Perhaps I was doomed from the start. I remember driving to high school and passing by Berkeley Ave. every single weekday as I headed south on Glendale Blvd. And even earlier than that, I had been using GEOS for the Commodore 64. (This here is geek history—the Commodore 64 is probably the computer that most Gen X hackers grew up on, perhaps alongside the Apple IIc. GEOS was a GUI for the Commodore 64. Can you believe it? A GUI on a machine that only had 64KB of RAM.) The creator of this awesome piece of software was originally called, you guessed it, Berkeley Software Design. In retrospect, hilariously, I recall that the decorative fonts were all named after either buildings on the UC Campus, or streets. So they had fonts like Telegraph and Dwinelle, Durant and Evans, Barrows, Bancroft, Wheeler, LeConte. And the system font? BSD. (After the software company, not the venerable Berkeley Software Distribution version of UNIX.)

Anyway, the reason I started thinking about this (besides perhaps being subliminally influenced by R's meditation on the nature of time and its passing) is because I found myself in the book store again. (Yes, as if I had involuntarily drifted there....) Now, I've mentioned Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea Saga. (I'm sure I'm making that title up, but I'm too lazy to find the correct one for the series.) So of course, I decide I need to reread Tehanu and also The Tales of Earthsea and since I was in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section anyway, I might as well grab some of Philip K Dick's short stories (and ended up getting the anthology containing "Paycheck," upon which a movie directed by John Woo and starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman is based.)

And guess what these two authors have in common? Berkeley. Ursula K Le Guin is the daughter of the infamous anthropologist couple Alfred Kroeber (best known for his exploitation of the last Yani whom he named "Ishi." One of the UC Campus buildings is named after him, right across from Cafe Strada.) Phillip K Dick moved from Chicago to Berkeley, and many of his stories are set in the Bay Area (and the one that sent shivers down my spine was Man in the High Castle, an alternate history considering what would've happened if the Axis had won WWII.)

I think about the last time I wandered those streets, about a month and a half ago, and I realize my college days are drifting farther and farther back in my memory.

Just as I am trying to latch my eyes onto the present, and stop trying to peer ahead into the future, I realize that I can't rely on the past for comfort.

No day but today. Heh. Easier said than done.