In other news, I have apparently received a self-addressed stamped envelope in the mail at the old (Janet's) apartment. I'm pretty sure it's the response to my submission to Tor. I'm about equally confident it's a rejection. I'll find out tomorrow I guess. I feel vaguely nauseous and my OCD's flared up a bit.

I mean, I've been looking forward to this and all but at least until opening the envelope there's that uncertainty where it could still possibly not be rejected.

Weird thing is, Tom was asking earlier today about if I'd heard back about it yet and I was talking about how I'd probably be hearing back sometime relatively soon, and then Janet texted me maybe an hour later to tell me I'd received an SASE.

Eek.

(via scazon, via lowellboyslash):

Take no more than 15 minutes to produce a list of 15 books that have influenced you in style, ideas, relationships, language, or other ways that you find important, and/or books that have really stayed with you—you keep thinking of that quote, you are always remembering that character, you are frequently reminded of that moment—that kind of thing. This is not a favorites list.

1. This might be kind of a cop-out, but I feel I have to give due credit to all the books I read (and had read to me) as a child, though I don't remember all of them for obvious reasons, as the information they put into my head (including layout and language and structure and such) established the foundation for how my brain would go on to subsequently process and be receptive to the information I've been putting into it as an adult, and thus these books arguably have had the greatest influence on me of anything I've read since.
2. Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson in general.)
3. Valis (Dick on the whole, really. I mean, his influence is already almost everywhere you look just generally speaking.)
4. The Illuminatus! Trilogy
5. House of Leaves
6. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
7. Yes Man (This book revolutionized the way I think not so much with the "say yes to everything" notion but in more of a "more mindful of chaos theory" sort of way. Also, I have yet to see the movie.)
8. Watchmen
9. The Shock Doctrine
10. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
11. 1984
12. The Handmaid's Tale
13. Under My Roof
14. American Psycho (The increasingly obsessive writing style is something I'd like to combine with influences from #4 and #15 at some point in a book about a genocidal psychopath/sociopath narrated in the first person wherein it eventually becomes almost entirely nested footnotes, the deepest level of which refers back to the original text.)
15. Dianetics

...kidding.

15. Infinite Jest (Last on the list because I haven't finished reading it yet, but it definitely worms its way into your head in a number of ways. Probably permanently.)

    He hated to kill them, but they were the only food for miles.  At this point, the only other option was starvation, and if he didn't value his own life above theirs, he'd have fed himself to them instead.  So, eating cats it was, then.  Sometimes he'd get lucky and nab the occasional deer or bear or badger, but it was almost always cats.
    He'd discovered their feral colony on a stroll through the woods about a week after he'd dragged his trailer out here to what must have been the capital of absolutely nowhere, when he'd become so tired of his life that he'd felt like getting lost somewhere it couldn't find him.  When he'd finally run out of gas in the middle of a field after days of driving randomly along unfamiliar highways, then roads, then trails, he wasn't even sure exactly where he'd ended up.  Nor did he care.
    Something scratched at the door as he fried his extremely early breakfast, his circadian rhythm resembling something more suitable for perhaps some Saturnian moon.  Normally the cats were careful not to wander too far from their colony a little less than an eighth of a mile to the east, so he suspected this visitor might be some stray predator that smelled his cooking and came to investigate.  He grabbed his homemade Taser from above the door, wondering how much bear meat he could store in the chest freezer.
    Whatever it was, it jumped when he peeked through the window, scampering off into the woods before he could release the various paranoiac locking mechanisms on his front door, and he was unable to get a clear look at it.
    Sighing, he returned to his cat bacon.

