It's writebastard.com. If you're a human being, and not a bot, go there.

Of course, if you're a human being, god knows what you're doing here. This place is a friggin' ghost town.

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I mean, "I." Where have I been.

Oh, walking here and there, they say, as an old man, hooded and cloaked.

Anyway.

Here's this news: Astonished Head is...well, it's finished. I've got nothing more to say here, really, and rather than give the place new drapes I'm just going to shut it down. I mean, it'll still be here, hanging around in the trackless space between pings and packets, but there won't be any more writing at this place. It's been over five years, and I've got other web-based things I want to do.

There will be a new site, at some point: Vague Media. The domain's already mine, but there's nothing there yet. I'll pop by to announce when it's up, but it won't be for awhile. "Astonished Head: The Comic" will live on at Vague Media in another form, along with other secret things I won't divulge right now, mostly because I don't know what they are yet.

So...uh...see you around, I guess. I mean, if you want to hang out here, that's cool and, you know, if you want to read other sites and stuff, that's OK. I won't be mad or anything.

It was...fun.

And stupid.

And meaningful.

And pointless.

And neurotic.

And, sometimes, almost sensible.

Thanks for stopping by.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (5)

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Every so often I forget I have a blog.

Anyway: poultry is in the oven, 15 minutes from carving, serving, and being devoured. I'm at mum's, and happy to be here. Soon there will be tryptophan-induced comalike states.

I hope all y'all have suitably social/familial milieus in which to achieve similar states of button-popping drowsiness.

Unless you're not an American, in which case, have a decent Thursday and enjoy work tomorrow.

Me, I'm off until Monday. I have tales of technical prowess re: digital camera and iPod repair to tell, and cartoons to create. There has been a Big Wacky about lately, mostly in my brain. I've been oppressed by pharmaceuticals, but have escaped, and as always, this means toons. Toon toon toon toons!

W00t.

Must go and carve bird carcass now.

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...yet in season three Fry,we find out, impregnates his own grandmother.

That is all.

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...as they do on an annual basis, the folks at edge.org asked a whole slew of scientists a question. That year, the question was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Here's what David Buss, psychologist, professor at the University of Austin, Texas, and author of The Evolution of Desire had to say:

True love.

I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout the exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many--the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, the profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.

That's either cause for hope, or the most depressing thing I've ever read.

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i swear to god these fucking fluorescent lights have a wavelength, man, a deficient wavelength, call it a tone of the eyeball, and it resonates all wrong, makes my head full of noise that, were it to continue after my exit from the office, would surely gain me admission to a state-sponsored home for the mentally interesting and a fortnight at least in the soft soft room, but because this is califuckinfor-nai-ae i’m sure i’d get in there and they’d have a compact fluorescent in the ceiling behind a whacko-proof cage so i’d be in a straitjacket in the puffy room and the wavelength, man, the wavelength would still be there, and if you can’t handle the puffy room there’s really only one more place they can put you and that’s the chemical restraint, the big big haldol bash in the noggin that makes with the drooling and the mismatched pupils and the endless games of chutes and ladders where you just stare at the board and get sticky while neville sits across from you telling you stories about stalingrad and how he hid in the well when they came for the tsar

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There is a wall, not so much over there as right here, about an eighth of an inch from my nose. It curves around me. It's made of brick...all sorts, all kinds. There are bricks laid in English bond, with alternating courses of headers and stretchers, ranging in color from reddish brown to chipped umber. There is brickwork slathered with layers of patched and decaying plaster. There are bricks impressed with the marks of Roman legions, and the mortar between other bricks is mixed with a broth of barley and elm bark. There are relics impressed into the courses below that, every twelfth brick, and below them, mud bricks furred with the protruding ends of straw and marsh reeds. It is a wall the foundations of which date back to Çayönü and before.

And I must smash it into pieces.

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"So one direction in which technology has to evolve is much more standardized units, that a nontechnical person can feel comfortable with. It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs. I see a future in which any person can have a node on the net. Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have. It's possible. We're working actively."

Mitch Kapor,
founder and former CEO of Lotus

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It seems that, in addition to memories and a minor story to tell, I also brought a host of microbes back from Austin. Or, at least, from the airplanes I used to get to and from the place. I'm laid out. Blech. And such.

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...to write about Nuno's and blues this evening.

Instead, I spent all evening in front of the Mac, making music, and now I'm beat. I'll get to it later. Honest.

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And I'll write about that tomorrow, when I'm back home. It would've been even cooler if I remembered that I actually know someone who lives here, as I spent a few hours after yesterday's session just walking around the place all on my oddy-knocky, and it would've been great to hang out. But I spaced on that fact, which is utterly lame of me. Somehow, it didn't click that the "Austin, Texas" she lives in is, in fact, the "Austin, Texas" that I was going to be in.

Sigh. I suck.

Anyway...my flight's in a few hours, and I'll be getting back at 11PM local time, so I'll post the details and such tomorrow at some point.

LATER...

Down and safe, after much planeage. Weird detail: apparently, they know whether you've gotten on your plane or not, and will page you as departure time draws near. Used to be they'd just take the hell off. I mean, they still take off, but now they're keen to have you on board when they do so.

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I suppose that should actually be "A-Traveled," because I've already arrived here in Texas. Austin, Texas, to be precise which, rumor has it, is a cool town in the middle of the vast expanse of...somewhat less cool...that is Texas. (I've got Texas readers, and they've got guns, so I'll just move on.)

Actually, my first thought when the downtown area popped into view was, "Good Lord, it's smaller than Philadelphia." And Philadelphia is small. I never liked that town...there's a reason people and businesses have fled that particular burg. I haven't seen much of Austin yet, although the taxi did drive through a sort of parking structure-like space sheltered by overpasses which looked like an open bazaar, well-populated by the indigent and Persons of Questionable Motivation. If I needed to go score some needle drugs, that's where I'd go.

From that small sampling I can extrapolate absolutely nothing, but I do know that the smaller a city is, the harder it has to work to be cool. San Francisco? Seven miles on a side, high concentration of coolness and quirk. I saw some quirk here as well, but as this is a business trip, I'll be spending most of my time in the hotel.

At any rate: I like hotels, and I especially like them when I'm not paying for them, so for the next couple of days I'll be doing the hotel-n-conference thing and trying to hack the minibar.

LATER:

I've got a lovely view of air conditioners on the roof. And, apparently, there's a bug population in Austin...I found this label on all the windows:

ALSO:

I now have the funk. It's on this laptop right here.

