I have great plans for Ftrain, but of course they take too long to execute, and in the meantime, there's a muddle of text, disorganized "books," ideas all over the place. I am trying to focus, but my desires get in the way.

I suffer from many small fixations, and I feel that they all fit together--but I don't know how. I have a fantasy that when I find that convergence, I become real. Here are some of the things I do: I cut up sounds and paste them back together. I write stories. I study branding and advertising. I don't believe in God. I can't control my weight. I am scared of my family. I am numb. I love my girlfriend, but feel afraid of her power over me. I talk too much.

I used to think that my life was about text, the pure and abstract construction of letters into words and words into thoughts. It's not. I think the theme, the real basis for me and my acts is trying to figure out what people are really saying, what they feel, so that I can make sense of it. I want to resolve ambiguity, to make the connection between what people say and what they mean. I am always amazed at my own capacity to lie, to fabricate a truth based on my emotions and lusts, devoid of empirical study.

I dwell on this topic, and a few months ago a small insight came out of that dwelling: our culture, any culture, is just people talking. Absolutely everything we believe in and hold true can be traced back to a conversation between individuals, or an inner discussion, people talking things over in market squares and on stone walls. Maybe this is why the classic philosophical form is the dialogue, the revelatory chat; the ancient philosophers admitted that the source of knowledge was simply discourse.

Write down the cream of the chatter on paper or stone and it becomes real. It becomes a book, no longer ephemeral, easier to trust. Now that it is pinned down, it can be spread to the masses, and then freely interpreted, correlated, and placed into new contexts, yielding new conversations, some of which are in turn written down. As a result we can have 10,000 kinds of Christianity and as many kinds of soda. The old words become the foundation of our new conversations; we identify them as dogma through the lens of our present vision, so that there 10,000 different dogmas, each one as real as the next.

Why are we willing to give mere words such weight? Maybe because human culture waits packaged for you when you're born, so it's easy to assume that the world is right, that the faith you were born into is the correct one, that the ideas your parents gave you were correct. Or you might reject those ideas, and look for others which offer an appealing contrast. Either way, it's all arrived from people talking. Shakespeare competes and is merged with email; the Bible belongs to both Jerry Falwell and Martin Luther King.

What this means, to me, is that human culture doesn't mean anything more than humans. There is no Star Trek manifest destiny other than the one we make, no heavenly father other than the one we imagined. There is no definition of art other than the one individuals choose to accept. There is nothing new under the stars.

I know these are not new ideas, but they're mine, and I write from them, so I'm dumping them into my phosphorus screen. What 's more, I can't offer a resolution; this essay has no end. I'm an atheist and sad about it. It is wildly painful to see my frail grandfather on morphine, realizing that he's destined for decomposition, not transcendence. There is no soul, just a body. I have a religion, I suppose, in literature, in reading, in believing that words can heal, that they can be used to arrive not at truth, which is always so relative, but at something between truth that allows people to see themselves, a mirror out of the alphabet.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan....you know the rest.

The important thing, for me, is to track my progress, so that I do not repeat myself, so that I know where I came from. At home I stole pictures of myself from my mother's photo albums, because I don't have any of my own, after leaving home at 16 as the ward of a philanthropic boarding school. I don't know where I came from--not just genealogy, but personal history. Whole months and years are gray already, disappearing.

Ftrain is a tracking tool, my way to learn about what I believe, to discover my own territories. My manifest destiny is inward. This does not mean I'll tell the truth, but rather that I'll try not to repeat myself, to keep learning. I want to keep a record of each idea as it appears, so tonight, I entered all of Ftrain into CVS, the Concurrent Versions System program that comes with most Unix systems. As entries are edited, documents edited, changes made, CVS will mark the arrival every new character and idea. I'll have a large, mappable statement of each day's additions and deletions, annotated with my motives and moods.

CVS is intended for computer programs, so Ftrain becomes ftrain-1.1, the very first version. Eventually the progress will branch; new characters will appear, old ideas will be edited away. I will want to erase whole entries, smudging out that part of my life. But the text will remain embedded firmly into its timeline, immutable, immune to the gray patches currently in my head. The computer will file my ideas, good and bad, old and new, into a kind of database. By carefully crafting queries for myself, as time goes on and I continue to write, I'll be able to search for my own past, despite any creases in my skin or dead nerves in my folded brain.

1974

A few months ago, one of the readers of the Subway Diary, whom I knew at Alfred but did not know was reading, sent a postcard to a person I'd written about in the poorly-written New Years entry. She addressed the postcard to his Subway Diary pseudonym. It read:

Sam,

I can't believe you kissed Barbara Martin on New Years. I am shocked! Shocked!

Kathy

I can't believe you kissed Barbara Martin on New Years. I am shocked! Shocked!

Kathy

"Sam" forwarded me the postcard. Kathy is not her real name, of course, but Sam and I both knew who she was. It was amusing, but strange, that people who know me in the flesh read without making contact.

It's fine when old friends discover this site and send email, writing, "Paul, hey, you're still an ass." And I expect the silent readership of strangers. Even my parents know about the SD; my mother has mixed feelings, and it bores my father. But former friends who became mute readers--finding out about them gives me an odd, one-way feeling. Especially if they send postcards about the entries to my other, less-mute friends.

This is day 8,401 of the Subway Diary.

I like to think that I was conceived in real pleasure, that my parents made love in the wasteland of their long marriage, both feeling a deep and human hope. That they loved each other, in that breathless moment. But it's better not to know.

I had wavy hair from the womb. It's gone straight, but my stayed blue. I wanted to become a Presbyterian minister. A college professor. A professional puppeteer and storyteller. A novelist. News radio anchorman. All jobs with voices.

I had wavy hair from the womb. It's gone straight, but my stayed blue. I wanted to become a Presbyterian minister. A college professor. A professional puppeteer and storyteller. A novelist. News radio anchorman. All jobs with voices.

About five months ago, I planned to end the Subway Diary August 11, 1998, on my birthday.

I turn 24 six hours from now. 10 AM, Bryn Mawr, PA, August 11, 1974, through 3:43 AM, Brooklyn NY, August 10, 1998.

I need human connections that rise above the spying of old friends. Or rather, I want to invest more in the connections I already possess.

I can't decide, and I've been putting off the decision. It would be nice to walk away from the computer. If I keep writing, tomorrow, or since I'm going out tonight and may be too drunk to write, the next day, then I decided to keep at it. If these spaces go blank, then I stopped.

In either case, thanks for reading.

A very definite work of fiction.

Not to say I have it bad, but the office assistant lost track of my health insurance forms. Forgot to send it in.

I had suspected this, and asked her about the form this morning. She told me, "I don't know." I asked if she could find the paperwork which I had given to her her, with clear instructions to fax it to the insurer immediately, three weeks ago. She gave a frustrated sigh, and said, "I don't know where it is, and I can't look for it in this pile. You'll have to fill it in again." She eyed me, angry at my presence. "If you find out how the insurance process works," she said, "let me know."

In her defense, she is not trained in the processes of the office. But still, discovering that, in the last two weeks, had a taxi struck me, had a building fallen onto me, had I been mugged, had the Philadelphia Mummer's Parade been diverted, marched to New York, and run me over, and had the ambulance arrived in a manner timely enough to ensure my survival, I would have confidently said, "yes, take me to an expensive hospital, because I have fine benefits paid for my by gracious employer," only to later find my posessions sold at state auction because of inability to pay the hospital, and then spent the rest of my life with debt hovering over my like a F-117A bomber, and me without any anti-aircraft capabilities, enrages me to the point that I must write incredibly long sentences.

