Here you have it. This is a year of my life, September 29th to September 29th. I've kept journals, on and off, for most of my life, but this is the first time I've managed to chronicle my day to day activities for a full year. I haven't embarassed myself just yet, but there's still time.

At this time last year, I was writing my letter of resignation at The Magazine Which Must Not Be Named. I was bored, desperately bored, and when I think back to that time I'd like to believe that I could already smell the odor of decay. I don't think that they ever moved into that beautiful new building that my boss promised me. It's certainly empty now. They filed for Chapter 11 this week.

And now here is my year in review, with a few statistics:

Apartments occupied -- 2
Jobs held -- 2
Months spent working -- 7
Months spent unemployed --5
Months spent drunk, insomniac, and/or unable to eat -- 6. Most of my stay at Plague of Locusts.
Vacations -- 4
Major theatrical epiphanies -- 1
Dinners at Plouf -- 4
Corsets purchased --2
Pounds lost -- 10
Friends lost -- 4
Old friends found -- 3
Ex-boyfriends resurfaced -- 2
Crushes -- 1. I've made a full recovery, thank you.
Loves -- 1, from which I will hopefully never have to recover.

It's funny to think that those numbers should explain how I got to where I am. My years do not stack up on top of each other, one identical to the rest. This is not my most chaotic year, but I do wonder sometimes if I go through jobs, through apartments and people, just a little too fast. I can't believe the number of times I've said that this will be the last apartment, the last job, the last boyfriend for a while. Now that I have this one, I swear a solemn oath to settle in and pull life, cozy and tight, around me.

A few days ago I started looking at warehouse spaces on craig's list again. It was supposed to be for a friend, but prices have fallen to $1 a square foot for the first time in years and soon I started to imagine a brick warehouse ten times the size of my loft that my friends and I could rent and remodel. Don't you see what's wrong with this picture? What the hell do I need a better loft for? I've only lived here for six months! Now is not the time for rental infidelity. I can't live with one eye always wandering towards the next thing.

Maybe this coming year I'll be the Red Queen. I will have the run very fast in order to keep standing in the same place. I will not move. I will not stray. I will not throw away my friends. I won't go looking for that bigger, better, faster, more glamorous life that I could be living. Let next year be just like this one. How hard could it possibly be?

J and I escaped the loft compound and went to Haight St. for shopping and burritos, almost like a date. There is no good used clothing on Haight these days. I used to walk away from Wasteland or Aarkvark's with armfulls (arms full? would it be "arms full"?) of clothes. Today they're not buying much, which means that there isn't much turnover. All of the things that I didn't want to buy months ago are still there.

I'm certain I've offended some wrathfull and trigger-happy god of fashion. Do you hear me, God? I don't want your pink imitation-snakeskin jeans! I spit on your clever op-art print fabrics! Nothing in this world could make me wear those Wilma Flintstone tank tops that only come up over one shoulder.

Bring me the head of the fashion sadist who brought back glam.

Where have all of the black beaded cardigans gone? Where are the black cotton eyelet dresses? The peter pan collar blouses? Where are the vintage nightgowns that don't look like they belong on a 60's tramp in heavy blue eyeshadow? What makes the fashion gods so unkind? Will I have to sacrifice 50's cocktail dresses and knee-length bloomers on a burning pyre? What must I do to prove myself worthy?

All of my favorite clothing is falling apart. I will have to steal J's clothes --his black jeans, his floppy DKNY sweaters. I will look terribly plain. I'll look normal. No one will be able to recognise me.

LOCAL WOMAN KIDNAPPED, REPLACED BY BANANA REPUBLIC MODEL

The local authorities will have to send out a search party.

Life is so hard. The streets are so gritty. I'm so authentic and real to be walking around here. Sure.

What did I do on Friday night? I went to the opera --Ashak II --with my mother. The world is full of people who would rather have their eyes scooped out with a mellon baller than spend three hours at the opera. I'm not one of them. I see something in opera, even bad opera, that most people don't see. Let me be clear on this: Ashak II is a terrible piece of work. If you don't have half season tickets to the SF Met, I can't in good conscience recommend that you spend an evening watching this thing. Stay home, my nebulous reader! Wash your hair. Pay your bills. There must be some reruns of Night Court on TV you could be watching right now. Leave the American productions of Italian operas based on Armenian history to me.

