Scowl, Nu?

Avery

Janet

Ok, now before one of you bleeding heart liberals start calling the police on me, let me clarify the topic. I don't really want to kill my neighbors, there is only one of my neighbors who I really want to kill.

Upon further consideration (and some advice from my legal counsel)… I really don't want to kill my downstairs neighbor. I just want to hurt him really badly.

I am not sure what annoys me more… the fact that even though he is TWO FLOORS under our apartment I can still hear his wannabe pseudo-techno god-awful music thump thump thumping so loud that the cats freak out OR the fact that when you knock on his door that he doesn't acknowledge that there is anyone out there OR the fact that when you confront him the next day he can't recall that he was even playing music the last night.

ARRGH! It makes me so mad that I want to go out to his circuit breaker, kill the power, and stand outside his door, waiting for him to come out so I can introduce him to by friend Louisville Slugger.

The damn thing is this: EVEN though I have called the cops twice on him and EVEN though I have complained to the landlord (who, by the way, is great man who is between a rock and a hard place due to this schmuck)… if I ever threatened this arrogant bastard, I'd be the one arrested.

Why the hell can't people take personal responsibility for their actions anymore?

The guy who lives two floors below us makes me so tense.  I mean, he makes my blood pressure go so sky-high that I feel short of breath.  All of this stress simply because either he's deaf, or he thinks the rest of the other 9 apartments are, because he plays his stereo at the loudest volume possible, with the loudest bass possible.

We're talking so loud that we can hear the songs over our TV set…and this is TWO floors away!  TWO!  And this isn't just a couple of hours on a Friday or Saturday night, no sir.  It is completely without warning, just unpredictable enough so that you have to sit anxiously on the edge of the couch for the rest of the night (20 minutes of music, 10 minutes of silence, 30 minutes of music, 30 minutes of silence…has he stopped for good?). 

 I once left work at 10:00 AM with a sickmaking migraine headache. When I got home the music was on!  On another occasion I came home from a terrible day at work.  At 5:00 PM the music was on! One night I was trying to relax and get ready for bed (8:00 PM this time) What? You guessed it!  Music!  On!

The peculiar thing about this situation is the fact that we had lived here for, like two years without hearing a peep out of this guy. Then all of a sudden it was like an epidemic, happening every day.  Then for about a year it was relatively quiet again. He's very cyclical, that neighbor.

You would think that complaining and calling the police would get him evicted. But NO!  In San Francisco, everyone has rights…and it's almost impossible to evict someone without a docket chock full of a year's worth of proof.  I could go on and on about the earplugs and Nytol I had to buy, but he just shut off the music.  I hope it's for good this time! 

My first computer was a Macintosh.

Actually, that isn’t quite true. My first computer was a TI-99/4A which was connected to the only color television in the house which, if memory serves, was picked up for $20 at a tag sale or something. It was all of the rage… 4K of ram, a BASIC interpreter built into the chipset, a cassette drive for saving programs and a cartridge slot for video games and to load new programming languages. I loved that little bugger… and spent hours programming on it. However it was extremely limited… the machine only understood BASIC and the tape drive was less than reliable. Add to that the fact that it didn’t have a printer, and nobody else that I knew had one.

My next machine was a Trash-80 Model 3 (That’s the old Tandy Radio Shack 80, also known as the TRS-80), which I got from (of all places) my summer camp. You see, they were upgrading their registration system, and someone knew that I was a computer geek… and they were just planning on trashing the old model 3s… so they gave it to me.

The TRS-80 was technically my first grown-up computer. It had dual 5.25” floppy drives and a built-in glowing green-on-black monitor. The TRS-80 also had the CPM Operating System built in, and you could load any interpreter via floppy, meaning that you could use it to program in all of the cool languages of the day: LOGO, Fortran and Pascal. The TRS-80 was great, because the town library had all of the good games for it (like the predecessor to ZORK), and you could check them out for a week (just like a book).

We had a brand new computer lab in my Middle School, which had about twenty Atari 8-bit computers installed for our use. Essentially, they were worthless, as the school decided that the only programming language they would teach is BASIC, and since I knew as much as the teacher at that point, the class time was spent by me playing video games and helping out the other students.

When I was in 9th grade, my mother helped soften the blow of having to move to West Hartford by buying me a Macintosh Classic. In my mind, this was my first real computer.

The Mac Classic was everything this little proto-geek could want. 2 Megs of ram, a 800kb (internal) and a 1.44mb (external) floppy drive, an Imagewriter II color printer with a Thunderscanner (this little device that you plugged into the Imagewriter which turned it from a printer into a scanner) and the best thing in the world… a 1200 baud Practical Peripherals modem.