I went to the phones, paperwork in hand, and called the Health Care Provider. I will not name this provider; let's simply call them Famous University in Britain Health Care. Amidst the cyberspace tangles of their phone system, I managed to repeatedly come in contact with individuals informed at total opposition to each other, and each time I gave them essential data, their system crashed. "I am sorry," they said with Southern accents, "our computer went down. Will you hold?" Music would play, and I would say quietly into the phone, "You make all the other hammers look smart in the hammer-box that inspired the phrase 'dumb as a box of hammers.' Your doctor has prescribed radical skull-thinning agents so that bare ideas can penetrate the thickness behind your limp eyes. If placed on a television game show, you would lose even if your competitors were oxen. I will dig up your grandmother's bones and boil the skull."

"What's that sir?"

"It's policy Group number RPS09101."

"Rock, Paper, Skissors?"

"That word is pronounced 'sih-zors.'"

"I know that, sir. It looks as though our database has crashed again." Pause. "Can you call back in 15 minutes? Or maybe an hour?" In the background, the sound of yelling and alarms.

(When I signed up with ConEd for my electric, the service rep embarassedly told me, "I can't complete the transaction. Our power just went down.")

Finally, after 5 calls like this, each one punctuated by long periods on hold, I found a solution where, by telling a lie, I could be legally covered starting today. After some scratching on the quadplicate form, I had the data correct, or at least convincingly prevaricated. To the fax machine, and then to the Pitney-Bowes to stamp an envelope, and I was insured. I could get back to the long list of tasks and long lists of email--

Before I could find my seat, my boss said, "Paul, will you spend some time with Elly to talk about soy products?"

Elly, in her late 40's and well-exercised, in formal clothes, appeared in the space before me. She clutched a large bundle of soy-related documents: cartoons, newspaper clippings, recipes, a press release on tofu sculpture.

There was no room to sit in the tiny front office, so I suggested she and I venture to the back, where the designers work in a gray den of digital cliqueishness, dressed like the extras in that television drama about cliqueish New York designers, "As the World Kerns." The designers lament frequently, in scratchy voices, the very presence of those who, like me, work in the front rooms, creating work for them to do. I avoid going back there too often, in case they make good on their promises and exacto out my eyes.

I spotted two spare seats in the back of the room, and walked towards them, only to realize that by one of the seats, someone had recently printed a full-color, 11x17, tabloid-sized cartoon of a hand with an upthrust middle finger, with the words "fuck you" in generous 280 point type below. The poster was affixed by a scalpel thrust into the shelving.

"No, no, this won't be right, too noisy," I said, turning and shepherding Elly back out into the daylight before her Ohio eyes spotted the profanity. We found a spare desk.

She is a fine client, perfectly capable, working with me instead of against me, but she wanted to say too much about soy. We sorted through the multifarious pages of non-digitized information she had aggregated, a damp process. I numbered the pages with her, noting which would need to be scanned and which would need to be marked-up for a web site, simultaneously creating a bare outline of the site's structure--and then she said:

"We'll have all this done for tomorrow, right?"

I felt like a frog at a dissection. "I don't think that's a reasonable expectation," I said. "You'll need to discuss it with my supervisor. For tomorrow, we could have an outline of what needs completed."

"I really need this for tomorrow."

This happens constantly; the client asks for something unreasonable. They have waited to ask for it, because they know it unreasonable, and now that it is out, they are ashamed to admit that they were wrong in the first place. It's as if they had blurted a love confession, and now that it is on the table, they are unwilling to hear the other party's ambivalence. Only an equal commitment will suffice.

"This is a lot of work. A week of work for even a large firm," I said. There were 200 pages of soy-related news in a large binder clip, and only a few files on a disk. This is, of course, for a prototype, not a real product, so whatever we do will be discarded in three weeks.

"We need it for tomorrow." Royal "we."

"You'll need to talk to Carol," I said. "I can't address that."

This mollified her, and we went on, until the client had to get to her hotel, so she could hit the gym and go out for dinner. They come to New York on a chit, and don't want to get any real work done while here. "Is it safe for me to walk uptown?" she asked, eyes clear.

I said, "People get mugged sometimes. Those from out-of-town are particularly marked, and the worst beaten. The worst murders happen in a cabs. New York will destroy you. You can't handle the tension. This place will devour you the minute you step from the door of the office. You are a lamb at a slaughter." I said this to myself. To her, I said, "yes, perfectly safe."

Some call them memes, I call them utter bullshit. I'm guilty of most of them. Here are 25 to start.

1. White men age 18-30 writing about pimping, or using 70's Black culture references

"You is a badass motherfucker, Brad."
"I be pimpin' in the Hamptons."
"Soouuuul train all the way back to Yale!"
2. Alternately, White people talking about "the Man" in an ironic tone
3. Or White people in their mid-to-late 30's dancing badly to Motown
4. Or just appropriating anything from any other culture and subverting it to their weird pasty need for hip, detached irony
5. And White guys criticizing White culture, especially criticizing White appropriation of other cultures, so that they sound cooler and actually more down than the blue-eyed guys rapping along with old Public Enemy
6. Women writing long, post-feminist essays about meaningless sex

"As a sex columnist, my sole intention is to make you feel inferior and inexperienced because you don't give blowjobs to strangers at least seven times each week."
7. Gay men in their 20's who call each other "bro" and roll up their bluejean cuffs
8. Mentioning NAMBLA as an "I am a cool guy into weird cultural references" signifier
9. Men describing their amazing careers

"And that brings us up to 1982...has it really been 18 hours of me rambling continously?"
10. Women in thrift-store dresses at New Media parties

"I make 240,000 dollars a year, and I actually found this dress inside a cat's asshole!"
11. Every bar in New York

"Tonight I went to Superbar, and then the Egg Bar, then Twiddle, and after that, Cumtorium."
12. Jewish People making fun of Jewish People

"Ah ha! And Hitler should have gassed all of them! I can say that because I'm Jewish."
13. Mentioning Mentioning Hitler

"Every conversation people mention Hitler. Every TV show. Everyone is fixated on Hitler! I say this because it makes me look thoughtful and analytical. But I don't mean anything."
14. Online journal validation requests

"Isn't that guy terrible? Don't you think he's terrible? I didn't tell you that I ran his dog over with my scooter and took all the money out of his kid's chemo fund, but he's an awful guy, right? Send me email about how awful he is, and make sure to mention how evil men are, and how I never, ever could be manipulative because I am beautiful. Here's a picture of me with my hand under my chin looking winsome."
15. The Society for Creative Anachronism

"We are so pathetic, we wish we had died 500 years ago."
16. Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace

"More than just a story derived from the principles of famous racist Joseph Campbell, it's about cheaply made plastic toys."
17. The entire breadth of Postmodernism

"Look! I bought all these books by Foucault, which I will never read but will display proudly on my aluminum bookshelves. Who are Hume, Locke, Berkeley again? My clothes are made of copper wire and newspaper clippings."
18. The business catch-phrase "at the end of the day"

"At the end of the day, we'll all get medically castrated, put on sweatsuits and Nikes, and kill ourselves."
19. Constructing meaning from the terrible The Matrix

"The ontological quandary is resolved speedily by Reeves saying 'my name is Neo!' Verily, this is a film for the ages."
"The image of babies in bottles resonates with anti-Cartesian overtones."
20. Trashing Maureen Dowd

"Maureen Dowd is a filthy, filthy human being who would have peed on the cross."
21. Trashing the media

"I watch the evening news and read the same six papers every day, for a total of 22 hours a day, and everything I read is terrible and pointless."
22. Trashing people who trash the media

"Brill's Content doesn't ever focus on how ugly Dan Rather is."
23. Online mailing lists that will be better

"This mailing list will be a real discussion about (online life||political issues||writing), not drivel like all the others which started with exactly the same charter."
24. Men who think they're sensitive and different because they admit they might have homoerotic tendencies when they mock wrestle and play grabass with their drunken friends

"Everybody is a little gay, but I'm still all man, babe."
25. Carping, ironic writing in personal journals

"Just because I do it doesn't mean I approve."

