Although this dream was more in the nature of a nightmare. It was a kind of Deliverance thing (a propos of which, did you see Burt Reynolds on The Daily Show the other night, pronouncing “bugger” as “booger”? Now I understand why my mother didn’t like ten-year-old me quoting at length from “Fungus the Boogeyman”, but anyway.) I stumbled upon an isolated village, a bit like Groveland up in Yosemite, with the timber storefronts and the quaintness and so forth, and there was a mystery to be solved, and it turned out that the mayor and the chief of police were raping and murdering young women and burying them on the beach. Not a viable long-term strategy you will say, the beach burial that is, and I must concur as the sea washed the sand away and uncovered the broken bodies. By that time, though, I was confronting the culprits. The mayor, who now that I think about it looked remarkably like defrocked Sydney Anglican minister and confessed pedophile Victor Roland Cole, tried to strangle me, but I bit off part of his thumb and spat it out. I can still taste the blood.

It qualifies as a celebrity dream because Skud was having a latte and reading the New Yorker in the village’s feminist bookshop and cafe. For some reason she was dressed as Pink.

I am rereading for the nth time A Deepness In The Sky, probably my favourite SF novel of all time. I reread for comfort. My unhappiness is spreading out like the fog flowing over Twin Peaks. This morning on the 49 Van Ness I got so absorbed in Sherkaner’s trip along the spectacular coast road the spiders call Pride of Accord that I missed my stop and had to get out at the armory at 14th and Mission and walk back up to work. I haven’t had anything to eat yet this morning, which probably contributes to the fog and general malaise. It is unquestionably bagel time.

We had a good weekend in spite of the metaphysical weather. Thursday night we saw Outfoxed, which depressed me mightily, and discussed at length how to raise Claire to be a thinking and compassionate person, and not a Republican pundit. On Saturday we had lunch at the chocolate factory with Bryan, and went to visit the wildly expensive furniture at Berkeley Mills. We dropped by the Temescal Street Fair to sign up for Rough Cut Studio’s iLife Workshops, then headed back to the city for Kat’s birthday party at Stray Fish, which involved everyone but Claire getting royally drunk. On Sunday, grievously hungover, we had brunch with Peter at Foreign Cinema and went to the Campbell’s farewell picnic in Tilden. Dinner with Robert, Gayu, Kat and Ian at the wonderful Cafe Ethiopia, and I snuck next door to Borderlands to buy some soothing hard SF: the abovementioned Vinge, Iain Banks and Charlie Stross, who people are saying is the next Vinge or Banks, and by people I mean the Irish hard-SF mafia.

Finally, here is your cut-out-and-keep guide to key portions of Claire’s vocabulary:

AGUA:
I wish for some water at this time, puny human.

BA’:
It is bath time! We will get naked and splash.

BEEBEE:
I approve of our cat.

BOO’:
You will read me this book at this time, puny human.

BYE BYE:
You bore me.

CALIENTE:
Give me the hot thing that I may smear!

DADDY:
1. Daddy. 2. What is this? 3. I like this!

DIENTES:
Not “teeth”, silly white woman.

MAMA:
Here, slave!

MIAOW:
The cat speaks more sense than you do, mother.

MOO:
As does my toy cow.

NANA:
It is time for me to daub myself with crushed fruit.

NO:
You bore me so very much.

NOSE:
That thing is HILARIOUS.

OJO:
Not “eye”, silly white woman.

PATI:
Not “zapato” and not “shoe”!

POOPOO:
An appalling ordeal awaits you.

THANK YOU:
You can take it away now.

WOO’:
The dog also speaks more sense than most.

YAY:
Life is good!

YIYIYO:
Time to sing and dance!

Danny, Quinn and I take Ada and Claire to UCSF to see Ishi. We’re amazed. He’s over a hundred years old, and still so courteous and sad.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is lying on a sofa at the old house at Bluegum. He’s feeling very sorry for himself. I point out that he’s richer than God, married to a Kennedy and governor of California, and that he should stop being such a baby. He is mollified. We talk about his work in fitness advocacy. He encourages me to buy a pair of running shoes.

Our conversation is interrupted when Mum and Dad arrive from the airport in an aviation fuel tanker they “borrowed” because the line for taxis was too long.

Although it was difficult to believe, the Old Man had not always been old, and in his dim, forgotten youth, he had said “I will go to Mars; sailing by way of the Moon, and the more friendly planets.”

Claire loved the aquarium:

…and has joined forces with Cian and Najih to have adventures and fight crime:

We had a video night last night, just like when we were kids, except that dinner was rack of lamb and apple pie instead of beer and pizza, because we have learned to cook. And it was a DVD, not a dumb old analog magnetic tape. Actually it sucks trying to rewind a DVD, so plus ca change.

