Mallory's Camera

In Monterey, I overheard RTT boasting to Wells about one of my stranger habits: “You know, my mother never reads a book from beginning to end. She’ll read the first few chapters of something and then flip to the end! And then read the other chapters out of sequence.”

Indeed.

I’ve been reading books this way since I was a very young child.

And this is not only the way I read books, it is also the way I watch streaming media.

I suppose because plot per se has never interested me. In my own private universe, everything that will ever happen has already happened, so what’s interesting is not that it happened but how it happened, how an infinite number of probabilities can rearrange themselves into a single possibility.

It’s a very hard internal philosophy to articulate, but it is how I see the world: All of this has already happened.

###

Anyway. This is how I rewatched Mad Men, zooming through the first season (context!) & then piecemealing my way through the subsequent 78 episodes.

And now I’m through and have nothing to watch!!!

And also nothing to read!

This is a problem because as I whine incessantly, this time of year, my day-by-day life is really kind of a flatline so the Life of the Imagination is paramount.

Mad Men is a particularly brilliant show, not only just for the cultural anthropology but also because it is as richly textured as a well-written novel. (Case in point: 10-year-old Sally, petulantly collapsing upon her bed, wears a blue patterned dress. Later, in that same episode, her beautiful, icy mother Betty also throws herself petulantly on Sally’s bed—and she is wearing a blue dress that’s like a grown-up version of Sally’s dress. This is art direction at its most subtle.)

I tried to start watching A Hundred Years of Solitude. And it’s good! But the cultural nuances just don’t resonate for me, so it’s not emotionally engaging.

And books!

I quite liked Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love (being a big fan of chick lit in general), so I picked up Good Material, but it is beyond ghastly, a gurglier version of Nick Hornby, so you know, yuck!!!

How am I going to distract myself?

###

Also, I found out Bradburn died.

Back in the day, Bradburn was one of those WELL-peeps with whom I tried to forge real-life chumhood. He was intelligent, amiable, humorous, tolerant.

The real-life chumhood never quite took.

Nevertheless, one of the defining moments of Bradburn’s life took place in my house in Monterey. He had come down for the weekend with his wife Kerry. She was participating in some kind of bridge tournament. He was gonna hang out with me & Ben.

And then Kerry didn’t come back till three in the morning Saturday night…

And it turned out that she had finally consummated la grande passion for her bridge partner!

And there was lots of muttering & sobbing & the sounds of objects bouncing against walls from the guest room I’d assigned them & from which they emerged at 6 in the morning to announce—grimly—they were driving back up to Oakland.

“Should I take up bridge?” I asked Ben.

Subsequently, Kerry & Bradburn divorced & Bradburn became Cynthia Heimel’s boy toy.

Cynthia Heimel was one of those Famous People who periodically popped up on the WELL & who everyone fawned over because you know—Famous Person!!

Okay, Cynthia Heimel wasn’t all that famous although at that time, she was writing a lot of television. She’d also written one very sharp, very funny book—Sex Tips For Girls.

But she was a real fucking bitch and mad as a hatter, too—though that didn’t stop people fawning over her because… Famous Person!!!!

There were a lot more famous people on the WELL. David Crosby! Robin Williams! But they weren’t quite as interactive as Cynthia Heimel who liked to pretend the WELL was Versailles & she was the Sun King.

Anyway, I was quite shocked when Bradburn became Cynthia Heimel’s boytoy—he had never particularly struck me as the toadying type.

But I understood it better when I saw the beautiful iridescent green New Beetle Cynthia Heimel bought for him.

Bradburn & I were never particularly close after that, but through the magic of Facebook, one can be connected forever to everyone one has ever exchanged so much as a significant smile with!

And I was quite shocked to learn of his death.

Natural causes, said the announcement.

What exactly did that mean?

###

I have a great photo of Bradburn somewhere, wearing mirror shades poolside at the Claremont Hotel.

But I’m too lazy to hunt it down.

I’ve been so anxious this past week.

This past month if I’m honest about it.

Without understanding why.

