People always seem to be particularly curious about what I'm going to dress up as for Halloween. They think I get all excited about the scariness and the spookiness, the fake cobwebs everywhere and everybody dressed up at Vampira or Elvira or Morticia. The truth is, the only thing that gets me excited about Halloween is the November 1st sale at the Halloween Store, where I pick up any striped tights and fishnets they have left at dirt cheap prices.

I'm not going to start quoting Ministry and say that every day is Halloween, though that's true to an extent. Every day I wake up and I put on a costume. Every night I go out and I put on something even more outlandish. I'm dancing at a costume party at at least twice a week. Who cares that this week there are some hollowed-out gourds in the corner?

Of course Deathguild had a Halloween party last night. There were some great costumes, even if my own was not among them. Angie went as a pornographic Little Red Riding Hood, all bright red lingerie and a red cloak. At 4' 10'' and 80 lbs, she made every man in the room feel like a pedophile. Devon decided to combine phobias this year. He went as a murderous doctor clown in full face-paint, oversized shoes, and bloodstained scrubs. Michelle went as Leeloo from The Fifth Element which is nearly the only thing you can be for Halloween if you already have bright orange dredlocks. David dropped his very convincing Enormous Scary Bouncer disguise for long enough to request "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants and bounce up and down on the dance floor.

A good time was had by all.

I am now taking applications for the following positions:

Arch-nemesis -- Also known as goodie-two-shoes hero. Must be handsome, square of jaw, and small of brain. Able to deliver pithy one-liners while trying stop my evil plots. Scruples, high moral standards, and a fussy sort of uptightness are a must. Prior experience with crushing failure desired, but not required.

Hero's Love Interest -- Thinks she's the heroine. Must be sassy and plucky, smarter than hero. Able to deliver scathing put-downs as well as raising her chin defiantly and saying "You'll never get away with this!" Some nudity required. Ability to do kung-fu while wearing stilleto heels ideal. All skills must conveniently disappear at the worst possible moment. Must enjoy iron cages, confined spaces, and heights.

I've decided that I'm going to be an arch-villain when I grow up. I understand that arch-villainy is really not all that different from UNIX systems architecture. It should be rather easy to pick up. First, I will need to be mad, not angry mad, but crazy mad. There are no sane arch-villains. If they were sane, they would have taken over the world by now, being less scrupulous than heroes and far better dressed.

I will operate out of the basement of the Spooky Dream House. Since the Spooky Dream House is larger on the inside than it is on the outside as a result of being built from pure plot-devicium, there ought to be plenty of room. I will have minions. I insist on minions. They can live in the basement if they're house trained. When the heroes come knocking on my door, I will point and say "Seize them!" so that my minions can botch the job.

It will be very easy to kill my minions. That's alright. I have extra.

I will have a humorous and easily corruptable sidekick. He/she/it will eventually betray me to the heroes, but I'll be ready for it with an clever trap designed to kill them slowly just as soon as I've told them exactly how my evil plot works.

My plot will involve a Death Ray. Instead of really killing the populous of Random Metropolitan City, my Death Ray will kill the local culture. It will raise rents and drive out artists. It will replace all coffee shops and bookstores with Starbucks and Barnes & Noble. No one will be able to afford to live in the city except for the very rich and no one will want to live in the city except for the very bland. The city will became like a giant airport, only no one is really going anywhere. It will be worse than death. Aren't I fiendish?

I will wear a latex bodysuit and knee-high boots. I will have improbable hair. I will have impractically long fingernails and Marlene Dietrich eyebrows. Men will fling themselves at my feet, but I will sneer at them because I'm a lesbian. Lesbians make excellent arch-villains because they give the hero castration anxiety. I will flirt with the hero's love-interest. I will hold her captive in a great big iron cage in attractively tailored rags. When she goes over to the forces of evil, she can wear a low-cut dress like Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Legend.

When the hero comes to rescue his love-interest, I will toy with him. I will allow him to break into my secret lair. I'll let him free the girl, since she's an evil lesbian now anyway. I'll let him kill minions by the dozen. Then I'll shoot the bastard in the head because death is not too good for my enemies.

It will be glorious!

Since a lot of people have asked for it, I've decided to put my picture up.

