I've been meaning to write about DEFCON 9, about the "Free Dmitri" campaign, about Peter Shipley and why you shouldn't pay for your laminate. I've started this piece a few times now, my take on the geeks, the frat boys, and the hangers-on of DEFCON. I was going to write about the cult of tee-shirts and the bizarre lack of pranks at the Alexis Park this year. I'm not going to write about these things tonight. You see, I just got a very strange email. I need to think about it for a while.

You probably don't want to talk to me, but I'm here.

That's S, my first boyfriend. It was my first year of high school and I had just turned fourteen. That was the year I traded my glasses for contact lenses. I started a high school for smart, artsy outsiders. I bought my first pair of army boots. I fell in love with a nineteen-year old boy who was listlessly attending City College while his father traveled through Italy. He was lovely. I've got the pictures to prove it. S had pitch black eyes and immaculate cheekbones. You could watch the muscles move under his skin, biceps and triceps, perfectly outlined abs. I think I would have fallen in love with the first person who told me I was pretty. It could have been some other kid my age, confused and covered in zits. We could have flailed our way through kissing and groping, notes on blue-lined paper, and high school gossip. Instead it was S. At nineteen, he was practically an adult. Even if in hindsight he seems like a hyperactive, overgrown child, when I was fourteen years old, S seemed like a God.

There's nothing quite like your first love. I would ditch my friends and run to his house after school. We'd make pasta or order Chinese food and watch cartoons (Batman, mostly) under blankets in his living room. We roughhoused constantly. That's what people do when they don't really know how to touch each other. At the slightest provocation, we'd be rolling around on the floor, trying to pin wrists and shoulders. Essentially, we behaved like children, except for that somewhere along the line I misplaced my virginity. I imagine it's still somewhere behind S's couch.

In retrospect I think it should have fallen apart sooner. I don't know how long relationships are supposed to last when you're in high school, but in comparison to my peers, my relationship with S was epic. Two years. It took two years for S to go from some mysterious stranger who made all of my girl friends sigh with envy to some annoying puppy dog that wouldn't stop following me around. So it fell apart. I cheated on him. We fought. He hit me. It didn't even leave a bruise, but it was the excuse that I needed, so I left him. So he slept with my best friend.

I remember the night I broke up with S, I was hysterical. I couldn't stop crying. I was sitting on the floor, making these gasping sobbing sounds when my mother came home. She went directly to the liquor cabinet, opened a bottle of cognac, and started feeding me shots.

S moved to Washington not too long after that. I liked to think we were both better off that way. I don't have misty-eyed memories of my first relationship. When I thought about him at all, it was as something vaguely embarrassing that I'd outgrown. It was years before I understood that he'd ruined me. I opened the door one afternoon and was introduced to --what shall I call him? It doesn't matter, does it?-- the most heart-breakingly beautiful man I'd ever seen. Nevermind his eyes (blue) or his hair (blond) or his smile (goofy), that man was standing there with S's cheekbones. And his chest. And his arms. I was sure that my knees were going to buckle under me.

LOCAL TEENAGER VANISHES. MYSTERIOUS PUDDLE FOUND ON HER FRONT DOOR.

I know that there are men who read this. Well, listen up. Listen closely. Don't ever let a woman tell you that physical appearances don't matter. I've dated all kinds of men. I've been in plenty of relationships, but the one thing that will invariably swoon me is a man who looks like my very first boyfriend.

Damn.

I don't understand how anyone who has taken an elementary statistics course can believe in luck. I know, people still believe in God and angels and aliens and Bigfoot. They believe in hunches and lucky numbers and beating the odds. You can't beat the odds. Just in case you think you're some kind of exception, take a look down the Strip. Las Vegas builds giant temples to the laws of probability. It's all built with the money of people who thought they were lucky.

Every quarter dumped into every slot machine (worst odds in town) is another drop of water in the well. That's what builds the giant pyramid, the Venetian canals, the roller coaster through New York, the fountains that dance to Frank Sinatra, the volcano that goes off every five minutes. What do you think brings a billion gallons of water to the middle of the desert just for the hell of it? Isn't that just a giant middle finger in the face of Mother Nature? Don't you just have to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of such a thing?

There are people who don't understand what I'm talking about when I tell them I love Las Vegas. It's the most honest city in the world. San Franciscans are always trying to prove their right to live here. They need to prove that they're cool enough, they're real and gritty enough to be taking up precious San Francisco real estate. Everyone needs to prove that they remember a time before the city was gentrified and defiled. Every time the city changes, San Franciscans take it as a sure sign of the End Times. It's not fog we're drowning in, it's near-permanent nostalgia.

