Gotta get throught the breakfast M. prepared. Well, prepared in the sense of “toasted,” which ain’t exactly cooking.

I’m shivering with the anticipation of small-town kitsch in an upscale community. There’s a parade for the kiddies to decorate their bikes and trikes and wagons and all and head down the main street, which unfortunately in this cliched image is not actually called Main Street.

Witnessing this event will answer a question I haven’t been wondering, welll until now midway through this question, do munchkins still use crepe paper or have cheesy decorations evolved?

The best ever kid parade of my childhood didn’t involve the traditional yards of red, white and blue streamers. Nope, in my nostalgia, the source, no doubt, of my digging July 4th, was the Scituate parade.

Instead of patriotic colors, we wee ones dressed in Halloween costumes and marched through town. It was better than Halloween, though, since everyone was on summer vacation so you had some time to do it up right without schools and your parents’ jobs and shit getting in the way.

The highlight was turning the same corner, year after fucking year, the exact same row of ocean-facing cottages. There the judges would sit, and some local civic group handed each and every kiddie a small box of candy and a Kennedy half dollar.

Alas, a Google search indicates Scituate has no celebrations any more. Must have been the bonfires on the beach that killed it.

Today, though, maybe I’ll run into the douche supreme with four children today. Tell me if I’m an asshole busybody or a good fucking sport.

Last night, we rode our bikes over to a diner-type place with outdoor tables. Our quiet little dinner, and everyone else’s on the patio, was interrupted with the entrance of two parents and their four, blonde-ringleted moppets.

The boy, as every boy seems to now, clomped in on those wheeled sneakers, and he and two sisters wove there grimy little selves through the tables oblivious to other folks’ personal space. They settled at the table next to us. Oh, joy. They then continued talking in their outside voices.

The baby, it just kind of whined, howled and whinged unabatedly and inconsolably, even when they moved it from high chair to an inappropriately unstable regular chair tottering on the brick patio.

Somewhere during the meal, one of the little girls knocked her milkshake glass to the bricks, where it shattered with globs of frozen cream and broken glass. The parents left it there.

As the meal progressed the largest shard of glass migrated to directly below where the approximately 9-year-old girl’s foot barely shod in flip flop swung. Other shards and a lot of splinters had rolled over to just under the lummox of a dad’s flip flops. At one point, he swung his foot around grinding glass and milk into the stone.

They seemed so fucking oblivious that as we left, I pointed out that all of the glass was under their feet.

(I assumed they knew it was there because of the loud shattering noise when the glass hit the ground, but I didn’t know if they realized where all the glass had landed. It’s not like most 9-year-olds have the focus and memory to remind themselves to be careful about an accident that happened 45 minutes earlier. I imagined the girl jumping off her chair directly onto a bleeding gash wound.)

The man of the family, he didn’t look up at me, he didn’t thank me. Nope. He said, “Yeah, we know.”

Feebly, as you inevitably feel when your expected social contract is unmet, I tried to clarify. “Oh, I figured you knew, but I wasn’t sure if you could see where the glass landed, it’s right under your feet.”

“Yeah. It’s fine. We know.”

The mother-type chimed in, “Sometimes it’s just easier to leave it until we’re done.”

I rode my bike away hoping that dad sliced his toes upon exiting.

I also sympathized with the two Mexican dudes bussing and waiting the tables, who would now have to contend with smeared, ground glass and congealed milkshake among the french fries and napkins the kids were dropping as they ate.

Fuckers.

Yeah, it’s a nice bit of technology. I spent the last couple of days, letting a variety of curious folks at all levels of technology skills play around with it. Pretty much, it’s a compelling hunk of metal, glass and circuitry.

I think the ease of pressing brightly colored icons and the fun of sliding shit around on a virtual plane is just damn interesting. People want to touch it.

And, for the grumpy ass naysayers who are looking for the petition to change the world or the “blogosphere folks” who are labeling early adopters as callous, shallow, soulless, etc., get over your fucking selves. You got your deals, I got mine. Difference is, I’m not calling your values into question.

