Have you experienced their postal behavior? Not "postal" as in emptying an assault weapon into a line of stamp buyers-postal arrogance. Not federal "I can't be fired" arrogance-tekkie arrogance. Being treated like a supplicant by nerds who don't give a glitch about your ignorant problems, especially since the Empire doesn't require them to do much except say, "Sorry … wish I could help."

Is there a connection between Revenge of the Nerds and Triumph of the Will ? I had that revelation at the Apple Store's "Genius Bar." The horror!

In case you just got out of jail or are a P.C. user, the Genius Bar is Apple's euphemism for "Customer Service" or "Repair." Here are the "geniuses" who will help you-or maybe not.

The Genius Bar is very busy. But Apple doesn't want you to know that there are many problems in Appleland, so unlike Tekserve, the booming Mac shop on 23rd Street that services all the dated technology the Apple Store disdains, they don't give out numbers to the people waiting in line. This means customers must enforce their own queue. Interlopers try to jump it continually. "Oh … is this a line???" "Really? Oh …. Well, I just have a quick question!"

Before proceeding, I avow: I am a Mac person. I have owned 13 of them, from the small-screen black-and-whites that are now a cult in Japan, down to the Powerbook G4 and iMac that are my present tools. I would use no other computer. That said, I hate Apple. Hate their attitude. Not as much as Nike's, but almost. Don't pretend you're Albert Schweitzer when you're Commodore Vanderbilt, I always say.

The philosophy is: The customer is always wrong. I first encountered this when, at their suggestion, I bought a combo scanner/printer/copier to use with the G4. It wouldn't work. Apple wouldn't help. So I spent $500 on a consultant to learn that there was no way this thing would ever work with the G4.

Naturally, I tried to return it. Too late! The clock was ticking while we fiddled fruitlessly, and the 10 days were up.

"But you said it would work."

"It should."

"Can you make it work?"

"We don't do that." I finally abandoned it in the middle of the store, raving, "You keep it!" They took it back. Quietly. (Eventually, they admitted that the printer and the G4 were as compatible as Bloomberg and a Marlboro red.)

Then, one morning, my old iMac wouldn't wake up. Can't blame it: If it was a car, it would have 150,000 miles on it. So I went down to Apple and bought a shiny new eMac. Then came the holidays. I went away. When I returned, the eMac was acting funny. Crazy code flashed across the screen. Then it started sparking like a toaster with a fork in it. But I was busy. It was a backup, anyway. When I had time, I'd deal with it. Then, terribly, my G4 went down as a result of an act of toddler. I had no computer.

I took the G4 to Tekserve, then schlepped the bulky eMac to the Genius Bar. Hours passed. Finally, I was "next." A young black shirt tried to turn it on. No dice. "Well, we can send it in." He hadn't seen the sparks. I explained that sending it in wasn't an option. It wasn't broken; it never worked. If it were a car, it would have 60 miles on it. It's a lemon. "But," he accurately pointed out "you have had it longer than 60 days." I tried to explain the vacation thing, the code from outer space, the fork-in-toaster sparks. Finally, I reached the verge of … postality. He correctly sized me up as a maniac and, realizing that "no" was not an option, declared the eMac "D.O.A." And threw it into a box. Crunch!

I was granted credit toward a new iMac. Calm returned; the office hummed. Then I thought: I should do something about the iPods. We have two: one 10 gigs, the other 20. The 10-gig never worked right; it needs to be reset all the time. A year and a half old, it's a little short of breath. Stops working after three hours instead of six, but ….

Please pause now to watch a charming little film by the Neistat Brothers, at http://ipodsdirtysecret.com/ (edited on a Mac, by the way, with iMovie). It shows the brothers stenciling Apple iPod posters all over New York City with the message "iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months." This they were driven to do after the Apple "help line" explained that since their iPod was over a year old, it would cost $255, plus a mailing fee, to have it "refurb'ed."

They added: "At that price you might as well buy a new one." I'd guess this film, which so charmingly articulated the iPod problem, is why Apple now "refurbs" at considerably less than replacement cost.

I could live with three hours playing time, but the 20-gig no longer plays its nine days, 18 hours, 44 minutes and 18 seconds of jazz from Abbey Lincoln to Zoot Sims. By the time I took it to the Genii to find out the meaning of the symbol that pops up when it doesn't play-a file folder with an exclamation point-I had the thing for 16 months. Never used it much. If it were a car, it would have maybe 2,000 miles on it.

At the bar I only had to give the finger to two line-cutters before I got to the "iPod genius." He plugged it in, shook his head, and lowered his voice to an M.D.-like tone: "Gee, I'm sorry."

