a second layer of being really awesome people on top of that admiration.<\/p>\n I’m trying to remember the punk I was at 20. \u00a0Not 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. \u00a0The lonely, angry, bitter punk who saw his future in a blank IDE. \u00a0It’s not difficult to remember that sense of bitter hope. \u00a0Atrophe torments a soul in ways that stagnation could never touch.<\/p>\n So, here I go again. \u00a0Pumpkin scented incense, bad lighting, and two not-stained CRT monitors. \u00a0My five years as a smoker are eight years in the past. \u00a0I am learning to take fuller advantage of HTML5, stuff we used to call DHTML, and databases. \u00a0I am coding a tool that will help me tell fantastic stories. \u00a0It will help other people tell their wild tales.<\/p>\n