Last night I dreamed I updated Yatima. It’s a great improvement on dreams about encountering the abyss in my local supermarket.

We’ve had a succession of glorious September days, the sun and sky glowing, Claire playing industriously under the avenue of pines between Les Oliviers and the vineyards. Tough life. Last night we had an extraordinary meal, which I shall blog as soon as I’ve more than a tenuous dialup connection.

Tonight: Toulouse. Tomorrow: Dublin.

“I had someone IM’ing me from the Oracle keynote, saying ‘Please let me die!'”

“Headline: ‘Journalist gnaws off own arm in bid to escape vendor briefing.'”

“No, a good journalist would gnaw off someone else’s arm.”

I had a very ordinary day yesterday, and by ordinary I mean bad. I dreamed I was at Cala, our local supermarket, buying a large bottle of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, when I caught sight of a couple of people we used to know. What is it with the supermarkets? I woke in tears and spent the rest of the day under a cloud. Grief, like evil, is very boring.

I’m halfway through the second volume of Janet Browne’s Darwin biography. It’s a masterpiece, as witty and engaging as a novel yet far broader in scope. A weird effect: when I read books I think are just very good, I sometimes get resentful and jealous that I didn’t write them. When I read books I think are truly wonderful, like this, and Pride and Prejudice and Mating and A Suitable Boy and A Peace to End All Peace, I get inspired. Why?

It reminds me of that wonderful Hazlitt essay on Hamlet: “Shakespear had more magnanimity than any other poet… he is the most amiable of misanthropes.” Magnanimity – what a choice word! From the Latin magna animus, great-spirited, big-souled, Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes,” the Apostle Mark’s “My name is Legion, for we are many.” Hamlet and Shylock and Beatrice and Benedick and Cordelia and Lear are all just fragments of Shakespeare’s immensely complicated inner self.

Maybe it’s not that my favourite books happen to be generous, but that the quality of generosity is a prerequisite for becoming one of my favourite books. We tell (or co-opt) stories to explain ourselves to ourselves and other people. The best stories encompass multiple points of view and invite explanations in return: Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. The worst stories characterize Armenians or Jews or Cambodian intellectuals or Bosnian Muslims or Hutus or Tutsis or Palestinians or Israelis as cockroaches.

Culture and genocide come from the same place, one based on courage, the other on fear. When I grow up I would like to be very brave, and to write magnanimous books, and not to have any more bad dreams.

“I always think Charlotte Lucas must have been in love with Lizzy. How else could she stand living with Mr Collins? I get the sense that there was no real outlet for her passion at all, that she could never afford to indulge the dream of a great love.”

“Poor Charlotte. The most tragic figure in all of Austen.”

“I like to imagine that she fed Mr Collins rich food so he would die young and leave her a wealthy widow. And she could have a young companion.”

“Yes! She could live at Longbourn and take Mary Bennet for her lover…”

The drive up I80 wasn’t very pleasant, so we stopped overnight at the Peppermill in Reno. Our room looked like the set of a porn film, all turqoise and lavender velour, chrome and mirrors, with low lighting and a shiny black jacuzzi. Claire loved it. As we were leaving, Jeremy saw a woman gesture towards the video poker machines and say, with great joy: “It’s my birthday and this is my favourite place!”

We exchanged wry glances. Mind you, she probably finds our favourite place equally insane. It was hot, it was dusty and the altitude always makes me queasy and miserable for the first few hours, but Black Rock City still makes my heart glad.

If nothing else, it’s very funny. Moby Dick chases the Spanish galleon La Contessa across the dry lake bed. Reverent participants hold ceremonies in the sacred center of a giant pissoir. Paul C went to the portapotties and was surprised by an orderly queue. “Where did this order come from?” he demanded.

“From chaos!” someone replied, quick as a whip.

Paul became despondent: “Chaos is breaking down,” he said.

We imagined the effects of reverse entropy, works of art rising from the flames, seventeen resurrected Men striding across the desert towards Gerlach.