Aww yeah.

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Verse by Wang Wei.

Under the crescent moon a light autumn dew
Has chilled the robe she will not change --
And she touches a silver lute all night,
Afraid to go back to her empty room.

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According to Janco Associates, as of September Internet Explorer commands a 63.86% market share, down 9.57% from last year. Here's the spread:

In September of last year, 59.4% of Astonished Head readers were using Internet Explorer to view the site. I begged you--begged, I say!--to use something else. Firefox, preferably.

Well well welly well then. Lookee here, at this September's Astonished Head chart-thingy:

(Yes, I know it's not equivalent to the fancy Janco chart, because it's only got one year in it. I couldn't be bothered to kludge one together in GIMP...GIMP is new to me and unfamiliar and thus a bit annoying, because I can't just whip things up like I can in Fireworks.)

Explorer use is down to 49.3%, a 10.1% drop from September of 2006. Firefox use is at 29.8%, up 5.6%. Mozilla is up from 1.7% to 8.8%.

The percentage of Firefox users is almost twice as high as it was last year. Mozilla users have multiplied like rabbits, and increased their percentage more than fivefold. But what makes me happy is not so much the spread between Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and other browsers as the overall drop in Internet Explorer share.

Based on the reduction in Explorer use, the Astonished Head readership is 14.56% cooler, tech-savvier, and more awesome than the overall Internet-surfing public, a .53% improvement over last year. In addition, by interpolating these results with other statistical data gathered by the site, my readership has better hair, snappier clothes, and more orgasms per week than the plebian, non-Astonished Head reading masses.

So: congratulations, everyone! Read Astonished Head, use non-Microsoft products, and become an improved human being.

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Not all grooves are good. There’s the kind of groove that surrounds George Clinton. There’s the kind of groove that you get into when life is swingin’ and poppin’. Those are good.

Then there’s the kind of groove that settles into your life like the ass-groove on Homer Simpson’s couch, or the groove worn by a rope into the crossbeam of a well-used gallows. Those are not good grooves.

Both kinds of groove share certain characteristics. They are repetitive. They’ve got rhythm. Unchecked, they can continue indefinitely. Which is fine if you’re getting down with the downbeat and swinging up and out with your creative capacities. That’s the kind of thing you’d want to last forever, and there are some people who manage that. It’s not so fine if the groove is the kind that wears holes in your soul, a repetition of abrasion that creates open wounds that never heal. That’s the kind of groove you want to stop.

The good kind of groove is productive, and the bad kind is reductive. You can see that in the analogies n’ metaphors I’ve chosen (‘cause I’m all clever and such): the bad groove imagery is that of wearing away over time, creating holes and depressions in things. A bad groove causes absence and lack. It is destructive.

So yeah, I’ve got a groove. It’s a furrow in my brain. And, like any well-worn path, choosing a new way is difficult. Water runs down a mountainside in much the same way, year after year. Once it’s found its channel, it deepens that channel. The only thing that causes it to find a new way is an overabundance of water, beyond the capacity of the existing channel. Then there’s a flood, a torrent, that tops the edges of the spillway and breaks free.

And I'm feeling my groove. It’s a slow subsonic note, a mentholation of my psyche, cold and a bit greasy. The fluid of my thoughts and emotions flows easily along the eroded path: doom, doom, doom…death and doom…everlasting, sourceless sorrow…doom and failure…. This flow is enhanced by the physicality of it: a limbic system in overdrive, the sensation of being stalked by a creature that wishes me ill, a red-eyed, creeping horror of blackened fangs and hoary claws, a ropy-muscled demon coiled to spring upon me. It’s a process of feedback as old as I am. I’m pretty sure I was born with it, as a propensity, and the circumstances of my early life served only to wear the furrow down into me, to create the pathway for the flow, and, once started, the flow deepened its own way.

It’s damnably tough to change such a groove. It often seems like there are no other grooves, not for me, anyway. I know that other people have good grooves, better grooves, because I see them in their grooviness, and I am envious. How do they do that? I wonder. They must not be like me at all.

Ow, we want the funk
Give up the funk
Ow, we need the funk
We gotta have that funk

Yeah, I’ve got to have that funk. So give it up. Anyone? Bueller?

See, the post title is a little misleading. I’ve got my groove back, and no mistake, but goddammit it’s the wrong groove! It’s like showing up at a P-Funk show and doing a Klezmer dance. I haven’t smashed said groove, haven’t smashed it at all. Farg.

According to the Mayo clinic, there are 10 signs n’ symptoms of depression, and the difference between “Major” and “Minor” is simply a matter of duration. I’ve got every one of them at the moment, and it’s lasted for longer than two weeks and so, damn it all, I’m in the muck again, despite tweaking my neurochemistry with the Official Drugs. I’ve recently upped the dosage—in consultation with my physician, of course—but the plain fact is that after the first couple of months, when it seemed that the old brainsoup was being properly spiced, my response flattened, and then declined, and that’s where I am now. Declined.

All of which means, as I approach the six month evaluation mark, that there’s a very real chance that these are not the Official Drugs for me. Unfortunately, I happened to pick the ones that have the fewest side effects of all the various pills and potions, and I am entirely unwilling to either add yet another medicine to my cocktail or sub one out for the other.

Why is that?

Well, I’ll tell you. [music swells] Stop that. [music fades] First off: there are many things of a nonpharmaceutical nature I could be doing, but am not, and I want to do them first before committing myself any further to the clinical trial-and-error that is mod’ren psychiatry. This includes: resumption of large doses of Omega-3 oils and resumption of the popping of vitamins, including additional B-complex supplements. Mind you, this is in addition to, not instead of, my existing medications. Also: I have contacted Hassan the Turk, and even now a date cake stuffed with opium suppositories is winging its way to me.

I wanted to snag Parliament’s Mothership Connection immediately upon arriving at my apartment yesterday, because “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” was in my head, and I need it in my ears, from whence it will migrate, mayhap, unto my booty.

It’s a curious thing…for someone who occasionally makes his own music, I tend not to listen to music very much. The recent death of my iPod hasn’t helped matters. I’ve had various DVDs playing on the Mac Mini, for the noise. But just hearing a slice of tha' funk in my head has somewhat brightened my mood, and I think what happens is that I get bored with my 8.7 days’ worth of music, because I can hear all of it in my head quite clearly, and so never need to arrange it so that it vibrates the air around my ears. This means that I need new and perhaps surprising music. So, seeing as how I’ve been on about the groove, it makes certain sense to seek out a new one, and funk certainly has that in it.