Las Vegas doesn't lie to you. Sure, the courts are fixed, the University is a joke, and the Strip is full of promises of not-quite-legal sex with ladies of negotiable virtue, but Las Vegas exists solely to take your money. Free drinks? That's so you'll gamble and lose more money. Comps for the food court? That's so you'll make bigger bets and lose more money. Provocatively dressed cocktail waitresses? That's so you'll look away at that crucial moment and lose more money. Extra oxygen pumped into the air on the casino floor? Daytime lighting at all hours? I'll give you three guesses. The first two don't even count.

The casinos track everything. I've never before seen an entire city so single-mindedly engineered towards turning a profit. It's like watching a perfectly functioning machine. I'm a geek. There's something appealing about complex systems, the vast infrastructure that's necessary for such an undertaking. There are miles of tubing that take liquor from a locked basement in the casino to every single bar in the place. There are machines that sort millions of dollars in change every day. There are tens of thousands of security cameras watching every dealer, every pit boss, every face at every table. A casino can track everything you do from the moment you walk in the door to the time you walk out. It's somebody's job to analyze that data and come up with more way to squeeze money out of your wallet, any little thing they can do to tilt the odds in favor of the House.

Devon and I immediately fantasized about moving to Vegas. Can you imagine what kind of network runs the computer system in a Strip casino? How about lighting design or one of the companies that designs slot machines? To be honest, I'd be perfectly happy to run away to Las Vegas and deal blackjack. I don't care if I have to stand on my feet all day. At least for once the odds would be in my favor.

When you're on the road for a very long time, the world dissolves into yellow and white lines on the road. Everything becomes very simple. Follow the lines. Follow the lines. Are you listening? Follow the lines. I know that Highway 5 is long and boring, but you're got to follow the lines. When we stopped somewhere the middle of Nevada because there wasn't a bathroom for miles, everybody stopped to look at the sky. The desert sky, high up where the atmosphere is thin, far from the nearest source of light polution, is the clearest view of the stars I've ever seen. There's Cassiopia and the Little Dipper and the Milky Way! At least I think so, I'm always getting the constellations wrong, and all of our eyes were so used to following the lines that the stars moved in shakey spirals every time we tried to focus on them.

In the van, we tried to keep each other distracted with music. Two or three hours into the trip, it was easy enough. Velvet Acid Christ's Fun With Drugs got a cheap laugh with Johnny Depp's Hunter S. Thomspon exclamation of "Oh God! Did you eat all this acid?" Eventually it moved into a contest to see who could dredge up the most annoying album. Annoying Devon was easy. He hates synthpop. All that J had to do was threaten to throw in Wolfsheim's Sparrows and the Nightingales and Devon would look as if he'd just swallowed a lemon. I was ticked off by noodly hardcore techno. Devon saved his secret weapon for the ride back: an album of music by the same guy who did the soundtrack for Twelve Monkeys, creepy carnival music, featuring groaning accordions. I was rather partial to it myself, but J made it quite clear that he would rather be listening to a dying horse.

Somewhere around three in morning, I opened my eyes and was awake. I hadn't realized that I'd nodded off through the Nevada state line, and some town with a roller coaster, and Jean. A couple of hills parted, and everywhere on the horizon there were lights, the glimmering gold lights of civilization. Even twenty miles away, the Strip looked larger than life, like some giant had stumbled into the middle of the Nevada desert and left its toys behind. Liz Frasier thought that the lights of Las Vegas looked just like Heaven. She's not too far off the mark.

I must have mentioned that I don't own a car. After three years of commuting 40-60 miles to work on the world's least pleasant freeway (101), I swore off driving forever. It wasn't just the driving, it was the parking. There isn't a spot in San Francisco where it's legal to park for more than two hours at a time. In a single year, I had my car broken into twice, my driver's side mirror smashed, and a hit-and-run that required the replacement of my bumper and the front quarter panel of my car. Did I mention that I ran up over $3000 in parking tickets? Do I even need to tell you how many times I was towed? Did you know that if you want to get your car back from impound, you need to pay off all of your outstanding tickets at once? Now add the price of car insurance and gasoline and you can see how getting rid of my car was a load off my wallet.

I am a city girl. I live in a city. I have arranged my life so that everything I need is within walking distance. I am four blocks from the center of this city's public transportation system (extensive and cheap, but smelly), should I be too lazy to walk. When all else fails, if it's cold and raining and I'm tired, I hail a taxi. Anything is cheaper and less stressful than owning a car in San Francisco.

