-- Sunday, February 27, 2000 --

2:23 a.m. Here is a lovely neon photo. I am inordinately fond of my neon ones, as if I were some kind of master with the lens. They seem so glamorous to me. I love city streets, display windows, storefronts. Shadow-shattering neon.

I am not much of a nature buff. I am a storefront buff. I was born in a very small city that felt like a great metropolis when I was growing up. By the time I moved to a great metropolis, I felt right at home -- as if I were a kid again.

I am an uneasy visitor to woods, or rolling green lawns, or prairies, or mountain vistas. I have enough sense to marvel, but I am just not comfortable or happy in a pretty suburban setting. I rather like the vertical shear of a multi-use building and the crumbly facade of an old brownstone. I feel at home on any stoop, any time.

Storefronts tell you the news of the community in an arcane, but easily deciphered language. For instance, the window in the photo shows you that our town is friendly to small businesses and startups, and that it's trying to catch up with all that new-fangled technology.

The email banner was made on an old-fangled dot-matrix printer. The store behind this front is open all night long if you are a client and have a key. The store next door sells sushi, and the store next door to that sells workout videos.

Every time we take a walk, one business closes and another one opens up. The seamstress and the palm reader and the nail artist are always there, but the real estate companies come and go. There's a doomed corner on every street where a restaurant opens and closes within the year. That's the restaurant we decided to try last night.

We've lived on the West Coast now for almost 10 years. I suppose it feels like home if I don't think about it too hard. Yeah, the water's on the wrong side and the sun rises out of mountains and sets into ocean. I know we're on the other side of the looking glass here.

Here, the past is constantly being erased and rewritten. Here, all the boxes in the video store older than six months have faded to cyan and magenta. Here, the store for head shots has just replaced the head shop.

Here is where I'm trying very hard to keep remembering my future before I forget why I'm not really home.