However: I have been totally stymied by iTunes (yet another addition to a small but growing list of annoyances that keeps me from being an Apple fanboi). First, the iTunes store forgot my original account entirely. No idea where it went. Poof! Making the noise that means "gone." So I made a new account, or, rather, resurrected the one I created when I bought my iPod in 2005, and hooked it into Paypal, all neat as you please. And every time I try to buy the funk, it tells me that I haven't used the account to purchase tunes before (Yes, I know that) and that I need to set up my payment options (Which I've done twice, thank you). Tech support's response was to not understand what my problem was, and ask for more information, which annoyed me further and caused me to drink a six-pack of Diet Coke and stay up all night, shivering with the aspartame sweats.

I hopped onto tech support chat with Verizon, so that I could recover the lost password for my DSL router, enable port forwarding on it, fire up Azureus, and acquire the funk by any means necessary.

So far, no luck with the port forwarding, and my, I do seem to have wandered a bit. Anyway, look at this:

And now it's really late, and I'm having that thing that happens where the gazes of my eyeballs wander around, each independent of the other, so that the only way I can actually see things is to close one or the other of them. I'm stretched out on the bed with season two of Blake's 7* playing on the laptop next to me, and I've got this laptop on my chest being all Ubuntufied and such, and I'm probably no closer to actually going to bed than I was at two AM, because I've got StumbleUpon.

That's right.

It's Friday night and I'm cross-eyed in bed with two computers, a fresh Linux distro, and a BBC science fiction series from the late'70s.

Because that's how hot I am.

*Two words: Jacqueline. Pearce. In addition to being the subject of many a pubescent geekboi's happiest fantasies, she also delivered one of the best villainess's lines of all time (in "Gambit," season two, episode 11): "He is a despicable animal. When the Federation finally cleans out this cesspit, I shall have that vulpine degenerate eviscerated. With a small and very blunt knife."

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Ooo! Sweet. Like a hit of silly when ya needs it. Check out the Monty Python video wall.

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[Patrician|Away] what does your robot do, sam
[bovril] it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

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[Mendo] lmao there's a wicked lookign spider on my monitor and if i move the mouse around he chases after it
[spitfire] haha mendo
[spitfire] take a screen shot
[spitfire] wait
[spitfire] that made no sense

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[AstonishedHead] sorry
[AstonishedHead] i raided bash.org cause i got nuthin 2day

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...as long as we're slumming, I was amused by this thing I found in a Fark thread about Wil Wheaton's hot pink wax replica of his hand in the "Shocker" position:

wickedragon 2007-11-02 01:36:57 AM

So, I'm sitting in my uni's computer lab. It's 06:38 a.m and I've been here all night. There's a guy sitting behind me and he's just collapsed on his computer desk. I think he's a sleep, mostly because he snores. But how can i be sure?

Should I call the bomb squad in case he's a bomb? He looks unattended.

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Go look at Peter Callesen's papercut work.

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I go through periods where I have wrenchingly intense dreams, full of symbolism and emotion. Waking up from one of them can color my whole day, and they always piss me off because I know they're indicators of some great honking mass of unresolved shit somewhere in the recesses of my psyche. That means I've got to think about them and probe into their imagistic nooks until I suss out what the issue is. I have had two of those over the past two days, and all I want to do now is have Marty's Pizza bring me something disk-shaped and evil, and maybe get a bottle of something white and cold to go with it. Which I won't do, because that's the old technology, and these days I'm supposed to be all about the new technology for fixing my noggin. I do like me some vintage tech, though...

That said, I fired off two short stories today, one of them to one place and another one to two places. I've got three more that need to go out, and then I'll start the round robin of submission, rejection, and submission elsewhere until the stories find a home. I think I mentioned several months ago that I was going to start doing this, but never actually did. Today's the real deal, though, three envelopes with stories, cover letters, and SASEs, all into the blue mailbox at the shopping center up the street. And now we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, though, I've got to work on these pesky dreams. The overarching themes are obvious. It's in the little details that the lessons lie...

UPDATE:

Great...Googly Moogly!

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I’m going to scrape a link from Sully, and then I’m going to talk about Me!™ because that’s what I do here.

Back in October of 2005, Andrew Sullivan produced a piece for the New Republic titled “The End of Gay Culture.” Despite my best efforts, I’ve only been able to read the first third of it, because it’s locked away behind TNR’s pay-to-read wall, they’ve successfully kept it out of Google’s cache, and I would not like" a one year digital subscription (24 issues) to The New Republic for $29.95!" just to read a single article. However, it’s been written about enough elsewhere—in part because Sullivan keeps flogging it—to convey its general gist: the post-Stonewall gay subculture is fading because of gay assimilation into the overarching straight culture. Although wistful for the past, I can gather that he thinks it’s a good thing, a sign of the overall culture very slowly evolving into a more tolerant and accepting society despite the best efforts of certain Republicans and Christianists.

There’s disagreement about the cause of this subcultural shift—the wonderfully acerbic and insightful D. Stephen Heersink over at Gay Species attributes it to economic and technological factors—but I don’t think there is any denying that gay culture, however you choose to define it, is morphing rapidly.

Today, Sullivan points us to a New York Times Article (“Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passeé”). It uses the recent cancellation of this year’s Halloween street party in San Francisco’s Castro District—typically a night for large-scale displays of rampaging excess—as a an example of the overall decline of “gay ghettos” across the country:

For many in the Castro District, the cancellation is a blow that strikes at the heart of neighborhood identity, and it has brought soul-searching that goes beyond concerns about crime.

These are wrenching times for San Francisco’s historic gay village, with population shifts, booming development, and a waning sense of belonging that is also being felt in gay enclaves across the nation, from Key West, Fla., to West Hollywood, as they struggle to maintain cultural relevance in the face of gentrification.

There has been a notable shift of gravity from the Castro, with young gay men and lesbians fanning out into less-expensive neighborhoods like Mission Dolores and the Outer Sunset, and farther away to Marin and Alameda Counties, “mirroring national trends where you are seeing same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population become slightly more urban,” said Gary J. Gates, a demographer and senior research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At the same time, cities not widely considered gay meccas have seen a sharp increase in same-sex couples. Among them: Fort Worth; El Paso; Albuquerque; Louisville, Ky.; and Virginia Beach, according to census figures and extrapolations by Dr. Gates for The New York Times. “Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York,” he said. “Now you can just go to Kansas City.”

