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.

---

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[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 much about my childhood, as the most prominent reminder of my childhood lately has been these recurring nightmares. She did most of the talking.

I don't usually listen to people, but I was fascinated by the things she was telling me. She had created this immense, highly-detailed world for herself when she was young. There were characters, rituals, fantastic settings, and stories that bound it all together.

The thing I loved best, though, was a memory of hers about snow.

I don't know how things were in your neighborhood when you were young, but snow was the greatest thing in the universe when I was a kid. My sister and I prayed for it, and we're steadfast atheists.

During winter, we stopped watching TV and started watching the thermometer. It was like watching a horse-race, except the race lasted for weeks.

When the thermometer got down to 34 degrees Fahrenheit, it was the alarm bell that told us it might get cold enough to snow (for the metrically-enabled, 34 F is just a couple degrees above freezing).

We'd watch with our little fists clenched, waiting with the same anticipation you feel when you're watching the lotto drawing. You have the ticket in your hand, and it feels like the process is going on forever, and that it's never going to end. It does end, of course, and you lose every time.

The nice thing about snow was that it did eventually come, but never without our help. When the thermometer read 33, we moved to the window and looked outside. We'd get on our hands and knees and say a prayer to The Snow Gods. It sometimes took days, but through persistence, we had our way and it would snow.

We got out of school, and when we didn't get out of school, we skipped it. After all that bloody work, we weren't going to let all that snow go to waste.

So that was our method.

The girl I was hanging out with, and whose childhood was that rich world that existed inside her noggin, had a far better way.

When it wasn't snowing for her, she didn't pray to The Snow Gods.

She and her friend would watch TV and wait for a forecast or a show or a movie in which snow was falling. When those images came, they leaned in to the screen, took in a deep breath, ran to the door, went outside, and blew their held-breath into the air, seeding it with the snow from the television.

That's one of the most beautiful things I've heard in a very long time. It's the innocence and novelty and hope and optimism of children.

I went home and slept right through the night.

Everything's good again. It's fine. I'm good. Got past the recent emotional stuff. Getting better at it. Going to start regular posting again on Monday. I think I just needed the break so I could get some practice with doing emotional crap. I don't get it, and I think I ought to given the human-being aspect of my life.

Enough about me for once.

Lloyd Humphreys is this kid I met over in the Channel 9 Coffeehouse. I could've sworn he was fifteen, though his site says he's fourteen. I'll let him clear that up. When you're thirty, a year (or ten) doesn't make much of a difference, but when you're thirteen or fourteen, it can mean the difference between soprano and baritone. A year is a long time to a wee lad.

I count Lloyd among my "online" friends. The people I don't get to hang out with in meatspace, but who I would hang out with in meatspace if their meatspace wasn't on the other side of the planet.

All my life, I've had friends who were much younger and much older than me. I hang out at a coffee shop where I converse somewhat regularly with several people who're just about in their eighties. I don't like them because of "wisdom" or the other things people like to attribute to old age. I think wisdom is the consolation prize for having been dumb your entire life, but also for having had to remember it. Rather, I like them because they're interesting, funny, good conversationalists.

People sometimes ask me about these huge age differences. They aren't too surprised by the people who're in their eighties, but when I tell them that one of my youngest friends is fifteen (unless he's fourteen like his site says), eyes bug out. People think I'm insane. Or a creep.

I find those people creepy. If I meet someone who's freaked out by my having young and old friends, I feel like it's those people who shouldn't be socializing outside their age groups. Whatever creepy goings-on they might be thinking of never cross my mind, but they're obviously crossing theirs. Would they do something creepy in my place? Makes you wonder.

Lloyd reminds me of myself in a lot of ways. When I was fifteen (or fourteen - get it straight, Lloyd, you little bastard), I hung out with people who were twice my age and more. I got to visit Intel and Symantec with these guys. They'd pick me up in their fast, fancy cars, and drive me out to their tech companies where I got to see amazing stuff long before it hit the market or even became rumors. I got to hold one of the first Pentium Pro CPUs. Nobody knew about them at the time. It was all hush-hush.

