1:39 a.m. Kinko's. We never close.

Slogans are very important. So are sensible working hours. Kinko's, the Las Vegas of service stores. You wander in with a few coins and a dream and it's always a gamble. You never know what you're going to walk out with, and how much it's going to cost you.

Somebody has to pay for that fancy architecture somehow, right? And somebody has to be hoisted up, fully insured, on a pulley, with a squeegee, to maintain that jazzy shine.

So, of course this morning the printer called with all-new specs. This time they gave me the dimensions in 64ths of an inch. As if. As if it were the middle ages and I am composing this thing with a calipers and ox blood. So, of course I had to move every little line and every little letter.

And then: Kinko's and FedEx, how well we know the drill. While waiting for my laser print to worm its way through the innards of their LAN, I amused myself with watching my time add up on the rental machine and taking some photos of the bent-headed ranks of the damned. The people paying and working by the hour.

But those photos are not to be. A Kinko's employee in a baby blue button-down shirt and dark blue butcher's apron stood over me and made me erase them, as if it were the gulag and not a kandy-kolored neon-green corporate machine scheme business service facility.

"It's a free country," I mumbled as I fumbled.

"Not in here," he replied, and sighed.

Later this evening I had a grand adventure. I installed Ircle on my machine and then, somehow miraculously* managed to find myself in a chat-room situation that seemed only one remove from a subway at noon or a madhouse at dinner time.

Hours have flown by and really, I looked at the clock and --

-- time spun round and round as though it were attached to a meter.

A lost evening. An evening more lost than if I'd spent the time in front of the TV. Or was it?

I "talked" to people, but I don't know their names, their ages, their sex, their heights, their weights, the color of their shirts. Yet I do know something about them and they've formed opinions about me. Their opinions might be more correct than not.

But the form of communication is almost purely mental, almost as primal as one prisoner tapping out Morse code on a cell wall right against the pressed ear of another. Hello! I'm here. Anyone out there?

I'm doing time for my crimes. Hard labor. Little rest. There are bars on the windows and few visitors; not a one with cake. I've got a death sentence for something I don't remember doing and my appeals have gone unanswered.

Help! I'm being held captive by an idea, a dream, a longing.

Welcome to the gulag. Open round the clock.