For the record, I give to charity and political organizations, work in a non-profit job that strives to make a difference, making a not-for-profit wage, tip pretty well at restaurants, read extensively and otherwise try not to be a fucking asshole. I don’t become an instant hypocrite by shopping.

I honestly believe all phone companies suck, and it’s all just a variety of suckitude. I’m not boycotting all products with obvious flaws, because I know everything has fucking glaring flaws. It’s a globalized and corrupt planet. You got to pick battles that might work, and so far product boycott has meant only someone else coming into the game.

One man’s Chinese sweatshop is another’s job to feed the family for another week. More importantly, no one yet knows the market impact of Apple entering the realm of AT&T. Jobs is notoriously secretive. The iPhone is locked today, like every other halfway decent phone I have purchased by the way, no one can see tomorrow.

After talking with an economist, a political scientist and the founder of a hot, “web 2.0” music site, I’m sleeping alright with my choice in technology.

Sad day yesterday, well Monday, I guess. You know rainy days and Mondays always get me down. And, it doesn’t rain so much here, so I focus my depression on Mondays.

Scooter Libby’s sentence was commuted, and Beverly Sills passed from the bounds of earth.

On the Scoot-man, all I can say is what the fuck and what kind of brass balls does GW have. Seriously, he’s like, “Fuck you, I’m in the home stretch, I can do whatever the fuck I want. Surge this.” If he doesn’t go down in history as the worst president ever, then as a country, a people, we have completely lost our collective soul.

For Beverly, I essentially tag two vaguish memories in my life. My ritual after school for many, many, many years was the afternoon talk shows they used to have. They were on TV. TV had like three channels that came in well on VHF, which I don’t fucking know what it means anymore.

Another cluster of shows were on UHF, again, no clue to what that abbreviates or acronyms. Those shows were usually repeats or local shows, and there were old movies, like creature doublefeatures and whatnot.

But, my addiction was shit like Dinah! and Mike Douglas and Merv. Come to think of it, that might very well be where I first saw the whole stand-up comedy thang.

Bevery Sills was a guest on those type of shows and was the antithesis of your basic opera diva cliche.

In that same vague reverie of seeing Beverly, I imagine Pat watching, as well. In the certainty of uncertain memory, I think there was enforced silence when she was first profiled on 60 Minutes some time in the mid-70s. Maybe. Kinda sorta. I could be making shit up.

Pat did like the local kid story. The Brooklyn girl who could sing her heart out. Or Arthur Ashe coming out of segregated neighborhoods to play a previously white-washed game.

The exception that proved that rule, I think was Barbra. Pat had no love for La Streisand, no matter the roots to riches story she might have lived.

It might have been the nose. Or maybe the schoolteacher in Pat just couldn’t abide the missing ‘A’ in her first name.

But, an earthy, down-to-earth, regular gal who could sing at the Met, that was a woman to admire. She was a real American. RIP, Bev.

Finally, enough of the story. Here’s my quick review. It’s not sheer perfection, a blissful moment of part orgasm and part heroin. Nope. It’s a pocket computer. A very fun to use, colorful device that makes calls and checks emails whilst playing music, displaying photos and way improving on tiny web browsing.

Here is my ultimate acid test. I take to gadgets with or without reading the manual and have used every kind of interface yet made. If I can figure it out, it ain’t no thing, since I generally have the patience.

M., though, hates that kind of shit. He’s impatient with phones and computers and like millions of others, he just wants stuff to make sense and to work. He has about 10 numbers stored in his cell and uses exactly none of the possible functions on his came with the service phone. On his last phone, he HATED the camera function, because he was forever taking accidental shots of his leg or the ground and couldn’t figure out which button he was clearly hitting whenever he took it from his pocket.

I handle all of the tech support around the house, including setting him up on his iPod Nano when he first gave it a whirl.

Combine all that kind of not giving a fuck aggravation at cell phones with his contact-lens wearing for distance that pretty much eliminates his reading anything small held in his hand, and you have a control group to judge the icon iPhone.

He could use all of the features quickly and totally dug it. When his contract is done, he very well might take the leap.