Down at Symantec, I got to see the web for the first time. I'd had a Unix dial-up account for a while, but, though I'd heard of it, I'd never seen the web. I thought it was for pussies. I was all about IRC, usenet, FTP, FSP, and other names/acronyms. But there it was. An image popped up in a browser, and I was floored.

I got to tour a game company in the middle of the night where we played networked DOOM (the original) back when almost nobody got to play on networks.

I got to visit Bootleg. We all had handles. They were dorky, geeky things. One of my good friends was recognized to be one of the better hackers around. His name was Kryptic Knight. Dorky. Way dorky. But I loved those guys. Sicily was another. Trident. Homer. Fong. Thing One. Milkman. I was Rob Bob.

And, as I said, Bootleg. Bootleg had this big old dusty house that was filled with old equipment. Computers and monitors were stacked waist-high throughout his home. You had to walk through the trenches to get anywhere.

I went out there one day with Scrooge to say hi and see what was doing. Bootleg had these huge beige boxes that looked like washing machines. He had stacks of reel-to-reel tapes. They were the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles records for every driver in the state. He was pulling all the records and stuffing them inside a database. We all eventually got copies, and were then able to get a person's name, phone number, address, and more just by entering their license plate info into the database's search field. We felt powerful, and rightly so.

Bootleg eventually tried to sell the discs, but got shut down. It was fun to have the info among ourselves - taking down the license plates of people who messed with us, or who were parked like assholes - but it wasn't the best idea to get that same info out to the public. So it goes.

Given what an amazing, fantastic, brilliant, entertaining genius of a writer I am, I get asked about where I learned to do it. It was with those guys. We all ran BBSs. Kryptic Knight's was a true hacker board where, provided you were allowed access, you could get the kind of info everybody pretended to have - except he actually had it. Sicily was more about the technology, beating us all to the first GUI BBS we'd ever seen (I think the software was called "RoboBoard," though it was a long time ago). My site was known for its forums, and it was one of the most popular in 5o3. People redialed and redialed for the chance to get their sixty minutes a day on my phone line so they could get their posts in.

We discussed everything. Religion, movies, coding, telephony... I learned a lot. I stayed home from school all the time so I could run that board, play in the forums, and hang out with my hacker crew. It was a better education by far than what I was getting in high-school.

When I began writing in the forums, I DID EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS AND I MADE GRAMITICAL ERRERS AND MISPELLD THINGS AND HAD RUNON SENTINSIS AND GENREALLY EXPRESSD MYSELF PORLY.

Nobody took me seriously as long as I wrote like that, so I learned to write well. The day I realized I had to improve my writing was when I got all kinds of crap for having told someone that he had terrible "grammer." It reminds me of something wonderful that I heard in a French class - the teacher was talking about prepositions. I didn't know what prepositions were, and, from the way he was talking about them, I got the feeling that they were important. All the other kids acted like they knew, so I was the odd one out. Never especially concerned with possibly looking stupid, I asked: "What's a preposition?" It got a few giggles. Some people probably thought I was joking, but the others took the opportunity to point fingers and laugh at the dumb kid.

A girl responded to my question: "Prepositions are the words we don't end sentences with."

Two minutes later, I Got prepositions, and proceeded to laugh for the last twenty minutes of class. I'll never forget that girl's answer.

But, back to the geeks... if you didn't express yourself well, you weren't respected, and neither were your thoughts. It was boot camp for writers. Not only were these people teaching me all about life and mischief, they were also largely responsible for my learning how to write well.

Those were some of the best years of my life. I was part of a club of highly intelligent weirdos. Admission to the club was based entirely on what was up in your noggin. We had bad stutterers and stammerers and all kinds of awkwardness in human form. You weren't judged by superficial things like having an extra leg or being half to a third to a quarter of the age of the people you hung out with.

I look at people like Lloyd and Yuvi, and I see some of the greatest aspects of my pre-adult years in their lives. Yeah, Lloyd isn't old enough to drive in the States. He wouldn't be allowed into an R rated movie, and he couldn't buy an MA rated game. But he and Yuvi can hold their own intellectually. They're highly creative, ambitious, and have, as you'd expect, the best qualities youth has to offer.