They don't come back from the exclamation-point file folder: My iPod is dead. What does he recommend? "Buy a new iPod for $299."

"Sorry," he repeats, shrugging. I almost believed it.

In a little more than a year and a half, I had spent more than $900 on iPods that don't work.

"You could talk to the store manager."

I could, but I couldn't. I just didn't have the energy to seethe the way I had when I returned the D.O.A. eMac. I knew I couldn't summon the postality required for this situation. I had to go home and recharge my batteries, which are internal and cannot be replaced. They don't last as long as they used to.

"Think different," I repeated to myself, meditating on the faces of Lennon and Einstein. But no different thoughts came. Suddenly I saw Andy Warhol instead, and he said: "Think the same."

About a year ago, Apple called me. They were looking for a creative director. I guess they had seen some ads I'd done and liked them. It sounded like a great job, but I wouldn't move to California, and I said so. Nothing ever came of it, but I hope they call again. I'd like to tell them my latest idea: numbers for the Genius Bar.

I have some other ideas, too. Like that file folder with the exclamation point. Wouldn't it be cooler if it was a little hand giving you the finger?

This week, Metro Channel's Full Frontal Fashion is providing 24-hour coverage of the shows, while an hour of their highlights will be shown nightly on WE, the Women's Entertainment Network. The Style Network will provide two hours of coverage daily, to be distilled into a prime-time clip of highlights on E! This instant and comprehensive coverage will enable housewives nationwide to realize to what extent their wardrobes are grotesquely dated…albeit half a year ahead. It will also give H&M and other fashion-follower factories plenty of time to churn out their "homages" to Marc, Calvin, Michael et al. Fashion obsolescence now travels at the speed of light, and it's quite possible for the knockers-off to beat the originators of a look into the stores. Meanwhile, the items most in demand by logomaniacal initiates of the Concorde-set cargo cult will be pre-ordered and sold out long before shipments reach the stores.

In other words, the shows are just there for show.

Blanket coverage means that the fashionably homebound need not miss a single runway look. Watching the shows on the tube while lying in bed will save me hours of traveling and waiting, as well as protect me from nervous exhaustion, dehydration and the possible injury or likely humiliation I'd experience in person. For fashion shows are like pro football: They're really a lot better on TV. If there's anything worse than joining the mead- and grog-swilling, face-painting proles of the N.F.L. in person, it's a full schedule of fashion shows teeming with the rudest, shallowest, most grating and upwardly thrusting egomaniacs extant. At least at Giants Stadium, you know where you're going to sit–and if you've paid enough, you'll be seated well in front of the brawling, bonfire-starting barbarians. (And if the humans aren't scary enough during Fashion Week, last season a crazed sheep ran amok on the runway, cowing the assembled fashion press. Yikes!)

The pre-seating crush of diehard fashionables can be every bit as brutal as a soccer riot. I remember the shocking spectacle of one of our most venerable and kooky fashion editors and one of our most glamorous, eligible-bachelorette fashion editors savagely elbowing a swath through the passively waiting "white trash" outside a show. It was brutal–especially when the younger fashion editor pushed an elderly, diminutive Japanese woman journalist to the ground. A fist fight ensued. The horror! But position is, in runway-show context, everything.

The attendees aren't there to see but to be seen; the front row is the ticket to major cable-TV and paparazzi visibility, offering an ego boost on a global scale. It's also the real fashion show. The major editors wear outfits that required their subordinates weeks of meetings to assemble, getting that unique dress, those crucial boots, that cult bag–and getting them exclusively. Runway-side seats are so important to second-tier "fashists" that they'll get there by any means necessary, because in their world, life is a perilous quest to move down to the front row, then a death struggle to stay there. The tents are the totem poles of this strange tribe, and front row is top man.

Of course, the front row isn't all editors and major buyers, especially at second- and third-tier shows. They'll hold seats for Anna, Glenda and Patrick and pray they show up. Good luck. Chances are many prime seats will be occupied by rabid interns and junior-assistant handbag editors who know the boss isn't showing and help themselves to major visibility and the freebie bag. The "muses"–the stars who depend on designers for free dresses for award shows–will be there applauding vigorously, and one may observe chairs marked, say, "Guest of Gwyneth Paltrow" or "Guest of Stephen Baldwin." Entourages must be served as well. But some stars don't seem to be there out of devotion to the designer. When you see Anthony Kiedis, Mickey Rourke, Steven Tyler or Jon Bon Jovi runway-side, you suspect it's not about the clothes. Everyone knows that if you rush backstage fast enough, the girls will be naked.

