ONE OF THE luxurious things about being born and raised in San Jose is that one is provided with a lifetime of idiocies and absurdities from which to generate story ideas. People are always asking me things like, "How the hell do you come up with all this stuff?"

My response is that it's pretty much the opposite situation. There's too much to write about. There's enough nonsense going on in this farce of a city (and valley, while I'm at it) to write about for the rest of my life. I'm just scared to death that I'll wind up doing exactly that.

The Silicon Alleys column debuted in April of 2005, but looking back on 2006, I cannot resist a healthy dose of navel-gazing and recall some of the juiciest experiences from writing the column just this last year.

In one piece, my old partner in crime from music school, Lisa Dewey, decided to show me her "tour" of San Jose. That one was a blast. Tripping around through the garbage, the bricks, the bottles and the discarded clothes behind the old Hart's warehouse was something that I would normally do anyway, and it was downright moving to find someone else my age who would relish in such delights. It was like our senior recitals all over again, and she received a slew of emails on that one.

In another column, I hooked up with veteran freelance writer Larry Tritten in Vancouver, British Columbia. About six years ago, after experiencing the sheer variety of stuff that he had published, I became convinced that I should do the same. Having to specialize in one area was death, in my opinion, and precisely the reason why I, at least most of the time, try to be unpredictable and write about as many different things as possible. That particular column also instigated a family reunion of sorts, as a friend of mine knew Tritten 30 years ago and hadn't seen him since. I hooked them up and the drinks flowed. It would never have happened if not for that column.

And speaking of things that would never have happened, here's proof that something good can come out of MySpace. I found the page of an old punk band I used to check out in the mid-'80s, Verbal Abuse (VA), and then just a few months later, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a sappy piece about the 25th anniversary of Journey's Escape album, so, being the reactionary type, I had to respond with a dark, violent piece about the 20th anniversary of VA's Rocks Your Liver album. That wasn't the original version of VA, but that article was a perfect example of the tortuous self-reflection that writers just sometimes have to go through. The darkness just poured off the page, and the drummer's ex-wife then found me through MySpace from Idaho after reading that one. Holy Toledo.

The CD rerelease of that album now sits on my desk, among piles of other stuff, the subject of yet another column that received mixed reviews. Yeah, one week I wrote about all the crap on my desk because I thought it was cool story. I had one friend tell me that was one of the worst things I've ever written and yet another friend tell me it was one of the best things I've ever written. Go figure.

But nothing topped the reaction I received after a pal showed me around the Elks Lodge on Alma Street. You see, this is where my sense of humor gets me into trouble sometimes. In a yarn titled "Got Elk," I tripped through the place and explained it as it was presented to me: a beautifully decrepit cross between a dive bar, an RV park and an old-folks home. I loved it. But some Elks didn't get the humor, and I got slammed with hate mail on that one.

Sacks of love mail do occasionally arrive in my inbox, and it's usually when I write about the lost San Jose Earthquakes soccer franchise and how the owners just hated this city and didn't want to be here. In fact, if I had to sum up my experiences with the Silicon Alleys column for the year of 2006, loss would be pretty much the core concept half of the time.

That's it. Loss. I feel like Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty—the scene where he's slumped over in the back seat, saying that he's definitely lost something in life, but he doesn't know what it is.

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