The Vision in the Visible

This essay was written just before writing the novel Bombardiers.

Animals as Metaphor

The novel that I began while I was working in the Taxable Fixed Income Sales department at the First Boston Corporation, in 1987, had nothing to do with the world of high finance that I inhabited eleven hours a day. My mind was needing a release, and so it chose as its scenery a forest of Ponderosa pine in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado, and as its main characters a weasel, a marmot, a badger, a pine marten, a crow, a rabbit, and a wolverine. Writing this novel was to some extent my escape from the non-stop pressure of selling derivative mortgage products to savings & loans. I went to work at four in the morning, returned to my apartment at three in the afternoon, and took an uneasy nap for one hour. Then I went for a run, came home, and on those days I still could not let go of the stream of numbers marching through my head, I picked up my novel,Wild Thing,. I sat up in bed and wrote longhand, caught in my own dream, until about midnight. This novel was a story of the small animals forming a preliminary social structure in order to end the violence and brutality of their nature. Their enlightened leader was a marmot by the name of Darmot who the other animals--each of whom had a name and a distinct character that I worked hard to differentiate--became enamored with and followed. The undermining, secretive enemy was Weasel, who tried to sabotage Darmot's attempt to civilize the animals. The plot turned this way and that, calling into question whether their new civilization was formed out of good-hearted selflessness or as an attempt by the small and smart to gain power in the forest. Inevitably, their society collapsed and most animals died. In speaking about this novel with my friends, I billed it as a cross between Watership Down, The Fountainhead, and Lord of the Flies. I knew it was a moralistic tale, but I worked very hard to bring their forest to life. I ordered away for Park Service brochures on the ecosystems of the Rocky Mountain forests. I studied vertebrate biology to make sure my animals could move as I said, and that they could digest their new civilized food. I read Skinner and Pavlov. These books stacked up on my bedside table, and I referred to them regularly as I wrote. At midnight, I forced myself to stop, to get the three and a half hours sleep I had trained myself to operate on.

For the most part I hid the novel from my associates at work. They did not know that I aspired to write, let alone that the book had become a counterbalancing obsession, a sort of lifeline, Hansel's trail of bread crumbs leading away from wicked temptation. It wouldn't have surprised them to find out. We all understood that the only way to remain normal was to be weird. Those that tried to act sane after work did not last. Those that lasted had counterbalancing obsessions.

One of those with a counterbalancing obsession was Samuel Belk, a.k.a. "Q" (for reasons too long to go in to here). His obsession was mountains. In the summer of 1987 he had taken an eight-week leave of absence and attempted to climb the North Face of Mt. Everest, the "Goddess Mother of the World." He was stopped only several hundred feet from the peak by the worst blizzard in six years. It was "Q" who I first showed my novel. I trusted him. He was excited to find that I wrote, that I was as crazy as him. He read my bizarre novel of gritty animal biology in about two weeks. He was wild about it. "It is," he said, as he twisted his phone cord around his neck, "the most accurate description of high finance I have ever read."

I quit the next summer. I lasted just less than two years, about the length of a tour of duty in the military. I can see now as "Q" saw then--that in that novel (which I have not reread since I quit) I was trying to sort out what I had seen on the mortgage desk at First Boston. The animals and Rocky Mountain ecology were my means of getting distance, of filtering out the facts specific to the time--junk bonds, savings & loans, trade deficits and huge bonusses--from the timeless pyschology of human behavior I had witnessed. Most writers get this distance by waiting, waiting until they can see the timeless, the principles, and gleem their vision from the visible. I now have that vision. I do not look upon Wall Street's high financial orgy as an 80s thing. I never did. Something happened there that I find endemic to the merging of pure capitalism, the Information Age, and computer technology. I did not get a glimpse of the 80s, I got a glimpse of the future. I got a glimpse of what our jobs will be like in another ten years, and it's a story I must tell.

