I'm watching "Waking Life" this evening--- something I found by chance on IFC. I hadn't seen it in years, and I'd forgotten how much I'd liked it. I have a DVD of it somewhere--- I have two big boxes of DVDs there by the TV. One night I'll have to sort through them and see what I can find.

I do want to tell Umi at ivich and the vur' wonderful little K-dot at citydress that I did get a club sammich for lunch today. We sent the little courier girl to fetch lunch from the red-painted corner grocery in my neighbourhood. It's a hip place at lunch, with a line of younger bureaucrats and local hipsters out across the patio. So--- a club sammich, then. Turkey and roast beef and bacon on whole wheat toast, lettuce and mayo and a hint of Dijon mustard. All cut into the traditional little three-layer toothpicked triangles. With fries. So--- not quite the room service club sandwich and chilled Suntory beer at the New Otani, but it was a vur' good sammich there in the conference room.

Remind me--- try the chicken club soon. And ask stelladellasera and besideserato what their own favourite memories of post-sex room service food might be.

The charming Ms. Flox at besideserato wrote an entry today about behaviour in a post-privacy world of blogs and Facebook and Google and camera phones. She did raise the issue of whether people who understand that they can be blogged about, that their photos can be found on the web, that their on-line past will never go away will be less likely to do things that are self-destructive and/or hurt the ones they love. My own answer would be...No. People will do whatever strikes them as fun or useful at the time and/or relieves the boredom. Ms. Flox keeps her own focus on consequences. Her thought is that in a post-privacy world, everyone must see the web as a kind of conscience, as something that makes it clear that there are Consequences for Actions. But that's not true--- or at least needn't be. I'm not sure Ms. Flox thinks tactically. She is a recovering alcoholic, and so her own view of actions and consequences may come from events that I don't know about and haven't experienced. But I'd argue that all life--- all tactical life ---is about learning to avoid consequences. The idea is to think tactically, to do what you want and learn to sidestep any consequences--- or at least dump them all on designated scapegoats. My own choice is to dump all bad consequences on Jimmy Smits. Just on principle.

Ms. Flox writes: If I weren't an alcoholic, I'd want a martini spiced with cayenne, habanero, garlic, echinacea & colloidal silver & call it Schadenfreudetini. She gets many points for that. "Schadenfreudetini" is a word I will be using. It's far more clever than Mister Taylor's traditional signature line in his letters: "Herr Doktor Schadenfreude feels your pain..." Ms. Flox at besideserato completely outranks Mister Taylor: more clever, of course--- and she has excellent legs.

If Selena at Atwowaydream (D-Land) and I ever go for drinks, we will be ordering Schadenfreudetinis.

Schadenfreudetini... Well, I spent half my life in grad school. I'm trained to cite my sources. So I will always give credit for that to Ms. Flox. Footnotes in U. of Chicago style, of course--- never, never in MLA style. You have no idea how much I hate MLA and APA citation styles.

I did go to Atwowaydream this morning and go back through her earliest entries. I've never heard Selena's voice, but she is from Virginia, and I do imagine a Tidewater flavour to it. She writes lovely post-midnight things, and if ever I have the radio studio there in the high desert, I'll invite Selena to do her own broadcasts, to be a voice on the aether there in the clear, cold, dry night.

I remember when Lily at apparitional had her first D-Land journal. I remember reading about her days at seventeen and eighteen there in the Midwest, remember reading about her rare books, and her fascination with the number thirty-three (the age she preferred for her lovers) and her taste in poetry and absinthe and photography. I wish all her old entries were still available--- moving out to La Jolla with her horse, driving up the PCH, living in an L.A. Deco night... She's CloverSt now, and a voice that I'd want there on the aether, one of the other voices I'd ask to sit in the studio and tell her stories over the aether into the high desert night.

One day I'll have all the old "Red Shoe Diaries" episodes on DVD, and I'll download "Art of Loneliness" onto my Tare Panda Laptop as a permanent feature. I'll watch it and dream of being a darker kind of Art Bell, of telling stories over the aether while Japanese jazz plays behind me.

Yes--- I'd ask Kelsey at clush, too. I'd give Kelsey or Selena or Lily as many hours as they'd want, and I'd sit silent in the studio and work the sound boards and have Yoko Kanno and David Sylvian and Delerium play behind them. I wouldn't play the interlocutor or the interrogator-- I'd just want them to be there, to offer up Stories over the aether. I'd light a cigarillo and look up at the stars and watch the lights of a single aircraft far away to the north and west. "The Art of Loneliness"---the art of love is the art of
loneliness is the art of war, or so Raven Snow says.

Last night the most-pettable little K-dot at citydress and I were talking about the History Channel's "Life After People" special, which fascinated her. I told her to find two books--- Geo. R. Stewart's "Earth Abides" and of course Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us", the source for the "Life After People" special. And then somehow we got sidetracked into a long discussion about, well, a kind of time travel.

