I lied. No in depth entry about my general state of being is coming. It's just too awful to talk about. The dream house is empty. I haven't been sleeping much. The last time I dreamt anything, it was that I was throwing a party in a big house with green and gold walls and I got yelled at by Jamie Zawinski. I couldn't possibly tell you what it means.

There is a theory that you dream because of random signals flooding the audio and visual cortices during REM sleep. The only reason that dreams seem to be coherent is that the brain is trying to make sense of the nonsense. The human brain is exceptionally good at finding patterns and making connections. You don't normally see your own blind spot. Sometimes there isn't really any pattern there at all. There isn't really any reason why caustic hackers with dredlocks are showing up in my dreams to berate me for some unknown failing, probably involving my sub-standard hostessing skills.

I used to get nightmares, sometimes the same nightmare every night for a week, like my subconcious mind has rented a movie and it wants it's money's worth before sending it back. My teeth are falling out. Sometimes this is combined with the Contact Lense Wearer's Nightmare, in which my contact lenses are the size of salad bowls and I have to clean them out in the sink. Usually it's just my teeth. One starts to get a little loose and I wiggle it with my tongue until it pops out. The first couple of teeth I can hold in my hand. It's not bad until there's more than a handful there and I can't keep track of them all as I'm trying to shove them back into my mouth. I don't remember what goes where, I'm just trying to push them back into my mouth like puzzle pieces, but they feel enormous. All of the teeth are loose in my gums. I can't talk because my mouth is full of them. I can't hold on to them. They wind up on the floor, in the dirt, wherever I'm standing and I'm on my hands and knees looking for them.

Sometimes I wake up at this point. I roll out of bed and I walk into the bathroom. I start to run the water and I notice that all of my teeth feel too big for my mouth. Then they just start to fall out again.

That's how my brain makes sense out of nonsense.

'Twas the night before Beta and all through the house, every creature was typing or clicking their mouse.

I promise to edit this into a more in depth entry concerning my general well-being, but right now I'm up to my knees in server configuration. My boss, of course, is convinced that "the worst of it is over" and keeps trying to say cheerful things. I keep trying to convince him he would be safer out of throwing range of my desk.

I need to stop. This has gone too far. Maybe it's the holidays. Maybe it's something in the water. Maybe it's the fact that I've put in a 50 hour week when I should have been enjoying a nice long weekend. It's this club thing. It's completely out of the control. I have no power over it. Since Monday I have been to Deathguild, Bondage A-Go-Go, 1984, and Carnivale. Tonight I'll be at Assimilate. On Saturday I'll be at Shrine of Lillith and Monday it will start all over again. Night after night with the same people, listening to the same DJ's spin the same music until three in the morning when we all go out to Denny's and order greasy food that hurts my stomach.

This has to end. I don't want to hear people watching TV in the living room while the sun comes up. I don't want some guy from Galaxxy Chamber spilling wine on the carpet. At least I think it was Galaxxy Chamber, the makeup looked right. I don't want to be groggy until the middle of the afternoon anymore. I don't want to trip over piles of yesterday's club clothes as I'm trying to get to bed. The club scene has beaten me.

It's official: Nightlife 1, Never 0. The bookies are collecting their bets right now.

Fine, I admit it. I've always wanted to write a zeitgeist novel. Who doesn't? It's one of those things you only feel compelled to do while you're still young and everything around you burns with importance. I need to hurry up. I'm sure that in another five years I would never be foolish enough to believe that anybody cares about computer geeks that listen to German electro. No one will care what colors we dyed our hair or how much rent we paid for our postage-stamp apartments. No one will want to listen to stories of Fear and Loathing weekends, caffiene jitters, or the chronic shortage of soy chai lattes. I have no doubt that someday I will look back at the pictures and laugh. I'll say things like "Oh God, I can't believe how many times I watched The Matrix" and "Wasn't that the year I ran up three thousand dollars in parking tickets?"

Consider this a notice of intent to publish. I will capture, in a Bret Easton Ellis kind of way, the very spirit of the technology boom.

