Microserfs

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

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

* * *

Oh - earlier today, driving up Arastradero from Starbucks, the sunset was literally almost killer.

It was all we could do not to crash the car looking at the pinks and oranges. And the view from Mom and Dad's house on La Cresta Drive was staggering: from the San Mateo bridge to the north, practically down to Gilroy in the south. The Contra Costa Mountains were seemingly lit from the inside, like beef-colored patio lanterns, and we even saw a glint from the observatory atop Mount Hamilton. And the dirigible hangar at Moffatt Naval Airfield looked as if the Stay-Puft marshmallow giant was lying down to die. It was so grand.

We sat there on the sagging cedar balcony to watch the floor show. The balcony sags because the sugary brown soil underneath all these older ranch houses is settling; floors bump; doors don't quite close true. We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom's golden retriever that she bought two years ago second-hand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she's too affectionate. It's a flaw we don't mind. It was just a nice moment. I felt like I was home.

* * *

Karla also keeps a diary, but her entries are so brief. For example, she showed me a sample entry for the entire trip to California, all she wrote was: Drove down to California. Dan drew a robot on my place mat at lunch in south Oregon and I put it in my purse. That was it. No mention of anything we talked about. I call it Reduced Instruction Set Computation diaries.

MONDAY

Karla and I took an R&R break and drove 40 miles up to one of the Simpsons bars in the City - the Toronado, where they play The Simpsons every Thursday night. Except I realized it was Monday, so no Simpsons. I can never get the dates right anymore. But soon enough they'll be syndicated on the junky stations every night until the end of the universe, so I suppose I'll survive.

* * *

We took the wrong off-ramp (a deadly mistake in San Francisco - they STILL haven't rebuilt after the 1989 quake; the 101/280 connector links are so unbelievably big and empty and unfinished) and we got lost. We ended up driving through Noe Valley by accident - so pretty. Such a VISION, this city is. I suppose the City is putting all its highway-building energy into building the mention-it-one-more-time-and-I'll-scream information superhighway.

* * *

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We're so sick of it!

* * *

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

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

* * *

Anyway, we couldn't find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District.

San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and

listen to the Germs' first album. Everyone here is so young - it's like Microsoft that way - a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there's an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places. It's a big town that feels like neighborhoods: a municipal expression of Local Area Networks.

And I must admit I'm impressed by the level of techiness - people here are fully jacked in. Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF coffee bar circa The Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:

• thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers

• a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner's old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)

• used mismatched furniture

• bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)

• a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)

• sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads

• multi-pierced bodies

• a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair

• nightclub flyers