The rental agent from Building #1 just called. She offered the Howard St. place to J and me with a $200 discount on rent because they can't give us the garage. Of course we've already signed the other lease.

Yesterday morning J and I walked down the street and rented an apartment.

We were certain that the Howard St. place had rejected us. Two days had passed without a phone call. This time last year, that was a sure sign that some boring couple (he's in khakis, she's wearing black capri pants) was already moving their Pottery Barn sofa into the corner near the window. I spent an hour or two trying to convince myself that I didn't want to live there anyway. Who needs all that glass and brick and brushed aluminum? Not me. I don't need that jacuzzi either.

It was time to get back to Earth, to come to our senses and accept the fact that people like us don't get to live in fabulous showplaces. We will always be cramming our stuff into some too little place in a dangerous neighborhood because no matter how well we do, there's always some couple out there who makes more money, has perfect credit, and isn't quite so bohemian looking. It's dangerous to rent to bohemians, you know. They might actually use the space to make art. Making art is a noisy and messy business. The owners of these "live/work" developments frown on anything that might disturb the neighbors. When they say "live/work" they mean "run an internet startup from your house, where no one will ever hear anything louder than the sound of you typing away at your keyboard." Nothing makes a landlord cringe like the words "professional recording studio." Bohemians have disreputable friends. They throw late-night parties. They get photo developer all over the floor and you'll never get all of the glitter out of the carpet.

When the landlord of Building #2 showed us in, he asked "Are you artists?" and he didn't say "artist" to rhyme with "cockroach."

1600 square feet, a quarter again the size of the Howard Street place. Sealed concrete floors downstairs, for easy cleaning. Two foot thick concrete walls on all sides. A perfect room behind the kitchen for the recording studio. Fireplace. Big closets. Stainless steel kitchen appliances. Open space, so much open space it makes me dizzy.

"We're going to paint these exposed beams before move-in. What color would you like them?"

"Black."

He sent us across the street to drink coffee while we waited for him to run a credit check. Half an hour later, we were signing the lease. Another half hour later, I got a call from my boss telling me that the Howard Street place had called to check my employment references.

My, how the market has changed. Last year it took me more than three months of diligent searching to find a place to live. This year, all it took was an afternoon. There used to be crowds of potential renters at every open house, nervous couples sizing up the competition, giving them the evil eye. Now we're doing the landloards a favor, filling up their empty lofts when everyone else is skipping town.

I swear that this is where I will settle down. No more moving once a year. No more packed cardboard boxes in the back of my closet. No more pictures that I don't hang or frame for six months. This is my last $400 rent increase. This is the last time I throw out furniture because I simply don't have room for it. No more holding out for something better. No more clicking through Craig's List. No more fanciful prayers for an Angel of Interior Decorating to whisk me away to some better place. There is no better place than this, my own blank canvas with a commercial lease, a place where we can change anything.

Besides, J has already promised to help me hang a trapeze from the ceiling.

You can't go home again. We all know that. Long, weepy essays about how much the "old neighborhood" has changed are a staple of nonfiction. I'm not going to write one. I'm going to keep things short and sweet. If you blink, you'll miss the whole thing.

Home is a little sliver of San Francisco we used to call the "Goth Ghetto." When I was sixteen years old, Divisadero, between Haight and Fulton was my whole world. As soon as school let out, I would walk down to the game store and flirt with the boys who worked there. On Thursday nights we all met up for coffee at Cafe Abir. When I got hungry, I'd pay $5 for pasta at the Bean Bag with cheese toast. My friends worked at the game store; they worked at the comic book store; they slipped extra things into my bag at Curios and Candles. They lived in scuffed-up Victorian flats, four or five people to an apartment, where they held epic parties. Oak Street House. Grove Street House. Ataku House. Baker Street.

