Nobody knows you when you are down and out...

This is true, but some kind people always show up in this world, sensing your pain, and try to find a way to help. That is worth paying attention to.

Those who are on top of their game have a different problem. Everybody knows (and loves) you when you are succeeding.

As fate would have it, I've lived a life of many ups and many downs. At this point, being a pattern recognizer, I notice who is my friend in the bad times and who is there for me only when conditions are good.

Please do not read any judgment here. I am no different from anyone else. If someone is sinking, I'm not sure whether I should get in his or her way to the bottom. It feels like as burden I just don't need. When a friend is soaring to the top, I feel good for them, and am happy if we can somehow share that experience.

One lesson about emotional life that somehow eluded me for 50 years is that our emotions quite naturally cycle up and down all the time. My then-girlfriend taught me that lesson in a conversation in the parking lot on Pass Road one night in January. I always turned to her with my most naive and embarrassing emotional questions, because I knew she would tell me the truth. Just as a teacher would tell a child what they needed to learn.

I only wish I had found out these kinds of things when I was young, rather than the lessons I learned as described in recent posts about my childhood.

Luckily these days I am on top of my game, earning plenty of money, deeply engaged intellectually with the ideas that interest me, with many caring friends and a great family life, though I also am nursing a badly fractured heart.

But, from here, I am not worrying about me. I'm observing all the pain around me, on the street, in the form of people cast aside as casually as the wrappers from candies from the corner store. I look into the eyes of every person I pass on the street. Trust me, as the singer tells it, "Nobody knows you when you are down and out." And, nobody loves you if she fears you are headed there...

Many others, however, love you as you once again ascend in material terms. Both experiences, in my experience, suck big-time.

Warm Saturday Nights

It is 66 degrees here, says My Yahoo, and "feels like 66." I don't think My Yahoo is sticking near me in the Mission, however, which makes me question whether he is really My My Yahoo, you know what I mean? I'd say it "feels like 88" here right now; the air is still, the fans are twirling, my ice water clinks in its glass, and outside, the girls all look so fine.

I'm listening to The Breeders, but remembering The Cranberries' "You're So Pretty," which reminds me of the Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?" How's that for free association? What I just heard on the radio driving back through town from dropping off a friend was "You'll Remember Me," by I'm not sure who...

Down in Biloxi, My Yahoo reports it is 88 but "feels like 99." My theory about My Yahoo is he measures emotional temperature, not the mercury level. That, in fact, he is personalized to the extent he can gauge our emotional temperatures -- part of an undercover intelligence dev effort by Yahoo to find the ultimate killer app. Thus I keep my eye on him and will report to you, dear reader, what I find out over time.

One way I could interpret this data is while I feel about 66 degrees emotionally in San Francisco tonight, were I with a certain someone down south, I'd feel more like 99 degrees emotionally. We did tend to have some hot times in Mississippi and Alabama when we got together down there. This summer was supposed to be another of our times, but she has nixxed that idea, recently floated by yours truly.

I don't give up easily, do I? Neither does My Yahoo, that's why I keep my eye on him, wherever he may be and whatever it is he is indeed up to.

The still of the night

Sometimes it still comes over me, this confusing feeling of being connected when I know I am not connected with the one who is so very far away from me. I don't know why this happens when it does, but my intuition seems to be calling these shots, not any rational part of my brain. Tonight is one of those times.

I am in a good mood after another family basketball party with our neighbor friends. Plus the Giants just won the first game of the second half of the season. I found a bunch of beautiful and rare pieces of seaglass (red, yellow and orange), which I photographed and posted on my site Seaglass.

I also did a little photo essay about an old mill she and I visited last summer and how that connects with a discarded bag I spotted yesterday in my neighborhood as well as Dylan's preoccupation with pigeons in a three-part series for my other photo site Sidewalk Images.

Now it's time to write here about what I am thinking and feeling tonight. As my colleagues at work know, I love websites that let me personalize a home page. (I think I'm a closet designer at heart.) At My Yahoo, I keep lots of information, about stocks, sports, news, weather. One of my weather nodes is Biloxi.

I checked it late this afternoon and it was hot -- "feels like 96" -- reported My Yahoo. I just checked it again now, and though the thermometer has fallen to 84, it "feels like 92." It's a silly thing, I know, but it makes me feel closer to her to read those weather reports, knowing how much she loves the heat, as the southern California girl she always will be.