I'm sure you've guessed that this lifestyle doesn't exactly lend itself to road trips. I've made many pilgrimages to Las Vegas, but they've always been the painless one hour flight variety. It took me less time to get to Vegas than it took for me to get to work in San Jose on a day with heavy traffic. We did not drive because we have some sort of romantic notion about the open road. Driving was our concession to poverty. It was a whole lot cheaper than getting a last minute plane ticket. Besides, we had all the time in the world.

The vehicle, our chariot, was Devon's minivan, a giant tan Windstar completely stripped of anything unnecessary, like air conditioning. You may laugh. You wouldn't be the first to laugh at Devon's soccer mom car, but his commitment to the world's least hip form of transportation is part of my deep and abiding love for this man. Devon is a sound and lighting geek. He has to move piles of speakers and parcans from one end of the Bay Area to the other, not just his equipment, but usually J's as well. Devon has regularly driven across the Bay at the very last minute to either contribute his own gear, move someone else's gear, or set up gear when no one else has a clue what to do with it when he could have been sitting comfortably at home, editing video and eating steak. The Windstar is the ultimate symbol of Devon's commitment to substance over style. While everyone else is buying motorcycles or tricking out their art cars, Devon has a vehicle that does exactly what he needs it to do and nothing more.

So we threw our luggage into the back and prepared to hit the road.

And the answer to yesterday's $10,000 question is...The Misanthropic Bitch. There are 2500 people on her mailing list. Most of them have hit my site in the last three days. Many of them have been kind enough to send e-mail explaining what happend. I'd never suspected she had such a huge following. Most of them sent mail along the lines of "I can't understand why she linked you. You're not a single mother on welfare or anything like that." Some of them followed up by saying nice things about my writing or asking where the naked pictures of goth girls were at.

Why does The Misanthropic Bitch link the things she does? Of the four links she left at the bottom of her most recent mailing, one was a mid-twenties gay guy from Ohio who wrote very articulately about his life, including his shady past as a candy raver, the other was my journal, and the next two links were clearly chosen to amuse and infuriate her readers. What does it all mean? I will never know. The Bitch moves in mysterious ways.

Let's move on to Las Vegas, shall we? Sometimes the weasels are closing in, you just need to pack up your stuff, fall into a car, and drive to Vegas. "The Savage Heart of the American Dream" Hunter S. Thompson called it, though he was talking about a different Vegas, a few shards of which remain downtown, and he was talking about it in the context of the end of the Summer of Love. Something monumental and huge had ended and a decade of unspeakable ugliness was just beginning.

My own personal pack of weasels was knocking on the door when J sat down with his laptop across his knees and announced that we were going to Las Vegas for DEFCON and that --here's the kicker, folks-- we would drive. We would go with Devon in his van. We would drive for ten hours, at night mostly. We didn't want to be cruising through the Mojave in July without air conditioning. He'd found cheap rooms at the Luxor. We would spend our days by the pool and our evenings at the Alexis Park, where DEFCON takes place, drinking with people we see only once a year and merrily avoiding what few technical aspects there were to the convention. It would be an epic journey, a reaffirmation of everything that was good and right in this world!

To be honest, J, Devon, and I were going a little bit stir crazy. We needed to get out of the house. We needed to see some new faces. We needed to spend ten minutes in broad daylight without being panhandled. So we aimed Devon's van at the Land of Denial, a city whose sole purpose is to make you feel like you're rich while it sucks away at the contents of your wallet.

Viva, at they say, Las Vegas.

I've had close to five hundred hits since yesterday, all from various email links. Does somebody want to tell me what's up? It looks like I've been linked to some enormous mailing list. All of these hits and not a single message. Who are you people? Why are you here? Who or what sent you? Is it porn? Is it spam? Do you think I'm someone else? I suspect that you're not here to tell me what a wonderful person I am. I'll bet you're not here because you're fascinated by my plans to buy a Birthday Party tee-shirt or you want a review of Kitchen Confidential.

Why are you silent, mysterious e-mail linked visitors from places like Sri Lanka? I've set up a handy little comment system. I have an e-mail address. I have a whole second journal for you to praise or laugh at or ridicule, but hundreds of you are just passing by silently. Are you lazy? Is my writing sub-par? Do you speak English? Are you just looking for naked pictures of goth girls? I get that a lot. All you have to do is say so and I promise to understand. But this silence is intolerable.

For God's sake, say something!

Actually, you can take your time. I may be a little punchy because I've been in a car for the last eleven hours. Vegas was lovely. Diaries will be posted.Right now I'm pulling the curtains shut and going to bed.

I've added a couple of new pages to my website, more as a design exercise than anything else. They're here and here. Coming up are some pages with actual content (one for the house and one for fire things) and a redesigned and updated links page.