I have quite a few friends in the 19-23 year-old age group, and I love them. I tend to date young, too. I'm sure people have their own opinions as to why that is, but it comes down to a couple things, neither of which is "bad":

1. Naivete. I think most people, before around the age of twenty-five, tend to be very naive. This is a good quality, and one I don't want to lose. I'm told all the time that I'm naive, and I'm thankful for it. Naivete is like cynicism-repellent, and cynicism is one of the worst things that happen to anyone. When you're cynical, you stop believing in yourself. You find the worst in people, decide nothing's ever going to change, and then you rot in yourself. I've had my moments there - we all do - but I always dig myself out. Cynicism is not allowed into The County of Neopoleon.

2. Ambition. When you combine ambition with naivete, you get amazing things. When you combine ambition with naivete and intelligence, you get... well, super amazing things. When you're naive, you don't know what you're up against, so the world looks like one big opportunity. When you're ambitious, you have the drive to take advantage of that opportunity. When you're intelligent, you give that ambition direction, and you can accomplish just about anything. When I was twenty-one, I wrote a Linux textbook in twelve days. It was only 25,000 words, but it was a hell of an accomplishment. I've been meaning to dig it up, as a friend of mine needs to learn about Linux, and I think it'd be cool if she learned from my book.

It's unavoidable that you're going to lose some naivete. That's life. But as long as you can avoid cynicism, you can continue to kick ass for as long as you want/can.

That's part of the attraction of youth. I get motivated when I listen to my younger friends talk about their big ideas. I love giving them guidance on how they can really get going on them. It's a good feeling.

So, when I say that one of my friends is fifteen (or fourteen - damn you, Lloyd), this is what I'm thinking about. I think about all the experiences I was fortunate to have because I had older friends. All along the way in life, I've had someone there to nudge me in the right direction and give me the confidence to follow my gut. Science, computers, music, writing, my career, and all the rest were things I pursued while being helped along by people who had more experience, but who also saw my potential and wanted to help me realize it.

That's not very creepy.

Right now, Yuvi is working on something to do with my religion (I'll finish the story - starting to get my motivation back). I have no idea what he's going to do, though I expect his young thinkmeat will come up with something interesting. Novelty comes naturally to youth because your head isn't cluttered with patterns. You have a lot of mental room in which to maneuver.

And Lloyd, to get back to part of the title of this post, just put together a tutorial for Microsoft's Channel 8. Channel 8 is part of the JeffSand Team Channel X family. I could be wrong about who's in charge, but I think it's a JeffSand thing.

So, Lloyd's this kid, and he's already putting his skills to work by teaching others How to Do Things. He's a positive thinker, full of ambition, intelligence, and the ability to follow through on his plans.

I have my own three part video for Channel 8. Clint Rutkas axed me to do it. So I did it. It done did. Should be up before too long.

But... Lloyd. And Yuvi. The two teens I've watched most in tech - I don't know what's bouncing around inside their heads, but I feel lucky that I get to be here and take part in some of it. It feels like it's my turn to take the role of the people who've helped me out along the way. That isn't to say that Lloyd and Yuvi need guidance. They certainly don't need me. But I can at least be a cheerleader for them.

Carry on, people.

Carry on.

[CLARIFICATION: When I talk about the lack of confidence, it's really only to do with women in these potentially amorous situations. My general confidence is through the roof - public speaking, walking into a room and socializing with everybody - I'm good at that stuff, and I enjoy it. I'm just not good at being confident around ladies I think I might want to Have Something With.]

I wasn't ready for the response. I don't know why I always think the personal posts are the ones people will automatically skip over, but it looks like you people give a damn.

Got your comments, texts, tweets, emails, MySpace messages, Facebook messages, calls, and voicemails.

It was a mix of it's-gonna-be-all-right, don't-let-her-get-away, and what's-with-the-fear messages.

