highindustrial.

Would that the words were arrayed before me in columns, always suspended at arm's-length, reasonably translucent, scrolling briskly along the y-axis; motion-blurred but crisp wherever my eyes focused. Their velocity would vary gradually across their ranks, in semblance of parallax, but not jarringly so. They would stop and start, stop and start, like blood, cycling with my pulse. And whenever they came to rest, sentences would spontaneously crystallize, briefly and perfectly; and if I so chose, I could reach out and glance one and watch it break off and float down down down someplace, joining other sentences, entire reefs of thought. And this process would continue, regularly and irregularly, indefinitely, at the junction of impulse and repose.

Would that the world were only words; and roads were sentences; and nations were paragraphs; and oceans were stories. + 11

Something broke or dislodged this morning and I slept and slept hard. In my dreams I surveyed technicolor cityscapes, scaled skyscrapers with ætheric impunity, bounded across rooftops in my overcoat. Later there were imaginary quarrels with loved ones, Möbius skeins of social intrigue both memorable and improbable. Even now, wakened and stirred, my blood is saturated with sleep, my muscles marinated in it, my thoughts turning to syrup. Every oscillating light source seems to suggest flickering eyelids.

Smack. "Good god, man, pull yourself together." + 12

VH1's basic-cabo attempt to air Showgirls—woofy looped dialog and cartoonish digital obfuscation; broad celluloidal deforestation, entire scenes of Semtex carnality razed to reaction shots and afterthoughts—piles unintentional hilarity on top of intentional comedy, resulting in something else altogether, a new gloss on old gloss, craven and riveting.

Paul Verhoeven had this to say about his movie in a recent interview: "Ehhhmmm... That wasn’t really a good movie, no. It had a bad story. But I liked the way we filmed it though." That's pretty much on the money. Not that I set much store by what Verhoeven says in general. Hollow Man all but soldered his career-coffin shut. I'm surprised he hasn't been tapped to direct the Mummy threequel. +

I watched the sun light out across the Peninsula this morning: watched it work its suburban-kitchen Saturday magic on the city, atomizing under motorcars and around street corners; watched its flaming banners leap over hilly horizons like a Nicene creed, transfiguring plaster and concrete, Victorian and Modern, into Byzantium. I looked upon these mighty works and rejoiced.

In passing, however, I lamented anew San Francisco's dearth of Seven Elevens: I would settle for a Wawa at this point; but upon returning home I remembered the muffin basket our landlord and lady had left on our doorstep the other day, resplendent with little cakes and a note which read simply, "The muffins are yours—the basket is ours."

I can live with that. + 4

The aborning Robert Blake media fuck-for-all harks back to a kindler, gentler aspect of our national character, recalling post-nuclear families gathered round that modern porch known as the rumpus room sofa, taking in the modern sunset known as the evening news. I remember a time, not so long ago, when folks could count on a fourth-tier sublebrity to murder his wife in a fit of brutal and spectacular public execution; then lie about it really badly, the way only a bad actor can; and then be made to pay for his misdeed by a just-us system which sometimes jails you and sometimes lets you off—but not scot-free, if twenty light bulb-screwing defense attorneys have anything to do about it. Eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five gol-den rings. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Benjamin Hill may be dead, but his music echoes still. Montgomery Python's too.

I'm going to need a moment to myself here. Talk amongst yourselves and Dominick Dunne. (Oh, and, uh ... "allegedly," right? Just thought I'd throw that out there. I think it applies somewhere.) + 4

I've been so sleep-deprived, or at least sleep-agnostic, this past week that my thoughts are literally beginning to stray—entering that frictionless half-dream free-fall where I start blurting out free-associative nonsense in lieu of cogent conversation; answer questions with non sequiturs; belly laugh at weird television commercials and old Maxim articles; exhibit shellack-shocked narco-disinterest in other people's affairs; view writing in terms of bulldozing. And as I listen to loud pop in the early AM, the lyrics actually begin to make sense, the way pretty girls in foreign countries always make sense. "Whenever, Wherever," indeed. + 11

And she pulled the paper down and looked me right in the eyes and said, "How shall I do it, dear? How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?"

Then she says, "How do you want to do it? From the front? From behind?" I say, "A little from the front and then a lot from behind." "Do you want to do it in the garden? Or in the pool? Do you want me to lie on the grass?" she says. I say yes. "Or do you want me perhaps to stand up?" Yes, I say. "Or do you want me to sit with my heels in the air pointing to the east and to the west?" Yes, I say. "Yes to what?" she says. "Yes to everything," I say. "Then I will," she says. And she does. Just like that. My God!

How memory works sometimes. + 11

The vernal equinox is just behind me, a spray of wet weeds I've stepped over as I conduct myself down the path of April-May. I halt abruptly where the gravel explodes into shimmering asphalt: I watch it stretch across June, sprawl under July, and bake through August. My current position affords only the oiliest vantage of the fallen pine cones and wrought-iron memories abutting the blacktop's opposite perimeter, where russet is rumored and peppermint is incipient.

It's barely spring and I already miss fall. Summer is a wild card. + 7

My timepieces are self-adjusting: my cell phone, my laptop—even my alarm clock, which subscribes to the natural regular oscillations of distant atoms in the desert. Only my wristwatch demands vigilance. I seldom wear it.

Someday, not too soon and not so far, I will live in a fully automated house. The house will know me in a dozen electrochemical ways. I will walk through it and it will follow me. The walls will have eyes, papered with SmartStuff™, receptive to my passing shadow—which upon close inspection will manifest itself not as an alpha mask but as an impossibly intricate animated fractal, an occultation of binary information, a writhing contour map of my domestic conduct.

I will be (even more) overstimulated and oblivious. + 6

In the way of fiction, mostly: Sometimes I like sentences that just hang on the page, linger in the weave of the paper, the ink still seeping deeper deeper, almost palpably; so that if one were to graze the text with one's finger (and one's fingertip were suitably sensitive, packed with receptors), the mass and substance of a line, a thought, a hanging sentence could be resolved as its characters pressed into the body of that page—not so much like Braille as analogous to a fingerprint, the very act of reading an intimation of flesh on flesh. + 11

A now song recalls a then song; the synthesis induces synaesthesia: old smells and buried light commingle in some half-forgotten Edward Hopper place where I'm younger (not so much and yet so very much) and the furniture is different and the altitude is higher and the hours have more teeth. There was less information to negotiate in those days, and in the bargain perhaps more tactility. But not tranquility. "Everything is process."

I remember myself all the time, after the fact, in passing. It happens. Two-thousand-two will register sometime in two-thousand-six. + 5