I have a new nightmare.

I'm asleep in my bedroom and people starting walking into my house off the street. They're people I don't know. They mill around the entrance for a while, looking around. Since they've left the door open, more people start to come in. They're looking for a party. When I come down to intercept them, still dressed in my house robe and slippers, that's what they tell me. I start to explain that I live here, this is my house, where I'm trying to sleep, and they need to leave. I show a couple of them the door, but no matter how often or how rudely I eject them, they keep coming back. I see people walk in through a side door. How are these people getting in? I keep locking the doors behind them, but that doesn't stop anybody.

I lead more of them out. I punch a girl. Now everyone is looking vaguely familar, so I have the added embarassment of being rude to people that expect a certain level of politeness. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs "Get out of my fucking house! I fucking live here!" I scream until my throat aches. "Get out of my house or I will call the police!"

So I call the police. I tell her that there are people in my house who refuse to leave. I've got people trespassing here. I'm hysterical and sobbing and my voice is getting weaker and weaker and the woman on the other end of the line doesn't seem to think that "having people in your house" really warrants that kind of reaction. It's just like having ants or cockroaches. Of course, as I'm telling this to the policewoman, people start to shuffle out, so I'm forced to explain to her that no, sending a SWAT team to my house will not be necessary.

The moment I put the phone down, people stop leaving. There are people in the music studio now. They're smoking cigarettes in the studio and they've got my wine glasses out. I walk up to these people and say "Didn't you hear me yelling? Didn't you hear me saying that this is my fucking house? I live here, dammit, and I want you out! Did you somehow think that I didn't mean you? Do you think you're some sort of fucking exception?" I remember that I was definitely swearing a lot at this point. Then one girl turns around, and she's someone I know, and she says "Well, yeah, we're your friends. We thought you were talking to everyone else."

I've been reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I've been reading it for two days straight. In a few pages, I'll be done with it and it will be time to lend the book to J. That's the way things usually work around here. Books work their way from one side of the bed, where I read them, to the other, where he does. The sole exception was Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon about a year and a half ago, which we spent three weeks swiping back and forth, grabbing it while the other's back was turned, and constantly losing each other's place.

There isn't a lot of good writing about food. I hate restaurant reviews. I hate watching smug English majors who would otherwise be slinging espresso find clever new words to describe the steamed mussels they're eating on the company dime. I hate the people whose job is to pass judgement on restaurants. When I was in high school, my best friend's father was a wine critic, with a sideline in hotels and restaurants. He was the single most joyless man I had ever met. Here was a man with a vast wine cellar, a man who was paid to eat at Fleur de Lys, Chez Panisse, and Stars, and I think he'd long since ceased to feel the pure, unadulterated joy of eating good food.

For all of my summers bumming around the back rooms of Thai, Vietamese, and Cambodian family restaurants, for all of my Culinary Academy friends gossiping about trysts between the sauce guy and the pastry chef, I'd never quite imagined restaurant kitchens in quite the way that Anthony Bourdain describes them. Maybe it's the pride with which he describes his compatriots, a pan-national crew of dangerous, untrustworthy, tattooed, filthy-mouthed, psychotic degenerates. Maybe it's his penchant for late 70's New York punk rock. I'm charmed. For Anthony Bourdain and his crew, food is war, a war that is fought every night by obsessed and unstable professionals.

I can almost see Hunter S. Thompson at the grill while Jim Carroll does dishes.

There are some jobs that are more than jobs. The strange and terrifying people who devote their lives to these callings do so because they are unsuited to do anything else. I've met novelists, software engineers, nightclub bouncers, and car mechanics like this. Add cooks to the list. In fact, I think I can add them at the top.

I think that there's something wrong with me. Some filter in my brain is broken beyond repair. Every night I go out, I fall in love. It can happen four, maybe five times in one day. Men who suffer this affliction became Cassanovas. They're the cads and serial seducers of this world. Their persuasive power derives from their conviction that at this very moment you are the most beautiful woman on Earth.

Women who suffer this affliction simply become miserable.

I can fall in love while waiting for the bus, or walking down the street, or doing my laundry. I can fall in love while I'm on the dance floor or cooking dinner. I could almost fall in love while sitting on the couch reading my email, but not quite. It's hard to fall in love while typing. It's like walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time.

Girls slay me. I fell in love with S, with her little black bob and immaculate silent film star makeup, for thirty whole seconds while she made kewpie doll faces at me for reasons that I can't quite remember. I fell in love with J when she gave me a hug and it felt like I was holding on to something tiny and birdlike. I fell in love with some girl in black stockings with the most perfect legs I'd ever seen. There's K, hopelessly disheveled, swaying drunk, and I'm hailing her a taxi because if some boy takes her home I will find him and kill him and no one will ever find the body.