Adam Gopnik once wrote of that "moment in opera when the clouds of schlock lift and something crazily artificial becomes transporting." I've seen it happen once or twice, during performances of La Traviata or Don Giovanni, I've fallen completely into the moment. But more often than not, the schlock never lifts. It settles in for a long stay. A cloud of schlock. A rain of the stuff, even. The sets tower; the costumes glitter and we know that the plot is paper-thin, the libretto is poorly translated, and that heaving, buxom soprano is hardly convincing as a frail girl of seventeen. It is ridiculous when the ghost appears from behind two columns, all dressed in white, and solemnly intones "I am your father." Overweight performers, hearty songs from the death bed, the details of offstage wars related by page boys, are all the cliches that opera is made of, but they're such vast and awesome cliches that I am moved by their very scale.

Maybe I have a weakness for epic tackiness, after all, I like Las Vegas. Opera is a great, grand, ugly, straight-faced venture in which the audience pays a lot of money to give themselves over to the illusion, but also to keep themselves seperate from it.We pretend that the acting is convincing and the story is moving, that we're society women and patrons of the arts when really we're just dressing up to spy in the house of wealth. Because we're impostors, my mother can nudge me in the ribs when the ghost comes out and whisper very quietly so that only I can hear, "I am your father, Luke. Come over to the Dark Side."

Okay, so it's not the zeitgeist novel, this thing that I'm writing. I don't think that I'm ready for a novel just yet. I have maybe one good short story in me per year. It's usually about three thousand words long and it takes me six months to edit. There are tree sloths that work faster than I do. There are monkeys at typewriters who are more prolific. That's why when people ask me if I'm a writer (they ask, I don't know why), I answer no. I write sometimes, but I'm not a writer.

But I've written so much here, in this space. I've got a year of walking through San Francisco down on paper. I've learned a few things, walking around late at night. I've learned how monsterous cities are. I've learned a little bit about the way the streets devour people. I have the language with which to describe the broken bottles, the graffiti, the smell of stale beer and urine, the different catagories of street people and their desire for my spare change, the crummy apartments with sloping floors, the basement offices, empty parking lots, cars with broken windows, all-night porn stores, stolen bicycles, and Wells Fargo/Starbucks Borg cubes that make up my neighborhood. I've spent the last couple of years living in places that people tell me are not safe, not proper, if you're young and female and prone to walking alone late at night.

Now everyone is thinking about their safety, the illusion of safety, the lie we tell ourselves that just because everything is clean and everybody is pleasantly middle class, that nothing could go wrong here. The Transamerica pyramid was on the list of terrorist targets published by the FBI this week. I used to work across the street from the pyramid in an office where people used to make a face when I told them the block I lived on. Isn't it dangerous there? Isn't it dangerous everywhere?

Am I a bad person for not wanting to write about last Tuesday anymore? I'm all out of outrage. I don't have any shock left in me. I can't talk about sympathy or mourning or how brave those firefighters are. Yes, I know that Falwell wants to lay it all at the feet of gays, feminists, and abortionists. I know that CNN has done a miserable job of covering the story. I know that the dead are piling up, bits and pieces of them, and we can't really expect any survivors. We're almost certainly going to bomb Afganistan, I know that. Nevermind that people have been bombing Afganistan for decades to no avail. George W. Bush's approval ratings are through the roof. There's something I really don't want to discuss.

None of that today. I'm going to talk about the Virgin. There's a Virgin Megastore on 4th and Market, the only giant corperation that I can't help patronising. Not for the music, of course. I am vehemently opposed to paying full price for a CD. I have an addiction: glossy art books. There's an illustrated copy of Julie Taymor's Titus. There's one of Kevyn Aucoin's makeup books. There's a history of lingerie and a book of Jan Saudek's photographs. There's a collection of Glenn Fabry's covers for Preacher.