    He kept the small, homemade nuclear generator in a lead-lined crate a safe distance from the trailer.  He'd made certain to collect all the components necessary to assemble and maintain it from various industrial dumping grounds before he'd left on his Waldenesque journey off the radar.
    This was what afforded him the ability to survive on more than just a daily-subsistence basis, thanks to the storage and preparation of meat using the electrically-powered facilities of the trailer.  It also provided energy for the various power tools he'd dragged along in order to expand and fortify his trailer and construct mechanisms that would make his existence more comfortable and secure.  The point was to get away from life, not get away from living.
    Another reason he'd dragged along the generator was to power a small television connected to an even smaller computer he used to watch some of the the seventeen terabytes of video he'd accumulated over the years.  For a while, he'd also been able to pick up some of the broadcast signals from whatever the nearest town had been, but eventually they'd switched to digital signal.  He wouldn't be ready to try to return to civilization for a while and he wasn't about to do it for a TV antenna.
    As he popped a segment of the still-gently-sizzling cat bacon into his mouth after blotting it briefly with some homemade paper towel, he opened up an episode of House, careful to use only his ring and pinky fingers so as to avoid smearing grease onto the mouse.  In the middle of the opening theme song, the power snapped off for the second time since he'd arrived maybe three years ago.  The computer stayed running with the UPS he'd set up in anticipation of general power failures, but he quickly shut it off before its battery ran out.
    Setting down his plate, he grumbled a little and got up to dig out his radiation suit from a plastic bin in the closet.

    Still wary of whatever the large animal was that had been sniffing around less than an hour earlier, he grabbed his Taser and a pistol before heading outside into the dim orange dawn.  He followed the thick, heavily-shielded cable bundle away from the back of the trailer along its entirety, all one hundred yards to the rectangular crate housing the reactor.  There was no evidence of damage to the cable itself and it was connected securely at both ends, so the problem was in the reactor itself.
    He disengaged the various locks on the access panel and pulled the heavy door open, revealing the internal components.  Sure enough, the control rods had dropped.  While puzzling through looking for an indication of what precisely had gone awry this time, he noticed some damage to the lead shielding near the bottom of the crate close to the access door.  Replacing it would've required completely disassembling the reactor in order to swap out the panel, so he made a mental note to put up a fence at some point to keep any wildlife from sniffing around and potentially getting irradiated.
    In the end, the problem turned out to be a damaged filter that had allowed an impurity to enter the pressurized water system and clog the coolant flow.  It must've slipped in the last time he'd changed the water and only became a problem when the filter broke.
    He replaced the filter and, to be safe, cycled out the water with a fresh supply from a nearby stream.  When he was done, the rods pulled back out without any complaint from the safety monitor and the power came back on.
    As he finished securing the access door and turned toward his trailer, he caught brief glimpse of something large moving out in the woods.  His Taser brandished and ready, he kept his eyes on the tree line, walking steadily back to his trailer.

    *

    It had been a while since the last time he'd managed to hunt anything big, and he was running desperately low on cat.  His stomach tightened a little, both from hunger and from the stress of thinking about having to catch another one to eat.  There was always a bit of mental prep work necessary to deal with plugging something so adorable in the head.
    It helped to think about the neoteny and mutual conditioning that had been going on between our species and theirs for centuries.  We tended to breed cats for "cuteness", which meant selecting for the most aesthetically baby-like features of both our species and theirs.  That is, the reason they were so cute was in part because we made them that way by domesticating them.  And they in turn led us to condition ourselves and our children to see their superficial charms and big-eyed infantile appearance as the epitome of catdom -- what we were supposed to seek and expect in the animals.  We wanted to care for them because we made them into something we felt a genuine desire to care for.
    Also, he figured that after several years steadily hunting them, serving as a predatory force for so long, they'd become biologically accustomed to his presence, and to suddenly remove it might prove devastating.  At least, that's what he told himself.
    When thought came to action, though, staring at their furry little heads as they wriggled up against each other, no explanation ever helped and he'd always end up just picking the weakest-looking one, aiming, closing his eyes and pulling the trigger.  Then he'd dry heave for a bit as the other cats scampered off, and when the coast was clear, he'd collect the body to bring it mournfully back home.
    This time, the choice was obvious: An elderly-looking, three-legged tom hobbling around the periphery of their territory, stopping occasionally to gargle out an agonized meow.  It was obvious he'd been in a fight recently as his fur was matted with blood and his missing leg looked like a relatively fresh wound.
    As always, peeking from around a tree at a considerable distance, he focused the scope of his rifle on the old tom, closed his eyes, pulled the trigger, spent the next half a minute gagging on nothing, and sauntered over to drop the body into a plastic sack.