My boss bought a swank digital camera and it's all mine to play with. We'll see what happens. There are a lot of things around here that I've wanted to photograph, if only so that I can write about them. Stay tuned for Never's Guide to San Francisco's Strange Architecture and Ugly Statuary. It's time that someone addressed the fact that we have some of the most atrocious monuments in the world. I would describe them now, but you probably wouldn't believe me. That's why I need the camera. Crimes against art must be documented, especially the giant bronze chair in Yerba Buena Park.

Since I no longer have to fit a Sony Mavica into my budget, I'm thinking of treating myself to a new corset from Dark Garden. My much-used leather corset is getting a little too comfortable. I can cinch it all of the way in and still take a deep breath. As proof that the cost of living is shooting through the roof, in the five years since the last time I bought a corset, the price has doubled. How's that for an economic indicator?

I've finally reached the point where time is more important to me than money. I've stopped asking how much it's going to cost and instead I just want to know how long it's going to take. I started sewing because, like most teenagers, I had more time than money. The first thing I attempted, right after your basic shift dress, was a corset with a pattern bought from Amazon Dry Goods. It took seven tries and help from an engineer before I could put together a boned corset that wouldn't rip apart when I tried to pull it tight. Right now, a corset would probably take me about three weekends at the sewing machine. I just don't have that kind of time. Better to leave it to the professionals. They'll do a better job anyway.

I'm not going to be witty tonight.

Every coffee shop in SOMA is a Starbucks now. The closest food and coffee to my new office is a Wells Fargo/Briazz/Starbucks Borg cube. I go there for my morning chai soy latte. This morning was no different. I was cutting through the back alley with my boss when I caught a whiff of burnt wood. There was a homeless couple that had been living in the alley on the other side of the Starbucks parking lot, in the shadow of a dumpster. They had a little camping tent set up. I knew that there were two of them, but they were usually just a pair of feet sticking out of the front of the tent. They never bothered anybody. They never asked for change.

There was a charred mess where their tent had been. All of their belongings were right out on the street, burnt up: big chunks of foam, clothes, the broom they used to sweep up the street. These two had practically hit rock bottom, and now they had nothing at all.

The world seems like a very mean and ugly place right now. I want to get out. I want to move. There's something in the water that makes us into monsters here, the kind of people who would burn out a homeless couple just for fun.

A wise man once referred to IKEA as the Norse god of crap.

Last year the Elders of Emeryville hung themselves from the Tree of Profit for 40 days and 40 nights until Ikea cut them and they bled yellow and blue ichor. The dwarves of real estate caught up the ichor in a bowl and used it to construct a great building, a store capable of causing untold frustration and traffic. Cunning artificers filled the store with shelves that fall apart and ugly plastic dressers so as to discourage the foolish and unwary. Many a shopper ventured into the mouth of the yellow and blue monster and returned with drawers that did not fit, glass that was really plastic, and finishes that looked battered before they even left the store. There was woe all through the land! The people cried out against Ikea! They loathed it's Swedish meatballs, yet their cafeteria was full. Yet the parking lot was full. The smell of inexpensive cinnamon buns blinded shoppers to the endless lines and malicious "co-workers."

It seemed that the great tacky blunder would prove to be a useless blot on the already bleak Emeryville landscape. Ikea danced with joy. The Shoppers of the San Francisco Bay Area were filled with woe. They tore their goatees and beat their breasts. Ten thousand middle class Berkeley families fainted at once.So it continued until a very clever shopper snuck into Ikea Corperate Headquarters and stole from them The Secret of Ikea, which I will now share with you:

The big things are crap, my children, but the small things are really quite a good bargain.

The cunning artificers that live beneath the Tree of Profit don't know how to make a good coffee table or an attractive nightstand, but they have laid out mountains of cheap silverware, $12 sheer curtains, little chenille throw rugs, and cheap plants. Yea, for there are somethings that even Ikea cannot ruin, and a $20 ficus tree of one of them.

You always hurt the ones you love. My last couple of days have come straight from the textbook of boyfriend-specific torture. J's parents are have come to visit from Brockton, Mass. They're here until Tuesday. After three days of intense cleaning and parent-proofing the house, I think they still find their son somewhat alien and they blame it on this strange city he's moved to. In my opinion, they've been perfectly polite, but everything they do seems to cause J accute embarassment. This weekend he's rented a car and taken them away to Napa and Sonoma, where they won't be bothered by homeless people, dirty streets, or their son's girlfriend's black and blue dredlocks.

