The French got to be very good at perfume because they were very bad at bathing.

Over time, they have become quite skilled at disguising odors with aromas. A quick walk through the city of Paris reveals battles of fetor and fragrance everywhere. On the Metro, a Frenchman keeps his brie warm in his trousers, and in so doing masks the foul smell of those trousers with the delicate, playful bouquet of the beloved cheese. Done well, it is an exacting act of compassion that, like a ballerina, dances from nose to nose, tickling each with a perfume-dipped wand of smelltacular effervescence.

Just like a ballerina.

These people - these French people - even scent Paris's river, the Seine, once a year.

Why do they do it? Because they're French.

That's an odd business, though, perfuming the Seine. Have you seen the Seine? You certainly haven't touched it, as you'd be dead. Like mimes, it's not one of France's more boast-worthy assets. There are some things in the world to which we do not want to draw attention, and the Seine is one of them. Filling it with perfume is just the sort of thing that's going to get people looking at it and thinking about it. "Francois! Look! Soom-eh-one has gone and poot zeh purfyoom een zeh soower!" Scenting the Seine is like dressing a piece of poop in a tuxedo, putting sparklers in its pockets, and taking it on Oprah. You're effectively saying, "Look what I have that you don't want. No, I mean it. LOOK."

One would expect the people of such a lovely smelling country to be happy all the time, smiling at the rosy nose tingles while they join arms and go on strike for the third time in a week to demand larger riviera villas for their government-mandated six weeks of paid vacation each year. I know I would.

But, no - they're not. Despite being viewed by the rest of the world as a shiny, happy, clappy people, the French are actually the largest consumers of antidepressants per-capita of any nation in the world. Maybe even in the whole galaxy. I wonder if aliens get depressed. If they do get depressed, how do they deal with it? Do they talk about what's bothering them? Do they even have mouths? If I saw an alien in my yard, I'd lure it over to me with a candy bar, grab it by the tentacles, take it inside, cook it, and eat it. Alien with a side of alien in alien-sauce. Or I'd sell it on eBay. I dunno. This is one of those I'll-cross-that-bridge-when-I-come-to-it things.

How did the French, masters of odoriferous neutralization, come to be so unhappy? How did they go from having great parties to trying to get the Olympic Committee to recognize nihilism as a sport (one from which they would have been disqualified for use of philosophy-steroids)?

They played with fire.

And they got burned.

The French think they know everything, but they don't. They know neither what number I'm thinking of right now, nor where they made the extreme biffage that landed them in this fine little how-do-you-do.

But I do know: "6" and "Ignorance of the power of odor on the mind and body," respectively.

Smell is a powerful sense. Unlike other senses, such as vision, you can detect odors with it. Try as you might to "see" the dewy soft fragrance of that jar of kim-chee... actually, if it's kim-chee, there's a good chance that the smell is visible, but for all other things, it is not.

The French didn't think about this when they dumped Chanel No. 5 into their river.

When fragrance wafted up from the river and into French people, it didn't go alone. The Seine passes through a few industrial towns and smaller cities before arriving in Paris. Although it is little more than a creek at the source, it's augmented all along the way with the tears of French children whose faces are blackened with the soot of the smoke of the machines in the Perrier factories where they're forced to put bubbles into water purchased by rich people. Do you have any idea of how many bubbles there are in each bottle of Perrier? I lost count once at ten. Over ten bubbles in each bottle, and these kids have to shove each one in by hand. I'm sorry to hit you with this awful truth, but there it is.

The Seine: a river of children's tears. "Seine" is French for "a river of children's tears." "The" is English for "the."

You sad? I'm sad.

In dumping perfume into the Seine, they were dumping perfume into a flood of sadness. They were also, unbeknownst to them and their funny little hats, creating a monster. The perfume bonds to the tears by way of a complex chain of carbon atoms created with a mechloid catalyst enzyme protein emulsifier that breaks down the triple-helix nucleotards at the hydrogenous terminal peptides, forming what we in the field of chemistry call a "buddy" molecule, which is basically two different substances - in this case perfume and tears - making chemical love.

Normally, you couldn't "smell" sadness, but when you have a perfume/tears buddy molecule, your olfactory system is "fooled" and lets everybody in to join the party. The olfactory system bypasses cortical processing and goes straight for the emotional center of the brain. This path allows tears to be processed as olfactory stimuli.

In short, the French have all but made sadness into a nasal spray. All that's missing is the cool bottle that squirts the liquid into your nose. That'd be a cool thing to see in the nasal spray section of your local pharmacy: "Sadness the Nasal Spray... by France."

The point here is that if you aren't paying attention, you can accidentally depress an entire nation with perfume, some child laborers, and a creek.

How could this have been avoided?

I'll tell you how: aromatherapy.

Like string theory, cold fusion, extraction of zero point energy, and Judaism, aromatherapy is a science.

Some people think aromatherapists are just a bunch of hippies peddling wishful thinking in the form of pungent greases, but this is not true! Many aromatherapists are new-agers.

But, be they hippies, or be they not, they all be trained in the SCIENCE of aromatherapy. Like doctors, they have to go to school for almost a month before they're allowed to practice. They learn many things in school such as distinguishing between peppermint/spearmint (harder than you think!!!), and how to say in reference to any oil, "This one cures cancer." In cases where a patient's condition is resistant to aromatherapy therapy, the aromatherapist is trained to distract the patient with a huge bill. "This'll take your mind off that pesky AIDS," they say.

Aromatherapy is all natural. Chemotherapy and antiretroviral drugs are not, and are, therefore, bad. Western medicine is all about chemicals made in laboratories. In being all natural, aromatherapy, unlike those chemicals, never interferes with the progression of a disease. Nature is allowed to continue unabated. As a bonus, people can smell you from two miles away, and assume the existence of a gigantic sage bush in the area. See how that's better? I do. I really do.

All aromatherapists are smart. You'd have to be to be able to not cure diabetes with dandelion oil. Just the other day - this is a true story - I was in my favorite cafe when I met an aromatherapist. She overheard and then interrupted a good conversation I was having with a friend about perfume. Being generous with her time and knowledge, she started talking at me about aromatherapy without asking if I cared. She thought that my interest in fine fragrances somehow translated into an interest in soaking my nipples in a nightshade unguent until they fall off, saving me from ever having to suffer the pain of breastfeeding.

Here's a snippet of our conversation:

Her: Peppermint gets into your blood from the skin in ten seconds and cures headaches in as little as six to eight hours.

Me: Really?

Her: Yes.

Can't argue with that!

...or can you?

Me: How?

Her: Because.

Wow! You can't argue with that!

Still, I think I'm smart, so I wanted to try some aromatherapy out on myself. That way, I'd have PROOF of aromatherapy.

I told her about a problem I was having:

Me: I've been feeling tired lately. Do you have anything for making me feel more awaker?

Her: Are you carrying cash?

Me: No, but I can get some.

Her: OK.

[Twenty minutes later]

Me: Sorry - the nearest ATM was farther away than I thought. What's this going to cost?

Her: What do you got?

Me: Forty bucks.

Her: More.

[Twenty minutes later]

Me: Here's another eighty.

[She sighed and took the measly wad of cash]

Her: Here's some ragweed oil and a guano candle.

Me: A what candle?

Her: Guano.

Me: What's guano?

Her: It's something you make candles with.

Me: Are you sure? Because I thought it was-

Her: HEY - who's the aromatherapist?

Me: Uh... you are.

Her: You are, what?

Me: Um. You are, ma'am!

Her: That's better. I almost had to cast a black spell on you that would have made your aromatherapy not work.

Me: Oh, no!

Her: You got lucky. So, to cure your fatigue, go home, smear the ragweed oil on the walls of your bedroom, turn the heat up to ninety, set the guano candle next to the bed, light it, and go to sleep for at least eight hours. When you wake up, you won't be as tired.

Me: Wow! Mercy me! Goddess bless!

Her: Who's the aromatherapist?

Me: YOU is! YOU dah aromatherapist! Yeah, dawgg!

Her: Ha ha. Now get outta here, you little rascal!

I tried the aromatherapy solution that night, and it almost worked. I tried it again the next night, but this time I took a sleeping pill right before bed. I slept for just over eight hours - like the aromatherapist told me to - and felt GREAT the next day.

All thanks to aromatherapy! Feel the magic! Smell the science!

I have now demonstrated that aromatherapy can be proven to exist. If you doubt me in my assertions, you most likely have skipped over a portion of this paper.

So c'mon, everybody - let's say it together:

Why aromatherapy? BECAUSEOTHERAPY!

Ha ha! Have a great day!

Bye!

I never thought I'd write two posts in a row with the word "blood" in the title. Maybe if I were writing a series of posts on The Wondrous World of Blood, but I'm not doing that, and neither are you. Put the pen down. Nobody cares.

Embarrassingly, I don't even know enough about blood to write a series of posts on it. I could prolly crank out one post and turn it into a series by posting one word at a time.

This represents the totality of my knowledge of blood (emphasis on "knowledge" - I've left out assumptions and outright fabrications - the following is 100% fact-inspired):

Blood is a red wet thing that is usually inside your body. Sometimes it gets out because sometimes people makes holes in your body and blood excapes out through them.

Blood is not to be confused with other wet things inside your body. Your lungs, for example, are wet, and they might even also be red. The difference is that, unless you have ebola, only blood will leak out through holes.

In olden times, blood was important because it just was. But in the modern day world, you don't need it as much. With the invention of hospital emergency rooms, you can leak blood all over the place, and, once it gets to be uncomfortable, a medical worker can put more blood into you. It's like when a car is really low on oil. You can keep driving the car for a long, long time, and it will work fine, and there's nothing wrong with it, but if you're a perfectionist you can buy oil that someone will put in your car (but you don't need it). The body is just like that.