###

Yes, yes, of course: the upcoming trip. Will I get my flight dates mixed up and miss the flight to Guatemala? Will the plane disappear in the Bermuda Triangle? Crash in the approach to Guatemala City when Pacaya decides to spew a real live ash column for the first time since 2010? Will Mara Salvatrucha decide to storm La Aurora airport and take all elderly gringo ladies with purple hair hostage? Will the shuttle I’m taking from Guate to Antigua blow a tire, killing all aboard?

The usual pre-trip anxieties, in other words.

###

But I was also thinking there was more to the omnipresent jitteriness than the pre-trip wobblies, and at last, I admitted to myself: It may have to do with nervousness about ongoing revenue streams.

So a couple of days ago, I took the bull by the horns and contacted my three most regular clients: Do you foresee the rise of AI tools having a marked influence on our professional relationship?

Best to know, right? So I can start putting in those job applications at McDonalds.

My retirement income pays all my basic bills, but anything I do beyond paying basic bills is subsidized by Remunerative Projects.

###

By yesterday, I’d heard back from all three clients.

No, said one.

No! said another.

NO, NO, NO! said the third—and confided they’d recently had to terminate the contract of another writer when they’d detected the unmistakable ChatGPT fingerprint. All AI does is spin existing content, the client told me. We want original insights.

So, that's a relief.

Though, of course, I am still anxious.

Because anxiety is what my body is used to.

It will take it a couple of days (at least) to get used to something else.

###

To that end, I have decided to do absolutely nothing today but read, watch TV, ablute (I have a new fabulous body wash,) and play with the cat.

Decompress.

I may tromp—but only because the sun is out and the sky is blue. Not because I want to exercise.

###

I’m reading The Ink Black Heart, J.K. Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike detective procedural.

I admire Rowling for many reasons, but her writing ability is not among them.

Rowling seems never to have heard of Chekhov's gun. At least 250 pages of every 1,000-page tome she writes is filled with unnecessary details that add absolutely nada to plot or characterization.

I will say that degree of imagination micromanagement leads to a very dense parallel world in which it is oddly comforting to lose oneself in certain moods—like the one I’m in presently.

Also, she is dead right about the toxic nature of the Internet. Twitter, in particular. But really, all social media. I get that mileage varies on this one, but personally, I think fandom is a creepy phenomenon because it collectivizes what really ought to be a one-to-one relationship with a piece of art that moves you personally. And fandom is the engine that drives social media.

###

I was a very early social media adopter. I joined the Well—the great grand-daddy of all social media—in 1988.

I’d have to say that, yes, there was a sense of “community,” the like of which I hadn’t encountered before, and that sense of community was intoxicating. Many, many people I liked. A few I still consider friends.

But the Well was also a cesspool of bullies.

Just before I joined, these bullies had actually shamed and abused one prominent Well member so thoroughly that he committed suicide.

It was very obvious to me, a newcomer, not bound through fear or misguided loyalty to dissemble, that Blair would not have committed suicide had he not been pushed.

So, I said something. I am ever Joan of Arc into the fray!

And then I was bullied.

I was bullied pretty consistently by the same group of creepy people throughout the five or six years I remained an active Well member. But as I say, there were also people I had real bonds with.

Still. I roll my eyes whenever I read the private Well group on FB and read the nostalgia for old times.

And whenever—as happens from time to time—an old Wellie asks me, Why don’t you come back? I think, For the same reason, I don’t put Drano into my morning coffee.

Miles Franklin died last night.



One of my cosmic littermates from the Well. A rock’n’roll Bad Boy. Very, very funny and an immensely gifted photographer.

Miles was the person who turned me on to Krampus.

He was also one of the most physically beautiful male human beings I have ever laid eyes on.

Memory eternal, Brother Miles.

Safe journey across the river.

###

What else?

I was completely out of it yesterday on account of having slept so little the night before.
Managed to knock off 3,000 words of deathless, Remunerative prose plus several items that have been loitering about on the To-Do List since February before taking to my bed to watch ancient Law & Order episodes.

Today, I will complete one of the Remunerative Projects—right now it’s (ulp) 76 pages long. Plus I have a bunch of Friends & Family tax returns to do. Plus I want to do some reading.

The weather has been uniformly cold and grey and damp since that one glorious foretaste of spring a week or so back, which removes me from any obligation to do Wholesome Exercise. If it ain’t warm, I ain’t doing it.