The film was Donnie Darko, which was brilliant and amazing and beautiful and gorgeously acted and moving and engrossing with many unforgettably vivid and lovely scenes and a wondrous soundtrack. It depressed the shit out of me. Reading up on IMDB afterwards I realized it was the jet-engine-falls-on-a-house film that I opted not to see in the horrible weeks after September 11. Maybe I should have seen it then, maybe Donnie’s weirdly redemptive smile in the final scene might actually have cheered me up. But I feel much better generally now, so the film made me feel worse.

It solved a mystery, anyway; in a thrift store in Brisbane I heard a haunting song about how completely awful it is to be a child, but I couldn’t remember enough of the lyrics to Google it and find out who it was. Turns out it was Gary Jules’ cover of the Tears for Fears song Mad World, and it plays over the shattering conclusion of the movie and tears your heart into bite-sized shreds suitable for a nourishing salad.

Combined with the gut-wrenching end of The Towers of Trebizond, an otherwise extraordinarily funny Barbara Pym-ish picaresque novel about Anglicans in Anatolia in the 1950s, and a haunting scene a friend described in which her three-year-old daugher told her parents to Go away! then sat alone and wept silently, it has all tended to undermine my always-precarious confidence in the future. You worry throughout even the healthiest pregnancy that you will miscarry, that the baby will be stillborn or will strangle on the cord. Until they’re seven months old you watch over them obsessively while they’re sleeping, making sure they remember to keep breathing. Until they’re twelve months old the spectre of cot death remains in the back of your mind. And then, just in case you’re tempted to breathe a sigh of relief, you realize that they’re off and sailing, launched on their own lives into a world of unimaginable sorrow and danger as well as adventure and delight.

Donnie Darko sees people travelling into the future on worms of ectoplasm projecting out of their chests. Elizabeth Stone says having children is letting your heart walk around outside your body. One night on the beach at Santa Cruz Tina told me how she’d looked at Noelle on her sixteenth birthday and realized that at any moment, if anything happened to her daughter, her life could turn into a nightmare.

Knowing what I know would I do it again? In a heartbeat. Ouch, though.

I made the obligatory cute little executive joke: “It took nearly as long to write this report as to have a baby. Difference is, I’d quite like to have another baby.” Boom-tish. Brought the house down. Thank you very much, I’ll be here all week.

After I’d finished the presentation, I sat in the audience with a small bud of relief unfolding in my heart. My life need now no longer be dominated by the convergence of the incumbent network and systems management frameworks with the pure-play application performance monitoring startups. Thank you, kind fates.

I’m getting a cold, so I’m grumpy and withdrawn. I’ve been reading all around the end of the Victorian era in my efforts to avoid writing about it, but this won’t work much longer. I hadn’t read Wharton’s The Age of Innocence before: what a brilliant book. Ellen Olenska is the grown-up version of my beloved Judy from The Children. I love Wharton’s sly wit and compassion. I think she, and not ‘Enery James, is Jane Austen’s true heir.

(Could you do a PowerPoint as the basis of a stand-up routine? I’ve been thinking about it ever since I noticed that Muddy Waters has opened a new branch on 29th Street, under the new apartments. Ironic use of clip-art, as in Get Your War On. If done well could be hilarious. Would they publish such a thing in McSweeney’s?)

I’ve also been watching far too much TiVo. I am rotting Claire’s tiny brain. (At least I haven’t dropped her downstairs yet, as another parent of hers who shall remain nameless has done TWICE.) She’ll never get into Stanford at this rate. She’ll have to settle for UC. (Jeremy hates it when I say that; too much pressure, he says. Oh, and Brad deLong had a wonderful post the other day about soft marking at Stanford… yes, Chelsea, I AM looking at you.)

Anyway, TiVo: you can always tell when I start yearning for horses again. I sit through mediocre but pretty films like Seabiscuit (Tobey Maguire is my boytoy) and utter drivel like The Man From Snowy River (Tom Burlinson is totally funny-looking.) Claire hugely enjoyed Seabiscuit. She got on her Radio Flyer rolling pony, Najih, and rode him around the living room. When Seabiscuit starting rearing onscreen, she watched, round-eyed. Pause for thought.

Then lo and behold, Najih’s front wheels were in the air.

Woke up yesterday broken-hearted as usual, but cheered up immensely on getting three emails from cherished faraway friends. Lunch with Eben at Luna Park. After work, a beer on the sunny front steps at Hillegass with the Jaffe-Tsangs, Danika and Kusia. Dropped by Koryo Sushi for California rolls for Salome. A long conversation and a cup of tea. Home at ten, refreshed.