The Promise of the Information Age

I came of age in Silicon Valley, during its gold rush glory years, 1982 through 1986, while I studied Economics at Stanford. It was the new California, the land of dreams and the dreamy, the age of entrepreneurism. We studied while sunbathing on the wood decks of our fraternity houses, where we could see Palo Alto engineers jogging in the golden foothills. In 1984, we lined up around the corner for a lottery number that, if later drawn, would allow us to buy a 128K Macintosh for one thousand dollars, which was then a highly subsidized rate. We ate LSD before we went windsurfing, so as to better appreciate the beauty and simplicity of Newtonian physics. I fell in love with a fellow student who held down two part-time jobs, one as an aerobics instructor, the other as a venture capitalist. In Silicon Valley, pleasure and industry had somehow merged. It was an enlightened world, capitalism with a human face. California offered the world a promised land, a future economy based on high technology that did not enslave us in an Orwellian nightmare, but rather freed us to be human beings: to call our bosses by their first names; to wear biking shorts to work; to treat our computers as if they were loyal dogs, ready at our every command. In this future there would be leisure time, lots of it. We imagined spending large chunks of that leisure time with our children, and they would know us as real people with souls and problems, rather than just as authoritarian fathers and mothers. Women would work beside men--for they could program or input just as well as men--and we would all be happy. Our product would be information, no back-breaking assembly required. We would all be really healthy because we rode our bikes to work and could take walks in the foothills on our lunch break.

It was a delicious, beautiful promise. But seven years and five jobs later, it has been hard to keep in touch with that hope. I'm not a doomsday writer, and I'm not threatened by technology, but the workplace seems to be getting worse before it gets better.

In most ways, the world of high finance was the antithesis of that promise. It was the dark side of the dream, despite the fact that it had all the right elements in place. I worked with the most intelligent and educated group of people I have associated with. Women worked beside men. The technology was futuristic: the average desk had four computers sunk into the well-oiled mahogony--two of which were linked online to "live" brokers markets, one which ran pricing models and crunched numbers, and one of which was an internal First Boston "live" product-by-product update. Long before "Ethernet," or "cyberspace," or "E-mail", we spent our entire days living in the wiring of our computers and telephone lines. We swore by the fax and telephone. Wall Street was a metaphor, a term used to describe the global electronic village of institutional finance. And on top of all that, we had the perfect, futuristic product: expertise in money. We bought and sold money. Money was the perfect information commodity. It was universal. It was liquid. It did not need to be manufactured, even offshore by the Taiwanese. We had expertise in money, and access, and that is what we sold. We sold the content of our brains, our predictions for how money would change in value. Information. I rode a motorcycle to work. On every count, we had the pieces of the dream.

But only the bike messengers wore biking shorts. Very few of us could use our computer models for even the simplest pricing. Men told dirty jokes around the women. The women tried to act tough all the time. Nobody ever saw their children. There was no relief from having to sell our information, from having to push our customers. Our backs hurt and our skin chafed and our feet swelled and our hair fell out. The flourescent lighting gave us headaches. The computer monitors gave us headaches. The excessive coffee drinking gave us headaches. We were at our desks at four in the morning, and we never, ever, took a day off or called in sick. During volatile periods, we slept with a beeper. We were addicted. In my 22 months, I only took three lunch breaks.

What went wrong?

It has been a long time figuring that out.

Flipping Economics Inside-Out

The first two years of my economics curriculum at Stanford focussed on the tools and models used to understand and alter economic processes. We learned why water is cheap and diamonds are expensive. We learned how governments stimulate the economy by printing money and building bridges. We understood why all the gasoline stations are at the same intersections. We studied why Volkswagon builds its cars in Mexico. This was purely theoretical economics: Country A and Country B. Company alpha and Company beta. Guns and Butter. Widgets and Gadgets.

In the second two years, I began to specialize in a branch of real-world economics that examined the social mores of a culture or country and asked how those customs affected--negatively or positively--their economic output. It merged cultural studies with economics. I studied extensively with now one of the most prominent Japanese-model economic theorists, Masahiko Aoki. Japanese culture was both more homogenous and more formal than ours, giving rise to a different mode of economics based on long-term "contracts" and communal interest rather than self-interest. This was exactly at the same time that our business leaders became enamored with Japan, so I was on the cusp of an important reevaluation of our business practices: In my first year in Aoki's class there were only thirteen students; the next year there were 146, with another hundred turned away. I moved into graduate-level classes in order to pursue this culture-based line of reasoning. We studied the Israeli kibbutz and the Basque villagers, both of which have very tight communal bonds that lead to extremely high worker productivity. We compared those to lumbermill cooperatives and Yugoslavian worker-controlled firms, which did not have communal bonds to underpin their economic structure and inevitably failed. I wrote four honors theses, graduated with highest honors, and was offered a full scholarship to continue towards a Ph.D, which I declined. It was a difficult decision, but I lacked the confidence that economics could describe the world out there. In all of the cases I studied, the existing culture was the agent of change, the X, and the economic structure was its effect, its Y. I wanted to turn this algebra inside out. I wanted to understand how our jobs affect our lives, not how our lives affect our jobs. Most people do not feel that they are the agent of change when it comes to work. Most people feel that they are the Y, that their lifestyle and dreams are substantially limited by their jobs. It was the most obvious topic, but economists never talked about it. I wanted to understand how our economy affected our culture--particularly because the economy was changing out of an Industrial mode and into an Information mode. If the economy changed, our culture would have to change. It would be a time of great stress on our social systems. The Information Age would not be harmless. Our traditional social systems would be obsolete.

