We didn’t see each other much that weekend. Doug and Jim had a lot of work to do on the business plan for Mojo Nation, and I spent a lot of time simply driving around the peninsula, trying to wrap my head around living in the dream that I’d always imagined to be Silicon Valley. I’d passed most of Sunday with Charlie, one of my old friends from the gaming industry, playing board games with his old group of older guys. They’d been meeting about once a week to try one game or another for more than twenty years; for a while, I was a welcome drop-in addition, and I was extremely grateful, even well after I’d moved into my own home. Charlie’s game room would be an island of sanity in what would be my increasingly unpredictable world, and that first time there was no different.

On my way away from Charlie’s place — in a suburb south of Oakland, just on the other side of the bay — I got a call from Doug to meet up again with Jim for dinner. He had news.

“We broke up,” he told me.

“Oh, wow,” I said, “I’m really sorry.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging. He seemed tired, for sure, but he looked a lot better. His shoulders weren’t slumped. He was almost relaxed.

Jim was eyeing him with quiet distance. I should’ve taken that as a sign.

“I hope I didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.

“No, no,” Doug said. “I mean, you did — but not in a bad way.” He thought about it. “Having you here showed me how unhappy I’ve been. You reminded me what it was like…to have fun. So, thanks.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m really sorry to hear that. I mean, I guess I’m glad it’s been fun and everything, but yeah: I’ve been wondering what was up. You’re not the same Doug I remember from Austin. You haven’t seemed very happy.”

“I’m not very happy,” he said with a laugh. “At least, I haven’t been. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thanks. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. Honestly, I had no idea what you were doing with that girlfriend of yours. I thought she was a terrible fit for you.”

“How so?” he asked, so I went off on what I didn’t like about her, because I’m a very stupid person.

The next day, Doug called me at work and asked if I could stop on my way home and pick up some steaks for him. He was grilling for some people — I would need to make my own plans for the evening — but he was too busy with work and the like to hit ths store himself.

When I got to his place with the steaks, Doug was so upset he was flustered.

“These are not—” he started, pointing at the steaks.

“What? I got what you wanted.”

“Yes,” he said, “but don’t you know what the important part of this cut is? It’s this little piece of meat right here.” He pointed. “You always get the ones with the largest part of this cut. That’s the best part, everybody knows it.”

I felt more than a little side-swiped. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” He waved it off. “I was going to ask you, though: What’s going to happen with you and your girl?”

Doug looked at me like I wasn’t making any sense, then his eyes snapped into focus. “Oh!” he said. “Yes. We talked about it, and we got back together.”

Oh, shit, I thought. “How do you feel about that?” I asked.

“Good, actually!” He smiled, opening the steaks. “We had a long talk, and it was good. I brought up with her a lot of the points that you’d made about her, and I think it was a productive conversation.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Did you tell her that those thoughts came from me?”

“Of course,” he said. “She’d actually like to talk with you about them as well.”

“I bet,” I said, and excused myself.

“Yeah, well,” Jim said, when I told him what had happened. “Doug doesn’t always break up with people on the first try. I learned a long time ago not to say anything until it’s definitely over, and sometimes even then I don’t ever.”

“I feel like an ass,” I said.

“Don’t,” Jim said. “It’s just what happens.”

The next day, I snuck out before anyone else was awake, made my way into the break room at work with a copy of the local peninsula phone book, and began calling apartments. There were no vacancies. In the city, where things were even hotter, people were paying as much as a thousand dollars a month just to crash on someone’s couch for a month. Having spent the past two years with a $500 monthly budget for living expenses, this seemed out of control. On the other hand, it was Silicon Valley.

Eventually, I found a complex that had a single one-bedroom open. While I was still in Austin, I’d been saving up for a new computer, one of the recently iMac releases. My monthly rent in Mountain View would cost more than an iMac each month. Luckily, if unreasonably, I could afford it. It made my head hurt, but the numbers were clear.

In less than ten days, I’d move into my own place. Not long after, for a while, Doug simply vanished.