Sure, they're crass. They smoke inside the house. They don't understand what their son does for a living or why anyone should pay him so much money to do it. They bought only the tackiest of San Francisco souvenirs: a cable car Christmas tree ornament, those San Francisco sweatshirts bought by disillusioned, shiverring, tourists thinking that they've come to Sunny California, and a little montage of the city painted on black velvet. But it's clear that they love their son and they would like to do something nice for him, they just don't know how.

To even out the balance of misery, we had dinner with my parents and their friends the next evening. The restaurant was fantastic. The wine was perfect. For dessert I had chocolate mousse while my mother told the story of how I had my first chocolate mousse in Paris and I'd practically inhaled it. Everyone at the table was an engineer. They had education and sophistication and they'd been all over the world. If only they could have bothered to speak English instead of Russian, J probably would have felt right at home. As it was, he requested subtitles with his appetizer and I spent most of the meal translating.

I do wonder if they'd love me just as much if I had grown up into something they couldn't even comprehend. What if they hadn't assimilated after twenty years in the States? What if we didn't even speak the same language? What if I'd grown up to become a hippie? Or a Republican? What if I hadn't taken to computers, or the sciences at all, and majored in underwater basket weaving? It happens all the time in immigrant families. Dinner would look like a Russian stage production of The Joy Luck Club. I'd have to go back to Riga out of some misguided desire to rediscover my roots. There would be lengthy descriptions of the preparation of borscht.

It's just too awful to think about.

I'm not going to tell you about a band...I'm not going to tell you about a band...

Let me tell you about a band. They're called Spy Versus Spy. They don't have a lineup. They don't have a genre. They don't have a video on MTV. You will probably never hear them on the radio. Spy Versus Spy is a right of passage. They're the kind of band that you only discover by going through your older sister's record collection or flipping through old xeroxed copies of Dirty Girls. Butch Vig steals their production tricks. BT samples their vocals. PJ Harvey covers them for John Peel on the BBC. When rock critics sneer at the state of modern music, they judiciously add "except possibly Spy Verus Spy." They're an electronic act that sings the blues, an industrial love song, punks with cellos and violins blazing.

The first time I heard of SVS, I was in a comic book shop. Have I mentioned that I was a painfully shy fourteen year-old? Must I describe the black sweaters, oversized and unraveling? The clunky Doc Martens? I was trying very hard to find myself. Unfortunately, I was a little unclear on the difference between myself and Death from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Like every other fourteen year-old girl, I had a crush. His name was Craig. He worked behind the counter at the comic book shop. He had tribal tattoos all over his back, spikey hair, and leopard-print creepers. Today he had a package.

What is it?

It's Crocodile Clock, Dan B's solo project from before Spy Versus Spy. It's got the bass player from Only the Dead Know Brooklyn and David Din doing vocals. The damn thing was out of print for years, but now Sinless records is re-releasing it.

Oh.

If the name dropping of obscure musicians was an Olympic event, Craig could have taken the gold medal. I nodded as if some part of that made sense to me. This was a special album. Rare. Hard to get. It was an excuse to stand very close to him and wonder what kind of shampoo he used. I let him lend me everything that Dan B. or Siobhan O. had ever worked on. I listened to the whole Spy Versus Spy catalogue. I copied bootlegs and Peel Sessions. I followed the output of 4AD, SVS, Sinless Records, and Metropolis. I said things like "You can really see the influence Stephen Merritt's work with SVS had on the new Future Bible Heroes album." I copied the lyrics to Perfectly Still in my notebook when I wanted to pretend I was taking notes in class.

My crush moved away, but the albums stayed. SVS led me off the beaten path into a world of musicans who never became rock stars, artists dedicated to the craft of making music. I look forward to hearing people complain that music has lost its magic for them. That's my queue, see. That's when I say Just wait till you hear this.

I finally have a moment at work where I can catch my breath. Well, not really. It's not as if I'm sitting quietly at my desk in my posh office, sipping a cup of coffee and waiting for my secretary to bring me lunch. My desk isn't set up, my computer hasn't arrived, and I'm sitting in a corner of the basement surrounded by half-built servers with one ear to the phone hoping to be plucked from permanent (your call is important to us!) hold by Veritas. No, there's nothing quite like working for a startup, although the Spanish Inquisition had some clever contraptions that nearly duplicate the experience.

