December 10, 2007 -- Monday evening

Reading Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken Macleod, which he found at the back of the bar he bartends at. Usually he buys his own books, laying down anywhere from $80 to $140 bucks on his bimonthly trip to Borderlands bookstore on Valencia Street. He reads a book every couple of days.

His hero is William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer and coined the word cyberspace back in 1982. One day he was standing in the Castro, in front of a deli, waiting for his sandwich to be made and a hunched over, tortured looking guy walked by and he thought--this guy looks familiar and then it occurred to him that it was the guy in the William Gibson author photo on the back flap of one of his books. The man was already three strides away but he said "William Gibson" and the man looked back and sort of hid his face in the shoulder of his coat. People told him he looked totally pale from the experience. His hero.

Sometimes my conversations are interrupted by the arrival of trains or buses. This conversation ended with a call for justice. His friend arrived, out of breath, apologizing for being late, but sporting a shrink wrapped black box she'd bought on the street--fifty bucks for a computer. She tore it apart and it was not a computer, but a pile of magazines wrapped in a black garbage bag, fitted with a boom box cord and bound with Intel packing tape. He took off on his bike to find the perpetrator.