It was hot out there, too, certainly, you could feel it in the air and see it on the streets. Some frenetic energy, as yet unnamed by science, propelled people through their days in a collective rush toward wealth.

In Austin, the traffic was thick with older and newer cars and trucks, the perfect and the dinged intertwined, carefully leaving enough several car-lengths between vehicles to reduce the risk of an accident. When construction closed a lane, the civilized response was the zipper: every car in the lane beside the closure taking its turn to let someone in, and every merging car waiting for its turn to fold into the path forward.

From a conference room at work, overlooking a Bay Area stretch of the 101 Freeway, traffic gleamed with new cars of mostly foreign makes and models. There were few American cars, and trucks were rare. And on the one hand, while the traffic was pitiless — the “we’re all in this together” spirit of the zipper was nowhere to be found — it cut both ways. It didn’t matter how fast you were going: if you left space enough for a car to physically fit between you and the next vehicle, you shouldn’t be surprised when a car moved to fill it, like any other vacuum in nature, usually without signally, many times abruptly, often for absolutely no apparent reason.

Bay Area driving culture was the exact opposite of Texas roads where, as we liked to say, an armed society is a polite society. But it wasn’t a fear of being shot that kept me from cutting people off in traffic, or that made me respect the unwritten social contract of the zipper. I genuinely enjoyed waving people over when they seemed ready to merge in front of me. I enjoyed waving a thank-you in my rear-view mirror after someone let me cut over in front of them. So the relative brutality and selfishness of Bay Area driving would have been infuriating for me, if there hadn’t also been an upside.

In Austin, and in Texas in general, you could go something like ten miles over the speed limit, and no more, without being guaranteed that the next cop who sees you will pull you over and rather aggressively ask what the hell you thought you were doing. In the Bay Area, though, most of the time if you were only going ten miles over the speed limit, you’re almost guaranteed to see other cars shooting past you, sometimes honking.

My heart soared when I discovered that eighty miles an hour was the basic flow of traffic along several a wide, winding freeways. My favorite was 280, which parallels 101 along the western boundary of Silicon Valley, dividing the tech towns from the long and sharply rising hillside — a mountain range, really, to this Texas boy — which itself separates the warm flatland of the peninsula from the cold Pacific Coast air. Low clouds sprint east off the ocean, building up on the western edge of the hillside until some critical mass breaks through, foggy tendrils waterfalling down the eastern stretch of hills, rolling in to calm any late-afternoon heat, with me, shooting north at more than ninety miles an hour, my ragged red convertible still being passed by shiny European road yachts driven by silver-haired men, lost in thought.

Few people talk about Silicon Valley from within Silicon Valley, even in the static-filled days of that unnamed frenetic energy, throwing off radical sparks of dot-com and Web and broadband-to-the-home. Still, there was no confusing the place for what it was. I had to be reminded repeatedly that until pretty recently, most of the peninsula had been a few scattered suburbs surrounded by tens of miles of rich farmland, fruits and nuts and vegetables in tidy rows where office parks and burrito joints and more office parks and some apartments and glass-and-steel office columns had come to squat. You really wouldn’t know it by looking at the place, which my Texas-tuned estimation figured had been built pretty much from scratch in the mid-1980s, with some office parks added or updated as much as a decade later. This felt odd to me, having come from a place where space was hardly a premium. In Texas there was always more room to build, and every year brought updated styles of home construction, or new modes of compositing strip malls, or a wave of gas station updates. Growing up, I could peg within three years when any housing development had come together, while in Silicon Valley, only two things seemed to change once the place had been built up: the expensively crafted logos which hung off the top edges of four- and six-story office buildings, glowing the names of whichever tech companies had been rolling in cash most recently, and the highway billboards, which were optimistically nerdy well before the rest of the world wrapped its head around the Internet as something that was not going away, that would definitely be a deeply important part of your life, and that would only be summoned into being by some secret alchemical combination of computer code and market vision.

