mr dave

People In The City is from Air’s 2nd full length album – 10 000Hz Legend, it’s one of the standout tracks on the disc. I had the chance to see them about 3 weeks before that particular clip was filmed, at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC. I remember the bass being punchier in the middle at my show, a little rougher around the edges if you will; it made the whole thing rock a little harder in my opinion. Live footage starts about halfway through the clip.

Now as for the way I got to see that show. Wow. Fasten your seatbelts because this particular rabbit hole gets really retarded really fast. Have I ever mentioned how stupid I used to be? Stubbornness and naivety can only take so much blame…

This goes back to the Winter of 2001. The previous 6 months had been quite eventful, graduating from college in video game design (which was really more like 2 years of ‘high’ school), a job training / work term thing of questionable legality in Seattle that was supposed to be a week but turned into 3 months yet somehow didn’t completely blow up in everyone’s faces (mine and 4 others), and a subsequent contract to work on a small scale game with a major online presence.

That’s where the good stuff ends.

The reality of that new job with the contract was that we were for the most part idiots in terms of managing ourselves. We were all too young and too concerned with remaining friends for one of us to step up and be the boss. The two graphics guys literally spent every single afternoon of our employment playing NHL ‘92 on the Sega Genesis. None of us actually went to work, rather we hung out in the office and ‘worked’ on our game. That’s not entirely true, the 2 programmers tried to work but a company without an actual ‘business’ man at the top is just a bunch of dudes hanging out regardless of intentions or words. I was the level designer with a serious case of tunnel vision on the special-ness of my snowflake.

By the time the winter set in I’d started ‘working’ later hours, showing up around 4 in the afternoon and sticking around until 4-5 in the morning. Part of the reason was due to rendering times for the worlds I was trying to create, lighting could take upwards of 90 minutes to render prior to being able to test the result to check for bugs / issues. That alone should have been enough indication that I should have scrapped everything and started over but that would have required experience and knowledge. But I was the only one who really knew how to create the worlds in the proprietary 3d game engines we had at the time, hell even my teachers would refer to me in class when it came to specifics about building in them. And so, my head kept swelling.

The other reason I never bothered revising my method was because of the seedy underside of the early days of the net. IRC. I’d start the render and fire up a chat client and start the sad dance of lonely nerds. Ahh yes, the late 90s / early 2000s - the heyday of long-distance e-relationships. God. Damn. We were STUPID.

So anyway one fine January evening I started a chat with SillyGurl (all names have been changed to protect me from those who have threatened legal action in the past) and we hit it off. First I added her to ICQ to help her with computer issues at her place. She worked some minor bookkeeping job in Baltimore. Within a few weeks it became rather apparent that she was obsessing with me and trying to gain my approval or praise on everything she did. I mentioned smoking weed, and having experimented with other psychedelics while in college, she’d never had that opportunity so within a few weeks of ‘meeting’ me online she’s now telling me about having started to puff and partying then how she tried just tried LSD randomly about a month into her new change. Even as stupid as I was I recognized that as dangerous behavior and tried counseling her to slow down a bit.

My main thing with ‘meeting’ people online back in the day was that the relative anonymity of indirect communication made it easier to be completely honest about ourselves. It’s not like Facebook existed yet with the majority of our specific personal information listed for the world to see. That’s not to say I hadn’t hidden the personal information I’d listed in ICQ when I filled out my profile as a ‘professional’ for work

So anyway, stupid boy and broken woman kept chatting. She’d start to obsess, I’d push her away, get bored after a few days, go back and the idiocy perpetuated itself. Ignorance doesn’t absolve guilt. Fact is though, the back of my head was tossing up as many red flags as it could produce I was just choosing to ignore them.

It got to the point where she claimed to be chatting with me during a party at her place. She’d have people over but kept excusing herself to send messages back to me. At one point one of her friends popped onto the pc and asked me a few questions and if she could add me to her own chat client at home. So I added DirtyGurl to the mix. Yeah… effing genius…
So that obviously created the start of a whole pile of dramatic e-love triangle drama. The main problem was that I was still very much a stupid ‘nice guy’, I wanted to help out SillyGurl, I also have a very hard time saying ‘no’ so when DirtyGurl claimed to want to help the situation I accepted. Reality was DirtyGurl was a poop disturber who just wanted to cause strife, and SillyGurl was a drama queen who took any comment to heart then emotionally overreacted to everything.

That actually lasted for a couple of weeks. By the time we could see the end of Winter things had calmed down a bit. I think it was near the end of March where I started asserting myself more and putting my foot down on the situation. I’d grown tired of constantly defending myself against their bickering to the point where I blocked DirtyGurl and gave the Silly one an ultimatum – do ‘not’ reference any more of her garbage drama to me or I block you too. The calm only lasted a few hours, so I blocked both and then went to bed.

Next day I get to work and my coworkers tell me about a phone message from a law enforcement type. Here’s another thing about letting a bunch of idiot nerds run an ‘office’ – we had two separate offices, one for artists, one for programmers, we only bothered getting a phone in the programmer office. So they had informed this LawLady that I normally worked evenings, and so she’d try calling again that night, only the programmers locked their office when they left that evening. The phone rang non-stop for over 4 hours that evening...

Next morning when the first programmer showed up, I got his help. 2 minutes later we’ve got the number for the missed call and one Google search later and we’re seeing an area code map of the Baltimore area. Time to come clean a bit, it helped that he was actually in the process of marrying a woman he’d met online, so no mockery or ridicule, and a definite plan to leave the door unlocked that evening.

Fast forward a few hours, this time I’m able to get the call from LawLady who described herself as a Sherrif’s Deputy for the area dealing with an attempted suicide. Apparently after I blocked SillyGurl she sent me some messages letting me know she couldn’t go on without me and that she’d take a bunch of pills if I didn’t reply (she was already blocked by this point so I never got the messages). She apparently smartened up after taking the pills and called 911 who then found her unconscious and took her to the hospital for treatment. Part of her ‘treatment’ was directly addressing her actions with everyone involved and since I was technically the last person in communication with her (our chat screen was open with suicidal messages when they found her) I was involved in that process.

LawLady and I talked for over 3 hours.

During that time I agreed to unblock SillyGurl so that we could chat a bit and hopefully smooth things out a bit. I did feel guilty and I agreed to help – for recovery, as a result I ended up with LawLady’s chat info as well just in case SillyGurl seemed to start freaking out I could warn her of a potential 2nd attempt on her life or something. SillyGurl and I chatted a few times after that but it was obviously not at all the same anymore, she had quit her old job and started studying tourism at a local college and I encouraged her to keep up with it. This would have been around April. As things cooled down with SillyGurl they started to heat up with LawLady.

Over the next 2-3 months LawLady and I started chatting more and more, even to the point of giving her my phone number so we could actually talk on the phone. She had apparently studied psychology as well as corrections to end up in the position she had with the county but it wasn’t going to last much longer. She found it too stressful and wanted to take some time off to work on her Master’s thesis – about how the increased popularity of the internet affects interpersonal relationships. Well isn’t that a nice co-inky-dink; and with my recent direct involvement with an e-relationship gone bad I was a perfect candidate for ‘research’.

That’s when the suggestion to visit Baltimore for a week in June came up, and within it the chance to see Air.

On that note we're over 1500 words again so I’m gonna cut this off here for now, part 2 will follow in 2 weeks (it has a car chase ).

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i am the universe