    On the way back to the trailer he heard something moving nearby.  Something big from the sound of it -- possibly the same creature he'd seen a few days before.  Readying his Taser, he turned in the direction from which the rustling had originated, but the creature had already scampered off and he was again unable to make out what it was before it disappeared into the shadowy late-evening woods.
    From what little he did see, it was either a gorilla or some kind of deformed bear.  Given the geography the former seemed unlikely, but he couldn't help half-seriously entertaining the idea that he'd finally found Bigfoot.  Whatever it was, it was large enough to pose a real threat, and he made a mental note to add some fortifications to his trailer and perhaps even build some kind of electrified security fence if he had enough steel wire left for it.

    It was the first time in about a week his cycle had circled around enough that he'd be awake during the complete run of daylight hours, and he decided to make the most of it by adding another layer or two of wooden shielding to his trailer and putting up at least one of the two fences he'd been meaning to build.
    The fortification of the trailer was easy, and mostly involved simply nailing on more planks, especially around the edges of windows and doors.  He also carved in some securely-shuttered, bolt-locking arrow loops so that he could poke out the Taser or a gun from different angles covering vulnerable spots and get relatively clear shots at any potential assailants.
    For the fences, he put together a river-powered makeshift lathe to put long, threaded tapers on the ends of some logs, and then he drilled three-inch holes through the other ends of them so that he could shove rods through and twist them deep into the ground.  When he was finished planting them, he carved in some grooves at ankle, knee, hip and shoulder height and ran what was left of his steel wire around them, locked into the grooves, terminating around two posts placed at about shoulder width where the thick wooden gate would be installed.
    Exhausted and with the setting sun projecting a long web of shadows off the newly-constructed fence, he went inside to pass out.

    It occurred to him, looking out at the fence the next morning, drinking some mediocre tea he'd made from some leaves he'd found nearby, that perhaps he'd finally started going insane after all these years in total self-imposed isolation.  Or, hell, that even the self-imposed isolation had been an early sign of insanity.  He'd spent the entire day yesterday bringing his trailer yet another step closer to some kind of siege fortress all because of some creature he might've seen or imagined or hallucinated out in the woods a couple times.  It was difficult to determine whether this was the behavior of a sane individual, especially with nobody else there to ask.  If a man goes crazy in the woods and there's nobody else around to hear it, is he really insane?
    Looking up at the ceiling, he sighed when the compulsion entered his head to build a little tower room with a search light up on top of the trailer, knowing full well there was no way he could stop himself from going through with building it.

    He set up a frame of support beams outside with three thick hand-hewn planks running over the roof of the trailer, two of them straddling a two-foot-by-two-foot hole, the seams of which were all triply fortified in the event of some kind of aerial assault, which he realized was ridiculous but knew he'd be kicking himself over it in the last few moments of his life as whatever drooling horror tore the tower off and ate him up from the inside of his little fortress like the gooey innards of an egg.
    The tower had a footprint of sixteen square feet (including the four square feet dedicated to the entrance from the trailer below, which could be closed off if necessary) and stood just over six feet tall to allow him more than adequate head room.  Outside, it was secured with additional diagonal beams, which were in turn secured in as many directions as possible.  The walls each had long, shuttered, horizontal slots secured with quick-release bolts.  On the top of the tower, constructed from the headlights from his fuel-devoid truck and some high-powered LEDs he'd brought with him was a powerful multi-directional search light that was turnable from inside the tower.
    Peering out over the landscape through one of the slots with a pair of binoculars, he felt a kind of inner warmth that only the comfort of total security contrasted against some outer danger could bring.  Almost like when you bundle yourself up beneath a giant comforter on a cold, stormy night while looking out the window.  It was easy for him to see how people might have dreamed up the version of heaven where you get to stand there watching the people roasting in hell.  Maybe one could even drink some hot cocoa and bundle up under a comforter while looking on.
    He was about to lower the binoculars and shutter the slot when he spotted a cat sniffing around out near the reactor, which he'd neglected to fence because he'd been focusing all his efforts on his trailer.  Reluctant to leave for the night, he eventually convinced himself to climb down the rope ladder and head outside to investigate.

    "Hey there, little guy," he said, half-whispering.  He'd grown unaccustomed to speaking, and couldn't quite get his throat to form the words.  "Kinda far from home, huh?"
    The kitten, completely alone, was somehow unafraid of him.
    At the risk of catching some kind of disease were it to turn on him, he reached down and scratched behind its ear.  "What're you doing out here by yourself?"
    Something in the corner of his eye caught his attention, over in the distance near the tree line.  At first he thought it might be another cat, but as it moved out from behind a grouping of trees, he could see it was the creature.
    As it ducked back into the woods, he scooped up the kitten and jogged back toward his trailer, his Taser at the ready in his other hand.