No one knows where anything is. No one is sure of what other people are doing. Nothing is set up properly and everything is urgent. I wish someone had told me before I signed on that our CEO was Franz Kafka and our Director of Operations was Terry Guillliam. There's hope. Maybe I'm the plucky heroine, here to deliver the company from the ludicrous expense of our contractors and the idiocy of my coworkers. Maybe I'm destined to rule with an iron fist. Or perhaps this place is simply fucked. Things could still go either way. After all, this is only Day Two.

In the meantime I indulge in what my friend David and I have come to call "real estate masturbation." I go through craig's list and lofts unlimited and examine the lofts and warehouses for sale South of Market and in the East Bay. Sometimes I call up the realtor and ask questions (is there parking?), but usually I just click through the pictures and imagine myself living in a 3000 square foot warehouse with enormous windows, stainless steel appliances, and immaculate hardwood floors. Sometimes I imagine exposed brick walls and wrought iron staircases, but usually the whole place is stark white, like an unpainted canvas and I get to fill it up with tanker desks from the 50's, asymetrical velvet couches, built-in bookshelves, and bizarre faux finishes to my heart's content. Some people build elaborate fantasies around sex. I have elaborate fantasies about interior decorating. I've found the perfect fabric for curtains. I have the perfect rug. I have ideas for distorted picture frames and strange paintings and even stranger art installations. A wall crawling with insects. A bed canopy made from rotting lace and old silk ribbon hanging down from the 15 ft. ceiling. Wallpaper made from the complete works of TS Elliot stained with tea.

Then I look at my bank statement and cry.

I woke up this morning in a fishnet bodysuit, streaked with soot and reeking of kerosene. That's how you know when you've had a good weekend. I went to Bound, which is a private fetish club, where I was part of the evening's entertainment. I fire danced with just a few friends of mine instead of Burn Unit, which is much more professional. It was good practice for someone who hadn't performed in front of an audience in more than a month. As it turns out, I'm not exactly in top form. After dancing for most of the weekend, my shoulders feel like someone has been pounding them with a meat tenderiser. At least people were impressed. I always say that people are impressed every time somebody gets up in front of a crowd and spins fire chains without burning thenselves to a crisp. I've discovered that if you do somehow manage to burn yourself, people are even more awed.

I'm not afraid of fire. I do a lot of wraps when I perform, moves in which I wrap the chains around my arms, legs, and waist and then quickly upwrap them. Arm wraps are probably the most dangerous since arms are a lot thinner than thighs and waists. The chain can get tangled and wrap around twice. To prevent that, I try to catch the chain with my thumb as it comes around my arm. With just a little push, it comes undone. If my thumb misses, I give a little shrug forward with my shoulders and that's usually enough to send the chains going in the right direction again. Of course, this time I wrapped and one chain wouldn't unwrap. I pushed with my thumb. No luck. I shrugged with my shoulders. Nothing. Finally, I look down to see what this flaming mess on my arm is. I use very thin chains, cables really, and the cable had gotten wedged in one of the key chains that I use to hold the wick on.

Towel! This is where out fire safety guys run over with the wet towel.

Do you want us to untangle you?

No. If I wanted you to untangle me, I would have said so. Just put the fire out.

Two minutes later I was doing arm wraps all over again. I've got battle scars now, a couple of little red streaky burns on my forearm and what looks like a mess of scratches near my shoulder. I have to resist the urge to show them to everyone. Yes, I was the sort of kid who was always showing everyone her injuries from the playground. This is where I fell off the swing. This is where I jumped off the top of the play structure to see what it would be like to fly. This is where I couldn't figure out how to slide down the pole. This is where I wrapped a flaming chain around my arm at a fetish club and it got stuck.

I'd do it all again too.

It's my last day at work. I've returned my laptop, packed up my books, backed up my mp3's, and gone through my exit interview. A lot of people have come by my desk to tell me that they're sorry to see me go. Rumour has it that they're going to replace me with two, possibly three people. I knew I should have asked for a raise. Would you believe that I'm upset? I'm serious. I have a lump in my throat the size of a baseball. I'm abandoning a comfortable job working with people that I like for something uncertain and new. If it all goes horribly wrong, this will be the moment that I regret. I don't know what's going to happen next. Some people find that exciting. I must not be quite as adventurous as I thought, because right now I'm terrified.

