He was well on his way to earning his patent and approached a large manufacturer of toilet-paper roll holders about mass-marketing his innovation. Apparently the idea was a little too revolutionary. And rather than watching it undercut sales from their phenomenally successful finger-pinching models, they preferred to simply buy him out and keep his brainchild from ever seeing the light of day. No matter. He got a chunk of change and moved on to his next inspiration.

And such was the bond between us that five weeks after he died I received a check for thirty thousand dollars and a handwritten note: "Seed money for that scatterbrained music thing you've been talking about. Love, Uncle Stu."

So removing Stu from my PDA was unthinkable. Though by all counts, there's not much chance of reaching him at any of the numbers I have for him.

But many lesser personalities remain with much less justification. It's not really even that hard to delete people, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Who knows when one of these people might prove pivotal? Who knows when some neighbor's dog will barf up a shoe and I'll have a desperate need to reach out to Foam-All? So now I stare at the SXSW contacts, debating their entry into my Contact Hall of Fame. Some aggravate me. They only suggest to my paranoia that everyone else at the conference is racing along the road to success while I'm stuck in the starting blocks, having forgotten my running shoes. I'm half tempted to chuck the entire lot. I guess what the exercise has taught me is that people come and go. Maybe that's all right.

So I begin to look through these cards. And already I've forgotten who at least a third of them were. Someone once said, People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. They forgot one other option: Some people come only to give us their contact information, let us know that we really need to get together sometime, and why don't we give them a call?

Heaven.

I spent my first week after being fired getting reacquainted with the soap operas that I watched in college. The second week I vowed to go to the gym every day, but tapered off after day one. The third week I did a budget for myself and realized that I'd already been living above my means and that I needed a new job. Like, yesterday.

So now I'm a waitress. I work at Temple, which is a French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant, and it's extremely hip. I'm not even sure why they hired me, because I had zero waitressing experience, but I've been here for two months and I'm getting the hang of it. Mostly. The money's decent, but my bosses are assholes, and the clients aren't much better. I've served Demi and Ashton, Mayor Bloomberg, and Monica Lewinsky. I should probably clarify that the latter two were not at the same table. I should also clarify that the names I've singled out are not the assholes I spoke of. In fact, all four were quite polite and good tippers. But on average, people seem to think you are their servant. Granted, you are. But they also must think it's okay to treat their servants like shit. The jerks I serve pale in comparison to the jerks I work for. I work for a white guy named Bruce who thinks he's Asian, and a French guy named Jean Paul who thinks he's Steve McQueen.

Bruce will use any opportunity to yell at us, and he'll always make sure it's in front of customers and the rest of the staff. Jean Paul . . . for the most part, he just smokes cigarettes and sits on his Triumph 650cc, which is prominently parked outside our restaurant at all times. It's never good to interrupt his "cigaritual," as I like to call it. Jean Paul takes out a cigarette, packs it on his hand, then places it behind his left ear, walks outside, and cases his motorcycle as if he's never seen it before. Then he sort of leans on it as he pulls the cigarette out from behind his ear and lights up. He always closes his eyes for his first inhale and always exhales through his nose.

The restaurant has all these little quirks, you might call them. I really shouldn't be talking about them this way. If they found out, I'd be fired. But fuck it. I'm okay with that.

Marco is wearing an eye patch today. Marco is a busboy at the restaurant. He's been in America for only six months and seems to get into a lot of trouble. He's absolutely my favorite busboy. He's about twenty-four years old, with an overgrown bowl haircut. When he first showed up at work he had hair down to his ass, and Jean Paul told him he had to cut it if he wanted the job. So he did, but he hasn't cut it since. Marco is from Albania and he likes to drink. A lot.

A few weeks ago he comes into work all smiles and tells everybody about a woman he met over the weekend at some discotheque in his neighborhood. The fact that he was still using the word discotheque in the twenty-first century we'll leave alone.