I told the K-dot that I'd been walking along one of the little streets in my neighbourhood on my way back from work when I started thinking about how different my life in the Year Eight is from what I'd imagined twenty years ago. I put my hand on the vine-covered wall of an old house and asked myself about a kind of transmigration of souls. I asked myself what would happen if the 1988 Eduardo-kun suddenly found himself there on that street in the Year Eight. What would I do? What could I infer about the world and my life.

First problem--- where am I? I'd know the street name; I'd know a couple of landmarks. But I wouldn't know why I was walking on that street. I'd walk over to the patio of the red-painted corner grocery and go through my pockets and my briefcase. There's one piece of mail in my briefcase-- a bill --with my new address. My wallet has nothing in it with the flat's address. I haven't changed my driver's license yet. So... I do have an address I could look for. That's something. My wallet has...my Bar card and some business cards. That would baffle me--- I went to law school? I still have an old faculty ID card, too. So--- I taught History, too? But that card is outdated--- what happened?

My keys... There'd be keys to the apartment gates and my door. And a car key, the key to my loyal and elderly little Saturn. There weren't Saturns in 1988, and in 1988 I'd never really driven a car with a manual transmission. What would scare me would be a missing key. There's no key on the ring that goes to my parents' old house in the suburbs. I'd know what that meant. My parents would never have moved from there. If that key wasn't there, it could only mean one thing. I'd have to sit there and realise that I'd have to mourn. I'd realise that wherever I was, I no longer had a family home or a family to go to for refuge.

There would be newspaper machines there by the grocer's. The headlines would mean nothing. The Obama person running for president--- he'd mean nothing. I couldn't even note that he looks like Gollum--- no "Lord of the Rings" films in 1988. War in Iraq? In 1988 Iraq was the lesser evil to Iran--- in the spring of 1988 the American navy sank pretty much the whole of the Iranian navy to keep the tanker lanes open to Basra.

Once I got home, once I figured out where I lived and let myself in, what would I find? I'd go first to my shelves--- what was I reading, how had my interests changed? Dorian would be there, of course, but I wouldn't recognise the Psyducks and Tare Pandas. Those are mid-1990s stufflings. I'd hold Dorrie and explain to my Small Mongolian Pony what had happened and let him tell me about the world.

The laptop... Well, I could identify what it had to be. I was a Wm. Gibson reader in 1988; I'd know what it had to be. But in 1988 there was no interweb. I'd have no idea what to do with the laptop, and even finding the manual for the little Toshiba wouldn't help much. I might not figure out how to get to and use Google for a while.

The keitai... Same thing, really. I'd know what it had to be, though the size would baffle me. I'd try to figure it out. Calls would be self-evident, but texts would never occur to me. I don't have numbers programmed in, so I'd have to go through the Moleskine in my briefcase and track down my siblings' numbers.

The best thing to do... Once I figured out which car was mine (and mastered a stick shift), I'd drive to the Zeppelin Pilots' Club and look for older versions of the Over-Educated Ne'er-Do-Wells I knew in 1988. I'd want to hear what had happened to me--- and to the world around us.

My wardrobe wouldn't be really different: buttondowns and jeans, buttondowns and Dockers. But the nightmare would come the next morning at 0830. I could use my business card to find my office, but I'd walk in and know nothing--- know even less than now ---about being a Rechtsanwalt. The 1988 Eduardo-kun could walk into a classroom anywhere and point at someone and ask where I'd left off and then take up from there. History is something I can do by instinct. Now then, let's review... But there's no way I could walk into law offices and be of any value.

I told the K-dot how strange it would be--- calling everyone in my Moleskine and saying, "Hullo, Eduardo here. Can you tell me who you are and what you've known me as for the last twenty years?" All I could do is hold on to little Dorian and Aloysius and little Frederick the Beagle and try to adapt to a world where I wasn't someone who was a clubland fixture, a world where I had a PhD and a JD (albeit no career) and the notebook computer...but no longer had a family home, and a world where I needed glasses to read.

I have no idea what that means--- a transmigration of souls from a world where the Towers and the Berlin Wall both still stood. But the little K-dot and I talked about it long into the night--- and about another issue: would it be more difficult for someone from 1750 to adapt to 1850, or someone from 1850 to adapt to 1950? That's something I would like to discuss with Tiff at vanity_overkill and Trish at kissingverlaine and Umi at ivich. That's something I'd like to hear about from Siobhan in Adelaide, too.

I do miss soft_melodies. I wish I could hear from her about expat cities, and about dreams in the night. She could be a high desert voice, too.

Tonight I'll be thinking about looking at the little 4gb flash drive in my briefcase and imagining 1988 me staring at it with utter incomprehension. And I'll be closing my eyes and hearing radio voices in my head...