For some reason, my happiest moment is invariably at dusk on Friday: last year’s insanely overdone sunset, space junk falling over DJ Christ Superstar, the cocktail party at Spiral Oasis the first year we went. This year, ten Moonbasers carried our 28-foot bamboo dome, festooned with LEDs, out onto the playa, as my brother’s iPod played the Underground Lovers: Is this your idea, is this your idea of a holiday?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is.

…I want to write you a letter. I mean, I’ll understand you’re there

when I reach you in writing.

from The Grove, by Jean Lieske

“If Charles Darwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.”

First sentence of Charles Darwin vol 2: The Power of Place, by Janet Browne

I camped in the woods with the Romany. Jeremy and I, both aged six, hollowed out child-sized tracks under the lantana to cross the merry rivers and make our way secretly into the town. But agents of the Vichy government followed us back to the woods, and the Romany were taken away by the Nazis.

I woke in tears, and ran through the Woolworths supermarket in Frenchs Forest. I found two people I used to think I was close to, leaning their heads together over a shopping trolley, having a private conversation. They both stared at me with utter loathing.

I woke in tears, remembered with relief that it was all a dream, then remembered that it was true.

I dreamed I was trying to buy a gift for my father. Salome and Jeremy and I went to 826 Valencia. It wasn’t the pirate store we have come to know and love, but a huge SF-MoMA-ish emporium on three floors, with mezzanines and shiny fittings and bleached blond wood floors and cabinets full of tiny expensive things.

Unfortunately they’d decided to pack the whole thing up and move it to New York. The workers were following us around emptying the store behind us, meaning that I had to decide instantly whether to buy a thing or not. I was deeply flustered.

“Why New York?” asked Salome.

“No one in San Francisco buys things like these,” said a staff member.

“Oh well,” I said, “at least we still have Cliff’s Hardware.”

We ended up at one of those pottery-painting stores, but the only white mugs they had were too girly and frilly for my Dad, with some tacky silver logo. They did have solid, well-formed mugs, but only in yellow and blue.

“How am I supposed to paint these?” I asked crossly.

Jeremy was looking out the window.

“Let’s go and sit in the garden,” he said. “There’s hummingbirds.”

But enough about Kiki.

Have I mentioned my daughter Claire? She’ll be eight months old on Monday. When she’s clean, she smells like vanilla and soap; when filthy, she smells vaguely of yogurt, as toe-jam-like substances accumulate in her many folds. Her cap of hair is strawberry blonde and finer than spider silk. She has freckles underneath it, for no apparent reason other than to exceed internationally agreed levels of cuteness. Her cheekbones are, yes, up the proverbial wazoo.

Claire is fat, in the best possible sense of that word. Her belly is a sphere like a peach with an @ sign for a navel. Her butt has myriad dimples. Her thighs and calves fill up your hand in a pleasing, weighty way. Parts of the body that on conventional people are bony, on her are deliciously fat. She has bracelets of fat around her wrists and ankles. She has fat elbows. She has fat feet.

Her eyes attract much comment. You know how in the movie Men In Black, the cat Orion has a little jewel on his collar, and inside that jewel there’s an entire galaxy? Or you know how in the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring, where they wanted to capture Tolkien’s description of the depth of Galadriel’s expression, they hung Christmas lights to reflect constellations in Cate Blanchett’s eyes? You get the idea.

So, yeah, she’s beyond beautiful, et cetera, but what I really like about her is that she Knows Her Rights. She’s a fully paid-up member of the Babies’ Union; all smiles all the time, until you contravene her immutable will and the air raid siren goes up. I love her stubbornness and sense of herself, her funny friendliness and her ravenous curiosity. She has no baggage. She is all hug. I think she may be the single coolest human being I have ever met.

The chic and adorable Kiki Chung points out that there’s too much Claire material on Yatima, and not enough about Kiki.