But you never know who's going to turn up. A few years ago, I arrived at Versace too late to take my seat. As the show started, I was poked in the back and wheeled around to hear a gentle lisp: "Thcuthe me." I looked down, and there was Mike Tyson. He passed without delay. I also remember a recent Anna Sui show, where strobes began flashing and there was a palpable buzz of the sort that accompanies the arrival of a major star. It was Ronald McDonald. You know, life can be a cabaret, chums, and nowhere more so than in the tents at Bryant Park during Fashion Week.

It is truly amazing to see such a vast, complex yet ephemeral undertaking. It's like a gay D-Day: dozens and dozens of designers, hundreds of models, hairdressers, makeup artists, dressers and stylists mounting extraordinarily detailed events all over town. And it all goes off like clockwork–well, maybe like sundial work. But it's a remarkable outburst of creative effort that has enormous global impact. What walks down the runways will soon be walking down our streets, changing the looks and attitudes of the civilian populace. Well, some of it will reach the streets, anyway, after the hemline has been lowered a foot and you put a bra underneath that gauze. But for months we'll be hearing about the aesthetic and social impact of the schmattas.

This week we'll be hearing plenty of human-interest stories, like the comeback of SuperLinda, and discovering fashion's newest enfants horribles and future gigamodels among the haute zombies. We'll see the willful wannabes. If they aren't showing, they'll be partying: Shoshanna Lonstein, designer for the bra-challenged, bag lady Monica Lewinsky, Denise Rich's loopy designing daughter and the precocious teen-designer daughter of Jerry Della Femina (not the same precocious daughter who wrote Jodi's Shortcuts 2000: The Hamptons and sent all those psychos in unarmed personnel carriers past my house).

In addition to showing us what's new, Fashion Week always promises us new geniuses! It was just two years ago that the designers who go by the name Imitation of Christ made their auspicious debut, sending out reconstructed thrift-store fashions on their muse, Chloë Sevigny. And this year we'll have our third eyes peeled for the latest breakthrough kids, designers like Imitation of Imitation of Christ, who might just change everything. Please! I'll be watching closely. And if I doze off, I'll just rewind.

The committee is to be chaired by Lawrence Herbert, the chief executive of Pantone Inc. As all you art directors, graphic designers and upscale house painters know, Pantone is the authority on color, so Mr. Herbert is undoubtedly qualified to determine whether art is "off-color" or "blue." The Vice Chairman is Imam Izak-el Pasha of Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, who, depending on his interpretation of the Koran, might consider art representing living things to be heretical. The Commission's Decency Subcommittee chairman is President Tricky Dick's former lawyer, Leonard Garment, for whom the garment district is named.

Then, on the left, there's lawyer-novelist Bartle Bull, the former publisher of that citadel of correctness, The Village Voice , who is also the author of a novel that graphically depicts the sexual escapades of a midget. Another eminent attorney on the panel is Raoul Felder, Esq., the Mayor's divorce lawyer, whose billing clearly demonstrates a mastery of obscenity. The panel's other divorce lawyer is Lester Wallman, noted co-author of Cupid, Couples & Contracts: A Guide to Living Together, Prenuptial Agreements and Divorce , who can be contacted through www.Split-Up.com. Then we have Giuliani campaign contributors Bud Konheim, the chief executive of Nicole Miller, who has said, "Ninety percent of women prefer comfort over fashion," and Mary Ann Mattone, the wife of lawyer Joseph Mattone, a man who took special courses on condemnation, appraisals and valuation at Columbia, and who is a member of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem as well as the Knights of Malta, Eastern Lieutenancy. The most spectacularly bearded member of the committee is Rabbi Shea Hecht, "the Jewish cult buster," who once presented Don King with a humanitarian award. On the Christian side, there's full-gospel honcho Bishop Roderick Caesar, pastor of the Bethel Gospel Tabernacle and member of the "United States Prayer Force."

Also on board is Herbert London of the Hudson Institute think tank, author of the upbeat tomes From the Empire State to the Vampire State: New York in a Downward Transition and Why Are They Lying to Our Children ? Then there's Curtis Sliwa, New York City's favorite paramilitary. He cleaned up Times Square; now he's keen to clean up our museums. There are also several actual artists on the panel, including Diana Kan, "the first lady of Chinese art," Constance Del Vecchio-Maltese, an illustrator married to a Republican state senator, and John Howard Sanden, who paints costly and realistic portraits of chief executives and V.I.P.'s on commission. Mr. Sanden's distinguished models have included the Reverend Billy Graham, Senator Robert C. Byrd of Virginia (who was only kidding when he made those racial remarks), His Majesty the Alafin of Oyo from Nigeria, His Excellency the Oni of Ife, and Virgil C. Dechant, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus.

