I work the late-night shift and pour the drinks,
And listen to the tales of lust and fear,
From programmers and journalists who think
That they can sink their hardship in a beer.
In pints of The Abyss they look for light.
I never will forget that rainy night
A regular walked in and claimed her seat.
I grabbed a glass and poured a whiskey neat:
Her drink. She’d been in many times before,
But every time, increasingly, she wore
The face of someone standing on a ledge.
In better times she’d written for the Merc,
For InfoWorld and Cnet and the Reg,
But that was back when journalists had work.
I did my best to turn her thoughts aside
From unemployment, hopelessness, and debt;
She only stared into her drink and sighed;
I swore I’d find the key to turn her yet.
“You see that guy who just came in? He might
Be looking for a blogger for his site.”
She raised her head and looked around the joint,
Turned back to me and muttered, “What’s the point?”
“You mentioned points,” I said, though I had none,
Except the wish to cast a ray of sun
Across the dreary landscape of her life.
“I want your thoughts,” I said, “on points and dots.”
You could have cut the silence with a knife.
I had no knife. I babbled random thoughts.
“The point goes in before the software’s done,”
I started, without knowing where I’d go.
“Like ‘Apple Keynote 42.1’.
(Of course we know to never buy .0.)
And any application would be crap
Without its point: there is no pointless app.
While on the World Wide Web there is no site
That doesn’t need a dot to make it right.
Why dots, not points? Their function is the same,
And everything about them but their name.”
She sighed and said, “You sound like one of these
Who always cross their t’s and dot their i’s.”
“I even cross my eyes and dot my tees,”
I said. She laughed, to our complete surprise.
She dropped back in that summer, and her look
Was utterly unlike what it had been.
She told me she was flush: she’d sold a book
On all the tribulations she had seen.
She had a drink and then went on her way.
I washed the glass and thought about that day.
What made her laugh? I think it may have been
The incongruity of what I said
With what she felt. I somehow see a scene
Of helium balloons uplifting lead.
There is a point to pointlessness, you see,
That’s sharp enough to puncture misery.
I learned this lesson on that rainy night:
The cure for heaviness is to get light.
That’s right: four sonnets.
If you’ll grant me my own rhyme scheme.
Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.
