I am who you think I am.

Maybe Jef Raskin is responsible for the human/machine interface I tolerate, maybe not. I don’t care, and Jef Raskin probably isn’t concerned, either, since he died yesterday.

I shall remember Jef Raskin for his dramatic resignation from his academic employer, a story that has almost nothing to do with my computer. Raskin described it best.

When I resigned I got into a hot air balloon in the middle of Revelle Plaza and flew over the Chancellor’s residence playing my sopranino recorder so that he would hear the sound. He came out and I yelled down that I was resigning and floated off. I was an art professor at the time and it seemed arty to leave that way.

What, no balloon, rocket, or torpedo?

So long, Jef; thanks for the interface.

That’s the technical reason a flight attendant on United Airlines flight 801 to San Francisco gave me in explaining why one of the toilets is inoperable.

Oh well, at least the ground crew apparently remembered to provide enough jet A fuel, hydraulic fluid, et cetera, or else I wouldn’t be writing this. I can live without blue juice.

“That would be me, I suppose,” I admitted.

“So just how very drunk were you?” Leonora asked.

“What makes you think I was drunk?” I responded defensively.

“Because you’re too cheap and too much of a wimp to use good drugs,” Leonora replied.

Ah, a simple misunderstanding; it happens all the time. I explained to Leonora I’d never have shaved my head if I was in a chemically-altered state. The only times I make serious judgment errors are when I’m in full control of my faculties. That’s when the delusion of adequacy kicks in, and sanity—for me, at least—rarely proves efficacious.

His suicide didn’t yield too many accolades in the obituaries, probably because he did his best work over three decades ago. I did, however, come across one memorable quote.

“Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.”

But what about today? Since Thompson’s dead, I suppose I’ll never read his answer.

I talked with Marty’s guest for less than a minute; that’s all the time I needed to realize that she was one of the already dead. I often find myself surrounded by the already dead, but it’s rarely a problem. The already dead tend to leave me alone and vice-versa; we have an unspoken truce that serves all of us well.

“It’s pathetic when people swear for the sake of it,” the old bastard and father of two children opined in a recent interview. “Something ought to be done about it.”

I find it pretty fucking ironic that someone who based his band’s marketing plans on offending conservative assholes is pissed off that others are copying the juvenile approach.

Having said that, I agree with Matlock that profanity has no place in a learned person’s vocabulary. Something really ought to be done about it, fuck yeah!