The world at large remains FUCKED UP.

I keep wondering when we’re gonna hear about all those Ukrainians packed together like sardines in underground bomb shelters and Poland-bound trains dying of COVID.

If we don’t hear about it, I’m gonna conclude the COVID pandemic is essentially over.

It’s VERY COLD.

Soon, SNOWPOCALYPSE will be upon us, and the world will be buried ‘neath seven feet of snow, and the shelves of the Drop & Plop will be empty save for frozen cheese pizzas, and the frozen cheese pizzas will cost $30 apiece, and Super-Coyotes with strange, light eyes will eat all our pets, and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death will hold illimitable dominion over all.

In other news: This is thought to be a photograph of Marion McCarthy née Fish who is thought to be the prototype for Jean Kronski.

She looks just like a whole bunch of GenX women on the Well I dislike intensely. Those GenX women went in for flapper bobs, though. At least back they did in the day. God knows what they look like now.

Anyway, it should be very easy to turn her into a horrible character since I dislike so many people who look like her.

Despite the paucity of stimuli, I continue to be in a mostly sanguine mood.

Had a dream last night where I was explaining to someone, See, the thing is I’m not particularly lovable.

I wasn’t particularly upset saying this, and I wasn’t upset when I awoke either.

Unlovability was just another descriptive: I’m 5’10” tall; I have hazel eyes; once upon a time, I had jet black hair, and I’m unlovable.

Dreamed that I’d come from the City to upstate NY to visit a strange little store. Was the store run by Eleanor? Maybe. The store was dark and filthy, dottering strings of dying ivy dangling from every shelf, in the manner of strange little stores everywhere. But it also sold things that were magic.

Anyway, unbeknownst to me, a team led by Amaryllis Pellegrino had arrived to do a makeover on the store, á la that Gordon Ramsay restaurant show. My job was to lure Eleanor out and distract her while they did the makeover.

When we got back, the store had been entirely repainted in pink and blue, and the Amaryllis Pellegrino-led team clustered around Eleanor, saying, “Isn’t this great?” while Eleanor looked around in mounting horror.

Truth be told, I, too, preferred the store in its original state.

But I felt as though I ought to like in better in its new nursery school colors. And it certainly was cleaner!

“Well, you will get more customers!” I told Eleanor.

She looked at me with a look of absolute reproach.

###

I’m thinking this is a writing dream!

Amaryllis Pellegrino is a writer I know, an old Well-ie, who writes stuff for Salon and that awful New York Times feature Modern Love. She’s very talented but at the same time, everything she writes is kind of glib and… predictable. You can see the epiphany she embeds in each of these pieces coming a mile off. It’s the kind of modern writing style that bores the shit out of me, actually.

Amaryllis has like a billion acolytes on FB! She’s constantly posting stuff like, “Covid chronicles would not be complete without me dying my roots to Springsteen!” complete with pix and a million follow-up responses: Bruuuuuuuce! You look so cuuuuuuute!

Still preaches the same edgy values she espoused back when she was the Mitchell Brothers’ only punk rock stripper even though these days she has a McMansion in Beacon and a handsome husband who makes a lot of money so she never has to worry about hustling. She frequently chronicles her battle with Depression, although honestly: What does Amaryllis Pellegrino have to be depressed about?

Meow, meow!

###

RTT got his unemployment. They back-paid him from March so that he now has close to $10,000 in his bank account. Plus he’s starting a contracting job today, and all on his own, without maternal prodding, he signed up for therapy.

Of course, I would like some explicit acknowledgement: And I owe it all to yew-w-w-w-w, Most Angelic Mother, for explaining the difference between Regular Unemployment and Pandemic Unemployment to me!

But I’m never gonna get that. So, you know: I’m happy for him.

###

Also, I’ve been binge-watching Shtisel, which may be the best television series since The Sopranos in terms not just of its storyline and the vividness of its characters but also in terms of its amazing ability to tie symbolic motifs together. It’s really, really, really an amazing show. I’m completely in love with it.

###

Other than that, life is just work and eating potatoes and listening to the thunder from distant storms that never quite materialize.

I dreamed that Eliza X was running through eight caves…

Why Eliza X? Why eight caves?