This was how I went into the world, in the spring of 1986. Six months later I was on the mortgage desk of First Boston's Taxable Fixed Income Sales department and I felt very much like the Y, a slave to the blitzkrieg of information I was supposed to master. I had no time to adopt an academic stance, no time to consider the premise I had set out for myself, for I was living it. I had gotten a job, a job of the future, and my life was going to hell.

The Struggle for Women

For a while, my aerobics-instructor/venture capitalist girlfriend also worked at First Boston, in the Corporate Finance department, which is the side that befriends corporate raiders and CEOs in order to convince them that they should buy another company or split one into pieces. It was a different culture than my sales and trading side, but it suffered the same social dynamics of our contemporary economy. Nina was one of two professional women among ten men. Her father had been CFO of a large lumber company, and she had grown up determined to be successful. She wore suits and starched white shirts and pulled her blonde hair into a tight bun. She learned to speak in short, clipped sentences. She learned how to work the copier and to download Dun & Bradstreet reports on prospective companies. She learned to keep her hips from rocking. She quit teaching aerobics. She learned not to cry when she was told, at six in the evening, that a breakup analysis of Genentec was needed by eight the next morning. She learned to be the equal of men by acting just like one. When in doubt, she acted like she thought her father would act.

The denial of her caretaking, emotional side took a psychological toll. Her skin looked stressed and lost its glow. Her hair thinned. Then she began to lose weight, dropping from 128 pounds to about 108--most of that drop not fat but lean body mass, muscle, the hard work of her aerobics years. Ironically, all the secretaries at First Boston told her that she looked great, better than ever. They wanted to know what diet plan she was using. You are so thin! What's your secret? What hurts me so much, to think about it, was that these comments came from the other women, not the men. The other women made it sound as if her stress was a good thing, that she was lucky. The men said nothing. They ignored her physical transition. Guys gain and lose twenty pounds all the time.

It was hard on me as well. We wanted to work in the same company in order to stay in touch, to know what each other was doing all day, to not let our work come between us. We thought it an enlightened philosophy, but it came with its own baggage. Just like the men in the corporate finance department, I began to think of my girlfriend in the sexless way I looked upon all of my coworkers. I had a harder and harder time seeing the woman I remembered from my Stanford days, the one who kept flowers in the window and would practice aerobics while naked on the bed. She had a harder and harder time accessing her playful nature and truly enjoying smaller beauties of life. She spoke all the time of wanting notoriety and professional respect. She brought home research reports on the paper industry and biotech, stacking them up beside our bed, tucking them under her pillow.

After one year, she began to look for another job in professions more sane and kinder to her identity. She was highly qualified for just about everything, and she was quickly offered an editor position at Hippocrates magazine, now known as Health. The executive editor there was a woman who Nina thought would be a good role model.

Nina went to talk through her decision with her female coworker, Louisa at First Boston. Nina told Louisa that she was thinking of quitting, that she wanted to take this job as an editor working for a woman. She'd had it working for men. Louisa chastized her. Louisa said that if Nina quit, it would confirm the men's hypothesis that women couldn't do this job, that they didn't have what it takes. If Nina quit, she would irreparably harm the reputation of every professional woman that worked in their department in the future. Louisa said that Nina owed it to the women's movement to stay at her job and beat these men at their own game.

That was a huge burden to shoulder. Nina did not take the job at Hippocrates. Instead, she took a job in the sales & trading bond department at Paine Webber, across the street. She was a fast learner. She sold Japanese banker's acceptances. One month after she was hired, the stock market fell 508 points, Paine Webber lost a ton of money, and every single person in the bond departments of Paine Webber's nationwide offices was given eight hours to pack their bags and leave the building.