    He'd never considered keeping one of the cats around as a pet before, probably because the only thing he ever really had around to feed it was other cat and that just seemed wrong to him somehow.  As he watched the kitten sniff around his trailer, he figured he'd keep it until the morning and bring it back to the feral colony when it was light out.  He didn't want it sniffing around the shielding-compromised generator, nor did he want to just abandon it to whatever in the hell that thing was out there, and he certainly wasn't about to make the trip over to the feral colony now that the sun had set.
    He fished some last little nuggets of deer that he'd been saving from the bottom of his freezer, put them on a dish and set it on the floor.  "There you go, buddy.  Enjoy it as much as I would have."
    After a couple episodes of Seinfeld, he climbed the rope ladder into the tower, opened all the shutters and flipped on the light, binoculars at the ready.  It took almost twenty minutes, but the creature finally appeared out near where he'd seen it earlier.
    "Gotcha," he said aloud, feeling more vocal after speaking to the kitten.  It ducked back into the trees before he could locate it with the binoculars.  He waited for another twenty minutes before eventually getting bored, switching off the light and heading back downstairs for more TV.

    A few hours later there was some kind of stampeding sound outside and he jumped up the rope ladder into the tower.  To his knowledge, that was the closest to his trailer the thing had come since the morning he'd first seen it.
    By the time he'd opened all the shutters it was nowhere in sight, but he decided to wait it out.  It would undoubtedly come again and this time he was determined to see it.
    There was a galloping noise in the distance to his left and he brought the binoculars to his face so quickly he smacked himself in the forehead a little.
    Then the light died, along with the rest of the electricity.

    Feeling his way downstairs, not wanting to risk going outside with that damn ape or whatever stomping around, he decided to just give up for the night, get some sleep, and do a complete check of the reactor in the morning.  If nothing else, it would give him an excuse to fix that compromised shielding panel.
    The kitten was meowing and pawing at the front door as he went over to turn off the computer and TV to conserve the UPS's battery.  "Trust me, pal, if I were you there's nothing in the world that could make me want to be outside right now."
    After a while, the kitten's curiosity was redirected to something else and it gave up on wanting to go out.

    Just after he'd fallen asleep, there was a knock on the outside of the trailer.  He wasn't sure if he'd dreamed it until there was a second knock moments later, almost as if to confirm that the first one was real.  At first he thought maybe it was just the cat batting something around, since nothing would've dared to cross the electric fence, but with a swift upright jolt he remembered the power was out, rendering the fence just a bunch of easily-scalable wires.
    Fishing around in almost total darkness, the only available light being the flashing orange LED of the slowly draining UPS with some faint, cloud-obscured moonlight seeping in through the triply-barred windows, he managed to find his utility light and its thick orange extension cord.  He plugged it into the UPS, clicked it on, uncoiled it and hooked the grated bulb cage over one of the handles on the cupboard.
    There was more banging going on against the side of the trailer, focusing mostly around the front door.  He grabbed his taser and moved around to one of the arrow loops he'd installed.  He swung the shutter open but he couldn't get a good view of it.  Everything out there was just shadows, and he couldn't get the light from in here out through the slit in an effective way.
    He remembered he had a flashlight somewhere in the closet and he was kicking himself for not keeping it in a handier place, but he hadn't needed it in so long that it had just gotten shuffled away with everything else to keep the relatively confined living space from getting too cluttered.  With the remaining light he had left, he managed to retrieve it from the closet -- it was some hand-wound model that didn't require any batteries.  He cranked it up, clicked it on and aimed it out the window.  The creature wasn't near the front door anymore.
    Am I going to be doing this every night? he thought.  Am I going to spend the rest of my time out here hiding from some dumb animal?  What if it decides to camp out there, and I can never get the reactor fixed?  Can I really live like this?
    Working up his resolve, he grabbed his pistol, set his rifle in an easily-accessible spot, made sure the flashlight was good and cranked, and started unlocking the dozen locks on the front door.  In the unlikely event it managed to get inside through his stream of gunfire, he could always clamber up into the tower, pull up the rope ladder and shoot at it through the opening.
    Undoing the last lock on the outer door, he steeled himself and kicked it open.
    There was nothing out there.
    He crept cautiously through the door, glancing all around, flicking the flashlight synchronously with the direction of his eyes.  Eventually, the creature lurched out from around the far corner of the trailer and he turned the flashlight on it.
    Too stunned to react, he stared at what he concluded at first was Bigfoot, watching as the creature lurched forward a few steps and then tumbled to the ground, separating into about two dozen individual cats as they let go of each other and scampered off, jumping between the wires in the fence and well out of range of the flashlight.
    Behind him, the kitten trotted outside, nuzzling briefly against his right leg before following the others into the night.
    As he stumbled back into his trailer wondering whether to blame the leaky reactor, his consistent culling of their weakest, both or even neither, he was already mentally working out a way he could rig the generator to power his truck enough to get him the hell out of here.