The modem threw me into the online world. I would spend every night holed up in my room dialing out to BBSes and Compuserve. Then I was given the Holy Grail… the one thing that set me apart from all of the other squabbling proto-geeks in West Hartford: an internet account. You see, a friend of mine went to the University of Hartford, and he was able to arrange for me a dial-in account on the University of Hartford’s VAX system. I now had the ability to send email around the world, participate in MUDs ad MUCKs, chat with people on IRC and my favorite… read the USENET News Groups.

I remember the early days of reading comp.sys.macintosh (I think that was the name of the group)… back when the Newsgroups were the real source for information exchange on the net… before the http protocol or the web even existed. We would talk about everything… but our favorite thing to do was dis on Bill Gates and Microsoft.

You see, in the summer between 9th and 10th grade, I came across a second-hand IBM Clone. It sucked. It was big and clunky and was horrible to use. However, it did have a 300 MB Hard-Drive, which was considered massive at the time. That, and it had an EGA Color adapter and monitor. Hmm… a hard drive, a color monitor and a modem… now what would an enterprising kid do with all of that…

So, for the next year or so, this computer would become the focal point of all of my friends, because I had a massive collection of nudie pictures on the system. Now, don’t get me wrong… it’s not like what’s out there on the net now… it was mostly scanned pictures of topless models from European magazines stored in 16 color low-resolution .gif files. Still, these topless photos became the new baseball cards to trade for me and my 14 year old friends. We would spend hours calling into the BBSes around the Greater Hartford area trying to find the latest and greatest pictures. It was something to bond over.

Still, other than the color monitor, this pieces-parts PC sucked. I would post about my trials and tribulations of using the ol’ PC on the Mac Newsgroups. We would mock the fact that it didn’t have a Graphical User Interface and that all of the filenames needed to be 8 letters long (or less). We mocked how often it crashed. It was then that I decided that I would never be sucked into the cult of Microsoft.

When I sold my Mac so Janet and I could afford to pay rent when we first moved in together, I used some of the money and bought an Amiga 1000. What an amazing machine that thing was! It was fast and had great graphics… and oh… the games! It was better than what I could find at the arcade! That Amiga was my primary computer for almost two-and-a-half years until Janet and I moved out to West Virginia. At that point, we bought a PC Clone because one of the classes we had required that we had a machine that ran MS-DOS. Plus, we needed something with a printer for our school work. We had to face it: the Amiga just couldn’t cut it for a school computer.

Geez, we hated that PC Clone! The only time we would even turn it on was to write papers (using the GEOS Note Writer, for the GEOS Operating System… 'cause I wouldn’t use Windows 3.1, as I was still anti-Gates at that time) and connect to Prodigy to send emails. As soon as we had enough credit to get an Apple Credit Card, we dumped the clone and bought a Mac Classic II with an HP Ink-jet Printer. We sold the clone and were finally Microsoft Free!

After moving to Boston a few years later, I got a job in a Macintosh Hard Drive OEM (the people who put the drives into the cases and sold them at a terrific markup)… and my IBM/Steve Gates hatred continued. When we briefly ventured into the IBM side of the market, we would spend afternoons in tech support complaining about how poorly DOS and Windows handled SCSI CD-Rom Drives. We all hated IBM. The few PCs on our network (used for inventory management) constantly crashed, and we couldn’t figure out why people would spend good money on these systems.

Up until last year, that Mac Classic was the only machine that we owned… but I had crossed over to the dark side at work. They gave me a laptop running Windows 95 and a 28.8kbps modem so I could work from home. More and more, Janet and I would use the laptop instead of the Mac which was now collecting dust on my desk. We tried to counteract it by purchasing a NeXT Slab, one of the finest UNIX machines ever made (which is now the foundation for the new Apple OS)… but it was too hard to resist, and we bought the parts to build a PC last year.

1300 words later, you can see that I am not a Mac Cultist or a Microsoft Junkie. I am, however a long term computer user, geek and technologist. So, you might ask (based on the actual topic of this week’s Topic of the Week), what does Avery think about Microsoft / Bill Gates?

Ok… here goes. Gates is a Marketing and Legal genius. Back when IBM was evaluating a whole slew of different Operating Systems, he sold them on MS-DOS. Now, did Bill create MS-DOS? No. He licensed it from DR Systems. Does it matter? No.

Gates used his Sales and Marketing savvy to attach his technology to the industry giants: Intel and IBM. IBM would only use Intel Chips for its PCs, and MS-DOS would only support Intel Processors. He essentially created the PC industry.

Where were the Steves at this time (Wozniak and Jobs)? They were in their garages making the better computer with the better operating system. Unfortunately, while they were scraping together the capital to do the hardware development… Gates was using IBM to sell his technology to the masses.

Gates was never the innovator. He saw where the wind was blowing, let the “bleeding edge” companies figure out where the technology was going, and if someone came up with something that sold, they’d either buy it or make an analogue.

I admit it: Apple Better. Microsoft Smarter.