A teenage girl on the train reading The Dharma Bums. I wish I cared about Kerouac, but he rings no bells in my head. Ginsberg is okay but not great, Ferlinghetti--these men belong to a certain kind of woman, a woman who dates a man with a beard when she's 25, then grows up into a good-paying job, stuffing her husband's stocking with a Norelco.

That's a good life. It's nice when people live that way. I wouldn't mind being the guy on the other end of the razor, some days.

Right now, more than Pound or Maugham or Kerouac, give me advertising. I downloaded a Jaguar ad today, for no reason, and began to break it down. Looking carefully at a commercial 30 seconds long, watching this compressed moment 100 times, you begin to see the work of researchers, artists, scriptwriters, rhetoricians, video editors, all scrambling to finish the thing and implement a vision, simply so that cars can be sold. Commerce brings together the disciplines long before the universities can, forcing image and text to work together, manipulating history through history, applying pure math to magnetic tape to make the pictures shimmer.

In this one advertisement, 30 seconds, there were 38 separate shots, dozens of people. There was a buried narrative, told through a collection of images, a visual vocabulary of thousands of elements--water, flashbulbs, fisheyed angles, wind in a little girl's hair, the reflection in chrome, a cityscape. The background music was a collaboration between Electronica dorks the Propellorheads and chanteuse Shirley Bassie. The song, called "History Repeating," is a small rant about timelessness of human behavior, a slower, smaller "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" with an organ groove and stretched-out, quiet rhythm.

All together all those shiny pictures say "love this, buy this." But one level further down it says volumes on our culture, on our desires, the way we manipulate ourselves to believe that we are better, more individual, smarter.

I'd like to break the ad down further in another essay, to start to talk about what I see--I wish I had time. I could take 38 screenshots and walk through the process, imagine the discussion and the options at the agency, create the back story. You may not find it thrilling, but I do; what you see on TV is powerful, blipverts right through the skull, and every second is calculated to make you feel, respond, emote. This is the heyday of rhetoric, a second coming of Cicero and Caesar, except this time the campaigns are for soap and cereal, not for conquering India. I want to question the message, since I'm partially responsible for creating it with my minor role in advertising.

Then again, everything worked out for the Roman Empire, right? We don't need to worry that our capitalist eyes are too big for our stomachs, trying to squeeze the wealth of the world down our WallSt.Com gullets?

As for that commercial, it took dozens of days, 100's of people working, from receptionists to account executives, and it fades in and out of your eyes like a winter breeze. But if it works at all, you get a cool feeling from the song and the images, and you identify the coolness with the brand--Jaguar--and when you see another ad for Jaguar later, or a real Jaguar, or a Jaguar in a showroom, you bring back the association of coolness, the collage of images in the ad flashing through your mind.

These are random notes, unconsolidated thoughts on an unconsolidated day.

To begin this work in a linear fashion: August 11, 1974, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 10 in the morning. I was there. Born out of a C-scar. The chronicler--my mother, because my father was outside waiting--says I cried lustily and shed tears. I was born with wavy hair, stamped onto my forehead in a swirl.

This small body was washed and returned to my mother, who studiously read over me, investigating the toes, eying the tiny fingers, poking the baby's-ass and pee-pee, exploring this new territory of 7 lbs 6 oz. Prognosticating doctors said, "he'll have a large, strong chest."

My father's father had just died a few months ago, the big C. I was bundled into a new Dodge Dart and driven to 741 South Franklin St, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and rested in my crib.

What were the indicators? What could be seen then? Not looks, hair color, eye color, height, personality. Not nerves, intellect, abilities, hopes. But I functioned; I screamed, excreted, shed tears, cried for milk and fed at my mother's breast.

I came second, 12 years behind my brother, who watched over my crib and finally said to my mother, "doesn't he do anything?"

For 4 months in upstate New York, I lived 3.5 miles away from my job, 7 miles a day to walk. There were hailstorms and thunderstorms, and boiling, breathless August nights, but the mornings could be massive orange, the nights gorged with stars. I was cashless, and alone. I carried my weekly groceries on my back.

After the first 2 of those 4 months, my legs began to crack out before me. I was healthy, and could sing loud, unheard, exploring my husky voice.

If I wanted, I could walk along the stream instead of along the road, or over the hills instead of around them. If I was in a hurry, I rode my bicycle, but I didn't like the way the asphalt blurred below me, the way it constricted my path. I admit I took a lot of rides from strangers and friends, but I turned as many down.

I've never wanted a car. Many people equate cars with freedom, and I see their point; it is freeing to be able to go wherever you want, as long as wherever you want is outside of yourself, and paved.

Looking into a 4"x4" magazine called Wipe, given away free at the Strand on Fulton Street, I found a photo spread of people at an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and suddenly recognized the circular mirror and whitewashed brick wall in the picture. I'd been there, and knew one of the women in the spread. She was the roommate of a friend of a friend, one of those standard connections, absolutely the kind of person to show up unexpected in a magazine in New York. In the photos she and her peers were smiling, cooking, having a good time in expensive designer clothing, the clothing identified in the captions. Then I remembered a further connection: the woman in the photo used to work at a web development company with my close friend Eli. I'll have to tell him about this.

The world is closing in; the world is as big as it ever was. Joan Didion left New York because there were no new faces at the parties; is this the first, long-distant echo of something that will smack me full-on at 30, the realization that the place is run out, that my voice is stale to the ears of the people to whom I'm speaking , that too many people have met and become bored with me? There are 8 million people here, 1000 languages spoken, parks with dog runs and museums with mastodons. If I run out of New York, where will I go?

Its a few minutes before 10 AM on Sunday. I am writing this on the NJT Trenton local, using the laptop purchased for me by Rock, Paper, Scissors, Inc. The laptop has a wide, bright screen. It can spin CD-ROM's at 36 times their regular speed. In the seat across, a woman is sobbing, choking and heaving. She is young and pretty, with red hair.

Her friend or boyfriend looks like me, tall and overweight, with brown hair. His weight hangs off him differently. I have huge bones, ridiculous bones. In X-rays, my ankles look like oak branches. His shoulders are more narrow. He is trying to comfort her, but not making much progress; he is not even rubbing her back in the way that people usually do with public weepers.

Now, she has stopped, and I can begin to write.

Tonight was the first night this new project has become a burden. I am exhausted, but committed to writing, so I'll write about what I'm up to with Ftrain. It's difficult to know that I have an audience; in many ways I am back where I started with the Subway Diary, but there I was privileged to work in total obscurity. There aren't many of you, but you matter to me, and I seek to please you. I am sad when I fail.

I have a few fixations, thoughts that consume my spare time. The first is me, especially my inner workings. Whenever I discover one clearly spinning emotional gear, I oil it, then label it, and always uncover another one, the gear that powers it, transfers its energy. Somewhere, there's a motor, fueled by some unknowable fluid, and I can hear it hum when I'm calm enough, but most of the time I only see its transferred power, exercised in some performed kindness, or in some carping statement, in the reaction to a movie or a lover, or the way I spend money. This writing, of course, is the manifest of that long chain of gears, but it also has the best chance, for me, of showing me a path, a diagram, to get back to the motor.

That is how tired I am, that last paragraph. I am past editing, I am so sleepy.

To be fixated on myself is not strange; my other fixations are different, vectoring me into some group, choosing my career ahead of me, volunteering my services. The first is advertising, and branding, and the uses of the language to persuade, the pure commercial fire on the tongues of copywriters and brand experts. I read about advertising in my spare time, studying its history, the first appearance of ads in the West (in the 1400's, a printed piece of paper nailed to different walls, hawking a "cheype" book of indulgences or some other religious stuff), the expanding use of language, color, material, the growth of Madison Avenue, the history of printing techniques from woodblock to lead type to Linotronics to phototypesetters to vector typography to this, the total abstraction of thought into symbols, a screen for paper, pixels for letters, but still words.

