Everything went wrong, Alex got sick, and we came back on Saturday to avoid the rain.

18 hours total in Miami; 9 of those sleeping, 2 in cabs. Drenching downpours at intervals, with newscasts predicting the same until Monday.

I said, Saturday morning, awake with an insignificant hangover, "it may rain, but look at the guidebook--there's an 11th century cloister brought over by Hearst, and a bunch of art museums. We can explore Little Havana. We just need umbrellas. It's not even all that hot."

He searched my face, sitting across the hotel room on his bed. "We live in New York. We have the Cloisters, and MOMA and the Met. I came to sit by the pool and charge drinks with maraschino cherries to the room, and look at hotties in bikinis. It's raining. There are men in their 40s in Speedo swimsuits on the beach, and that's it. They're reporting a tropical depression on TV. I want to leave." It was a compelling argument. I gave him my cell and he called the airline to switch the tickets.

We left; he was accurate, and he was paying my airfare. I felt guilty about giving up, quitting the Cadillac Hotel and South Beach, but it didn't make sense to stay to watch the rain. Miami without sunshine is a useless city, at least for the two of us.

---

I had a dream on the plane home where I met some Ftrain readers, and they were bloodsucking vampires in black cloaks. They held me down and scolded me.

---

I decided this weekend to write a long essay about cargo pants and neckties, branching out to explain the whole of the human condition in clear, lucid prose.

It will never be written. Better I should write a story about a guy making phone calls to his friends to apologize for something that happened years ago, or a woman who wants to get laid but is scared of the man who wants her, or a medical illustrator who befriends his girlfriend's 15-year-old son. It's better to show than tell. I don't have anything to tell you; I just like the talking and the display.

---

On the plane I fantasized that they found Carver's novel, that he'd written it but been afraid to tell anyone. It was wrapped in butcher paper at the bottom of a drawer, marked by the words "old bills" in magic marker. Tess found it. It's what we were all hoping for, the language and rhythms and the effortless, perfect, searing descriptions. We would know the characters better than ourselves by the fourth page. The story arc would be stretched into the months and the years, not a slice of life but the whole loaf, long enough to take a full day to read, and then a second day to re-read. And a third...

---

You know, I don't want to give it up today, but I had to write something.

I have two short story ideas that I'm working on, and an awful lot of things which can't play out here on a Web stage. If I could just rest in bed for a week and recover from...what?--but I am behind on all my responsibilities: I'm Associate Editor for a little Web literary magazine called Sparks. My job needs me, and the redefining of Ftrain to include other writers, so that I can turn the spotlight off of myself takes programming and planning time. I have a Wednesday deadline to finish the outline for the Science Fiction novel.

Someday this will all break; the multiple goals and needs and desires will either converge and resolve or they'll all crash into each other in a shattering burst, and then I will have to decide what I want and what matters. Right now I live different lives: the young corporate monkey, the midnight writer, the schemer and coordinator, the capitalist, the socialist, but none of them fully. I am an amateur at all of my choices.

Despite my multiplicity, today I installed MySQL, a free database server for Linux, and set up the test schema for the next Ftrain, along with the DBD and DBI modules for Perl, making it all work with CGI.pm. You know? I think a lot about these things, how to fit the technical pieces together snugly, drawing charts and Venn diagrams in looseleaf binders. In between I've been reading Graham Greene novels and short stories. I don't like Greene, but he's involving, and his subjects resonate with my convictions. It makes for a weird mix, a short story like The Destructors balanced by the strange babblings of the MySQL manual, explaining terms like "nested select" and "varchar" and "auto_increment."

The databases are satisfying; I like the simplicity of the technical. Any program can be changed, edited, any database can be dumped and re-implemented. You can always start again, debug, fine-tune. There is resolution. In my relationships, nearly everything is ambiguous: do I or don't I? Should I push this and promote it, or release it? How do I exercise power kindly and for the good of others? How do I subject myself to power? How do I stop hurting feelings and violating trust?