I have no idea. It’s not as though Eliza X plays any kind of role at all in my existing life or present imagination.

But there she was. Or at least there was the Eliza X from the mid-1990s, which would have been the last time I saw her: We hung out together at the Beverly Plaza while I was getting dressed for the Academy Awards. She’d been bitter that day; she’d been talking about the ways success had eluded her.

I would have known her anywhere.

###

In a way, my membership in the Well was my own little attempt to create a Bloomsbury. It wasn’t successful because most people on the Well were what I would have called at the time “organic hippies” whereas a Bloomsbury would have needed to be populated by Bohemians.

Bohemians don’t care about sustainability! Bohemians just want to have fun and make art.

Eliza X was one of a triumvirate of sex goddesses on the Well. By “sex goddesses,” I mean they wrote memoirs about their own sexual experiences and about other people’s sexual experiences for which they received respectable advances.

The other two sex goddesses were Katy Y and Amaryllis Z.

Those aren't their real names, of course.

The Story of Katy Y

Katy Y was – is - the most successful of the resident sex goddesses. She’s still in demand as an editor and as a writer, which is saying something in these days of Trump when after decades of sex positivity, sex has once again become a societal negative thanks to fundamentalism on both sides of the political divide, the Right and the Left.

I met Katy in real life when I interviewed her for Birth Stories, which was the first major piece I ever published. Since she lived in Santa Cruz, and I lived in Monterey, I went to parties occasionally at her pumpkin-colored Victorian, and we saw each other one-on-one from time to time.

I wrote some porn for one of her online entrepreneurial ventures. She was an excellent editor! “Patrizia,” she’d say, “this is great stuff from a pure writing perspective, but ya gotta ease up on the character development and the status detail and cut straight to the genitals!”

Katy has a tender heart and confrontations upset her.

Katy had first gained fame as the lesbian editor of a rather famous lesbian zine called On Our Backs, but by the time I knew her, she was partnered up with one of the nicest and most attractive men I know. This caused some people in certain quarters to say nasty things about her behind her back, which was a source of considerable personal agitas for her. But that’s what I mean about the fundamentalism of the Left: We live in an era where gender fluidity is unacceptable; where even if you’re someone who falls in love with people and not their genitals, you’re required to catalog yourself as “bisexual.”

One foggy morning, I had some errands in Santa Cruz and dropped by Katy’s house for coffee. I found her close to tears.

“It’s Eliza X!” she told me. “She’s so impossible! I gave her On Our Backs when I stopped editing it, but I don’t actually think she believes in sex positivity –“

“Well, of course, she doesn’t,” I said cozily. “That’s how young female writers accelerate from zero to 60 in 15 minutes of fame! First they write about sex. They attract an audience! Then they write about other things.”

Katy shook her hair out of her face, made a sad mouth. “But that’s so sad,” she said.

Katy truly believes in sex positivity.

It’s her life work.

The Story of Amaryllis Z

When I first met Amaryllis Z in real life, Amaryllis was working as a stripper in San Francisco.

A Well pal was in the Bay Area for a conference, and this pal put together a San Francisco nighttime tour that began at the Tiki Room at the Fairmont and ended at the Mitchell Brothers Theater, which no less a personage than Hunter Thompson once called “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America.”

Of course, I’d known Amaryllis for ages online. She was (and is) a very brilliant writer. Since us writerly types do like to compare, for the record I will state that I think Amaryllis is a better writer than I am. And I have a high regard for my own writing abilities.

I’d never been to the Tiki Room before. I was captivated by it! The enormous drinks with the feathers and the paper parasols! The artificial rainstorm! It was like something out of the marine tide pool exhibit at the aquarium! I got very drunk.

The pal who’d put the expedition together was a real go-getter type. Her day job was professing marketing at a major university in the Southeast. While we drank pina coladas, she kept up a steady flow of prattle – value propositions, CTIs, CRMs – and this marketing babble helped normalize the situation. We were all pretending that it was a perfectly ordinary thing to do to go to a strip club and watch someone we knew gyrate naked upon a stage.

Only of course, it wasn’t.

Did I have a boyfriend along for the jaunt? I think I must have, and I think that boyfriend must have been Matt.