"She was beautiful. And she said she wanted to make sex with me. So I took her home and she gived me a blow job." His English could still use a little work, but he spends every Sunday in English classes, and he's getting better. "And then . . . when I took off her underpants . . . she has a penis!" he says, still smiling and laughing at the audacity. We're all mortified and half wondering if he just saw The Crying Game for the first time. But no. Sadly, for Marco, he missed that one.

"What did you do?" we all ask simultaneously.

"What do you think I did? I told her to go home!" None of us laughed at him. I mean, all of us laughed at him, but we felt so bad for him that it wasn't really malicious laughter. And he's so unaware that he didn't really get that this isn't the kind of story you tell everyone at work on Monday morning. Or any morning, for that matter. You tell your best friend. Maybe. But now everyone knows. God bless him, he's not ashamed. As far as he's concerned, it's just another experience of all that America has to offer.

"What's up with the eye patch?" I ask.

"I lost it."

"What do you mean, you lost it?"

"I had a car accident, and it broke."

"What do you mean, it broke?"

"It broke!" he says, like an eye "breaking" is a common occurrence.

"Your eye?"

"It broke. It came out and got broke into a million pieces." I look at him, but before I can inquire further, a customer waves me over. Later, I found out that Marco has a glass eye. Or had a glass eye. When his face hit the dashboard of the car, his eye popped out and it broke. Apparently they're like seven thousand dollars and he can't afford a new one. Apparently I'm the only one who didn't know he had a glass eye, as well. I heard that once he asked another waiter to hold it, and the other guy took it-not knowing what it was-and then freaked out. I never got the privilege of seeing that. I guess a customer once did, though, and threw up. Which made another customer throw up, and made the majority of the restaurant want to throw up. They had to comp everyone who saw. Jean Paul and Bruce sat Marco down and told him if he ever took out his eye again he'd be fired. This all went down before I got hired. I always miss all the fun.

So to help Marco's cause, I take an empty Opus One wine magnum and place a sign on it. It says "Glass Eye for the Bus Guy." The "Queer Eye" reference is almost mean, considering the blow job, but it's a tip jar, and I place it prominently on the bar. If helping Marco get a new eye is my mission . . . then I'm gonna do it. Marco is so touched, he sheds a tear out of his one good eye. We hug, and I toss the first dollar into the magnum.

I spit in someone's Caesar salad today. I'm not proud of it. But I promise you . . . the customer was such an asshole, he deserved it. It was a preemptive but prophetic spit. He went on to leave me a five-dollar tip on a bill for one hundred seventy-eight dollars. And he complained about me to my manager.

Luckily, it was Jean Paul that he complained to and not Bruce. Jean Paul never cares when people complain. As far as he's concerned, the restaurant is so "in" right now that if someone's not happy, they can just go somewhere else and not take up space here. Anyway, Jean Paul had a cigarette in his hand when the guy called him over. He tells Jean Paul that my service was "poor" and my attitude so disgraceful, he was embarrassed to have brought clients here. I'll admit when I do something wrong, but this guy was on me from the minute he sat down. I did nothing to offend or embarrass him.

First, he snaps his fingers when he wants me to come over to the table. When I offer to tell him the specials he rolls his eyes and says, "Fine." Then as I'm telling him and his guests the specials he actually blurts out "Blah, blah, blah," while I'm talking. Stunningly rude. I mean, what is that? So, fine, I ignore it.

He was nasty the entire time, and I swallowed it and smiled. Even when he loudly announced that he dated a waitress once, but dumped her because it was embarrassing when people asked her what she did for a living. I chuckled at that. Maybe that was what pissed him off. I've developed the habit of smiling and sometimes even laughing when people go out of their way to be jerks. I find it amusing. Life's too short to get that worked up over nonsense, and when people freak out over virtually nothing, I can't help but laugh at them. Probably not the best idea, I know, but it's either that or letting them get to me, and there's way too many of them, so amused is what they get, like it or not. In his case not.