The first thing I ought to say is that I'm more or less OK. I went through a bad period during which I didn't post or respond to communications. When I'm in the middle of a big emotional mess, I withdraw. I get overwhelmed by the incoming messages. I don't post because I'll probably just write a lot about what I'm going through. I don't think you want to read that, and I don't want to write it - when I write about emotional craziness, it makes it harder for me to deal with it. I focus on it and then overthink it all. The result is that the problem becomes bigger in my head - gets blown out of proportion. I've learned over the years, and particularly over the past six or seven months, to keep to myself when feeling this way.

I've also learned to take my attention elsewhere. Working on abstract creative projects helps to clear my mind and keep everything in perspective. One of my goals for the summer is to have an acoustic set together and then to play out. To get that done, I've been playing guitar for anywhere from one to four hours a day. It's great therapy - I love the process, and, because of the nature of music, you don't get the chance to stop and dwell on more concrete issues.

The other medium into which I disappear nowadays is video. I just finished a rough cut of the trailer for the Mini Cooper modification performance shop project thing I've got going on. Hours and days fly by while I'm editing. I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. And, this time, I got to edit together a car chase between a Porsche 993 Turbo and a Stage IV Mini Madness Cooper. I had never done anything like it. I want to do more. Getting to choose the shots and control the pace of the action was so much fun. When I get a tighter version of the trailer together, I might post it here. We'll see.

Now... to the fear.

While I couldn't possibly explain it all, I thought about it quite a bit this week, and I can at least highlight a few of the things that, for me, contribute to, and keep alive, that fear.

---- Insecurity ----

This one's obvious. We all doubt ourselves. No matter how amazingly gorgeous we are, or how unstoppably charming, we'll never be entirely confident.

For example, although I effect an outward appearance of arrogance and narcissism, the truth is that I feel like an awkward, ugly, inelegant mess. A couple of my close lady friends and I have been discussing this. They want to help me get past my fears. This one, though - my feeling that I'm extremely unattractive - drives them nuts because they think I'm just being dramatic. But, it's the truth.

I never assume that a girl wants anything to do with me beyond friendship. I rarely make the first move when it looks like things are going to move from a friendship to a romantic relationship. I don't make the first move because I don't think she wants me. I wait for an overt, let-me-spell-it-out-for-you signal before I act or respond.

One reason for this is that we can't see ourselves from the outside the way other people see us. And I'm not just talking about being able to see the backs of our heads - I'm talking about the whole package.

Do women think I'm charming? Handsome? Dorky? Bumbling? Creepy? Fake? Genuine?

I don't know, and I always expect the worst. Even when a woman seems to have given me the go-ahead, I think she's made a mistake, and that she'll realize it before long.

It's totally Psych 101, but I think my persona might be my attempt to counter this insecurity.

By faking cockiness and confidence, I almost am. The persona - in the case of this site, Neopoleon - protects The Real Me. As long as I'm Neopoleon, I'm taking chances with someone else's life. Neopoleon can try to court the women, and, once he gets close enough, he passes things over to The Real Me. It's very Cyrano.

That's the idea, anyway. It doesn't work very well. If I want a meaningless fling, it's splendiferous. If I want a meaningful relationship, which is always, it's useless. You can't court someone from behind artifice and then switch back to yourself when you're in and safe.

Take the girl who's been the best/worst thing to have happened to me in ages. We met in 2004. She read my site on and off for a couple years, and loved it. When I moved back to Portland in October, she started calling, and we started hanging out. She progressively got to know The Real Me. When she was finally there, she told me that I can't read my site anymore - that she finds it "disgusting" because of how shallow and conceited Neopoleon is, and how not those things The Real Me is.

Yeah, there's crossover. There's a lot of truth to Neopoleon. It's just that it's a small and exaggerated part of me. The me you meet in a relationship is very different.

So... personas... artifice... a belief that the women don't want me... a belief that I'm ugly...

It's insecurity, and it gets in the way at every point in a relationship. It blocks the beginning, and it causes me to behave poorly in the relationship itself.

---- Trust ----

If you've been betrayed by someone close to you, your ability to trust others is weakened. How much will vary from person to person. It will also vary depending on how often you're betrayed, and how important to you the person is who did it.

