The spectre of Work emerged slowly from the closet and moved menacingly toward the bed. Robed in peeling layers of fabric, the figure approached soundlessly, shuffling slightly in a way that suggested its knees bent the wrong way under its cloaks. With rising terror, I realized I couldn't move a muscle. In the murky grotto under its hood I could see shifting, twisted features comprised of movable graphic layers coded in complex HTML. It opened its mouth, and an inarticulate groan began to rise in volume, filling the room, causing the feathers in the pillow to turn brown and curl up, the books to blister. The mouth kept opening, impossibly wide, splitting the face in two as inside the throat something terrible began to blink rhythmically. I found myself wanting to reach out into the greasy opening and push the blinking button, and boot up this creature's internal drive.

We get off to a bad start, but I befriend Work. It takes time; he tries to scare me by coughing up eyeballs and letting them fall from his tongue to the floor. When I stop showing signs of being impressed, he backs away from me like a bird on those strange backwards legs. Yet when I walk away, he follows, silently, expectantly, his graphic features swirling in consternation. He gets a little closer every day.

By now, he sits beside me as I type, his eyes glimmering in the screenlight. Looking into them is like querying a database. He pouts when I stop typing, the layer containing the graphic for his protruding lower lip moving to the foreground of the dynamic environment of his face.

He gets tired easily, and naps on the easy chair in the office while I stay busy. He says he's "compiling." I mess with my website while I wait for him to awaken.

While Work napped last night, I put up a new section devoted to my letters to "Hints from Heloise". It made me giggle as I proofed it. Also I've been working on a new flashy page as a gateway to more info about Virtue. I poked around the web and didn't find any sites that were clearly the preeminent source of information on goodness, so I thought I'd try to move in on that market as well. Naturally, the best way to do this is to package Virtue attactively using the wonders of modern technology. No one can be expected to bother with goodness unless it's served to them with whipped cream 4.0 and a clickable cherry.

In other website news, my friend Doug recently offered to give me his old webcam, having grown weary of the naughty world of NetMeeting chats that it opened up for him. Lacking any idea what I could do with it, I readily accepted. It isn't the digital camera of my dreams, but the kind of low-res variety that has to be on an umbilical to the computer. I won't aim it back at myself -- too passé, even if I did perform the customary lewd acts online. The window? Boring. Cops coming and going at the local police station. Point it at an ongoing painting so the world can watch it evolve? Point it at the picture of my grandfather with Jack Dempsey? Get a mobile and let the world watch it spin? Point it at my friend Work, snoring gently in the corner? Nothing feels quite right yet.