"And you could find the parts to almost anything, on Dog
Solitude, if you dug long enough." - William Gibson, Mona Lisa
Overdrive
Neuromancer is one of the few books that influenced me
profoundly as a young person. I recall first hearing about it
in 1987 at the New York City 2600 meeting. It had been out for
a while, and the second part of the trilogy, Count Zero, had
just came out. I had found both at my local bookstore, and in
the process discovered another profound influence, Report on
Planet Three and Other Speculations, by Arthur Clarke.
I was in my senior year at high school, working as a bench
technician at a run-down TV Repair shop on the outskirts of a
run-down New York suburb during year one after the 1987 Stock
Market crash when Mona Lisa Overdrive came out. Job prospects
right out of high school with just a Business Information
Systems certificate and a high school diploma were pretty bleak
when you're in a recession with a bunch of laid off ex-IBM
PhDs. The TV shop paid my bills, and provided me with scrap
electronics to salvage for parts. The place had three people:
my boss Charlie, an occasional part-time tech named Frank, and
me. It was an odd assortment of characters. Charlie was a
right-wing boomer Republican dude who was few classes short of
his BSEE. Life got in the way, and he found himself in the
consumer electronics service business. Frank was a hippie, and
didn't talk much about what he did prior to working for
Charlie.
Charlie was a pack rat. The back of the shop was nothing but
shelves of old TV, stereo, and VCR carcasses, and electronic
parts. Occasionally we'd scrounge parts off one to repair an
older set, or we'd fix a broken unit up and put it in the
"showroom" up front for sale. I swear Charlie had one of
everything in there. One wall in the back was nothing but
vacuum tubes. In the years I worked there I think we pulled one
tube to repair a set for a customer. It was a high end Zenith
console from the 1960s or 70s, the kind that was a piece of
furniture. The 70 something year old customer was in absolute
love with this TV, and willing to pay a decent amount to keep
it running. That customer was an exception to the status quo.
Most people in the area eschewed the higher-end Zeniths, RCAs,
and Sonys in lieu of less expensive brands, and simply went
next door to Jamesway when their TV broke to buy a new one.
VCRs were still novel enough at the time to justify repair
instead of replacement, and you could always count on the
audiophiles to get their systems fixed, but the days of
consumer electronics repair were coming to an end. I took
another job doing final test and QC for a local manufacturer of
high voltage systems, but still helped out in the TV shop on
the occasional weekend. Test and QC in what was essentially a
factory was boring and shitty compaired to troubleshooting and
fixing stuff, but that's another story.
When Mona Lisa Overdrive came out, I read about Dog Solitude,
and it resonated with me because the TV shop I learned the
hands-on parts of electronics was like Gibson's industrial
wasteland in that there was a lot of detritus piled up, and if
you looked around the piles you would find whatever you were
looking for. It was also pretty quiet and solitary at times.
Charlie's wife had a baby while I was working there. She had a
rather cushy administrative job with a European pharmaceutical
firm that came with some rather impressive benefits including
the capability to work at home part time. (They gave her a PC,
a modem, and a phone line.) I really think, knowing the shop's
expenses and income, that the TV shop was more like a hobby for
Charlie, especially when his wife got that job.
After junior was born, Charlie would leave me at the store on
Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. It was usually just me
working on equipment and taking care of the occasional
customer. Plenty of time to experiment and work on my own
projects. Some nights I would just close up the shop, lock the
front door, turn off the lights in the front of the shop and
stay late tinkering around because the shop had a better test
bench than I did at the time.
Later on, my personal workspace became like Dog Solitude, minus
the level of pollution that Gibson's fictional location
possessed. Charlie started cleaning out the back, and I'd grab
anything I could for later rendering into potentally useful
parts. I'd scrounge obtainium out of dumpsters, and find cheap
(or free) test equipment at local hamfests. My contemporaries
were mostly software hackers or system crackers, and I thought
I was the only hardware hacker and tinkerer in the area. I
later found out that there were others, but we all were solo
artists and kept to ourselves for the most part.
It wasn't until I met Dave W. aka "Wildflower" and moved to
Connecticut that I started seriously collaborating with someone
in a shared workspace. He liked to call his workspace the
"Wizard's Lair," and I went along with it because it was a cool
name and we were really just a couple of techno-wizards messing
with stuff. Dave went off to the Next Great Adventure right at
the beginning of COVID, and now it's just me and a few ghosts
of the past to keep me company while I work. Dog Solitude.
There is a decent hackerspace about 20 minutes down the road.
I visit it every once in a while, but I don't get much done
there compaired to my own shop. YOu gotta pack up your tools,
test equipment, and work in progress, drive it over there,
unpack it, and then do the whole thing in reverse when you're
done. People ask you questions while you're working which is
a distraction even if you don't mind answering them. Then
there are some projects you want to keep private or at the
very least away from minors. Old-school hacking was always a
solitary endeavour for the most part, however.
Just like Gibson's Dog Solitude there is also more than one
adult living here, but also like Gibson's place, we all have
our own projects we work on independently except for when our
place's infratsructure needs work.
Every era has its oracle, and I've made use of them on more
than one occassion when conflicted. The latest oracle is
ChatGPT, so I consulted it to get some additional insight. The
space has been known by other names in the past, the most
recent being the "Wizard's Lair." It was a good name, but not
quite right at present. It's just a few people who work more of
less independently, and a bunch of cast off electronic and
industrial surplus.
These days I'm mostly a junk hacker. Don't have money for the
latest and greatest, and I have a lifetime's worth of stuff to
experiment with. These days I'm also a solo artist, and am
pretty happy with that state of affairs. Gibson's work,
especially his earlier stuff, has never stopped speaking to me.
Dog Solitude it is.
