Finnegans Wake

I had a fast trip to the City and drove in circles around Finnegans Wake in Haight-Ashbury for half an hour until I found a parking spot six blocks away.

I walked to the bar and Dan Kutler called out to me as I was about to open the door. He'd been waiting across the street, apparently, instead of waiting inside. He bought me a drink and we yakked for a while...he's fresh back from shooting the "High School Classes" TV spots for the back-to-school campaign for Macy's. He didn't get a chance to shoot the mini-movie he's working on...he emailed me the script a couple weeks ago and I couldn't make head or tail of it:

A guy is having sex with a girl. He leaves, and she opens a door and finds newspaper clippings about a serial killer. Cut to a backroom poker game, where several men are yakking about the guy. The guy enters and they start to play poker. There's a knock at the door, and the girl comes in and stabs the guy to death and leaves. The men drag the body out into the alley and resume their card game. The end.

Then Mark Welte showed up and he bought me a drink. He's been swimming a lot, he says--he regularly swims from the Golden Gate bridge to the Bay Bridge. A 2.5 mile trip.


Mark has a full-time job on the Nokia account, but there's nothing going on there and he's getting restive.


Then Carole Ergas, Mike and Tanya Wyr, and Allison arrived. Ally is a new pal of Tanya's, a lithe blonde. We found a table and sat down and yakked. Rosie didn't show up for about another hour, and she seemed half plastered. Some tall guy named Lance showed up, a friend of Mark's from Manhatten who has recently moved here.

Around midnight Mark, Lance, Rosie and I went to another bar where Rosie's friend Jack is the bartender, and her friend Bruce was there. The place was small and had a loud jazz band, and Mark and Lance and I stayed for one drink. I took a picture of Rosie with the jazz group behind her. Who knows how it will turn out. Mark and Lance gave me a ride to my car and I drove home through zero traffic and got home around 130am.

Friday I went into San Francisco and met six of my writer friends at a
bar called Finnegans Wake and then later went to a bar with a live jazz
band, but we partied so hard that I don't really remember what happened.
Rosie got a pink slip at her job as director of content at www.owners.com
as the company went belly up. Mark is writing print campaigns for Nokia
and swims from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge every morning. Dan was fresh back from New York where he supervised the filming of his
scripts for the Macy's TV commercials for the back-to-school season. Tanya
is depressed because the interesting work seems to be over at
www.miadora.com and she's writing dreck about diamonds every day. Mike
feels he made a good bargain by agreeing to stay on at
www.firstauction.com until the end of July, when it will move to LA in
some deal that media mogul Barry what's his name arranged--Mike gets a
nice big severance deal. Carole was hush-hush about her newest dot.com
job, but she arrived in a new white BMW convertible. She deflected the
conversation toward a discussion of what was the worst drunken stunt each
of us had pulled.