This is probably true. But I don’t see Kiki sprouting new teeth.

You know that seal-bark laugh I do when I’m particularly amused: “Ha!”? Claire did it to me the other day. I melted. I felt like a proud papa taking his son to the ball game. She’s going to be sardonic!

Later she crawled over to the bookshelf and inspected Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and The Diamond Age before picking out a slim volume for herself

R: Looks like… is it Civilization and its Discontents?

Jeremy held it up: Strunk & White, The Elements of Style.

She lurks beneath:

From her gum there sprouts a gemstone, sharp as ground glass:

Katz Bagels was full of foxes today. There was a drop-dead-pretty punk-ass kid, a ringer for John Mayer in the clip for “Your body is a wonderland”, cheekbones up the proverbial wazoo, drinking Diet Coke and grinning adorably at his girlfriend. Then this lovely Japanese girl came in with her boyfriend, who would have been memorable in any other company but who just kinda paled into insignificance beside her.

Sally quoted Maude from Harold & Maude the other day: “Of course I like people. They’re my species.”

Actually, it’s more complicated than that. Lately I’ve been reading hundreds and hundreds of pages about the war to end all peace, which seems to have started some time around 1914 and continued with only brief breaks to this day. It’s disturbing, to say the least, to turn from Buruma’s visit to Auschwitz to Joe Sacco’s visit to Gaza. I think of my friend Eben describing the girls on the beach at Tel Aviv, and I think of the Sydney University dig at Pella in Jordan, and I think of the trip I’d like to make in the footsteps of Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt’s first expedition to buy horses from the Negev tribes, except that their tracks lie across Syria and Northern Iraq. Um. Maybe next year.

Try and make sense of any of this and your brain will bend. Sharon’s fence, for example: I’m not the first (and won’t be the last) to note its striking resemblance to the Berlin Wall, but beyond that purely superficial point, where does the analogy get you? The East Germans built a wall to keep defectors in; the Israelis have built theirs to keep bombers out. Stratfor gloomily wonders whether cutting the Territories off economically will put pressure on Jordan’s government and cause the Hashemites to fall, giving Israel a far more powerful and unfriendly neighbour on its Eastern border. What a joyous prospect that would be, eh?

The best I can do, and it’s pitiful, is to think of the Wall and the Fence as mismatched bookends framing the dangerous illusion of peace I indulged in the 1990s. Learning more about Croatia and Bosnia and Rwanda and the African World War and East Timor and Iraq and Afghanistan puts the lie even to that naive dream. Wired Magazine’s Long Boom never reached far beyond the limits of the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston’s Route 128. People, like wild dogs and rats, apparently need walls and razor-wire and UN-mandated safe areas backed by NATO bombs to prevent them from slaughtering each other en masse. They may be my species, but apparently we’ve got problems.

It’s weird and scary reading this stuff with Claire gurgling and playing with blocks beside me, but I think it’s Claire who gives me the courage to tackle it. More than that, I think being Claire’s mother gives me an obligation to look these things in the face, to think deeply about the world and how fucked-up it is, and to figure out some kind of provisional response, some way of tackling a future that’s clearly going to be much stranger and more frightening than I can at present imagine.

To step back a bit, critical consensus is that Wartime isn’t quite as good as Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. That’s not to disparage Wartime so much, because The Great War is a modern masterpiece. Wartime is still a knockout. This time around it made me incredibly, viscerally angry (What doesn’t? inquires the peanut gallery), to the point where instead of writing the short story I was reading it to try to research, I went and wrote a completely different short story about growing up Christian and the misuse of language and the perversion of the imagination.

This, it seems to me, is close to the root of the problem: the ongoing effort to persuade members of my tribe that we alone possess the divinely mandated secret of eternal life, while your tribes are all hell-bound infidels hell-bent on persecuting us and therefore worthy only of death. Having believed this once, I do appreciate what a comforting fantasy it is. But I no longer subscribe.