If I get over one million Twitter followers by May 5th, I'll go out and actively try to catch swine flu, documenting my experience along the way. I might even go to Mexico! (The deadline is, after all, Cinco de Mayo.)

Tell your friends to subscribe to Twitter user jdcrowley. Details, logo, and marketing materials to come.

LET'S DO THIS. Only YOU can make this social networking/information distribution experiment work!

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I had a bizarre and wonderful dream last night in which I played an assassin posing as an actor in a stage performance in which George W. Bush was supposed to be acting. Only, instead of Bush himself, it was Josh Brolin who showed up, so I scrapped the whole assassination plot and rolled with the actor thing.

The performance took place throughout this immense cruise ship kind of thing, and the actors would wander around playing their roles and the audience -- apparently a class reunion that had rented out the boat -- was supposed to follow them around.

Rashida Jones was on the cruise, and we drunkenly ate ice cream cake, feeding ourselves and each other with our fingers, lying on the floor in front of a freezer in a grocery store kind of thing. She told me about how her interest in sex kind of waxes and wanes while she's in a relationship, and she was apparently falling in love with me.

There was a dark room below that housed a museum piece that was supposed to be a "comic book brought to life" kind of recreation of the home of a weird superhero who was kind of a combination Venom, Rorschach and Nite Owl. The front door had this black ooze trail going inside, and the ooze was forming Rorschach patterns. I really had to go to the bathroom, so I was trying to find a toilet in this reproduction home.

I ended up stumbling into this multi-level bookstore deeper in the ship that was a re-enactment of a scene in a 1980s film in which I had apparently acted as one of the main characters. The scene involved two genius geek friends in a contest that was set up such that there was this path of photos or little plastic baggies full of things all lined up throughout the store. The friends had to walk through the store as their mutual friend read questions about the items they'd pass, and whichever one got the question right would score a point. Some of the questions were only tangentially related to the image or item, and others were simply "identify this relatively obscure object in this baggie". This movie was apparently really popular during the 80s, on par with Breakfast Club.

Then I woke up.

In other news, I'm apparently going to be 26 in a week (on the 9th) and I have no idea what to do. Maybe karaoke at Japas 38 this weekend? Or the next? I don't know. Everything's all in such a state of stressful disarray that I haven't even thought about it, and it kind of snuck up on me.

Anyone have any ideas?

Someone had to pilot a commercial jet through a giant concrete tunnel, and the tips of the wings kept scraping the edges.

Later, there was a killer who thought he was a vampire. He hid in this dark concrete hallway inside a small building in the middle of nowhere that had a recycling center with a machine for crushing cans and bottles, and killed a woman. Then, he forced another woman who'd stumbled onto the scene -- a blind woman played by Diane Wiest -- to help him dispose of the body by chopping it up, drinking the blood, and crushing it up in the can-crushing machines. She was, understandably, traumatized.

The killer hung out in the woods while investigators came and examined the crime scene. His cell phone rang, and when he answered it, someone inside my head who was mocking the dream as if it were a movie on MST3K or something said "Psycho Killer. Qu'est-ce que c'est?" He ran off through the woods to escape getting caught by the police.

It then cut to a bridge, where we learned that the victim was Thirteen from House, and that House and the rest of his team were there to figure out what happened. Then it all got kind of garbled and I woke up.

