Dedicated to:

Nelda, Forrest and Bobbi

For providing support for it all

The Drunken Sausage

For providing a place from it all

Arah Edgel Galarneau Cox Maloney

Who finally found Paradise

INTRODUCTION

It was near midnight on December 31, 1999. I’ll never forget it. Beyond thinking about Prince and how he wanted to “Party Like It’s 1999,” I could not assure myself that all of the lights would not go out, that all of the computers would not shut down, that Mankind would not, in the next five minutes, find itself without the electronic means to support itself. The Computers would finally win. And my poor ass, along with thousands of others, standing dazed on, or near, the Roberto Clemente Bridge in Pittsburgh, would become nothing more than statistics. In all of my well-reasoned, left-brained conglomerations of experiences, I still imagined, on that starry night, that life was going to change in some dramatic way that made all of the idiotic soothsayers…intelligent.

Didn’t we all?

If the clock turning “00” would have been the end of the world, then all of us—me, my wife, my brother-in-law, everyone I cared about (which suddenly included a couple of thousand people standing on a bridge)—would have met a collective, untimely death, one that had been invented by man, accelerated by man and promulgated by the information channels that man had crafted.