Maybe it’s not as extreme, but there is a similarity to the first time I went from command-line computing to using a mouse and a graphical user interface. Once you worked out the hand-eye coordination, going back to the command line seemed wrongly horse and buggy.

Below I just had to let go of some annoying feelings. Here, I’ll explain my complete and other dorkiness and revel in my computer geekhood.

Like many an asshole who’s living debt-free and holding some spending money, I decided to by the much published, hyped, discussed, critiqued and overblownedly dissected Apple iPhone. I’d link, but fucking seriously, all but those without TVs, newspapers and computers have heard of it. The Amish have probably heard of it.

My smartphone universe was collapsing into itself from a variety of broken reasons, and I live an easy bike ride from the ihome of the iconic himself head of the iconic Apple and two different retail stores. I work at a job completely and wholly made possible by tech dollars in the middle of Silicon Valley.

I also have wanted for years a smartphone that would sync well to my Mac computers without workarounds, software add-ons and various partially working hacks.

What the hell, I thought, I wanna see the “historic” event for myself. (I wish there were smaller letters for that reference to historic, because product release isn’t quite historic. Least not compared to something fun like Ronald Reagan getting shot in the 80s.) I had the time and the means and the ease of access. I also don’t mind waiting, and I fucking love people watching at any and every kind of event. That’s what I like most about parades.

It started at around 10:30 a.m. on Friday, here in this hallway, where the mall security (who ride Segways), cordoned off the riffraff away from the front doors of the largely upscale establishments of the Stanford Mall.

It ended just about 8 hours later, like this:

That picture may look like what my friend Hbee emailed me as my “geekgasm.” Truly, I was telling M. to cut it the fuck out with the camera and completely laughing at the applause that met my purchase.

When the first bout of applause greeted the first folks in line to come out of the store, I tried to get the crowd around me to join in a chant of “Yay, SHOPPING.” I just got laughs. Everyone near me knew it was absurd to wait so long for an expensive toy. But, it was a pleasant wait. Friendly geek conversations, sharing of power sources for our laptops and tons of free samples from local businesses recognizing a pre-made marketing opportunity.

Here’s a couple of my favorite shots. In the first one, you gotta love the row of boys with their ‘puters. Two seconds later the security guard, whose sleeve was caught on film, wheeled his Segway (yes really) over to tell us no pictures were allowed at the mall. The flowers of the gardens in and around the mall were OK, but no stores were to be photographed. Um, what the fuck?

In the second, my new line friends. My line-buddy Rick is a Bay Area native who was a wealth of info for the Canadian couple who had literally moved to town the week before.

For me there was nothing in the cliche of the soulless, mindless followers of fashion that weblogs and some media have portrayed. Just regular folks of all kinds with the kind of flexible time that let them shop on an unusual day.

I get a sense, we’re supposed to think that everyone who bought one the first day was style conscious and looking for “hip” and “cool” the worst way possible, through acquisition.

Why then was I sandwiched among some non-dickish people? There were a couple of friendly Mexican guys who traded off the waiting during the day and came prepared with a camp chair and a bit of tequila to take for the afternoon siesta. They wee joined later by their super friendly seeming, senior citizen Caucasian boss, who paid for the day of waiting, as well as both phones. The Canadians were in town getting ready for his new residency at the Medical Center doing open heart procedures. The native Silicon Valley jockey was working a duct-taped phone and a laptop all day, logging time coding and whatnot as a telecommuter. The young guy was a student just finishing his semester and contemplating grad school after his last year in either law school or film, just a crazy kid. My favorite was the guy who brought his Newton with him. This day was a special day for the true fanboy.

Myself, I sleep at night. I only buy what I can afford. I owe no one. I work hard. I work in non-profit and have for a million years (it feels like it). Both M. and I do what we can to throw in for charitable and political causes. I know us, and we are not assholes.

I know me, and I have always made a point of getting gadgets and using the hell out of them. No different here.

Between setting up the new phone and living some of my regular existence (sadly, once again missing the Sunday Farmers’ Market down the street), I’ve been thinking about the hype machine that is Apple marketing and leaving Boston.