Anyway, we got to the theater, ordered more drinks, and then it was time for Amaryllis to come on stage.

###

When it comes to men, I don’t have a physical type; but when it comes to women, I definitely do. And Amaryllis was that type. Petite. A little bit plump – the softest swell of belly beneath high breasts with apple blossom nipples. Hard-edge packaging: fake eyelashes, heavy eyeliner, lipliner-defined pout.

One look at Amaryllis on that stage, and I was a goner.

This was how I imagined adolescent boys must feel. This was lust. Unalloyed, undiluted desire. Kind of an… embarrassing sensation. Shameful, even. Because how would I with all my imperfections ever get someone as hot as Amaryllis to go to bed with me? How would I even get her to talk to me? It was beyond imagining! And if I ever did manage to get her naked in a bed, it would be the most awkward of fumblings. She’d lay there like Jane Fonda in Klute, roll her eyes, sneak a peak at her watch if she happened to be wearing one, while I kept dolphining, trying to find the magic button.

Best never to try.

There was that dimorphism thing going on, too. That must be something that men feel all the time, right? I’m so… big. She’s so… small.

The feeling was just so uncomfortable. There was no emotional dimension to it! It was all about the fantasy of the physical experience. The very graphic fantasy of the physical experience.

I didn’t like the feeling at all.

Looking back on it, it’s certainly very odd that the women I was most strongly attracted to on a purely physical level all made me feel so… male.

###

The Well pal thought it would be fun to commission a Amaryllis lap dance while we all watched.

I can’t remember anything about the lap dance except thinking I wanted to commission one too! And that wanting felt terribly degrading.

It’s interesting that it never occurred to me that Amaryllis was the one who might feel degraded. Amaryllis was in the total power position, it seemed to me!

What a stupid person I could be back then.

###

Several years later, People Magazine Online, for whom I was then working, wanted to do some sort of Hot Girls of the Internet feature, and I immediately thought of Amaryllis. Who as it turned out was now living in New York. So it was very easy to arrange a get-together.

I was then in my 40s; Amaryllis was in her 20s. Boomers and Gen-Xers have a genuine antipathy toward one another; I’m not entirely sure why. Possibly because Boomers pretend to be so enthusiastic about everything, and Gen-Xers pretend to be so world-weary and ironic. It’s that post-modernism thing.

Anyway, that generational disconjunct combined with the physical attraction I still felt strongly – even though I was getting laid regularly and happily now, having married B – meant that conversation between us was stilted. I felt as though I bored her. Amaryllis was in New York hustling her writing – successfully, as it turned out: Tina Brown’s new Miramax-funded publishing picked up her stripping memoir. I felt as though she’d consented to spend the afternoon with me because she thought I might be instrumental to her career, and if that was the case, she was right! I talked her up to my editor at Entertainment Weekly. She began writing regularly for EW.

I was happy to do that. As I say, she’s a phenomenally talented writer.

She agreed to be a Hot Internet Girl, and I used part of my People budget to buy her a fabulous dress to wear to the Hot Internet Girl party we gave to launch the feature. The dress was expensive! Four hundred dollars in the 1990s; close to $700 today.

I’ve never owned a dress that expensive myself. I felt like a sugar daddy buying it for her.

###

In the first year after it was published, Amaryllis’s stripper memoir generated a fair amount of positive attention. But it did not set the world on fire. And the following year, some other beautiful young woman published a controversial memoir.

Shortly after that, Amaryllis got married. To someone surprising. The marriage was a happy one and continues to this day.

The person Amaryllis married was singularly qualified to offer Amaryllis protection. In retrospect, it strikes me as odd that as perceptive as I can sometimes be, I never picked up that protection was what Amaryllis wanted after all, but of course, I didn’t know her really: I knew her shell.

She lives two Metro North stops south of me. She doesn’t look the same; she’s a matron now. And she’s found religion.

She’s still an exceedingly good writer.

The Story of Eliza X

I cannot remember whether the afternoon we spent together at the Beverly Plaza took place before or after Eliza X published her sex memoir.

I do remember that Eliza X’s sex memoir was a bit of a disappointment because there was lots of buildup but when it came right down to it, no juicy revelations.

The book didn’t do well.

I think that came as quite a blow to Eliza. She was a golden girl, used to getting attention and approval without having to court it at all.