So I am fixated on rhetoric, pure and applied language. How does one use words as one might use a wrench, or calculator? How can they prove, disprove, influence, or destroy an idea? To me, advertising, branding are the pure studies of this world, the least apologetic and the most relentless. Read a marketing survey, and you'll see how much the language bends towards the light of spent dollars; you'll discover that 6% of beer drinkers wear only white socks, but 60% in Denver, and then you must consider: how do I co-brand white socks, how do we reach out to the white-sock-wearers to make them buy more beer, and vice versa? What do they want to hear? Suddenly, then, you're meeting with company reps in Denver, and with a hosiery company, looking for connections, sewing the beer logo on the sock, offering socks free at the brewery tour, giving cans and gift certificates to people buying shoes, anything, all held together by a stream of memos, proof-of-concept demos, editing sessions, chats with designers, and ultimately bound up with only language, below all the images and ideas, the scripts that make up the compulsing stream of letters, the letters compiled into TV commercials, brochures, placemats, coupons, radio spots, and then discussed on cellular phones.

I once tried to write everything I could think of about a Diet Coke can, and I couldn't. That's what we have made that extraterrestrials will find so fascinating upon their arrival, even more than great art--the profusion of endlessly decorated common objects, not the limited pieces of sculpture and painting, but products sold for spare change, like the Diet Coke can, a pure example of the ridiculously complicated processes used to decorate and expand upon the properties of objects. Think: the can is printed on aluminum. Smelting, strip mining, shipping were all involved. The designer had to consider how to wrap the design around the cylinder. The materials specialists had to decide exactly how thick the can must be, with thinness meaning money saved, accommodating for the gentle pressure of carbonation, so that the aluminum might not smash in the vending machine. The scientists had figured out a way to print color separations reliably on aluminum, so that the halftone dots on the can will always be there, the colors synced and familiar. The branding experts have chosen white for the caffienated Diet Coke, and brown for its caffeine-free brother. The logo, of course, is Red, but not the swirly pigstails of the ancient Coke bottle; it has been modernized, through a million hours of futile meetings, meetings where people were trying to come up with something to say, something to explore. I'm not getting it across, because I can't go into that much detail, but: every sip of that black fluid is a billion hours of work, a million names over thousands of years, smelters of aluminum, managers of mines, plant supervisors, graphic designers, brand experts. And that's one thing on the supermarket shelf. Art belongs to one person, one originator who writes or thinks things through for us, but our products are for everyone, ambivalent in their aspect, a space for common capitalist ritual.

I wrote all that, and a page more, about Diet Coke in a white heat, and still had only taken a brief drink on the topic. Everything you handle in your hands, every day, is a million years old, is filled with stories of triumphs, but also everyday power struggles and lusts. The notebook by your desk, the light in your lamp, each have 1000 stories of invention and failure behind them.

There is another fixation which I won't try to explain here--and that's the representation of art as data. I am amazed by programs, like one called CSound, that allow you to write programs that generate music and sound, that layer reverbs and add noise to anything. There are programs which allow you to take images, sound, and video and transform them, by applying tokens, small commands in a sequence, into art, or a kind of art. I don't want to write any more about this; it's exhausting, and I can't think.

These are the things I think about most. Ftrain is my final fixation, the thing I hope will glue them together, a grouping of ideas. Maybe not tonight, but sometime in the next few months, I hope these narratives will begin to grow, to intertwine, as my fascinations expand.

Occasionally I get strange email from Ftrain readers. Today came this advisory slice:

"the world is a lot bigger place than you allow yourself to believe."

That's all there was to it, one line, sent anonymously, submitted twice. The writer expounds upon my life for a span of 13 words, without a clear rhetorical strategy. He or she or it read over the sentence five or six times before clicking the "send" button, making sure the sentiment was accurate, then decided that I needed to hear this. I wonder what effect it is supposed to have?

I mean, I saw The Matrix too.

It's great to receive these things, which I both laugh at and listen to. I get many of them, people trying to contextualize my life into their own, throwing me odd, uncredited lines of criticism, or long, long emails about their sex lives, or their anger with me, or their jealousy. I always feel a little sad for anonymous emailers, who fear placing a name with their emotions or ideas--afraid to be wrong, perhaps, or dreading a response. Sending anonymous email has even more pathos than online journaling.

I'm sure the writer is right, and the world is much bigger than I believe, or allow myself to believe. Who can live in the whole world? I can't take East Timor into myself, or the scope of French literary theory, or the poverty and extreme riches of India and Pakistan, or the full emotional needs of even one other human being. I can't hold onto the concept of Allah without slipping, while the bearded man in the little corner store on Smith St. has no problem telling me that God is great as as I buy a bottle of diet soda.

Right now the world is 3:54 AM--but only 1/24th of it. My back itches, and it's time to work on something else.

I've sat down trying to write an Ftrain for an hour now. I rarely have writer's block, but I do tonight. It's 12:40AM.

When I get rolling, when I have an idea, I write 1000-1500 words an hour. All I see is the screen and the letters.

The average Ftrain entry takes 30-40 minutes to write, edit, and post. I've been sitting here for 40 minutes with about 100 words to show. I have 15,000 words sitting in a folder with half-completed entries, but none of them inspire me right now. I have another folder with the beginning notes for a SciFi novel. There's another with a collection of half-written pornographic short stories. I'm not sure what to do with them, but they're fun to write, and they help me manage my sex angst and fear.

Ftrain is explicitly about quantity, not quality, but even quantity is past me.

The topic I'm considering most is prejudice. Between women and men, between ethnicities, between classes.

A few weeks ago, I began to write an essay about race relations in America. I didn't get too far with it, but it's been smoldering in my head for a while, a collection of memories and senses and issues.

Sooner or later I'll write what I'm thinking down in a proper, reasoned form. Now I'm trying to sort through impressions.

I think constantly about race; I was raised to do so. My mother, who was a puppeteer by trade, fought for civil rights in my home town, and my childhood was a blur of protest signs, court battles, Freedom Riders who'd returned home to fight the local fight, and puppet shows where we performed African folk tales.

West Chester, PA, where I lived until I was 15, was Bayard Rustin's home town, and the park a few blocks from my house, where I went to play, once Walnut St. Park, is now Bayard Rustin Park. When you consider that Rustin was Black, homosexual (I think, but I'm going on word-of-mouth), and a communist, West Chester did pretty well by its conservative mores to name something after him. My mother knew Mr. Rustin, and apparently I met him in 1976, when I was two.

I still remember the names and faces of the dozen or so older Black men and women who had dedicated their lives, all of their time, to fighting for the cause. Norman Bond, Charles Melton, Dr. William Johnson, Eva Rice. When I was eight, nine, ten, I went to the incredibly boring NAACP dinners at the West Chester Community Center where they were honored with dinners and plaques. My mother was honored once, two, the first white woman to receive an award from that chapter. (There were copies of Crisis magazine all through my house growing up). The men all died young, in their 50's and 60's, stress and cancer and heart disease eating away their bodies.

(Bayard Rustin taught Martin Luther King about nonviolence and organized the March on Washington in the 1960's.)

I read Black Like Me when I was 13, and by then I knew the details of slavery, not just the salt-pork and Huck-and-Jim oppression but the torture, rape, and system of cruelty and deprivation. I knew who founded the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and who the Tuskegee Airmen were, as well as about the Tuskegee Syphilis study, and I'd read Up From Slavery. I can still recite "The People Could Fly," or the Anansi Spider stories, or tell you about W. E. B. Dubois or Markus Garvey or Booker T. Washington or Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman or George Washington Carver or Ralph Ellison, and I could sing "No More Auction Block For Me" (we used to spin an Odetta record over and over on the Radio Shack turntable) and "All God's People Got Shoes."