So when I was walking back to the office with Katz bagels in hand, thinking these and other thoughts, and a clean-cut Chinese boy thrust a pamphlet at me, saying

“Jesus loves you!”

…I regret to say that I laughed out loud in his face.

Calmly and without fuss, Claire cut her first tooth.

This afternoon after work we headed down to the new park at Treat and 23rd. It could hardly be any closer to us – two short blocks west, one block south. Used to be a Superfund site, toxic, a paint factory I think. They pulled up the contaminated earth and trucked it away and built this in its place.

It’s a great park. There’s a playground for pre-schoolers and another one for grade-schoolers and a gazebo and a community garden and a greensward for playing ball. It’s only been open a week or two and it’s already swarming with children, almost all Hispanic but with a smattering of white and mixed-race folks too. People are friendly, though mostly in Spanish and to my shame, no habla Espanol.

Claire and I stretched out on the grass. I listened to the kids laughing and smelled the steamy loam and felt the wet grass soaking through my jeans and watched white clouds scudding across the sky. Claire pulled up blades of grass and inspected them minutely. I’m snowed under at work and vaguely worried about money and where we’ll live next and how to make time to write fiction, but even so, lying there in the park with my best girl by my side, I was as happy as I’ve ever been.

The CTO was speaking what sounded like English, but now that I come to read over my notes, I realize it was the language of dreams.

“I like to joke that it’s a dessert wax and a floor topping,” he explained. “The landscape is changing anyhow. The big players are clearly in tune with the value prop. We’re not looking to boil the ocean and replace the moon, by any means.”

The phone rings, waking me, but mercifully not the baby. Jeremy is working at the computer.

“It’s 1am!” he begins.

“Oh,” he says. “Are you sure she’s the right person?”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay then.”

He appears in the doorway of the darkened bedroom.

“It’s okay, I’m awake,” I say.

“It’s the security company for your work. They say they’ve tried to get hold of John but they can’t, and the alarm’s going off, and they want to know if they should call the police.”

I take the phone and tell them to, yes, by all means, call the police.

“Now don’t worry,” says Jeremy. “Go back to sleep.”

I lie awake in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring again, which of course it does.

“There has been a break-in,” says Jeremy. “They need you to go down there and talk to the police.”

I park Hedwig the wonder car behind the four patrol cars flashing in our alley, and wonder uneasily whether I’m here to learn that John has been bonked on the head and Oscar is going to grow up fatherless.

“Are you Rachel?” asks the friendly Irish sergeant with the grey handlebar moustache. When I nod, he calls to the others: “The responsible is here.”

You know you’re scraping the barrel, hierarchy-wise, when I am deemed the responsible.

Everyone is straight out of central casting: the Irish sergeant, his beautiful black-Irish woman sidekick, the go-getting twenty-something red-headed jock with the Italian name, the heartbreakingly pretty Japanese boy at the bottom of the pecking order. There’s an eyewitness, who I will call Comic Book Guy. He’s our neighbor, moved in to the apartment opposite our office on July 1st, immediately formed the Crime-Ridden Alley Improvement Society and talked to Captain Corrales at Mission Station about cleaning the place up.

Comic Book Guy was watching our office at 1am, as you do, when he saw a black man in a red shirt and white pants climb the door, kick in the window and enter the office. He called the dispatcher and the police arrived in time to find the black man cowering under our conference table in the mezzanine upstairs. The suspect is in custody. He doesn’t seem to have purloined any company property, but the police have confiscated his crack pipe.

Comic Book Guy wants him locked up, preferably for ever. Comic Book Guy watches all the cop shows and has the jargon down.

“If he does get charged, please make sure I get called as a witness. I’m your eyeball, right? I want to tell the judge how bad the alley is. I want to ask the judge to put him away. Did you say he’s on parole? Is this his third strike? Is he going down?”

Friendly Irish sergeant is wise to city politics. San Francisco’s district attorney Terence Hallinan has a background as a public defender, a poor relationship with the police department and a reputation for being very soft on crime.