There is approximately some blood in your body, plus or minus a little.

Blood is OK to drink. If you want to drink your friends' blood, you should boil it first. And Miss Manners would say that sharing the blood of your friends is polite, but not required.

Some people get "bloody noses," but they don't. It's a magic trick, likely performed with the help of a small concealed pump in the sinus cavity that's attached to a sack of blood stapled to the back of the person's throat. They do this both for attention and to deceive. The worst thing you can do is help these people.

One amazing thing about blood is that, despite being wet, it can go from a wet to a not-wet state if left outside the body long enough. This is a waste of blood. If you find yourself near a puddle of your own blood, you should, as quickly as possible, scoop it up and try to push it back in to the hole whence it came. I know I said earlier that you don't need blood, but blood research has changed since I wrote that paragraph, and it turns out that you do need it. Whatever plans you've drawn up for a revolutionary weight-loss program based on what I said before ought to be scrapped before you kill a bunch of people and get me sued.

The reason you need blood is that it carries your Life Force. According to the esteemed theoretical-psychophysicist Brian Greene, Quantum Yarn N-Theory Mechanics posits the existence of a particle called a "spiriton" that constitutes part of your soul. If you lose too many spiritons, you lose part of your soul. This loss makes it harder for you to join Dr. Greene's colleague - the disembodied energy essence of L. Ron Hubbard that's currently parked in a higher plane of existence in the center of the super-massive black hole at the heart of our galaxy - in the afterlife. For this reason, you must NEVER allow medical staff to take blood samples unless - and I stress this - they agree to put it back in later.

Be safe and plug all your holes. Insufficient spiritons == no L. Ron Hubbard for you.

Now you know everything there is to know about blood.

What I have to say about blood today is going to turn the world of the arachnidial sciences on its ear. Also, if you're anything like my friend Felix, you're going to whimper and beg for the sweet, blissful refuge of ignorance - to forget that you ever learned what I am about to learn at you. By then, the damage will have been done. You'll be frelled, and you're just going to have to deal with it.

But that's for later on.

The first item on the Agenda of Blood isn't the groundbreaking revelation I have planned, but something more pedestrian.

My testosterone level, lady and gentlemen, is closer to normal. Things are going back to normal. Normal is on its merry, normal little way. It's not back up to its normal levels, but I've been assured by people who get paid a lot to say such things that everything's going to be normal Real Soon Now.

Let us pray.

Join hands.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

Hallowed be Thy name

Please make me a man again

Thanks a lot,

Rory

Amen

P.S.

Make that Amen a double

I feel better already.

You wouldn't guess this about me, but I attended chapel twice a week for six years, and I've said the Lord's Prayer, knees on pew, hundreds of times. Despite being an atheist - and I was at the time as well - I loved going to chapel. I actually miss it.

Just a little trivia for you.

This, right here, is the worst segue I've ever written.

The homeless. Brilliant tax-cheating entrepreneurs or casualties of a system that works pretty well for most people but can't be easily adjusted to accommodate the needs of the few square pegs left out of the round hole of society?

Doesn't matter. Nobody cares.

What's important is that I seen a homeless in my favorite cafe. He comes in often, spending money he's acquired unlawfully, denying Uncle Sam his fair share of the booty.

He buys half a cup of coffee, pocketing the rest of his easily-earned cash to spend on drugs later in the day. It's all he cares about, the homeless. He couldn't be like me and get stressful jobs, pay taxes, and only spend a small portion of income on drugs. No - he has to feed on the teat of Liberty, pausing only to mix his cocaine with a little baking soda and water in a spoon, heat the spoon with his lighter, let the resulting goop cool until it's a coagulated chip of a glass-like substance, remove the chip from the spoon, and go to town with it on the crack pipe, holding in the vapor until he achieves the characteristic rush and high that makes this particular recreation so appealing to so many people.

I believe that's how crack works. There's no way to know for sure.

It's just a guess.

Before heading off to hit the crack pipe, he must prepare his coffee.

I happened to have been standing near the cream/sugar/honey/etc. station the other day when he walked up.

I have a few OCD-like tendencies, and they come and go in intensity, but this guy clearly has serious Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder activity going on.

I watched as he selected a quantity of drink lids, lifted them from the pile, and threw them in the trash.

Next, he pulled napkins from the two napkin dispensers, one after the other, until, satisfied, he threw them in the trash to keep the lids company.

Then it was the sugar. Also, the "sugar".

He grabbed the blue packets, the white packets, the pink packets, and the yellow packets, wadded them up, and, you guessed it, threw it all in the trash.

There was a break of a few seconds before he went at it again, starting the process over, seeking balance between the condiments in and out of the trash.

Absolutely fascinating.

What he was doing made perfect sense to him. In his world, this is how it had to go down.

This, right here, rivals the worst segue I've ever written (see above). It might even be worse, as I'm repeating the basic structure of the last, making it stupid and unoriginal.

One of the many blood tests I've had this month came back with glucose levels in the red. They weren't yet diabetic, but they were well outside the normal range.

Since blood sugar is one of the few things I can monitor on my own, I bought a little glucose monitor thing. Of ten tests I've performed with it, only one was abnormal, but it was abnormal to the point of being borderline diabetic (yes - it had been at least two hours since my previous meal).

You don't care, though. I'm sure you'd help if you could, but aside from sending me tons of money, there's nothing for you to do.

What you care about is my great, grand, interspecies experiment.

It was 2:00 AM. I'd just gotten home and was feeling a little off. Decided to check my blood sugar to see if there was any possible connection (it was high, but I think it was just a coincidence).

When I went to check it, there was a spider sitting on my bottle of test strips. I picked up the canister and shook the little guy off. He (or she - whatever) fell to the counter and remained still. He was probably starving, as I don't remember my test strip bottle being a rich hunting ground for hungry spiders.

I did the test and reached for a paper towel to wipe off the blood. That was when I had my idea.

I tore off a strip of paper towel and squeezed a few drops of blood onto the end of it. I lowered the bloody end of the strip to the counter, about six inches from the spider. It didn't care.

I slowly moved the strip closer and closer. When it was a couple inches away, something happened inside the critter's head. It ran on its little spider legs toward the paper towel. It stopped when it was in the middle of the big red blotch, and it stayed there for a little while, sucking on the paper towel.

It eventually lost interest and walked away slowly. I don't think it was able to get much blood out of the towel, though it certainly tried.

As Felix observed, "They[spiders] would hurt us if they could."

Yes, Felix.

They would.

Looking back, I don't know what's creepier: that the spider tried to kill and eat my blood, or that I, alone in my kitchen in the middle of the night, was trying to feed my blood to a spider.

I'm sure da Vinci did stuff like this. The only difference between him and me is that he would have had a good reason for it, would have drawn it, and then spent the rest of the night designing, fabricating, and testing a flying machine that was powered by blood.

It's not fair to compare us, though, because I can't draw, and he's dead. Apples and oranges, as they say.

Brilliant, really good looking apples, and dead, show-off oranges.

Hear me, people. I give now to you a list.

To you.

Just for you.

It is this list:

- Galileo Galilei

- Isaac Newton

- Rene Descartes

- Oscar Wilde

- Carl Sagan

I could go on.

I won't.

I could.

I shan't.

What is the significance of this list?

I have been ill. For two weeks, I was suicidally depressed. As soon as the depression lifted last week, my body fell apart, and I spent nearly thirty hours in hospitals or under the care of my personal doctors. Once those problems were brought under control, one more problems was discovered.

The men on this list had also been ill. Some of them chronically; others acutely, but with unusual conditions.

I don't like saying it, but I think I've had significantly more health problems for a guy my age than most others in modern fancypants developed nations.

That's where the list comes in.

It is not unusual for we men of genius to fall ill with greater frequency than the common man. Some of the greatest minds the universe has ever known were trapped inside bodies unsuitable to sustain them.

When you have a brain like Newton's, Wilde's, or mine, you learn that its needs are greater than the needs of the kind of brain you're likely to find in, say, your own head.

Its caloric requirements are astronomical. I estimate that my body's total needs come to ten-thousand calories a day. That's the minimum for uninterrupted basic functioning. To get the most out of my brain, that'd have to be bumped up to fifteen-thousand or more. Anything less, and my health is in a decaying orbit, coming closer to disaster every moment, and closer to burning up during re-entry.

This presents the genius with a couple problems.

The first is that we were not given mouths, stomachs, and appetites to keep up with our brains.

The second is that, thanklessly carrying the burden of advancing society, we don't take many breaks, and certainly not to eat. It's better now than it was in the past, as we have food that can be unwrapped and consumed with as few as one hand, but it takes time to venture out to hunt and gather more cereal bars. If Plato's vision of the Philosopher Kings were a reality, this wouldn't be a problem, but those who benefit from our brilliance are also those who are unable to appreciate it, so we make do with what little we have, and in so doing, we face death as a matter of routine.

It has been said that I have a big mouth, but it's clearly not big enough to serve as an orifice through which to sufficiently nourish myself. Even if it were, any time spent using my mouth for eating is time taken away from talking. With each mastication, I risk letting civilization fall back to the Dark Ages. Therefore, I do not eat. Therefore, I fall ill.

I'm certain - yes, certain! - that it is my supreme intellect that repeatedly landed me in the hospital last week.

My arms are bruised where needles were inserted by health care workers who wanted to take things from, or put things in, my body. I was pissing blood. I had full on allergic reactions. My back glowed, swelled, and pulsated while I shook and couldn't breathe, and spoke but made no sense.

The docs still don't know what's to blame, but doses of the meds most likely to have caused these problems were lowered, and I'm starting to feel human again. It was frustrating because it can take a few days to see improvement from a med change, but that seems to be over.

Good.

I still have tremors, but that's probably the lithium. They're stronger than I'd expect given my experience with the stuff, though I'll happily take this over the depression and allergic reactions.

