when it seemed like enemy invaders or Naziis or vampires had taken over --- people you'd known for years had been replaced by pod people and there were kinds of people in the Bay Area in numbers I'd never seen before (marketing weasels and financial sharpies and the kinds of female communications majors that if they are lucky, usually up marrying pro football players, for example). People were believing in the most ridiculous nonsense. It was also the era when, as a joke, I would make up the idea for a company and then it would come into existence! E-gravel! I-drycleaning! dogfood.com! And I'd think "no one could be stupid enough to fund those companies". And then they would materialize into existence.

--- a spot where there is now painted one of those patriotic gore red-white-and-blue yellow-ribbony exhortations: "United We Stand". You have to realize this was a time when billboards and cars and condoms were emblazoned with the names of the latest silly dotcom company.

So I glanced over, and saw painted on the side of that building, an advertisement for something called --- utility.com. Now I thought, "This wins the prize. This is the stupidest idea for a company I have ever heard of; buying your electricity online? No. Really bad." Electricity is a concrete thing in the real world. You shouldn't buy it online. Unlike what Nicholas Negroponte says, we live in a world of atoms and not bits.

But I also had the sensation that you read about in bad horror and suspense fiction --- that can only be described as someone walking across your grave. It gave me the chills.

I didn't know why.