Howling at the Moon

Most of San Francisco lies in a grid. It lacks the topologically wandering avenues of Pittsburgh or Boston. Sure there is Lombard, but at either end of the crooked tourist magnet is pure grid. No, the real exception is Market Street, the cross-town traversal nightmare. It is the off-kilter divider of downtown, and its pedestrians share the slightly skewed view of the world.

There is a man who wears a Christmas hat year round and carries a sign offering poems for a price. Another has long streamers that flow out of his glasses, wears a trench coat, and tends to mumble to himself. And in that sense he isn't that much different than another special form of market street life - the cell phone shufflers.

The latest phones have a built in microphone and earpiece. Technology that was once reserved for the secret service to track interns around the White house now makes its users seem like they are conversing into the ether. They ramble past Stacey's bookstore and Wendy's talking very loudly about "B2B", "Open Source IPOs", and "e-pricing in web time." - word combinations that didn't exist when Michael Jordan was playing basketball and the hum was about "portals" and "push." Somebody important must have thought to start words with the letter "e" than "p". This has result that our tobacco billboards have been replaced by e-bay, e-trade, and e-toys. More addicting than nicotine is commerce.

Or perhaps it's the potential of commerce. Companies with no real idea of how they are going to make money are giving away stuff to other companies that also aren't making any money, but these deals cause more buzz and further financing. Layer after layer this city of babble is being built as the cash is being pumped across the north of Market Street to the south, orthogonal to the direction gold went 150 years ago, when the first wave of entrepreneurs reached the city.

So the question comes up as to why the guy on market street mumbling about "virtual servers" is going to be paid 30 million more than the guy trying to huck poems. That there is such a large gap between thestreet.com and "Street Sheet."

I think the difference is the guy with a cell phone has a community that believes in him. It is not only his contacts stored in a palm pilot - the investment bankers, the lawyers, the accountants, and the marketing research firm, but also a nation that has decided to throw the retirement dice into the NASDQ. If the idea was just his and his alone, it wouldn't get past the frighten tourists to whom he shouted leaving the Embarcadero. Even though we are spending a great deal of our time building a digital network, in the end the personal one is the one that became the most important.

The concept that a team joined together around a common belief can accomplish far more than the sum of its members is not a new one. Our country was founded in part on that concept (as well as lowering the stamp tax). The we-are-all-freezing-together attitude was a binding part of the experience at Dartmouth.

Perhaps the alcohol helped. There was one guy who I would always seem to stumble into at parties whether it be at scorpion bowls or recovering from the smells of AD. He would always insist that we go outside and howl at the moon. It was a great, nutty moment between two guys both somewhat frustrated at their attempts to seduce the opposite sex to shout a primal scream into a New Hampshire winter night. No one complained

Now I did run into David O’Brien outside of parties – I went to his Frost play during our summer term and a couple of meetings of “Students fighting hunger.” I would like to say that I was involved in charitable organizations more, but I tended to gravitate towards my studies and Ultimate Frisbee. Definitely drank quite a bit as well.

I graduated and made a promise to keep in touch. I found Dave’s humor and enthusiasm infectious. He wrote a long letter to me in grad school (my dark years) and I never had the time to write back or for that matter quite a few other good classmates. He was the sort of person that I had hoped to meet at a reunion – someone that no matter what had happened over the remaining years would just be happy. A few remarks about the chicken sandwiches at EBA’s and we would be back to our usual banter. I figured our tenth is coming up shortly and even though we celebrate twelve years out maybe I could track him down then.

Yesterday, I was cleaning up my desk when I ran into an old class newsletter. Normally I avoid these things – there is only so much of Jake’s nicknames, and finding out about marriages and kids that I generally want to know. In this one there was a page describing how there was a dinner honoring David. I was pretty excited and wanted to know what great thing he was up to. I found out that the award was being given posthumously.

It turns out that he did go on to do wonderful things. He was the Dartmouth volunteer coordinator and worked with CARE in South Sudan and Somalia. He went to India to study food distribution and caught a respiratory virus.

It hurts to lose one of the few people I know that would have spent time with the poet wearing Santa Clause hat. The guy with the streamers needs someone to believe in him. In my years since Dartmouth, I have spent far too much time drifting in the ebb and flow of start-ups. They have the duality of having everything being absolutely important right away, but no one remembering what went on three months ago.

The one major charitable thing that I do is Team in Training, an organization that uses marathons to fundraise for blood cancer research. It basically takes four months to prepare for a marathon. Tuesday mornings we have a buddy run that takes us from the marina to the golden gate bridge.

We are usually are at the middle of the bridge when the dawn breaks. This morning looking to the east, I could see the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street silhouetted by the rising sun. A new ball park is opening up around the corner, and the whole city seems to be coming alive to the possibilities of the up coming season.

Towards the west, the moon was starting to set. And for the first time in many years, I howled.