The other problem, and this is far more important, is that my testosterone level has fallen to the point that it's a health risk (168). As guys who've dealt with low testosterone know, it can lead to brittle bones, memory problems, focus problems, difficulties coping with stress, loss of libido, and a bunch of other crap.

Doc is hoping the low testosterone is an acute response to the physical and mental stress of the past month. I'm hoping so, too. Getting tested again on Monday. I expect I'll be back in good health by then, but in the meantime I'll have to endure yet another illness - one that affects 54% of the people on this planet.

Diagnosis: Woman.

Yes. Just when I thought everything was going fine, I've turned into a woman.

Symptoms include crying during romantic comedies while eating avocado ice-cream, thinking I look fat in these jeans, wanting to cuddle, and lying about everything.

But don't weep for me. Don't cry for me, Argentina. I'm not dying of being a woman - I am living with being a woman. And until my testosterone level is returned to normal - naturally or via a testosterone transplant - I am stuck being a woman, and I'm not happy about it, but at least nobody's sticking a needle in my arm, and I think I'm just italicizing things at random now.

Now, Battlestar Galactica.

As the genius convalesces, he finds ways to entertain himself. Possessing vast mental resources, he (or, for the time being, she) can make nearly anything amusing.

At the moment, this genius is amused by watching TV and not throwing up.

The shows most prized by the genius are seasons four of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. The genius has seen nary a show more better than these two, and especially in their fourth seasons.

While watching last week's episode of BSG, I noticed something awesome. It's a total boo-boo. It's not a spoiler, either, so don't worry.

There's, like, this woman who's hooked up to one of those hospital beep-machines (sound familiar?), and, for a couple seconds, her beep-machine's readout is displayed clearly to the audience.

Most people would miss it, but my calorie-sucking brain didn't.

I speak of the date on the readout. This screenshot is taken from 34:02 of the recording I yanked down through the bittorrent - look at the text up top and center:

Egads!

Your eyes deceive you nary a bit, my subjects. As I live and breathe and lack testosterone, the date on that machine says it's May 27, 2006.

Do you know what this means? Has you did figure it out?

It means THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ARE NOT PERFECT.

I shall speak nary a word more on the subject.

I bid thou tah-tah.

It began on the sofa. It continues on the sofa, even now.

My near near death experience.

My almost almost fatal condition.

I just got home from six hours at the hospital. After days of lying on the sofa, sweating, occasionally vomiting, even less occasionally feeling somewhat ok-ish, I decided to go to find out why, it seemed, I was dying.

Going to the hospital was a good thing. I told my shrink about my symptoms, but he didn't think they were all that bad. I told one of the twenty-four-hour hotline nurses provided by my insurance company. Oddly, the nurse, despite agreeing that I was expiring, thought I should see if I could avoid dying until Monday when I could see my doctor rather than make an expensive trip to the emergency room.

The first twenty minutes sucked, though. The waiting room.

The Waiting Room.

Yes... the room... of waiting.

Screaming babies. Really depressing scenes of people who aren't just almost dying, but dying. No vending machine. Bad magazine selection.

And my Stargate book.

I accidentally discovered a whole line of Stargate books. I don't remember how, though. It happened while I was still being treated with anxiety meds that wiped my memories as they were forming. I only know because I have the book and the receipt indicating the book was paid for.

The Stargate Book.

Yes... the book... of Stargate.

I've read sixteen pages, and I don't know what it's about. The writing is so bad that I had to rewrite it in my head as it was entering. It was 90% adjectives and adverbs, which is confusing.

"Major Carter's polished low-heel business-casual matte-finish shoes tapped across the burnished marble government-quality floor reflecting the golden yellow orb in the sky that was blue as the bluest azure polished sapphires on bands of gold like the golden yellow orb in the sky."

It would have been sufficient to say:

"Major Carter walked."

Fortunately, I was already experiencing every possible malady the book could have produced in me. That's why I was at the hospital in the first place. Convenient, then, that I happened to start reading the book there - the one place I could have been treated in the event that I, probably through duress, might have read seventeen pages. Or eighteen. Any further, and we reach the limit of 21st century medicine.

I was very happy when I heard my name called and knew I would have to put away The Stargate Book. I sat and enjoyed the feeling for a moment. The feeling that I knew I was about to get up and leave. Basked in it for a few.

A really hot orderly led me back to my room. It sounds glamorous - having "my" room - but, although the space was packed with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, it was all designed to do any one or combination of the following:

1. Hurt me.

2. Invade a bodily orifice.

I wasn't almost dying enough for the second. Which is nice. (That's why you don't read to page seventeen of The Stargate Book.)

I looked at something on the bed. The orderly, obviously staring at my hot, sweaty, pale, clammy face, looked at it, too.

"Do I have to?" I asked.

"Yes."

"But..."

"Yes."

"It's just so..."

"Yes."

I pulled off my shirt and put on the gown.

The Gown.

I got to keep my pants on. Although it has nothing at all to do with the hospital, those pants have gotten my buttocks pinched twice by unknown saucy women recently. Getting to keep them on allowed to me to hang on to a little dignity. Or I thought it would. Now I associate those pants with the gown. I tried to leave them behind with the gown, but a gang of nuns in the lobby objected to my nakedness and ordered that I return to my room ("my" room!) at once and cover my shame. The police said the same thing. Due to consensus, I complied.

But none of this matters.

That's right! Everything you've read up until now doesn't matter!

You're an idiot!

What matters is that I'm almost dying.

Gown-donned, I hopped in bed and awaited the phlebotomist. A "phlebotomist" is one who practices phlebotomy. If you slept through Phlebotomotology 101, a phlebotomist is someone who sticks things in your veins. Appropriate or otherwise. Like, you could cram a sofa into someone's arm and still call yourself a phlebotomist. They might call you "asshole" or similar, but that doesn't make you any less of a phlebotomist.

I'd been seeing hot nurses everywhere. I thought I was living in a cliche, but an AWESOME cliche. Based on my observations, I expected to get phlebotomized by a foxy little naughty nurse.

My dreams were exploded to hell when in came Quasimodo. He had a wheel for a leg, a robotic arm, a whole-body limp, and was missing an eye and also the other.

He was a little sloppy, but I couldn't fault him too much. After all, he was a blind cyborg. You'll notice I didn't call him a "phlebotomist." I would have, but he indiscriminately jabbed needles into muscles and organs, and that, if we're going by the book, isn't phlebotomy. That's "illegal."

Two hours later, hospital staff had availed themselves of 75% of my fluids. After the first half-hour, I stopped caring.

"You want some of that? Yeah, sure... go ahead. Let me know if it's squirty. I can shift positions or tighten other muscles if it's squirty."

I assume my liquids were combined in a big pot, heated, and fed to interns. If an intern made a "yucky" face, I was broken.

I was... and is... broken.

As I understand it, I'm having some big allergic reaction to a medication, and that I've probably been having this reaction for quite some time. It wasn't until the past couple weeks that it progressed enough to douse my social-life in gasoline and toss a flaming redwood on it. I haven't seen my friends because there are BAD liquids and chemicals in me.

BAD.

But I'm home, with medicine, and the doctor assured me that I almost likely won't die before noon. He gave me some uber antihistamine that was supposed to help me and knock me out (the latter being useful if The Stargate Book fell out of my bag and opened to a page I accidentally saw).

It isn't knocking me out. My old drug habit was such that my daily allotment probably would have killed several dozen non-users. I'm used to brushing comas out of the way.

I'm also kind of scared. That makes it hard to sleep. Although it'll be much later when I post this, it's nearly 5:00 AM, and I'm wide awake.

Some of the symptoms have stopped, though. The antihistamines must be doing something. I'm hungry, which is new and exciting. I'm not sweating. I'm not changing color like a cuttlefish. No tremors.

In fact, except for the sniffles and a huge rash on my back, I feel pretty almost not dying.

I'm not wearing any pants.

I leave you with that.

[Hey, people - wrote this yesterday morning. Since writing it, I had to go back to the hospital. This... whatever-in-the-hell-it-is thing is still causing problems. My doc should be waking me up this morning with a phone call so we can chat about how to keep me alive. Tah.]

[If there are typos in here, it's because I'm too tired to find and fix 'em.]

As usual when I disappear, I've gotten contacted in every possible way about where I've gone.

As usual, there's too much to respond to bit by bit.

As usual, I'll do it here. And I'll keep it short.

About a week and a half ago, something went horribly wrong with my meds. Blood pressure, heart rate, body temp, and other vitals all over the place. Did a lot of puking. Puking around the toilet, on the toilet, on myself, and, when I was lucky, in the toilet.

Crashed into the worst depression I've had in almost the past year. Obsessive thoughts, cycling for hours and hours and hours, day after day... "I want to die," and "I don't belong" were the most prominent.

Wanted to quit everything. Wanted to shut down Neopoleon. Guess I wanted to shut down me.

Spent a few hours with various doctor types. I was sedated for the obsessive thoughts. It worked, and I'm thankful for it. I was really losing my mind. Turning down the brain a few notches quieted the thoughts.

Because of the sedatives, my memory went on the fritz. I seem to be missing much of Sunday and Monday. That's hard for me, as my memory is usually demmed, demmed good.

I was in a cafe on... Tuesday? (See - I still don't know when things happened.) I was waiting for a friend of mine to show up because we'd made plans. I started to get rather irritated because she had stood me up. I called her and asked her where she was and when she was planning to show up. She was confused because we didn't have plans for that day - our plans were for the previous day. I'd forgotten. Even better, we'd hung out two days in a row.

I have foggy memories of texts and phone calls... but I was also nodding off each day and having these strange, vivid dreams. I don't know which calls actually happened and which were dreamt. Like, I think I'm supposed to be getting my haircut with a friend this weekend, but now I know that I have no idea.