Oddly, no art critics or art historians have been nominated to the panel. I doubt if it's because they couldn't find any art writers who have been less than enthusiastic about Andres Serrano's Piss Christ , Chris Ofili's pachyderm-poop Madonna or the manner in which Bob Mapplethorpe carried his bullwhip. If I were a mayor concerned about publicly funded blasphemy, I'd have surely nominated some of our more independent-minded critics, such as Robert Hughes or Hilton Kramer. I might have even nominated myself, since I'm more into abstract painting than conceptual sacrilege.

Most observers think that the Mayor's Decency Commission has as much of a chance for success as his marriage. Even Cultural Affairs Commissioner Schuyler Chapin believes that the First Amendment protects museums from the meddling of inspired moralists. But still, couldn't the Mayor have made better appointments? I would never appoint a decency panel in New York without including Jackie Mason, a man who can really hold his own with elephant excretions. What about Don Imus? If, as Rudy alleges, the art emperor is naked, shouldn't we have more naked-emperor spotters and fewer campaign contributors on the panel?

Of course, if the Mayor is willing to back off a bit on the "oversight" concept, the committee might yet prove useful to the art world in a consulting capacity. Here's how I see it working: Instead of holding embarrassing public meetings at which members vent their outrage at examples of what Hitler termed "degenerate art," the committee could work within the art community to help artists meet standards of seemliness on a one-to-one basis. This might take the form of the time-honored studio visit. Each panel member could call on a number of decency-challenged artists for counseling, allowing artist and moralist to exchange ideas. Just as non-artist Clement Greenberg was instrumental in the refinement of Jackson Pollock's work, so today's contempo artists might genuinely benefit from this panel's undeniably broad experience. If our artists were directly assisted, they might be more inclined to play ball with Yankee Fan No. 1.

I could certainly see Jeff Koons gaining from the advice of Raoul Felder and Lester Wallman, the prenup king. If the decency panel had existed 10 years ago, they might have nipped the whole sordid Ciccolina business in the bud. And I'm guessing that if a developer like Alan Friedberg got a look at one of Mr. Koons' blooming puppies, it could change the whole landscape of the city.

The talented young artist Tom Sachs has run afoul of the law, as when the city decided that the homemade firearms in his last show at the Mary Boone Gallery were illegal (maybe they didn't have trigger locks or serial numbers). It got so bad that Mary Boone went to jail. I figure the savvy Rabbi Shea Hecht might be able to shake some sense into Mr. Sachs' head. This "cult buster" might be able to get Mr. Sachs out of the habit of making cult objects like the Hermès Value Meal or the Prada Death Camp. Who knows: Don King was once accused of murder; maybe Mr. Sachs could wind up with a humanitarian award, too.

What are we gonna do about Renée Cox depicting Christ at the Last Supper as a naked black woman? Well, I say let's send Bishop Roderick Caesar over to Renée's studio with a bathrobe! Send in the "Prayer Force" to drop a bomb on her soul.

And what about Bud Konheim? Let's face it: When he got involved with Nicole Miller, she was nothing more than a mid-level necktie designer. But by learning to think big the Bud way, she is now a top head-to-toe designer. What do you suppose Mr. Konheim could do with an artist like Karen Finley, who's obviously talented but stuck in the smut rut? Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Ms. Finley could be having a career on the Kathie Lee level. And when I start imagining the "happenings" an artist like Vanessa Beecroft-known for her assemblages of armies of naked babes-could do with a little help from a streetwise organizer like Curtis Sliwa, I get chills.

Well, O.K., I said, being a sport and generally in the service of truth. I don't usually talk about my clients, but I had nothing bad to say about them and they were out of business anyway. So I said what nice people these e-commerce kids were, and how it was too bad that they had gone through such a huge fortune with nothing to show for it. When he asked pointed questions about my own experience, I answered the best I could. I did wince, however, when he asked about my salary. I just said, "Call my agent."

So then the article appeared, all about how the Web fashion company Boo.com spectacularly went through more than $130 million in a year and a half. No mention was made of the fact that they ran a huge advertising campaign in nearly every major magazine, plus television, approximately six months before their site was up and running. There were suggestions of overstaffing, overreaching, poor planning, profligacy and partying, but the real climax of the story seemed to be the fact that Boo employed me for one week at £3,000 per day to work at their London offices, putting me up in the decadently posh St. Martin's Lane Hotel. I was, it seemed, the straw that broke the cartel's back. I was cited as an example of their extreme profligacy. At the time, I tried to put some positive spin on this. "At least it shows I seem successful," I whispered to myself.

