Eastern Standard Deja Vu

I (finally) got my paws on a copy of Cory’s new novel Eastern Standard Tribe at his reading on Thursday. Personally autographed, even:  “For Joey — In circadian solidarity!”

(We agree on many things, but circadian rhythm is not one of them. Cory

likes to start his day insanely early, while I prefer to end mine

insanely late. His upcoming move to the GMT zone may actually put us in

sync.)

I read it in two bursts: from the start to the point where the

protagonist explains tribes to his incredulous group therapy-mates

yesterday, and this morning, I read from that point straight through

the end. There’s a certain casual but insistent forward flow to his

writing that makes you want to keep reading. It’s rather like the

motion of a Haunted Mansion Doombuggy: it shows you something cool, but

its wiggle tells you that something cooler is waiting just over there

in the next chamber.

One thing I enjoyed about the book was the way it was peppered with

little bits of OpenCola cultural folderol:

• Quirky

  coworker/friends: argumentative personalities, smooth-talking biz-dev

  guys and anal-rententive user experience orthos so real that you want

  to pimp-slap them with a hardcover edition of Tufte.

• The

  wireless

  Napster on the Massachusetts Turnpike in the novel is a refinement of

  ideas that Cory would bounce at us during our runs to Fry’s when we

  both lived in Bay Area (“Impulse-shopper aisle, Joey! Beef jerky plus

  porn equals-equals good!”). We talked about how a peer-to-peer network

  of WiFi nodes in cars could be used to report traffic conditions and

  provide drivers with optimal routes.

• The instant-messaging nicknames: “opencolon” and “ballgravy”.

  “Opencolan” was the company’s joke name for its employees. We’d started

  using the phrase “that eats serious ball chowder” after stumbling into

  it on a message board where the Icy Hot Stuntaz were getting dissed.

• San Franscarcity: Cory’s pet name for Baghdad-by-the-bay. I called the satellite office we shared “Deep Space Nine”

  because it shared certain qualities with the ficitious space station:

  far from the central organization, a visiting place for strange aliens,

  and bad acting.

• The phrase “midget wrestling”. One project we worked on,

  Colavision, was a personal broadcasting tool, and we always suggested,

  even to the most stoned-faced no-apparent-sense-of-humour

  investors,  that “backyard midget wrestling” was one of the things

  that people wanted to broadcast. I think the midget wrestling thing was

  an obsession of John Henson’s (not the guy with the TV show, but our friend and coworker).

Of course, I can’t imagine a writer not throwing in little bits of

his or her own experience to give some meat to a novel. They make the

story feel more “real”. It’s especially cool when you’ve worked,

played, double-dated and gone to Disneyland and even watched Dude, Where’s My Car? (and in the theatre, no less!) with the author; it makes those bits feel like little secret high-fives.

I was about two-thirds of the way through the book when the feeling of deja vu

hit its peak, and then it dawned on me. A clever idea to make a cool

tech product? Everything going smoothly until the double-cross? The

idea’s originators being run out of the deal and dicredited and screwed

over by the suits? This was OpenCola. This was life, from late 1999

through to early 2002.

Keep in mind that this is Yours Truly’s interpretation of the book. I

have no special inside knowledge: I never saw any notes for the book,

nor do I have direct access to the part of his brain that he will

eventually stick a Creative Commons badge on, once we get wetware technology.

It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it.