Consider this a notice of intent to thinly diguise real people and events.

There will be a couple of spaced-out ravers completely unlike the boys who started this company. They will be happy and vacant. They will be bought out by a software giant and use the money to buy identical half million dollar lofts, essentially big white boxes that exist only to hold their flatscreen high defenition televisions and beanbag chairs.

There will be a 30-ish former wunderkind hacker who really did change the world for a couple of years until the company he worked for was bought by a great evil and he quit out of disgust. He will buy a nightclub, completely unlike this one, which will eat into a large chunk of his rather formidable disposable income. He will be a great programmer, but a lousy club owner. When his enterprise fails, it will be tragic. We won't linger too long on it. After all, this book isn't about him.

There will be an awful 80's one-hit wonder in an unattractive hat who is trying to use his name to start up an internet business.

There will be the ruthless CEO of a billion-dollar consulting company who slashes and burns through industry after industry. He knows that his business model is destined to burn through any young company's venture capital before they even have a chance to open up shop, but he plans to dump all of his stock and get out before the first bubble bursts. He will have army of prematurely rich thugs and frat boys in suits at his command. He will say things like "We like to think of ourselves as e-business marines."

There will be the hacker who thinks he didn't make it. He's worked in the industry from the very beginning. He's been at some of the largest and most influential companies in the online world, but he's never once stayed at any one company for long enough to vest. He's brilliant and bitter, so bitter that he can't enjoy the fact that he makes an obscene amount of money.

There will be the permanently-stoned owner of a large industrial record label who made his money in currency speculation. He doesn't even like industrial music. In fact, he'd rather be listening to Wire.

There will be the permanently-stoned industrial DJ. He will drink high-grade tequila and take his shirt off at any opportunity. He will hit on women reflexively, but it will still be charming. Every story needs comic relief.

Yes, there will be some women too. The bright pink-haired systems administrator by day, DJ by night, who has sworn off all things industrial and gone over to the bright side. The girls who run the local record store. Art school girls who went into web design. Professional online sex objects. A game designer who never talks about work.

I will name drop the names of bands and fancy restaurants. I will talk about people's drug stashes and heavy drinking habits. It will be a brilliant tell-all confessional, the defining tale of this place and time. It will be praised by The New Yorker and slashdot. Laurel Wellman will write catty, jealous remarks about me in her column. If only I could get around to writing this masterpiece.

Now I know I have become truly irrevocably internet-dependent. I made my first peapod order this week. I have become so lazy that I can't even go out and buy my own groceries. It's not as bad as that. I don't have a car and the nearest grocery store is a Safeway whose shelves are almost completely empty on account of a strike that's been going on for nearly a month. Now I can sit in front of the computer with an open cookbook and make some attempt at planing my week out in advance so that I don't find myself running to Denny's because it's three in the morning and my fridge is empty. I have successfully eradicated another point of human contact from my life. Such is the power of technology.

When kozmo first came to San Francisco about a year ago, I was instantly addicted. I ordered DVDs, ice cream, book, candy, cold medicine, anything really. It was a joy just to click a button on a web browser and have some former bike messenger on my doorstep within the hour. Then the novelty wore off and the venture capital dwindled. Kozmo added fees and developed a reputation for treating its employees like trained monkeys. Deliveries rarely came within the hour and they were always out of my favorite videos besides. It's a shame, really. For a while I felt like I was really living in the future. You know, the year 2000 where everything is delivered with the push of a button and we all drive flying cars.

What ever happend to the future? Aren't we supposed to be wearing jumpsuits, having vacations on the moon, and living to be a hundred and three by now? Where are the homicidal androids and moving sidewalks? Where are the evil corperate Japanese hitmen? There's no utopia out there, no nuclear holocaust either. No one was cynical enough to predict that the future would be so banal.

Oh well, there's always next year.

I'm the last person at the office again. That means I get to play Massive Attack at full volume.