At times like these, I wish I was so powerful I could send my thoughts and feelings up into the soft breeze that is now sweeping over San Francisco this evening. It is a lovely night here, warm and dark. Outside for a while, I felt fine in my short sleeved shirt. I wish I could puff up my cheeks and blow that soft breeze all the way from here to Biloxi, from my house to her little room on the balcony of the church on Pass Road where she sleeps.

If I had that much power, the breeze would reach her tonight, and sweep away any concerns she might have. It would caress her sleeping body, comforting her, wrapping her with the spirits of our ancestors, who watch us and keep us safe from danger.

By now this post is probably sounding like recidivism. David, didn't you break up with her a week ago, let her go, and move on? Didn't you withdraw your proposal?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

But if I am to speak my honest feelings, there continues to be a deep reservoir of loyalty and love inside my heart for this woman now so lost from me; this person who danced away, never to return to me. I cannot stop caring for her, remembering all the things she did that were so special to me, for me, and with me, and how much I valued every single moment I got to spend with her.

I always knew, on some level, it could not last. It's hard to make the good things last. My sense of how fragile our relationship was meant I never took her for granted, even on the few occasions she thought I did. She was never far from my mind or my heart, and there never was room for another as long as she rocked my universe.

I'm not sure why, on this night, my instincts are triggered that somehow it is a night I should send her a love letter. I cannot do it openly any longer; it is no longer appropriate, and the few times I tried after she left she truly got angry with me. So I won't make that mistake again.

But I can do this. I can say that the other day, when the kids and I lost an orange balloon, I kept watching long after they forgot about it as it drifted ever higher on its voyage to the east. I wished on that balloon. I wished it would travel on the jetstream all the way to southern Mississippi and land softly on a peppercorn-colored Mini parked in a church lot on Pass Road.

Just land there and sit there quietly in the still of the southern night, and greet her in the morning, when another day beckons to her. How magic would it be to find an orange balloon on your car one morning?

I can't do any of the things I used to do for her. I cannot touch her in my special ways or bring her small surprises. I cannot do anything at all, except wish that the laws of physics would make the impossible happen, by reaching across from where, according to My Yahoo, it "feels like 57" to where she dreams her unknown dreams and remembers what she wishes to remember and feels whatever she feels, all mysteries to me, but it "feels like 92."

This song still is for you, only for you, baby.

Every generation pays a price

When my father was ten, his father died. They lived on a farm outside London, Ontario, and his father's death meant he and his mother had to sell the farm and move into town. Not long afterward, they immigrated to America, taking a ferry to Detroit. In those days, they were known as "nickel immigrants," because the one-way boat fare was five cents.

Growing up as his only son, I could always feel the lingering sense of loss my father felt for his own Dad. It sounded as though he never really got to know him, partly because of the dawn to dusk workload on the farm, and partly because was gravely ill for some time before he died.

I more or less ended up with custody of my father's dreams and fears. One of his desires was that I become a successful athlete. There were signs early on that this was not entirely fanciful -- I was coordinated and could run very fast. Baseball was our chosen sport.

He coached a team and wanted me to play on it and to be a star. I was an outfielder, with my speed I had good range and was learning how to track down fly balls hit all over the field. He was proud of me.

But then something happened. My energy started dissipating, I'd get out of breath easily and break out in a sweat. I kept trying to run but I stopped being able to reach fly balls that weren't hit straight at me. It was confusing.

My Dad somehow became convinced I had a character weakness, that I was "lazy." "You have got to have to want it really bad to become a good ballplayer. If you lag behind like you are doing, it won't happen."

Back at home, my mother noticed I was running a slight fever -- 99 degrees.

The next week at baseball practice it happened again. I couldn't run very fast or very far anymore. My father was getting pretty angry now, and threatened that if I wasn't going to keep up with the drills, he'd have to send me "home to your mother."

The following week I was no better, so home to my mother it was. I never again played baseball on a team until I was 30 years old. Mom was concerned that my fever never went away. Dad argued I was just using that as an excuse to be lazy. I didn't know who was right or what was happening.

We went to our family doctor, Dr. B. who ran all sorts of tests and finally concluded there was nothing wrong with me physically. "It's all in his head. It's psychological." He said this to my father with me sitting there.

After this, I had two years of very low energy and stamina. The other kids were out running around, while I tended to lie on the couch, reading. My father's disappointment in me was palpable.

The fever never left me. Two years after my baseball "career" crashed, I finally collapsed, and was taken to the hospital. I'd had rheumatic fever all that time; it had gone undiagnosed.

