In the years before I could drive, I prized a collection of George Carlin cassettes I had. I’d learned about him from a show on Nickelodeon called Turkey TV, which for some reason played George Carlin skits, among other things, for children in the late afternoon. All the curse words were bleeped out, and I remember vividly wondering about one: him making driving motions and saying, “You drive like old people BEEEEEP. Slow and sloppy!” God, what had he said? To steal the joke and tell it myself, I would have to find out.
          Seriousness begins when there are certain recordings not available on cassette—Carlin On Campus, for example—and you seek them out in the used record store and dub them to tape in the name of completism.
          My mom had a vague sense that George Carlin was dirty, so she asked to hear one. I gave her the one with “A Place for my Stuff” on it, which I had calculated had some bad words on it, but nothing sexual, nothing gross, nothing I thought she would object to. It passed, as I remember. I had a yellow Walkman, and for several years I listened to George Carlin tapes over and over, knowing all the jokes word for word and pause for pause. There was a pleasure in hearing them again. In the summer visiting my grandparents, I can remember lying on the hammock in the black as night basement, day after day, listening to them.
          “Ever think about the plastic dog crap in the novelty store window? ‘I’d like to see something in a dog crap, please. Do you have something in a Saint Bernard?’” “‘Yes, but there's no room in the window for that.’”

          Of course I learned the seven words you can’t say on TV. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. I could say it for a couple years, probably, before I would hear cunt used in any other context. What was cunt? It was the mysterious word in the list—a jewel to discover for later, because understanding everything right away is always awful. Turns out it would be my favorite. Want to continue to offend people well into our era? Cunt, the greatest word on earth, will still do it. Bless you.
          I met a kid at school, sometime in seventh grade, Chris B., who also knew the seven words you couldn’t say on TV. His dad apparently had a record, and he’d spotted the same beauty in it I had heard. We both said it, seeing who could say it faster. I was slower, but although I didn’t point it out, he didn’t quite enunciate all the words. I learned something from this: you never sacrifice the punchline for a technicality. His version was flawed, because he was trying to win. “I can say it faster than Josh!” he’d say. I didn’t yet know the word Philistine, but I had formed the concept in my head. “He can say it faster,” I’d say.
          When you get all the albums together in one place, and you become familiar with them—from the earliest I had, Killer Carlin, where he does a Lenny Bruce impression, “Make you a malted, make you a malted?? Ok, BOOM, you’re a malted!” to the latest, which I believe was the aforementioned Carlin on Campus, where he ends with a cheer, “Ratshit, batshit, dirty old twat! 69 assholes tied in a knot! hooray! lizardshit! FUCK!”—you get a sense of temporality. He went from dry, to the hippy druggy guy, to the angry, cynical guy he became in the 80s. It was a life, spelled out for me in my comedy records. He was the same, but different.
          The best laughs, when you stole his jokes in junior high school, always came from the dirty words and the louder, angrier bits he did later on. But I always, as a 13 year old, liked the mid-period George Carlin who talked about words. “I like words, words are all we have really. We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid (whoooosh, wheeeleeeewhooooo). Then we assign a word to that thought (POP!), and we're stuck, with that word, for that thought.”
          “With a name like George, you’re never done spelling it. G-E-O-R ... G-E. O-R. G-E. O-R.”
          “Our God—he’s only third guy in charge. Number three. The REAL God, he’s too busy throwing fireballs around the firmament. ‘What, Earth? Never heard of it! Sunday, right? Right, the only day I have off, and they all crowd into the church.’”
          “Wonderful W.I.N.O. radio! W.I.N.O. time, bing-bong, five minutes past the big hour of five o’clock.”
          “What will be expected of you as an audience member? Will I be a credit to my row?”

          Lots of times I didn’t even understand what he was talking about. “Boys have dreams, but little girls have the banister. The banister knows, the banister is sensitive to all this. Mom, dad. I’d like you to meet the banister. ‘Banister, can you support my daughter?’ ‘I can support anyone who holds the handrail!’” No idea what he was talking about. It was always a good day when I’d say to myself, “I got a George Carlin joke today that I’ve known verbatim for seven years, and I’ve performed to a group of people, to uproarious laughter, at least four times.”
          In a lot of ways I learned about the world from George. In Waverly, Tennessee, we didn’t have Catholics, but George talked about being Catholic all the time. I knew all the funny, awesome things about being Catholic, but had no idea what it was. “I used to be an Irish Catholic, now I’m an American. You know, you grow.” He talked about the Hispanic priest who all the teenage boys went to confession with. “Because he didn’t really seem to understand the sins. Or, he didn’t take them personally. It wasn’t a personal affront to him. We used to say, ‘In and out, three Hail Marys, you’re back on the street with father Rivera!’”
          Everything I know about religion, everything I know about drugs, everything I know about New York City, everything I know about a lot of things—it’s all based on something from George Carlin, way back. For most of the middle part of his life, his reoccurring theme, other than words, and other than profanity, was to be kind to other people. Describing Christianity, he said, “Love yourself, love your God, love your neighbor. Because basically you’re all the same person! We just don’t have uniforms yet.”
          These weren’t bad things to hear. George, you were a good teacher.