My mother can be a horribly abusive person. I grew up being blamed for everything, punished for things I didn't do... I'm not going to go into detail, but it was bad. Overall, she did more things to break my trust than to earn it. I became emotionally self-sufficient very early on. I kept to myself, spending more time with computers than people. I didn't use the words "I love you" with anyone. It wasn't until my late adolescence that I first told my mother I loved her. We had had an argument, and she was in this despair over how things had gone. She was rightly worried that I didn't think highly of her. I told her that I loved her because, although I had known all my life that she was wrong to treat me the way she did, I didn't have any malice toward her. Plus, not telling her that I loved her would have made things worse.

Actually, just remembered another instance - I told my father in 1987 that I loved him. Once.

I didn't do emotion. At least not the good stuff. I could do hurt, sadness, loneliness, and so on. I didn't trust anything else.

After my maternal grandmother died in 2006, I told my shrink that my grandmother was the one person in the world I truly believed loved me, and it was the truth. We grew close during my teen years. Before that, I assumed she disliked me, but spending time with her proved otherwise.

When you don't believe that your grandmother loves you until you've amassed enough data to prove otherwise, it's a good sign that it's extremely difficult for you to trust people.

So, if trusting family members was hard, then what about people who didn't even have a biological obligation to love me (though I didn't believe in that love, I still figured it was there at some level)?

In every relationship I've ever had, I expected Her to walk out on me at some point. Or to betray me. I'd seen enough infidelity growing up to doubt that anybody out there didn't cheat. I've always been faithful - I just don't expect others to be. It's always been this way.

I expect my girlfriends to lie to me. As a few of them could tell you, I was always looking for the lie. She could tell me that she just went out to pick up some groceries, and I'd start wondering who she'd just slept with.

I even have a hard time trusting Normal People - that is, people who are just friends or coworkers. It's hard for me to delegate work because I grew up doing everything on my own. I was the only person I could rely on.

The trust issue is much more complicated than I'm going to be able to communicate here. Just understand that I basically don't trust people.

---- Memory ----

"Forgive and forget" is quite the popular cliche. I can do the first thing, but, unfortunately, not the second.

I have a freakishly good memory. It's not photographic - something for which I'm thankful. I feel sorry for people with photographic memories. Remembering pretty much everything would be awful. I certainly don't want to remember a lot of the stuff I have. Perfect recall (or as close to perfect recall as anyone could have) would be a curse.

"Drink to forget" is a cliche I understand much better. I don't do the first thing, but I've found alternatives. The drugs to which I've always been attracted are the ones that lift depression, calm anxiety, and impair your ability to form new memories. My recollection of my life as a drug addict is hazy, and that's how I want it. Regrettably, I do remember a lot of what happened, but at least it's a mess of tangled images.

Friends and family could tell you how frustrating my memory can be. If you tell me something about yourself - maybe your feelings about infidelity, for example - and if it contradicts something you told me, say, fifteen years ago, I'll call you on it. I'll provide you with the context, the conversation we were having, and, sometimes, the relevant snippets of the conversation.

It can really complicate things. The more inconsistencies someone has, the more work I have to do to resolve them in my mind. I'll wind up having to grill you for information about why you have these behavioral inconsistencies. I'll need to have an explanation for each, and then I have to determine whether or not I believe the explanation, or, if I believe it, how far it goes toward a solution.

Sometimes people get really pissed off at me for it. Something I've learned is that people have an enormous capacity for self-deception. They'll try to modify history to resolve their guilt or shame or whatever, so, when you provide them with information that shows they've tried to rewrite things, they really, really flip out. Like it's my fault that someone can't live with their guilt. And, I ought to clarify, I typically only do this when I'm on the receiving end of someone's crap, and they're justifying what they're doing/saying based on that altered history.

There are many things I don't remember. Routine events such as getting coffee in the morning don't get stored strongly. Yeah, I'll remember, but unless something happens that's worth remembering, I let it go.