The only things I can be sure of are the texts, voicemails, emails, and anything else that leaves a record.

One area the nodding has been really interesting is how it affected watching movies and reading. I'd be watching something, nod off, but not really fall asleep, and the show would continue in my head for some time, seamlessly. It wasn't until something uber weird happened that I'd realize I'd nodded off again.

That, as with the other things, happened over and over and over...

My sleep meds have also been changed, and I've been having amazing dreams. I hadn't dreamt much in ten months, and it's like my brain is getting all caught up right now. Fascinating. Not at all unwelcome.

Nauseated every day. It's been hard to eat. Taking anti-nausea meds hasn't helped with the mental fog, as those meds are also sedating.

Today is the first day I've gotten up and felt pretty all right. I'm eating right now. Sipping a latte. Typing. I'm aware of my surroundings. I'm not totally nauseated. I'm not having obsessive thoughts. I don't want to kill myself.

I feel overwhelmed about figuring out just what in the hell has happened these past few days and whether there's anything I need to attend to. I'm a little nervous about what might set off another depressive episode. I'm not taking the sedatives because I want to be awake and have my memory and experience things.

It looks like I wrote a couple posts while I was out crazy. I'll check 'em out and see if they're worth putting up (provided they even make sense).

If I come out of this depression soon, then it'll all be worth it. In the past, I'd be severely depressed for up to a year at a time. Since being diagnosed as bipolar, it seems like my docs can cut that down to a couple weeks. It's intense and horrible and painful (physically/mentally), but, if you've ever wanted to blow your head off, you know there aren't many things in life than suddenly losing that desire.

So... thanks for being here. Thanks for your messages. I haven't been reading any of them or listening to my voicemail. I've just seen email subject lines indicating concern. Hopefully I'll get around to checking the messages out. It's just, as I said, I'm overwhelmed. I feel like I woke up from a coma.

There's so much more to talk about, but I said I'd keep it short, and, for me, this is short.

It'll all come out along the way.

I kiss you all over your face.

Morale's been down in the Roryverse this week. Dunno why. To combat it, I'm posting something warm and squishy. Full of love. And... squishy. Warm squishy. Squish squish.

Squish squish squish.

I didn't sleep much last night. Ignore me.

Squish squish. Warm squishy. Warm squishy squish.

That's enough of that. I shall now to the meat of this writing event.

I've been hanging out with "new" people lately.

I have friends I've known my whole life. Some I've known for most of it. A few I've known for half of it. A couple I've known for 8/32ths of it. Maybe a handful I've known for 1/4938th of it. I'd have to check my log for exact numbers, but these will serve for the purposes of this online web editorial article posting.

I love those friends, but we're well past the getting-to-know-you phase. I generally know what they're going to say before they say it, or at least how they're going to respond to various stimuli. When you get that close to people, you lose some spontaneity. It's also no longer a challenge to hurt their feelings. I like being challenged, and I really like to hurt people's feelings, so you can see the problem here.

Still, that familiarity isn't a bad thing in my world. There's comfort to it. My own family is sort of completely, utterly, and totally screwed up. I don't feel like I belong to my family. It's weird for me to be around them - sometimes uncomfortable. I don't think we Get each other, and I feel especially strongly that my parents don't Get me.

I've responded to this by building family from spare parts. I have siblings and parental figures. The closest one - definitely a cross between a sister and a mother - just moved to Switzerland, and it's been hard on me. I miss her. She went over there to get her PhD in cryptography and also in ditching her friends. She's selfish.

I love shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica because family is essentially what they're about. I think of close groups of non-blood relations such as those in Firefly and BSG as "found family". It just happens that you grow close and come to rely on each other the way you think a family should. In both cases, it's inevitable because's everybody's stuck in these big metal things floating through space. You can't get away from each other, so you're forced to relate and hang out and fight and stuff. You can't just go out for a stroll. There's a lot of stuff in space, but chances are you're nowhere near it. Even if you are near it, something about it would probably kill you. Radiation, corrosives in the atmosphere, aliens who might be as violent as humans... space is a dangerous place, and no matter how dangerous your own family is, you at least have a fighting chance if you stay in your big floaty metal thing.

Anyway.

Great as having close friends is, I need new people in my life every so often. It's that "If you aren't busy being born, you're busy dying" thing.

I've met so many people in recent years. So, so, so many. Of those many people, though, I only got to know a few. There's an enormous difference between acquaintances, friends, and close friends. Close friends are what I want most, but I don't have many.

To fix this, I'm finding close friends among these "new" people. It's quite pleasant.

I've been spending a lot of time with one in particular. She isn't just a new friend, but also new to the Pacific Northwest, having moved here from North Carolina. I've been showing her around town, and by introducing her to the things Portland has to offer, I've gotten to see Portland from a different perspective. Having lived here so long, I forget about all the fabulous things in this town.

Of greater benefit is that, as we've gotten to know each other, I've learned about myself in addition to her. I have thoughts floating around in my noggin on a daily basis that have been present for years. They're a sort of code by which I live my life. Thinking about them is so automatic now that I hadn't thought to share them with anyone until last week.

We spent the day together, cruising through the hills in the auto, and dining in the evening.

We've had a few Life Talks - morality, beliefs, and such. In the course of these talks, some of the most important thoughts running around in my head came out for the first time. She found these thoughts interesting - maybe even useful if I may be allowed one brief moment of egotism among the years of humility I've exhibited here and elsewhere.

At a party Sunday night, I was chatting with a couple ladies about similar things - morality, beliefs, the way humans treat each other... it was another lovely conversation among the others.

I shared The Rory Code with them, and they seemed to find it interesting as well.

Same goes for Tony. I hung out with Tony, and I totally shared The Rory Code, and it BLEW HIS MIND. He's been at home all week, crouched in the corner, cradling his head in his hands, sobbing, telling people to go away, sobbing more, and ramming his face into the wall. The amazingness of The Rory Code was too much for him. It might be too much for you. I don't know. I wake up to the blinding light of genius every afternoon, so it's not a big deal for me.

Based on how well received The Rory Code has been, I've chosen to share it here. I think it's awesome. Hopefully you'll get something out of it as well. Probably an aneurysm. If you have any doubt about your ability to accept without injury this awesomeness, then take it slowly. If you feel nauseous, place your head down between your legs and wait for the moment to pass. If it's hot out and you've been sweating and you haven't washed your pants in three weeks, DON'T DO THIS - just wait it out.

There are three (3) main components of The Rory Code. Before writing them out, you should know that I've failed in all of them repeatedly. This code isn't compulsory. It's a goal. I try to live by these values, and, in trying, come closer to succeeding to live by them than I otherwise would.

And, despite my usual flippant tone, I take this stuff seriously. I have a hard time with serious, and I try to dilute it with irreverence.

Whatever.

Aight.

---- The Rory Code ----

#1: Don't hurt anybody

There's a handful of readers who've been on the receiving end of my failure to abide by this one. Like anybody, I'm insecure, and that insecurity can present itself in many ways. One way is to hurt others. Preemptive strikes are common. If I think someone is going to hurt me, I'll try to hurt them first.

There are plenty of other reasons I've hurt - and will hurt - others. Some reasons, I think, are justified, but I've done terrible things.

I've carried tons of guilt and shame for it. In 2006/2007, I came down to Portland repeatedly. I brought a list of the people I'd wronged during my insane phase as a druggie. I went around and apologized to each person. I didn't expect forgiveness - it was just something I had to do.

Afterward, I continued to feel that guilt and shame. I've learned since that hanging on to those emotions doesn't do anything good. They're to be learned from and then left. The guilt wrecked me. I isolated myself because I thought I was incapable of forming friendships and relationships without ruining part of someone else's life.

Through counseling and healthy interactions with others, I've learned that Sober Rory is quite a bit different from Druggie Rory. That's a good thing.

What I've also learned is that...

#2: These things happen

I can't change the past. I can apologize as much as I'd like (or to the limits of the patience of the person to whom I'm apologizing), but it doesn't change what I've done.

For years, I've used the phrase "These things happen" to deal with unfortunate outcomes that can't be undone. It's not just about hurting people - it can be about dropping a weight on your foot or burning your toast. It's about anything you can't change, and particularly the things you might dwell on, but where dwelling solves nothing.

Up until a couple years ago, if someone insulted me, I'd respond... well, poorly. If someone in a car flipped me off because I did something as horrendous as signal before changing lanes in front of them in a perfectly legal manner, I'd do whatever it took to effect a direct confrontation. I wound up in situations that could have gotten me pounded. I got in yelling matches with guys who could've picked me up, tied me in a knot, squished that knot into a ball, and rolled me down the street into a busy intersection. Or eaten the ball. Many of these guys looked like they ate people. They just had "that" look.

I still have that not-gonna-back-down attitude (some of you who were present for the Rory vs. Ballmer thing in '06 might know what I'm talking about (as will some of you who were present for the Rory vs. Ballmer thing in '04)). The difference is that, now, I don't let it consume me.

I used to leave these matches feeling unsatisfied and even more desirous of fisticuffs. Arguments would continue in my head for days. I would punch random objects out of anger. I've reduced a few things (walls, floors, houses) to their basic molecular components with repeated beatings. I was filled with rage.

Now, I don't let it happen. The anger appears, I recognize it, and then I move on. It's sunny outside right now and there are gorgeous girls walking around. Why would I want to be anything but appreciative of things? And it's not like I ever achieved a satisfactory resolution when I attempted to through indulging in that anger. The anger went nowhere. Worse than that, I intensified it by focusing on it, and it never got out entirely. It stayed with me.

I still have a difficult time getting past some events, but I've changed my life by accepting that "These things happen."

And that's invaluable because...

#3: Life is for living

I first had this thought... I don't even know how long ago. A decade? More?

