I dreamed the other night that a reader of this web site tried to murder me.

In the dream I replaced this entire web site with a message “AS YOU MAY KNOW, A VISITOR TO THIS WEB SITE ATTEMPTED TO MURDER ME AT 6:18 PM ON…”

As I explained to a friend (and before you roll your eyes), this dream was not a product of self-absorbed paranoia. It was garbage of the day dreaming.

Before going to bed that night I typed in the URL of a web site I hadn’t seen in a long time. Every page of that site was gone, replaced with a note saying “As some of you know, my house burned down and everything is lost.” It shocked me.

This got mixed in with the loosely associated memory of a time I got recognized as “Sorajbi” by some guy handing out porn club fliers in Times Square.

To further clutter my evidently peaceful mind (and I forgot to include this in my explanation of the matter to that aforementioned friend) there was the ongoing matter of correspondents who live a few blocks away but would live a full lifetime before meeting for coffee at a mutually convenient place. I do not know what I do to attract this sort of thing, or if I simply exacerbate it, but as long ago as 1994 I have had extravagant correspondences via e-mail and other means with women who live as near as across the street but who would never consider taking our communications outside e-mail.

When I lived in Washington Heights (and then on the East Side) I corresponded with a woman for over a year, this during the reign of FidoNET and dialup BBSes. She tried and failed to draw me into what the kids now call NetSex.

After months of correspondence I inadvertently discovered that she lived, literally, across the street. That was 1994. This is 2004 and it happens today just like 10 years ago.

But recently it’s a little weirder. This is what contributed to the garbage of the day dream. The same day I saw that web site of the person whose had burned down, I got e-mail from someone up the street saying “I think I saw you at the grocery store today. Were you wearing a tan shirt and white pants? Did you buy some rolls from the bakery?”

The attention whore in me, which assumes the world revolves around my travels through the sidewalks and grocery stores of my life, used to feel a tinge of satisfaction. In my mind it rang like the sound of “a little pin-prick” in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”

But it no longer tantalizes. It bores me. Now I wince at how I still attract this sort of thing, and at how the problem is with me and no one else.