I got to thinking of my cramped, love-starved, sensationless existence at Microsoft—and I got so pissed off. And now I just want to forget the whole business and get on with living—with being alive. I want to forget the way my body was ignored, year in, year out, in the pursuit of code, in the pursuit of somebody else’s abstraction.

There’s something about a monolithic tech culture like Microsoft that makes humans seriously rethink fundamental aspects of the relationship between their brains and bodies—their souls and their ambitions; things and thoughts.

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.

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 assume it’ll appear like rain.”

While decoding Ethan’s existence we were removing stray grass seeds from each other’s Clockwork Orange thug costumes. I said, “There’s something about Ethan that’s not quite oxymoronic, yet still self-contradictory—like an 18-wheeler with Neutrogena written on the side—I can’t explain it. The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic—geeky and rich and hip. I’m undecided if I even like Ethan—he’s definitely not one of us. He’s a different archetype.”

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 used to date an installation artist from UC Santa Cruz,” is all Ethan says about his art.

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 with Ethan. She says it’s corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I’ll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.

Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into “Marvins” and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

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 trade convention.

“If they changed it to POSTINDUSTRIAL city, it might be meaningful,” said Karla.

Oh—we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don’t mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He’s a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He’s a real turtlenecker—one of those French guys who’d be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.

Fast food for thought: Do you know that if you feed catfish (America’s fauorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-ouer grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flauor (marine or otherwise) of their own? Thus they beocome whatever coating you apply to them (i.e. Cajun, xesty Cheddar, tangy ranch) They’re the most postmodern creatiures on earth … metaphores for characters on Merlrose Place … or for coders with NO LIFE.

“You mean you can turn your dreams off, just like that?” Susan asked. I said, “A little bit. A nightmare doesn’t count as sleep, so I don’t get any real rest. I wake up even more tired.”

Michael overheard this and said, “But that’s so inefficient!”

He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. “I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It’s more like I’m running ‘test scenarios’ in my head at night—like RAND Corporation military simulations.”

Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping.

I have noticed that on TV, all of these “moments” are sponsored by corporations, as in, “This touchdown was brought to you by the brewers of Bud Lite,” or “This nostalgia flashback was brought to you by the proud makers of Kraft’s family of fine foods.”

I told Karla, “I’m no sci-fi buff, but doesn’t this seem like a dangerous way to be messing with the structure of time—allowing the corporate realm to invade the private?

Karla told me about how the city of Atlanta was tampering with the idea of naming streets after corporations in return for paying for the maintenance of infrastructure: “Folgers Avenue; Royal Jordanian Airlines Boulevard; Tru-Valu Road.”

“Well,” I said, “streets have to get names somehow. The surnames Smith, Brown, and Johnson probably looked pretty weird when they first started, too.”

Karla said, “I think that in the future, clocks won’t say three o’clock anymore. They’ll just get right to the point and call three o’clock, ‘Pepsi.’”