Off I went to see Assemblage 23 and Imperative Reaction at Justice League, right in the midde of Home, the most familiar streets I'll ever know. Only they weren't quite so familiar anymore. Didn't I promise to spare you the weepyness? I'll try. Anne Marie's clothing store has closed. The same goes for the magic supply store whose owner is a jerk, but he employed so many of my little skinny goth girl friends who wore pentagrams around their necks and read tarot cards. The place was full of oils and incense and the girls always smelled like ambergris and vanilla. The Church of John Coletrain, with services on Sundays and Wednesdays when they played sloppy jazz, is a boutique now. They don't make pasta anymore at the Bean Bag and there is no one behind the counter at the game store that I could envision myself sighing over.

The neighborhood I grew up in has been gentrified. The places I spent time in have either shut down or changed beyond recognition. The people I cared about have long since moved away or moved on. I wonder what happend to them.

I wonder if C. ever got back into the theater. I wonder if G. likes Ireland. I wonder if M. ever got the chance to use his physics degree. I wonder if S. ever found someone to love.

I'll probably never know. It's better that way.

I'm in big trouble. There's a restaurant upstairs that serves crepes and Belgian fries. They have an unlimited supply of soy chai lattes and the staff likes to play Portishead. They even have a cozy little reading corner by the window. I am in serious danger of slacking off from work. I can think of a dozen important things that I could be doing right now, but none of them sounds as tempting as ordering a cup of chai and curling up with my neuroscience book.

J and I spent Sunday looking at apartments. Nearly everything for sale in our neighborhood is a loft. The money is gone, but the building cycle is about two and a half years long. They'll be building big white boxes that no one can afford to move into for quite some time yet. So off we went to pick at the bloated corpse of the dot-com boom like vultures with funny-colored hair.

Some people want everything to be new. They want a brand new car. They want a just-built house. I like old things, used stuff, things that have been beat up a little. Newly constructed houses are hopelessly ugly. It may be all shiny now, but a year from now those white carpets will be a mess of stains, all of your cheap finish will be scuffed in the kitchen, and there will be black marks all over walls whitewashed with the cheapest possible paint. I'll bet the toilet breaks and don't even talk to me about the dishwasher.

Beware of houses built during a housing boom. It's like living in the housing equivalent of cheap Swedish furniture. But J has his heart set on a loft, and so long as it's a warehouse conversion rather than a built-from-scratch place, I'm willing to go along. To this end, we went to go see a place on Howard St. that we've both been drooling over ever since construction started. Most live/work projects are ugly, all pine and brushed aluminum. Years from now we are going to be deeply embarrassed by late 90's architecture. Yellow and orange are not great colors for hulking, boxy buildings. Yellow and orange are colors that only look good on fruit.

The Howard Street complex isn't one of these fruit colored buildings at all. The building used to be a stable for the San Francisco Fire Department's horses, back when you needed horses to pull great big wagons filled with water. Can you imagine a time when even horse stables were elaborate Art Deco things? The warehouse conversion has left all of tile and brickwork intact. All of the new construction is on the top floors, painted industrial black. The loft we saw has a giant window looking down onto the street, partially covered up by the original brick as if the apartment was buried in the crumbling shell of the original warehouse.

Within thirty seconds of walking into the place, J and I were talking (quietly, so that the rental agent wouldn't hear us) about what colors to paint the walls and where to put the recording studio. Should the dressers go into the walk-in closet? Do we have enough square yards of purple velvet to cover that window? Have you seen the stainless steel fridge? Can you believe this place? We need it. We want it. Where do we sign?

In my interior decorating fantasies, the walls are dark blue and burgundy. There's a canopy over the bed. There are piles of rugs on the floor, so many that they overlap. The mezzanine is strung with faerie lights.

I'm pricing new sewing machines. J wants to turn the downstairs bathroom into a dark room. We're already talked to Rachel about commissioning a painting from her.

Who am I kidding? We'll never get it.