When I was four my mother brought me along to the Community Center; she needed to talk with one of the directors about some action or court case or event or fund-raiser. I was given a quarter to buy a soda (that's how much it cost then). I went out to the hallway and put in my money, and hit the button for Fanta Orange. When I turned around with the aluminum can in my hand, a Black girl, maybe 7 or 8, wearing a dress, slapped me hard across the face, and said, "you're a stupid little white honkey boy." I began to cry and went to my mother and repeated what had been said, and I wanted them to go get the girl and punish her, but my mother just shook her head about it.

There was a stop on the underground railroad across the street from my grandparents', a house owned by generations of Quakers, a space in the basement where people could sleep on the way to Canada.

I've had some good friends who've been badly treated because of their skin, who dealt with prejudice in their earliest memories. Black, Jewish, Latino, Asian.

For an odd stretch in my life, around 4 years ago, I was down. I could speak in the particular urban American dialect associated with Black people, and I did it unthinkingly, switching in and out as easily as my friends, with darker skin than my own, could switch from speaking Black to speaking White.

Note that all this history does not make me "culturally valid," or cooler, or better, or even eliminate my racism. It's just experience. I have plenty of prejudices, plenty of stupid racist thoughts. I overhear a dumb conversation between two teens with cornrows on the Ftrain, or see a Black mother whaling at her kids with an open palm, and because my mind is good at sorting, and since the racial characteristic is a convenient tab in my inner index file, it's easy to put that kind of behavior inside the "Black people" folder, rather than the "People living in uneducated poverty, regardless of skin color" folder, which is where it belongs. It's a fight to not let stereotypes override my thinking; after all, they seem accurate, some of the time.

I don't know how to manage these thoughts except to take them out of their social context and analyze them as objectively as possible. Why do I think this? Why do I judge this in this manner? What aesthetic and moral criteria am I using here, and am I using a double standard? It's never a final, resolving, satisfying answer. Racism is part of my culture, and it will always come back, in small and large ways, and it's always harder to get rid of it than give in.

I have another prejudice, or if not a prejudice a cultural fetish, which is similar. I think that darker skin is richer and more beautiful than my skin. If you put me next to an African-American, or a native African, or someone from the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East or Latin or South America, I just want to look at their hands and face. I wonder what it's like to absorb all that light, to have a color that expressive and warm all over your body. I have pink European flesh, skin that turns blue in fluorescent light and burns the color of an apple if left in sunlight. When I get old I'll be craggy and red-nosed, but age doesn't seem to do the same to non-Europeans; they don't get hit the same way. Nelson Mandela is about nine thousand years old, and he's still looking good. So is Odetta.

I think a lot about the national apology for slavery, too. My voice is inconsequential, but I'm for it. I won't justify my position here; I should probably shut my mouth and think for a while before writing, to make a reasoned argument against the standard rhetoric, but I think America should admit we did wrong, that actions have consequences, and that slavery was the economic backbone of our country for hundreds of years, and that was unconscionable. Too late is better than not at all. I know all the standard rhetoric against it, but I think it would be the right and moral thing to say "America fucked up super bad, for 100s of terrible years, and the effects are still being felt." Then we could talk about the price to put on the apology. Everyone is always rushing to the money part.

And while I'm pompously suggesting sweeping American social change, I think they should bring back the WPA. I know we're not in a depression, but the WPA was good for the soul. I would like to be a WPA playwrite, crafting sone-act dramas about the dangers of venereal disease and the triumph of reforestation.

I had a 100 other topics to discuss, from a new magazine I want to see published, to the combined database of cliches and prejudices which I want to compile online. But I'm sure I've pissed off all manner of folks of all colors with tonight's meandering entry, so I'll simply go to bed. Ftrain news time is 3:11 AM, and writer's block is a bastard.

(My middle name is Edmund, ala Lear, and he was a bastard, too.)

