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Oh God.

I knew I'd do something. Karla's on the warpath because I forgot our one-month anniversary. Doh! She gave me until bedtime tonight to remember, but I still forgot, so now she's not speaking to me. I tried to tell her that time isn't necessarily linear, that it flows in odd clumps and bundles and clots. "Well, err, um - what exactly is a month, Karla? Ha ha ha."

"I don't know about you, Dan," she interrupted, "but I programmed my desktop calendar to remind me. Good night." [Insert one frosty glare here. A bored yawn; a bedroom door nudged closed with little baby toes.]

It's nice to see this romantic side to Karla's personality - an unexpected bonus - but still, nobody likes THE COUCH. And so now after weeks of blissful insomnia-free sleep, I'm yet again PowerBooking my daily diaries here on the acid green couch in a big big way.

Comely superstar Cher hawks cosmetics on late-nite TV. Mishka is also spending tonight in the living room and she is making foul smells indeed. At least it's raining out - buckets - and the weird too-hot summer is over.

Tomorrow I will program my desktop computer to remind me of every one of our anniversaries, monthly or otherwise, until the year 2050.

Actually, we all have so much free time now. Karla, Todd, Bug, and I sit around awaiting our next product group assignment, feeling deflated and just plain exhausted. We forget about clock- and calendar-type time completely.

Today, while raking the front lawn, Todd said, "Wouldn't it be scary if our internal clocks weren't set to the rhythms of waves and sunrise - or even the industrial whistle toot - but to product cycles, instead?"

We got nostalgic about the old days, back when September meant the unveiling of new car models and TV shows. Now, carmakers and TV people put them out whenever. Not the same.

Yes, Karla moved in a month ago. We're an item.

Todd, Abe, and I lugged her "ownables" from her geek house down the street up to our own geek house at the top of the cul-de-sac: futon and frame . . . cluster o' computers . . . U-Frame-It Ansel Adams print. . . and dumped it all into Michael's empty room. And then, once she installed herself in our house ("Think of me as a software application ") she announced that she was an expert in (thank you, Lord . . .) shiatsu massage!

Mom phoned this afternoon. Out of the proverbial blue she said to me, "The house! The soil up in the hills is settling and the roof's rotting. The door and windows need replacing. I just stand here and feel the money being sucked out of my body. At least we had the foresight to buy it when we did. But all my librarian's salary goes into the house. The rest goes to Price-Costco."

Money.

I changed the subject. "What did you have for dinner?"

"Those pre-formed pork by-product patties. And ramen noodles. Like the food you kids eat when you do your coding all-nighters."

It was a "Listening-Only" call.

"I know, Mom. How's Dad doing?"

"Prozac. Well . . . something like Prozac. At least he doesn't obsess on the garage anymore. He goes out in the morning I-don't-know-where looking for work. Let's not get into it. God, I wish I drank."

Life is stressful in Palo Alto. I send Dad $500 every month. It's all I can spare on the 26K I make here ([$26,000 / 12] - taxes = $1,500).

It was a really bad phone call, but Mom just needed to vent - she has so few ears in her life who will listen. Who really ever does, I guess?

Michael never did return from Cupertino.

Rumor had it Bill had Michael secretly working on a project called Pink, but nothing ever came of the rumor.

A delivery firm specializing in high-tech moves carted Michael's things to Silicon Valley. His pyramid of empty diet Coke cans - his suitcase-worth of Habitrail gerbil mazes - his collection of C. S. Lewis novels. Gone.

Fun fact: We found about 40 empty cough syrup bottles in the cupboard - Michael is a Robitussin addict! (Actually, he bulk-buys knockoff house brands-he's a "PayLess Tussin" addict.) The world never ceases to amaze.

It’s late at night. Basketball on TV; computer and fitness mags everywhere. Let me talk about love.

Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart! You remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everybody keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.

Let me try again. I'm not good at this.

Karla and I fell in love somewhere out there - I think that's the way it happens - out there. The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.

Karla and I would talk about computing and coding. Our minds met out in the crystal lattice galaxy of ideas and codes and when we came out of our reverie, we realized we were in a special place - out there.

And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them, "Will you take my heart - stains and all?" and they say, "I will," and they ask you the same question, and you say, "I will," too.

There are other reasons Karla's lovable, too, reasons not so poetic, but just as real. She's like a friend to me, and we have all of these common interests - "mind meld" - whatever. I can discuss computers and Microsoft and that part of our lives - but we also have esoteric conversations that have nothing to do with tech life. I've never really had a friend this close before.

And there's the nonlinear stuff: Karla's intuitive and I'm not, yet she's still on my frequency. She understands why yaki soba noodles in a plastic UFO-shaped container from Japan are intrinsically glorious. She scrunches up her forehead when she knows she's not explaining an idea as clearly as she knows she can, and she gets frustrated.

Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

As I type this in, I feel small arms around my neck and a kiss on my jugular and I don't know, but I think I may be forgiven. I hope so because my forgetting the anniversary thing was an honest mistake. I'm new at this love thing.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Cedars Sinai

starburst explosion

Gak

UNDO

Ctrl Z

CtrI Z

CtrI Z

Phoenix

Cleveland

Luis Vuitton

Kalashnikov

Waxahachie

LA Lakers

San Antonio

bubble economy

Creamsicles

Livermore

the place for ribs

Taylor Sequences

frog

Bleeding eyeliner

Colossal

Todd's obsessing on his body big-time these days. This afternoon he came in late from the gym and sat on the living room Orion carpet flexing his arm and staring at his muscles as they bulged - buff and bored. His biggest project at the moment is making pyramids out of his empty tubs of protein supplements with their gold labels that resemble van art from the 1970s. Why do nerds make pyramids out of everything? Imagine Egypt!

The Cablevision was out for some reason, and Todd was just lying there, flexing his arms on the floor in front of the snowy screen. He said to me, "There has to be more to existence than this. 'Dominating as many broad areas of automated consumerism as possible' - that doesn't seem to cut it anymore." Todd?

This speech was utterly unlike him - thinking about life beyond his triceps or his Supra. Maybe, like his parents, he has a deep-seated need to believe in something, anything. For now it's his bod . . . I think.

He said, "What we do at Microsoft is just as repetitive and dreary as any other job, and the pay's the same as any other job if you're not in the stock loop, so what's the deal . . . why do we get so into it? What's the engine that pulls us through the repetition? Don't you ever feel like a cog, Dan? . . . wait - the term 'cog' is outdated - a cross-platform highly transportable binary object!"

I said, "Well, Todd, work isn't, and was never meant to be a person's whole life."

"Yeah, I know that, but aside from the geek-badge-of-honor stuff about doing cool products first and shipping them on time and money, what else is there?"

I thought about this. "So what is it you're really asking me?"

"Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity? Microsoft is no Bosnia."

Religious upbringing.

Karla came into the room at this point. She turned off the TV set and looked at Todd square in the eyes and said, "Todd: you exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species - you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthly paradise - the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear."

She sat down on the couch, and there was rain drumming on the roof, and I realized that there weren't enough lights on in the room and we were all quiet.

Karla said, "We all had good lives. None of us were ever victimized as far as I know. We have never wanted for anything, nor have we ever lusted for anything. Our parents are all together, except for Susan's. We've been dealt good hands, but the real morality here, Todd, is whether these good hands are squandered on uncreative lives, or whether these hands are applied to continuing humanity's dream."

The rain continued.

"It's no coincidence that as a species we invented the middle classes. Without the middle classes, we couldn't have had the special type of mindset that consistently spits out computational systems, and our species could never have made it to the next level, whatever that level's going to be. Chances are, the middle classes aren't even a part of the next level. But that's neither here nor there. Whether you like it or not, Todd, you, me, Dan, Abe, Bug, and Susan - we're all of us the fabricators of the human dream's next REM cycle. We are building the center from which all else will be held. Don't question it, Todd, and don't dwell on it, but never ever let yourself forget it."

Karla looked at me. "Dan, let's go out and get a Grand Slam Breakfast. I have $1.99 and it's burning a hole in my pocket."

Susan taped the following clipping from the Wall Street Journal to her door (which won't be hers much longer - she's moving soon): Sept. 3, 1993, a littie while ago. The clipping was about the Japanese rainy season that started this year in June, and never ended:

A typhoon flooded the moats of Japan's imperial palace in downtown Tokyo. Imperial carp fled their home for the first time and flopped in knee-deep waters covering one of Japan's busiest intersections.

Susan's "totally right-lobe" now.

I tried to find her and ask her what she meant with the article, but she was out on Capitol Hill getting pixelated with her no-doubt right-lobed grunge buddies.

Susan quit the day after she vested and began "running with the wolves" - or so she announced to all of us the morning after her Vest Fest. She unveiled her new image as we were sitting in front of our Mitsubishi home entertainment totem, eating our last few boxes of Kellogg's Snak-Paks with plastic spoons, deconstructing old Samson and Goliath cartoons, and trying to figure out how/if to wake up my Dad, who was still passed out on Michael's bed.

Susan's previous image - Patagonia-wearing Northwest good girl - had been shed away for a radicalized look: bent shades, striped Fortrel too-tight top, Angela Bowie hairdo, dirty suede vest, flares, and Adidases.

"Wow," said Bug. "What a stud."

She stormed past us, stopped at the top of the stairs, said, ''Fuck it. I'm tired of being Mary Richards. I'm off to hold up a 7-Eleven," and then clomped down to the driveway.

I think she expected us to be a bit shocked, but you know, it's actually really great when a person reinvents themself. We finished our Froot Loops and soy milk.

Todd came up to me later tonight and said, "Dan, I wouldn't fuck around so much if I could meet somebody like Karla." This freaked me out and I got this awful feeling that I think is jealousy, but I can't be sure, because it was a new feeling, and nobody ever tells you what feelings are supposed to be like. But Todd saw this and said, "That's not what I meant, Dan. I'm not gonna jump her. Gimme some credit. But man, where do you find someone like her?"

"Yeah, she's something else," I said blandly, masking my interior burn.

"She's so smart, but not just coding-smart. She thinks like a preacher, but not a by-the-books preacher. She believes in something."

Watched an old documentary about NASA. Then afterward I saw this documentary about how codfish have been gill-netted into extinction in Newfoundland in Canada, so I went out to Burger King to get a Whaler fish-wich-type breaded deep-fried filet sandwich while there was still time.