The Struggle for Men

It was inconceivable to my father when I had quit First Boston, that I had walked out on my own. My father was enchanted by that world, by so many people who made a living just by talking on the telephone, how our entire inventory was stored in a computer. My father ran a small company, ReNew Manufacturing, that bought old plastic telephone casings from Pacific Northwest Bell for a dollar a unit. 30 employees in his warehouse cleaned the casings, filled the nicks with wax, and repainted them, then sold them back to the phone company for two bucks per. My dad's employees were all high school dropouts. He'd frequently find them smoking dope behind the flammable paint barrels. When I was in high school, Dad had tried to upgrade the company by adding an electronic repair shop for the phones' innards. He installed these phones in our house--they never worked very well. Dad and his company were on the verge of the telecommunications revolution, but he never quite made it into the new age. By the time I arrived at First Boston, his company was frozen in Chapter 11. When I'd come home on the holidays, the phone would ring, and I was under strict orders to tell the caller that my father wasn't around. They'd call during the night. A couple times, to get away from it all, my father came down to visit me.

He'd just sit behind my desk and watch, sometimes turn and stare at the 180-degree, 42nd-floor view of the Bay Area. He loved to watch me talk on several phones at the same time as I zipped through several computer screens and listened to currency trades in London over a speakerphone. He loved the ongoing chatter, and so many fine young men and women all sported up in fancy duds, and the ease with which we seemed to make money. From Seattle, he would call my 800-number when he woke up in the morning to get an update on inflation in Australia, because he'd managed to hide a little money from the bankruptcy court, and with it he'd been buying $AZ Euros. I knew that he loved to correct his broker (retail brokers never had current updates on Australian markets) "Well, my son says . . ."

That was the closest I have ever been to my father. It's a rare thing to actually get to see someone in your family work at their job, to begin to understand what they do eight or ten hours a day. This is a sad, very real aspect of our economy--that the people we are supposed to be closest to, our family, have little tangible sense of how we spend huge chunks of our lives. It's something we accept as part of modern life, but I'm not sure that we should accept it. It wasn't always this way, in historical terms. In the eight thousand years that we were an agrarian economy, we could see the fields we worked in, and we could eat the crops grown in those fields. At harvest time, the whole family worked together. Then, at the dawn of the Industrial Age, only 120 years ago, men suddenly left the home for the factories. It's been hard on all of us ever since. "Mystery" became an aspect of manhood, as well as "independence," character traits broadly reinforced by movie heroes. We are no longer supposed to understand women, or vice versa. And it has now become exponentially worse as we have entered the information age: at least I had those broken telephones to remind me what my father did for a living. Nina, by contrast, had no idea what her CFO father did all day. Something with numbers. Though he worked for a lumber company, he never brought home loads of two-by-fours or sheets of plywood. He carried a briefcase full of paper. When she visited his office, there was never any lumber or timber to be seen.

I believe that it isn't "strange" for spouses to want to work together. My parents (who are divorced) and Nina's parents (who are hanging in there) admit that the happiest part of their marriages were the earlier years when they struggled together to overcome their poverty, when they shared a common goal.

Nina and I married ten days after I left First Boston. One of the reasons I had quit was that "happily-married-investment-banker" was an oxymoron. We had a small ceremony in a park near the University of Washington. Our fathers cried. My mother's boyfriend was the drummer in the blues band that kept us dancing past midnight. When we returned to San Francisco we tried working together again. It was another experiment. With our sweat equity and a third investor's money, we bought an insider's newsletter on San Francisco politics. She was the editor, I the publisher, and we had several other part-time reporters. Our small office looked over Geary Street near Union Square. We spent most of our time in the field, so although we shared a common goal I only worked with Nina maybe one day a week, at crunch time. San Francisco had a new liberal mayor after nine years of Dianne Feinstein. The grassroots political organizations held weekly meetings in the backs of bars and the basements of churches. Vacancy control went on the ballot, as well as a measure to keep the Navy's U.S.S. Missouri from homeporting at Hunter's Point. It was a delicious, beautiful time.

Three years later Nina and I separated, and I moved into a boardinghouse in lower Pacific Heights.