It turned out that the Big Sexual Adventure Eliza wrote about was with someone with whom I'd also had a sexual relationship, so I found myself literally rolling my eyes over vast portions of her book. He told you that? And you fell for it? Oh, come on, Eliza. Et-cetera. (I guess in some ways, the Well was like Bloomsbury!)

Her husband is another one of the most attractive and nicest men I know, and their marriage is very happy.

I have no idea why I would have dreamed about her: I haven’t thought of her except as Eliza-Who’s-Married-to-Alex in years.

Sunday night is a biiiiiig TV night. Thus, I was up until the wee hours of the morning. Watching Reza use Liquid Ass on the gang! Catching up with the adventures of Jon Snow, Cersai, and Tyrion. Wondering whether Eli will ever snag another political consulting job since he’s failed so miserably in keeping Peter from being indicted.

After that, it seemed very important that I watch Ghost World for the 40th time.

It dawned on me that video on demand is actually the fourth major technological revolution of my lifetime.

###

The first three major technological revolutions of my lifetime were (in chronological order) computers, the Internet, and smart phones.

###

Rik was the first person I knew with a computer. He won it at an Apple trade show. When would this have been? I have no idea, actually: My memories aren’t anchored to a timeline.

But by 1987, I would have owned one, too. I would have needed it for grad school.

Computers, in those days, weren’t for communicating. They were strictly word processors or data compilers. They were very clunky and slow. And there was a Holy War going on between Microsoft (the Catholic Church) and Apple (the Gnostics.) I came down on the side of the Gnostics. It had nothing to do with design and usability – two concepts, which to this very day, more-or-less sail right over my head. It would have had to do with the fact that Rik had an Apple.

###

In graduate school, I amused myself by doing things like inventing the Marginal Futility Function, counterpoint to the Marginal Utility Function, which is the utility a consumer gains or loses by increasing or decreasing the consumption of a good or service. The basic unit of microeconomics. Economics is an exceedingly dry subject.

Somewhere toward my third year, pounding away on my Mac Plus keyboard at a paper on water regulation, I thought to myself: I’m sick of talking to my computer! I want my computer to talk back.

And this turned out to be well within the realm of possibility.

I’d read about this… thing… that let you talk to other people using your computer. Well. Write to other people, anyway. Kind of like typing a letter, putting it in a bottle, throwing the bottle into the ocean, and waiting a couple of hours for the bottle to wash back up with a letter inside it from someone else.

This thing was called the Well.

I joined the Well, and thus became what they now call An Early Internet Adopter.

The Well exerted a disproportionate amount of influence considering its tiny, tiny size. Chiefly because journalists then, like journalists now, greatly prefer sitting in their bedrooms, guzzling Diet Coke, eating Cheezits, and reading about stuff to actually going out and doing investigative legwork.

I became moderately famous on the Well due to my propensity for hilarious quips and blood feuds.

As I became moderately famous, I, too, began to exert a disproportionate amount of influence! I’m in books! Thankfully, they're out of print. But the best thing about being famous on the Well was that it attracted the interest of Time Inc., leading to a job at People Magazine. I became People’s Interactive Entertainment Editor, which meant I got to sit in my bedroom, guzzling Diet Coke, eating Cheezits, and interviewing Real Live Celebrities on the phone! Best job evah!

Well.

Twice a month I had to show up in New York, and more often than that, I had to be in Los Angeles where I had to interview Real Live Celebrities in person and go to functions like the Oscars. Believe it or not, this was actually boring and depressing. The Oscars are not the fun fest the television cameras would have you believe, and Real Live Celebrities quite often look and behave like ferrets.

###

Though I was an Early Internet Adopter, I came late to smartphones.

I can remember tromping around downtown San Francisco in the early oughts and wondering about the epidemic of schizophrenia that seemed to be hitting well-dressed young professionals in their mid-20s to mid-30s. They all seemed to be rushing around the city talking to themselves.

Took me a while to understand they were actually talking on tiny phones.

I had an enormous clunky portable phone that I hardly ever used.

I’d gotten it because I was away from home so much, and I needed it to keep communication lines open with the family in case something went wrong.

Eventually, I got portable phones for the kids, too.

