On the night after the Heaven's Gate UFO cultists were discovered dead by mass suicide in a San Diego suburban McMansion, I was standing in a dark patch of the Presidio, watching the Hale-Bopp comet and its forked tail over the Marin Headlands. Someone passed around binoculars, somebody else passed a little pipe around, and after a half hour everyone was cold and bored and we drifted back to the battleship-gray Victorian on Haight Street that I shared with a rotating group of five or six pals.

My bedroom was just a large closet on the upper floor, with enough room for a narrow mattress and a chest [...]

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We wondered how people pay their bills, so we asked them: how do you pay your bills? They—and we—answered thusly: It's a mess. Someone figure out how to make this less difficult, pronto. So, how do you pay your bills?

Tyler Coates, blogger "My roommate handles all of our utilities. We have a Google doc with all of the expenses, how much she has paid, and what I owe her, and I write her a check every month or two. In addition to that, I have rent to pay, which I do by check. I think [...]