This mail was sent out to the entire company this morning:

Coffee and tea drinkers,

As most of you know, we are managing our budgets tightly around here as of late. In order to provide more goodies in the kitchen, I would like to ask you to bring in a coffee mug to replace the "throw away" cups we are currently purchasing. No personal mugs, please. These will be for everyone's use and reuse. Thank you for your support.

This is the mail I sent out to my department shortly thereafter:

Computer users,

As most of you know, we are managing our budgets tightly around here as of late. In order to provide amusement for your heartless corperate masters, I would like to ask you to bring in a computer to replace the expensive desktops we are currently purchasing. Windows 2000 only please. These computers will be for everyone to use and break and we would not want to confuse people with open source operating systems. Thank you for your support.

The bath towel guy followed me down the street today. He wears a robe over his clothes and a towel wrapped around his head and he sounds just like every black drag queen in movies that have black drag queens in them. I wish I could remember what he said aside from "Changefourquatersforadolla'changefourquartersforadolla'."

"Say jealous," he said. "Say jealousjealousjealous. Witch." He usually calls me a witch, something something "so I can sit on it." I was curious to listen, but I had Sixteen Horsepower running through my head. I couldn't hear the towel guy over the sound of David Eugene Edwards telling me to take a breath, hard and clear, like a hammer on a church bell.

The weather has soured. It was going to be spring. Everyone promised us spring. Where did it go? I was looking forward to nights of fire dancing, but I'll settle for the chance to wear my new coat. There is nothing at all redeemable about the 1970's except for the coats. Purple double breasted wool overcoats. Green velvet opera coats. Black leather trench coats with great big fur collars. No one can possibly wear them all, so they sell cheap. Some women collect shoes. I could do with just one good pair of boots just as just as I had a coat for every occasion. It gives me a girly thrill to walk down the street thinking "Just try to find this at Gucci, you pallid Marina creature."

I will take my spare leather trench coat and cut it down for something to wear at Burning Man. I will cut out most of the front and have it close just under my bust. I'll rip out the lining from the waist down and shred the leather with a serrated knife. I'm pricing Army tents for our camp, something that will be able to withstand the dust storms. The pop-up domes were nearly blown away last year and the parachute was shredded. The little geodesic dome that J and I built stayed put, but the wind tore right through the cover and brought so much alkali dust into the dome that we finally gave up and started sleeping in the back of the truck. The 50 ft. Army tent that we bought for the kitchen worked out perfectly. When the dust storms came, we just battened down the hatches.

I have a small snake skeleton coming in the mail this week that will probably be taken apart and turned into a headpiece of some sort. The punk rock bouncer at Deathguild had a 140 lb boa carcass, but no one was willing to take it off of his hands. The skull of a boa that size would have made great art project material if only I had room for a beetle colony. The bouncer brought his poor dead boa in a bag to the Manhattan Lounge because D. had promised to take it, but M. wouldn't let it into his truck because it smelled so bad. They just left it at the base of a streetlight.

It was gone the next morning. Will the new owner of the giant dead snake please stand up?

I'm not writing this. I'm not here to talk about my personal life. You're just some voyeur on the other side of the screen. You've come through here because you're looking for pictures of hot naked goth chicks. Well, there are no hot naked goth chicks here.

Let me talk about my new coat (1970's, leather, fur collar), burning mp3's for my Rio Volt, the Howard Street Lofts, my server problems at work. It cost me fifty dollars to replace the zippers on my favorite pair of boots. There's yet another guy wearing the Fallen is Babylon sandwich board. I'm going to Paris, did you know that? I haven't been to Paris in years. I watched a documentary on the History Channel about the engineering effort involved in digging the Chunnel and I got all nostalgic for the last time that I took the EuroStar, playing backgammon while Dutch teenagers chattered around me. This week I will book a hotel in the Marais.

Let me tell you how beautiful the day was, what a perfectly blue sky I stood under, how clear the view is to Alcatraz and across the Bay. Let me tell you how relieved I am that spring is here and the nights are getting warmer. Last week I walked home from work, through North Beach and Chinatown. I bought J a blue rose. It's in a glass in the kitchen. I came home and he had dinner ready.