Prominently featured on one of the tables of newly released books, next to the new Francesca Lia Brock novel, is The Office Kama Sutra by Julianne Balmain, who used to work with me at Plague of Locusts. It's a cute little book --a guide to romance in the workplace, says the cover. We all knew that it would be published eventually. Julie left Plague of Locusts to become a full time writer. Maybe it's too easy to make fun of the CTO's girlfriend when she writes a book about sex in the office. This is the comedic equivalent of a sitting duck. None of the machines in the server room were suspiciously sticky when she left. I take this as a sign that she practices the discretion she counsels in her book.

Who am I kidding? I'm jealous. Some girl, a girl from my office, is sitting at her word processor at this very moment writing the great American novel, for which she has received an honest-to-god advance, and what am I doing with my abundant free time? Nothing. My zeitgeist novel remains unwritten What will happen if she beats me to chronicling the inept management, the visits from OSHA, the frat boy engineers and bizarre coffee mug-related office memos of Plague of Locusts?

I'd better get writing right now.

J took this picture of me in the courtyard of the Louvre this spring. There's a corresponding picture of him setting up a tripod: the geek in his native environment. We'd been walking non-stop for three or four days and our feet were starting to rebel, but I think that was the last time that life felt limitless and benign.

All of my friends are safe. You don't care, of course. You have your own friends to worry about, but when the newscasters say "the world will never be the same again" I know my world will be the same eventually. I've got jambalaya cooking on the stove and sometimes I can look away from CNN or BBC World Service because I'm not afraid that the moment I look away, something awful will happen.

I haven't felt to starved for information since I had the chicken pox. I came home from school one day and collapsed in my parents' bed. I was cold, the coldest I've ever been in my life, and they had all of the best blankets. No matter how many blankets I wrapped around myself, I shook. When my mother took my temperature that evening, it was a hundred and five. It's dangerous to get the chicken pox when you're twelve years old --maybe not so bad as when you're thirty, but you feel it. When you're hot and aching and weak, you understand that sometimes a very small thing can kill you.

I spent the first week of the Gulf War delerious with fever, drinking from the 2 liter bottles my parents left by my bed and listening to NPR. I never turned it off, not once, through BCC World News and Sound Money and Terry Gross. I had newscasters speaking in my dreams like the voice of God. I would close my eyes and pretend I had no body, nothing that shook and itched (I scratched, even though you're not supposed to scratch. You can see two pox marks on my face if you know where to look) and sweated while Patriot missiles fell on Iraq and retaliatory SCUD missiles fell on Israel.

I couldn't stop listening. I couldn't look away, but I think I can look away now for a little while.

Comments have been broken for a couple of days because reblogger lost its free hosting. Reblogger has been moved and comments are back up, but I seem to have lost all of my previous comment data. If you had anything to say, now you've got to say it all over again.

In other news, the world is a little surreal today. When I was a kid, I read a lot of cyberpunk novels. Embarassing as it seems now, I played a couple of cyberpunk role-playing games. The news looks like a page torn from a cyberpunk role-playing supplement. This is what I get for living in the future.

It's Monday evening and I'm finally doing the dreaded playa laundry, a triple load of clothes that used to be black, for the most part, but are now almost white with alkali dust. The desert is not kind to clothing. All of my vintage slips and negligees feel brittle. My burgundy Lip Service bloomers are ripped in two places. Everything I own which is made of leather could use a good polishing because no amount of soap and water is going to completely banish the dirt from my coats and boots. A few years ago, a friend of mine, still addled from his weeks in Black Rock, was doing his own playa laundry at the local laundromat when he noticed that the clothes he was wearing were pretty filthy and could do with a good washing. His shirt was halfway over his head before he remembered that he was back in the real world, a place where spontaneous nudity is not appreciated.

I gave him no end of grief when he told me that story. That only made it more embarassing when the very next year, I nearly stepped out of my dress in a laundry on Franklin Street --I was that close --and a crowd of pseudo-hipsters with brightly colored hair and tell-tale filthy sneakers all smiled in sympathy. We all had the Reality Bends. We had it bad.