Okay, so the first piece of good news I’m busy not getting too excited about is that my parents have rejoined the landed gentry. They sold Bluegum, the house I grew up in, four years ago. The last evening I spent at that house was a joyful family dinner in anticipation of my wedding. Even the brushtail possums dropped by:

In 1997 Mum and Dad saw a documentary called Grey Nomads, about retirees who hit the road. A couple of weeks later Dad said to Mum: “I’ve been thinking about that doco…” “Me too,” said Mum. Three months later they’d traded Mum’s superannuation for a Winnebago fitted out like a land yacht, and they’ve been on the move ever since.

It’s a good life, and they seem to have made more and more congenial friends in the last seven years than they did in the whole 29 years they lived at Bluegum. Part of the plan was that they’d keep an eye out for an optimal place to maybe settle someday. Last week they finally found a bush block they like, in Glenwood, north of Gympie:

Isn’t it gorgeous? I’m so happy for them and I can’t wait to see it for myself. I miss my family every day and dream about them all the time. I love San Francisco and the life we’ve made here, but it’s a long way from where I grew up.

I had a very long and complex weekend. Chickens were involved. Claire and I were marooned at Ikea for a while, and were forced to subsist on Scandanavian crispbread and gravlax until Carole came to our rescue.

Salome and I drove up to Davis where we saw some of the nicest horses I have ever seen: Seffer, Najih, Abu Zanzabar, Zadaran, Namib, Crystal Naiah, Auralu, Zenobiyah, Bright Flame and Anduril. At the same time, Claire got a pony! Don’t panic, it’s just a Radio Flyer Rolling Pony, but we named it after Najih.

On Sunday afternoon we all bundled off to the Connecticut Yankee to watch the game. As I could not be less interested in sport without losing consciousness, we amused ourselves discussing plans for a reality TV show involving twins.

My first idea was that Paris and Nikki Hilton should be forcibly conjoined – say, lop off a leg each and sew them together at the hip. Then they could hop around A-list parties in Manhattan. They share DNA so no risk of rejection. Then I realized we could do this to Mary-Kate and Ashley as well, and have the two twin-sets jelly-wrestle. Jack had the best idea of all: throw in the Bush twins and send them all on a road trip…

My dream life has been better than Netflix lately: see below. This morning I was Harriet Vane engaged in a delightful murder-mystery romp with a gloriously platinum Lord Peter. The action took place some time after Have His Carcase but before Gaudy Night, yet Peter and I were already lovers, and as soon as the miscreants were brought to justice we tumbled into a four-poster bed like a giant linen meringue, in a grand room with sunshine streaming through French doors that opened onto a formal garden and maze.

I woke to the hoots of our blicket. She had a marvellous weekend, camping with the Murgisteads on Friday night (Daisy and Belinda sleep in their own tent: this is true) and playing with Knoa and Avi on Sunday afternoon. Jonathan and I stripped off Knoa and Claire and hosed them down in his front garden. I have to tell you, spraying naked toddlers with water on a hot summer day is pretty much the most fun ever.

Last week was a week of outrageously good news which I am not yet allowed to get too excited about.

“I can’t believe you guys let me join the Fab Five,” I said. “It’s like a dream come true.”

Ted and I were making hors-d’oeuvres of roast beef, horseradish and Melba toast.

The make-better was an ancient homeless man with a wispy silver beard and a very obvious brownish toupee. Jai was holding his hand and talking to him in an intense undertone. Kyan was wondering how to broach the subject of the toupee. Thom was kicking his feet, having nothing to do.

“In fact,” I said, puzzled, “if it wasn’t so obviously real, I’d think I was dreaming.”

“If it turns out you are dreaming and you wake up, do you want me to come into your life and make it fabulous?” asked Carson.

“Oh yes please…”

Atkins dieters may wish to skip this entry. Yes, Mister Pesce, this means you.

Because I have to say that after a hard evening’s drinking (two pints of pear cider, two!) at my newly discovered local dive bar with its amazing and unsuspected garden, there is nothing, absolutely nothing nicer than bringing a bunch of rowdy friends back to the house and boiling up masses of wholewheat spaghetti and pan-frying broccoli and zucchini and baby spinach and cherry tomatoes and sweet corn in several glugs of olive oil and grating cheddar and pecorino romano and gruyere over the whole mess, and eating it with a fresh hot baguette and a bottle of Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz. And then polishing off two pints of ice cream for dessert. I swear, it was just like that manipulative Coke ad that always used to make me sniffly, only it was real.