Let me tell you how badly I need to do laundry. I should be doing laundry right now instead of writing this. There are heaps of clothing on the floor so thick and dense that's it's impossible to find any one particular thing. I can only wear the first things I pull free from those piles in the morning. I need to go grocery shopping. I'm out of milk and eggs and most fresh vegetables. I've been skipping dinner because I can't eat. There are things flying around in my stomach. That's where the things that are none of your business live.

I shouldn't tell you that my hands shake and my pulse goes cold at the wrists. I shouldn't tell you that I have that one Tear Garden song on constant rotation on my stereo. What does it matter to you that I don't sleep late, I daydream, hugging my pillow, humming along with Ed Ka-Spel about no ropes, no strings, no obligations.

I have a crush. They're called crushes because you can collapse under the weight of them.

He has tattoos on his arms. He smells like cigarettes.

If I was a good person, I wouldn't be feeling like this. If I was a good person, I would not have this sixth sense of where he is in the room. If I was a good person, I would not have to confess. But sometimes confession isn't enough. Confession won't make you clean. It won't make you good again. I would not have to tell these things to a room full of strangers if only I was good.

There are ropes, you know, and strings, and obligations. I see them every time I close my eyes and daydream so that my heart beats a little faster. It does, you know. Maybe if I was a better person I could make it stop.

Now go away before I tell you everything.

My insane former roommate once said that he doesn't go out on weekends because weekends are for amateurs.

If Saturday night is amateur night for would be drunks and revelers, then St. Patrick's Day is the Day of the Drinking Novice. There is only one way to account for the veritable rivers of puke I encountered this weekend. Every last one of these whooping frat boys must have the alcohol tolerence of a cloistered nun. SOMA was a scene right out of Night of Living Dead. The streets were filled with stumbling, moaning bastards, held up by their moaning, stumbling friends. I have no doubt that a fair number of these geniuses got into their cars and crashed into one another in their eagerness to get to wherever it is that they come from.

It was quite the weekend for traffic accidents and bar brawls and the guy yelling into the pay phone at 1st and Harrison about his wife and his best friend and he had her pocketbook, dammit! I'll bet she never gets it back, either.

Not being even the tiniest bit Irish, I hate St. Patrick's Day. I hate beer. I hate four leaf clovers. I hate the stupid accent that everybody puts on. I'd bite the head off a leprechaun and put it on a stick as a warning to the first person who tries to pinch me because I'm not wearing green.

You don't see everyone pretending to be French on Bastille Day, do you? You don't see people pretending to be German during Octoberfest. You don't see people putting on stupid Russian accents for...nevermind. No, the Irish are some kind of special breed that makes Americans go all soggy with nostalgia.

I blame you, Frank McCourt! You can take Angela's Ashes and smoke them.

I'm just bitter because I stopped drinking. It wasn't a conscious decision. At some point I thought back and I realized that I hadn't had anything more than a glass of wine with dinner in about a month. I would go out and forget to drink. J would be stumbling home, leaning on me, or he would wake up with a hangover, and I would blink and say "You were drinking?" as if I'd suddenly forgotten what bars were for.

When you stay sober in a room full of drunk people, the drunks begin to look more and more stupid. First they're just chatty. They want to corner you and talk to you all night. Then they want to buy you a drink, so you can be as chatty as they are. By one thirty in the morning, they're staggering and gasping and saying things like "You're such a great friend. You know I love you, right?" By two in the morning, they feel they must explain themselves (ie "I'm so drunk"), and by three you're keeping their hair out of their faces while they vomit.

I'm such a good friend. I'm a regular saint.