Where this fits into relationships is, to be, obvious. When you have a detailed picture of someone's inconsistencies, self-deceptions, infidelities, lies, and so on, you see that someone is capable of just about anything. That person can hurt others, rewrite history, continue on without the burden of guilt, and then do it all over again while believing that he/she is completely in the right.

People change. I've changed over the past two years in ways that I hope are positive. But, still... as much as someone may change, I can't forget everything that came before.

In the case of my mother, I can remember horrible things all the way back to my early childhood. The same goes for other family members. But my mom is the worst. When we're arguing, and when she denies that she ever did anything to hurt me, I respond with The List. I'm guessing she's reading this, and either accepting or denying the validity of what I'm writing. If she were to confront me about it and accuse me of lying - which she's done - I'd probably say something like, "Do you remember the night in 1984 when you were throwing the temper-tantrum, screamed at me, told me you were leaving forever, got in your car, took off in a huff and a puff, came back an hour later, and got right back to screaming at me, this time because you'd just gotten a speeding ticket down by Dunaway Park, and that it was my fault because I had supposedly upset you?" If that isn't good enough, then I'll recite another eight-thousand episodes of many varieties. The more she pushes back, the deeper I'll go into the details.

I haven't spoken to her for months because she finally went overboard and, even for her, did something profoundly hurtful. I tried to work things out - tried to forgive her - but, over and over, she rewrote the past, lied, accused, blamed, etc., until I couldn't take it anymore.

I wrote to her recently to say that I'd like to give this healthy mother/son relationship thing a try again. We'll see. Another problem with a good memory is that bad events don't feel discrete - each builds on all the ones that came before. If she lies to me in a certain way, for example, my reaction isn't going to be proportional to that one lie - it's going to be proportional to all the lies combined.

Some people say that I "keep score." It's not the case, but it looks that way. The reality is that I'm not looking to be Right or to take the moral high ground. What I want is to resolve problems in as unbiased a way as possible. When these events stack up in my head, I don't use them to lord it over someone - I use them to protect myself. If an obvious, negative behavioral pattern is demonstrated, I'm going to walk away.

I have, many times in relationships, gotten extremely mad in response to what the other person thought was a minor offense. She'd wonder why I was so furious about "one lie." It's not because of that one lie - it's because it's another lie in the stack. When it's contested, I'll go down the stack, detailing the lies, and then explaining my position. As with people who rewrite histories, these people go nuts. They feel that it's unfair for me to judge them based on previous transgressions. What a bunch of crap.

Anyway, what my memories tell me is that people don't just hurt each other - they do it so often, in my experience, that it's almost like they want to do it. I have nearly three decades of confusing events in my head. People being nice, then mean, then nice, then mean, then mean again, then continuing with the mean, maybe being nice for a moment, and then getting epically mean.

It scares the crap out of me. I can go back, slip into the moment, often as though it had just happened, and experience the hurt all over again. It happens automatically when someone I'm involved with triggers those memories, typically by adding to them.

With a crappier memory, I wouldn't remember so many of these inconsistencies, lies, abuse, and so on. It would be easier to "forgive and forget" if, like so many other people, I could fill in the blanks with "memories" that make it easier for me to deal with the past.

---- And Other Stuff I Won't Get Into ----

There's so, so much more, but these three things - Insecurity, Trust, and Memory - account for much of my fear.

I'm afraid of women because I've seen so many do so many awful things. It's not to say that men aren't completely assholes, but they're irrelevant to this discussion, so don't freak out, ladies. I'm not saying it's just your sex that's bad news, but it is just your sex that I have to worry about in relationships.

I'm also afraid of women because I don't think they want me. That's the insecurity.

Intimacy... intimacy, for me, is an emotional thing. Physical intimacy is no big deal if I don't care. It's when I do care that it becomes difficult.

Relationships... yeah. How do you have a healthy relationship when you feel the person has made a mistake about being attracted to you, but doesn't realize it yet? Or the trust problem? How can you have a healthy relationship when, based on past experiences, you believe She's going to betray you? How can you have a healthy relationships when you amass a library of memories showing that She's inconsistent about Big Serious Things? Or that show she lies?

It goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on...