One day, Max and RTT ambushed me. “We hate these phones! We want iPhones!”

I resisted. For a couple of hours.

I was shocked/shocked/shocked by how much I loved my iPhone! Chiefly for its camera and texting functions. Texting on an iPhone took me right back to my haydays on the Well when I would write screens and screens of the most brilliant, ephemeral elucidations!

It still shocks me, though, to walk down a street and see that no one is paying any attention at all to the world around them. They’re all scowling and focusing on that tiny, tiny screen in front of them. Like that wonderful scene in the movie Her when Theodore walks into a crowd of people, just emerging from a subway, each immersed in the phantom world their personalized operating system has crafted for them.

Though, of course, I’m one of those people who makes eye contact on the subway.

###

I’ve been torrenting for years – information wants to be fr-e-e-e-e-e! – but it was only a year ago that I signed up for Netflix and Hulu.

###

Nielsen says the average American consumes 3.5 hours of entertainment programming every day, but I’m quite sure the actual number is higher than that. Nielsen’s representative sampling includes cats, right? And dead people.

I have no idea how much entertainment programming I consume in the course of any given day, but the figure is quite high. I know more about Reza and the unresolved issues that drive him to use Liquid Ass than I do about just about any human being in my – ha, ha, ha! – real life. And Jon Snow’s journey reveals itself to me with the Technicolor clarity of Stations of the Cross.

I think I should feel bad about this.

But actually, I don’t.

If it makes me happy to be a voyeur spying on the intimate lives of imaginary people, who's to judge?

And who’s to say that Reza or Jon Snow aren’t more "real" than four-fifths of the “people” on my Facebook “friends” list?

Only George “1984” Orwell and Aldous “Brave New World” Huxley?

They got it wrong.

The real future is the future of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops.

The Meezer went on an extended walkabout yesterday, leaving the house at 8 a.m., returning precisely at 8 p.m.

I watched her stalking some invisible creature through the dead leaves when she first took off, as graceful and predatory as ever. It was raining but very, very warm – close to 70.

This was the first time she’d been out of the house for more than half an hour in many months, so after an hour or so went by and she didn’t return, I freaked, imagining the nearby coyotes in bibs, waving forks, over a delicious snack of Meezer tartare. I really am turning into a demented Cat Lady. I spent many hours in the adjacent woods searching for her small, furry, mangled body.

But at 15, she is apparently as lithe as ever. Age really hasn’t slowed her down in the least though I keep thinking it must. Projection, I suppose.

I also rejoined the Well because they were having a one-day special for its 30th anniversary.

The Well is exactly the same.

The Well made me extremely miserable once upon a time, so I’m not at all sure why I rejoined except it does seem to be the one tribe I was ever a member of and a fair amount of my psychic DNA is entendrilled around that place that is not a place.

I mean – it’s not exactly the same because we’re all so much older now. But there are no visual cues on the Well so I can imagine everyone still in their late 30s.

A million things on my To Do list today, but I seem to be fixated on chasing down why Scott Fitzgerald hated his mother so much, I mean given the fact that he was so in thrall to the feminine principle. Or was that a reaction formation as Ernest Hemingway sneeringly implied?

Also upgraded to Sims 4. Very, very different from Sims 3. I’m thinking of making a little Sims Scott and Zelda to see what career paths they choose.

The Number 1 Son is something of a chef. If Stanford doesn't work out, he intends to run away to New York with his knives and snag a job as a line cook at some expensive restaurant.

"Culinary school is a scam," he tells me.

At Deep Springs he was a butcher and a baker. They don't make their own candles or he would have been a nursery rhyme too.

Anyway he has a good palate so last night we took him out to a farewell dinner at Fresh Cream, the only Zagat-rated restaurant in Monterey County.

He won't be 21 for another five months so we avoided the wine list.

I had an heirloom tomato caprise, veal medallions done in a cabernet reduction and for desert a crème brûlée (because I always eat crème brûlée – really, I should buy myself a blowtorch and make it at home. It's not that hard.)

Ben had a Caesar salad and a salmon dish.

Max had the lobster bisque, a seared tuna sashimi and a Grande Marnier soufflé.