Except for tonight. It's Deathguild's 8th year anniversary and there's a bottle of Scotch with my name on it. Some unlucky sober soul will be stuck with the job of holding my hair back just about the time that the sun comes up, because I'm going to get giddy and stagger down the street and tell my friends that I love them while the good people, the nine to five people, are safely tucked into their beds. They don't know what happens late at night on the empty sidewalks, at the 4th and Mission Denny's, in the back rooms of nightclubs, not like I do. There's a whole secret world out there that those people will never see. I'm in it.

Stand back. I'm a professional.

I have seen the best minds of my generation ranting, raving, waving their severence checks. I'm starting to run out of friends who are still employed and companies that are still solvent.

Let's read the list of the names of the dead, shall we? Of the two companies I have worked for the in the last two years, one folded completely in January, and the other has laid off half of its workforce. Of the four companies that J has worked for in the last two years, two have laid off half of their employees and are penny stocks, one moved to LA and has been laying people off one at a time ever since, and the last just threw a party to celebrate an emergency round of funding which means they will not have to close their doors in the next six months. You want names? Go to fucked company. They've got a list as long as your arm.

These days, most of my conversations start something like this:

"How've you been?"

"So-so. I just got laid off."

First they came for sales and marketing and I didn't care because I'm not a suit. Then they came for the web monkeys and I didn't care because, face it, how many web monkeys does the world really need? Now they've come for the engineers and I'm getting just a little uncomfortable because I know who they're coming for next. It won't be soon. Maybe it won't happen at all, but you bet I'm updating my resume just in case. I didn't become a hardened veteran of this industry by sitting around waiting for other people to tell me what's up.

It's best to feel sympathy for the fucked. Someday you may be one of them.

I learned this by heart in high school. It was in a stack of Xeroxed poems that my English teacher was handing out. It was the first time I'd ever come across Rainier Maria Rilke and I haven't been able to find this translation since:

Put out my eyes and I can see you still
Slam my ears too and I can hear you yet
And without any feet, I'll go to you
Tongueless, I can conjure you at will

Cut off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true
And if you set this brain of mine afire
Apon my blood then I will carry you

When oh when will this icky eye infection go away? I woke up this morning and my right eye was all red. Fortunately, I had leftover eyedrops from the last time this happend, so I took my contact lenses out immediately and I've been applying the drops all day, hoping that my eye will not reach the bright-red-so-puffy-you-can-barely-see stage. I'm stuck wearing my exceedingly ugly glasses. There is no such thing as a pair of glasses that flatters my face. I look like a librarian, and not the sexy kind of librarian either. I look like the dowdy librarian who always shushes you because "other people are trying to study." I look like I should be wearing a brown tweed suit.

That's a far cry from my weekend, when I put my hair up and did my best femme fatale imitation for cyberpunk night at Shrine of Lilith. I look ridiculous in the usual cyberpunk accoutrements: leather pants, enormous stompy boots, strangely revealing body armour. But there's nothing more cyberpunk than Sean Young as Rachel in Blade Runner. I would take up smoking just to state from behind a plume of carcinogens that I am neither a replicant nor a lesbian. I didn't, since smoking in clubs is prohibited in the state of California, but you get the idea. I could have done it and it would have looked right.

It's a rare thing for me to actually walk into Shrine of Lilith. I stand outside and talk to whoever is working the door. I shiver in the doorway while we talk about the best place to go on vacation, the damage a .50 Berretta could do to a manhole cover, who would win in a jello mud-wrestling match between Steve's new girlfriend and that 6' 6'' amazon in the PVC pants, the best way to describe the awful smell that comes from the trucks that carry dead animals from the container ships up 1st Street to somewhere in Oakland, how to mix a Zombie, and why you must never, ever play slots in Vegas. At one point we had no less than five people at the door who were able to recall, with a mixture of derision and amusement, exactly what food they used to live on back in their tweaker days. First place, for the curious, went to bananas, followed closely by Peeps and cans of peach juice.

Don't do drugs, kids. There's no telling what you'll wind up eating.