How many times have you heard someone ask, "What's the meaning of life?"

I've been drawn into that discussion over and over and over and over...

People get so caught up in ideas. They assume that, because a question can be asked, it has an answer.

This question in particular is a great offender. Asking what the meaning of life is implies that there is one. If there is, what is it? When you figure it out, the question will be validated. Until then, it's like asking, "What's the meaning of dirt?"

People want these answers. They want for there to be a point to life. They want a reason.

It's like blame. My mother needs to assign blame. Even for something like tripping and twisting your ankle. If my foot catches on a turned-up corner of a rug and I fall, then some idiot must have left it that way, and that idiot needs to be burned alive.

The truth is that These Things Happen. Who knows why the rug was like that. If it was someone who did it, the person likely had no intention of causing injury to anyone. There's no blame to be assigned. It just happened. That's it. That's the end of it.

But people want reasons for things, and they want to put the responsibility on someone else. They don't want to believe that senseless crap happens and that it sucks and that there's nothing to be done and no satisfaction to be had.

My paternal grandmother died late last year. She had a systemic infection from surgery on her leg. That infection certainly contributed to her death, but she was already dying. Nobody meant for the infection to happen. To the contrary, people work very hard to prevent these things from happening. But she had rheumatoid arthritis - an autoimmune disease - and she simply couldn't fight off infections. Even a cold put her life in danger.

There were many things that contributed to her death, but in a recent conversation with my father, he blamed the infection and the surgeons for her death. I understand why he felt that way. It's natural to want a reason for a death. Nobody wants for death to Just Happen. It seems senseless. It is senseless, but that's just how the universe works. There's no meaning to death. It happens to everybody. Your chances of dying are 100%, and it's likely you'll die through no fault of your own, and through no fault of anyone else.

Still, people want reasons.

I should say that other people want reasons. I'm actually not all that big on the reason thing. I don't need reasons. In my world, the universe has no intent. The turned-up rug has no intent. Things don't happen for some grand cosmic purpose. They just happen.

There are few places, then, where this is more clearly illustrated than in the "What's the meaning of life?" question.

There's no answer. Life doesn't have meaning. It just Is. That's all. And that's enough, by the by, if you think about it. Life is amazing. The universe is amazing. If you want a profound spiritual experience sometime, find someone who owns a telescope, head out to the middle of nowhere and look at Jupiter or Saturn. When you realize the immensity of the universe - how small you are in comparison - there's an awe that's indescribable. You're part of something so much larger than yourself. Even I have to admit that there's much more space in the universe than is needed for storage of my ego.

I don't want an answer to "What is the meaning of life?" How utterly dull. I prefer looking at all the astounding crap happening around me and being in constant wonder about it. Right now, for example, it blows my mind that I'm a complicated sack of chemicals typing out a message to be read by other sacks of chemicals, and that I'm doing so through a medium created by many other sacks of chemicals.

In Rory's world, there is no answer to the meaning of life question. The question is irrelevant.

As I said, life just is. You can waste your time and your one life on this planet navel-gazing about the universe and existence and associated intent, but you'll never come up with a meaningful answer. What's likely is that the question simply doesn't make sense - we're just used to thinking that it can be answered if we try hard enough.

So, when I was much younger, I ran out of patience with that stupid question. When that happened, the phrase popped into my head:

Life is for living.

That's it.

Because of that thought, I've packed a lot into a short time. I've treated my life like an experiment. See what I can do. Be myself - don't bend to the pressure to wear, say, jeans that aren't ridiculously tight. And, just so you tight-jeans-haters know, I was getting cash at an ATM a few days ago when this cute girl came up behind me, slapped me on the ass, and told me that I looked quite fetching in my denim. Would I have had that experience if I wore pleated khakis the way everybody else in business does? I don't think so.

Like the other elements of The Rory Code, I don't do a good job living by this one, but I try. It reminds me to keep on pushing. If you have ambitions but don't try and take risks, you'll never get anywhere. If you wait for things to happen, you'll be disappointed. You'll come-to sometime in the distant future, and you'll reel in horror at the recognition of the sad fact that you didn't accomplish what you wanted because you expected someone else to come along and offer it to you.

My career got kicked off for the most part when I crashed a party on the roof of a hotel in LA. I was looking for Carl Franklin and Mark Dunn. I was a fan of .Net Rocks, and all I wanted was to tell them. It was important to me. They took the normally stuffy community of business and turned it into something fun. By extension, my own life became more fun, and, for that, I was thankful enough that it was necessary that I tell them in person.

Nobody up there knew who I was, but because of that one meeting, I wound up being interviewed by them, and went on to co-host the show not long after. The visibility provided by the show led to being noticed by Microsoft, and that led to some of the most interesting work I'll have ever done, and it began with a risk.

If you're stressing out over something petty, or if you spend more time angry than neutral and you don't have a piece of shrapnel embedded in your frontal-lobe, then ask yourself: "Is this what I want to do with my one life?"

Live is for living.

That's all.

Happy weekend, you bunch of freeloading scumbags.

---

Give me your money so I can spend it on drugs teaching the children to sing:

In my last post, I provided the URL to what I thought was possibly the worst video game ever made.

I was wrong.

DaveVB left a comment with a reference to the game he suspects is the worst game ever made.

He was right.

I watched the gameplay videos, and couldn't believe it. There are no words. You just have to go see for yourself. I laughed. I laughed 'til I cried, and then I stopped laughing and simply cried.

Aside from the accomplishment of having run up against the physical universal limit for idiocy, the fact alone that the game was available for review is astonishing.

There's a process to these things. To get even the most offensively stupid thing made, people often need to work together and take it step by step. This doesn't just go for video games, but for most of the products in this world that were tarded, tarded again, and so retarded.

This video game is a good example, though.

Think about it. People had to:

1. Come up with the idea for the game.
2. Pitch the game to someone.
3. Get the game approved for development.
4. Get development funded.
5. Produce milestones along the way to show how awesome the game is going to be.
6. Finish development.
7. Have the associated materials created - artwork, the box, manuals, keyboard shortcut guides, etc...
8. Have the game published.
9. Get retailers to carry the game.
10. Get the game distributed.

I'd add "Sell the game," but I don't think that was a problem they had to face.

This is a long process. From inception to completion of the project, months must have passed. From the look of the game, it could have just been days, but because the devs were so clearly inept, I'm assuming it took them a long time to round up a bunch of demo/example code they could paste together around a few ghastly 3D models.

How does this happen?

How is it that projects like this get funded and completed while other projects - projects that don't suck dog balls - are never given a chance?

There are many factors here. Networking, nepotism, and other factors unrelated to the product can come into play, but these aren't the things I'm thinking of.

--- The Rodawgg's Very Own Experience with Money Thrown From and To Stupidity ---

It was about seven years ago when a friend-of-a-friend contacted me about starting a business.

I won't use any names, as I think he's part of the mafia and would have my intestines pulled out through a hole in my knee if he found out I was talking about him. For the sake of this post, we'll call him Francis. I like that name. It's a little girly-boy's name. Now I really hope he doesn't find this. I don't think he'd like it if he found out I gave him a little girly-boy's name.

Francis has an uncle. Francis's uncle isn't intimidating at all. He's a weaselly little man who'd look right at home in a dilapidated old GMC van with tinted porthole windows in the back and an airbrushed tiger on the side, parked outside an elementary school.

We'll call the uncle Piddlesworth.

So, Francis and Piddlesworth.

Francis, aside from running a construction company, made a little money on the side selling huge quantities of cocaine. I don't know exactly how much he made. He wouldn't tell me.

I tried to find out once how much money someone makes by selling coke. I had this conversation with Francis:

Rory: So... you're probably the only coke dealer I'm ever going to meet, and I'm curious - how much money do you make? You must rake it in.

Francis: [befuddled] You don't ask that question. It's not polite to ask questions like that about business.

Rory: Uh. You're a coke dealer. That's not business so much as it is crime. And I can't look up the average income of people in your line of work the way I could, say, a doctor. So... how much?

Francis: ...

He didn't answer. I eventually got it out of him that he kept about $40,000 in cash in a mattress in his house, though he wouldn't disclose which mattress. It's not like I could have gotten to it anyway. Most of the rooms of the house were connected by a central room - a hub of sorts - and the main decoration in the room was a small pen in which there were, like, fourteen rottweilers drooling and licking blood off the floor from whatever/whoever was fed to them earlier that day.

Anyway, Francis wanted to branch out into a new area of business - diversify his portfolio, if you will. He wanted to get into tech. Tech, construction, and coke. A true Renaissance man. He had a stupid haircut, too. All the money in the world, and he looked like a lumpy mushroom.

A lumpy mushroom who needed help.

That's when he came to me. Rory Blyth. The Smartest Man in the World. Soldier of fortune. Genius. Friend of Man. The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.

Messiah.

He and Piddlesworth wanted to meet to discuss a multi-billion dollar idea. Coke tends to lend people a little extra confidence and effect delusions of grandeur, or, in the case of these slappies, delusions of slightly above average intelligence.

The basic idea was actually sound. I don't know that it would have made billions of dollars - not even with my involvement - but it had the potential to make us tens of dollars each month, so I was on board. Not for any pay up front, but for the promise of the dream. Ice-cream money... bus fare... I'd never want for loose change again if this project succeeded.

Francis, being in construction, knew a thing or two about the construction business. Or at least he had a couple working theories about things in the construction business. Ballpark figures. Gut feelings. Blind guesses. Answers from reading tea leaves. Advice from fortune cookies. As much knowledge about the construction business as a Frenchman has about soap.

Whatever.

Whether through conscious thought, overhearing someone else talking, or, most likely, divine intervention, Francis had an idea.