If I were king, I’d be running an Intel box with the OpenStep or BeOS Operating System… but I need a system where I can use my work files easily… that means that my primary home system needs to be a PC running MS Windows.

So, once I took that deep breath and accepted Microsoft back into my home, I realized that it isn’t all that bad. Sure it crashes, but no more than my old TRS-80 did.

When I went to evaluate PDA, I wanted to fall in love with the Palm Pilot… but for $350, it was just a black-and white low-resolution machine that reminded me of the blocky 16 color porn that I used to look at on my old EGA monitor. I evaluated the available systems, and eventually decided on the Philips Nino, which runs Windows CE. Now I always have a little piece of Gates on me where ever I go.

It’s sad. My Nino has 1000 times the RAM of the old TI-99/4A that I started off on over 15 years ago. Hell, my watch has 3 times the RAM of the old TRS-80 that I used to program on.

The funny thing is: now that I’ve finished this Topic of the week and am looking back at the last fifteen years of computing and the internet, I think I’d happily give it all up and go back to an old VT100 terminal attached into a UNIX system via a 2400 baud modem. I’d gladly make Scowl, Nu? an Internet accessible BBS system with message boards and text files for the daily entries into the Barfly Chronicles…

…and just for you, maybe I’d even dig up some of those 16 bit .gifs that I know you like so much.

Hallelujah! Someone – someone who is not one of our friends or family – actually suggested a topic for the Topic of the Week. This person wanted to know what we thought of Bill Gates. When I read that question I thought, "Bill Gates, Bill Gates…what do I think of Bill Gates anyway?" Turns out that I haven't really thought of Bill Gates very much at all, I guess.  He seems more like a myth than an actual person; a collective of minds, an untouchable. But is he an untouchable because he's brilliant…or because he's rich?

The man is intelligent, there's no doubting that. He's the CEO of one of the biggest household names in the world, largely because of his thinking, his problem solving, his business savvy and, to a smaller extent, his good luck charms. The reward for this, in America anyway, is money. So much money, in fact, that he and his wife and his little daughter could go on shopping sprees until the cows came home and they still couldn't spend it all.

But he earned it, right? In the past, everyone mocked him because he was a geek with mismatched clothes and a bad haircut; now he's a billionaire and everyone mocks him because he's a cocky success story with a bad haircut AND because that's really all we can do in 1999. But he didn't just stumble upon his fortunes when taking a walk through the pines while contemplating DOS one day. Sure, there are too many zeros on his bank statement. Sure, he can do whatever his heart desires whenever it desires it. But what are we going to do, make him give it away?

It's funny how society thinks that Bill Gates, someone who has changed technology and therefore the world (for the better or for the worse, it doesn't matter) has too much money, but no one would even dare utter those words about our more-than-a-little-wealthy sports "heroes" who do little else than run around a squared-off piece of land.

Personally, I don't really mind Bill Gates. I haven't really followed any Microsoft news to any great extent, and to tell you the truth, when I found out that he was this week's topic, I tried to bone up on my Gates Trivia by doing a search for "Bill Gates" via Yahoo (which was a mistake, as there are about seventeen gazillion websites that have some type of Bill Gates information on them.) See, while Avery has a great deal of interest in computers and technology (and always has), I was a relatively "late bloomer" computer-wise. Years ago, I remember Avery introducing me to the joys of BBSing well into the wee hours of the night. I consider this the primitive precursor to the web, when the coolness factor had more to do with how many phone lines that the SysOp had installed in his basement (50 lines! Never busy!) and how many cool games were available for downloading and nothing at all to do with thought-provoking journalistic content.

I then took some Quark and dBase III classes in college while I was going through my "computers are the anti-Christ" phase. Quark. dBase III. Lotus. Does anyone use these programs anymore? Do any help-wanted ads list these as a pre-requisite for an entry-level administrative job? No! Why? Windows! MS Office! Bill!

I cut my technological teeth on Microsoft Windows. I got my first job and started using Word and Excel, and five years later — still using 'em –I consider myself somewhat of a Windows Whiz. A while ago, Avery bought a NeXT machine for us to use, a machine which runs on a Unix-based (the anti-Windows) operating system. I have tried to use it, I have. The little picture of the house for "Home" and all the lines of commands you have to enter, the cluncky toolbar in the wrong place, the whole nine yards. But I get frustrated with it too easily…it's slow-going for me because I'm too used to Windows; my mouse just knows instinctively where to go. Windows is for the lowest common denominator. After Windows, everything else is "too hard."

I did have my Windows-based gripes, though. That whole "you are only allowed eight letters to name your file" thing was damn annoying, and I'm glad I can now call my Word document "Business Plan – July 1998" instead of the former "zxslplzc" which, unfortunately did not come with the Janet.doc Secret Decoder ring which was so badly needed by anyone who should happen to need a file off of my hard drive.