J has already called me twice and asked when I'm coming home. Both times I told him I was just on the way, but he knows my caught-in-the-middle-of-a-tricky-server-problem voice, so I suspect he isn't expecting much. I hear that in Europe workers get six weeks of a vacation a year. It's a wonder anything gets done there at all. I can't even fit my workload into a 40 hour week.

People work themselves to death here. My boss is 35 and he's already suffered from a heart attack. A few weeks ago, I came home at midnight and J wasn't at the apartment. He was at the office until six in the morning, having rebuilt his company's entire network not once, but twice. Who knows what our blood pressure is going to look like by the time we hit our mid-thirties. We work too hard and we stay out all night so that we can forget about working too hard.

My supervillainy is nothing in comparison to our Vice President of Product Development. He has the power to inflict carpal tunnel syndrome at will. He makes weekends disappear. He is immune to attacks via common sense or logic. His secret lair is a fortress built from business cards engraved with his title, salary, and stock potion package. No engineer can ever destroy him. For every Vice President of Product Development I slay, another will take his place.

Where oh where is my death ray?

There is an unspoken rule among my club friends that you never, ever talk about work except for in the vaguest of terms. I got a new job. I got a raise. I quit. I vested. Most of them don't even know what I do for a living. It's not polite to press the point. You get a shrug. I work in computers. I work in retail. I'm a student. It's all the same in a dark club, shouting above the music, holding a Cosmopolitan you know you cannot finish.

I know I brought this on myself. This is my just reward for complaining that I was bored at my last job. Nothing is boring now. There's no rest for the wicked. Everything is crucial. Every machine is essential. Every server had to be racked and configured yesterday. That's the problem with being a big fish in a small pond. Everyone depends on you. I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me feel important. But I'd give anything to be an important person who wasn't on call 24 hours a day.

I need a lackey.

I need a good night's sleep.

I need 24-hour sushi delivered to my door.

I'm going home now.

Today I turn the full fury of my death ray on hair dressers. For years I've been doing my hair at the same little cluster of salons in the Lower Haight. There are four or five good ones, so there was always at least one with an appointment open for me. They're all staffed with eccentric girls with funny-colored hair who understand what I mean when I walk in and say I want standard goth girl haircut number three.

When I got extentions, I chose my hairdresser carefully. It takes seven hours to put in a head full of extentions. Nothing is more important than choosing someone you wouldn't mind talking to for almost an entire work day. Of course all of my careful work came to nothing when my hairdresser became a victim of gentrification and moved to Los Angeles, where she has a perfectly nice little house by the beach for less money than it would cost to rent a hole in the wall in San Francisco. She does hair on the weekends and spends her weekdays painting. It's not enough that I'm seething with jealousy over her newfound life of leisure, but my extentions are getting a little ratty and it's high time they were replaced.

In a panic, I turn to the Lower Haight. Help me, Edo! Save me, Zip Zap! Forgive me, stylist, for I have sinned. It's been four months since I've been to a salon. I brandish my most holy check card. No number of prayers to Vidal Sassoon sends me an extention-granting angel with black and blue synthetic hair. Maire Rua has no one who can help me. Spaghetti and Ravioli is closed even though the sign clearly says they are open at this day and hour. The staff at Transformer is too busy to answer their phone.

Has the market bottomed out? Is there a decreased demand for enormous, strangely-colored hair? Is this the lead indicator of a new era of social conservativism? Are all of the hip stylists too busy coiffing rock stars to pay attention to my ever-worsening plight? Has the high cost of living driven them all to Southern California or off the Pacific Coast entirely? Is there some undiscovered colony of former San Francisco hairdressers hiding out in Nebraska, where the rents are low?

I demand answers! We need a mayoral commission on this pressing matter. We need NEA grants for San Francisco's struggling artists doing important work with hair as their medium. The city will be declared a Fashion Disaster Area and stylists will be air lifted from New York. The issue will spawn opposing propositions on next November's ballot.

In the meantime, I'll take goth girl haircut number three, please.