Rules: Place your left hand below the piston indicated in Figure C. Connect the battery pack plug to the connector inside the case and insert the battery pack. Do not exceed 30mg every 24 hours without consulting a physician. Cook for thirty minutes, or until surface begins to darken. Let chill, and serve over ice or fresh garden vegetables. Rinse. Repeat.

1. I apparently naturally tend to smell like bread and vanilla, and sometimes, strangely, caramel. You probably think this is generally a positive thing compared to the way most other people smell, but you've probably also never woken up blanketed in ants and bears.
2. Dogs suffer from colorblindness except for when they look at me. Then, not only can they see in color, but they can see exactly how they will die.
3. I'm the only known object in the universe impermeable by neutrinos.
4. Almost every time I close my eyes, after a moment or two I begin to see vivid, rapidly-changing, totally random images. (Like Jake Gyllenhaal morphing into a woman with a bird's head, or a monkey made of only the rounded head cylinder parts from Legos, or Robin (from Batman) giving the Hitler salute. I'm dead serious.)
5. Though I have really lofty aspirations, I'm extremely cynical, and don't genuinely believe I'll ever actually accomplish any of the things I'd like to.
6. I used to have OCD as a child/teen, wherein I would have to tap things a certain number of times (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1), touch anything that I touched a second time in order to "un-touch" it, and various other goofy things. I still wrestle with it a little, at times, but I worked it against itself by developing a compulsion to NOT perform repetitive behaviors.
7. I am convinced I'm one of the least attractive people in the world, at least physically.
8. If I kiss a bullet before it is fired, it can never be stopped.
9. Over the last couple years, I've grown to feel nearly completely disconnected from the rest of humanity, as though I'm in some sort of game or simulation or something. Even when directly interacting with other people and having a good time, I almost feel like I'm not really there, and that I have little connection to the emotions any of them are feeling, as though I'm watching all of it as an observer. I'm happy for them, in kind of a weird, detached way, but can't really feel happy myself. Even when I'm included in group activities, I still feel like I'm somehow an outsider, like the third or fifth or eighteenth or nth wheel. I probably have depersonalization disorder.
10. Monsters have their parents check under the bed at night for me.
11. I possess a memory so powerful that I can vividly recollect your childhood. I prefer, however, not to.
12. I feel like I have a deep well of motivation inside me, but no rope from which to hang a bucket. I suspect this will change when I sell my first piece of writing. If that ever happens. Which it won't. (See #5.)
13. Giraffes can speak English, but only if I let them.
14. If I concentrate hard enough and squeeze just the right way, I can get orange juice out of any fruit, and most vegetables.
15. I don't think I've ever actually been happy. I've been substantially less depressed, but never truly happy. I think this is in part because I can never stop dreading the inevitable ends of pleasant or positive things, and feel like if I get too drawn into them or moved by them, said ends will only be that much more painful. That plus whatever the hell's going on in #9.
16. It's taking me substantially longer to throw this thing together than I expected it would.
17. I know exactly every way there is to skin a cat.
18. I am Keyser Söze.
19. If I get close enough to a hive, bees will disobey their queen and instead follow my instructions.
20. I often feel like people give me too much credit for things I feel I'm mediocre at, and not enough credit for things I feel are my strongest abilities or talents.
21. The only real cure to a mummy's curse is to drink my tears. And I never cry.
22. I'm completely invincible except when in the presence of a virgin, which is why I rape everything that moves. I also avoid unrefined olive oil, just to be safe.
23. I think I manage to be relatively easy-going and open, despite my myriad insecurities and neuroses.
24. I wrote a novel at the beginning of 2008, and if you haven't read it yet, I can e-mail a copy to you. If you already have a copy but haven't yet read it, please do. Of course, it will probably never get published, and I will die unknown and unloved. (See #5.) Still, I'm writing a second novel, which is also bound inevitably for failure.
25. I have difficulty endin

F&SF rejected For Sale (the short story I put up here a couple weeks ago). Admittedly, it was probably the wrong venue for it -- not very scifi-heavy. I'll try submitting another one that might be more appropriate.

Anyone have any ideas where I could send For Sale? I'm kind of puzzled.

