University of Arizona Library, Main: book unknown

Something powerful in the possibility of a slip of paper with a password. About half of my teenage life was spent in pursuit of passwords, searching for them on systems, cracking them, social engineering them, trying standard ones, rooting through trash for them. I see the image above and there is a bit of my brain that starts me salivating, kicks on the electricity, makes me want to find the system and get inside the system.

The system's gone by now, replaced by another, and another, but it will still have a password. Security's exponentially better than it used to be. Still, the weak point is our human wackness. Our desire for ease. Our laze. Our lack of imagination. Our inability to remember more than a few of them. We all know we should be better with our passwords. But there are so many! We become so many thanks to our proliferation of selves online. I don't know about you but I use several different email addresses when online so as to reduce my vulnerability to tracking and spamming, and about twenty unique password/email combinations. Occasionally one account gets hacked. Then that portion of my life is opened up until I shut it down. I try to make it hard to strip me bare but for the dedicated (or one with enough dedicated server time to use brute force attacks) it would not be difficult. For one, I'm sure I'm tracked to some extent by the NSA, the FBI, or some other combination of acronyms. I don't want to bore you with the stories, but I've had run-ins with the Secret Service a couple times, for dumb reasons, and resultingly my name (and various handles I have used) still surely keep me on a list. My stepmother is convinced that because of this she is being tracked and surveilled. It's not impossible. When my family lived in Saudi Arabia we were surely being overheard, paid attention to. Recent years have shown just how much we are paid attention to, I mean we Americans not just we my family (though there's that too I have no doubt: if one member of a family goes a little rogue it makes sense, doesn't it, to see who else in the family might dabble in the darker arts?).

Some days all the world feels like a system, or a series of overlapping, interlocking systems. If only I had the right key, the right series of passwords, all might be revealed. From this desire I can understand religion. Instead I turn to books. I hope that each will, in turn, open me, offer me a little peek at some revelation.

Do you feel the same? What might our shared desire reveal?

Still, to find a slip of paper with a password written on it brings that part of me to life again. I can't quite tell if the last letter's a or u, the penmanship being inexact.

Working on a poem about the movie Predator (yes that Predator, the 1987 one) I feel suddenly like I exceed myself, like I am not part of the world in which we live but can see it clearly, like slow-motion stop-time in movies seems, like how they say it feels to be in the zone, whichever zone we mean, like how it is for Fry from Futurama in the episode in which everyone gets a $200 tax refund, and the characters use it different ways, and Fry uses it to buy 100 cups of coffee, and when he hits 100 he somehow becomes superfast, so the motions of the world are slow to him. It's a rare feat to get to this feeling, and I don't have it now, but I remember it, how it felt to be in that moment working on that poem, like shit came easy all of a sudden, like rhymes be clicking and iambs dropping into place: like I had the key to the world.