There’s a part of me that feels as though I’ll miss that culture, if it truly fades away. It’s shiny and brash and colorful, and I continue to feel its allure. I’ve dabbled in that world in real life, and my fiction has explored its far reaches. However, there’s another part of me, much louder and more insistent, that has always rejected the notion that my sexual or emotional identity is my primary identity, and to me nothing suggests “I am my affections” quite like a street lined with Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flags. The struggles of the post-Stonewall era and the horrors of AIDS helped to form that cohesive identity, and although I hovered around the nebulous edges of those defining forces, I have always resisted the idea of personal identity formed through shared oppression and suffering. There is an entire edifice of ethical and political thought that rests on that foundation, and I’ve repeatedly rejected it in favor of individualism, personal choice, and heterodoxy.

Later in the NYT article, Mayor John Duran of West Hollywood laments, “We often clamored for equality where gay and straight could coexist. But we weren’t prepared to give up our subculture to negotiate that exchange.” My response would be, you don’t have to give it up, but you must recognize that it’s going to change, perhaps beyond recognition. As the gay-lib generation ages and sexual mores evolve, the conspicuous hedonism that defined the subculture will become less prominent. Heersink writes,

The facts are the evidence. When I first came to San Francisco as a gay man (I had been here many, many times before), over 150 venues existed to meet other gay men. Today, the number is between 8-15 (yes, in the "gayest" city in the Western Hemisphere), and many of these are weekend clubs reserved for dancing. […]

…economics and the computer have killed the "gay culture" -- not assimilation nearly as much as Sullivan wants to suggest. Every innovation causes some dislocation (that's a fact, not a threat). One of the casualties of the hook-up sites for encounters is the diminution of "community." Yes, the hoards of other gay guys on the World Wide Web may create a sense of solidarity, if not also availability, but it's not the same as when thousands are in physical proximity to each other, dancing, parading, or just cruising. The physical presence of others, even if they are not intimacy candidates, develops into friendships, acquaintances, sparring partners, competition, gossip, dissing, jealousy, and rivalry. It's lame, but it's fun, and it builds "community." It also generates its own culture.

It’d be disingenuous for me to claim that the hedonism of it all wasn’t a large part of what I found so enticing. At the same time, I was never much of a social creature, preferring a good extended flirt at a small party to a paws-on encounter in a loud and flashy club, although the latter certainly has its charms.

I’ve always resisted labels, which is why choosing “the middle one” has always been problematic for me. I’ve never been comfortable with being the “B” in a GLBTQI* letter salad. In The Bisexual's Guide to the Universe, Kristal and Szymanski wrote,

All of us have gay days, weeks, months...even years. Just 'cause we're leaning to one side for a while doesn't mean we'll stay there. All right, it's true many of us have a preference for men or women, but unlike those boring monosexuals (people who date only one sex), our preference doesn't define us. We're honest about what we do, at least more so than those in the gay and straight community who dabble with members of the opposite or same sex and conceal their behavior. We know better than to claim it will never happen again.

There's a certain hipper-than-thou attitude there I can do without, but on the whole that's an accurate summation of where I'm at. The fey bits of me, and their accompanying desires, come and go. Pea will tell you that I was “pretty gay” when I last saw her in March of this year, but I’m less so now. I don’t regard myself as having two sets of characteristics; it’s all me, all the time, and I’m as variable in my affectations and sexual proclivities as others are in their moods. I regard these variations with no more alarm than someone who’s content one day and subdued the next. This makes dating a bit difficult…do I check off the gender I’m into at the moment, or both? Pea encouraged me to check off both for my Nerve.com profile, which I did because well, that’s the truth of it, and I might as well get that out of the way first. The result of this, so far, seems to be that all of my non-anonymous profile viewers have been men. No invites, messages, or winks yet, although I suppose that just showing up in my “Who’s Viewing Me?” list might is the equivalent of a brief glance at a bar. I haven’t been interested enough to follow up.

Although I haven't been able to get my hands on the whole essay, there's a section of Sullivan's "The End of Gay Culture" that resonates with me:

I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

I'm feeling rather intermingled, myself.

*That’s gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/queer/intersexed, and I’d like a Diet Coke with that, thanks.

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Color me impressed. I continue to experiment with Ubuntu on my Dell Jesustop. Everything that I'm running now is free and open source, created by hundreds if not thousands of folks who build and compile kernels, maintain repositories, cobble drivers together, troubleshoot, kill bugs, write nifty apps, and show up in new user forums to help out Linux novices like me.

Ubuntu simply works. I downloaded the entire OS, along with all of its accompanying applications and utilities, and then burned the ISO image onto a single CD. I did a clean install on a two-year-old laptop and booted up without incident. Every time I thought I had run into a problem, the OS ambled off into the net, grabbed a package or two from a central repository, and installed it. For example: I tested out the Dell's DVD player with Life of Brian. The video player launched and told me that it didn't have the proper codec. Then it offered to go get it for me. I clicked a button in the affirmative, so it went and got the codec, installed it, and then the DVD started to play. In addition, all of the other audio that I can grab off the net plays as well. This took all of two minutes to accomplish.

When I thought I might have broken something while poking around in a configuration file, I went to the Ubuntu user forums to seek help. The forum software automatically searched for an answer based solely on what I typed into the Title field on the Post New Thread form. It found one, too. How wacky is that? Free tech support that's so good I don't even need to ask the question. I also found a way to get the WiFi indicator LED working on the Dell, just because someone who knew what they were doing was annoyed by the fact that the Ubuntu driver didn't provide for the LED's on/off function. So they solved the problem and posted the solution.

Compare that to the festering, idiotic, utterly useless incompetence that a company like Symantec expects me to pay for.

Vista was where I finally drew the line with Microsoft. I bailed on Internet Explorer years ago, going open source with Firefox. I never used Outlook for email because it always annoyed me, and when Eudora's email client annoyed me, I went to Mozilla's Thunderbird, another open source product. I use a Mac for my music production. I still need to use Windows professionally, because that is, unfortunately, what most corporations run on. But after reading the horror stories about Microsoft's latest bloated OS, and after being forced to buy the only model of laptop at CompUSA that was still available with Windows XP, I decided that I would never use Windows for my personal computing needs again.

