WHEN I MET Jessica Grace Wing in 1993, she lived in the Mission District in a flat on Guerrero Street, a few apartments down from the neon beacon of the 500 Club cocktail glass at the corner of 17th Street. She liked to say that all music could be divided into three types: weepers, bangers, and noodlers.

Jessica worked as a sound engineer for a black-maned electronic musician called Naut Human, whose studio lair was forebodingly known as the Compound. She performed her own ambient electronica with a group called Weird Blinking Lights at places like Anon Salon.

On July 24, 2003, the night of what would have been her 32nd birthday, about 20 of her San Francisco friends held an informal memorial for her at the Orbit Room Cafe on Market Street. One of her former bandmates brought a commemorative flyer advertising the long defunct group's current gig: Weird Blinking Lights, Jessica Wing Tour of Heaven, July 2003.

Back in those pre-really-big-money dot-com days, Jessica was an intern at Wired and the music editor at the then-print zine bOing bOing. But it was her own arch Web site that got her written up in a cyberculture column in the New York Post. Her personal site deliciously mocked look-at-me, I-am-so-beautiful vanity pages. And she pulled off the joke – making fun of you for looking, but still making you want to gawk.

I wrote about Jessica, too, in my very first Bay Guardian column back in May 1997, which was a paean to the local art of fast-forward self-discovery. I grinned at her many different incarnations: exuberant Friends and Family raver, corseted goth princess at Roderick's Chamber, and punk rock star of a very obscure Stanford undergrad band called the Turgid Miasma of Existence.

When you write a column like Culture Shocked covering local eclectica like self-help groups for magicians, nude-modeling marathons, and perverted nerds, a.k.a. nerverts, you're often asked how you come up with your ideas.

Aside from obsessively scanning event listings on Craigslist, the real answer is you get to know people who are doing more interesting things than you are. And when you're really desperate, you cajole an indulgent friend to help you make up a spoof. If you're lucky, at least the two of you will be amused.

Back in 1997 Jessica helped me write a goofy send-up of our own lives as recent transplants to the Bay Area in our twenties, including sardonic predictions about what the future would hold. It was a takeoff on the old board game Life, with this headline: "The Game of Life."

I remember writing that column with her at the desk where I am typing this now, kitty-corner from the blue velvet couch she helped me pick out. (Her lingering goth-lite influence means I also own a pair of very macabre sconces that hold candles just close enough to the wall to make even the most laid-back landlord sweat.)

In our mock fantasy of Bay Area life, we noted important milestones, like spreading rumors about which stores on Haight Street are head shops, abandoning your futon on a street corner in the Mission when you finally get a "real bed," and registering your own domain name, preferably an ominous one.

The game was supposed to end many stages and many decades later in Colma, where local teens, dressed up as vampires, would take moody pictures of each other next to your gravestone. "The Morrissey graffiti doesn't bother you now. Soon you'll be reincarnated as a repressed individualistic type in the Midwest who dreams of moving to the Bay Area where you'll be able to just be yourself."

As one of Jessica's friends in New York wrote on a memorial Web site for her, "She held my hand when I got pierced and always helped me feel cooler than I was." I'll second that. She was an intrepid coconspirator, always up to something new. I can't imagine my early Harriet the Spy-turned-columnist years discovering the Bay Area without her.

Jessica died of colon cancer July 19, 2003, at her apartment in Brooklyn, less than a week before her 32nd birthday. In the final days of her life, she finished writing the music for a new opera based on the Hansel and Gretel story, titled Lost. But she didn't live long enough to see her last work debut at the New York City Fringe Festival early this August. I haven't been able to listen to the songs for Lost yet, but I hear they're all weepers.

This is my last Culture Shocked column, so this exploration of local subcultures, idiosyncrasies, and idiocies is over. But this month I'll go to New York to see Jessica's opera with her family and friends. And you'll still find my writing here in the Bay Guardian, usually in Being There, the travel column.

Good-bye Jessica. You're already missed.