I remember, on those few occasions when methamphetimines were an academic necessity, that bread tasted disgusting. I couldn't keep anything down. I paced and twitched and chewed on my lip. I made a deal with myself. I would spend an hour working on my chemistry paper, then an hour cleaning my room, then another hour on my chemistry paper. I thought it was the strangest thing when I found people that actually did this stuff because they thought it was fun.

Have I mentioned, kids, that you shouldn't be doing drugs? Don't snort cheap biker crank, my purely hypothetical young reader. All of the tweakers I knew lived on Top Ramen with hot sauce and apple fritters from All Stars Doughnuts. All of the tweakers I knew have disappeared. They moved Colorado, or was it Oregon? They ripped off a Hell's Angel and wound up in the hospital with six broken ribs. They turned on each other. They fell off the face of the Earth. They discovered heroin and overdosed in a Mission Street residential hotel. The people you used to be able to count on for an all-night party are gone now.

I'm pretty sure I don't miss them at all, the rich kids, the men with faces like eroding cliffs, the gutterpunks on Haight Street. I like these new people better, the ones who can look back at all of the stupid things they used to do and laugh. That's not to say that we don't all have our vices, but things don't seem quite so precarious as they did then. I can see a future where we're all still standing around in doorways and we haven't run out of things to laugh about.

Why not? The world is a very funny place.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we had vegans for dinner on Wednesday. No, we didn't eat them.

It started last week when J and I were invited to dinner with some friends of ours in Alameda. This was a great to-do, since J and I rarely leave the city. I commuted to Silicon Valley for three years. If I'm going to go through the trouble of leaving San Francisco, I'd better be headed for Paris, not some dinky East Bay island suburb. Still, I love M and it's always a joy to see her retro-fabulous apartment.

M is another one of those vintage-addicted people. She has a closet full of coats for every occasion, with little gloves to match. She'd rather have Fiestaware than a new set of dishes. She spends a lot of time looking for things that match other things. It's a real coup if those matching things are leopard print. The only indication that her boyfriend also lives in the apartment is a ten-foot bookshelf crammed with movies and a proliferation of Nightmare Before Christmas figurines.

Dinner was so pleasant that J and I decided to pass the karma along and invite another couple over for dinner later in the week. Just to add an extra level of difficulty (the culinary equivalent of the triple toe loop), we invited vegans. The Iron Chefs created six dishes --vegan tapas. Now, when you're a vegetarian, the cornerstone of your diet is pasta. The true evil of veganness is the search for eggless pasta. We didn't bother. We were armed with portabello mushrooms. We made garlic and tomato gazpacho with fresh-baked bread. We had red and green roasted peppers. J made something with leeks that actually made leeks taste good. For dessert, I made pears poached in creme de cacao with cinnamon. We drank the bottle of good wine, then the bottle of so-so wine, and we finished it all off with the bottle of cheap wine.

Afterwards we lounged around the living room in a food coma and watched Titus directed by Julie Taymor.

I feel like such an adult. I always thought this was what being a grown-up was all about. I imagined that someday I would be sitting around, eating a gourmet meal with my friends while watching an incredibly violent artsy adaptation of the worst of Shakespeare's plays. Then again, maybe being a grown-up is about staying up all night making archvillainesses with hero machine.

We have to seriously consider the possibility that the world is coming to an end.

I write a lot about walking down Market Street. That's because it's something I do every day.I walk out my door and I'm two feet from the first empty bottle of malt liquor, five hundred feet from the nearest million-dollar loft, a block and a half from the nearest crack house, and five blocks from the Versace store. I walk out of my door and there's some guy passed out in his own vomit. There are the flies buzzing around human shit. There's my garbage dumped out on the sidewalk because some homeless guy decided to go through it. There's the great gleaming Sony Metreon, like an ad for a life where everything has a label on it. There are the $80,000 SUV's parked on the sidewalk so that they won't get street cleaning tickets when the DPT descends in their little Cushman scooters. There are the offices of architecture firms and design companies, where every Gucci-clad ass rests in an $800 Herman Miller chair. There are the restaurants where the newly-laid-off are spending their severence pay on ahi tuna and Chateau St. Michel because no one's told them yet that the world doesn't really need that many web producers, especially not for $75K a year.