By way of further compare and contrast: the reason I had to buy the Compaq laptop to get XP was because all of the new "Certified for Windows Vista" laptops were full of components that might or might not work with Windows XP. The manufacturers of those individual components got their Vista certification, but there was no way to tell prior to purchase whether they'd bothered to develop XP drivers as well. That meant that I couldn't just buy a new laptop, blow out the Vista installation, and install XP in its place...because there was no guarantee whatsoever that the hardware would work with XP at all. The Ubuntu forums, on the other hand, are full of people asking about drivers for this or that specific bit of hardware and,more importantly, full of other people either providing those drivers directly or providing links to them.

I'm not the only one who's finally told Microsoft to take a flying frak at a rolling doughnut, either. The company has extended the availability of XP until June of 2008 after planning to force people to switch to Vista by phasing XP out this year. According to Mike Nash, a Windows product manager, the official position is that "There are some customers who need a little more time to make the switch." The reality is that there are some customers who are not going to make the switch. Ever.

30% of businesses have no plans to migrate to Vista. NASA, the DOT, and the FAA aren't making the move. Neither are MIT or Stanford University. There are all sorts of techish compatibility issues related to legacy software and hardware, but I think that underlying all of that is the simple fact that people are just fed up with Microsoft's big dumb dinosaur wares and its lumbering insistence that we need more features than we actually do, especially when those features are founts of annoyance poorly disguised as convenience. There's a reason why people expressed such vitriolic hatred towards an ostensibly harmless animated paper clip, and it wasn't because the creepy thing was the Jar Jar Binks of help interfaces.

And now, here I am with a nifty free OS that does nifty things, an Office suite that doesn't have eight billion features I don't need, and a legion of developers and end users who just hang around in well-designed forums and give away knowledge if they've got it.

That's just cool.

What's even cooler is the eye candy. The video below is a demonstration of what my desktop does now. Along with some silly fire effects, there are wobbly windows that I can toss around almost like handkerchiefs, a rotating cube, dozens of tweakable settings ...essentially, the desktop interface has been transformed from a flat, two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional plain that allows me to manipulate the individual windows hovering over it in three axes. A lot of this emulates functionality that's found in the Mac OS which is, after all, a Unix-based operating system. But I'm running this on a Dell, and I didn't pay a dime for the software.

Most importantly: all of this wonderful stuff was created by people who just felt like creating it...and their products gleefully kick the multi-billion dollar ass of Microsoft from here to Redmond and back again.

And my, ain't that satisfyin'?

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No, no, no. Not really. However, certain bits of that unnecessarily startling title are true. Everything, in fact, except for the verb.

You see, in addition to having two degrees of separation from such disparate luminaries as John Cleese, Paul Hogan, Neil Gaiman, and President Bush--all true, really, I mean it--I've also got two degrees of separation from Douglas Adams. My mother worked in the office of Douglas's physician. On May 9 of 2001--which was a Wednesday just four months prior to my participation in a great deal of unpleasantness that was to take place in downtown Manhattan--Douglas visited his doctor. The doctor found that a number of not at all good things were going on in Douglas's chest, and told him to come back the next day for a full battery of important and expensive cardiac tests. Douglas, who was something of a can't-be-bothered-with-doctors sort of person, did not return at all on Thursday to get the tests. If he had, those tests would have revealed the horrendous narrowing of the arteries that killed him on Friday. He would've had emergency bypass surgery of some kind, and might very well be alive today.

So, while my mother did not in fact kill Douglas Adams, she was part of the whole tangential medical establishment that surrounded him and was supposed to take care of him. Of course, you can't really take care of someone who's not entirely interested in taking care of himself if it happens to be inconvenient.

Now, the telling of this tragic anecdote was prompted by my discovery that I have The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy on my laptop, so that film is playing at this very moment in a small window next to the one into which I am typing these very words. The post itself serves no real purpose other than to share a little bubble of coincidence with you, wherein I'm watching a movie adapted from a famous funny book written by a famous funny man my mother knew, if only a little, and who could have, but for a bit of ill-considered stubbornness, remained alive awhile longer, and perhaps written more funny things for us all to enjoy.

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Maybe it's just me. When I hear "tranny" I usually don't think of transmissions, and I never think of monocoque carbon fiber and convertible gearing systems.

Still: check out the Ibis Cycles Tranny. It looks like a sweet and clever ride that can transform from a single speed bike to a geared bike, and breaks down into two pieces for travel.

As for whether the word means what they think it means...well, Ibis is based in California, and the section on the page about the bike's availability is called "Tranny Spotting," which is an obvious wink in the general direction of the sexually transformed. So I think this could very well be the first instance of using transgenderism to sell a bicycle...

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Check out the amateur high altitude balloon stylings of Alexei Karpenko and his Helium Balloon Mission to Near Space:

My project launched a payload with GPS, camera, sensors and communications to an altitude of 30km. I obtained most parts ready years ago, but only recently had time to finish it.

High altitude ballooning is an emerging hobby, since price of GPS and communications equipment has gotten quite low. It is an excellent hobby for people fascinated by space flight and telerobotics and has many learning aspects — from systems design to electronics design to software engineering. There is also an exciting risk factor, namely, that you could lose your precious electronics if something malfunctions. In this project, many of my interest and knowledge areas came together. Also, I have verified that the Earth is indeed round and that space is black.

He's got photos and videos of the launch, the flight, and the recovery. I just love the idea of it: a tiny little Canon PowerShot, stuffed into a small styrofoam box with a few gadget companions, suspended 30 kilometers above the earth beneath a balloon, snapping photos and videos all by itself as the winds of near space buffet its fragile vehicle.

[Via BoingBoing]

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I'm posting this from my Ubuntu-laden Dell 700m. This laptop is like Jesus, in that it's returned from the dead. Twice, actually, which makes it twice as good as Jesus. Also, it has taken on the sins of the world, and makes for a tasty redemptive snack.

So far, I'm fairly impressed with the Ubuntuness. Most things work, right out of the box (although there is no box, it's just a download and an ISO burn). The important things, anyway: touchpad, video, even WiFi. OpenOffice comes standard, and I've got the new chapter of my novel open in the inelegantly named OpenOffice.org Writer. I haven't actually used it to write anything yet...but it doesn't know how to spell "pharmacopeia." I don't know whether that bodes well or not. I've yet to pay too much attention to audio and video, YouTube video and audio works, but I haven't been able to listen to my own .MP3 tunes from this site (they're over there under Me Music, by the way, and not enough of you have clicked on them). But Firefox works, Thunderbird works, and I'll be mucking about with GIMP soon, trying to create some comics.

