What That Raven is All About

I can’t possibly tell it all now, but I’m going to have to, sooner or later. Call this just a beginning…

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Macworld San Francisco 2000? Ask Beth about stepping over homeless vets sleeping on the sidewalk. Six months before then, Kathy and I left Maryland for New Mexico (see here). I was writing for Applelinks. There was something called “Mac Lit.” John Martellaro waxed mystical over “Mac chi.” Man oh man.

When I started writing my “Farr Site” columns a couple of years before, one of the first to tell me he loved them was Tim Robertson (“who??”). I knew he’d be at Macworld, and he found me after the keynote. I was freaking out over bad $10 sandwiches and being the only guy there with a cowboy hat, but he came up and introduced himself. That night (?) there was a Mac writers’ party. What I remember most about the evening was how Tim gathered the MyMac crew together for a group photo when it was all over. (Nobody else did that that I saw, and I’ve never forgotten.)

Too much to tell here, so much to remember. Rodney O. Lain and Tim fighting for justice from a high-rise hotel room, Del Miller and I blowing off the whole scene by the second day, San Francisco winning my heart. I wrote nasty news items and nearly got canned (that came later), then just took in the city. Met an email correspondent who smoked funny cigarettes and showed me the Haight, bought fish us stew in North Beach. The next night my wife and I met an old college roommate of hers and her partner, now lesbian commandos, who drove us all over the city at night past Japanese tool stores, a cathedral, and restaurants in the fog.

Never did have that cheeseburger and a beer with Rodney, dammit. That spring he and I scored side-by-side gigs writing for MacAddict.com. We were promised a thousand bucks a column, they paid us $300 per. There were at least a few guys at other sites making tons more than that. You wanna know what busted the dot in dot.com, there you go — and four months later they fired all the columnists. I was stuck at 8,000 feet in San Cristobal with no way to live. Almost moved back to Maryland (read the book), then didn’t, and broke my wife’s heart. Try that sometime in your life and see what you’re both made of. Rodney went on as the iBrotha until his skull met a .357 magnum. My wife moved away for two and a half years (she’s back now). The world went to hell. I hung on and kept writing. Macs on Intel? That’s nothing.

Through all of this, Tim kept in touch. Once or twice a year the phone would ring and he’d talk about this scheme or that, and MyMac kept churning along. However many months ago it was, Tim let me stick up a logo for the column I write now, my self-published GRACK!. (Do you understand now?)

Lord God in heaven.

Well, that’s how it is, or was, and certainly will be. You don’t know what anything means until after it’s over, and this isn’t yet. The latest GRACK! column is now up at my site, so go have a look. Here’s the excerpt and links:

[GRACK! 12-14-2005] STUMBLING FREE

“My stomach tightened perceptibly. The answer was simple, and I’d given it before. I knew there’d be no follow-up, as my words came from a place she’d never known. She would listen to whatever I said, judging the emotional color of my delivery, and show no reaction unless I was harsh. I appreciated the question, though: even a stone will eventually dissolve in the mouth, and her asking revealed it was still there.”

Current column always here: http://www.jhfarr.com/grack/

This column archived at: http://www.jhfarr.com/grack/121405.html