jwz@mcom.com

``We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there.''

-- Dana Gould

Hi! How are you! Get out of my way!

Back when I had a life, I used to go to a lot of concerts and movies. Actually, I still go to a lot of concerts; I just never sleep. (Sleep is the enemy: it must be destroyed.) Best bands seen recently: Crash Worship; Sharkbait; Switchblade Symphony; Christian Death. Best movies seen recently: Natural Born Killers; Killing Zoe; Trust; Bodies, Rest, and Motion.

Here's my music collection, including a bunch of links to other info, and a reformatted version of The List of upcoming Bay Area shows.

So hey, send me some email. Distract me. Take me away from all of this death.

(As long as you don't ask me for a job. I know I work for God's Gift to Startups and everything, but the ``hire me'' thing is getting kind of old. It just ain't my department, man. Can't you love me for me?)

Claims to Fame:

Other Hacks Perpetrated by Me:

Words Which Will Make Me Leave the Party:

I was standing in my bedroom, and my vision was blurry in my left eye. No matter how hard I rubbed my eyes, it just wouldn't clear up. I looked in a mirror and noticed that there were two tiny red puncture wounds on each eyeball, as if a needle had gone tangentially through. The entrance wound on my left eye was on the iris, and the exit was just on the edge of the lens, which was what was causing the blurriness. I couldn't imagine what could have caused this; spiders, perhaps?

Suddenly there was a doctor in my room, and he was puzzled as well. He stared into my eyes with one of those little ear-canal magnifying lights, and made uncertain doctor-noises. Then I realized what the problem was -- I asked the doctor, ``how tall do you think I am?''

``I don't know," he answered, ``six five, six seven, somewhere around there.''

That was it! ``Don't you see,'' I told him, ``the problem is that I'm growing uncontrollably! That's why my eyes are all messed up!'' He didn't understand, so I kept trying to explain this to him, but at the same time I was realizing that, since I had just started a new job, I didn't have any medical insurance. And there I was, with a punctured eyeball and uncontrollable growth: ``this is going to cost me a fortune,'' I thought.

So as I was standing there, worrying about hospital bills, and trying to make the doctor understand what the actual problem was, I noticed a bunch of people just outside my bedroom window. Naked girls. There I was, trying to explain a serious medical problem that I couldn't afford to have fixed to an idiot doctor who was in my bedroom while naked girls I didn't know pranced around out on my deck. Do you have any idea how distracting that is?

Then I woke up, and of course, having just woken up, my vision was blurry. Brief anxiety ensued.

One of the best parts about almost never sleeping is that you get really vivid dreams. And -- bonus points! -- sometimes you get to have them while you're still awake! Like that time, driving home at around 4am, that I was certain that the tree outside my house was not a tree, but was, in fact, a pale, naked, christ-like homeless guy, gesturing wildly. Here's another good one:

It was a an early morning in a large, wooden kitchen, the light streaming in at a steep angle. Over in the corner by the toaster sat a large, clear jug - two gallons or so, made of thick, bulbous glass, like old Coke bottles. The jug was nearly filled with coffee beans.

Crossing the room, I detected motion in the jug.

``Oh, yes,'' a voice explained, ``I think we have roaches again.''

At this point the streams of ants criscrossing the floor became apparent. They kept to the gutters between the tiles in the floor, passing completely under my bare feet.

My attention returned to the jug of coffee beans and the motion therein. As I got closer, I started imagining the sight I would see - dozens of inch-long beetle-like bugs, shuffling and sliding through the similarly colored beans. But in actuality, there was only one cockroach in the jar, and it was nearly ten inches long.

``This is just like the bug in Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch,'' I thought. ``I wonder if it can talk.''

It had human eyes. Shockingly blue.

I touched it, and part of its carpace began to peel away, revealing a sticky, sludge-like interior. Before I had time to really investigate this, I found I needed to leave -- my name was being called, although I hadn't actually heard anything said.

Time and space fogged as they do in dreams, and I was outside, walking quickly along a wooded hillside. It was fall, somewhere back east, and the trees were dying. The ground was covered with crumpled leaves, a uniform brownish grey. I was in a great hurry, and getting very tired, when I noticed a change it the woods around me - the trees were more bare, and the further I walked, the more densely covered their higher reaches were with cobwebs. The crumpled leaves on the ground became more of a fine powder. In the dream, I understood what this meant, and it worried me slightly, but I can't remember its meaning now.

It was getting colder, quickly. I shivered in the wind, and woke up.

Are you detecting a ``nature is disgusting'' theme here, or is it just me?