So I don't feel bad about the spitting. He deserved it. Okay, maybe I feel a little bad, but not that bad. Considering the fact that I know waiters who have wiped people's credit cards in their ass cracks and then handed them back to customers, a little spit doesn't seem so bad. Like everything that happens to us in life, it's all relative, and I try to keep things in perspective.

I feel awful about the spitting. I called my best friend, Sydney, and told her. She gave me a spiel about the karmic ramifications of what I did. She said I had just opened up the floodgates for some really bad juju. Actually, it's not that I feel worse about what I did or that I'm overcome with guilt, really. I guess it's that now I have to live in fear of bad juju. Which is worse. Now I can never eat in a restaurant again. Thanks, Sydney.

"La-di-da, la-di-da, la la."

-Annie, Annie Hall.

"I'm not talking to you. Call me!"

-Neil, The Big Picture.

Brady.

I went back to my apartment today. Only just when I was about to turn the key, I remembered it's not my apartment anymore. So I leave, and I'm walking away from what was my apartment building, and my cell phone rings. I answer.

"I knew you'd change your mind," Sarah says. I look up and see her standing in the window. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, the way I always liked it. That is, back when there were things to like about her. "Less hair . . . more face," I'd always tell her. I wave hello. "I was just about to shower," she says. "Want to wash my back?"

"Hi," I say awkwardly. "Shit, Sarah . . . I'm sorry. I didn't change my mind. I'm tired. I just got off a long, annoying flight. I just came back here out of habit."

"Fuck you, then. I'm changing the locks." She hangs up, slams the window shut, and then flips me off with both middle fingers. I wave good-bye, feeling very, very good about breaking up, and head back to the subway.

Along the way I see an ambulance and a crowd watching as paramedics carefully lift someone onto a gurney. I shake my head in disgust and continue on. I hate that. People who slow down to see the crash or stop and stare at other people's misfortunes. It's morbid curiosity and bad karma. Who knows? Maybe someday they'll be carted off as other people watch.

However, there is one thing I always do whenever I see the wreckage of a car crash or the wreckage of the relationship I just left behind. I see the flashing lights on an ambulance and immediately start to think about how every moment in that person's life or my life has led up to this moment right now. How your whole life had to be measured out in such a way that you step out in front of the car at that very second. And for the person driving the car to be at that spot at that second. Right now I think about my life and how every single thing I've ever done has gotten me to right here. Walking away from a failed relationship and a cheap apartment.

And for some reason known only to God and the operators of torture chambers the world over, into my head comes "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers. A song destroyed-along with the art of making pottery-for a generation to come by the movie Ghost. A movie I was once forced to watch for the thousandth time by-you guessed it-Sarah. "Oh . . . my love . . . my darling . . . I've hungered . . . for . . . your touch . . ." The next line of the song is about how time goes by so slowly. Maybe it wouldn't go by so slowly if you could just . . . finish . . . a . . . fucking . . . sentence.

I think about the first time I fell in love with a girl and a song at the same time. The Beckets' house. They were friends of the family, and they still had a bad shag carpet. I was eleven and Sheryl Becket was thirteen. When I passed her room, she was playing "Cars" by Gary Numan, dancing around her room, singing along. She didn't see me, but I thought she was the most graceful girl in the world. With the most beautiful voice in the world. And I loved the song. Although, truth be told, it wasn't the best showcase for her teenage lyrical chops. Not only did that moment show me the hold that music could have over women . . . it made me want to learn how to drive.

I think about the first time I kissed a girl. Maggie Stanhope. She had a Band-Aid on her chin to cover a zit, and she thought somehow the Band-Aid was less conspicuous. We were thirteen and hanging out at her friend Monica Sellers's house. Maggie took me into Monica's closet and planted one on me. I can still taste her bubble-gum lip gloss. Elvis Costello's "Alison" was playing on Monica's radio. When he sang the words "My aim is true," I thought about what a target her lips made and that I should keep aiming my kisses right there at the bull's-eye. Now I think about the promise that kiss held-and every other kiss with every other girl I kissed after Maggie-with a similar sense of hope, each one turning out progressively more disastrous.