It all comes together to leave me utterly freaked out by emotions.

All that said, I'm glad about this most recent experience. Even though I didn't get the girl, I got to feel something. There was passion, desire, affection, adoration, and other things that hadn't made an appearance in my life in ages.

I'm also a little less scared of these things now. This girl and I were both confused, and we both acted inconsistently, but it was also all honest. We never deceived each other. We misled each other, but not maliciously - it was out of conflict of feelings and reason. Neither one of us is in a "good place" for a relationship, but emotions aren't rational.

I've said this a lot lately, but I've been repeating it over and over because it helps me make sense of how reason and emotion can be completely at odds:

You don't get to choose who you fall for. You don't get to choose who you love.

You might think you can, but all you can really do is choose how you're going to handle those emotions.

So, that's what we did. The attraction is there, and we gave into it a little. I wanted to give into it entirely, but she didn't feel comfortable with that, so here we are.

As I was saying, though, this is all good stuff. Having had a positive emotional experience - trust and respect are much more important to me than success - has left me feeling like I don't have to tuck my emotions away again. This whole thing opened the door a little.

I want to do this again. Not with her, as she made it clear that it's not going to happen. I plan to pay attention and keep an open mind - be receptive to situations where there might be the possibility of a relationship. I'm going to try not to let my insecurity get in the way - even though we're not together, she does dig me, and that helps to remind me that, whatever I believe, there are some out there who do think I'm attractive.

Her honesty also gives me a bit of hope. There are girls out there who are more interested in doing what they think is right for the situation rather than just themselves.

Anyway, gotta run. Battery's running out, and I have some errands to attend to. I expect there are a few typos here, and that the usual typo-spotters will let me know if they spot 'em. I'll fix 'em later.

Tah.

I'd say that the title says it all, but it doesn't. Not even close.

I'm sure you've been clutching your soul where the Rory-Shaped-Hole in your life caused by my absence has been cut. Put ice on it and apply pressure to stop the bleeding. It's gonna be OK.

Women.

If there's one thing that can distract a man from paying bills, remembering to gas up the car, purchasing groceries, getting plenty of fluids, eating, walking, sleeping, and other assorted present-participles, it's women. Or men if you're gay. But for most men, it's women.

There's this girl.

When you see that sentence, it means trouble. Nothing simple ever came from "There's this girl."

I haven't had a single, healthy relationship since breaking up with Aydika in December of 2005. That's a long time to go without experiencing a relationship built on trust and affection. Nearly everything since Aydika has involved being some girl's sexual fantasy or being some girl's Other Man. Sometimes it was both.

Imagine spending month after month after month getting involved with girls who are cheating on their Others. Or feeling like they've built this other person up around you - someone they want you to be - and then taking off when they've had their fill of fantasyland, never actually getting to know you.

Throw in a good deal of intense personal problems, and you have Me.

With two exceptions, I haven't let anyone anywhere near the ol' heart.

The current exception is... this girl.

I've been hanging out with her since October. At first it was spotty, seeing her once a week at most, but usually less. By January, though, we were getting to be rather close.

She's the first one I haven't turned and ditched at the first sign of the possibility of a relationship.

I'm at my most comfortable when I'm up in front of people. The more people I'm talking to, the better. I hold court at parties and do what Rory does - I give anecdotes, converse in an amusing fashion, flirt, and charm. It turns out that women find flirting and charm to be indicators that a guy wants more to do with them. I was so uninterested in relationships, though, that it wouldn't even occur to me until the party thinned out and I was left with one girl, still listening to Rory, giving me those Looks that girls give when they'd like to, you know, take the party someplace else.

That's when I'd split. Like I said, I'm at my most comfortable talking to groups. They're safe. You can't very well accidentally fall into a romantic situation with a group. At least not at the kind of parties I go to.

But... this girl. I only ran away once. It was in early January while I was in my Cigarettes and Alcohol phase. She came over one night, we drank, we goofed around, played guitar at each other, and then, exhausted, fell asleep on the sofa together.