Anyway, one of my New Year's resolutions is to get something published this year. Even if it means having to take hostages at a printing press on December 31st.

I'm in the Upper Peninsula now, for a while. Not sure how long I'm staying... it'll depend on fees and things for altering my ticket. Anyway, I've had a terrible sinus infection over the last couple days, and ended up spending much of my time since arriving yesterday sleeping. At this point, it's drained out of my sinuses, mostly, but I'm still suffering some chest congestion/coughing/etc.

I had a dream that I was being vetted as a new writer for 30 Rock. I'd taken a cruise with Janet somewhere, and managed to write the most brilliant and recursive episode ever, which was all mostly in the form of a comic book for some reason. I showed it to Tina Fey/Liz Lemon (at this point, the show and the show-within-a-show became almost indistinguishable), and everyone loved it.

Then, somehow, I was caught in a time loop that brought me back to before the cruise, and events changed such that I wasn't able to think up the episode again. I tried to rewrite it from the bits and pieces I could remember (Janet and I were the only people who were aware of the time loop, though it obfuscated our memories a little), but it just wasn't the same. In the end, it turned out unimpressive and terrible, and I was shunned by Tina Fey and all the others.


Later, I dreamed that if you whispered to cows, you could control their minds.

I don't quite get it when people say "oh, they died so young" about people who are maybe fifty or sixty. Twenty-five years already seems like way the fuck too long to have been on this planet. I think after another twenty-five, I'll be leaving cookies out for Death every night.

Say you're in a bar with a bunch of people you'd only just met a couple hours earlier, and you only have one beer and everyone else has a bunch of other stuff. One of them had put down a credit card earlier to start a tab, and you figured you'd all pay cash later. Eventually the bill comes, as such things do, and you look at how much your beer was and toss in that plus a couple extra dollars for tip. The collective cash comes up short, so you throw in a little more.

Then, the person who'd put down the credit card makes some offhand remark about how "I hate it when people look at the bill and say 'well, I only had this' or whatever, why can't we just divide it up evenly?"

Now, I'm not opposed to doing that or anything, but nobody laid out any "rules", and typically when I'm with people I don't really know, I tend to default to "let's all just pay for what we had". I offered to throw in even more, but by that point, she'd gotten passive-aggressive and weird about it and I figured "fuck it" and stopped paying attention.

It just felt odd to have someone try to make me feel cheap over that, especially when it was someone else who didn't give their share. Not only that, but, like, a couple hours before that, when we first got there, I discovered a busboy in the bathroom wrangling some monstrous toilet torture device trying to unclog the thing with a mess all over the floor, and I remembered being a busboy and how thankless and terrible and underpaid that kind of job is and gave him $20. So it was like, I was feeling all good until getting implicitly snipped at for not throwing in, like, four times the cost of my drink.

So my question is: Should I feel like a cheap bastard asshole, or am I just overthinking this?

We keep developing new dangers for ourselves to have to deal with in order to continue to survive. For instance, electricity, smoking in bed, plugging in too many Christmas lights, pulling a poorly-secured TV onto your head when you're a toddler, being careless around large machines -- so much of our technology can kill us if we don't adapt to deal with it.

Meanwhile, we've sort of slowed down our biological/genetic evolution with our medical technology and our having such large populations that don't really undergo the same kinds of bottlenecks you'd see in earlier humans with smaller populations, so much of our evolution takes place intellectually and technologically instead. That is, we are evolving through what we create and not necessarily as much within our own bodies.

It's an interesting effect in that it's sort of like evolving these spinning bone blades on your shoulders that you have to learn to avoid by not leaning the wrong way or they'll take your head off.

Welp, been on the verge of tenterhook-induced vomiting since about noon after hearing about a round of layoffs (apparently becoming an annual end-of-November tradition), but it turns out I get to keep my job -- at reduced hours, but that's better than nothing. I can always get a second job, or write another novel like I did last winter when I had some, erm, spare time, or help promote Janet's art, or any other number of things.

Hopefully, things will take the same turn they did early this year, and I'll be back up to normal hours again in a few months. I guess it all depends on whether we can get a solid release out at the end of this month, so we're going to have to knuckle down and really push.

Relieved, but the potential impending doom is still a little gut-churning.