Political Revolution

Studying cultural economics at Stanford gave us little to be excited about. I often felt inferior to friends who studied political science. As at most liberal arts universities, politics was the topic of choice. Hate speech and sexual-tolerance were the source of protests at the student union. South Africa and tuition costs were for sit-ins at the Chancellor's office. Sexual harrassment was for the dinner table. A multicultural curriculum was for the library lobbies. Solving the Cold War was for the coffeehouses. I sat amongst my friends with little to say. Gorbachev had been elected. I had read the newspapers about him, but none of it stuck in my mind other than that he was young, though that had given me hope. I did not know whether he was a Premier or a President or a Czar. I did not know if there was a Parliament to approve any arms treaties he seemed willing to make with Reagan. When I told my friends that Japan was starting to sell mainframe computers and telecommunications satelittes to Russia under a new trade agreement, they looked at me blankly.

While I worked in finance, I watched as the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed both arms treaties and trade treaties. Slowly, democratic reforms were implemented. Then, in the Fall of 1989, as Soviet control over the Eastern bloc loosened, the borders broke open--first in Hungary, then East Germany, then Lithuania, then more countries than I could properly pronounce. I was working in book publishing by then, and we immediately put together a book of essays by writers from these countries. It was widely regarded that politics had very little to do with the collapse of the communist empire. Instead, the driving force for democracy was their corrupted and inefficient command economy. When its failures became obvious, the political system that ruled it also became a target. For me, this was all great retribution for having studied economics rather than politics. Economics was not merely the way to explain why the dollar was worth 2,300 rupees on the black market; it was the way to explain why governments failed and citizens revolted.

Particularly, it helped me answer Why then? Why 1989? Why did Russia's economic failures suddenly become obvious? In two ways, the answer has much to do with the Information Age. First, our modern communication devices brought the rest of the world into Russia's living room. They saw a strange world of both massive wealth and desperate poverty, a world of neon and superhighways and computer animation and endless consumerism. It was different, and enticing for its difference. Second, it was obvious that we now worked in office buildings, pushing paper, while most of them still worked in factories, welding steel. We were in an Information Age; they were still in the Industrial Age. We were an economic superpower; they were a second-class economy, a relic. As long as we were both industrial economies, they could match us missile for missile, truck for truck, bomb for bomb. They were less efficient at it, but they just worked longer hours. Their inefficiency only became obvious when we left the Industrial Economy behind.

The Information Economy was making promises again. It kept luring me into its web. It had given to my wife with one hand and taken away with the other. It put us both on the psychiatrists' couch. And now all of Eastern Europe wanted to sign up.

Cultural Revolution

My mother also attended Stanford. She graduated magna cum laude in the late autumn of 1962, two semesters ahead of schedule, passing up what would have been a playful spring in order to return to Seattle to be with my father. Even with all that education, she never seriously considered a profession. "That was not what was expected of me," she reminds me at our infrequent family gatherings. "It was relatively unheard of." When she divorced in 1973, she had three boys to feed but no skills to get a job. She worked two years in a framing shop. Then three years as a secretary. Then a year as the baker at a muffin store. She has worked for twenty years straight, but she has never had a career, nor the skills on which to build one. She tried taking accounting classes at the community college, but there just wasn't time to do the homework. Recently she moved into some portion of the bureaucracy surrounding the University of Washington, and on her desk is a Macintosh. I think of those twenty years, and of the dry rot in her house's foundation, and of the vacation she wants in Oaxaca--and I want to train her in all that computer can do. I want to think that the Information Economy hasn't passed her by completely, that there's still time to get on board. I can't help but be tempted.

1962, 1986. Only 24 years difference, same university, and I did not know a single woman who did not desire to work or enter graduate school after graduation. Zero.

As it was for the Cold War, the Information Economy has been a catalyst for civil rights. When physical labor was removed as the basis of employment, the legal argument that women should be excluded from the workplace because of their biological difference was taken away. When the walls came down, women stormed into the workplace, accounting for much of the economic growth of the 1980s. My mother, who is now more liberal than all of my San Francisco friends put together, has made criticizing Republicans into her daily exercise. "They are," she says, "so fond of their `economic growth.' Then they blame our social problems on women leaving the home. They can't have it both ways. If all 30 million working mothers didn't go into work tomorrow, our economy would collapse."

The Novel

I don't want to aggrandize the novel I am writing. I don't mean to imply it covers all these bases. It is not a work of philosophy, or of politics, or even of economics--it is a work of fiction. It is my vision that so many of the seemingly unrelated crises affecting our society--from why children don't know when the Civil War ended, to why the majority of poor people are women, to why men are beating drums in the woods, to why heart attacks among the middle-aged have gone up--have their roots in our new economy and our new jobs. I am arguing that a novel about work, about the workplace where pure capitalism merged with information-as-commodity and futuristic technology, is a novel from the frontlines of the most dramatic change in our society. It is a report from the trenches of an economic superpower. My characters are the soldiers in that army of laborers we are about to become. Their marriages and health and children's education and masculinity and femininity are all going to hell, but they are addicted to the work that gives them these problems. My narrator is the sole survivor of this war, the last man standing when the smoke clears. My novel is his rapid-fire rant of that war.