So I didn't lose my Dad around age ten, but on some emotional level, the sad truth is that he lost me.

We did our best to reconnect the rest of his years, and we both tried to be close, but this hole in my heart toward him was something I found difficult to heal. I didn't blame him, he wasn't a doctor, and he didn't know what those symptoms meant.

But I wish he's sought a second opinion. And that he didn't think I was lazy. The worst of it was living with the diagnosis that I was crazy. Dr B.'s words still ring in my ears, even now.

One legacy of this childhood experience is that I never quite seeem to know whether I'm sick or not, unless undeniable symptoms appear. Whereas other people say they have a cold or the flu, all I may know is that I don't feel very well -- but maybe it's all in my head.

History repeats itself

A little over a year ago, I was working at home one Friday morning, editing stories for the Stanford Social Innovation Review , when several calls came from an unfamiliar number (which turned out to be my kids' school) to my cell phone. I thought I was too busy to answer, so they went into voicemail.

Once I finished editing, I checked these messages, and immediately went into a panic. They told me that my then-nine-year-old son, Dylan, had collapsed during P.E. But they thought he was fine, now he had regained consciousness, but they wanted me to know what had happened.

It normally takes ten minutes to drive from here to there. From the moment I set down the phone that morning, until the moment I ran into the school, wide-eyed and screaming, "Where is my son?" no more than two minutes had passed.

I broke every traffic rule that exists, but no one got hurt in the process. Alarmed by my appearance, the first few people I encountered pointed me to his classroom, where I found Dylan, ashen-faced and lethargic, resting in a chair.

During my two-minute drive, I had placed an emergency call to his pediatrician, described what I had been told, and received her instructions to "drive him straight to an emergency room." I gathered him up in my arms, dismissed the protestations of his teachers, and raced across town to UCSF. On the way, I called ahead, and when we arrived, emergency physicians were ready for us. He immediately was examined by pediatric cardiologists; and then ensued a long afternoon of further tests and discussions.

It was determined that he might have a heart abnormality, and that if so, this could be a fatal condition, unless we could identify and treat it before something horrible happened. His mother came to UCSF and relieved me, staying with him that afternoon, while I went home and tried to keep working, though that proved impossible.

Many, many months later, after a series of cardiology tests, experts decided that there was nothing wrong with Dylan's heart; that in fact his collapse was probably due to dehydration. He is very fair-skinned, with curly red-hair and freckles, and these kinds of children often become dehydrated on hot days if they don't drink enough water.

But that Friday night I did not yet know any of this. All I knew was that my precious, beautiful son might have a terrible heart condition, and that his collapse earlier that day was an early warning of how at risk he was.

That night, in this emotionally exhausted state, my girlfriend showed up at my place. She had been working all day, on one of her design jobs. We had dinner and listened to some music and chatted, and then got into bed. She asked me if anything was wrong, and I broke into tears, telling her the whole story of what we had been through that day.

Do you want to know one of the reasons I love her so much and always will? She got very angry at me. "Why didn't you call me and tell me what was going on with Dylan?" Then, she wrapped her arms around me and held me as I cried, for a long time. "If anything should happen to him, I just would not ever be able to accept it."

"I know," she said. We stayed in that position for a long time, her holding me and me crying. As I allowed her comfort to come in, I started to believe that Dylan might ultimately be okay. Which has proved to be the case.

But if readers of this blog ever wonder why I persistently remain loyal to this wonderful woman long after she broke up with me, and told me to "move on," this story may help fill in some of the blanks.

There actually is much, much more. Because this incident resonated with other events involving my oldest son, Peter, and all the way back to my own childhood, in incidents too painful to recount here. (If you are wondering why my father's photo is here, it is because of what happened to me when I was Dylan's age, and how he reacted.)

Thank you, former girlfriend, for being here for me that night. I will never forget that.

My life as a movie star*

This by all rights should be a short post, since the only Hollywood film I acted (as an extra) in was Jack the Bear, and my scene ended up on the cutting room floor. The three oldest kids were extras on the same set, and they too ended up cut from the final except for one fleeting frame where we can see Peter from the back, wearing an old shirt of mine, and throwing a piece of bread toward Danny DeVito, who was pretending to a seal. (Don't ask.)

First, (*) since there are no truly original ideas left, I like to pay my intellectual debts whenever I consciously lift something from another writer or artist. In the case of any post that begins "My life as..." I believe I am channeling Lincoln Steffens, whose autobiography is one of several hundred books that seem to have lodged themselves into my brain, feeding me phrases now and then. He titled his chapters in this way; which made enough of an impression on me that I'm copying him here...