He wanted to build a site where brokers of used construction equipment (bulldozers, jackhammers, union strikes, etc.) could post their stuff and then auction it off. It was like eBay except that it was focused at this one niche, and nobody would ever use it. Otherwise, the similarities were striking. eBay had a web site - we were going to have a web site... I'm serious. Save a few superficial differences and eBay's profitability, they could have been the same site. Only their mothers could tell them apart.

I agreed to do it, and I did it. I'm a man of my word. If I say I'm going to do something, and if you believe me, I can seem very reliable.

This detail will matter not a whit to my non-geek readers, but I built the site using JSP. If I recall correctly, I used PostgreSQL on the back end because I didn't like the way MySQL performed a lock on your server farm every time you wanted to look at a record.

It worked. It was slick. We needed a graphic artist to come along and wipe some of the vomit off the UI, but it was functional.

So far so good, right? We had a working site based on a solid idea from someone who lowered the average IQ of a room by walking into it. This is an accomplishment considering he had already lowered the average IQ of every living thing on the planet including rocks and dirt and algae just by being born. It's like an intellectual version of the limbo. This guy was a natural. The answer to "How low can you go?" was "Very."

Along the way, Piddlesworth - because he was the oldest - had appointed himself the Business Manager. That's like being named the Treasurer of a Tree House Club when you're a kid. There's that one kid who has nothing at all to contribute, but everybody's too nice to send him home to be stupid by himself, so you make him the Treasurer. The post is made all the more useless because there's no money in a children's Tree House Club. The Treasurer has nothing to manage, and that's good - that's how you want it. Give the stupid kid a title, but no power. It's like the Royal Family.

Despite his lack of worth as a human being, Piddlesworth had things he wanted to bring to the "business," and he was insistent about it. Like a male cat in heat during the spring who smells your female cat and claws at your door and makes that weird "RRRRRRRMMMMMMMRRRRRRROOOOOOOOWWWWWWMMMMMMRRRR" noise, apparently Cat for "Bring out the shiznitches or I'm going to sneak in and pee in your shoes the first time you leave the window open this fine season," Piddlesworth wouldn't give up.

Since I didn't want Piddlesworth going #1 in my shoes, I heard him out and tried my best to honor his wishes while not laughing and also not barfing in my throat so I could choke and die rather than endure the Sledgehammer of Maximum Stupidity he wielded with such grace.

Piddlesworth had at some point in his life, despite his being a chance evolutionary dead-end mutant of simian life, managed to amass a little money. $10,000. That's what he had.

He had these $10,000 when he was living in LA. It was gas to power the Stupidmobile.

This "man" hired a team of voice actors, brought them into a studio, and then paid them to read various children's fairy tales into microphones for preservation on tape-based media. The stories were all in the public domain. Stuff children love that was written in Middle English and requires an advanced degree in Useless Skills to be understood. Anybody who's ever been outside or gone out on a Friday night is SOL.

If you aren't familiar with children's literature of a few hundred years ago, think "The Canterbury Tales," only more depressing. If you aren't familiar with "The Canterbury Tales," then you're stupid. Still, to give you another reference point should your ignorance get in the way of my story, just imagine what would happen if Free Willy had been written and produced in France. That's kind of like old school children's stories. Sad and scary. Not at all suitable for children.

$10,000 spent on audio recordings of children's stories from a time when children didn't have time for children's stories because they were too busy shoveling shit, being sold, or married off to high falootin' families that had, like, a hundred times more shit to shovel than any of the other poor bastards who lived in the ghetto. There was no such thing as focus-groups back then, so there wasn't much feedback on the quality of these tales.

As a mental exercise just now, I sat and stared at the wall for ten minutes while trying to think of a worse way to spend $10,000. All I could come up with was an enema. A really, really big, really, really fancy enema.

And how, I'm sure you're asking, does this foolish project figure in to the construction machinery auction site?

Piddlesworth wanted to have a landing page page for the site where the user would make one (1) of two (2) choices:

1. Enter the auction portion of the site to buy and sell equipment at rather high prices. This area would appeal mainly to businesspeople who represent major manufacturing companies.

2. Pay $100 for lifetime access to the audio recordings of children's stories you could go and download for free, and not be able to understand for free, from Project Gutenberg.

Side by side. Same page.

I'm not kidding.

It'd be like walking into your Swiss Bank to make a six-figure withdrawal, but being lured away at the door to ride a pony while eating cotton-candy. Or churros. Churros are good, but I don't think they have them in Switzerland. Or cotton-candy. Do they have cotton-candy in Switzerland? What about ponies?

I obviously didn't do my research here. If only there were a way to go find the answers to these questions and then come back to update the text.

Too late now.

The partnership ended a couple weeks later. Francis and Piddlesworth called me to a meeting at a Ramada Inn on the edge of town. That alone could have dissolved our relationship, but I wanted to give them a chance. Part of me was resistant to the thought that human beings can be so mentally deficient. I wanted to see them do one smart thing, and, at this point, "smart" was a term I'd adjusted to put success within their reach. I set my standard according to a study in which bonobo chimps preferentially ate their own poop rather than receive electric shocks while self-administering heroin. There was no right answer, so I figured a win was guaranteed, and I could move on, my faith in humanity restored.

There was a lawyer there. We were going to make our company official. We'd been advised to form an LLC. I felt like I was sitting in front of a judge, pen in hand, being asked to sign a marriage certificate so I could spend the rest of my happy life with Mrs. Frogbottom, known throughout the carnie world as The Living Armpit of Halitosis County.

Just as I'm protecting the identities of Francis and Piddlesworth (more accurately, protecting myself), I won't give the name of the lawyer. For the purposes of this tale, we shall call him Moron. Has a nice ring to it.

Moron was three hours late and had smeared lipstick and an STD on his face when he arrived. He smelled of urine and herrings.

He greeted us, calling us "gentlemen," and produced a stack of paper from what looked like a doctor's bag. Like the rest of him, I didn't ask.

I wondered why there was so much paper for what should have been a more or less standard set of forms that lawyers had perfected over the years. What I didn't take into account was that you generally have to write larger when using crayons. Plus, every few pages there were pictures of things - dogs, cats, kids holding balloons. I'd never seen illustrated business forms before, and I wondered why more people didn't use them. Because, I realized, most businesspeople are in it for the money. That was why.

I stood up, punched everybody in the face, and went home.

Had I stuck around and signed the forms, I would have been stuck in this business until I filed for a divorce and entered the witness protection program.

And that, my friends, is how really stupid businesses come to be. Idiots somehow make money and then want to make more, but they can't repeat the accident that led to the initial acquisition of dough.

Oh, and Piddlesworth wanted to name the company "Iddybot" - oddly, the domain name was available.

Iddybot.

What the feck is an Iddybot?

Form small groups and discuss.

---

[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]

- Kellyhelderboobs - I was introduced to this site by a friend of mine, and this girl is funny. She's recruited a few friends to start a sort of blog-magazine thing. I've tried to do that a few times over the years, and it always fell apart, but maybe she can hold it together. Regardless, she's a good writer, and her writing's fun.

- Clifton Craig - Mr. Trash-Talky Coder Guy. We've been meaning to do a sort of Battle of the Geeks over video iChat - to be recorded and made available for your enjoyment. Because my schedule's sort of a wet slippy thing that's constantly flicking around and getting stuck to stuff before breaking off and getting affixed to the bottom of someone's shoe, we haven't gotten it done, but we shall. Oh, yes, Cliff - we shall!

- Yuvi - Yuvi did something really cool for me this week. Long story, but it was quite an honor. So, thanks, mister :)

You know him.

You love him.

He's me.

The Smartest Man in the World is finally back. It took a few months because of various hold-ups and miscellaneous issues of import, but the show is returned.

I am returned.

If all goes according to plan, there will be a steady stream of episodes from here on out. Carl and I have also talked about adding video episodes either weekly or every other week. I see myself doing a sort of weekly address. Like the president when he sits next to the fireplace and babbles about war and oil and money and says stuff like, "We're moving forward into a time of great prosperity," and "All our PhD research scientists are moving to Korea because they can make more money there," and "My shorts itch."

If you haven't listened to the show, then you're a frakking retard. You should go listen to it. It's so effing good that the iTunes team made a "brick" for me and advertised the show on the front page of their podcast section:

I don't mean to brag, but... Oh, wait - yes I do.

This show has probably gotten me more fan mail from hot girls than any other thing I've ever done other than the writing, the videos, and strutting down the street.

It's nothing special - just me reading some of my longer posts against a musical background - but it seems to be the wind beneath some people's wings. It's not my place to judge, though I'd never listen to the show myself. It takes all kinds, you know?

If you're totally caught up in the hype now, head over to The Smartest Man in the World and get your subscribe on. The best place to go, though, is iTunes [this link should open iTunes for you, and take you to the show], as it's far easier to subscribe and get the shows onto your iPod with minimal effort. If you haven't already gotten them, there are already a couple dozen shows out there that can keep you company while you're commuting, walking the dog, or making love.

Thanks as always to Carl Franklin and his company - Pwop - for doing this. I'm not sure what he gets out of it. It might just be that he feels it's his duty to ensure that the message of Me gets disseminated throughout the land.

In other news, I think I may have discovered the worst video game of all time. By "discovered," I mean that I found it on Gamespot, and Gamespot said it was one of the worst games of all time. Check it out. Here's a link to a video of the gameplay - that alone should have you barfing in your throat, praying for death. By the by, rather than praying for death, just stop the video or close the window. Nobody's interested in your melodrama.

Ok. Go download my stuff and make me famous and rich.

Tell your friends about it, tell your mother, and tell your mother to tell her friends.

Together, we can all improve my life.

---

Like Neopoleon? Then donate, you cheap bastard:

Hi.

Beep. Boop beep beep boop boop boop beep beep DING! boop boop bzzt bzzt bzzt...

