highindustrial.

"I wasn't this guy who everyone lusted after. I got dumped. I got cheated on. I had to pursue girlfriends who didn't really want to be with me. I was gangly and not in control of my body. I was big. I was tall. I had baby fat. My tooth was cracked."

"I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."

Sometimes I seriously have trouble telling Ben Affleck and George Orwell apart. + 8

What were computers like before the internet? I ought to know: I was on my fourth Apple (IIGS, PowerBook 170, Duo 280c, 5300c) before I had regular access to the streaming reams of metacontent which lie about us like heaven about Wordsworth's infancy; but the prologue is obscure. There were HyperCard stacks, CD-ROMs, happiness at finding a clip of the "Dance of the Knights" from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet embedded in an Encarta article. ClarisWorks, Microsoft Word, Aldus SuperPaint. Hours of concentration and purposefulness, quaint and remote. Attention surpluses where now there are deficits.

Covad hiccuped this morning. The laptops and the handheld, delivered from free-association, were reduced to their essential parts. My thoughts bore their own weight for a change. + 5

Late dinner at Grand Lux. The television over the bar was set to CNN: mostly instamatic commentary punctuated by bad videophone feeds and shots of dusty roads and distant minarets. Eventually Saddam showed up, looking waxen and wan as he denounced "Junior Bush." (If our prexy ever decides to DJ post-admin, he now has a handle.) We joked about Sad's fabled mustachioed doppelgängers, about Jerry Haleva's career ... and then it was back to the potstickers. (Roast duck, pretty good.) And of course, the Oscars. I'll say it ahead of time: Diane Lane wuz robbed. + 1

I dreamt Faye Dunaway (late-period, brittle) was a hitwoman, and I was assigned to protect the mother-daughter who were her target. We hid from Faye in a movie theater filled with smoke and silver-halide light; and on a public beach, behind a cabana, under a hot sun, mindful of her sniper rifle and the surf's capacity to muffle its discharge. The affair unfolded in a manner reminiscent of Fitzgerald by way of Adrian Lyne—picturesque, accomplished, derivative. +

I'm generally disinclined to small-talk, but many people seem to expect it. Barring sports and politics, which bore or vex me, as the case may be, there's always the weather. I can talk about the weather with such grim, grinning conviction that your grandmother would vouch for my character on her grandmother's grave. And it's strange, to para-invoke Jim Morrison, what people will talk about when talking about the weather: what thought-corpses float up amidst the verbal flotsam. Rorschach rainblots.

People talk about the weather a lot in Los Angeles. + 4

"We architect by accretion," I began to write. "We compile our fates by layering inaction, action and overreaction."

The words felt familiar. They were mine, and new, but sense memory led me to Google, and in a Ouija way, to type "we are the dreamers": whence sprung Arthur O'Shaughnessy and his dimly retained but freshly enjoyed ode. I don't remember where I first encountered it, whether in a high school textbook or a dot-com television commercial, but I clearly had some apprehension of it. It's worth the facilitated recall. + 6

hot girl says hi
you're hot think i

Not quite e.e. cummings. + 4

Observed: the contagious, ~~used-Kleenex~~ shared-needle propagation of annoying young actors across television commercials. Case in point: the unnamed Gen-Z alpha-minus who leads Dell's replacement "dudes" through their machinations in the PC manufacturer's current crop of desktop spots. He also waxes hormonal via SMS in that (possibly regional; it looks budget) Verizon Wireless commercial where the object of his alphanumeric affections trips and falls on her ass after sassing him about said affections. (You had to be there.) The repertoire: a single, puckered expression of consternation, or perhaps merely concentration, applied indiscriminately like so much late-period Pacino HOO-ah! ... if Pacino were a mime ... on Xanax.

Whoever this young man is, I'm sure he'll be making out with the 2003 Alexis Bledel variant on some as-yet-untitled WB dramedy any day now. + 1

I'll never understand why people love the T68i so much. I mean, sure, nice form factor, Bluetooth, and so on; but: horrible screen, slow-ass processor, cheap construction and (unforgivably) erratic reception. And don't get me started on the joystick. Maybe the T610 will actually be usable. + 8

Napping, I dreamt about Mindy Cohn. She was in some movie; I had a walk-on. We had a scene together; I kept missing my mark. But she was cool: bronzed and good, all you-go-girl aglow; not at all redolent of Chris Farley in drag.

I whipped out my digital camera. Do you mind if I get a picture of us together? My friends will love this.

But just then there was a leak, a seeping realization that Mindy was not at all cool, that a picture of us together would be lame, that my friends would not be impressed.

In reality, it was the phone ringing, cold-cocking the sleep right out of me. Mindy continued to linger just beyond my subsequent conversation, and for some time afterward, like so much bovine spongiform encephalitis. + 4