On the computer, missing information can be found via Altavista, or in an O'Reilly book. But in the flesh or on the phone the variables become legion, the equation becomes impossible, and the chance that there's a right answer disappears. Not only are there no correct answers--there are no answers that allow compromise between honesty to oneself and injury to others. You must choose.

For instance, if I called my home and resolved old angers and feelings right now, I would open a huge Pandoran can of horror. I would spend the next week in tears, making phone calls, defending myself.

For instance, if I quit my job to go freelance, I'd lose freedom and be a burden to others while I got on my fiscal feet.

So instead I lie a little here, tell some truth over here, and hope it works out without any confrontation. In inelegant language, this makes me a hypocrite, or perhaps I could say I'm cyclothymic with a very brief oscillation between the poles. I know that whatever I say I believe utterly, but I can switch a moment later to a totally opposite truth, and I can rarely tell the difference. My friends, good listeners all, see it plainly, and they shake their heads through a complicated affection and love and say to their friends, "Paul is a good guy, but he's a little crazy," or "Paul would be amazing, if...."

If. In the digital world, the database and Perl world, this is a case statement--if something is true, then do something, otherwise do something else. If the name is "Alice" print, "Hi, Alice," otherwise print, "Where's Alice?"

if (($paul eq "hypocrite") or ($paul eq "a little crazy")) {$friends = "disappointed, hopeful, hesitant"}
else {$friends = "pleased, confiding, trusting"}

Or something like that, but as I said, you can't actually reduce it all to such simple conditional terms; there is no working moral calculus, despite the best efforts of the reductionists, rationalists, or theologists. There is only an incredible, chaotic, trillion-variate equation which cannot be accurately simulated by any tool now extant. If I look at it from a distance I can see God, or natural selection, or pure chance, or a Turing machine, but up close none of that matters; I'm just trying to figure out how much it would be okay to hurt someone to get what I want, or if it can be avoided.

I explained this to someone on the phone a few nights ago, and with her I ended up indexing and exploring my hypocrisy: the quick flip between jealousy and kindness; the way that I transmute lust into self-recrimination; the bizarre networks of blame I've patched together; all of that.

I said, "I wasn't finished, I was left with too much soft clay around the frame. I need hardening, in the body, in the mind, in the emotions. The tears-twice-a-day needs to end. But it's good to feel anything, even grief, and I'm sure it will all work out for the best, just like it does for everybody on this happy planet."

I listened to my friend on the phone, too; you read this, you can't see me listening, but I can keep my mouth shut to let people speak, more and more. Their stories are always more interesting than mine, if I am attentive.

She said, "you have power, you are not powerless. Ftrain is used to hurt people, sometimes. You use your words, and you send things out coldly and clearly and they sound entirely correct, but it's only you."

"But I disclaim my opinions," I said. "I never meant to cause you pain. People know I'm crazy, they know I'm a hypocrite."

She stayed silent.

"Lately I just cause a lot of injury," I said. "At work, with friends, in my family. I used to cause less, but I felt nothing. Now I feel all sorts of things--mostly dread--and I don't know what that does to me, but I seem to..."

I trailed off, rather than complicate things through further language. We talked about love and its many uses, and the varieties of jealousy. We are reaching an agreement, one that accommodates for my hypocrisy and her distrust, but perhaps will satisfy even still the gaping need we share.

---

At 10:30PM, it's 97 degrees. With 4 fans and an air conditioner at full blast, the apartment is still an oven, surfaces hot to the touch. Life becomes vague and slow when everything is coated with a humid film, Vaseline on the lens. Of course, the heat is not permanent. I need only to take the steps back from the pressures and fronts of the day and trust the almanacs and guidebooks, which tell us that given the patience of a few months, everything will cool down again. The dust and cardboard from last night's fireworks over the East River (like galaxies colliding) will wash out to the Atlantic, the clouds will roll in. Twirling storms will move below the weatherman's finger in technicolor swirls, and everything will change, then change again.