I've been sick. When I get sick, I fall spectacularly ill. I had a cold that lasted through most of August and into September. It meandered through bronchitis, sinus infection, and laringytis before it finally gave up and became a week-long case of the sniffles. I never took a sick day. I didn't make any attempt to slow down my social life. Oh, and I spent a week and a half in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, running around half naked in freezing weather with lungs full of alkali dust from the wind storms.

Let it never be said that I don't learn from my mistakes. I took a sick day immediately. I raided Walgreens for chewable Vitamin C and a year's supply of multivitamins. I bought aspirin and echinacea with goldenseal. I drank orange juice and very hot tea. I ordered a big bowl of pho from the Vietnamese place on Powell St. and resigned myself to a weekend spent on the couch, wrapped in all of my blankets, watching television and answering panicked email from work.

It should hardly come as a revelation that even with a thousand (hacked) channels and a Tivo at my disposal, there's nothing on. Well, there was nothing on after the Powerpuff Girls marathon was over. Some ancient channel-flipping part of my brain took over and started browsing through the music channels. I'm proud to say that I have so lost touch with Top 40 Pop, that I was unable to identify anything on MTV, VH1, or Much Music. I don't know the difference between Britney and Christina or the 180 N Synchs on the Block. I am finally old enough to be puzzled by kids these days. For joy!

At least that's what I thought until I hit AMP, which is a little half hour show on M2 (you know, the MTV channel that actually plays music videos) that stopped me in my tracks for the full 30 minutes. They played videos for "Cowgirl" by Underworld and "Never Gonna Come Back Down" by BT.I started writing down the names or artists and albums. For the first time since high school, commercial television was trying to sell me something I actually wanted to buy. It was a strange, strange feeling. I blame the fever and too much vitamin C.

On Monday, I'm still going to order the new DJ Rap.

I did it. I stopped complaining and started calling all of the fire dancers, musicians, acrobats, and circus freaks that I know to see if they would be interested in a practice with an emphasis on group work and choreography. So far everyone I've talked to has been very enthusiastic. If I can actually get them to all show up in the same place at the same time and not rip each other apart once they get there, I'll be amazed. Directing fire dancers is a lot like herding cats.

I'm rather giddy and hopefull for the entire enterprise. Most of the people I've talked to have also had the vague feeling that we could be doing better, more interesting performances. They just didn't know where to start. I don't want to jinx my plans by talking about them, but I hope that maybe we'll have something to perform in time for the New Year's Eve party in Oakland. Tania is looking into a way to set the roof of her hearse on fire without harming the car. Seriously, I don't think it will work, but it certainly would look stunning if it did.

For my part, I'm building fire fingers. There are some doubles acrobatics tricks that don't require the partners to clasp hands that I think would look great with fingers. You can also put them out by swallowing the fire at the end of your set, which always looks good. Other people have offered to make costumes. I got all kinds of ideas from watching Cirque du Soliel. Fire dancing costumes are, by necessity, minimalist, but in "O" the performers had wonderful headpieces/wigs that managed to stay on their heads through just about everything. It's time to start digging through patterns and looking through the discount tables at fabric stores again.

I added a guestbook to my page. Use it. Know it. Love it. It's maddeningly primative, but I just wanted to give people a chance to leave their feedback.

I wasn't going to talk about this. Sometimes you see something or go somewhere and it changes your life. This is not a life changing experience. I wish it was, but here I am at my office, in front of my computer, servers humming on either side of me. No, nothing has changed at all.

What didn't change my life? Front row center tickets to Cirque du Soliel's "O" in Las Vegas. So close to the stage they're called "wet seats" because you risk being splashed with water from the tank. I could have slouched and touched the stage with my toe. I could hear the acrobats signaling each other over the music. I could smell chlorine and kerosene. I have seen the most elaborate gothic spectacle that theater has to offer and my life remains the same.

It's tragic. You probably think I don't mean that, but I do.