I still have my Playa Body, ten pounds lighter, tanner, sleeker than my usual self. Everything fits a little more comfortably. The Playa Body is a point of pride at Burning Man. It takes almost a week to fully acclimate to the harsh Black Rock terrain, tan enough that you don't need to slather yourself in sunblock, tough enough that you don't need to carry a gallon of water with you at all times. You burn two thousand calories a day just sitting in the shade and sweating. You need avocados, candy bars, steaks, things you would never, ever eat in the real world, just to fuel a rigorous workday. The legions of the tanned, whose bodies no longer secrete natural oils, sneer at the newcomers, anyone whose hair is still neat, those people whose clothes look suspiciously clean, people who look as if they have had a shower (a real shower with hot water!) in the recent past. A newcomer, a tourist, a pansy frat boy spectator who probably brought beer instead of water and is only there because they hear Burning Man has lots of tits, is anybody who arrived on the playa after you did. In some ways, Black Rock City is not so different from San Francisco.

At Thunderdome, we are filled with the malicious urge to defile our newcomers. The first thing Matt does when he sees me is grab a handfull of playa dust and rub it into my hair. When J sees Jen, more than a week later, he rushes her, screaming "You're so cleeeeeeeean!" A true playa veteran is dirty, dirty and unrepentant.

There is a long tradition of holy pilgrimages into the desert. We journey into harsh environments to cleanse ourselves. We put ourselves through trials on an alien landscape because ordinary life has no real trials to offer. For this reason I've seen people cut themselves, go on fasts, get tattooed and pierced, and hung from hooks that dig into their flesh. I see a lot of those people at Burning Man, people who are there because they need to escape easy, boring, ordinary living. Every year I put myself through the dirty, unpleasant, exhausting, expensive ritual of Burning Man because it is hard and everything else is a just a little too easy.

Welcome to Burning Man. We built this city, but we were really hoping you wouldn't show up.

That's Mateo on the megaphone in the Center Camp Cafe, which isn't even open until the event officially starts on Monday. We're waiting for a demonstration of the Tesla Coil (not Doctor Megavolt's, but somebody else's) and Mateo is filling in the time by heckeling the audience: Which of you dumbass motherfuckers left fruit in the port-o-potties? Fruit! How many times do I have to tell you? If it's not shit, piss, or vomit, it doesn't belong in the port-o-potty! If you can't remember that, get off my fucking playa and take your American Spirit hippie cigarettes with you! There's more, but Lil' Matt is busy rummaging around under my skirt as if he's lost his keys down there. Matt is a dangerous and unstable psychotic who has been drinking since the middle of the afternoon. His idea of hitting on a girl is to restrain her so that she cannot run away and then bite her until she bruises. He has a kiss like a meat grinder. In the desert, I find this charming. Later that night, we jump into Mateo's art car (a beat-up Saab that only drives in reverse), drive past the greeter's gate, and begin to assault cars coming into Black Rock City, demanding cigarettes, candy, beer, and beautiful women before they would be allowed to pass.

Driving around Black Rock with the DPW and Deathguild is like being aboard a maurauding pirate ship. There are two bottles going around, the booze and the chaser, and every hour or so the bottle is emptied out and someone has to bring out another one. Everyone is dangerous and drunk, looking to cause trouble, and as we cruise down the Esplanade, people point and yell "Deathguild!" That's how notorious we are. That's how unbelievably cool we have become. In a temporary city of almost thirty thousand people, we're the one who wear black so that you don't have to. We'll drink all the booze, do all the drugs, harass anything carrying a glowstick, and fuck anything that doesn't run away fast enough.

I felt like such a badass. I caused trouble. I kissed boys. I drank abysmal vodka. I did a lot of drugs. I shouted from the roof of the hearse until my voice was gone. I choked myself on excess.

You already know that couldn't last.

I'm back, but I'm exhausted. I need more sleep. I need some food. I need to get the alkali dust out of everything I own. Then I'm going to tell you a story.