Dear Reader,

1. I've been working on making Ftrain into a real publication, where three to five regular writers, possibly more, will publish updates simultaneously, instead of only me. It's not going to be exactly an Ezine or a Web community or a 'Log or whatever; I don't know what to call it. It'll be thematic, and structured, and have lots for everyone, from my meandering self-absorption, to someone else's cultural rage, to nasty smutty true stories. It will also include a magazine of bad poetry called "Sloppy Poesy." It'll be a few months before it all works, since it's all in the programming. Until Ftrain goes database-driven, there'll still be regular updates by me only.
2. For the multiple-narrative version of the site, I've lined up an old alkie political commentator, a ribald literateur, and the most sexually honest, and promiscuous man I've ever met. He's a red-hot dandy rawhide hardcore rocket-thrusting bulletproof slap-up sex dog.
3. He's also so stereotypically handsome it's comic, and he promised me tonight, over a drink, that he would relate, via Ftrain, with a moderate veil of secrecy, in complete honesty, the depravity of his New York life as a model, actor, and aspiring filmmaker. I would imagine he'll also let us post naked pictures from the nose down, which would be fun, or at least underwear shots. He lives in a world of swing clubs, fivesomes, bizarre triangles and mutual erotic performances, and he's a keen inside observer of the manipulation and foolishness that comes with it; he sees people literally at their naked worst. So I'm looking forward to reading that; it's the sort of insightful nastiness I like quite a bit, and to which I would never have access. (I'd say I don't want access but of course I'd like to be a fuck-all hot raging prong of a man.) Usually when sex lives are described to me, it comes from an "I get laid all the time, I am badass and liberated--right?" perspective. But D----- has no desire for validation; he's too busy being an amused heathen.
4. Me, I'm sexually invalid. I like admitting it. I am a genuinely lousy, nervous lover, and I cling with a prideless psychic meathook to the women who sleep with me. I'm probably going to do a little writing about that, too. I manage to keep enough friends to survive, and the rest of it takes on a comic pallor--good fun.
5. The science fiction novel is going into a second plotting stage, slowly. I have someone helping me with it. I won't mention her name, because at this point in the entry, who would want to be associated with me? But she may be another contributor to the next version of Ftrain. She hasn't decided what to write about yet. I'm also trying to get a friend to write about math and science in everyday life, conjoined with his amazing sound collages as RealAudio. Oh! And my Mom and Dad (divorced) will each contribute essays, poems, and short stories on a regular basis. They're pretty good, and they both have backlogs of hundreds of pieces of text. My mom has some great illustrations, too, and watercolors.
6. I've been hoping my next girlfriend will be a writer, so that when the relationship fails, we can both put up our stories about the breakup on Ftrain. It would make great, sick reading, the back and forth and frustration and pain all born out. Who wouldn't love it? There was a terrific journal breakup last year, where a woman left her long-time boyfriend for another man and the long-time boyfriend suddenly took to writing online, and it made for fascinating browsing, even if I felt like a voyeuristic fucker and I felt awful for everyone involved. I can only hope to be involved in a really destructive relationship, though, right now. Cross your fingers that the next lady obliterates my soul.
7. I love public, performed messes; I've always wanted to document truly private stuff, since I was a kid, and it's tough for me to not ask questions like, "can we we audiotape it when you lose your virginity and mix it into some music on the radio?" I know the answer is no. I've asked it.
8. I have cassettes of my Mom going insane, losing her shit and telling me I am evil and that she'll never know me again, and I secretly taped other phone calls of my confronting her about childhood stuff which may or may not have happened, I can't really tell, and played it all on the radio, when I was in college. Mom's good about it; I want to get her AOL so that if I write about the crazy childhood stuff and my boring, weak blame and anger, she can write her own side of the story and publish it right alongside. I think she deserves the forum, and more importantly, she's a fine, practiced writer. She's totally willing to do this, too. I think it would be good for others to read. I love that woman.
9. For those of you who hate to read Ftrain, and have sent me cranky emails about how awful the writing is, thanks.
10. For those of you who sent the kind emails, thanks.
11. I don't want to fuck any of you, but thanks.
12. I love to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I enjoy doing pushups. Sadly, I can do about 15 now without crying. This is what happens to the neglected, underutilized body. Kids, take it as a warning: it's better to abuse alcohol, or to cut yourself, than force food down your mouth for emotional comfort. Because fat, unattractive people don't get laid, so they need to find other ways to validate themselves, like writing an online journal, and they pretend it's really all okay even when they're lying in bed shaking because everything hurts so bad. Not me, that's not my problem, but I know a lot of friends who suffer that way, and it's a sad truth.
13. Remember--cutting yourself and drinking too much. Slice those arms.
14. I am working on a radio play called "The Loneliest Guy in the World," about a self-pitying, masturbating, dishwashing lug who breaks into song at uncomfortable intervals and can't believe how awful his life is. It should be entertaining, if I finish it.
15. Things keep going over here. Thanks for participating; we'll return to our staples of sad fiction and comic melodrama after tomorrow.
16. "The only true freedom/is freedom from the heart's desire/and the only true happiness/this way lies."
17. For the multiple-narrative version of the site, I've lined up an old alkie political commentator, a ribald literateur, and the most sexually honest, and promiscuous man I've ever met. He's a red-hot dandy rawhide hardcore rocket-thrusting bulletproof slap-up sex dog.
18. He's also so stereotypically handsome it's comic, and he promised me tonight, over a drink, that he would relate, via Ftrain, with a moderate veil of secrecy, in complete honesty, the depravity of his New York life as a model, actor, and aspiring filmmaker. I would imagine he'll also let us post naked pictures from the nose down, which would be fun, or at least underwear shots. He lives in a world of swing clubs, fivesomes, bizarre triangles and mutual erotic performances, and he's a keen inside observer of the manipulation and foolishness that comes with it; he sees people literally at their naked worst. So I'm looking forward to reading that; it's the sort of insightful nastiness I like quite a bit, and to which I would never have access. (I'd say I don't want access but of course I'd like to be a fuck-all hot raging prong of a man.) Usually when sex lives are described to me, it comes from an "I get laid all the time, I am badass and liberated--right?" perspective. But D----- has no desire for validation; he's too busy being an amused heathen.
19. Me, I'm sexually invalid. I like admitting it. I am a genuinely lousy, nervous lover, and I cling with a prideless psychic meathook to the women who sleep with me. I'm probably going to do a little writing about that, too. I manage to keep enough friends to survive, and the rest of it takes on a comic pallor--good fun.
20. The science fiction novel is going into a second plotting stage, slowly. I have someone helping me with it. I won't mention her name, because at this point in the entry, who would want to be associated with me? But she may be another contributor to the next version of Ftrain. She hasn't decided what to write about yet. I'm also trying to get a friend to write about math and science in everyday life, conjoined with his amazing sound collages as RealAudio. Oh! And my Mom and Dad (divorced) will each contribute essays, poems, and short stories on a regular basis. They're pretty good, and they both have backlogs of hundreds of pieces of text. My mom has some great illustrations, too, and watercolors.
21. I've been hoping my next girlfriend will be a writer, so that when the relationship fails, we can both put up our stories about the breakup on Ftrain. It would make great, sick reading, the back and forth and frustration and pain all born out. Who wouldn't love it? There was a terrific journal breakup last year, where a woman left her long-time boyfriend for another man and the long-time boyfriend suddenly took to writing online, and it made for fascinating browsing, even if I felt like a voyeuristic fucker and I felt awful for everyone involved. I can only hope to be involved in a really destructive relationship, though, right now. Cross your fingers that the next lady obliterates my soul.
22. I love public, performed messes; I've always wanted to document truly private stuff, since I was a kid, and it's tough for me to not ask questions like, "can we we audiotape it when you lose your virginity and mix it into some music on the radio?" I know the answer is no. I've asked it.
23. I have cassettes of my Mom going insane, losing her shit and telling me I am evil and that she'll never know me again, and I secretly taped other phone calls of my confronting her about childhood stuff which may or may not have happened, I can't really tell, and played it all on the radio, when I was in college. Mom's good about it; I want to get her AOL so that if I write about the crazy childhood stuff and my boring, weak blame and anger, she can write her own side of the story and publish it right alongside. I think she deserves the forum, and more importantly, she's a fine, practiced writer. She's totally willing to do this, too. I think it would be good for others to read. I love that woman.
24. For those of you who hate to read Ftrain, and have sent me cranky emails about how awful the writing is, thanks.
25. For those of you who sent the kind emails, thanks.
26. I don't want to fuck any of you, but thanks.
27. I love to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I enjoy doing pushups. Sadly, I can do about 15 now without crying. This is what happens to the neglected, underutilized body. Kids, take it as a warning: it's better to abuse alcohol, or to cut yourself, than force food down your mouth for emotional comfort. Because fat, unattractive people don't get laid, so they need to find other ways to validate themselves, like writing an online journal, and they pretend it's really all okay even when they're lying in bed shaking because everything hurts so bad. Not me, that's not my problem, but I know a lot of friends who suffer that way, and it's a sad truth.
28. Remember--cutting yourself and drinking too much. Slice those arms.
29. I am working on a radio play called "The Loneliest Guy in the World," about a self-pitying, masturbating, dishwashing lug who breaks into song at uncomfortable intervals and can't believe how awful his life is. It should be entertaining, if I finish it.
30. Things keep going over here. Thanks for participating; we'll return to our staples of sad fiction and comic melodrama after tomorrow.
31. "The only true freedom/is freedom from the heart's desire/and the only true happiness/this way lies."

Sincerely,

Paul Ford

Oh shit I believe in goats. My mom had her tit nearly ripped off by a goat. We grew up on a farm and she was wearing this sweatshirt with rhinestones--

Ghosts. Sorry. Well, that's different. I don't know. Maybe.

I remember one thing. I used to hang out in this shack by the woods near where I grew up. Well, not really hang out there. I used to go there to tickle the otter.

Tickle the otter. Bring out the veins in the marble. Slug the slug. Strip the pip. Honk the goose. Reverse the pole. Agitate the alligator. Tear the hair off the eclair. Got that?

So, I had all these magazines out there in my shack. Did you ever read Peek a Snatch? They got up close, so you couldn't see anything but a couple hairs and something that looked like greasy watermelon. I bet half the gynecologists in the country got their start with that magazine. They had them pierced 15 years ago, before it made the mainstream. I had half a dozen issues. That was a great cut rat mag, man.

No, not cut-rate. Cut rat. We called it cut rat, not split beaver, because where the hell are you going to see a beaver landlocked in Ohio?

Don't look like that. So I used to go out to this shed where I had all the magazines. And one day I'm out there, and I'm trouncing the turtle, using a little vegetable oil, working it with this thing I made from toilet-paper rolls and a coonskin cap I got at Disney World, when all of a sudden the walls begin to rock, and a voice cries out to me, and says "Did you tell? Did you tell?"

It was the voice of my grandfather, I swear. He'd been dead since I was eight, but I could not mistake the sound of his voice. The windows were rattling. I got up, and said, "Poppy?"

The windows just kept shaking, and then I heard it again: "Did you tell?" The woods were rustling, and there was a bright light from outside. Let me tell you I pulled my britches up and was out of there running across the field in less than the time it takes me to tell you this. When I looked back, the shed was all lit up--and there was no electric in that shed. And then I see the light pouring out the front door of the shed, and the light is coming after me across the field.

So I kept running and finally I got home. It was only a couple hundred yards but it took forever, and the wind was blowing the other way. I get inside, and my ma is lying on the floor with her head split open. First thing I think is she's dead, but she's moaning. She fell, and whacked herself on the edge of the kitchen table on the way down. I kneel down and hold her head, and she says, "Poppa?" She must have heard it too, I think, and then suddenly there's the same light in the room, even though it's dusk. Not electric light, more like ball lightning, but hovering. I heard the voice again, "Did you tell? Did you tell?"

I didn't know what to say, but the light keeps getting closer, and my ma comes to, terrified, and says, "God, Papa, I never told."

"Who told?" the voice says. "Who told?"