Once apon a time, I was circus queen. I was a little pixie gymnast first, but then puberty caught up with me. In circus arts, I had a head start. No one cared if my toes were pointed. They were just impressed that I could do a back handspring. I did partner acrobatics, Chinese acrobatics, and little bit of trapeze and Spanish web. I learned to spin plates, dive through hoops, and eat fire. The summer between my senior year in high school and my first year of college, Cirque du Soliel held auditions in San Francisco. Chances are that I would have never qualified, but I'd like to think I really had an opportunity to run away with the circus.

About twenty minutes into the performance, J turns to me and asks "Are you alright?" The stage is reconfiguring itself. Footmen on carousel horses are descending into the water. A woman in a torn Victorian gown is walking across the stage playing a cello. And I'm not alright. Everything I've done with Burn Unit in this last year has been worthless. We've been going out there and spinning fire to angry music and thinking that's enough. Eventually the novelty of fire wears off. Even the novelty of scantily clad rivetheads fire dancing to the sound of VNV Nation wears off. Not all of the clever costuming or breathtaking moves in the world will ever be compelling unless we tell a story. Theater exists to comment on the human condition. Anything less is just tricks strung together.

Somebody wrote to me asking what happens to the arch-villain after the hero gets shot in the head. I thought I would write my answer here, just in case others were asking themselves this weighty question.

After I've shot the hero in the head, he will be replaced by a new
arch-nemesis, probably his brother. This will allow our new hero to look
soulfull and brooding and say "You killed my brother" in a voice hoarse
with emotion at every given opportunity. This type of hero is particularly
tiresome. I will blast him with my Haggis Ray.

Let it never be said that I don't give my adoring public what it wants. In case you want more supervillains, go here. Budgie has many tales of supervillain woe. Being bad is hard work.

I'm working late again tonight. The only thing we have to eat in the office is ramen. Chicken flavor. Maruchan Instant Lunch. Maruchan is Chinese for "starving student." I haven't eaten ramen since living in a college dorm, when it was safer to add boiling water to an instant lunch than to eat dining hall food. There were days when I would have promised my unborn children in exchange for some decent sushi, roughly nine days out of any given ten.

A college classmate of mine assured me that the deep fried unmentionables they tried to pass for food were nothing in comparison that nadir of the culinary arts, dining hall haggis. I believe him. Maybe the next time I try my hand at supervillainy I will build a Haggis Ray. Death will look merciful.

Actually, I've been eating rather well. J and I made more jambalaya. On those nights when we can't handle any more cajun food, there are some fantastic restaurants in SOMA. About a year ago, some friends and I instituted a tradition we called Snob Night. Every Friday night we would make reservations at a fancy restaurant. We were all rather new to the idea of disposable income. We would order unpronouncable food, quiz the waiters, and drown the whole thing in cocktails and wine until at last we staggered home, tipsy and humming to ourselves. We made quite a game out of escalating the hauteness of the cuisine, the price of the food, and the difficulty of getting reservations until finally the whole thing collapsed under our expanding waistlines and dwindling bank accounts.

There's no folly quite like the folly of youth. I haven't used up all of mine just yet, but I've traded gluttony in for vanity. It's cheaper.

I think that I woke up with a hangover this morning. I'm not sure. It's difficult to determine my state of mind before coffee. My co-workers were very understanding. They know Halloween is the closest thing I have to a religious holiday.

Note to self: Do not drink any drink that has the word "death" in its name. That's the bartender trying to tell you something. A Red Death tastes like fruit punch and feels like a kick in the head.

I blatantly stole from a friend of mine and dressed up as one of the Gashleycrumb Tinies. Which one is not important. Such and such is for so and so who died of something or other. It's all in the long tradition of me dressing up as something dead for Halloween, though I guess that in this case it was something that was about to die.

Ebay is flooded with Edward Gorey merchandise these days. They have the Dracula Toy Theater, a couple of the heat-sensitive Mystery! mugs, and original Edward Gorey lithographs. People have told me that I'm difficult to shop for. I can't understand why. It's probably because those lithographs are going for upwards of three hundred dollars.

My world is bleak and without hope.