Failure Releases us to Dream II

Failure Releases us to Dream II

Why would I give this picture of a smiling old man such a title?  Think of this man, this IT guy, sitting at his cubicle in the basement office as he has sat in many cubicles in many basement offices, for many years, decades. Outside, the sun shines, but here in his ancient space he is in darkness. Why does he smile?  Once he was a young IT guy, healthy and strongly odiferous, full of life, playing dungeon quest at his workstation and repeatedly advising many a computer illiterate prole from the upstairs offices to reboot, reboot, reboot. He joined many dungeon gaming groups and attended many pc hobbyist conventions, and at one of these he encountered his enemy; a tall, good looking, glib and uninspired programmer, a mediocre engineer with a gift for working people, and a mean tendency for sarcasm, everything the IT guy was not. This man mocks him at meetings, mocked his homemade computer in front of his fellow hobbyists, manages to pass himself off as the bigger expert, with his fellow pc hobbyists, fooling them all with his charm. Back then the IT guy smiled and laughed inwardly, mentally preparing himself for a revenge of waiting, of patient forbearance, awaiting the inevitable end to such stories; the parvenu crashes and burns, his walk can't match his talk, he is exposed for his lack of deep knowledge, for the slenderness of his understanding, and they will meet again, at an electronics shop perhaps, where the parvenu works as a salesman, and the IT guy is a famous hacker, regarded with awe at the conventions for his deep understanding of software engineering, of robotics, of Artificial Intelligence. The parvenu cannot meet his eyes, he is embarrassed, hoping the IT guy won't remember his earlier remarks...This vision has sustained him through many years of cubicles in basements, even after it became apparent that the parvenu, now quite rich and well known, would not ever be working in an electronics shop. But the IT guy has held out hope for the basic idea of their reunion in his mind, taking care to never apply for work with the company the parvenu owns, warming himself with the talk of his friends at hobbyist meetings nowadays, who laugh and remember the parvenu back then, and reflect on the sad ignorance of the public and the lies behind all idols. But today he has seen a news item, of a celebrity death. He links, gripped by a compulsion, to the obituary, and reads; "Steven Jobs, Inventor..." the phrase works through his mind, there in the darkness, with the queasy blue light from the monitors playing upon his unkempt beard, and the smell from the young IT guy in the next cubicle beating powerfully into his nostrils, and he decides that this day, today, will be his last day working in this basement. At the moment of this picture, that thought has filled him with an ecstatic joy. He will go now and drive away, into the sunlit mountains, and he will not return.