"Goddamn, Papa, you know who told. You know it was Jake," said my ma. Jake was her ex-boyfriend.

"Jake told," said the voice, and it sounded real final and real mad. It just boomed through the house. Then the light vanished, and I helped my ma in cleaning herself up, getting a bandage on her head, and then putting the kitchen back in place.

I didn't go out to the shed for a week or so after that. When I did go back--right in the middle of the day--the whole inside was burnt, all the wood black, and my magazines and coonskin-paper-roll contraption were embers. I left the shed alone after that; I did my business in the shower or quietly at night.

My ma wouldn't talk about what had happened, but I kept bugging her about what she said, and she finally told me the truth.

My grandfather died when I was nine. What I didn't know is that another woman's husband shot him and was now in jail for it. They kept that a secret from me, told me he had gotten sick and died. I can't believe nobody ever told me about it, but small towns are good at keeping secrets from you, as long as everybody else knows. I wasn't allowed at his funeral.

My grandpa had been fooling around with the woman for ten years, and her husband didn't even guess. But Ma's boyfriend Jake was a friend of the woman's husband, they were fishing buddies, and he figured it out from being around our house for a year or so. So the first thing he did was tell. He couldn't hold it in.

After the shooting the other fellow went to jail, and Jake confessed the whole thing to my mother. I think he expected her to forgive him, but she threw him out right away, threw his clothes on the porch, not waiting for apologies. See, I remembered all this, but I didn't know why she did it, and she would never tell me. I'm glad now she did, because his talking had killed my grandfather, but at the time I was real sorry to see him go. After that, Jake moved into an apartment in town, and even though my mom told me not to, I went to visit him sometimes over that last five years.

About two weeks after she explained all this we both began to treat it like it had been some kind of dream. Otherwise it messes with your life too much. I stayed away from the shed, but other than that I just put it all out of my head. Except one day I came home to see her sitting at the kitchen table, and her face was gloomy and she looked agitated. I asked her what was wrong, and she said:

"I have some bad news." She took a long breath and I braced myself. "They found Jake all burnt up, on the ground outside the apartment building. I'm sorry," she said. "I know he was your friend."

"All burnt up?" I asked.

"Yeah," my mom says, "some people say they saw a light all around the place last night, and then they heard Jake screaming loud, in a lot of pain." She took a breath. "They couldn't budge his door. Three guys were trying, and one of them was Rich Jenning, he's a volunteer fireman. But no one could break it down for almost a half hour. There was smoke coming out of the bottom crack, and screaming, and people on the street say they saw light flashing in the window, but they figured he just had a new TV.

"So finally they get the door open, and smoke just pours out, but there's no fire. When the smoke clears, they see the entire inside of that apartment was black, all charred. And then they see the front window was smashed open, and Jake was outside on the pavement."

I tried to talk, and then said, "what do you..." and trailed off.

"I don't know what to think. Doug Chambers came over and told me all this. They said the body was bone and a little skin. He said it looked like a pig roast."

My stomach clenched. "What about Tom Craig?" That was the man in jail for shooting Grandpa. "Maybe Grandpa is going to burn him up, too."

She looked at me sharp. "That's superstition talking," said my ma. "But I'm thinking it, too." I told her about the burnt inside of the shed, and she just nodded. "I was thinking the same thing about Tom Craig. In any case, your granddad would have no trouble with a man shooting another over fooling with the first man's wife. He would respect that. It was the backstabbing that he would have hated. That's why he got Jake."

And it's true, Tom Craig is still in jail and perfectly safe. Seven years left in his sentence. He doesn't know how lucky he is to still be there.

So that happened when I was thirteen. But other than that I don't believe in ghosts at all.

It's still the same as high school. I'm the new kid, too fat, a little weird. The designers are standoffish, embarrassed to be talking to me about a project. I look at their mutual stack of music CD's, primarily bands that use vocoders and drum machines, and I feel their annoyed peripheral eyes watching me, each eye flashing "out, out of our space."

A week ago, I didn't care about these people, had no desire to please or impress them. Now, I am looking at the face of a coworker as I ask him to move a text box up a little on the screen, trying to make sure I don't say the wrong thing. I try too hard to be cool, blurt something awkward, some word like a sarcastic "surprise" or an over-bright "yeah!" For a flash I feel like I'm wearing a bow tie and spats, spittle coming out of my mouth, paint flecks on my safety goggles, and I brush my lips to make sure they're dry.

They have asked my boss about me: "he doesn't work here, does he?" And peered at me, withheld positive judgment, a little disappointed by default, just in case I turn out to be a failure, a dickhead, a glory hog. Enthusiasm would be an error this early. I would do the same thing. Strangers can fuck up the works if you don't keep an eye on them.

To make the job real, I must earn their trust, so I will relay little personal details in conversations, helping out of my turn for helping, proving my value across the board, offering my sympathy for boring work. Some know I have a girlfriend who lives upstate, that my father was a professor, where I used to work, quick conversations in the first few days. They can begin to piece me together; sooner or later, someone will ask if I write creatively, and I'll say, "no, not really." They do not know about Ftrain, and I won't tell them, unless someone asks "do you have a web page called www.ftrain.com?" Then I will say yes.

I am an okay fit for the place, if early indicators are accurate, a wild little design shop. When the honeymoon ends, we'll see, and so will they--the faults of the firm, and my faults (a certain sluggishness that is really fear) will out. Rock, Paper, Scissors Inc. Looking out the huge plate glass onto 5th Avenue, over to the Flatiron, it seems to come together--I can write, and there are no other writers there. I understand design, computer programming, HTML layout, information architecture, project management. All the droplets of ability that make up the cloud of agency business, I have touched--but not excelled at any of them, except my bit in writing. The color wheel is a mystery; the grid is distant; the world of C and Java programming a complete perplexity, although I understand the models for building computer programs and crafting databases. I can discuss the issues, offer sympathy, and bring forth criticism, and then I can honestly say, "all these criticisms aside, I could never come close to what you're doing. It's phenomenal work." And I am humble, then, and express it. This personality, this humility matched with a random mess of skills, will work well. But this is only day 4; there are 361 to go. I hope I work hard, keep the fire burning.

Because I am an outsider, the only writer, I can do my piece without threatening a soul; I can be excellent, if I work very hard, outstanding, unbound, and not hurt a single feeling, not make an enemy. Errors will come, but I should be first to spot my own. I can learn, I hope.

Coming from a job where the raw ambitions of those around me--ambitions less for excellence and refinement than for political mastery--predominated. The politics are all somewhere else at Rock, Paper, Scissors, and in a month the designers will begin to speak openly, forget my newness; I'll lose my outsider status, make a friend who tells someone else that I'm okay. I'll listen to a complaint in a kind manner at 10PM, there late, and suddenly be considered okay enough. Of course, it could all fail, collapse, and I could be looking for a job in two weeks. I don't know; I can't guess, only hope and use prior evidence of my own behavior and that of others. And in the meantime, I am still in high school, new to the area, met with frowning distrust, my heavy feet creaking the battered wood floors.

(Rough draft of a quick fiction.)

I have to leave for work; I only have a few minutes to tell you how I remember vomiting together. I held your neck as you leaned into the toilet and puked triscuits and clear vodka. I cleaned you up and held you until you couldn't stand to be touched, and you threw off the bedclothes in a sweep, opening your skin to the air, the areolae contracted, the nipples stiff, but sweat in your navel, a whole body cascading down to your toes in big curves of cold and hot.

The next day we made love behind the sculpture at the hairpin turn, at the top of a crooked hill, still sick from the night before. I didn't see the edge in the snow, and I nearly slipped into the valley, right over. You pulled me back, grunting. And right about then your father fell, splash, off his own cliff.

You didn't tell me. Your mother called when you were out. I asked about your dad, and she said, "he's gone." She told me he had taken the Volvo and driven to some other state, to complete a chat-room romance. He had planned it, and told her it was a fishing trip. Then he called two days later, and after some fishing lies, he blurted out the truth.