I don't write too many nerdy posts nowadays. I decided to begin this one with a textual representation of the computer noises I'm making on my side of the screen. I'm like all, "Beep boop boop beep DING! boop beep beep bzzt bzzt..."

It gets me in the mood.

I'm making dot-matrix printer noises now, but I don't know how to spell them.

Before getting into the meat, I'm gonna remind you again about the $200 discount on JavaOne tickets. I figure it's more appropriate to mention it here than it was in my post about Snow Gods and The Never Ending Story. To take advantage of the discount, head over here and use the promotional code "iphone".

Now. The post.

As I've discussed here (and quite a few other places now), I'm not happy with the dev tools for OS X. I don't like Objective-C. The last time I dealt with a header file and felt OK about it was in 1992. Unless you're holding a gun to my head, it's unlikely that I'm going to willingly subject myself to my coding adolescence all over again. If you plan to take me up on the gun thing, by the by, make sure it's loaded and that you're ready to use it. If you hold a gun to my head, my ninja instincts will take over. I'll break your arm, break your nose, break your throat (yeah - the whole thing), and then hadooken you until you can't take it any more. Your only hope will be that you're faster with your gun than I am with my nunchucks.

I want to write client apps. Barring Objective-C and Cocoa, there really aren't that many options. When I code, I use an IDE. I never code with notepad or emacs or vi or any other antiquated crap. I want code-completion, a nice interactive debugger, a fancy form-builder, and a sane language that ties it all together like the rug from The Big Lebowski.

All roads lead to RealBasic [company page here], which is unfortunate. It's so close to being great that I have a hard time seeing the good in it. The biggest thing they're missing, from my point of view, is a nice, proper framework.

The current system is a messy combo of the global functions you'd find in Visual Basic 6- that come from who-knows-where, and halfway decent objects that offer some of the functionality you'd expect of them. What's frustrating is the division of labor between object functionality and those global, module-based operations. It divides your attention, and it more than doubles your effort.

I don't have a "code mode" for representing code here, but I'll see what I can do with block quotes and a little Courier New.

To give you a brief idea of something that drives me insane because it could so easily be solved, check this out - it's a little simple array handling:

for i as integer = 0 to UBound(someArray)

    someOperationWith(someArray(i))

next

What do you notice?

Yeah: UBound. I haven't had to use something like UBound in... years?

That sort of thing pisses me off. I just want something like:

for i as integer = 0 to someArray.Count

    someOperationWith(someArray(i))

next

That's all. Too much to ask? I don't think so. There might already be some nice object wrapper out there that provides this functionality, but I haven't seen it, and I think I read the manual, like, eighty times last night, and didn't find anything relevant.

My complaint, of course, isn't just with arrays - it's the design philosophy, and it's rampant throughout RealBasic. I'd list the number of global functions required for string-manipulation, but the quantity of data required would clog and bring down the entire net. Economies would collapse. The medical and emergency-response infrastructures would come apart. By the end of the day, we'd all be looting - we'd be fighting each other for flashlight batteries, bottled water, antibiotics, weapons, food, and shelter.

So, in the interest of the survival of our species, I won't list them.

You might not think this kind of "design" a big deal, but you might also be one of the people who only moved on to, say, VB.Net kicking and screaming.

There's no consistency to a language like this. With Java or .Net or any other platform out there with a proper framework, much of it is self-documenting. I've worked with enough languages and platforms that figuring out how iterate over an array using a property like "Count" isn't going to be very difficult. The namespaces change, the names change, the hierarchies are different, there are differences between the languages (think .Net properties vs. the standard Java getter/setter methods), but if you Get how to use and explore frameworks like these, just spelunking through the frameworks can teach you much more than a manual ever could. It's useful, but, if you love coding, it's also fun. Within twenty minutes, you can have a list of "Wow!" functionality you can't wait to use. Sure, it might exist in a VB6 or a RealBasic, but finding it will be a totally different experience, and one that, in my opinion, isn't especially fun.

Systems like this where "UBound" type functions are still the rule rather than the exception are much harder to learn. Picking up a language's syntax is often simple to the point of being trivial. It's the same thing for spoken languages of similar families - although I don't speak Italian, I've studied Italian grammar, and I can do just fine reading and writing it. I don't practice it enough to know it inside-out, but once I get warmed up, a lot of it comes back to me. It's easy because I already speak French and know a bit of Latin. I can read many Indo-European languages even without a grammar and do so with enough accuracy that I can at least get the gist of things, and that's because there are patterns that carry over from, for example, Spanish, Italian, and whatever else.

The difficulty comes from things like vocabulary. For me to express myself in one of these languages, I need to know more than the syntax/grammar, and the more consistent and regular the rules of the language, the easier it'll be.

Coding languages are basically the same. Many exhibit more or less shared patterns and structures. The real work isn't in learning the syntax. You could pick up the syntax of a brand new coding language in an afternoon as long as the document from which you're learning was written expressly on the language and its keywords/operators/etc. rather than the functions and frameworks you drive with the language.

The analogy breaks down in that spoken languages change too quickly to enjoy much regularity, but there are exemptions. Whether you like it or hate it, Esperanto has such regularity that you can learn the grammar in twenty minutes and a lot about its vocabulary in a few more hours.

A sensible language + a sensible framework is closer to Esperanto. A (possibly) sensible language + higgeldy-piggeldy inconsistent global functions and no proper framework is more like English. I love English, but it's highly irregular, and it's cruft upon cruft.

For me, languages like RealBasic fall somewhere between. I get the basic syntax, and I see the same patterns, but there are "symbols" that I don't have to deal with in my favorite (more) modern languages.

It's certainly possible to find "UBound" type cruft in C# or Java, but where there are oddities and relics, there are almost always clean ways to avoid them. VB.Net is a good example. It supports a lot of the lameness of VB6, but you don't have to use it. I'd be perfectly satisfied of RealBasic were the same. I don't care for the verbosity of VB.Net, but when you accept it, it's not much different from C#. The first app I ever wrote with VB.Net (Beta 1 of VS.Net) left me thinking, "They turned VB into Java! GOOD!"

The real pain of the "UBound"s of the universe is that you have to find them. You want to do something perfectly ordinary, and then realize that you can't do it until you find it in the documentation. Then, once you learn it, it's tougher - at least for me - to remember it because, unlike string functions sitting in a well-organized OO framework, it has no context. It's global. It's not self-documenting.

If I spent my entire life in RealBasic, I'd still dislike this, but I'd learn to live with it as I internalized all these functions. But, with no reason to their naming and organization, it's a real pain in the ass, and I plan to jump ship the second something better comes along, so putting in the effort doesn't appeal to me. I have faith. With the increasing popularity of OS X, I have to believe that things will get better as others experience the same frustration.

Anyway, it looks like there's been some effort put toward correcting this mess in RealBasic, but, in the example I'm going to give, it's actually not much better than it was before.

In an app I'm writing, I need to get a "FolderItem" that represents the user's home folder. If you code at all, and even if you don't use RealBasic, you ought to be able to figure out what a "FolderItem" is, so I won't bother explaining it.

I have two paths to the solution. The first is the Old Really Sucky Way, and the second is the New Not as Sucky Way. Something to note is that the first way is a sloppy hack because, although you'd expect to find a simple function that returned the user's home directory, you actually have to do a little work yourself, whereas, in the New Way, you don't. But, when looking through the documentation and code samples I found online, the first way was all I found until I knew where to look in the help for the second. But... the second STILL isn't properly documented, so it STILL isn't easily discoverable.

Perpend:

Old Really Sucky Way:

dim f as new FolderItem

f = DocumentsFolder.Parent

New Not as Sucky Way:

dim f as new FolderItem

f = SpecialFolder.DocumentsFolder

Looking at the Old Sucky Way, you'll see that there isn't a way to get a reference to the user's home folder - I have to ask for the DocumentFolder's Parent. This method should return the user's home folder most of the time, but this might change in some networked scenarios.

There are similar functions that will get you several other folders, though, oddly, not the user's home folder, which is just weird since that's one I'd expect to use fairly often. With the built-in global functions, it'd be easier to get into the user's pants than the user's home folder.

I did a search in the language reference for "DocumentsFolder," but it only returned an entry on the function "DocumentsFolder" I used above (or property, or however you'd like to refer to it). Unless you follow a hierarchical document tree in the language reference to the section on "SpecialFolder," you won't find out about "SpecialFolder," and that would suck since SpecialFolder does provide easy access to the folders you'll need.

What's even more frustrating is that, when you drill down to the "SpecialFolder" section of the docs, you get a list of some of the "special folders" you can get access to through it, but:

1. It's a partial list - it only lists the folders for which there are already global functions such as the one in the "Old Sucky Way" example ("DocumentsFolder").

2. It doesn't make it clear that "SpecialFolder" itself is a module. Because of this, I didn't think to try typing in "SpecialFolder." to get a code-completion list of its members. Since the list of "special folders" in the docs was the same as the ones accessible through global functions, I had no reason at all to think that it was anything more than the title for some entries in that section of the documentation.

This is just messy. They offer two way to get to the same functionality. The older one sucks, and the newer one is very poorly documented. That makes them both about as easy to use. Ultimately, they both suck, though, because they're both globally exposed without being part of a framework - you still have to either guess they're there, or divine their from the not-so-great docs.

Now, if there were a proper RealBasic framework, you'd expect a sensible object hierarchy that, under some File or Folder namespace, would expose a "SpecialFolder" static class. It would be self-documenting. I could find it with a few keystrokes and some code-completion. Something like "RealBasic.IO.Folders.SpecialFolder" - just import the proper namespace and go to town. File IO is common, common, common, and you'd just import the appropriate namespace so you wouldn't have to type out the fully qualified name. No biggie. Done. It's self-documenting and well organized.

