And other personal dramas only add to the stew. Yesterday I discovered, to my genuine surprise, that I had consumed nothing but coffee for the then-ending 24-hour period of time. I wasn't hungry, either. Not dizzy, not anything. Just standing there, up to my guts in anxiety, waiting for news to come from New York, and from a conference room in the same building.

I've been really chatty for the past several days. But no one I've spoken to has felt quite as talkative as I, and it's been pretty obvious. But I just kept yapping, kept calling people, kept sensing the discomfort of the person I was talking to, and always gave up on the conversation within an honorable period of time.

Last night was another night of calling all over the world to find someone at home and who wanted to talk to me. And tonight has been the same. It is too late in Belgium to call the person there with whom I occasionally correspond. We met over the Minitel network sometime in 1992, and spoke on the phone, and I sent tapes of myself playing piano while she sent long letters and photographs of her town, which at the time was Strausburg, France. She used a rather masculine nickname online, and for weeks and weeks until she called I thought she was a man.

The phone calls lately are so odd. Especially if someone calls for me but only on business. "You mean *that* is the only reason you called?" I kept asking people. And they mostly revealed that yes, in fact, they only called to ask for a password or a filename or a URL.

"You don't wanna just chat? I feel like talking, man!"

Now, it's late in the day and no one is answering their phone, it is very late in Europe, it is getting later and later on the East Coast, none of my west coast friends ever return my calls any more, no one I know is on-line, and I'm starting to feel a little tired of myself.

Lately I'm experiencing that kick-in-the-ass of mortality. I see people and wonder why I did not follow a path in life similar to theirs. Or if it is too late to change wherever it is I am going.

At a previous job I was at a meeting of about 25 people. We were in a cafeteria-turned-conference-room overlooking Central Park, and our agenda focused on the mundane, rhetorical nonsense of how our company should store its records "into the 21st century."

One topic led to another, and at one point the debate actually got a little heated as several higher-ups questioned why we had not created database fields for products we would develop beyond the year 3000.

To which someone one of the programmers responded "Our database can handle as many as 99,999 new product lines every year until the year 2714. I can't see any of us on pension beyond that."

It was meant to be funny, but that rare sensation of bureaucratic energy wafted out of the meeting. All I remember of the next 3 seconds is the profile of everyone's face, black and shadowed against the windows, their very lives flushing down the side of the building as the futility of existence lifted us out of that intoxication of relevance.

And that is how I'm feeling these days. Like every endeavor is just nonsense, and that this earth is a fascinating little pod.

But it's OK. After the senseless episode of positive energy and talkativeness this week it is routine that all of it drain away as quickly as possible. The highs for me are rare, but they never come without unbelievable lows a few minutes later.

On the phone last night I called some friends back in New York to tell them I had a more-or-less definite date of return to that city. (October 10. 1010, that is.) Someone asked "Did you just run a fucking marathon or something?" And I asked why and he said I was gasping for air as if there was some shortage of the stuff.

I did, in fact, run home from work on Friday, the news of a scheduled and immovable departure date from this situation was that energizing.

This place, this web-space, this thing we do, I am already starting to think of this as "The old homepage." I want to move on. This place has been here for 2 and a half years and I am proud of a great deal of it, but the accumulation is mounting like a giant noseblow, and I get the strange feeling that it is pushing me out of my chair.

Unless death interrupts, I have to find the time to chase down and grow those ideas I've had since adolescence. You know, those things that are in you, that fill you and litter your personal vernacular and offhand remarks all throughout your life. I have lately had occasion to think of those ideas again, to wonder why they floundered or got squashed, and to wonder what makes me think I'm so special that I don't have time to give them everything I can.

This place will never go away, not by my own choosing, but it will change. I am holding my finger on the switch. It will not disappear because nothing in my life which means anything to me disappears. Permanence. Stability. I have to have these things or else it's just waiting, and looking, and going nowhere.

Praise.

The time has not yet passed in which a lot of people with personal home pages feel that the world owes them a goddam living.

But we are not doing anything new here. None of us are. Paths are not being broken. During the coming years every printed word and every scrap of every culture's intellectual heritage will be transferred to the internet; the phenomenon is similar to the "historic classical recordings" craze of a decade ago in which every 78-rpm and the earliest cylinder recordings ever etched were re-issued on CD to wild critical acclaim.

New technology lets us think we're hearing and discovering old things for the first time, but nothing about our cultural heritage has changed. Technology does not change thought. It imparts no additional merit to mediocre expression or trivial narrative, nor does it owe anything to the past.

For some reason I've lately had occasion to actually talk about this place. Why I ever called it The Place of General Happiness is lost to me now. But it's been unnerving to talk about this place. Out loud. With other people. So strange.

There is stuff in here that I can not believe I created, and there are words in here which sound like the voice of someone I'll never know. Even now, typing like this, these words, and thinking of your eyeballs darting over them and your fingers scrolling through and your lips smiling and brow screwing up -- even now I turn up my hands and ask "Who?" "What?"

Why is the back of my head numbing right now? My fingers, as well, and arms.

I am looking at a live image of a street corner in the Canary Islands. Things make me sad at times for no clear reason. Pictures of people in far off places doing things, driving cars, looking around, why do they make me sad?

Yesterday, after another frivolous phone conversation, I became fascinated by the view from my desk. I work in the south tower of our building, and from where I sit can be seen all the windowed offices of the north tower. There are television sets in every window, and eyeballs were glued to every one of them, and as the seemingly momentous news of NBC's dismissal of Marv Albert reached the air I could see every television in the place saying the same thing, and every face near every one of those televisions looking and listening.

While the Los Angeles police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford Bronco I was on the m79 bus in New York passing through Central Park and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A man on that bus had a radio through which Larry King's voice "announced" the chase to those of us without televisions.

The bus reached 5th Avenue, where apartment buildings met every movement of your eyes. I looked toward the north. Many of the apartments' curtains were wide open, and all of their televisions turned on. Anywhere I looked I could see what was happening on the highway in Los Angeles, and through the radio of the man nearby I could hear the unfolding events which became the stuff of folklore.

I slowly panned my eyes across one of the apartment buildings and was never without sight of the police cars and the white car. 79th Street was saturated with this event, and there were televisions everywhere you looked, all of them showing the same thing, everyone stopping what they were doing, adults and children leaping from their showers, from their beds, from their work.

I just paused many minutes between that last paragraph and this one, and erased several sentences of irrelevant allusions to the 1960's. I have learned to just stop typing any time I try to be prosaic. Is that the word? Prosaic? I don't know. But I am looking forward to going home. To New York. I know it sounds hackneyed but I can taste it from here. I can feel the air, and the people. Such safety there. Such oblivion.