Market Street is a gauntlet of religious lunatics. Everyone who doesn't want your spare change is after your eternal soul. I swear that there was a different man wearing the "Fallen in Babylon the Great" sandwich board this morning. I couldn't tell you what the Babylon guy normally looks like, but this guy was tall, with a beard, and he was wearing a blue jacket. He didn't look right. I am terrified by the implications. Is there more than one Babylon guy? Do they cover different parts of the city? Do they cover for each other if one of them is sick? Do the Mormons ever try to convert them? The street is full of Mormons now, clean-cut young men with cheap suits, bad acne, and Jansport backpacks. They're on a mission from Men's Wearhouse. At least they understand that I don't need to hear an uplifting message about Jesus Christ right now. I just need to catch the 30 Stockton.

One of the dangers of living in one place for too long is that you start to see ghosts. It's inevitable. The debris of your life starts to pile up around you and sooner or later you're going to stumble over it. You'll walk straight into the spectre of someone you used to know or somebody you used to be.

I'm walking down the stairs of the Manhattan Lounge and the very first face I see is E. Before I know what I'm doing, I'm saying hello. We're making small talk. I'm showing off my outfit. We're talking about work-related stress and the difficulties of graphic design. All that I really want to do is lock myself in a bathroom stall and hyperventilate. I have a little vision in my head where I'm doing just that.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh God I'm so sorry.

I'd like to forget that I was ever sixteen. Everybody has a novel in their head. In that novel, you're the protagonist. The wrongs your enemies have done you are inexcusable. Your own little shortcomings, those moments you're not so proud of, are the product of extenuating circumstances. But some things you just can't excuse. You have to pretend that wasn't you. It's a ghost, the ghost of being sixteen. That heartless and terrifying creature isn't you, because if it was you would wake up every morning feeling like a monster.

You don't feel like a monster, do you?

Maybe I should. E. and I dated for six months. He was ten years my senior, working at a brokerage house. He took me out to fancy dinners and showed me how to read a wine list. He bought me expensive fetish-related presents. He cooked up gourmet meals and made witty conversation. In return, I slept around. Half a dozen lovers in as many months, usually culled from his circle of friends. I stood him up on dates. I forgot about plans. I ignored his phone calls when they were inconvenient. There were times when I forgot about him completely.

When I dumped him for F., I didn't feel a single twinge of remorse. In fact, I don't remember feeling anything at all. He was a minor impediment standing between me and the man I would date for the next three years. It didn't even occur to me that he was upset until he cornered me at F's birthday party and instigated the breakup fight we never had. I remember missing most of the party because I was in the spare bedroom with E. He kept asking "Why him and not me?" and I don't for the life of me remember what I said because I was tripping my brains out on my first hit of acid.

At the end of the night, when everybody had gone home and the sun was coming up, I was crying huge, shuddering sobs while F. said "How dare he! No one makes my girl cry."

Funny, a lot of people have made your girl cry since then. She's not even your girl anymore. I've sloughed off a lot of skin since then.

I wonder what E. sees when he looks at me, while we make pleasant conversation by the stairs at Death Guild. As we talking, I'm praying for the power of telepathy, for every nuance of body language to bring across what I could never say in words: that's not me anymore. That wasn't me. That wasn't me.

It was a ghost.

My weekend was doughtnuts at three thirty in the morning. It was sleeping until the middle of the afternoon. It was a fuzzy new sweater and the first Death Guild/Thunderdome meeting of the year. It was a corset that's harder to break in than a new pair of boots. It was a $300 trip to Andronico's, elaborate menu plans, and dinner in good company. It was glass after glass of wine with a Seattle fetish photographer whose house had just burned down. It was falling asleep in the middle of Heavy Metal. My weekend was being so cold I couldn't feel my toes and getting rained on with the bouncers in the doorway of the Maritime Hall.

