He said, "We wave at people in trains because their lives-their cores- are so intensely and powerfully reflected in the inexorable, unstoppable roaring dreams of motion and voyage and discovery, which trains embody. One can't help but admire the power and brutality and singularity of decision a moving train implies. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Underwood?"

Does Michael practice these things? Where does he get them from? And wouldn't you just know Michael's a train nut like my dad.

I say "Ummm ..." a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it's a CPU word. "It means you're assembling data in your head-spooling."

I also say the word "like" too much, and Karla said there was no useful

explanation for people saying this word. Her best guess was that saying "like" is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known. Not too flattering.

I think I'm going to try and do mental Find-and-Replace on myself to eliminate these two pesky words altogether. I'm trying to debug myself.

Karla is changing herself, too. She's becoming a womanly woman. She's growing her hair and trying to look like an adult. Right now she looks in between, as do most techies. Her skin certainly looks better. Actually, we all have better skin . . . except maybe for Ethan. California sunshine and an attempt to at least slightly cut the crap food seems to have positive epidermal results.

Smoother skin in seven days.

Karla drinks Ovaltine instead of coffee. She drinks it from her high school reunion mug. Her reunion actually had custom mugs, and this is so weird. Susan looked at the mug last week and asked, "Your high school reunion had horizontally cross-marketed merchandise tie-ins? Where'd you go to high school. . . Starbucks?"

Apparently there's some company in Texas that helps you market your reunion.

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

Misty busted into my work space after all the fire engines and everything left, and pawed and slobbered all over me. She smelled like roses and top soil, so I guess she was down in her special grotto in the lower yard.

Ethan came into the office shortly afterward trying to lug Misty out, but instead Misty barraged him with dirty fur and mouth goo, and I know Ethan enjoyed it. He said to her, "Quite often / feel like pawing and slobbering over people I like, too, but I never, of course, actually do it."

I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals- things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty . . . that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

Misty really would have made a terrible seeing-eye dog. She'd bound into traffic to greet truck drivers. Ethan lured Misty outside with a Cocoa Puffs promotional Frisbee, and then stood, wearing his sunglasses, beneath the balcony's shade and played with her a while. He didn't seem to mind the muck all over his Dolce & Gabbana three-piece.

Ethan just wants some company. He's spending far more time around the Habitrail these days since The Hug. We all hug Ethan a lot now because suddenly he's human and Karla held a small meeting the day after the bandage-removal episode and told us all we had to be extra kind to Ethan. I haven't mentioned it at all to Ethan though-too weird. Susan was in shock.

After a while Ethan and I went down to look at the rubble of the house below. Gone. Fwoosh!

Ethan said something provocative and left me dangling. He muttered something about "Michael's expensive little addiction," and I said "Robitussin? It's cheap," and

Ethan said "Robitussin?" so I said, "Well, what did you mean then?" and he said, "Nothing." I hate it when people only open the floodgates a little bit, and then close it up again.

Oh-Ethan is trying to wean himself off cel phones. Good luck!

I heard a lovely expression today about brains-an ad for smart drugs touting thicker, bushier dendrites.

Moist little tumbleweeds blooming inside one's skull.

Susan was doing her biannual hard-drive cleanup, which is half chore/half fun-going on a deleting frenzy, removing all those letters that once seemed so urgent, that now seem pointless, the shareware that infected your files with mystery viruses and those applications that seemed groovy at the time.

Susan's own efforts did get me to do a brief cleanup of my own hard drive. I thought of Karla's equation of the body with the computer and memory storage and all of that, and I realized that human beings are loaded with germs and viruses, just like a highly packed Quadra-each of us are bipedal terrariums containing untold millions of organisms in various states of symbiosis, pathogenesis, mutualism, commensualism, opportunism, dormancy, and parasitism. We're like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, enclosed in a perpetual probabilistic muzz of biology.

I posted a question on the Net, asking bioheads out there what lurks inside the human hard drive.

Michael and Dad were out in the backyard later on watching R2D2 clean out the pool. There was a fair amount of soot because of the fire.

Around midnight I was in the reflective mode and walked around the streets by myself. I felt as though I was walking around the neighborhood on Bewitched. "Look-it's Larry Tate driving a big, ugly mattress of a car! One-great big honking machine."

I thought about the word "machine." Funny, but the word itself seems almost quaint, now. Say it over a few times: machine, machine, machine- it's so ... so ... ten-years-ago. Obsolete. Replaced by post-machines. A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

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WEDNESDAY

This morning I was sitting by the pool with Michael, watching him watch the R2D2 pool cleaner. I mentioned last night's machine/progress notion. He was eating a Snickers leftover from Halloween trick-or-treating, and said, "If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than their own, then BINGO, you believe in progress whether or not you even think so."

So I guess I believe in progress.

Michael was staring into the clean blue fluid, an anti-Narcissus, and he twiddled his index finger in it. He said, "You know, Daniel, I wonder if, after all these years, I have been subliminally modeling my personality after machines-because machines never have to worry about human things- because if they don't get touched or feel things, then they don't know the difference. I think this is a common thing. What do you think?"

I said, "I think nerds secretly dream of speaking to machines-of asking them, 'What do you think and feel-do you feel like me ?'"

Michael asked me, "Do you think humanoids-people-will ever design a machine that can pray? Do we pray to machines or through them? How do we use machines to achieve our deepest needs?"

I said I hope we do. He wondered out loud, "What would R2D2 say to me if R2D2 could speak?"

My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

HELLO

My name is:

UNIX

Friend

or Foe?

I went out shopping for memory this afternoon with Todd and Karla. I had to get a strip of 27512 EPROMs-at Fry's, the nerd superstore on El Camino Real near Page Mill Road. I had to grovel to Ethan for the petty cash; so degrading.

The Fry's chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day-if not the week-and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Therefore, to get guys to shop, a store has to eat up all of their MSE calories in one crack-like burst. Thus, Fry's concentrates only on male-specific consumables inside their cavernous shopping arena, aisles replete with dandruff, bad outfits, and nerdacious mutterings full of buried Hobbit references.