Then there was that slow day at work when I thought it would be so new and exciting and fun to abandon my clunky Netscape Navigator and go with smooth Microsoft Internet Explorer like all the other cool kids. After 4+ hours of downloading on my slow work computer, I installed it only to find out that, like some weird, crawly bacteria, IE had managed to infiltrate every part of my computer with it's happy primary colors. What's the deal with my desktop? What are all these Microsoft icons? Why do I need Outlook Express? Enough with all the navy and orange already! Shut it off, shut it off!

The wiley Internet Explorer took over my computer that day. Kinda like Bill himself, eh? More power to him, I say. If we didn't like it, we wouldn't be using it…there is life after point-n-click, y'know. As for me, I've found a happy medium. Netscape at work, Explorer at home, Windows everywhere.

It all balances out.

There was a period in my life a few years ago when I hated the computer. Hated it. It was around the time that everyone was making a big deal about how great computer animation was, and in an artistic act of stubborn opposition, I resisted the computer as much as I could, arguing about art and pencils and using your hands and what a travesty it would be that nothing would be truly creative anymore because computers could render everything perfect, and wasn't it the subtle imperfections that made the great works of art so… great?

That was right after college, when I was belligerent about nearly everything. I called anyone who so much as touched a computer a geek (or a nerd or a loser)…until a couple of years later, when I stumbled upon The Internet. After spending hours upon hours linking from one site to another, I became formally addicted, and finally accepted the computer as a friend, not a foe. I wanted a website. I wanted to be a geek.

So I started reading the first chapter of the O'Reilly HTML book, and slaved over my sad, little Tripod Member Page which was blue and yellow and turquoise and said a whole lot of nothing, but was all coded lovingly by hand, god dammit! At the time, Avery also had a personal web page on Tripod, and one after one particularly trying day in San Francisco, we decided to pool our efforts while at the same time venting our stresses, and do one webpage called Scowl. 

We didn't really have a format in mind when we created Scowl; as a matter of fact, the whole "online journal" phenomenon was unknown to us until someone pointed out that our site could be considered as such due to the dated entries. Since we started Scowl 8 or so months ago, the whole online journal community has grown by leaps and bounds; some of them great, others just pre-teen unicorns and rainbows, but an awful lot of them containing entries about the interesting e-mail that their readers sent them. "Hmph" has always been my attitude on that subject, as we have only received a few e-mails from the readers of our site.

When we started publishing Scowl, we weren't expecting critical acclaim or anything, but we thought that for sure we would be able to bond over shared annoyances with at least a few people. We think it's an entertaining step above a stagnant dime-a-dozen personal page, and cheaper than making copies of what would be a traditional hard-copy zine at Kinko's.

The web-publishing equivalent of the "If a tree falls in the forest" question would have to be "Do you do it for You or do you do it for Them [the readers]?" There are a lot of people who maintain that the only reason that they have a journal on the web is for themselves, which I think is a big, fat lie: why publish it if it's only for you? Why not password-protect it, then, or write in Note Pad or write IN a note pad? If it's in public, you want someone to see it, plain and simple, and  we're no different. 

When Avery came up with the new Topic of the Week idea of inviting people to submit topics or questions for us to write about (there's only so many topics you can come up with before you just start to run dry!), I anticipated us getting zero response. Why should anyone write to us now, when they never have before? And really, when you think about it, why should we expect anyone to? The web medium itself is the epitome of the "I want it now," short-attention-span, useless-information-laden society that we've turned into…who has the time or the energy in 1999 to tell us what to write about?      

Well, OK. We understand. Just remember…no complainin'. (And would it hurt you to pick up a pen once in a while to let us know how you–sorry. Never mind.)

Hello… I know you're out there. I can hear you breathing, damnit!

When we started up Scowl, Nu?, I thought that it would be something more than just a journal or an e-zine. I thought it would be the beginning of an online community where like minded barflies and curmudgeons would come to vent and bitch and moan…

… and according to the server logs, we get a good amount of hits. What's more surprising, most of the hits are from return visitors. By the looks of it, at least thirty of you come over to visit at least once a week, and about ten of you come at least once every other day.

Still, I wouldn't know that by the minimal interaction that we ever have with yinz (which is Pennsylvanian for the collective plural tense of y'all). The message boards go relatively untouched… and aside from two or three people that we exchange emails with regularly… we have no idea of who is visiting the site. That's why when we changed the Topic of the Week to a format where we could have some interaction with our regular (and brand spanking new) readers, we hoped to get some responses.

It's not Thursday night and not a single question has been lobbed our way.

Don't get me wrong… I'm not whining here, nor am I planning on closing up shop and heading out to join a militia in Montana. In all reality, I write because I enjoy writing… and I know some people (including family members and friends) read the site in order to keep up with what's going on in my life. On top of that, if I didn't write, I'd have probably seriously crippled a few yuppies by now.

