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On the mountain coming in from the airport they have what has to be the world’s ugliest sign saying, SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY, in huge white letters up on the mountainside. You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a tr…

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that’s the surest way to tell which company to invest in. “If the techies aren’t grinding, the stock ain’t climbing.”

Karla doesn’t like my being friends wi…

We went in the house to warm up. Ethan’s living room is painted entirely in white enamel, and lining the ceiling’s perimeter are a hundred or so 1970s Dirty Harry bank surveillance cameras whirring and rotating, all linked to a wall of blue-and-white, almost-dead TV sets. A surveillance fantasy. “I…

Sitting next to a burning Tiki torch spiked into the ground, beneath an orange tree, Karla said to me, “You know, Ethan’s been a millionaire and filed for Chapter Eleven three times already—and he’s only 33. And there are hundreds of these guys down here. They’re immune to money. They just sort of …

She said, “You guys really like each other, don’t you?”

And I said—no, I whispered—“I love her.”

I’ve never told anyone that yet—except Karla. It felt like I jumped off a steep cliff into deep blue water. And then I wanted to tell everybody.