I think about the first time I got fired from a job. I was washing dishes eleven hours a day. Day after day, in a non-air-conditioned kitchen. My clothes stuck to me. The only thing I was allowed to drink for free was soda water. Not soda. Soda water. And my boss would walk around every now and then and take a sip of my soda water to make sure it wasn't actually 7-UP. Every time he took a sip, I'd toss it because I didn't want his germs or God knows what else lurking in his mouth. One day he did a spot check and took a sip. I tossed it. Then, thinking he wouldn't check again for a while, I got a cup of 7-UP. Five minutes later he took a sip, and I was busted. I was so distraught that right after he fired me I ran to Kmart-it was the only place open past nine-and bought the new Tears for Fears album. When I got home, I played "Mad World" over and over again and wallowed in self-pity. I'd become a lonely traveler in a world of broken dreams, and no song seemed a better accompaniment on the journey.

All of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It's like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack.

My first KISS concert. Which led to my buying an electric guitar. Which led to my starting my first shitty band. Which led to my finding out that girls are impressed by guitar players-even if they play in shitty bands. Which led to a career of helping other guitar players with their shitty bands. Which led to a 2002 New Year's Eve gig at Roseland and an unwarranted spirit of optimism at the moment a stranger named Sarah ran up to me at midnight and demanded that I kiss her. Which led to my kissing her, which led to my living with her, which led to my finding out what a screaming psychotic banshee she is, which led to my leaving her, which led to . . .

Well. To here. Right here, descending the steps to the subway, after being flipped off outside her apartment. A straight linear progression from then to now.

But you can see that it's not my fault. I should really blame KISS. Or John Hughes.

Heaven.

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. I set my watch alarm, but I've never been good at that, so it didn't go off. Then I was looking at my toilet-seat cover thinking I wanted to get one of those furry carpet covers, and for some reason it came to me . . . the lunar eclipse! I raced to my window, but my window is north facing, and directly north of me is a brick wall about seven feet away.

So I raced outside with a paper plate and a roll of aluminum foil, because those were the items I vaguely remembered from my fourth-grade science project involving lunar eclipses. Or maybe it was solar eclipses? Anyway, I didn't know what to do with them exactly, so I used the plate to sit on, in an effort to buffer the cold concrete, and I rolled the aluminum foil into a telescope. Then I realized that without lenses it wouldn't be good for much, so I turned it into a mini megaphone to bay at the moon.

I stayed up half the night, enchanted by a lunar eclipse I never got to see. The other half of the night I stayed up for a less enchanting reason. Some asshole in my building was screaming "Hello!" at 2 a.m. repeatedly. In the apartment right next door to mine. I don't know what the hell that was about, but I finally pounded on the wall and screamed back, "Yeah, hello! Can you please shut up now?" He yelled, "Sorry." And then he stayed quiet. Then I couldn't sleep for the next two hours because I started worrying, What if that guy was retarded? He must have been. What if he couldn't help himself . . . and I just told him to shut up. I felt awful. Completely guilty. I couldn't fall back asleep.

Brady.

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. From all the press, you'd have thought a meteor was going to hit us. I looked all night . . . for someone who actually gave a damn.

It was my first night in my new place. It echoes. I don't know if it's a guy thing or what, but I had to test the echo from all possible angles of the apartment to see where it was best. All of my furniture is being delivered tomorrow, and then it won't echo anymore. So I had to take advantage of it while I had it.

Some bitch started pounding on the wall like a maniac to get me to shut up before I got to fully experience all possible echoes, but I did get my fair share in. Sorry I woke you and your twelve cats up, lady. Jeez.

It's weird sleeping in the new place. Sarah insists I'll be back, but there's no way in hell that's gonna happen. If I left a rent-controlled apartment just to get away from her, all bets are off that I'll be moving back in. I will not be getting back together with Sarah. I don't want to date anyone, period. This is going to be my time to be single. End of story.