Hmm… maybe I should consider a smack-a-yuppie filled hiatus.

Maybe it's a little spoiled to consider the web to be any different from a traditional publishing media. I mean, is the web that much different from a magazine or a book? Hell, I read five or six magazines a month and I've never written a letter to the editor… so why should I expect to hear from the teeming hordes reading the site?

Perhaps it's because the web is supposed to the new interactive media… something bigger and better than the mainstream publishing media out there. The whole conception of the web was to create academic discourse… now it has just become another commercial medium for companies to hock their wares.

Or maybe it's because in my heart, I look at some of these sites that get hundreds of emails a week and know that Scowl is much better most of the drek out there. I mean, our graphics aren't the best and the layout is in need of a serious revamping… and yes, we should update more often. But I think what we have is pretty damn good… and obviously at least fifty of you do as well.

So the question and answer period is over, kids. Put your pencils down and pass the exams to the front of the row, because from now on… you'll take what we give ya!

… and somewhere in the dark recesses of your soul… you know you like it better that way.

When Janet and I first decided to take the plunge and make the move to San Francisco, we did our research on what the city was like. Actually, what we did was watch television shows set in California and read through a couple of websites talking about life in California.

When we first came to San Francisco to scout out apartments and jobs, we found the weather to be beautiful. The food was amazing… I ate burritos almost every day. By the time we left to finalize our affairs in Boston (and to graduate college), we felt that San Francisco was the perfect place to live.

Landing in Boston confirmed our feelings. When we left San Francisco, it was a cool 60 degrees. When we landed at Logan International Airport, it was snowing. Again.

The first year in San Francisco, we reveled in the fantastic weather. We spent Christmas in Napa wearing shorts and t-shirts. Well, Janet was wearing a short little plaid skirt… but I digress. When our relatives called us from Connecticut to tell us how bad the winter was, we would rub it in by telling them that we were wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Yeah, we were cruel, but so what? If they didn’t like shoveling wet snow every day, they could move just like we did.

In San Francisco, we didn’t have any snow. We didn’t have thunderstorms or hurricanes. San Francisco wasn’t prone to tornadoes or even spells of extreme heat. We were living in a 65 degree paradise. Even the fog was charming.

The second year in San Francisco, we had a horribly hot summer. We had fans running 24 hours a day at the house. Since offices in the City weren’t prepared for the extreme heat, they didn’t have strong enough air conditioners. The Director of the division where I worked changed the dress policy from ties and slacks to tank tops and shorts.

So, for two months, we would go to work wearing as little as humanly possible. Unfortunately, at 3:30pm, the fog would start to roll in. Fog is San Francisco’s natural air conditioner. By 4pm, the temperature would drop to 60 degrees, which meant that when we left the office, we would freeze. Every morning, we would say that we should bring sweaters for the afternoon… then we would start sweating before we finished getting dressed and we would decided that we didn’t want to haul the sweater to the office… yadda yadda yadda. Then we would leave to catch the bus home and just like every other night, we would freeze.

The third year, we just decided that the weather was just too boring. Since there were no season changes, the leaves never turned color, the grass never died, nothing ever changed. That was the year that we also realized what happens when a city doesn’t get rain on a regular basis.

No, we’re not talking about anything like a drought. I mean, as long as there is bottled water, Gatorade and Amstel Light, the average San Franciscan would never go thirsty. We’re talking about the other things that you take for granted about the rain.

First off, Rain is nature’s natural air cleaner and ionizer. You know how the air smells after a drizzle? That’s right… it smells great. All of the pollutants are sucked out of the air… and the little pollen pieces that makes me sneeze are nowhere to be found (ok, the mold comes after the rain ends, but I’m not that allergic to mold).

Also, rain cleans the shit off of the streets. All of that dog shit and piss that covers the sidewalks gets cleaned by the rain. Since we don't have regular rain, the city has a program where sidewalk cleaners come out with compressed hot water and steam clean the crap off of the sidewalks. They usually do this early in the morning.

Once a month during our third year in San Francisco, they decided to steam clean the area by the bus stop at 6:30 am. Unfortunately, we were catching the 6:30am bus that year. So, that one morning, each month, we would walk out to a steamy dried piss and puke filled fog cloud. Mmm. What a way to start the morning. It was absolutely disgusting.

So, now we're about five months into our fifth year in San Francisco. We haven't gotten any thunderstorms or hurricanes. However, we've been in the middle of an extreme cold snap the last few weeks… cold enough for frost in the city. On top of that, last week there was an earthquake. Follow that by a couple days of torrential rain and a tornado in the East Bay. Then we had the power failure on one of the coldest days of the month on Tuesday.

What next? Locusts?