the lab where i work—lab 1016, sometimes featured in the osmium photo up above—has seven small rooms in it. in many of these rooms there is an institutional clock mounted near the ceiling. these are the same clear-faced, black-rimmed timeguys you’d recognize from a school wall, or a cafeteria.

all of these clocks read different times. one says 3:45, another 12:10, and one is 10:30 and never moves. as the old saying goes, that last one is right twice a day; however, the operating ones continually run away, and are therefore continually wrong.

in one of the middle rooms there is a single clock who is always right. from years of experience, i instinctively know to believe none of them unless it’s him. if i’m without a watch, i’ll walk through to him, glance up, and then return to place.

if you’ve ever tried to fix a clock like this, you know you can’t, because the smooth back is connected only to a 4-pin wire. the responsibility of setting the clock is controlled from afar. an empty control room covered in dust.

two days ago i walked in and saw that the correct clock, the reliable one, was missing. disconnected, just the wire hung from the wall. facilities had come and gotten it. a day later, it was back. and it now reads the wrong time as well.

perfection has been achieved. the timemasters in the dead control room have finished their job. chairman stalin finally got around to my lab. in the future we won’t need time. god bless the collective mind.

sarah occasionally updates us on the antics of other sarah browns, such as sarah.brown@gmail, sarah_brown@gmail, and sarah brown the wife of gordon brown, prime minister of great britain, who must have a permutation of the standard sarah brown email choices herself. kevin fanning also weighs in with the activities of the other k fannings, who are oldly parallel in a square-earth kind of way. if only they could all bump into each other on the K train.

josh gallaway is not a particularly common name, as gallaway is an ellis island-style misspelling of the more typical galloway. this means i’m my own first google result, and i rarely have to beat people to the joshuagallaway login name. however, the internets haven’t always been so big that we had to have a formal first and last name relationship with it. me and inner-net, we go way back.

in the prehistoric times of the internet, when your mom and your grandmother didn’t have email addresses, when the internet consisted mostly of bulletin boards, and everyone, everyone, had a superfancy dot-sig file with ascii art and quotes and shit on it, my friend justin and i, both college students, wanted to talk using the intertubes. there was a problem, though—he didn’t have access to IRC, and i didn’t have access to a TALK client. there were two ways to go about this—IRC and TALK—and we each could do one of them, but we didn’t match up.

undaunted, i went on a fishing expedition of the inchoate net one night, trying to find myself a way to use TALK. each college town worth its salt had a freenet, and if you could telnet, then you could hop from one of these freenets to another. i followed link upon link, looking for one that would grant a user access to TALK.

i found one at the tallahassee freenet. hooray, i thought, and applied for an account. the tallahassee freenet said sure, and asked me what i wanted my email address to be.

nowadays this goes like: can i be 123joshuagallaway1974@hotmail.com or something, right? but, that day, i suggested josh. josh@tfn.net. and the TFN said sure thing. so now i was josh.

i get all wistful sometimes for them days. i could be josh. just josh. was there no one in tallahassee named josh who had tried this before? here i was, sitting in cleveland, my feet up on the desk, taking the name josh away from floridian internet users. i wonder: who is josh@gmail.com? who is josh.com?

but these were different times. people had better things to do than getting on the “internet” and reading alt.music. clearly being josh@tfn.net wasn’t cool, otherwise i wouldn’t have been josh@tfn.net.

here’s the strange thing about being josh@tfn.net, though: i got a lot of mail for other joshes. just normal things—spam didn’t exist yet, so everything was a personal message of some kind.

it was during finals in 1993 when i got a long email from a girl, intended for her brother josh. the gist was: "how are you doing? i’m all settled in in israel, and i’m looking forward to the summer program. jim isn’t around anymore, which i guess is ok. there are things i don’t like about it, though. it bothers me that he could fuck me the same week he broke up with me."

on a sunny afternoon, i wrote this girl back and explained to her about not being the right josh. her message had such a humanity to it—something so personal from a total stranger. when she replied, she was embarrassed about it, but friendly nonetheless. “Ignore all my bullshit!” she said. off an on we emailed for a year or two, almost never about anything personal. i didn’t even know her name, because she signed her messages Memorygirl. we would talk about world events and music and about the internet, like isn’t all this shit cool? once she asked me how i made her previous email come up in my message indented with a bunch of greater than symbols, because she wished she could do that. “magic!” i said. “No, seriously,” she wrote back. “Please tell me how to do it.” “i don’t actually know,” i said. “it really is magic. my email just does it.” “Oh! He he,” she said.