Heaven.

I think I'm suffering from toxic mold poisoning. I've been achy and tired and feeling like shit for months. I know some other people that had the same symptoms, and it turned out they had mold in their homes. My friend Deirdre had to move out of her house because of black mold. She and her boyfriend had been sick for months, and as soon as they moved they got better. They could have done mold removal, but they wanted to move anyway. I'm not moving. If I have toxic mold in my house I'll just have to get it removed. I hope it's not expensive.

I just ordered a mold test kit online for $29.95 from Mr. Mold. After looking it up online, I'm almost positive I have the black mold. This Web site lists all the symptoms. People who have it have at least ten of these symptoms: 1. Respiratory distress, coughing, sneezing * I cough, I sneeze.

2. Burning in the throat and lungs * Does acid reflux count?

3. Diarrhea, nausea, piercing lower abdominal pains, vomiting * I'll go with no on this one, except for that time I ate at San Loco. Never eat at San Loco.

4. Dark urine * No, but I do have fluorescent urine when I take my multivitamin.

5. Memory loss, short-term memory, brain fog * Definitely.

6. Swollen lymph nodes * Not sure where my lymph nodes are.

7. Headaches * Yes. Almost everyone I know gives me one.

8. Anxiety/Depression * Yes, yes, yes! In fact, I'm getting even more anxious as I go down this list.

9. Ringing in ears * Yes! And I thought it was tinnitus from too many loud concerts.

10. Chronic fatigue * Yes.

11. Intermittent twitching * Not really. I did have an eye twitch that lasted for a week, but my doctor said that was just stress.

12. Nosebleeds * No.

13. Night sweats and hot flashes * No, but I do get overheated when I eat spicy foods. Indian food makes me sweat like a major-league baseball player in a steroids inquiry.

14. Hair loss * Yikes! Every time I wash my hair I lose enough to make a Barbie-doll wig. I go through two bottles of Drano a month to clear up the hair clogs. I should start saving the hair and actually make the wigs. If Mattel ever makes "Cancer Barbie" and sells her in all her bald glory, my wigs will sell like hotcakes. And I can use the money to pay for the mold removal.

15. Weight change * Yes. I go up and down daily. I gain five pounds between breakfast and lunch. This is bad. How many yeses do I have now?

16. Infertility * Knock on wood, I haven't gotten pregnant. I use condoms. Well, they use condoms. Unless . . . oh, great. For all I know, the condoms could have broken, and I never got pregnant because I'm infertile.

17. Heart attack * Not yet.

18. Rash, hives, bloody lesions all over the body * Ew! No.

19. Heart palpitations * Yes. Right now, in fact.

20. Death in some cases * Not yet.

So I have at least ten, possibly eleven of these things. I could be dying right now and not know it. Which brings me back to my point about getting married in eighteen months.

I guess I never really explained that. When I said before that I am engaged, it wasn't exactly the whole truth. I'm not actually engaged. Now before you go off thinking I'm some kind of compulsive liar, I'm not. Because I am engaged to be married in eighteen months. I'm just not engaged to anyone in particular.

In eighteen months, I'll be twenty-seven. Twenty-seven is the age at which all of my musical heroes died. Jim Morrison? Dead at twenty-seven. Kurt Cobain? Dead at twenty-seven. Jimi Hendrix? Twenty-seven. Janis Joplin . . . twenty-seven. Coincidence? Maybe. But for some reason, I've always thought I was going to be dead at twenty-seven, too. Unless I got married. Don't ask me why I think this. I just do. It's just something I know in my gut. If I get married my destiny changes, and I'll live a long and happy life. If not-there's always my funeral to look forward to, which you know I'm already making preparations for. But let's not go there. I have every intention of being married within eighteen months. Or dead. Don't get me wrong-I'm not going to settle. I'm not looking for any old schmuck to put a ring on my finger and save me from my disastrous fate. It has to be the right schmuck. And I'm picky as hell. So understandably, this is a very precarious time.