To someone from the East Coast, the state of California seems like another country, if not a whole other planet, what with all its Hollywood and Beverly Hills mansions and wineries and famous people and the Spellings and whatnot. When I was growing up in small-town New England, people who had the money to spend on vacations went to the exciting city of Orlando, Florida, with all of its Disney World and later, Epcot Center and MGM Studios, and beaches and hot weather and alligators and bad-smelling water. Back then, it seemed highly unlikely that your average East Coast resident would even want – or need – to venture all the way over to the opposite side of the country, never mind to the vastly famous state of California.

Evidently, I'm not the only one who entertained this thought, because the first question out of everybody's mouth (and I do mean everybody's — I must have answered that question two hundred times by now) when they find out that we moved here from the East is "and what brought you to California?" Truth be told, we moved out here totally on a whim, less than 24 hours after our college graduation ceremony for no real reason in particular. Being fresh out of college we figured that we had to find a job anyway, and California seemed just as good a place as any, so why not? We knew someone moving out here, he had a 24-foot moving van with only 9 feet of stuff, and the rest is history.

As we began to meet people in San Francisco, we started to wonder if there was anyone living in the city who was actually born and raised here. Most people are transplants, leaving the cities and towns where they've grown up and somehow ending up here. When I think of all the people I know, only two or three grew up in the Bay Area. This city's weird that way.

Alluringly weird is how I would describe my experience when we visited San Francisco for the first time, right before we moved out here. The city seemed like something out of a storybook — the people and attitudes were so vibrant and colorful, the vibe was strange and laid-back; totally the opposite from the preppy, stuffy, conservative mannerisms of New England. It was intimidating and very different, yet when our week was up and our plane took off due East, I looked down onto the city's lights and felt sad to go, like I had already gotten attached to something that I couldn't quite identify.

The actual process of living here was a different story altogether. What once seemed so new and exciting on our visit only served to constantly annoy me in the beginning. Laid-back started to seem like just plain lazy and apathetic. Colorful personalities were really just crazy, homeless ex-hippies who constantly harassed passers-by and peed on the street. It took me nearly a year to stop hating this city and all of its liberal-minded, meandering ways. For the next couple of years I suppose that I grew to like it, and would inexplicably defend it to anyone who I heard mention even the slightest criticism of my city, but now I'm beginning to feel the slow rise of the bile of annoyance yet again, and I'm wondering if I should just stop playing with fate and go back to the East Coast where I was born and where maybe I belong, only I just don't realize it yet.

SInce this city has a history of drawing creative people to it like moths to a flame, what you end up with is a conglomeration of opinionated, creative, often high-strung (or strung-out) people, people who were the losers and outcasts in high school who are searching for a place that they can finally feel like they fit somewhere. Believe you me, you will find no shortage of ex-band geeks and tortured souls here. San Francisco is beyond overcrowded. Apartment buildings full of people are literally wall-to-wall, lining street upon street upon street. There are no lawns or flower beds (though people do try, planting things into the occasional crack in the sidewalk), and the only nature we ever get to see is when we go to Golden Gate Park, one of the only city-sponsored patches of grass.

We have a mayor who is a media hound who is completely out of touch with the plight of the common man, and who has appeared in People, guest-starred on Suddenly Susan, and showed up on the Playboy's list of the Best Dressed Men of 1998. We hear more about his hats and where he shops than his policies. We have a public transportation system that, despite having the second-highest paid employees in the country, barely runs. The city is so overcrowded that in order to do something as simple as go out to dinner, you need to decide what cuisine you will crave and what time you will crave it a week in advance, or risk waiting in line for at least 30 minutes, no matter what you choose. Gentrification is running rampant; rents are skyrocketing and forcing people onto the street. With roughly one Starbucks or Jamba Juice per city block, these newly-minted homeless and their army of previously-homeless brethren have even nicer storefronts to sleep in and shinier corners to stand upon. We live in a place where the earth moves under our feet without warning.

When people ask me "what brought us out to California" they're looking for a reason and I usually try to give them one. The funny thing is, not one of them has offered their own reasons in return, and I've never asked. But now I'm beginning to wonder, what is it about this place?

I had my free star chart done the other day at some site or another, and one part of the report that came along with it told me that I have a "very strong affinity with animals — an acute sensitivity and a nonverbal kind of rapport with them." This I found kind of strange, not because I have a fear of any animal in particular, like a people who fear dogs because they were bitten by one in the past, but because I just don't feel any particular bond with them. My best friend in 5th grade had a horse, and whenever I went with her to visit it, all the horse handling people would tell us not to stand behind it, because it might get nervous and kick. Whenever they offered me the chance to groom it, I would nervously decline because to do that you had to go around the back of the horse and I thought for sure that it would kick me, and I would also have nothing to do with the feeding of carrots to the horse, what with all the stories of fingers getting bitten off and whatnot.

