Half Life

I eat horoscopes for breakfast
not because I believe in the future
but because I can't look on the bright side
poems can be prayers if you're desperate enough
poems can be dreams come true
consider that the center of a four dimensional object
can only be defined after that object has ceased to exist
a temporal center
a spatial center disconnecting from its enzymes

yeah. I've come to see the future as death impending
all of its principles dissectable. Predictable. And I still
cannot see my center. Instead I've crafted a relative center.
Where was I half my life ago?

I was in highschool. I was learning how to drive.
I lived in a yellow bed room with my computer.
I logged onto BBS's (there was an internet then,
but it was all text). BBS's were accessed by modems
through telephone lines. I downloaded porn and interacted
with people. Porn is a commodity in an all boys highschool.
I distributed freely on the school's computer.
Back then these computers have security systems like ironclad
and at ease. Gigantic file servers with Novell networks.

I could blow through Novell and At-Ease with the click
of a button and a file copied from the hacker BBS's. But ironclad
was new. It had a reputation for being the best. It very well could have been
but we beat it.

It wasn't just me. I had half the solution.
Basically, what ironclad did was create a folder
(called directories back in the non-visual era of computing)
that kept all of its own files from being accessed. If you typed
'cd ironclad' it would say “No such file or directory.” But by
using Microsoft's own attrib command I was able to assign
the directory a drive letter and access it by accessing the fake drive.
But there was a problem. We were in the directory now, but we couldn't
access any of the files.

From there it had everything to do with overloading the modest machine's
puny memory. Indeed, computers of this era would be impressive to have
20 megs of RAM. Well, the other dude created multiple instances of my
fake drive and simply typed 'dir' while simultaneously accessing the drive
through Windows. Neither one of us were sure how it happened. But whatever
security measure was in place to prevent the files from being accessed simply stopped.