Claire climbed the entire play structure at the Precita playground, alone, just so she could slide down the big slide. She is fearless. In order to conserve the equilibrium of the universe, I have been equipped with extra fears. Cian, too, is facing existential crises daily. He got very tired in the swing and started chanting:

“I want… I want… I want… I want…”

We guessed water, juice, hugs, something to eat: all wrong. Then we realized what he was trying to say:

“I want! I want! I want! I want!”

Yearning for something impossible to articulate, aged two. It’s hard to be Cian sometimes.

Later we swung by Emeryville for the weekend’s third barbecue. Salome and I raided Toys R Us and brought home a sandbox in the shape of a tree stump. This made Claire squeal for joy. Leslie and Neil turned up, and the neighbors Lyndell and Katya brought their baby Zarina over to play with Claire. Chickens clucked, corn cooked, beer was drank.

Eventually we all piled into the house for the West Coast premiere of The Curse of the *****. Despite a certain hamminess in one key performance, it’s a wicked film, spooky and pretty and funny. Reminded me a lot of the early Peter Jackson.

Claire fell asleep on the way home, so naturally she woke at midnight and wanted to play with her Daddy until 3am.

Breakfast with Peter the Rocket Scientist at Valentina; a visit to The Crucible in Oakland (with a looong detour through the blighted city when we got severely lost); molten iron!; lunch at Atlas; a cheerful afternoon in Leonard’s back yard, chatting about the Clark campaign and whether there is life on Europa or Titan.

There were two Chinese girls about Claire’s age in Atlas. The elder of the two asked “Are you Claire’s mother? Is she Chinese?” “Err… no…” “But she has such pretty eyes!”

Leonard, talking about vulcanism on Io, said: “The thing about Io is that it has this gravitational tidal effect from Jupiter… Okay, I just sounded like someone out of Star Trek.”

“No! No! No! I don’t want the chair to move!”

“But Cian, you’re the one moving it!”

“WHY am I moving it?”

“What’s that you’re reading? ‘My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn.’ Errol Flynn… hey, I think I know that name!”

“He was an actor in old films. He played Robin Hood.”

“Oh! Oh, I didn’t know that he was wicked. How was he wicked?”

“Women, drugs.”

“Oh! Well, why would he want to write a book about that? What if it fell into the wrong hands?”

“Mistah Kurtz, dead he.”
Brando, that is. Timor mor-
tis conturbat me.

The non-dream Alex, last September, with Jeremy and Claire:

Got home from university tired, hungry and sweaty, the cotton strap of my Army Surplus backpack digging into my shoulder. Bag full of books on Cycladean figures and Geometric votives for my Greek art essay, due Monday. An unseasonably hot day in May. Mum was in the kitchen, methodically bread-crumbing veal cutlets. Alex was in the family room inspecting Mum’s African violets, which sat on a planter just inside the plate glass windows looking onto the weedy patio.

“Hey Mum, hey Al,” I said as I headed past them to my bedroom. Then I stopped, backed up, and looked Alex full in the face. He blinked.

“I like your hair,” I said.

“Just had it cut,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” asked Mum.

“Err – sure. Mum, this is Alex, a friend of mine from… Ireland…”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs Chalmers,” said Alex.

“You’ve never been to Ireland,” said Mum.

“No, but I will,” I said. “Alex – what are you doing here? I’m not even going to meet you for another, what, three, four years? Is it 1989 or 90?”

“Ninety, I think. I’m at Bull Alley. Have you seen these plants? They have fur on the leaves.”

“But -”

“I just thought I’d come and see if your childhood really was as 70s-grotesque as you always said.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mum.

“He’s joking,” I said, grabbed Alex’s arm and dragged him past the unicorn poster and into my room.

We sat awkwardly side by side on my single bed, facing the mountain of old computer printouts on my desk – Dad brought them home from work so I could write abysmal poetry on the back – and the dusty fantasy novels and china horses crammed onto my bookshelves. There was a dead fly on the black window-sill.

“This house is very…” said Alex. He picked up my poem about Yuri Gagarin:

(Y) The stars are shining where you left them
(U) One hundred miles above the ground
(R) No one goes out there to disturb them
(I) The skies are empty that you found…

“Yeah, the house,” I said, gently retrieving the poem. “Do you like my Hollie Hobbie wallpaper?”

“It’s not quite as spectacular as the lime-and-orange paisley in the kitchen.”

“Jesus. To be fair, Mum’ll replace it with fake red brick in a year or two, when she pulls up the wall-to-wall flokati in the front room… I can’t believe you came.”

“Hey,” said Alex with a grin. “What are friends for?”