I have until Monday to swallow down my terror and present myself at my new office as a capable, confident, leader of men.

Wish me luck.

Notes for my first novel Thriftstore of the Apocalypse:

Our setting -- San Francisco in the very near future. Rent is high. Parking is scarce. Artists build whimsical floats and protest in front of City Hall, but no one can distinguish them from the ranting homeless. Market Street is gauntlet of religious lunatics. The Fallen is Babylon...wrath of her fornication guy with his sandwhich board, the little asian guy with his Clinton found guilty in 8 galaxies sign, the preacher at cable car turnaround who can't stand to see people kissing in front of him, and a lot of suspiciously clean-cut Mormons who always seem to think our heroine needs to hear an uplifting story about Our Lord Jesus Christ. Meter maids feast on the broken bodies of the poor, which is nearly everyone.

Our heroine -- an ingenue from some obscure and boring place. Kansas. If Quentin Tarantino can rip off The Wizard of Oz, so can I. She's hounded at home, misunderstood. Her mother is already starting to ask her when she's going to find herself a nice boy and get married. Unlikely. She's a lesbian. She leaves home for San Francisco, Gay Ground Zero, to start life anew in a place where people will accept her for who she is. She moves into an apartment that she shares with six other people (several of which she never sees and one of which communicates only through cryptic notes on the fridge) in The Mission. Her room is a closet. Every week she calls her mother and tell her that she's living in Paris/Thailand/Morocco/New Zealand, where she's met the man of her dreams and they'll be married in the spring.

The Store -- our heroine's place of employment. A charity thrift shop run by the Nuns of the Order of Something That Sounds Vaguely Menacing. They sell the donated knicknacks of their dead and dying adherents. Old books. Heavy furniture. Fur coats that smell like mothballs. The only black beaded cashmere sweater in Northern California that costs less than fifty bucks. People who walk in always seem to find exactly what they want, but with tragic consequences because, of course, it's eeeeeeevil.

Will the Vaguely Menacing Nuns succede in their plans for world conquest? Will our heroine catch on to their schemes? Will she find true love in The Mission? Will the world end in a blood-curdling holocaust? Maybe. Sure. Why not?

Ebay ebay ebay. Ebay is love. Ebay is the yard sale at the end of the world, the thriftstore of the apocalypse. There is nothing for sale that somebody won't bid on it. Sometimes that bidder is me.

My Jack Skellington mug arrived today. I've bought beaded flowers, Edward Gorey first editions, a tarot deck, pointy Victorian shoes from the turn of the century (too narrow), vintage lingerie, silk nightgowns, cut velvet 30's dresses, a seal fur coat, Nick Cave bootlegs, old photographs, and a trapeze artist's costume from the circus, all without leaving the house. Who says this isn't a wonderful world that we live in? My city, really, any major city, is exhausted. We have so depleted our supply of curious objects and silk velvet that we must have them shipped in from other parts of the country.We need emergency air drops of antique vanity sets and circle stitch brassieres.

Without ebay I might have to give up my day job and devote my waking hours to prowling antique stores and thrift shops, searching for the only black cashmere beaded sweater in San Francisco that costs less than fifty bucks. I might be forced to wear ill-fitting 70's reproductions bought at Urban Outfitters. I might even have to move.

I've been reading a lot of other people's weblogs, just to see what sorts of things they're using them for. So far high industrial is the only one I read on a regular basis. I also check on /usr/bin/girl sometimes because she has good links. Besides, I can understand a girl who wants to be an anime character when she grows up. I've always wanted to be a supervillain myself.

I've noticed an increasing obsession with hits and trackers. I guess no one likes to feel like they're just talking to themselves. Me, I don't mind. I've been on usenet. I know what it feels like to have your words just disappear into the ether. I hope that some people find this weblog entertaining, but I'm not fixated on who is coming here and why.

Those of you who are pouring over your unique hits, please remember this: don't be flattered if I've visited your web page. I also stop to look at car crashes.

