We're dreaming of living in the end of days. The end times. The dust of pre-apocalypse is settling upon us and among us, and we couldn't be more delighted to rub each other's noses in it. And our best weapon in our arsenal in this civil, civil war is our computer, where we can gain access to like-minded freedom fighters, facts to support our beliefs, and of course, tickle our buttholes with the feather duster of nostalgia.

In 1984 I didn't know shit about what a Macintosh was. Back then, the closest I got to anything resembling a computer was when I was casually observing my brother diligently copy code into the Commodore 16 from a book on basic. We checked out books of code at the library, so we could play a "Star Wars" game, which required as much imagination as, well, a book. Computers were a novelty, mostly for rich kids or nerds, or rich nerds. Our parents scooped up the Commodore after going to the coast and sitting through a four-hour presentation on the virtues of owning a time share. They sat through the bullshit, took the computer, drove home, plugged it into the tv, and we were off. The Commodore 16 was later upgraded to a 64, which was ultimately replaced by the NES, because we mostly used it for video games.

At school we would occasionally use an Apple IIe (OG Oregon Trail) or some kind of IBM clone machine in order to do math or practice typing; obediently placing our fingers on the home-row keys. To me, computers were sterile and boring, and not for creativity. In fact, the very idea of using a computer for an artistic pursuit was counterproductive. Computers were for endless busy work.

In 1989, Apple made a commercial that had a profound impact on me as a youngster. The ad featured a young female professional, who was very frustrated and intimidated by the idea that she had to use a computer. Of course, the computer she was forced to use was a Mac, so by the end of the commercial everything was fine and she even admitted that she was wrong. As a child, I didn't really understand the casual sexism in the ad, but one thing was crystal clear: you were going to have to learn how to use a computer; everyone was, and nobody was interested in hearing you fucking complain about it.

When I was first introduced to the Mac, in 1992 with the Macintosh Classic, it was with the intention to finish a specific artistic task, but more specifically for a practical artistic purpose: building the high school newspaper. We wrote, edited, and constructed every edition on the Mac Classic with Claris Works and PageMaker. We stared at that little monochrome 512x342 CRT writing articles and adjusting layout, after which we printed them out and pasted them onto the full-sized contact sheets on light boards. Then they went to the local newspaper where they applied halftone screens to our photos, and sent everything off to print.

I was afforded a lot of artistic leeway as a young student; I started off as the staff cartoonist and illustrator, and eventually worked my way up to photo editor. I spent hours studying how the mac would reinterpret images and photos into pixels and dots in a logical black-and-white dithered pattern, as opposed to the manual halftone screen for printing.

After I graduated high school, I made post cards and flyers to promote my band using a PowerBook 145b. It had a slightly larger screen, but still used that delicious duo-chrome look on its one-bit-per-pixel passive matrix display. I would design them in Claris Works, and print them out on the StyleWriter 1200. My day job was at a regional copy shop chain, spending my days printing business cards and wedding invitations while sweating over a Therm-o-Type machine connected to an offset-press. One evening, a friend from high school called me, and the conversation went something like this:

"Hey, do you still remember how to use a Mac?"

"Yeah, sure, I guess," I said.

"Well, my company is having a hiring fair this Friday and they're looking to hire people to work on a Mac support team."

"Okay."

He gave me the details and I drove over Friday after work. My friend worked at one of those large tech support firms that contracted support and customer service to large computer companies like Microsoft, HP, and Apple, to name a few. Back in 1996 when you called for tech support, you probably weren't talking to an employee of the company with the misbehaving hardware, you were talking to someone who worked for one of these outsourced tech support firms. Of course, they never admitted that. They answered the phone announcing their affiliation as fact; as if they could bump into Bill Gates in the break room. Some customers actually believed that. In a few short years, all of these jobs would be shipped off overseas to some company in India, where they worked for pennies and spoke better English.

Tickle, tickle.

When I arrived, I realized that I was way out of my element. There were people handing out their resumes in their handing-out-resume-suits, while I was there wearing a sweaty flannel and jeans, with ink from the week's printing in my nails and the cracks in my hands. Job fair, right. I didn't have my resume, I filled out an application and took the five-question test for the support position. My previous experience working on the school newspaper had not prepared me for this in the least. By a process of elimination, I was able to make an educated guess on some of them. On another question, I remembered the old adage, "when in doubt, go with Charlie." C it was. I didn't know what a P-RAM was and how or why I would want to zap it. The fuck? I handed everything in to the polite people in charge of the job fair and I drove home.