Sometimes I was grouchy. Sometimes I was unhappy. Sometimes I was so tired it all I could do to stay standing, but all in all, I've decided that life is good and it's worth living.

I stayed up until four in the morning watching Magnolia. I'd like a couple of those hours back. Normally, I have a lot of patience for the slow and the pretentious. I like Wings of Desire, for God's sake, a film which sets the standard for pretentious slow-moving art movies all over the world. Wim Wenders is the anti-John Woo. Angels and creepy circus music and Nick Cave, the very formula for what a Salon film critic once referred to as "art up the butt." Magnolia opens up with a couple of tales of quirky coincidence, which sets the scene for some tales of quirky coincidence, which leads to more quirky coincidences, culimnating in some coincidences that are downright quirky. Then it rains frogs.

You probably think I'm kidding.

Somewhere in the middle of having my heart strings pulled on by dead/dying characters staring vacantly into the distance and singing, I began hoping for a car crash, a drug overdose, a giant goddamn atomic bomb, anything to make this movie end a little bit faster. Suddenly, the state of "art" cinema was looking pretty bleak. If I want to watch a poignant movie about death, I'll watch The Seventh Seal. At least then I can be bored out of my mind by a great director.

In the meantime, my nesting instinct has set in with a vengeance. Some women get older and they want a great big wedding, a nice car, a couple of kids. I want a bigger apartment. I'm so tired of moving every twelve months. I want a place where I can settle down, a place that I can move heavy furniture into because I won't be thinking about having to move it out at the end of the year. I want a dining room with a dining room table, where people dine and they don't have to sit on the floor in front of the television. I'd like to be able to use my sewing machine as something other than a desk. I want a place where I can settle down and enjoy the benefits of San Francisco's draconian rent control laws.

It was seven months before I hung pictures on the walls of my current apartment, because from the very beginning the place felt temporary. Why bother putting things in frames when I'm only going to have to take them down again? I'm one of those filthy rich dot-com people, right? Shouldn't I at least be living better than I did in college? Instead, every apartment gets smaller and more expensive. Every time I move, I throw out another piece of furniture. My life is shrinking and it has to stop. It will stop here. It will end with this apartment, if only because if I progress to anything smaller I will have to step out of the room to change my mind.

To this end, I read through craig's list and RentTech and MetroRent. I look through Lofts Unlimited with considerably less apprehension than I did at this time last year. Rents are going down again and $2500 for a spacious two bedroom Victorian in SOMA doesn't take as large a bite out of my paycheck as it used to. In the twisted mirror of the San Francisco rental market, $2500 is starting to look downright reasonable. If I hold out for a new more months of recession hysteria, I might even be able to talk the landlords down a few hundred dollars a month.

I just want a place that's mine (and J's), all mine (and J's). It's reached some sort of critical stage. I can tell because I'm starting to browse through furniture stores. Nevermind that I haven't put in an application for a single apartment. I'm already thinking about bookshelves. I've found a steel lawyer's bookcase for $50 that's been painted a nasty khaki color and if I only had the space, I would purchase it this very moment and strip off all of the paint until it has the bright shine of a dental implement.

What an awful thing it is to be seized by the irresistable desire to buy things, a desire so strong that you have to relocate just to have a larger place to put all of the things you've bought. I've never been so conviced that consumerism is an illness as I am right now. Well, I am sick with it. It's in my brain and deep in the morrow of my bones and it will not stop until I have a two bedroom flat with an eat-in kitchen and hardwood floors.

Heaven help us all.

I picked up my new Dark Garden corset this afternoon. Here it is:



It's a lot smaller than my leather one because I'll be damned if I let myself shrink out of something this expensive. Tomorrow, I'll have my chance to show it off. I haven't been the pretty girl, the "Oh my God, who is that. I simply must meet her" girl in years. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it.