Nightclubs are a cumulative experience. The more you go, the more you get out of them. On Monday nights I go to Death Guild. On Fridays I go to Assimilate. Sometimes I'll go to Fury Bar, Shrine of Lillith, or 1984. There's a decent club here for nearly every day of the week. Sometimes I'm dressed up, sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I dance all night. Sometimes I spend the entire evening talking in a corner. Sometimes I go home early. Sometimes there's an afterparty and we all stay up until dawn. Either way, the familiar faces accumulate until suddenly it's two in the morning and you're bopping in the DJ both, tipsy on the unpronouncable special tequila. You look down at the dance floor and realize you know everyone. You can draw little lines of love and hate between every dancer on the floor.

That's what it's like to have family.

There are circles within circles, groups within groups. In the weeks leading up to Burning Man the circle was as all inclusive as it would ever get. As soon as we came back from the desert, the tribal feeling began to dissipate. It was so thin in some places that it was almost as if I'd never met these people at all. Didn't I go to the desert with you? Didn't I go to meetings every Saturday for months? Didn't I go to fire dancing practice every Wednesday? Didn't I perform at the benefit? Perform at the Thunderome? Didn't I wash other people's dirty dishes and keep shade structures from falling over in the windstorms?. Some people's memories are very, very short.

That's what I was thinking when I walked into Death Guild last night. I was ready to confront the whole lot of them, the little die-hard original core of Death Guild/Thunderdome rivetheads who pride themselves on not playing well with others. I never got the chance. No sooner had I showed my ID at the door than one of the security guys grabbed my arm and said "I'm taking you to the girls."

There, at the far end of the bar, the girls of Thunderdome were holding court...and buying me drinks...and getting me a barstool...and complaining about boys. Tiny little Calico, with her boots up on the bar, laid sloppy kisses on us all and declared "I'm sitting with the most beautiful women in this club!" We scribbled down witty things on napkins and made plans to run off to Las Vegas. We took turns wearing a glow-in-the-dark tiara and calling each other "princess." By the end of the night I had family again. It felt good.

This cooking at home thing has really been working out. In the four months since moving to SOMA, J and I have eaten out almost every night. J's roommate is a compulsive cook. Every night he would make the same goopy rice/lentil/coucous dish and drown it in hotsauce. For all his cooking, he never cleaned up the kitchen. If J and I wanted to cook, we'd have to spend half an hour scrubbing lentils off of everything just to make the kitchen usable. Now that his roommate is in Seattle, the apartment is a whole lot cleaner.

J and I are continuing to make our way through to cajun cookbook. We made jambalaya this time. No, it wasn't dawn. It was merely midnight by the time we finished. While the concoction was cooking I went into the living room and did a headstand. Jambalaya is much simpler and faster than gumbo. It requires a lot of chopping, but not a whole lot of cooking time. I added some okra to thicken it up and bring the cook time down even further. You should have seen us in the grocery store, a California girl and an East Coast boy looking for a vegetable they couldn't identify. Is this the okra? No, that's a root of some sort. Is this okra? No, okra's got ridges and it's green...I think. If the celebrity chef in question were dead, he would turn over in his grave. Our knowledge of the South is roughly equivalent to our knowledge of Mars. Both are intriguing but inhospitable environments.

Winter weather has started here. It's raining, not really rain but a very agressive sort of mist. It caught me so off guard that I didn't even take my umbrella with me on the way to work. I simply had no idea of where it might be. A warm coat was protection enough from that light sprinkle, but I spent most of my walk to work meditating on the fact that I'd probably seen my last blue sky for six months. It doesn't get cold here, but it does get relentlessly gray.

Sugar hiccup on Cheerios. Sugar hiccup...

I've been digging up all of my Cocteau Twins albums lately. I ripped Garlands, Treasure, Head Over Heels, and Milk and Kisses at work and put them on random shuffle.My desktop wallpaper is pure Vaughn Oliver. I'm sleeping in J's Cocteau Twins tour tee-shirts. I never buy tour tee-shirts myself since they're usually so large they're only good as nightshirts. At the Front 242 show they were selling forrest green (Dear God deliver me from LL Bean!) polo shirts with the band's logo tastefully embroidered above the left breast. I can only imagine dozens of balding computer professionals coming to work the next day in their khakis and Front 242 polos. Some friends of mine brought their fifteen year-old son to the show. He had that half bored, half mortified with embarassment look that most teenagers have when they're seen anywhere in public with their parents.He's traveled all over the world with his parents. He's hung out with Wumpscutt in Germany. He's had nearly every major Industrial act to dinner at his house, but Industrial just isn't his thing. He'd rather be listening to Rancid.