There was another time, just recently, where we were out taking a walk; the weather was sunny and nice, and I was in a pretty good mood for me. We passed a little vegetable stand outside of which was a dalmatian tied to a tree while its owner shopped. It was sitting there looking so cute and unassuming, so I went over to pet it and all of a sudden it turned into some Kujo-type beast, barking and snapping all over the place, causing me to nearly jump out of my skin and then proceed to curse that firehouse dog for the entire rest of the day. Dogs. They really perplex me.

We had a dog whose name was McDuff when I was younger. He was a cute little Black Lab/Irish Setter puppy when he came from the SPCA, but grew up to be quite large and high strung. When he got too big, we eventually had to keep him outside in the backyard where no one could really play with him because when he stood up on two legs he was as tall as most of us kids back then. When my skinny 11-year old self decided to take him for a walk one day, no sooner had I unsnapped the chain and snapped the leash onto his collar that he was taking off like a bat out of hell, sending me face-down into the grassy dirt and literally dragging me behind him like something out of a bad cartoon until I grabbed a handful of hedges to stop him, my arm getting nearly yanked out of its socket in the process.

Since it was too cruel to keep the dog outside during the long Connecticut winters, we ended up putting him in the cellar where, on one afternoon when no one was home he decided to snoop through a fishing tackle box. He must've been way ahead of the whole body-piercing trend, I guess, because when we got home we were greeted by a whining McDuff with 3 or 4 fishhooks stuck through his lips. Everyone started to panic and the dog was stuffed into the car and shuttled to the vet for an emergency fishhook removal process.

We also had a cat for a short period of time, a cat my sister got for a reward for no longer needing rubber sheets on her bed anymore. When we went to the farm to pick it up, I saw a goat walk by one of those doors where the top half was open and the bottom half was closed. It walked by the door, turned and looked right at me, and I swear this is true, grinned — showing its teeth and everything –and kept walking. (I'm sure that it had just gotten done eating a tin can or something and just had gas.) My sister named the cat Pepper, and though it was strictly a housecat not allowed outside for any reason whatsoever, it ironically met its untimely demise by getting hit by a car during one of its abrupt attempts at escape. We told my sister that it ran away.

Aside from a failed attempt at an aquarium, where the catfish kept getting bigger and the water kept getting darker and the one angelfish attacked the other angelfish and took out an eye, which caused the poor thing to swim around all lopsided and bump into the sides of the tank every few seconds; aside from that the only other pets I've had since are the two cats we have now, Murat (named after Gorbachev's cat, while we were in our International Studies phase in college) and Odessa. We got Mu while we were on vacation in Florida, and then took her on the cross-country drive with us from Boston to San Francisco, during which she behaved exceptionally well all the way up to the California border, at which point she commenced howling and doing that deep-cat-voice meeOOWWW thing, and then she shat all over the inside of the cat carrier and when we laughed at her she just did it some more, to punish us.

When we got Odessa, we chose her because she was the loudest one at the pound. She was also one of the skinniest and scrappiest looking, and so tiny that when we brought her home I was afraid of accidentally sitting on her. To some people Odie doesn't even exist, however, because whenever anyone other than the two of us come into the apartment, she hides under the bed and will not come out, no matter what. Three years later she's still tiny, antisocial and sneaky; I'll walk into the closet and reach for something on the shelf, end up touching something furry, freak out and turn on the light. There sits Odie on the top shelf, silently blinking and shedding all over all of the nicely folded clothes. Then I'll pick her up and pretend she's a superhero and run around the apartment with her so she can feel like she's flying. She doesn't like flying. The cat will scratch me, I will scream, and Avery will shout "stop torturing the cat" from the other room.

Our cats are picky, only eating Friskies Tender Cuts canned cat food, and never the chicken-flavored. They turn their noses up at the chicken-flavored. Mu knows the word "milk," and meows like crazy when we take it out of the fridge, but when I put some in a little Japanese wasabi dish for her, she just sniffs at it and walks away. They have not yet met a toy that they want to play with, preferring to laze around instead. Mu has her certain sleeping spots, including the exercise bike, the Health Rider, and my side of the bed. So possessive is she of my side of the bed that she will actually sit next to it and incessantly meow at me when I lie down, like I'm in her space.

Even though Odie and Mu, who are often at odds, did join forces to destroy an entire hallway carpet by sharpening their claws on it, and they sometimes choose to throw up in the most inconveneient of places, they do look awfully cute when they tuck their feet under themselves in that little meatloaf pose.

And they hardly ever get mad when you laugh at them when they leave their tongues sticking out of their mouths.

I am not sure why rational, sensible people choose to live with boxes of shit cluttering their house. No, I’m not talking figuratively about the sort of shit that people keep, like old newspapers and magazines. I’m talking about real shit. Hell, I’m a reasonably rational person, and I have two boxes full of shit in my house. I kid you not.