“In an ideal world, yes, he would be locked up,” says the sergeant. “But this is Hallinan’s world. He’s not on parole, he’s on county probation. That’s a Hallinan thing… You will get a subpoena, don’t worry.”

There’s a lot of standing around, waiting for the inspector to turn up. While we wait, the sergeant explains How These Things Work. He has the knack. He’s a business analyst of the underworld.

“Stolen property typically sells on the street for five to ten percent of its book value,” he says. “So say he’d stolen a three hundred dollar computer, he could expect to fence it for fifteen to thirty dollars.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” says Comic Book Guy to me, “When you’ve worked so hard to start a business?”

“Yeah, we should have just set ourselves up as fences,” I reply. “Ninety to ninety-five percent? That’s a terrific markup.”

Everyone looks at me very blankly, and I am reminded of the signs in American airports: “Jokes Will Be Taken Seriously.”

“When you see street vendors selling things on the sidewalk, that typically comes from one of three places,” says the sergeant. “Home burglaries, car burglaries or stealing out of the donations to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. The biggest scam in the city, though, is stealing recyclables. I don’t have any issue with street bums digging through unsorted garbage. At least they’re doing a little bit of work to improve their situation. But there are people who drive around with vans on garbage nights and pick up the recyclables before Sunset Scavenger can get to them. That sort of thing just raises everyone’s property taxes.”

I like friendly Irish sergeant very much. He notices the picture of Boston as a puppy and says: “Your office manager has a golden retriever? He’s good people.”

“Yes she is,” I say.

He shows me pictures of his own golden retrievers, in a swimming pool.

“I can’t keep them out of the water,” he says.

“I guess they’re checking the pool for ducks,” I say.

“I guess they are,” he says, and chuckles.

As we are locking up, I thank Comic Book Guy for keeping an eye on the office.

“I’m helping you as well as myself,” he says truculently.

When I get home there is thunder rumbling in the distance. Cat and baby are fast asleep. As Jeremy and I lie awake and I tell him all about it, one of San Francisco’s rare summer storms forges its way overhead, spattering warm rain on our bedroom windows. I think about the black man in the red shirt, dragged from under our conference table, locked up at Mission Station, waiting to be charged.

Next on Yatima: she’s a wicked-tempered working mom. He’s a bearded Linux guy. They fight crime!

I was Batman! Claire was still my daughter, of course. I was throwing her a huge party and I went in my Bat-costume, which confused several guests who only knew me as Bruce Wayne. Alfred was serving hors d’oeuvres.

Being Batman, I was a man! I can tell I really was a man, because I was thinking about sex. This gorgeous thirty-something woman, who reminded me vaguely of Justine and also of Tina, was helping decorate the scout hall with streamers and helium balloons. She was on a step-ladder and I was totally checking out her, well, y’know, her ass. Can I say that on a family blog? It was kinda hard to avoid it, since she was wearing turquoise bikini bottoms under a translucent skirt. But she carried it off! She was all lean, muscular thighs and the cutest bubble butt.

She looked down and caught me in the act. Her blonde curls were tied up in messy pigtails. She had huge blue eyes and cheekbones up the proverbial wazoo. She met my eye and gave me this amazing, frank, open grin, like I was the most fun she was going to have all day. Be still my beating wossname. I wondered shyly if she would go out with me.

Then I remembered – of course she’d go out with me! I was Batman!

Of course when I woke up, I realized she was the girl version of Jeremy.

Man, she was hot.

Knoa said to Recheng the other day: “Where is baby Claire’s mama? I miss her.”

Yatima is one today.

As I look back over last July, I find that very little has changed. Luminists are arrayed against me, but my scurvy dogs guard my flanks. The Gandhi mural has been cleaned up. I continue to seek out raptors and bagels at Atlas. Kids today still smile blankly at my jokes, and my brother, he is still funny.