Back to my movie career. I spent a lot of time behind the scenes in Hollywood as a writer -- 0ff and on for over a decade. I wrote pitches, story summaries, screenplays. Sometimes I got paid, sometimes not. Some stuff got produced, some not.

IMDB has got my career all wrong. As far as I know, I only scored one screen credit throughout those years, and that was for shared story credit on Rollover, an IPC Films/Warner Brothers release starring Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson, that came out in the early '80s.

Rollover (1981)

My old friend and writing partner, Howard Kohn, and I researched and wrote a pre-script document that was essentially a narrative story line, which was then turned into the movie by director Alan Pakula and screenwriter David Shaber.

The most vivid memories I have from that project were our working sessions with Jane Fonda and her producer Bruce Gilbert. We'd fly down to Jane's ranch at Santa Barbara or Bruce's house in Beverly Hills or to one of the studio lots for day-long brainstorming sessions.

These sessions were usually about three weeks apart, as Jane was acting in another movie at the time. Every time we got together, I found it remarkable that she was able to pick up exactly where we had left off, as if the previous meeting had been yesterday, not three weeks ago, and as if nothing else had happened to her in between our working sessions.

She had an impressive ability to concentrate. Part of the plot involved a character I'd developed based loosely on Walter Wriston, the then-powerful Chairman of Citicorp. We had decided we needed to develop a better idea of the psychology inside large corporations, and Jane or Bruce had somehow located a psychologist who catered to such clients; so this one night they invited him to have dinner with us.

As he was drinking his first glass of wine, I asked him who his biggest client was, and he said, much to our surprise, "Confidentially -- Citicorp." Jane became so excited I could see she was about to interrupt him and spill our beans. But I kicked her (hard) under the table, getting her attention just in time to cut her off, and we proceeded to find out what we needed to know for this part of our movie.

As I recount that incident, I realize it wouldn't make a bad scene for a movie in itself, perhaps one about Ms. Fonda's life.

Rollover was hardly a box office sensation, but I still get royalties every quarter, usually enough to buy, say, a basic burrito from the place around the corner...

How to read this blog

Any new visitor would be forgiven for asking, when encountering this space for the first time, "What is going on here? Who is this guy and what is he trying to accomplish?"

I realize my posts are all over the place, covering a wide range of subjects. Some are long, some are short. Some are funny, some are sad. The majority make at least passing mention of a certain unidentified woman who broke up with me three months ago. So, many of the posts lament love lost. One of the highest-traffic days here was when I launched a "poll” asking readers for advice -- should I try to forget her and move on (as she has asked me to do), or listen to a deeper instinct and keep my heart open to her.

But writing about love, or love lost, is not my only preoccupation in this space. I also expend many words about children, parenting, friendship, sports, aging, death, divorce, journalism, memoir writing, digital technology, and a range of social and political issues. I make lots of references to books, music and art.

Which reminds me, as a followup to my post, "My Life as an Art Dealer," June 30, 2006) I've reached my friend Gus at Sanibel and that red painting is no longer available but a very large, unique Rauschenberg that is white is still able to be purchased, so if you know somebody with the means and desire to own an amazing painting by this American legend, now quite aged, contact me, and I'll shoot you the details. (You have to be able to invest a minimum of $200,000.)

The reason this blog is so diverse in tone and content is I am exploring how to use this form as a new kind of memoir. So, I'm opening my life as I experience it day by day up to whatever audience chooses to view it, in the hopes I locate the best writing voice for telling my life stories.

This is a much different experience from my professional career as a writer the past 30+ years. I've never before written for free. Magazines and newspapers and Hollywood studios and book publishers have paid me good money to write for them.

Here the only source of revenue I have is via Google's AdSense service, which places those blue links at the top of each page in my blog. Should a user choose to click on that link, or the links promoting Google Search or other products that may appear from time to time, a few pennies get credited to my account. (There is no obligation to the user to buy anything, of course, and no information about you is captured by the act of clicking, as far as I can see.) Based on my experience to date, less than 8% of my visitors choose to click these ads, but when they do, I earn around 25 cents each time they do so. I mention this not to induce you, dear reader, to click on ads -- that is your choice -- but to explain how the blog world is evolving as a media outlet.

Years ago, my friend John Markoff, a talented journalist who covers technology for The New York Times, predicted to me that one day writers like me would be turning to this space, and become our own proprietors over our writing, perhaps charging micropayments for readers to access our work.