It had been a long, long time since I'd last fallen asleep next to someone I was close to. I'm entirely accustomed to sleeping alone. So accustomed to it that, when I woke up a few hours later as the sun was coming up, my still half-asleep brain registered the presence of a body next to me. I was still too groggy to have remembered who this person was - all I knew was that I wasn't alone.

I leapt off the couch. Up on my feet, I began to pace. And pace. And pace and pace and pace.

I looked at her and went over the events of the night in my head. We hadn't even Done It - we really did just sleep next to each other, but to my emotionally shell-shocked brain, this was about as intimate as Doing It would have been.

I remembered our conversation before falling asleep. She was asking all sorts of personal questions - things I hadn't talk about with anybody in almost two years. When I'm around people, I present them with what I'm comfortable sharing, and I do it intensely enough that they don't even have a chance to ask anything else.

But this girl... she asked, and I answered.

I felt embarrassed. Looking at her on the sofa, I felt like I had done this Horrible Thing, and that there was no fixing it. She knew Stuff about me, and it made me vulnerable. This girl now had my trust and true affection, and that meant she could hurt me.

I wanted her gone. Not because I didn't care for her - it was the opposite - I wanted her gone because cared for her.

She woke up a little while after me, put on her shoes, and went home.

I didn't call. I didn't text. I didn't want to see her. I was doing my running away thing.

It didn't work. My fear of the situation was proportional to the strength of my feelings for her. So, when the opportunity to see her again came up, I went for it.

We talked about that night, and managed to resolve the weirdness, returning our friendship back to the neutral state in which it began. At least it looked that way.

As is probably already clear, we've spent more and more time together, and we've gotten closer and closer.

This is the closest I've been to anyone since Aydika and I split.

When I'm not around this girl, she's on my mind. I think about her all day. I want to call and text and email and see her. When I'm around her, I want to bring her things - little gifts and crap like that. I'm doing all the things a guy does when courting.

I didn't plan any of it. The courting behaviors aren't a conscious thing. I just have this powerful instinct to do whatever I can to make her happy and comfortable.

We finally hit the point where we had to decide what we were going to do with each other. In my mind, a relationship like this begins with that first nervous kiss. It's the signal that you're ready to dedicate yourself to this thing.

Instead, we've talked about it, and we've decided we're both in the wrong place to start a relationship. She has a lot to deal with right now. I've accidentally started a business. She likes camping, and I like shopping. In terms of lifestyle, we seem wholly incompatible.

We went out to dinner last night and had what felt like the final conversation about all this Stuff. Halfway through, she said, "It feels like we're breaking up, but we haven't even kissed."

That summed it all up. We're so scared of getting into this thing, but our feelings for each other are right out in the open. I don't know if we stopped it because of the reasons we gave, or if the reasons we gave were just rationales to avoid getting any further into something that could easily end in both of us getting hurt.

I used to think I knew everything about women that I needed to know, but it's become evident to me this past month that I don't know anything. In the past, for the most part, I got what I wanted. I had no fear when it came to women. I realize now that the reason it was so easy was that I didn't really care.

For the first time since Aydika, I have a girl stuck in my head. I can't write. I haven't been able to converse with anyone, as I inevitably turn the subject to Her. When I'm out, I think about how much better everything would be if she were out with me.

She fell asleep on the sofa with me again on Friday night, and it was the greatest thing I've felt in over two years. I stayed up as long as I could, trying to get as much as I could out of that experience, because knew that it probably wouldn't happen again.

I'm in trouble.

[Note: This is a long post. If you don't like reading long posts, but if you choose to read this one anyway, then spare me the "That was really long" comments. Devs have the worst ADD in the universe and the capacity for whining to match. This post isn't for people who get their knowledge exclusively from Twitter and Facebook status updates. I'd also appreciate it if you READ the post before commenting. There's always that jackass who reads one sentence, jumps to the comments, and vomits up opinions that were already in the post - this jackass will also start an argument that, it often turns out, is not in any way contrary to what I've written. Basically, don't be retarded - if you want to participate, then do your homework.]

Got this email from reader Steve Cholerton a few days ago [Steve's Blog ---