Kids these days.

Two entries for the price of one today, seeing as I'm stuck at work for another hour and a half.

I've decided that I can't wait to grow old. I will skip directly from my twenties to my fifties at least so that I can get started on being a grande dame in true Rosalind Russel style. I will take up smoking so that I can smoke cigarettes from a foot-long cigarette holder. I will start the day with cocktails. I will wear silk formal pajamas around the house. I will wear false eyelashes and paint my fingernails bright red. I will own a chaise lounge and flirt shamelessly with men half my age. It will be glorious.

I was in a miserably bad mood last night. I tried going to Spin Jam, which is a poi spinning ravey thing South of Market on Thursday nights. If you don't know what poi spinning is, you can read about it at Home of Poi. I usually fire dance, which is done with flaming poi. Incendium has a pretty good page on fire dancing. I usually go to a lit practice in Oakland, where about fifteen of us gather outside of a West Oakland warehouse with a big bucket of kerosene and spin to the sound of stompy industrial music until midnight-ish. That practice has been on hiatus while all of us recovered from Burning Man. At this point I'm not merely recovered, I'm starting to go through fire withdrawl, so I screwed up my courage, gathered up my gear, and went to Spin Jam.

I don't have anything in particular against ravers. I like trance. I like dancing. When necessary I can put up with the blacklights and the enormous pants, but this place pushed all of my buttons almost immediately. It was indoors, to begin with. That means no fire. That would have been okay except for that the space was miniscule given the number of glassy-eyed rave kids trying to spin in there. Everyone was using those commerically-bought neon pink and green bean bag poi. These are children's toys compared to the heavy, soot-covered, fire chains I brought with me. Because everyone was using these light user-friendly bean bags, they didn't feel compelled to have the least bit of respect for other people's space. Not only was I constantly getting hit by the squishy bean bags, but no one had the presence of mind to avoid being hit by my big, mean, bruising chains. No one made any attempt to get out of the way. No one said "Excuse me" or "Could I please get through?" Everyone was so busy vaguely shuffling their feet and staring at the floor that no one even made I'm-going-this-way-you-should-go-that-way eye contact. No one had taught any of these people what I always thought were the most basic rules of spinning etiquette. After an hour of this, I was so frustrated I had to go home.

I might go back. I always swore I wouldn't be one of those snotty spinners who insists that the way they do it is the One True Way. I just need to bring softer, more brightly lit poi and a lot more patience. The first part is easy. The second is going to take some time.

This is my third day of eating gumbo. I think we shouldn't have made quite so much of it. There's still enough to last us through the entire weekend. I'm going to have to have people come over and eat the gumbo for me, take it off my hands, get it out of my fridge. It's lurking in there. I'm being haunted by cajun food.

I stopped by the Halloween store on the way home from work. It opened just a few weeks ago, so it hasn't been pillaged yet. I haven't given much thought to my costume yet. I'll probably throw together some sort of dark faerie costume since I'll need it for a performance at a friend's Beltaine party anyhow.I'll shred a couple of skirts, pile on the jewlery, cinch myself into a corset and it'll all work out. That's not what the Halloween store is for. The Halloween store is for year-round interior decorating. Last year I found a great black wreath and some neat-looking skulls I use as bookends. The year before I found a brain in a jar. This year I found articulated skeletons that I've already taken apart and started using in jewelery. They have feather wings of various sizes going for half the price they were two years ago. At $30 a pair, they're almost cheap enough to dismantle for art projects. There were also butterfly wings (red, blue,yellow) made from feathers, but I haven't thought of a good use for them just yet. I bought a pocketful of little plastic flies. I tried to make a necklace out of them once, but the little transparent wings kept falling off no matter how carefully I glued them in place.This year I'm going to glue them to my bedframe. Eventually I want to cover my bedframe entirely in insects. Maybe they'll scare the real ones off.