I fell in love with some boy whose name I can't remember (didn't he tell it to me twice?) because he managed to look old and young, smooth and weathered at the same time. For five minutes I was hopelessly in love with M, who has one of those Greek God profiles. There was an entire week when I was in love with D, all tattoos and cigarettes. I don't even like the smell of cigarettes. I can't stand it. But every time I would see him, it felt like a cold hand was closing around my heart and squeezing until it was completely wrung out.

How do people live like this? How do they get through the day? Do they lock themselves in their houses? Do they take a vow of celibacy? Do they blind themselves? Is there medication or meditation? Is there a mantra? Will they be starting a twelve step program?

"Hello, my name is Never, and I am a sucker for beauty. I am powerless against it. I need help."

I'm not normally the kind of person who wears tee-shirts. I own three of them, which I only wear in case of a severe fashion emergency.

Exhibit A: One white tee-shirt from the Pink Godzilla Sushi restaurant in Santa Cruz. Says "More Wasabe!" on the back.

Exhibit B: One white tee-shirt from the Community Spacewalk in 1998, featuring three monkeys, hearing, speaking, and seeing No Evil. Fits perfectly.

Exhibit C: One black babydoll tee of the Emily variety. This one says "Emily Has a Posse."

I used to have a punk rock boyfriend with a vast collection of re-dyed, bleached, sleeves ripped off to show off his tattoos, and otherwise messed-up tee-shirts depicting all of the things he thought were cool back when he lived in Hollywood: The Velvet Underground, Abby Hoffman, William S. Burroughs and such. There were blurry silk screens of Frankenstein and Marilyn Monroe. My favorite was a picture of Chairman Mao, large as life, printed on a tee-shirt that instead of red, had turned out magenta pink.

I wore the Mao tee-shirt constantly, with my most comfortable black jeans and my purple Doc Martens, in punk rock imitation of him.

J's tee-shirts are all black. They're the record of ten years spent up to his eyeballs in industrial music. He has a tour shirt for every band he's ever seen. There's the tee-shirt from rec.music.industrial. There's the tee-shirt from Kurtzweil, promoting some new keyboard. There's Front 242 and Front Line Assembly and a Cure shirt so old it looks like it's about to disintegrate. I don't steal those shirts. For some reason, I just don't look good in them.

Exhibit D: My next tee-shirt. I'm going to soak it in bleach and dye it sloppily and rip the sleeves right off. I'll wear it even when I'm not completely out of clean laundry. I promise.

I've started a livejournal. I don't know if it makes sense to keep two journals. Hell, it doesn't even make sense to keep one, but we'll see how this evolves.

I am not a charming hostess. I'd like to think of myself as the kind of person who has small get-to-togethers where I make sure that everyone has tea and we make witty conversation all afternoon, but I know better. In truth, I'd rather be at other people's parties than host one of my own. I don't like handing out fliers. I don't like desperate, last-minute house cleaning. I don't like worrying about what to wear when I know that not a single person will remember it the next morning. As much as I like showing off my new home (a fellow Mark Danielewski fan has dubbed it The Five and a Half Minute Loft), I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of people I don't quite know getting their grubby hands all over my stuff.

Despite my lack of hostess charm, J and I threw a housewarming party last night. It was the most painless party I've ever put on. L. brought over all of Bound's old liquor, which was more than enough to stock the bar. G. provided the guests with food, little sandwiches and pizza and spring rolls in the most incredible peanut sauce I've ever tasted. A rotating cast of DJ's played music much too loud, so that everyone who wanted to have a conversation had to go the studio or the mezzanine or outside or the roof. People danced. Champagne appeared out of nowhere. Some guy brought a couple of boxes of nitrous. S. brought me a little sign made of diamond plate to hang on the door instead of the #3 we have made out in electical tape.

I mixed people drinks with little paper umbrellas in them. Then the umbrellas wound up in my hair and they caught on the porcupine quills.

Somewhere around four in the morning, just after we'd kicked the last of the people out, a whole new group of people came storming in. It was a bunch of rock stars on their way to Insomnia. They did what rock stars always do, which is smile and make vague promises, and then disappear so that J and I could finally go to sleep. One of them was opening for My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, I think, I wasn't really paying attention by then, and he was on his way to Chicago. I'm pretty sure it was Chicago. He kept saying that I should send tape of my fire dancing because they wanted fire in their show.

We'll fly you out. We'll pay you.

Lies, I'm sure, but it was a lovely thing to imagine as I was falling asleep.