I expect to find the usual apologists leaving comments and telling me that I'm stupid/lazy/hate it because it isn't Microsoft stuff or Java, but the reality is that I simply hate it for what it is. It isn't that I can't learn it - it's that there's a greater barrier to entry for RealBasic than there should be.

What's the point of offering an "easy" alternative to Objective-C/Cocoa when you have to do stuff like this? As much as I dislike Objective-C, Cocoa as a framework still makes sense.

I'm not just going to whine about it, though. That'd be the usual Crappy Customer thing to do.

I'm writing a simple framework to wrap some of the functions I'm most likely to use. I also plan to possibly write some object-wrappers for data types that could really use them. It might be that a lot of this has already been done. I didn't see anything in the docs, so if someone out there knows otherwise, do tell. Until I learn of an extant solution to his problem, I shall endeavor to do whatever I can to group this functionality in a sensible way that'll make coding for RealBasic a hell of a lot easier.

And, to address some concerns that might arise...

Whether you're into .Net, Java, Cocoa, RealBasic, or whatever, one of the first things you might be thinking about when it comes to object-wrappers is performance. This won't be a problem - at least not for the kind of apps I'm going to write. These are good ol' fashioned desktop apps. I'm not trying to optimize a web-app for eighty-billion simultaneous connections. I'm not rewriting SETI@home.

Eventually, I'm either going to set up a little site for OS X dev stuff I'm working on, or I'm going to post it here. I hope I put in the effort to do the site, but these Big Plans of mine have a way of getting pushed aside when Real Life and Real Work need my attention.

Wherever it winds up, I'm still doing it. The app I finished is a cute little utility that I think Mac users will dig. The other apps I'm planning are going to be larger. Not huge, but big enough that I don't want to deal with these poorly-documented global functions with inconsistent names.

That is all, my people.

Solidarity among Those Who Understand.

---

Like Neopoleon? Then donate, you cheap bastard:

[NOTE FOR THE GEEKS: A good friend of mine is involved with this year's JaveOne Conference, and he asked me if I would get a little message out to those who would like to go but who might not have all the cash to get a ticket. Basically, there's a $200 discount available for Java devs who have specific interests in specific products. There's a post all about it here. To take advantage of this promotion, register for the conference with the priority code "iphone" - ought to be an interesting show. I'd go if somebody gave me a ticket, airfare, a fancy suite, a car and driver, a special wardrobe for the conference, dinners with celebrities, a daily allowance of at least $1,000, and didn't require that I actually showed up. Seriously, though, I'd dig it, as I'm curious, and I'd love to see what the latest and greatest is in the Java world compared to the .Net world...]

[NOTE FOR ALL AND SUNDRY REGARDING THIS AND THE PAST FEW POSTS: I don't know where all this sincerity is coming from. If we stick together, we can get through it, and Neopoleon can get back to normal. Also, this post is somewhat long, so set your expectations accordingly. Finally, for those of you who loved the Purple Monster Doll post (which was, like, everybody in the whole universe), although this post is of a different nature entirely, writing it felt similar - the ending left me feeling demmed good...]

When I was a wee little Rory, I had a lot of nightmares.

Stand-alone nightmares, recurring nightmares, nightmares that were part of a series that got renewed over and over and over again due to great success in achieving their goal of scaring the dumplings out of me every night.

I learned how to wake myself up when a rerun came on. There was one where I walked down a hallway toward a door. Though I was walking, I didn't have a choice. The door was like a big, door-y Rory magnet.

It had a window, but the window was opaque. I could make out flickering lights cycling through reds and blues, but I couldn't see what was beyond. All I knew was that Evil was on the other side, and that it wouldn't benefit me in any way to make the acquaintance of The Thing Behind the Door.

The first time I had it, my terror increased as I got near the door, and it hit a point at which I couldn't handle it. I woke up, probably peeing all over the place as I did so, thought about how unpleasant the dream was, thought about it for a while, and then fell back asleep, marinating in my own urine.

That dream was just one of many like it. Over and over and over again. That hallway with that door.

Eventually, when I recognized a recurring nightmare, I would try to wake myself up by calling my own name out loud. While you're sleeping, most of your voluntary muscle control is shut off, so it was tough trying to speak. Evolution probably took care of the people who had nightmares like mine, but acted them out, and walked off cliffs or whatever.

It took tremendous effort to do it, but after a few tries, I could get out a weak "Rory..."

A couple more, and an exclamation point was added to my name: "Rory!"

In the dream, I could hear my conscious self calling to me, telling me to wake up. It worked, though it took a few shouts.

I had another nightmare in which I was sitting on the living room floor with my dad. We were playing a board game. The lights were off in the room, but the kitchen light was on, providing enough light to see the board and each other.

This nightmare was perhaps the shortest, so I didn't have time to wake myself up. I had to go through it.

This bizarre silver pig creature would run out of the kitchen over to my dad 'n me. When it got to us, the first thing it did was eat my eyelids. I had no choice but to watch because I could no longer shut my eyes.

The dream ended with me having to watch as the thing ate my father alive. It happened so quickly that neither of us had a chance to do anything.

There were so many others. While Mrs. Preston was talking and teaching my first-grade class (for all the foreigners, first-grade happens when you're six or so), I drew the various creatures and images from my nightmares on the paper where I was supposed to be practicing my italic handwriting.

I remember most of them - from the thirty-second spots advertising horror to come to the epic nightmares that spanned hours or days.

The Psych 101 explanation for this would probably be that I felt out of control, and that there were a few things going on in my life that weren't a six-year old's idea of a good time (for the foreigners, a college class with the designation "101" is a beginner's course in the subject).

Whatever the cause, it's happening again, though the dreams are much worse. That, I imagine, is the benefit of experience.

For several weeks, I've been waking up over and over throughout the night, either pulled from my nightmares when they hit that point of maximum crappiness, or when I manage to wake myself up.

Even worse, most of them have been carrying over into my waking state, so the nightmares continue for up to a minute while I'm conscious.

Every bloody night.

One theme is ex-girlfriends. I'm getting the "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" treatment. One after the other. After the other. After the other. The only thing that could make it worse would be if they had each other's phone numbers and email addresses. When ex-girlfriends communicate, a peace of your world falls apart.

Horrific as the ex-girlfriends thing is, the other flavor of nightmare is raw and primal. These take place when I'm half-awake, but, as I was saying, continue right into my waking state. Sometimes, the voluntary muscle paralysis of sleep lingers, so I can't even move while I'm awake and my nightmares are still playing themselves out.

They come in many shapes. I've lain there as some strange, small, hovering machine with a spinning blade ripped apart the room around me.

I've been sleeping on the sofa lately (I have a thing for sleeping on sofas). I tend to sleep on my sides, tossing back and forth through the night. This, combined with the paralysis and the waking nightmares, leaves me:

1. Conscious to experience the nightmare as though it were real.

2. Paralyzed, so I can't react or sit up or run or whatever I feel I need to do.

3. When the side I'm on has me facing the back of the sofa, I feel much more vulnerable. Some people have a fear of sitting with their back to a room or an open space. I'm not one of those people, but when there's something freaky going on and I can't move or see it, it's pretty effing scary to be that exposed.

I've woken to the sound of something small and fast running around the room, knocking things over, jumping up on things, and generally causing a commotion.

The worst are the screams, growls, and these other... sounds.

Waking to screams isn't a good use of my free time, nor is waking to growls. What gets me most, though, are the sounds I can only describe as alien, angry, predatory, nearby, and the prelude to something Very Very Bad on the way. Imagine sounds like the screeching of the aliens in, well, Alien, but the sound starts low, and gradually rises in pitch and intensity until the creature launches in my direction. I wake up or snap out of it before whatever it is gets to me, and I'm thankful for it.

Again, the Psych 101 explanation is probably that I feel like I'm out control of my life. I've had a wild few years, broken down a few times, and built myself back up. But this time is different, as I'm moving out of my comfort zone - the tech industry - and establishing myself in another area that, although tech can be involved, is very generalized (it's called "Marketing 2.0" but I don't like to call it that, as I've had it with anything "2.0").

It seems like having these nightmares ought to be a bad thing, but the reality is that I'm extremely happy to be where I am, and I'm hopeful about the future. It might just be that, because of my childhood, my brain is wired to handle uncertainty through nightmares that corner, paralyze, and terrify me.

Two days ago, I spent a few hours getting driven around in an extensively modified Mini Cooper. I sat in the front passenger seat, strapped in with the harness, and tried to keep my camera level to video the deserted country roads we were tearing up at speeds up to 120 MPH (roughly 200 KPH).

Everything about the car has been tightened and locked down. Every tiny bump, pebble, and crack is communicated to the seats and steering-wheel. The vibrations are so intense that you fully expect the car to simultaneously dismantle itself and explode at every seam, screw, bolt, belt, and other miscellaneous auto thingies.

That's my job.

I don't know how I wind up getting to do things like this. It's amazing. I'm very, very fortunate.

That's why the nightmares are odd. Change may feel like a lack of control, but I'm actually back working for myself again. As this grows, I'll pick and choose my clients as I did in the past. However much it may feel like the opposite, I'm more in control now than I have been in years, and I love it.

But back to the nightmares.

I've been hanging out lately with some new people as well as old friends I haven't seen in ages. It's refreshing. When you hang out exclusively with people you've known for most of your life, you have a good idea of what they're going to say and do. It's comfortable, but you lose some of the spontaneity that arises from hearing and experiencing the unexpected from minds that are brand new to you.

I spent last night driving around town with one of these new friends. We were talking about dogs, the various shapes they come in, and so on. She told me about one dog in particular that she'd like. It's a giant, elongated, white, fluffy, flying dog named Valcore. It's the airbound canine behemoth in The Never Ending Story.

This led to childhood. I didn't talk mu