Well, you’ve got me… I am kidding you a little. Yes I do have two boxes of shit in my house, but it’s not mine.You see, the boxes of shit is the price that Janet and I have to pay, because we decided that we wanted to share our house with two cats.

I have had pets for most of my life. When I was a baby, my mother had a cat named Jennifer, which lived to the ripe old age of fifteenish. Ok, I know that it’s not a precise age… but nobody knows how old she was when my mother found her, but by the vet's calculations, she made it to about 15.

My mother rescued Jennifer from a park in Hartford, CT. Someone had doused her in gasoline in an attempt to light her on fire. She somehow escaped, and after my mother cleaned her off and brought her to the vet, voila, we had a cat. Well, my parents had a cat. I was still in the spermatazooa and ovum phase of my existence. But a couple of years later I popped out and I instantly had my first pet.

Jennifer was a bad-ass sort of a cat. She would bring in mice and snakes from the woods near our house and leave them as presents for us. She was a real rough and tumble sort of pet. She spent most of her time outside and would only come in to dry off, eat, and sleep. Jennifer was a smart one: she would shit outside.

Thinking about it, all of the cats that we had until we moved to the neo-city of West Hartford (CT) were all outdoor cats. Then again, we lived in a safe, wooded neighborhood so it wasn’t a problem to let them roam around outside.

For most of the time when Jennifer was around, we had other cats around the house. There was Harry Cinderella (I was like 3 when I picked that name). Harry liked to spray everything. I don’t think I really liked him all that much. Then there was the cat that I just named Cat who had kittens (that were not named kitten).

Cat had three kittens, and then someone my mother knew had a cat who had kittens and then got hit by a car, so we ended up with six kittens total and one very tired Cat.

At this time, we also had a dog named Forbes. Actually, his full name was Chocolate Brook Whiskey Forbes, but I’ll get back to him in a minute. Forbes wasn’t my first dog. First, we had Toro. I named this beast of a dog Toro because as we were coming back from the pound, we passed by a Toro Lawnmower Shop (hey, I was seven years old, give me a break). Little did I know that Toro was a fitting name because he was like a raging, maniacal bull. Toro is responsible for destroying two waterbed mattresses, digging up the lawn and scaring the living bejeezus out of me and my friends. I didn’t spend too much time playing in the back yard when Toro was around. I don’t remember what happened to him. I think we gave him away to someone.

Then we had Elmo the jet black mutt from the pound, who met his demise under the front tire of a car. Following Elmo was Frisky, the cocker spaniel which pissed me off so much that I was elated when my mother decided to give him away. Then there was a dog that we got from my teacher Ms. Dielman. It was a beautiful husky with slateblue eyes and the most interesting howl.

Unfortunately he howled so much that it bothered the neighbors and we had to give him back after a few days. That brings us back to Forbes.

Forbes was a fullbred Labrador Retriever that we bought from a man who was moving to a small apartment. Fortunately, we lived in a house with a big yard so it was a perfect fit. Forbes turned out to be the best dog that we ever had.

What was I talking about before? Oh yeah… the kittens. Forbes was like a surrogate father/jungle gym to these kittens. He would lay there and let them crawl all over him for hours at a time. I think he really liked having them around. Unfortunately, one day he barked at a kitten and it fell over, breaking its own neck. Though we weren’t mad at Forbes (I was there at the time, he didn’t lunge or bear his teeth or anything), he spent the next few days hiding. We practically had to drag him back into my room [where the kittens were].

Forbes and the remaining kittens got along swimmingly. Sure, one of them scratched his nose and ended up needing to be taken to the vet after getting smacked across the room, but the kitten was fine, and we ended up having him for years after that.

During the pre-Forbes era, I had hamsters and gerbils and about a half-dozen rabbits. We also had two ducks and a pair of geese that we raised from goslings. Let’s face it, I never really lived without pets until college.

Forbes passed away while I was in college.

When Janet and I first moved in together (during my Junior year of high school), we had two of those Japanese fighting fish. One of them just sat there. The other one was very active. So active, it jumped out of its bowl and scared the living piss out of us as it flopped around. That was the end of us and fish until our second year of college.

When we were at West Virginia University, we got a little kitten while visiting my father in Florida. We drove her all of the way back and she never even panicked. Her name is Murat. She’s now 7 years old. Almost three years ago, we decided to get another cat, so we went to the pound. While looking at all of the cute little kittens, we heard this horrible yowl. It sounded like a cat which had been chain smoking for 5 or 10 years was letting out it’s death scream. Little did we know that the smoker’s meow was attached to this cute little kitten. Her name is Odessa, and she is about three years old.

Neither of these animals are really our pets anymore. Murat is a co-habitant of the house. She has her routine, her chair and really sees us more as a roommate than an owner. Odessa is a little scaredy-cat, but she’s slowly coming out of her shell. I couldn’t imagine living without them… but I could really live without those two litter boxes, filled with shit, that they leave us to take care of.