War as Metaphor

The metaphor of war has a certain appropriateness. The novels from our soldiers are the dark side of our ill-advised forays into geopolitics. O'Brien. Vonnegut. Heller. Countless others. But now geo-economics have replaced geopolitics. We have trade wars, measured not in land but in trade deficits. We have economic superpowers. We have a president elected to fix our economy. We used to have the Marshall Plan and the Monroe Doctrine; now we have the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mastricht Treaty, and GATT.

War terminology had also been part of the lexicon of the trading floor. When the phones began to ring, at about five in the morning, we would yell out "incoming," and duck down into our foxhole-like desks. On big days that there was sure to be a lot of activity--if, say, the trade deficit figure was going to be announced--we would get ourselves "combat-ready." After we had sold a large block of bonds, and had hung up the phone, we would yell out "bombs away," because that is often how we felt about the quality of the bonds we were selling to the savings & loans--that they would soon blow up on their new owner. At the end of the day, when we would go through our trading tickets to make sure all of our trades were recorded, we were "counting scalps." And probably the most telling metaphor was on October 17, 1987, the day the stock market dropped 508 points and my girlfriend lost her job: the stock market dropped that afternoon because interest rates had shot up that morning; interest rates had shot up because there was a rumor that a Japanese insurance company had sold one billion dollars of 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds, creating a panic that the Japanese had no confidence in the quality of U.S. debt. The next morning, we were already joking about it: we had dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, and 42 years later they dropped an economic bomb on Wall Street.

The Vision in the Visible

My marriage had all these problems which went unaddressed, including my untested manhood, Nina's obsessive ambitions, our morning-to-night busyness, and our lack of friends. We didn't know these made us at-risk for worse. There was another woman, a separation, three marriage counselors, two psychiatrists, a hypnotist and an astrologist. Four long months of mania, of sleepless nights and binge eating and a dark urge to break all rules, to chase the forbidden. Time slowed down. Each day was endless. In certain ways, I was oddly relieved to know that I was human, that I was capable of cracking, that I was not controllable. I was also glad that at last, after all those years where work was how we defined our lives, we could no longer ignore our problems. For the first time in my adult life, work was unimportant. Seven years, five careers, a seemingly endless struggle to find my niche in the economy, and my life had gone to hell. Finally.

Generation X is not having careers, and it's not falling in love, and it's not getting married. They are protesting the new economic war, and they are avoiding its draft. In Seattle and San Francisco, my friends look at my life--my short, telling history--and what they see scares them.

The promise of the information age has yet to arrive. But I am not a regressionist. I cannot argue that we return to the fields, or that women return to the homes, or that we bring back the factories. I grew up in this Information Economy, came of age in its promise. I was the first generation to have a television for a babysitter. I was the first generation to have divorced parents. I was the first generation to come home from school to an empty home. I was the first generation to embrace the microcomputer. This is not a world I can retreat from.

Instead, I ask questions of my world. I ask questions of the most obvious sort. Why can't my 53-year old mother get a decent job? Why can't my wife act feminine and not risk bias or harassment on the job? Why am I supposed to be "mysterious," or "independent"? Why does my neck hurt at the end of the day? Why am I short of breath? Will my children know me any more than I knew my father? Between the reality and the promise are cultural customs that no longer have a basis in the Information Economy. Why can't we just let them go?

I try to take work less seriously now. Some days, though, I am still wound up when I come home. Nina can sense it--we have learned to watch out for the signs. She takes me into the bedroom and has me lie down on my back and close my eyes. She slowly counts down from ten, and with each number I take a step down a dark staircase. At one, the door opens and I am in a warm silver pool. I slowly swim to the bottom and open another door, and now I am in an orange river, with blue goldfish. The river carries me past a green meadow. She leads me into the meadow, where I lie down on my back and make angels in the grass by waving my arms and legs. When the thoughts come to me--my thoughts of the day, my thoughts of work--she has me throw them in the river. I throw them all in the river. "Let them go," she whispers. "Let them go."