I've got a slew of other people's writing to read and edit this weekend: I've been terribly slack with that work, due to brain fade and life issues. Mum's out of the hospital, tired, but un-cut on, and with no real answers about what put her in there in the first place. Her experience was far better than Cicily's, but it's always disturbing when the answer offered by the multiply-degreed is "I don't know." With her basically out of the woods and my brain's flywheel spinning back up to speed, I fully expect to get my editor on this weekend, in conjunction with my own writing. It's good that I have patient clients. Unless I'm just presuming patience and they're on their way here with pitchforks and torches.

I get to write a scene of decadence that takes place in a deconsecrated cathedral in New York. It's actually a scene I've already created once, for a different project a decade ago, and I've been researching it for just as long (Christopher Wilson's The Gothic Cathedral was invaluable). It's like building a movie set: spend enough time mentally constructing the environment, and you don't have to spend time describing it in exquisite detail. A few well-placed eyeball kicks will create the whole set...things that your characters will naturally notice as they move through the scene and interact with their surroundings. I see a lot of writers--particularly in the science fiction and speculative fiction genres--who spend page after page describing the intricacies of the sets they've built, simply because they've put so much work into it and it seems a waste not to get every last little bit of it on the page. It isn't a waste. Leave it in your head. If you've built it well enough in your mental sound stage, and if you know your characters, the reader will get the structure of the scenery and fill in the rest. I think many writers get too attached to their Big Ideas rather than their characters and their stories, so they feel a need to get everything across so that you'll know Exactly How They See It and how clever their Concept is. That leaves nothing for the reader to do, and it gets tiring.

Just my opinion, of course. But dat's as I see it. It's basically a long-winded and puffed up way of saying "less is more."

Aaand that's it from my hovel for this evening, unless things get weird later.

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Selective binding of distinct sugars in water is a challenge for molecular recognition because the abundant OH substituents must be differentiated from one another, as well as from the markedly similar surrounding solvent. Ferrand et al. have prepared an organic receptor that achieves the task for certain disaccharides with an efficacy approaching that of the much more structurally complex lectin proteins, and so holds promise for biochemical applications. The receptor binds cellobiose and related compounds, in which all OH groups are equatorially oriented, with an association constant of ~600 inverse molar; the affinity drops more than 10-fold for substrates with an axial OH group. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy confirms a binding motif in which polar walls in the receptor interact favorably with the hydroxyls while aromatics at the top and bottom straddle the alkyl portions of the guest.

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Thank you.

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Verse by Li Bai.

Her robe is a cloud, her face a flower;
Her balcony, glimmering with the bright spring dew,
Is either the tip of earth's Jade Mountain
Or a moon- edged roof of paradise.

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Ha! Just joshin'. I mean, I'm as big a fan of exploding nuns as the next guy, but this isn't really that kind of site.

I had a dream last night that Steve Martin* showed up in my white Calvin Klein suit, and it didn't fit him at all. I could see his ankles, and the coat was sausage-tight, and I wanted to know how the hell he got into my closet in the first place. I was all worried that he would do risky things while wearing my suit, like ordering cherry pie. So I pointed at him and said, "OK, Martin, you can wear it, but the dry cleaning bills are yours." There was other weird dream stuff in my head when i woke up this morning, but I don't recall much of it, which is fine by me. That was basically an anxiety dream anyway, as I can no longer fit into the suit myself, which would be fine if I was famous and rich, but I'm not, so it's not fine, and if those catamites don't get their pert asses in here with my grapes and my champagne there's going to be some serious Ken Russell-style violence.

All of which is sort of a vaguely surreal gloss on the day so far, which I'm spending at mum's house. Mum's in the hospital, with yet another Random Health Issue. How serious remains to be seen: serious enough to be in the hospital with uncomfortable tubes and so forth, of course. "Surgery serious" is an open question at the moment. In any case, not much fun for her, worrisome for me, and not at all what we were planning to be about this weekend. Feh.

One of the things I'm doing, in addition to absorbing some television--a rarity for me--is beginning the process of emancipating myself from windows and OS X. With Ubuntu! Free, open source frivolity on my Dell 700m. Right now it's just a big experiment...unlike OSX, or even mod'ren Windows, drivers are a real crap shoot, particularly for more specialized laptop components like teeny WiFi cards and so on. Still, it's diverting, although I really should be writing, or editing some of the stuff I'm supposed to be editing for other people. I call it avoidance! Laziness!

Where the fuck is my champagne?!

See, you think I'm manic. But I'm just writing manic. It's like acting, only you have to do the work. Like a movie with subtitles, only without the movie, or the theater, or any kind of visual stimulus whatsoever.

So...like a book, I guess.

Hey! Thanks for letting me waste your time.

*And of course, Steve Martin is all over the television today. Because I am psychic, and improbable.

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One of the reasons I’ve never liked Alcoholics Anonymous is because, in my experience, attempts to deviate from the “Alcohol is a demon that rules my life and I am totally helpless and out of control” personal narrative are generally met with knowing glances and slogans about a river in Egypt. I’ve heard at least half a dozen people get up to address a meeting with some variation on, “I thought I was different, then someone got up at a meeting and told my story.”

I’ve been to a bunch of meetings over the past six or seven years, and no one’s ever gotten up and told my story. No one’s ever told my story because, for a long while, I’ve known that my overuse of alcohol was a symptom and not the cause of my problems. It’s an effective anesthetic. Take care of the pain some other way, no need for an anesthetic, done. I was irritated by the knowing “Yeah, I used to think that too!” attitude I encountered at a lot of meetings, as though everyone who drinks does so for the same reasons. Maybe that’s true for the majority of folks who are regular attendees, so they’re all validated within their 12-step echo chamber. Good for them, whatever works. But that’s not true for me, never has been, and I’m happy to give Bill W., his Higher Power, and his Big Book the big fuck off.

In San Francisco I had an interesting conversation about drinking with K., during which he said, “I realized that if I didn’t get my drinking under control, I wouldn’t be able to drink anymore.” It’s a wonderful paradox, and it has to do with forming a concept of moderation within a permissive culture of excess. Granted: that weekend, objectively, is a poor example of moderation. As James Thurber remarked, when dealing with martinis, “one is all right, two are too many, and three are not enough.” I had not quite enough martinis that evening, plus certain other minty drinks earlier in the day.