I'm adding a new pillar to the Tao of Never: gumbo. That's four pillars now. Soon the Way will start to look like the Parthenon. J and I made gumbo from scratch last night. I don't cook much at home. I always say that I'm going to, but with no car it's just so much trouble to go grocery shopping and keep fresh vegetables in the house. J rented a cargo van so that he could pick up his sound equipment last night, so we took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on some groceries. If it hadn't been so late, we would have gone to Rainbow Grocery, which is a worker-owned co-op where everything is crunchy and organic and the staff gives you the "you're cool enough to shop here" nod, provided you've got funny-colored hair and a couple of piercings. But we were in a hurry, so went to Yuppie Mart...I mean Whole Foods. The parking garage is wall-to-wall SUVs. The vegetables are alphabetized. There's a conspicuous abundance of sashimi grade tuna at the fish counter. We could measure the standard of living in this city by tracking Ahi Tuna consumption. It's a graduate thesis in economics just waiting to happen.

It took us two hours to navigate all of the aisles. We're thorough shoppers, we are. That means looking at absolutely everything, including the dog food and the diapers. We got lost in the chutney section and we nearly didn't survive the liquor aisle. Whole Foods carries almost a dozen different varieties of Muscat, which is a ridiculous. After all, I only need one. In a case. Good thing we brought a cargo van. While I was trying to distinguish between Drunken Goat Cheese and Vodcheese (how the pierced and tattooed Rainbow co-op girls would have sneered and chucked oraganic granola at me!) J was a busy impulse-buying a celebrity cookbook by an outspoken televised chef who shall remain nameless. By now it was nearly ten in the evening, I was faint with hunger, and my darling had just decided we were going to make Seafood Gumbo.

If my life had a soundtrack, ominous music would be playing at this moment.

Since we had to return the cargo van before we could start anything, it was past midnight when we started cooking. 12:30 am and I had not yet eaten dinner. In fact, we had only just started chopping vegetables and making the roux. Roux is a mixture of fat (vegetable oil in this case) and flour used to thicken soups. You're supposed to cook the roux, stirring all the while, until it turns a chocolate brown. My recipe failed to mention that this would take upwards of half an hour.

1:00 am -- still no food.

We add the vegetables and the water and let the whole thing simmer. Our recipe says to simmer for an hour and a half, but we think they must be joking. We take turns sipping at the gumbo every fifteen minutes to see if it's thick enough.

2:30 am -- the gumbo is still watery. I think I burned the roux. I add garlic which effectively masks the smell.

2:35 am -- we give up and decide to add the seafood. The clams are supposedly still alive when we toss them into the simmering stew. I spend a few (admittedly delirious) moments meditating on what it must be like to be a clam, doing your clammy thing, only to have your life end by being thrown into a pot full of vegetables.

2:50 am -- T minus zero minutes! The gumbo is ready. We rush into the kitchen and pour the gumbo over some rice. It's too hot. We immediately burn our tongues.

3:00 am -- Bliss. The gumbo is the life. I have never eaten anything so perfect. I fall asleep with the fork in my hand.

Tune in tomorrow when I try to make jambalaya at dawn while blindfolded and standing on my head.

I can't believe that I spent so much time worrying about what to do with my career. It would have been better to follow the Way of the Samurai. All important decisions should be made within the space of seven breaths. Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Of course, everything I know about samurai comes from Jim Jarmusch and Akira Kurosawa. The samurai always dies at the end, doesn't he? Or does he become a great warlord? I can never remember. Either way, the Way of the Samurai makes for lousy career advice.

The Tao of Never has three pillars:

-- vintage clothing

-- fire dancing

-- sushi

All else springs from this.

It's fall and the concerts are starting. In the last few weeks I've seen Din_fiv/VNV Nation/Apoptygma Berzerk, a Finnish band at the Monteray Music Festival whose name escapes me at the moment, and Front 242. Later this week I'm seeing 16 Horsepower. This is the only time of year that I really go to live concerts. Every year there's a little less sit-down and act civilized concert-going and more jumping up and down like a madwoman for three or four hours. This is what it felt like to be a kid, when you could just go and go because being alive and moving felt so damn good.

There was some crowd surfing, not quite a real mosh pit, but a couple of people got up there and red-jacketed Security didn't try to stop them. I haven't been in a mosh pit since I was seventeen. I didn't bring the right shoes. People stepped on my toes all night. The whole thing left me sweaty and nostalgic.

After being a kid all weekend, I had to act like an adult at work and put in my official resignation. I miss everything about this place and I'm not even gone yet. I have to spend the next couple of weeks frantically scripting and documenting everything I've done in the last year because they don't have anyone else here who really knows UNIX. I'm going to do right by these guys. I don't want people cursing my name after I'm gone.