Except for the lobster bisque, I wasn't all that impressed. In fact, I thought the cabernet reduction was a rather heavy sauce for a veal dish and immediately began to make the recipe over in my mind – really you want to make the sauce out of something like a white burgundy, hearty but not overwhelming.

During the meal I caught glimpses of the grown-up Max as he will be in another ten years, and it made me proud and it made me sad. It all goes so quickly, doesn't it? So quickly.
###
All of what I'm about to recount is a lie.

So. The Well.

In this age of Facebook, MySpace, Slashdot et al it is hard to describe how unique the Well was once. But my discovery of it twenty years ago ranks right up there with other experiences that unlocked new worlds for me.

Dropping acid: all perceptual lenses focusing simultaneously.

Giving birth: pain, like a trip to the dark side of the moon where all personality was stripped away; reemergence into full spectrum sunlight with a new companion soul at my side.

Logging on to the Well: an invisible tribe filled with people whose psychological profiles I knew as intimately as though we were connected by a telepathic thread but whom I wouldn't recognize if I passed them on the street. Shades of John Wyndham's Rebirth!

Of course, timing is everything. Had I not had such a powerful need to reinvent myself when I first discovered the Well, it might not have exerted such a pull. I had just divorced my first husband; I was in my last year of graduate school. I had a lot of friends but they knew me too well. I wanted to seduce strangers. And I wanted to do it through writing.

There were some discordant notes, of course.

A few months after I joined, the Well held a party at the Hotel Utah. I put on my red high heels and went. It was like the most boring, awkward college party you can possibly imagine. Everyone was standing around hugging themselves, peering surreptitiously at the other people. Nobody actually talked. And then the next day, there were all these new postings about what a fabulous party it had been and boy, don't you wish you'd been there.

Huh, I thought. Huh.

Of course it could also just as easily be that I only saw what I wanted to see. That my old persona – Perpetual Stranger At the Party – had caught up with me again.

And actually it's not true that I talked to no one.

I talked to one guy. A week later, we were lovers. We had absolutely nothing in common beyond a certain acerbic playfulness with words but the Well provided a kind of matrix and context that I imagine is something like being an actor on a movie set.

I fucked lots of Well notables those first few years.

Which made it all the more striking that when I finally met Tom Mandel, I did not fuck him.

The Well's infrastructure has been imitated by enough content-associated bulletin boards in the years since to be very familiar. There are broad Areas of Interest – on the Well they're called "conferences" – subdivided into topics. My favorite conference was something called "Weird" where the writing was all edgy and freeform, like a pen of stand-up comics trying out new material for one another. It was as close as words could get to being jazz. You riffed, you picked up other people's instruments. You wore porkpie hats.

Weird inevitably was a place that new users gravitated towards. For one thing the Old Timers might actually notice you there. The Well has always been characterized by a deeply entrenched Old Guard with rather stuffy ideas of what makes interesting and acceptable content. In cyberspace, you might think it would be valuable and worthwhile to engage with people whose ideas are the very opposite of your own. After all, it's a safe forum. And simply millions of people in real life don't agree with you about much! Doesn't it behoove you – if nothing else then as an intellectual exercise – to try to understand them? But that's not the way it worked on the Well. You couldn't actually join the conversation until you'd generated some Well cred of your own and interacting in Weird was the fastest way of doing that.

Once they had enough Well cred, most users left Weird. But a few stayed on.

Two of those were Tom and me.

We played. Oh, how we played! The fabulous, perpetual Blowjob Machine! The Yak! (I still think Will Wright modeled the llama after the Yak.) The Scrotal Status Reports! The petitions, the injunctions, the pissing contests, the cheers.

There was a dark side too as related in Katie Hafner's book which is mostly about Tom.

Anyway we became confidantes via sends and phone long before we met.

Tom was always unrequitedly in love with some belle dame sans merci or another. For a while he started hinting broadly that woman could be me. But knew this would never work – I didn't exist in a starlit realm distantly revolving far above his own; I was too accessible. And Tom was pretty nasty to women who were accessible to him.

So when we finally met, I fed him the "Gee, we'd be better off as friends" line.

And it took.
###
TBC if I ever have the time. Now I gotta scuttle to do the Stanford convoy thang with a van full of Max possessions.