• I washed lots of clothes in the sink of the bathroom. My room is a heterogeneous mix of dirty laundry, paperwork and electronic junk in various stages of destruction/construction. Removing the laundry part does much to make my environment more appealing.

• I filled out forms for things like personal property tax on the Dodge Dart, a state tax refund I never received, and my soon-to-renew driver's license.

• I wrapped my mind around LINUX in various stages. It's a whole new world to explore, in ways I never could have explored UNIX back in the 80s, when I had no physical access to the machine and no special privileges to make cool things happen. Figuring out how to mount a removable volume was especially satisfying. The odd thing about UNIX/LINUX is that nothing happens unless you explicitly tell the machine how it should happen. It's a big switch from automatic volume mounting and bootable disk making in the worlds of DOS and Macintosh.

You see, I'm trying to be frugal. I haven't had a pay check in over a month, and it looks like I'm going to have to raid my usually inviolate bank account to pay rent this month. What I really need, it's obvious, is a job.

What sucks is the fact that, to an extent, I staked my hopes on reliable work coming from the former Comet employees. But the job they found for me was an obscenely grandiose website to be done for an überspeaking wanna-be cyber-tycoon. It's now clear that this guy has no money behind all his big talk of "Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, Fortune 5000, Fortune 10,000, Government Agencies, Schools, Corporate POs and open accounts." I was suspicious ever since I saw the pounds of deconstructed catalogues he wanted me to scan and make into web pages. They were, of course, catalogues for someone else's business. But I did the scanning anyway and made some pages too, grimacing in disgust the whole time. Get this, the guy wanted me to make a page with island pictures and/or fast cars, animated of course, floating down lazily to a body of water with text reading "Do you have the big bucks to live this lifestyle?" Then there'd be a link to the jewelry section. You can brush your teeth now, the puking is over.

Jennifer was wearing a long black wig, and I joked that she must have been rubbing Rogaine on her head.

"It's working too well," she said, "actually, I had to cut two feet off on the way over here."

This weekend Jennifer was busted in a sting operation to crack down on the selling of alcohol to underage customers. A sort of redneckish boy ("he looked like he came from Harrisonburg") came up to the bar and asked for a beer. She was suspicious (and wondering what a redneck was doing in a alterna/sushi-bar in the first place), so she asked to see his I.D. But she spaced out at that point, failing to register that a birthday in 1979 made him too young. She sold him his beer. Shortly thereafter, agents of the Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) bureaucracy escorted her from her domain to let her know she'd been busted. She faces a fine of "no more than 500 dollars." Immediately, of course, she tipped off other bartenders in Charlottesville about the ongoing crackdown (there's a bartender network, it seems). Word filtered back gradually that the sting had hit bars throughout the town.

But the ABC types, they really don't do their homework. They should have found some emoesque alternalad to infiltrate the Tokyo Rose. Had Jennifer been slightly more on the ball, the sight of a redneck at her bar would have set off all kinds of internal alarms: "Bwoop, Bwoop, Bwoop! This guy can't be for real, he's a plant!"

Zachary suddenly showed up, and not knowing what else to do, he decided to join the contingent going to the Buddhist Biker Bar.

Sipping vodkatea on the way over, it felt strange to see the lights of the Corner. It was like seeing an old friend after an extended absence. When was the last time I'd been to the Corner? A month ago maybe? And it's only a mile away.

Downstairs, the Hogwaller Ramblers were whooping up an acoustic Blue Grass storm, Jamie Dyer being the apparent front man. The downstairs was so crowded that Jennifer, Deya and I found our way to a table upstairs.

I've been so cut off from the world that I've gradually come to regard myself as sexually irrelevant, at least on some kind of subconscious level. It was gratifying, then, to find myself being scrutinized by the sexiest alternachick in the upstairs room.

As I was heading for the door, Jamie Dyer gave me an enthusiastic hello. He asked if I was doing okay in the aftermath of Comet, and I said I guessed so (which is sort of a lie). Interestingly, Jamie says he still has free Internet access through Red Light, even though, unlike me, he's no longer connected with the old Comet staff in any way.