I suffer no illusion I can yet expect anyone to pay anything for my words. Besides, this blog is part therapy, part fun, and part a long-term retirement project. If I can tell stories well enough to attract an audience that returns frequently, maybe I can work into my old age doing what I love to do -- write -- and earn a modest living in the process.

Please let me know what you think of this blog. I truly love getting comments, and it is fine that they are anonymous, if you prefer. But no writer writes only to hear the sound of his own voice. I am not in love with my words. I write to connect with you. It is our relationship that I cherish -- you and me, writer and reader. Plus, I encourage you to start a blog and let me know you've done so. Every writer deserves an audience.

I'll be yours if you will be mine. Plus I promise to consider clicking on your ads!

Walkin' in Memphis

Now I've finally learned how to add links here (duh) I'm going to briefly discuss two radically different pieces I have published over the past seven years, both at Salon.

The first is a reported piece from Biloxi, last fall, in the wake of Katrina.

Everything's Broken

It was my attempt to bring attention to a forgotten corner of America. Mississippi is not only one of our poorest and blackest states, it is little understood by people in places like New York and San Francisco. The devastation visited upon Mississippi's Gulf Coast has set the area back at leaast half a generation. No matter how many times I or other writers mention these facts, there is little hope the situation will improve there fast enough to help the most vulnerable hurricane victims recover any semblance of the lives they had before. The only good news out of the area lately is that a trial is underway that may help reveal how insurance companies screwed residents by labeling the hurricane's wind-driven water surge a "flood."

***

As to what any of this has to do with that great song title referenced up top, the answer is nothing at all. I just like that song a lot, that's all...

Read more here: Trial Report.

***

The second of my articles was a profile of Rolling Stone editor, publisher, and owner Jann Wenner.

Wenner's World.

One of my oldest and best friends on the planet, Howard Kohn, called this piece a "love letter" to Jann, and noted that it was one of the kindest articles he'd ever seen about the notoriously difficult Wenner. Jann saw it differently, saying it was mean-spirited. He refused me all access to his files and records, rendering my book contract to write his autobiography a difficult task, at best.

But Jann also told me something that made me sad, and that is, because this link persistently showed up as the top link on Google, his young sons had read it, and he worried they would think ill of him based on what I wrote. If this is true, it was never my intent. I admit the piece is snarky in tone, but Howard was right too -- it is a compasionate portrait of a difficult man. I suspect Jann's sons are fully aware of what I am talking about.

How to write a memoir-1

Four years ago, my mother took a class in "life stories," i.e., how to write a memoir or autobiography. She asked me whether I thought this was a good thing for her to do; my answer was an emphatic "Yes!"

Over the next few months she produced a short manuscript that covered most of her life. Though my three sisters and I knew many of the incidents she wrote about, we gained new insights into how she experienced them. For instance, she disclosed new details about how she met our father.

A few months later, my mother became seriously ill, and a week later, she died. She was 87.

In the intervening years, I've begun teaching memoir-writing, first to my students at Stanford, Faculty Page, both to graduate and undergraduate students; and more recently to Baby Boomers through San Francisco State University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, OLLI site.

The first step is to gather together as many old letters, journals, photos, and other resources as you can easily locate.

Then, focus on emotionally loaded moments from your past. Just try to write one scene that captures what it was like to live through one of those moments.

The next day, jump to another emotionally compelling incident and try to write about that. Do this every day for a week.

The moments do not need to connect together, at this point. They can be random scenes from your life.

After a week, this exercise should trigger other memories. These may involve more complexities than the first set of memories. You may also start dreaming about memories, or find they come to you when you're doing something else.

Pay close attention to these randomly accessed memories, these discoveries of what your brain has been storing away for years or decades.

Many memoir writers who follow this method end up discarding their initial wave of memories -- the stories they had thought they wanted to tell, in favor of the more complex, and often less resolved material that floods into the vacuum once they've swept the initial layer of memory away.

This is just a rough outline of the course I teach, I'll flesh it out in the weeks to come, and republish it as more robust guide to memoir-writing at some point in the future.

Blogs I like (now with links)

For those interested in some of the creative ways others are using blogs, please check out the following:

The Sweet Life
(Shea is in Oakland, and writes about post-breakup life from a woman's point of view with a fresh voice and an ear for language.)

Kinga Free Spirit
(This amazing blog from a Polish woman who hitch-hiked around the world came to a tragic end last week when she died from an illness.)