I’ve been carrying a couple of cell phone numbers, but only using one phone, my Sidekick. My original Sidekick 2 was suffering button sticks and weird flakiness, so I had upgraded to a Sidekick 3. The Sidekick 3 had an unfortunate bump when it slid out of my messenger bag onto the floor of the work garage and got nudged by a rolling car tire. I had been using it until the cracking of the LCD display spread into a web of splintering glass kaleidoscope.

The second number was my original Boston cell phone number. I was loathe to give it up, but I couldn’t transfer it to a California number what with all of my living being done here and all. The time had come. I’ve let 617.

Completely unrelatedly, but kind of reassuringly, I read a couple of weblogs from some Boston-based “comedians.” The quotes are really only for one of them. One is, indeed, a certifiable comic, the other is a weird, angry man who blusters on stage in a manner that’s meant to seem dangerous. I was first introduced to him as some kind of comic rebel, truthteller who drank and smoke without remorse.

He always struck me as the know-it-all geek who realized, when his acne cleared up and he let his hair grow a bit more stylish, he could upon occasion get laid. I found him more sad and desperate than honest, not funny, and the rebel boozer persona past, say, the age of 25 is fucking boring. (As a complete tangent, he has one of the least funny, least attractive (inside and out) comedy girl girlfriends I have ever met.)

Anywho, both comics (and I’m sure more), weighed in on the web with the name-calling of anyone sorry enough to lay money down on Steve Jobs’ latest toy. Apparently, I am a spineless, drooling, mouth-breather unable to discern mass manipulation.

Thank fucking god there are geniuses out there setting us mindless masses straight.

Thing is, reading this shit reminded me of a peculiar type of behavior that I will always and forever associate with my home-town state of Massachusetts. My uncle Jerry told me once it was among the reasons he left Boston himself, and tied it to a not-so-fine Irish tradition of begrudgery.

I think begrudgery is more or less defined as the compulsion to prick negatively at the successful, bringing up their less glamorous past or suggesting their path to a better life was not as it seems. My uncle’s experience was people undercutting his legal career, culminating in being a judge, as a product of luck and gladhanding, rather than maybe understanding the law.

I think there’s a Boston flavor of not just bringing down the successful, but generally shitting on anyone else’s sense of fun. Apparently there’s joy in deflating that which yanks someone else’s crank.

It’s not a California thing. Leaving it makes it kind of conspicuous by its absence in my life.

I know for sure, sometimes folks here are just blowing smoke up my ass or wind in my skirts or some other kind of fake breeze effect, but phony nice is more pleasant than the grind of griping. A Boston comedy club became a special depressing hell for me by the time I left, with a few bright spots that were my exceptions that proved the rule. Too much emphasis on others’ success and the snarky stabbing takes a toll.

I’m not perfect, mind you. I enjoy bitching about folks as much as the next miserable human. I gererally, though, don’t believe myself so lofty an authority on all things and all people. I’m fucking humble that way.

A lengthy, long-winded preamble to my opinion on the hype. Yup, no bones about it, Steve Jobs is a marketeer. From day one Apple was about packaging and style and form following function and changing function to follow how people work. It’s not a magic scheme, it’s design and capitalism. I totally grok that. ‘Splaining it to me, as the detractors have spent some time doing all over the fucking web, is just condescending.

It pretty much works just like on the TV, though.

A computer is a tool. And fuck me, but I like using tools that feel good in my hand. I own a fairly pricey power sander, which I was I used when I stripped some turn of the century wainscotting down to it’s original, varnished gum wood. Am I victim of the fancy display at the hardware store and the slippery admen of Porter-Cable?

I’m at the mall. I’m about 40 or 50 deep in the line. So, I’ll be an annoying gadget whore all weekend.

I have electricity, a computer and music. Truth is, if I don’t get some writing done in the next couple of hours, I’m a giant douche.

A little Apple/Silicon Valley trivia. Palo Alto is actually home to two, count ’em two, Apple stores (and an AT&T store).

