-- Friday, July 16, 1999 --

------------

10:50 a.m. You've got to make rules. You've got to have limits. You have to have walls and lanes and ruts. Who is making the rules for working daily, online? I think that unless I create some for myself, I may go insane here. What with all this freedom. Too much freedom. It is driving me crazy.

Nobody says you have to type something in everyday. There are no lines to memorize, no lines to wait on impatiently, no lines to try to stay within with your stubby red crayon. I thought this would be fun! Fun to hack my way through the technical brush and get online and do anything I wanted, every day if I wanted -- no editors to stop me from -- from -- from doing what?

Am I writing to one warm, intimate friend? Or to the cold, unborn stranger far in the future? Am I designing this for a person with drug store magnifying glasses and a cheap color monitor just like mine? Or will these words come scrolling one day, unannounced and incomprehensible, across the wafer-thin face of a 2-inch, gray-skinned palm reader?

Who can comprehend this world? Who can judge it?

Are we all just people here, trying to find our way? Sometimes I wonder. I've just finished a stretch in Cryptonomicon in which the hapless individuals who survived a few hundred disembodied bombs from the sky and then some unnumbered, unsympathetic sharks in the sea finally stumble onto the shore of a tropical island. They are giddy, of course, with relief. In only a matter of moments however, they are being sashimied and eaten by the islanders. Being consumed and devoured by their fellow human beings! There is a gulf, a communications rift, between the folks on either side of that picnic table.

And those girls fading into tinty brown dots in the picture opposite? They were once the vivid, famous, larger-than-life cheerleaders from my high school, which once was full to bursting, and nestled in the woods outside of Philadelphia. Now those dots are the mothers and the grandmothers of the angry computer grrls who design the programs that let you view this message. Our cheerleaders were affectionately called Pixies, and now ... now they are merely pixels, rendered nearly unrecognizable by the years.

In the old days, in the long-gone bygone days when those particular Pixies ruled the earth, the nuns at Notre Dame High School, Moylan, Pa., told us to study hard and never, ever cheat. Can you imagine living by such rules today? You study as hard as you can -- every single page in the manual, including taking the 12-part tutorial and the Classroom in a Book, and what does Adobe (or Claris, or Microsoft) do? But, of course. And -- it'll only cost you $299.99 to upgrade. If You Act Now. And please study the manual carefully, because we've had to discontinue our customer service hotline. There, there. Calm down.

And don't cheat? Ha! Tell that to Monica. Don't even get me started. Already, my mental state is very fragile here, and to contemplate her bank account and to imagine the discussion between her publisher and her agent ... well ... I would need a glass of water and some rope.

Let's see -- do your homework, brush your hair and your teeth, open the window a crack, say your prayers, play by the rules ...

Rules? What rules? Remember slide rules? Where did they all go? What happened? Who's made off with the pamphlet? Anybody see the stone tablets? Whatever happened to that old game we used to play? Who's in charge here? Anybody got the box lid?

Tomorrow --