At least, those two things seemed to be the strongest vectors of change from the perspective of a haggard red convertible sprinting down 101 at a speed approaching three digits. Exit the freeway, calm yourself, and drive a few blocks, and you may find one more degree of freedom in that time and place. Even though the people who’ve made lives for themselves in Palo Alto and Mountain View may believe that the normal rules of the world don’t apply to them — and this misconception would bring them enough grief soon enough — the life and times of restaurants didn’t seem to be any different there than any other. If you were very profitable you could survive, at least for a while, but the churn was high and if you didn’t keep upgrading your signs and your service you would quickly find yourself left behind.

Doug lived a couple of blocks from Mountain View’s small downtown strip where, after my first day at work, we walked over and met Jim. The look and the feel of that walk though cool, late-summer air as a few street lights began to flicker to life is forever cradled in my memory, and though I have no idea what we talked about as we walked over to Tied House that early evening, I’ll never forget what they told me once we got there.

I’d found myself in California, though that says so little for having been so much.

It was cool, certainly. “Air-conditioning, but on the outside,” I’d said at the start of this story, and having just suffered through a summer’s worth of days when I’d been unable to keep my computer up for more than twenty minutes before its core would swelter from heat internal — the black arrow pointer stuttering across the screen before the whole machine crashed hard — the consistently temperate Pacific Ocean breeze could not have been more pleasant.

This coolness in the air changed everything over what I’d come to expect to be normal in Texas, from how the buildings came together (thin wooden walls, without insulation) to where the people came together (anywhere, everywhere, on the streets, all the time). It would be a long time before it would change me, though it wouldn’t take long for the process to start as I first got my lay of the land.

Hold your right hand up in front of you — fingers straight upright and together, palm facing away from you, allowing your thumb to hang naturally, creating a slight space between it and the forefinger knuckle — and you’ll be looking at a good map of more than half of the San Francisco Bay Area. Your thumbnail is roughly the shape and size of the city of San Francisco itself, seven miles tall and seven miles wide, with water on all three sides. Along your forefinger are the cities of the East Bay, Oakland and Berkeley and others, first joined from thumbnail to hand by the double-decker Bay Bridge; ignore for now the fact that there’s a gaping emptiness above your thumb, where the Golden Gate Bridge joins San Francisco to the rich towns of Marin, in the North Bay.

The deep crease, where the meat of your thumb joins the rest of your hand, is where you find the city of San Jose. Between San Jose and San Francisco, on the inside of your thumb, the Bay Area Peninsula, is Silicon Valley, where towns ramble north from Cupertino and Santa Clara to Sunnyvale and Mountain View and Palo Alto and beyond, each one easier on the eyes and harder on the wallet as you wander away from the sprawl Hispanic poverty around San Jose to the intimidating beautify of San Francisco. Not that it was a clear gradient all the way up the fifty miles between the two cities, far from it. In those early days, outside of the handsome homes and glass-and-steel skyscrapers of the city, I often had a hard time telling the rich from the poor.

One of the first days, driving around Palo Alto with Doug, he’d jabbed a finger toward a row of flat-roofed wooden homes, surrounded by low, lush greenery but built to press nearly up to the curb. “That’s a million-dollar home,” he said. “Or more. One-point-two, probably.” I could not believe it. In Texas, a million-dollar home would sit far back from the curb, cripplingly thick brick walls holding off the outside world, three stories of open air and windows you would never open — God, why would you want the outside air in? — surrounded by neatly mowed grass that grew yellow and sun-burned along its tips even when heavily watered in blatant violation of the strict water conversation plans imposed some years. That place looked like my tin-roofed shack, times eight, minus the tin.

“You have got to be joking,” I said.

“There are bigger places, for sure,” he told me. “People are fighting with the city to tear down these flimsy things and instead put up multi-story McMansions with elevators, insulated walls with double-pane windows built right up to the edge of the property lines. So a lot of these are getting replaced by the new wave of money that’s coming through here.”

Doug wrestled with the steering wheel, doing something I seldom saw. He frowned. Money, and the new wave of it, was a thick current of heat that flowed over the coolness, just beyond the fingertip reach of most.