Tiredlings
(The group of us who gathered at Wired/Hotwired/Wired Digital a decade ago have scattered to the winds, but you can track many of us here.)

Brad's Cool Blog
(My friend Brad has apparently turned his site over to the youngest blogger on earth, his son Esmond, now a week old.)

Dan Kreiss
(My friend Dan is an incisive political thinker who has helped me in establishing my blogs.)

World Thought
(This anonymous young journalist doesn't post often but when she does, it is among the best-written, most thoughtful material I have seen.)

Inside Gaza
(I am reposting this link, from inside Palestine. In our present world, there is no reason to rely exclusively on the major news media to find out what is happening. People who do not get a fair shake, like the Palestinians, are taking matters into their own hands with blogs.)

What we fall in love with

One of my favorite quotes about writing came not from a writer, but from Van Gogh, who said, "Paint the gesture, not the hand."

When I start falling in love with somebody new, it is not her physical form so much that attracts my male instinct, as it is what she does with her body. Of course, I love to look at women, and many of them appear very attractive to my eyes. I like the same things all heterosexual males like about women, which is to say how they differ from us.

But I have met many beautiful women whom I could not possibly love. Sometimes it's because they have created armor against the unwanted attentions of men, a defense system. Whatever it is, it's not what turns me on.

When a new woman comes into my view, it is mainly her gestures that either draw me into her realm or push me away. It's the way she talks with her arms and her fingers; the way she glances sideways in a crowded room; the way she walks across a room; the way her face furrows as she empathically considers the dilemma of another; the way her eyes flash with anger when my teasing strikes a nerve.

These and many other cues lead me along the path to her heart. I think many women believe men want them to look a certain way -- to be big here, for example, and small there, to have this hair color or that skin type. My experience as a man who loves women is that these things are largely irrelevant.

Yes, I have tended to fall in love with certain "types," according to my observant female friends, but there is enough variety in my choices to suggest that I'm instinctively open-minded about which women appeal to me. There is also the much more important variable, to my way of thinking -- which women find me attractive? It does no good to fall in love with a person if she doesn't return your affection.

And it has long since been clear to me that, while it may be up to the man to make the first move, it is always up to the women to close the deal.

We're floating in space

Did you realize?*

First, some important industry news. It's been eight years since Louis Rossetto's Wired empire was broken up by the company's Class C investors. Conde Nast bought the magazine but Lycos bought Wired Digital. Along with the websites, Lycos also got the valuable URL, wired.com, where Wired News was located, but also, at that time, Wired Magazine's archives. Today, Conde Nast finally got wired.com and Wired News back where they belong, as part of the magazine group.

Link to Wired News story

I suppose I may have played a rather minor role in how this drama unfolded. During the period we developed Wired News in 1996-7, I talked Louis into letting us locate this new, untested product at the wired.com URL. It was a battle, one of many we had, but I (and others) felt that Wired News would be the truest expression of the magazine's vision in the online environment.

A couple years ago, my oldest daughter, Laila, a talented journalist, worked at Wired News for a while. No one there even knew who I was by that point, not that they should have, but it is consistent with my point about the post-modern discontinuities of our current lifestyles, at least here in the Bay Area and other urban centers.

Yesterday, I visited Google for the first time, and had lunch with one of my former students from Stanford. She is so excited to be there, and the entire campus had such an energetic feel, I felt happy she has found such a nice place to work. Google is one of the most fascinating companies to emerge in this new century, but it has a long way to go before it achieves its potential to be a force for good in this confusing new world of ours.

***


*Rarely do my 7, 10, and 11-year-olds agree on anything but they all love the Flaming Lips song of this title. The oldest also says it reminds him of J, who introduced the group to them two years ago.

Swish! (Behavior Mod.)

So this little backyard basketball court I've created has become a draw for kids visiting my kids. Adults too. Men, women, boys, girls. The way the space is configured, you may have to adapt your shooting style. An apple tree overhangs part of the "court," and though I keep trimming it, it keeps growing, and its branches, leaves and apples sometimes act as shot-blockers.

A stand of bamboo at the rear of our "court" can literally steal the ball from your hands, sometimes. There are obstructions all over the place-- a barbecue here, some clotheslines there, a bicycle, some stairs, windows, fences, chairs, and so on.

Weaving in and out of these fixed objects, with great fluidity, a young child can master new shots -- flat hooks (under the apple tree), long 3-point jumpshots (over the apple tree), curling layups from under the stairs and before the cement meets the grass.