Then, a month or so later, The New York Times also mentioned my astonishing fee in a similar story on the same corporate tragedy. I was the writer made who made £15,000 in one week! Insane!

Never mind that I actually wrote everything on the site during that week, edited all the automated responses, gave a charming voice to their animated "personal shopper," Miss Boo (who, by the way, had several top hairdressers flown in to redesign her cartoon hair). Never mind that the company had filled warehouses with time-critical merchandise for inventory. I don't think it was mentioned that even after their way-delayed launch, Boo.com was not accessible by Macintoshes. No, aside from general suggestions of mad expense accounts, office bubbly-swilling and staffers horning up lines of illicit anesthetics, the real shocker was a writer making a decent living. I finally realized: This is really bad for me and inspired typists everywhere.

In 1981, The Times reported that the average professional writer was making $5,000 per year. That was for published writers; it didn't even include the wannabes. For years, I had a New Yorker cartoon in my desk drawer of two people, drinks in hand at a cocktail party: "You're a writer? Oh, I write, too." The story of my life-our lives. I think the poet Michael Brownstein nailed it when he wrote, "A writer is a guy who sticks it in the mailbox."

If a college-dropout basketball player gets a contract for a quarter of a billion dollars-or about $200,000 a game-this is not even slightly shocking (unless he has felony convictions). But a writer making five large in about 10 hours? Stop the presses, Mary, the sky is falling!

Artists are expected to make some money, even if they're not dead, because they manufacture precious objects that can be speculated on. Just hold on to some of that early work, kid, because it could be that the stuff you gave away is what brings down the real cake. What have you done since you paid off the loft?

But a writer? Gore Vidal once wondered, "How can you sell so little of anything as a novel?" The irony is, of course, that the worse your novel is, the more it may sell, but that's another jeremiad. For me, the scandal is that one day spent writing dialogue for a cartoon character on a Web site would earn me as much as the royalties for the first six months of my last book-and my book was considered to be doing well!

Writers are supposed to be starving. This builds character. It gives them ideas. They are supposed to live in a garret, except that there are no more garrets; they've been converted into penthouses. They are supposed to work hunched over a typewriter or a legal pad, under a blanket, in the middle of the night. Well, I'm writing this on a G3 Powerbook in a luxurious loft fit for a lawyer. I did manage to get it a bit cheap: I qualified for an Artist in Residence certification from the City of New York because I am a poet. And poets need a lot of space, because dreams can be big. But I'm not starving. I'm pulling it down like a divorce lawyer. I'm keeping up with the Joneses and the Clintons. Wealth wasn't my goal. But now it's personal.

See, my friends and I, we came here to be artists and poets and musicians of the New York School, and back in the day we used to be able to live in nice tenements on the Lower East Side and maybe drive a cab or tend bar one or two days (or nights) and make out and be happy. Maybe we'd get lucky and get to be a curator at MoMA, like Frank O'Hara, or teach a class at the New School. But in New York today, you've got to be a millionaire to be middle class. So we're no dummies. We've got to hustle.

Maybe people are never going to understand that writers work hard and deserve rewards, because they never see us doing anything but eating and drinking in cafés or taking our children to mid-level private schools. When we write, we're just sitting there, staring off into space. And we're getting paid for it! But perhaps the worst indignity for someone like myself, who writes the occasional side of a bus, is when someone says, with all good intentions, "So, are you getting to do any writing for yourself?"

What is the answer? "I only write for the others"? "I'm writing for Christ"? I wonder if that's what got to Andy Warhol when he was drawing shoes for I. Magnin. "Doing any drawing for yourself, Andy?" The genius was that Warhol did every ad like it was a painting for the Met (and maybe vice versa).

We have to find a way to make people accept that working for food, even if it's Beluga, does not invalidate one's Parnassian credentials, that writers deserve luxuries, too. Writing taglines or care instructions or e-commerce caveats does not detract from my sonnets or essays. In fact, commercial practice frees my mind from the fact that my gardener's bill last year was $17,000. But it's still a struggle. Last week, in the middle of the night, I woke up and said to my wife (who didn't hear me), "I have become a slave to my freedom!"

But I'm going to write my way out of this. Like Spartacus, I'm going to make somebody pay or die trying. This spring, my new book of poems comes out. It was beautifully printed in Germany. It comes in a box. It has silk-screened illustrations by a great artist, who drives an AC Cobra and has Callaway golf clubs. The cheap edition is $85. I'm working on the hang tag and care instructions for it now. So how's Seattle, Patrick Ewing? Have another doughnut, Julian Schnabel. I wrote this in eight minutes.