-- Sunday, July 11, 1999 --

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10:40 a.m. The concrete wound in front of the house is slowing drying. The big, blue-plastic torpedo of the Sunday Times is blessedly dry too. It used to land, sometime in the sleepy pre-dawn, splat! in one of the puddles created by the leak. The smell of wet newspaper in the morning is second only to wet dog.

Our little house is no longer a blight on the neighborhood, dribbling uncontrollably into the gutter. All it takes is money.

I never really appreciated money, never really lusted after it, until I got involved with eBay last year. The pictures on this page are just the tip, the mere tip of the iceberg that nearly sunk our tight little ship.

It all began modestly enough, as any suspiciously cleaned-up addict in a suit will tell you. Really. I only wanted to buy a trinket, a bauble, a mere bagatelle. But you should have seen my mailman -- eventually he would come to the house tsk-tsking, lugging a hand-truck loaded to overflowing with with gay, priority-tagged styrie-foamy-filled brown boxes.

What fun I had ripping through pellets and pop-popping clear plastic sheets and shredded paper for the teeny little weenie things that I just had to have. You're on a joyride of emotions from the second you hammer in your take-no-prisoner bid until the moment when you rip off the tape and pull the hideous smelly little thing from its padded nest and you know you're in deep deep trouble here. No decent person has ever gone this far and come back to tell about it.

Oh, it was bad, I tell you: bad. By the time I was screen-grabbing these pictures, I was so hopelessly hooked on fabric, scraps, trimmings, embroideries, and things that went squeak when you squeezed them that there was no more room in the house to sanely store the treasures. I was looking into -- I'm serious -- storage space for the stuff. Once you've settled into an eBay frame of reference, you begin thinking that certain things are yours, already, the second they're put on the block, because you begin to see yourself as a Collector.

I was trying to corner the market on embroideries of men in sombreros, preferably sleeping under or working near, palm trees. Serious Collectors know: you've got to be really, really specific if you're going to corner a market. So. You fine-tune and work your bookmarks like an accountant with a calculator. You stockpile your booleans and search your special keywords in a trice; you devise a devious bidding scheme, you take catnaps and never actually go to bed, and in just a few days: voila! Another man in a big hat is yours, all yours.

But sadly, for me, the money ran out. That was it. No more money. I actually considered becoming a temp again so that I would have: money. Twenty-five dollars could buy maybe an hour or two at the submit buttons if I were prudent. But leaving for a job meant leaving my post and look -- the little men were still lining up at the starting line, snoozing and stirring on circa '50s linen towels and tablecloths, just calling for me. Yoo-hoo. And if I didn't bid, they were going to go to people named "Wirehair" and "Chacha Momma" instead of coming home with "Fleamail." That was me.

Money has always been a mystery to me. Too many numbers. Not enough color. Turns people mean. The mob will scratch past you to grab for it. And why? You don't need a token to open that Pearly Gate.

If I'd had a flea brain in my head, of course, I would have stepped away from the shredded newspaper, brushed off the static peanuts, and raced with my $25 dollars to the cute stock broker guy down at my friendly neighborhood blue-carpeted bank outlet and bought shares in the eBay enterprise itself. If I had just taken the money I spent on salmon-colored middy braid and bought stock instead, I'd be rich-ish today.

We would have been able to fix the dreadful water leak sooner, and we wouldn't be paying the scary Popeye-guy in installments. We would be able to take a vacation, maybe even frolic under a real palm tree. At the very least, if I had invested in eBay back then, I'd have enough money today to -- you got it -- fire up my bookmarks and buy more sombrero men made entirely out of thread.

Tomorrow -- it's Monday. You know what that means.