***

Throughout my media career, I've been part of teams that design content destinations with the hopes of succeeding in attracting an audience. We've done it at newspapers, magazines, at radio and TV, and now on the web. Here, the challenges are huge. A website is not so much a place to read as it is a place to navigate.

The way the page is laid out is critical. For my blogs, I favor templates designed by Doug Bowman, another ex-Wiredling. But, whatever design you choose, it's critical that your audience can figure where they are, what this place is about, and what they can do here.

You hope they will bookmark you, and return to your site often. You hope they will see the ads and other promotions running on your site and that they will check those out. You hope they'll dig into your archives, and add Comments when they want to (at the end of each article.)

So the story teller is like a dealer, hoping to hook his audience. The best media are addictive. Thank you for visiting, dear reader. Later on, I'll post some more crack, probably about love...

A romantic interlude-4

We didn't get much to eat at the party, so we headed to Chow, a late-night restaurant at Church and Market. We sat across from each other and talked our way through a nice meal. J. was concentrating her dark brown eyes on me in a new way. After I dropped her off at her place, parked, and walked home to my bed, I dreampt of her all night.

We had made a plan to go see Team America the next night, a Sunday night in mid-October '04. She laughed through the entire movie; I'd never seen her this happy. After dinner, when I drove her home, she asked me to park and come inside.

She sat on her living room chair and I sat on her couch. We got home by 11 pm or so and started talking like we always did. Now, our conversation was becoming loaded, there were lots of sexual nuances and double entendres emerging from both pairs of lips. On and on we talked, for two hours, four hours, five...Unlike every other night, she didn't act tired, or make any references about going to bed.

She just kept looking into my eyes with those new eyes of hers. Finally, around 4 am, she got out of her chair and came over to sit beside me on the couch. All talking ceased, to be replaced by kissing, and then...

Anyway, that's the night we became lovers. We barely spent another night apart over the next year. Two people who had taken a long time, six months, to really get to know one another, now were complicating their friendship with love. The chemistry was immediate and undeniable.

We were like an explosion that had been waiting to happen...

A romantic interlude-3

Twenty-three summers ago, my wife's mother died, in Hawaii. She was in a hospital, with heart problems, but none of us knew how sick she really was. Her oldest daughter and only son were there. Her middle child, my wife, and our three young children were in the family cottage on Sanibel, when the phone calls started coming. After she died, the other two siblings brought her ashes back to the island in her favorite carryon bag, which I thought was a nice touch. The three children of this remarkable woman then kayaked into the jungle and spread her ashes somewhere in a place only they know.

The reason I am telling this story is that the night before she died, my mother-in-law stayed up very late into the night, talking to a stranger, a nurse on the night shift. This woman later told my wife's older sister that the dying woman described in great deal each of her five grandchildren, their essential natures and the promise of their futures. These five have indeed all thrived in the decades since. She would be proud of all of them.

But the point of my story tonight is that after she had given all of this intimate family insight over to the care of this night nurse, she fell into a deep sleep, and never awoke again. Years later, I discovered this frequently happens to nurses caring for dying patients; at the very end, they want to give their stories to somebody before they leave this world.

The reason her story came to me tonight is I think I am doing something very similar, on an emotional level, by trying to relive the love affair I had with my Angel. Hopefully, I will not keel over and die when this story-telling is finished, but it does seem that I am driven to tell our story, in a certain amount of detail, now that I have committed to letting her go.

Rereading my earlier post tonight (.2), I am not very impressed with the passion behind that writing. It captures the period well, but not the feelings that were coursing through me week by week as we became ever closer, though not lovers, not partners, just friends.

I am going to have to get this story right before I can honestly let her go. If she ever reads these fragmented chapters, I hope she'll forgive me that this is my way of letting her go, a story-teller's way. Some stories do not have happy endings; our's didn't. You all know how this story ends. Yet there may be some worth in the retelling. Maybe you, maybe me, maybe her, maybe someone apart from all of us will benefit somehow.

I'm remembering the classic, "Letters to a Young Poet,", and the other works of an author who argued that no matter what else you may think about all of this relational chaos surrounding us -- all of our betrayals, our secrets, our mistakes, our true loves, our moments of heated passion, and the long sadness of our loyalty to someone who has already left us emotionally -- despite all of that and so much more -- this is how we arrived here as a species, reproducing oursleves, evolving, and probably overpopulating the planet. There's beauty and tragedy in our collective history.