Celebrity tech bloggers and web gods are in full force down the street at downtown Palo Alto, with Robert Scoble at the front of the line. Rumor has it that CNN will be filming from there around 6 p.m. Pacific.

But, here at the Stanford Mall, home of the second Apple “mini” store, a few folks have been showing up here, refugees from the other store. Apparently the blazing sun unbroken by the roofed walkways and dappled gardens of this mall, coupled with being 200 deep despite sleeping on the street last night, was a bit much for a few.

I’m hard by Starbucks, which keeps walking free samples up and down the line, and the restrooms. Could definitely be worse.

It’s summer at work. There’s a lot of writing going on and strategic planning, but there’s definitely a lull in what I do to get the paychecks rolling into the bank account.

Benefits and downtime equal why the fuck not try to get an iPhone tomorrow? For me, it’s not so much the hype as the hope for a combo-PDA-internet toy thingie that tops all 912 of my previous attempts at convergence and digital completion. Syncing with a Mac has been a holy grail or something more mysterious and unattainable.’

I’ve used versions of the Missing Sync, Palm, Handspring, Apple’s own Sync, Motorola and all sorts of products from phone companies with cables and Bluetooth and whatever. No joy. Or brief joy and then not enough.

Boring and geeky. Really, I do know it. My gadgeteering is freakish. Plus, I was an early Mac user thanks to an office where I first used Word and Excel in the ’80s. Although, I couldn’t afford one of my own until the 90s.

Point is that it’s summer, and we live in a part of the country that is just mild and mellow and sunshining most all the time. We also live an easy bike ride or walk to one of the most stylish outdoor malls of high end boutique comfort I’ve ever strolled. It’s very un-mallish in it’s cozy strolling design. It’s the site of Apple’s first, and flagship, mini-store.

I’m counting on the store’s mini-tinyness to keep the throngs (if throngs there be) from thronging. Better yet the student-types from the ‘hood are off for the summer doubtless splitting atoms and taking over the world as summer interns. Betterer yet, there’s a French Bakery, Starbuck’s, a gourmet grocery shop with great, affordable-for-the-neighborhood produce and a fruit smoothie place. The coup de grace, well-maintained toilets.

Throw in the fact that I should be able to pick up some WiFi skipping between Apple and Starbucks.

Since Steve Jobs like to boast about revolutionary, I’ll chronicle the occasion. I have verious sized digital cameras and my video camera plugged in for re-charging right now, so I can decide what I need in the morning

It’ll be total anti-climax, pointless circus or geek heaven. What it won’t be is “historic,” as the hype machine might have one believe. It is just a computing device afterall.

Interesting evening. A small crew took a co-worker out to dinner on occasion of her upcoming nuptials.

Here’s the chicken/egg thing I haven’t figured out for myself. I have no interest in having a wedding and doing the wedding thing and partying the wedding style. Is the unlikelihood of my having such a fete a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The bride was worrying about her mom getting offended at the likely shenanigans gotten p to by both her old college friends and the groom’s. A bullet I have dodged on several fronts. Although, to Pat’s credit, she was always pretty hip to excusing herself before any shit went down from which she would wish to be excused.

Completely unrelated, apart from coming up in conversation, it’s inevitable that I will always have a freakish side of not fitting in a crowd. Still and all, sometimes I really don’t understand other folks either.

Towhit, the topic of the iPhone (and my serious iPhone jones) came up. I know I am plugged in, wired, gadgeted and automated to a fucking farethewell, and the rest of the universe ain’t. I totally acknowledge my extreme ways in the world of the web.

But, how has that world so seriously passed by the educated folks with whom I work? Here, in 2000 and 7, I gotta say I accept not everyone would take a day off to buy a goddamn cell phone. Good fucking idea really, to know queue up for consumer goods. How, though, can you not have learned anything about it, if as the NYTimes reports, 11,000 articles have been written?

I dunno. I think among the curses of my personality (and the pleasures of my company with M. who’s my match) is I consume information and need to know what’s going on in the world. The whole magic computer thing, helps that out mightily.