I’m self-aware enough now to a) recognize a failure of moderation; b) realize that it’s not the end of the damn world; and c) know that it is qualitatively different from my “problem drinking.” Problem drinking for me involves drinking a lot, drinking frequently, drinking alone, drinking in secret, lies, hurting people I love, and waking up the next morning with a knot of panic in my chest. Having too many drinks with a good friend during a whirlwind weekend in San Francisco is not a problem. End of story.

At this point, were I telling this story in a meeting, I’d be getting sympathetic glances from some people. Others wouldn’t be able to make eye contact with me. And someone would tell a tale about how they once thought that way, too, and then one day they woke up naked covered with cow dung in a field behind a truck stop in Omaha two weeks after they started binge drinking in Tampa.

I’m a bit of an Aristotelian, in that I’m interested in first causes. I used to think that drinking cost me my romance with Pea. It didn’t help, of course, but more important than the sucking down of 375ml bottles of Absolut in secret is the why of it. I realized, a couple of weeks back, that I was basically depressed for the entire course of that relationship—that’s over eight years, for those keeping score. After 9/11, things got worse. One of the terrible things about such black states is the hopelessness: it will always be this way, and there’s nothing to be done about it. You can see how this might lead to an affinity for mood-altering substances, if only to alleviate the monotony of that singularly dark state of being. It’s quite a vicious little trap, and I’m happy to say that I’ve broken out of it, at no small cost.

It wasn’t the drinking that ended things, it was the why of it, and the why of it was chronic, life-long dysthymic depression. Pea spent over three years holed up in a small house with a fellow who, many mornings, could barely get out of bed, when what she really wanted to be doing was going out, having fun with this fellow, and being a city girl instead of a small town homebody.

People in intimate relationships reflect each other in a constantly shifting dance of stimulus and response. I used to regret my drinking. What I regret now is that, because of my own misery, I never really got to see Pea truly happy. My experience of her was limited to what she could express of herself while sharing a house with a wretched, self-medicating lump. Similarly, her experience of me, and of how I related to her, was bent and refracted by the sort of fear that comes with knowing that you’re in close quarters with someone who’s not at all well in the head. The ever-increasing feedback between the two of us centered on the fact of my malaise, and you can’t form a lasting and healthy partnership in such a situation, although the gods know* we tried.

These thoughts were all prompted by a phone call last night. Seems Pea was coughing up blood. No, really…not arterial lung-busting embolism blood. Bronchitis-or-maybe-pneumonia too-much-coughing blood. Just a bit, from a torn-up throat. But, see, I’m the guy that held her the night before the first surgery she’d ever had in her life a couple of years ago, and I’m still the guy she calls to ask whether she should go to the ER at 2AM or wait until the morning and go to the doctor. That’s because I rock, and so does she, and despite everything—all the crap and pain and drama and so forth—we apparently have the kind of relationship that survives things like breaking up romantically and dating other people. She is, quite simply, my best friend, and I mean that in its most virtuous and Aristotelian sense. It’s cool. I’m proud of both of us.

Thus, when she reads about last weekend’s martinifest, she worries, because she’s seen me huddled in my shadowy little pit with my clanking vodka bottles. I told her an abbreviated form of what I’ve written here, but it’s a tough sell, because she’s heard it all before, too many times. I could hear the doubt in her voice, and I understand it completely. It’s difficult to convey the difference between now and then, but there is a difference, and I know it. It doesn’t mean that alcohol is never problematic or an issue. It means that I know where the lines are, I know when I cross them, and when I do, I’m no longer compelled to stay in the land on the other side of those boundaries.

So no, I’m not powerless, and my life is manageable. I like martinis, and I like being able to wake up the morning after having a bunch of them and say, “Hmm, probably too many drinks last night, watch that,” without feeling beholden to some absolute standard of inflexible teetotality, and without feeling like I’m tottering on the precipice of absolute ruination.

Next week: “How my freebasing demonstrates personal responsibility.”

*No, I don’t believe in a god or gods. I just say that because it pisses a certain kind of atheist off.

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See, I'm really more of a mind to do me some cartooning, but at the moment all of my software tools are locked away on some other distant hard drive, awaiting recovery. So there's that.

But: this past weekend. San. Fran. Cisco. Love that town. Traipsed about the place with the Mountain Madman. Consumed significant amounts of martini. Watched other people watch football. Got into an increasingly inebriated conversation with Dave the bartender, who knows how to green up a business and also makes a fine martini, all proper with a spoon through the ice krosh-krosh-krosh which melts said ice in just the right way, taking the edge off of things and smoothing them up proper.

And realized, finally: intention's the thing. So I intend to do something. But I can't tell you what it is.

Color me coy and smack my bottom.

Ooo!

Anyway, I am a bit put off by my sudden lack of graphical tools. But that'll be remedied tomorrow, and I can get around to posting random images for your enjoyment.

I've been thinking about selling my trike. Yes, this one. It's worth...what's the technical term...ah, yes: a shitload of money. But beyond that, it was a pedal-powered tri-wheeled crucible. That thing hauled my maniacally depressed ass across the entire states of Virginia and Oregon, as well as into the hearts of Kentucky and California. And I, in turn, hauled its steel-tubed carcass from Kentucky to the Pacific Ocean. It began its life in Australia, so it's better traveled than I am. It's an aero-nosed home away from home, and there's not really a price on that, not yet.

This evening I totaled up what it cost me, and priced it out according to the current used trike market, and then started thinking about putting the new tires on it. It came equipped with slick Scorchers, but I traveled on Primo Comets, which are better suited for long haul triking, and they served me well. That means that I still have a shiny new set of tires, though, designed for zipping around with the speedy whoosh! that only slicks can provide, and Scorchers are as slick as they come. I thought about those new tires, and about polishing up the trike's frame in preparation for its sale, and taking some fine steel wool to the rotors of the disk brakes that once got so hot they threw tiny dabs of molten brake pad onto the backs of my hands as I careened down the switchbacks into Vesuvius, Virginia. And I realized, by the gods, that right there is a vehicle with history, and meaning. Yeah, it's a material thing, and it's worth a wad of cash, and it cost even more wads of cash when I bought it new. But it is a Space Blue, chain-driven, Lexan-faired representation of my intention. No, I didn't make my 5,000 mile leg-powered journey in its entirety. Yes, I was fairly close to miserable for much of my time on the road. But it was a thing I did, a journey I set out on, that wrenched me out of a black rut that was miles deep and years long, and--except for the parts where its hub exploded--that trike bore me through it all. I'll be damned if I let someone else take her now, for any amount of money.