Enough of that. Back to our story. So a group of intrepid artists and writers had cooperated to try and capture the essence of San Francisco, circa 2004. Friends of mine (Mary and Rhonda) were designing and organizing the photos for this "book," and I was in charge of acquiring or writing the stories that would accompany the images in its final form.

We had lots of fun doing this project, but we also expended a lot of creative energy, which, as it turns out, was never properly compensated for, according to the contracts we were working under.

I must here break with my story and say, if any of you have any dealings with BIG magazine, beware! They ripped me and lots of others off. I am still owed over a thousand dollars and none of my writers ever were paid. Shame on you, BIG owners. Ripping off creative people is a crime that may not be on any court's case list, but truly is a crime against our common humanity.

Back to the BIG party. J agreed to go to this one with me. I included two of her friends on the guestlist, but they never showed up. Not to worry, she and I had a very good time. We toured the "castle," explored the waterways, and talked with some of the guests. At one point, outside of the castle, we were perched on an uneven stair, talking to other guests, and the wind was rather chilling. I placed my arm around her, and she folded into me, and for the very first time we felt each other's warmth, and it affected both of us on a deep physical level.

For me, it was special and lovely to finally be holding her, which, given our position, could be considered necessary so she would not fall down backwards. Her body was warm, slender, and cozy all at once. She was letting me take care of her in a new way. In all of our months of friendship, we had rarely touched one another. Now we were.

And my life would never be the same again.

A romantic interlude-2

As the summer of 2004 progressed, Angel and I spent more and more time together. I helped her find an apartment, pack up her house, and move boxes to and from a storage facility. Once she moved into her own place, we started being regular companions. I was relatively free, as a Stanford faculty member, since it was summer. We started shopping together sometimes and often met at restaurants for meals. After Labor Day weekend, we became much closer. I started dropping by almost every night, and we'd talk for hours. We talked about everything -- the news, politics, music, movies, relationships, real estate, computers, books, TV, clothes, health, our pasts and our present. Occasionally, we would talk about our friendship, that it was odd and unprecedented for both of us to have such a close friendship with someone of the opposite sex.

By July, three months after we'd met, I knew very well that I was attracted to her physically, as well as all the other ways. But she'd made it clear on a number of occasions that she wasn't interested in our friendship becoming romantic, so I cooled those jets best that I could. The truth was I could think about nothing else much of the time; I'd become obsessed, mesmerized by her. I loved the way she thought, and how she used words. She became ever more beautiful to my eyes, her gestures were a visual poetry for me, and her laughter was music.

It was hard to convince her to get out of the house in those days, so my invitations to events were usually turned down. But she went with me to a Giants' baseball game one night, and had a grand time. Among the crowd, she spotted a girl with copper-colored hair, and said, "I want her hair." Soon after she dyed her hair a similar shade.

I'd gotten her a small design job creating material for a event at U-C, Berkeley, where Sy Hersh was to speak. The night of the event, I managed to convince her to come along with me. She stuck close to my side the whole evening, saying she didn't like crowds or parties. I introduced her to a bunch of people backstage, including Sy, then I introduced him to the crowd of 1,000 waiting in the auditorium.

Afterward, she and I had dinner together near campus. Later that night, after I had dropped her at her apartment and returned to my neighborhood, I had to park several blocks away from my house. A gentle rain was falling. I remember feeling ecstatic as I walked home in this rain. "Life is so beautiful," I told myself. She now felt closer to me than ever before.

A week later was to be an even more interesting event. She had committed to go with me to the coming-out party celebrating BIG magazine's San Francisco edition, which I had edited. The party was going to be held in a fantastic venue, a castle-like structure in Bayview, with natural underground freshwater pools, on the site of an old independent water company.

Neither of us yet knew it, but that night would turn out to be a turning point for us.

Always the Flirt

That's me in that ridiculous outfit on the right with my first girlfriend, Suzie. Probably I was suggesting that we go inside and play "Doctor" or something. Every time I find myself atttracted to a new woman, it's the same feeling. Testosterone -- that's why we look. If women take it in drug form they start looking at women, too, the same way we do.

So that's my excuse. Can't help it. Wouldn't change it if I could.

Happy

What's to complain about when I have a cup of Peet's, The Sunday New York Times, and our pumpkin plant is thriving in this gorgeous summer heat (windows open all night.)

We will watch the World Cup and I'll root for France, out of loyalty to Loic, my future son-in-law.

Life is good. Except, how do I transplant this vine into the soil?