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Wedge is staring at me disdainfully; he's allowed (he's a cat), and it's Saturday night.

It's Saturday night and I'm home alone, by choice, and it feels strangely nice. I haven't been alone much at all lately, and the silence is refreshing.

S. and I have spending insane amounts of time together, but today, for the first time in a week, it's been a rush, a release, and a silly and fun time: tickles, ridiculous voices, lotsa nasty bed fun, and eating food which the Good Lord had the smarts to let mankind invent on its own. (If there'd been a cheese fries tree in the Garden of Eden, our arteries would never had lasted this long.)

The remnants of Mariko from Tokyo's visit still litter our studio/D's room � toys, home-burnt CDs, monster fish figurines, the little Rite Aid bag on the desk (filled with cigarette ashes, coffee cups, and used condoms). It's cold up there, and I don't mean because the windows were left open. She deserved a better time here than she got.

S. and I walked into the kitchen earlier today, and I just sat and breathed, listening. The house was dead still...an odd feeling. When this house is quiet, you can feel it pulsing, knocking, the ghosts pacing in the cellar.

I keep erasing partial diary entries and giving up or starting over. So here are a few farewells.

Farewell to 'I'm still alive' updates.

Farewell to painful rehashings of D's everyday idiocies.

Farewell to a lot of the past that's tainting me (Mei, D, every bad relationship or psycho girlfriend)...I'm throwing away a lot of stuff this weekend.

I've long since crashed into the side of the mountain and burned. I'm the raw, wrinkled, barely speaking mountain man. I'm the power broker, waking up in an alley with a bottle of gin by his side, half of a double-breasted suit still on his body, and old cashcards and passkeys in his pockets that do nothing but remind him why he needs to stay buried. I'm the mountain man. And I'm not.

The moral of Patrick McGoohan and his great Prisoner was this: Trust the path, not the signposts of your predecessors. Get the funding, get the guarantee of creative control (which, in my case, I already have both), and watch the times. Write what you see and feel.

NYC is heading for a long downspiral, despite the country, our less-than-erstwhile president's best efforts (not so good, as it turns out), and everyone's desire for a bolstered economy. The estimated unemployment rate is 3-4%, and it's only going to get worse.

And all I have to my name is a temp job. Time to pray, my children.

So I'm writing. D and I's little brainchild should be finished in the next week or so, and I hope this'll be the last pseudo-autobiographical piece I do for a while. Our Marvel pitch was close in energy, if not specifics, to real life at the time, and speculation's the fire behind my eyes right now. Dream the future, if you see it.

You might start hearing about a bubble future here soon.

A note long forgotten and remembered now:

I keep thinking back to Mei and her relentless deconstruction of language, a poet's fire to break down words and see what hoops they could jump through under her nimble pen.

She and I couldn't have been more different, and more doomed to not accept each other. I'm a storyteller; whether it's acting, writing, or a pint at the pub, I use language to wash people's minds with the worlds I imagine, the futures and presents we can create, the people we could be.

Ray Bradbury's always been my hero. Still is.

I want to dream the future in ten thousand different ways; then I'm going to run for President, win, and take my shot at remixing reality for real. (In 2012, I'll be 36, just over the legal age restriction...and I'll probably be running against Jesse, my old Air Force intelligence buddy, who'll win in a landslide for the GOP.)

Check it, two Jews running for President at the same time...it'll set the Catholics ablaze with envy, and Israel will be pissed when we're not automatically on their side.

Except for the most primary characters in my life (who get first initials only), all names are now fair game.

Mine's Steven.

What's yours?