Which is an incredibly impractical decision, and that, in turn, is what the machine embodies. The lure of the impractical, the keen shiny flare of the ridiculous and the romantic. It's all one big happy tadpole of a windmill tilt, and it's mine. Mine, I say! So this weekend after I've trimmed errant branches from trees around my mom's house I'll be swapping out her tires, greasing her nine-foot chain (mmm, that sounds...uh, moving on), replacing her brake pads and applying liberal amounts of bike polish to her long-neglected powdercoat.

Hell, I might even go for a ride.

To intention! And the defeat of crass happenstance.

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Every so often I get the urge to post random snippets and assemblages of words that, in my head, grumble and shout and growl like Charley Patton working his way through "High Water Everywhere." Unfortunately--hep! hep!--there's no real way to get that audio component out to you, because I have yet to perfect the Synesthesia extension for Firefox. So, instead of throwing down with the word pixels direct from my--Lord, the whole round country, man, is overflowed!--musical fingers to your eyeballs, I can only describe the experience, and poorly at that.

Oh yeah.

Nothing too bad, nothing too wrong, in the household today. I'll be in San Francisco this weekend visiting the Mountain Madman and doing my thang. (Yes, I have a thang, and it does get done from time to time).

Lord, the water done raised,
over the Jackson road
Boy, it starched my clothes
I'm goin' back to the hilly country,
won't be worried no more

W00t! And other incoherent noise.

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Here is some verse for you, by Zhang Jiuling.

Here, south of the Yangzi, grows a red orange tree.
All winter long its leaves are green,
Not because of a warmer soil,
But because its nature is used to the cold.
Though it might serve your honorable guests,
You leave it here, far below mountain and river.
Circumstance governs destiny.
Cause and effect are an infinite cycle.
You plant your peach trees and your plums,
You forget the shade from this other tree.

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Actually…that wasn’t fun at all, and no one laughed, least of all me. The worst thing about crawling out of depression is that you will, without fail, fall back in at some point, and when you do, all the positive gains you’ve made will pale beside the immediacy of the black dog and its languid growling. Then you lose motivation to do certain things, which results in, say, a weeklong gap in fiction writing, or the failure to fill certain prescriptions that were more important than you thought they were, and before you grab onto the ripcord and release the chute of happiness you spend a couple of weekends apartment-bound with pizza and boxed sets of Futurama.

It’s this sort of experience that makes me believe in the chemical nature of it all: the difference is so profound, and such a thing apart from me, that it truly feels like a demon. A malevolent entity. We hates it, we do.

Then I take some steps. I do things to take care of myself, which almost immediately result in positive change, and lessens the sense of being alone in the rearmost car of a plunging roller coaster in the middle of Death Valley. I still think it's chemical, but I continually wonder at the ways in which acts of individual will can re-spice the neuronal soup and transform it into something less like week-old haggis in a blender and more like onion soup made with Vidalias and a nice Gruyère.

There’s a flip side to all this, and that’s jolly old mania. I do get a bit of that from time to time, but not in a typical “manic depressive” sort of way. It’s more that my undepressed state of mind is, by comparison, so energetic that it can feel like mania. When I’m in the groove I write a ton, I stay up until four in the morning recording vaguely musical noises, and I post long, self-involved essays on Astonished Head.

Which leads me to my current project: Die Korrektivs. Correctives are how I deal with what I call the “consideration gap.” That’s what happens when I’ve given further thought to issues I’ve raised on the site in the past but haven’t yet written about again. I’ve made a commitment here to avoid revisionism, the icky practice of deleting embarrassing posts or changing them to reflect a better version of myself or my thinking. I’ll go back and edit for basic language, typos, and so on, but once it’s out there, it’s out there, and I treat my posts like print media, which can be an interesting, if neurotic, experience. (Actually, that’s a concise summation of my entire life. I shall have it carved onto my tomb: An Interesting, If Neurotic, Experience.).

Along with generating content that’s of absolutely no interest to anyone at all, the consideration gap is one of the dangers of making the deliberate decision to be a public diarist. The period of time between Wait! I’ve changed my mind! and Here’s some new and better thinking! can be cause for anxiety, which is only partly remedied by the knowledge that no one really cares all that much about my foibles. The fact that I now find some of what I wrote in a fit of general wobbliness to be embarrassingly emo is of no real concern to anyone. No one links to my fifth-rate Heinleinesque theoretical ramblings about polyamory, and that's probably for the best.

Which brings up the question: why bother?

I bother because this is a work in progress, and it’s got holes in it. I try to patch those holes, and in so doing, I mend gaps in my thinking. The fact that these writings are public, and can actually be read by others, keeps me honest.

So there’s that.

In the meantime, while you wait with bated breath for more of my rambling, here's a nifty New Yorker article on counterfeit wine, via BoingBoing.

BUT, ALSO:

I black out the site for a few days, and traffic spikes up. Seriously, what the hell.

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• There's nobody around to notice how you've got your Jack Sparrow twiddly-fingers down cold, and when you notice, you realize that you've been doing it for quite some time without being aware of it at all
• Giggling fits
• Your eyes keep crossing, but with a little effort, you can move around the apartment quite well
• With a little more effort and the clever placement of a straight-backed chair, you discover that you can read two books simultaneously
• Those books are "Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East" (left eye) and "An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration" (right eye)
• Occasionally, due to the aforementioned eye-crossing and a lapse in concentration, you fall over
• You find this amusing
• At some point in the recent past, you purchased and consumed an entire cheesecake
• You do not remember doing this
• Cheesecake is good
• The wind outside is clearly trying to tell you something
• Cookies?
• The rushing sensation of spirit trying to claw its way up your chest and out your neck
• A keen desire to let it do so...so that it can go to the store for cheesecake
• Or maybe cookies

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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I don't *hic* don't know...tell them whatever the hell you want.

I don't care.

Tell them I ate a plug of opium the size of a golf ball and got all constipated.

My "public?" Please. I'm like a monkey to them.

*hic*

I don't know, I've been hicupping for like two days straight.

Because of the opium.

No. I'm not writing a goddamn thing, and there's nothing in my contract that *hic* that says you can make me.

UPDATE:

Cretinous swine. Don't call here again.

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