“Why do you type in all lower case?” “it’s email, so it’s informal and no one cares.” “I can’t stop doing it. I always hit the shift key like I have to do it. I can’t stop!” “you probably know how to type, don’t you? i never learned how, so i’m doing this with two fingers.”

i wonder who that girl was.

every week or two, i would get something for josh. “Josh, dude, we’re playing D&D on Thursday at 8.” i would write back the same thing every time, “sorry your message went the wrong place. i’m josh gallaway, but my address is just josh. try adding your friend’s last initial to the ‘josh’ and maybe that will work.” “Josh, did you get the pictures I sent?” “Josh, I tried to call you.”

the most interesting message i got for “josh” was a few years later, in 1997. aol existed at that point, people had webpages, and civilians had email addresses—and by civilians i mean people who didn’t read alt.music even though they could, because they had better things to do. i checked my mail, and had a message that was along these lines:

Dear Josh,

I wanted to write to tell you what a great time I had last night. Everything was so wonderful, and you are a wonderful person. Such a gentleman! You are, all the time, and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before. So many people in the world just want to be ugly to everyone, and it would be too depressing to bear if I didn’t know that there’s someone as special as you out there. It was really one of the greatest days of my life. I know I’m gushing, but I think it’s important that you understand exactly how great you are, because I know you don’t think you are, and people don’t tell each other these kinds of things very often. But you are. You are really wonderful. I’m looking forward to seeing you soon.

-Tina.

i don’t remember if it was tina, but it was something like that. it was really one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever heard someone say to someone else. it was a perfect jewel, one paragraph, that wasn’t spoiled in any way by sarcasm, neediness, or sexual subtexts. it radiated sincerity like the sun radiates light.

i read it over many times, and thought about what to do. but then, after some time, i just shut my computer off and went about my way. i should have replied, and told tina that she’d typed in the wrong address. the josh this was intended for needed to get it. but i didn’t do that. they would figure it out--she was going to see him, so they would work it out what his email address was. as it stood, the message was too perfect, and any action would add soil to it. best to leave it as it was, just perfect. the world would be better for it.

the tallahassee freenet still operates, and i am very likely still josh, but i had to cut the josh@tfn.net address off in 2001, because it was getting about 500 junk mails a day. i even exchanged messages with the admin there, and asked if there was anything they could do. “I’ve frozen the account because you don’t keep it cleaned out in a responsible manner.” “responsible? it gets so much mail that it would be a full time job to delete it.” “There’s nothing we can do.”

so, c’est la vie. when people are talking to me, they’re usually just talking to me.

it’s illogical and unhealthy to accept bad news from the environment and incorporate into oneself. at times, i have to tune it out, because i am convinced it will hurt me.

when i heard that edward kennedy had a brain tumor, i felt terrible. hearing about any public figure who’s sick upsets me, and kennedy is in a way the living thread to JFK, who is iconic, so it’s doubly bad. soon after, in the lab at work, the radio stated that the new york governor, david paterson, was in the hospital for some problem with his eyes. it wasn’t explained, but the word tumors was used.

i switched off the radio, because it was too much. later that day, i would have a headache, i knew, caused by the news, caused by myself. would i accept a brain tumor, would i accept eye tumors, would i bring them unto myself? would my mind convince me i was deathly ill, bring it onto me, smile at me, and ask me to empathize?

after september 11th, after flight 597, i got up early one saturday morning and the radio said space shuttle columbia had disintegrated during landing. i switched it off immediately. i would have to face it later, but i needed some time, with only the information i had heard, to get used to the idea. accept it, understand it has nothing to do with me, and then i could learn more.

it’s hysterical—the literal, original meaning. i’m certain that on my entrance interview to the army, they would note it’s a feminine quality. a valid criticism would be that it’s narcissistic. i believe i am more important than i am.

i would say this is not entirely true. rather, i just believe i am more to blame.

so i bought a summer home in the country. on the shore. in the city. please click me there on occasion, dear sir or madam, if you wish.

cherry blossom petals on my can of beer

it feels as though my world has contracted down to a very small, very perfect circle. i didn't think this would happen to me. perhaps ... perhaps it is just the weather.

what is inside the circle?: i am looking at the Just For You thing on i-tunes right now. usually this unworldly circuitry deity omnipresent mind thing does a good job--proof that we humans are expendable. it suggests i try The Adverts. the adverts are some good-ass punk rock. it wants me to get The Mob Rules, by sabbath. good choice, guy.

it also says i'd like Cliffs of Dover. is this meant to get my attention? i'm here in the office before everyone else, staring out the window, wondering why it's telling me this. Cliffs of Dover? really? does it know something i don't? what else does it know? am i gonna be hit by a car tomorrow? does it know i'm adopted? cliffs of dover, what the fuck. does it recommend that to everyone? is it a litmus test? what are you trying to tell me, great server farm in the sky? is this the moment i should cast off the world and retreat to the hills, trying to carve the perfect radio headset to make the cargo planes bring me chocolate and penicillin from the gods?

see what i mean. too small, this circle. i need something to change.