The night after your mother called, your father called. You were at work again. He asked me if you were upset. I said I couldn't tell. "Have her call me," he said, and gave me a number. "Or send email." We talked for a minute about computers, my job.

I gave you the message when you came home. You were 19, and looked down to the floor.

I said, "do you want to tell me?"

You sat on the brown couch and we held hands. After a while, you got up to turn on the ceiling fan. I waited. Finally, you said "no, I don't." Then you told me anyway, and we went to a movie with Uma Thurman, and stopped for a beer after.

Later, in bed, you put your arm on me. You always ran too hot, with the regulator up, and I lifted it off. You slid it back across my chest, and I pulled it off again, and then we built that little action into our first real fight.

I'm still not sure why I pushed your hand away. But I'm writing this as an apology. I should never have shoved you off that night, regardless of the heat.

These questions have each been asked more than 5 times.

1. Are you Scott Rahin?

We are all of us connected by tuning forks implanted in our brain, all of which vibrate sympathetically at the correct, resonant frequency.

2. How many people read Ftrain?

Dozens. Why? Does it change your experience in reading this site to know if it's popular or unpopular? Would Ftrain seem better, less amateur, if I was a real writer, with books and articles published? What do you think about writing on the Web in general?

3. It took me a while to find your e-mail address. Don't you want people to write you?

No, because strangely, I don't do this for praise. Or rather, I can't. I don't deny that I want praise, or any kind of feedback, every single second of the day, but I think it's unhealthy to open a direct line. I used to get excited to receive reader e-mail, taking both praise and criticism very seriously, but then I became numb. I took the e-mail link off of every page and banished it to one solitary part of the site, just in case someone wants to get in touch about my MacArthur grant.

I like when people send me notice of grammatical errors, links to their own work, or reading and viewing recommendations. I would love if people would send me links and references to interesting news about technology, especially in these topics:

• New external Web technologies - things that are related to the Internet but don't happen inside a browser or e-mail client.
• Nanotechnology, quantum physics.
• Applied artificial intelligence, especially as it applies to writing.
• Aesthetics of engineering.
• Aesthetic programming - CSound, MPEG-4, Perl::ImageMajick, genetic algorithms and images, granular synthesis applications.
• Nanotechnology, quantum physics.
• Applied artificial intelligence, especially as it applies to writing.
• Aesthetics of engineering.
• Aesthetic programming - CSound, MPEG-4, Perl::ImageMajick, genetic algorithms and images, granular synthesis applications.

4. When is Ftrain updated?

When I have time, and when I feel it will not be shit, but not sooner if I can help myself. Sometimes I post junk without realizing it, riding on some wave, and then I go back and delete it hours later. Other times I leave it up to punish myself.

To give an idea where I am going, here are sample sections from a few pieces close to completion.

Love Among the Ylem

They had a private joke about strange animals. At night, in bed, they would make up cross-bred monsters, dogs with cats' heads, llamas with elephant ears, rats with human hands, describing these animals' habitats, their herding behavior, their equally imaginary predators. Every creature had disgusting, rapacious, disturbing breeding habits. Their night zoo was filled with interspecies rapists, like the horse ferret, which laid its viscous eggs in the nose of the sneezing snake snail, and creatures like the briefly extant wild tooth, known only from the fossil record. It was just a single big tooth, and after it was born of primeval sludge it ate its mate and young, rendering itself immediately extinct. The stories of these animals were a line running from their third date, at a bad, expensive Italian restaurant, to their cohabitation eight months later, to this dinner; Tess, who woke early, would sometimes sketch the last night's creatures for his wallet.

A Brief History of Sex Robots

In 2008, Apple introduced a one-orifice model for the beginner. While less powerful than IBM's Microsoft-powered Zoom! brand of sex robots and prone to crashes, Apple's sex robots were considered the best looking, and during a triumphant presentation, master showman - and now cocksman - Steve Jobs successfully demonstrated the features of a blowMac running MacOS XXX to the roar of an appreciative crowd.

The Principles of Motherfuckerism

Scott Rahin & I are Motherfuckerists, which means we believe in the philosophy of Motherfuckerism as espoused by the American philosopher Yan Dran. Among other things, Motherfuckerists consider selfishness as an inherently good trait, and feel that you owe nothing special to your blood relatives. Much of this philosophy is clearly espoused in Yan Darn's great book, Hercules Shit All Over Everyone.

Puppet Show

"I'm Paul," I said to the older woman who opened the door. She wore a white button blouse and a pair of tan slacks. She smiled. Like my mother, I wore a black turtleneck and blue jeans, black sneakers. My hair was shaggy. I knelt on the floor and began unpacking, assembling. Wing nuts screwed the legs into the folding frame; the playboard slotted on, the top of the stage was mounted. A red curtain wrapped the outside; side curtains went out like wings. The lights were racked; the dimmer switch hung on the inside by shelves that folded in from the frame. I poured talcum powder across the playboard. Five minutes.

William Blake's Information Revolution

And here, clearly The Mental Traveler can be seen to apply to ARPANET, the birth of the concept of the connected digital network emerging from the limited domain of scientific anguish - nuclear research - a field both evil and well-funded, a field which produced accidental riches, and long prior to privatization:

For there the Babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe
Just as we Reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow

The Mysterious Port 80

Why, in so many discussions about Web usability and design, do people miss the point that the entire user interface is utter misery? You think future network dwellers, jacked into their neurolink VR motion-tracking work environments, will look back at IE, Navigator, and Mozilla, the HTTP protocol and HTML markup language, and say, "yeah, they almost got it, back then, except -- they didn't split their pages into multiple pieces?" Or they'll think that JavaScript rollovers mattered at all?

The Black Monolith just came from the sky; we're barely past the 12-year-olds-in-ape-suits level. This is the barest beginning. We're all running Altairs with dip switches, and hitting them with bones. And yet everyone can't wait to standardize every possible technology, from defining ECMAScript to, more nefariously, insisting, "this is a Web site, and this is a Web log, and this is a Web journal, and this is how they should be created."

The standardizers are convinced that what's needed is codification; they're seeking memetic immortality by imposing their template of thought on everybody else, the more conceptually rigid - XML, DOM, XSLT, ECMAScript - the better, insisting that at this early stage there's a right way. These are technologies for data; they model the behavior of networks, not humans.

Too often, the Internet pundits are expression killers, petrifying the opportunities of the new forms of expression - but it's more important for them to be right than take risks. Academics. Is Microsoft really that much worse than a bunch of Standards Zealots insisting their way is the right way? Yes, in fairness, but not that much worse. Not as much worse as it should be.

To think that we have arrived at true forms of digital narrative, and that they can be codified, is not just idiotic but wrong; those who would tell you what a Journal, Weblog, WebZine, or Web Site is, who would define its shape, are content to live in this current self-reflexive world of digital pablum, as long as they can map it and tell us what to think about it, normalizing all the frequencies, slowing the oscillation to a safe, steady hum.

Despite their efforts, there are no right or correct words or colors or shapes; there are only the words and colors and shapes we choose. If the future is an information economy, our current efforts - including this one - will seem laughable and trivial, greedy and small to our future selves and progeny.

The Black Monolith just came from the sky; we're barely past the 12-year-olds-in-ape-suits level. This is the barest beginning. We're all running Altairs with dip switches, and hitting them with bones. And yet everyone can't wait to standardize every possible technology, from defining ECMAScript to, more nefariously, insisting, "this is a Web site, and this is a Web log, and this is a Web journal, and this is how they should be created."

The standardizers are convinced that what's needed is codification; they're seeking memetic immortality by imposing their template of thought on everybody else, the more conceptually rigid - XML, DOM, XSLT, ECMAScript - the better, insisting that at this early stage there's a right way. These are technologies for data; they model the behavior of networks, not humans.

Too often, the Internet pundits are expression kille