( Stupid Survey )

My mind trapped in the body of a fugitive, I had to convince my friend who was pursuing me that I was really me and not the person I appeared to be. I ended up in a helicopter (that was kind of like a mobile home) with Jack Black and a couple other people, as part of a contest where we had to fly back and forth between two islands just off the coast of Florida somewhere. We were getting a warning indicator because someone had left one of the bathrooms behind the kitchen open, so I had to get up and close the door. When I returned to my seat, I realized I had Mario Kart 64 in my backpack for some reason, along with some other thing that I can't really remember that was really embarrassing to own.

Sarah Palin had to fly us back to the other island after we landed, and she was a terrible pilot. She couldn't keep the helicopter steady, and kept checking this map and veering toward various skyscrapers and things. We kept screaming "PULL UP! PULL UP!" at her (there were a couple people from England who were shouting "PULL OUT! PULL OUT!" and it was accepted that that was the British English alternative that they used instead), and she eventually managed to get us over to the other island after nearly crashing into this gigantic palm tree hanging over the edge of a cliff that rose high above the road near the shore. We landed on this little pad on a boat in this cove where the contest was taking place.

I "woke up" in the dream because I heard someone playing an upright piano that was next to the kitchen door (where the bookshelf is, for those who've been here) in a much larger version of our apartment. There was nobody here but me, so I figured I must have just dreamed it. There was this extension onto our apartment that looked like an art gallery, with white walls, bright lighting, and various things on display, including a giant rolling globe set in the floor and a huge screen hanging on one wall.

I checked my e-mail and had something from work about how I was assigned this really weird, rarely-reproducible bug that was somehow adding things to images, like for instance islands to a map. You could recognize which parts didn't fit in because they were a lighter shade. I was a little pissed off that they assigned this one to me because I had absolutely no idea how to address it because it was so bizarre, and they needed it done right away.

After that, I realized I had to go to the bathroom, so I headed down the hallway to where our bathroom normally is, only instead of there being an actual bathroom, there was just a toilet at the end of a hardwood-floored hall with a couple boxes stacked in front of it. I started going, but was startled by the sound of someone playing the piano. Nobody else was supposed to be in the apartment, so I shouted "get the fuck out of here!" but there was no way of telling who it was or what was going on or whether they'd left. The chilling sensation I got was that there was, in fact, nobody actually playing the piano. I kept shouting at them, but it was mostly to try to allay my fears by making myself seem intimidating.

I told myself it had to be a dream, and convinced myself that if I could get John Sundman to appear, it would indicate that it was a dream. I accidentally bumped the wall with my elbow, cracking it as though I'd hit it with a sledgehammer, and then saw John down at the end of the hall, only he had a shaved head.

The hallway suddenly shortened, and I could see a couple other people wandering around this dining room and kitchen area in the apartment. (The layout had radically changed at this point.) We were all apparently having this same dream at the same time, but it was on a different "level" from other dreams, and there was this incredibly sinister, ominous feeling we all shared that seemed to be linked to whatever had played the piano.

Just dragged the bike out of the closet for the first time in months, and used the indoor bike thingy that you clamp onto the bike and it keeps it in place while providing resistance. Did that for about 25 minutes, using the heart rate monitor for the first time as well, which made things a lot easier. I was kind of surprised how easy it was to actually hit the target heart rate, and averaged about 145 BPM or so. I'm going to try doing this about twice a week over the course of the winter.

Also: Haha, fuck yourselves, Florida bigots!

I've never tried any of the apparently numerous methods of removing the skin from a cat, but I'm getting really fucking tempted. It's approaching 10AM and I haven't gotten any sleep thanks in large part to these stupid fucking cats, though postnasal drip is partly to blame. Or, well, mostly Bernard, who has still been managing to get under the bed. Fortunately, I've figured out how at this point so as soon as he finally comes back out I can secure that spot. I don't know what his problem is, but ever since the last time we watched him, he's just been a tremendous fucking asshole. Janet, meanwhile, can sleep through the detonation of an atomic bomb.

In other news, I started a really fun short story I've had planned for quite a while that I'll probably put up here at some point, at least in part. Instead of dumping out a summary, I'll just wait and let you guys read it when it's done.

Filming of the internet TV show had to be delayed, which kind of sucks, but I guess I can just film more episodes at a time when we actually DO start filming. In the meantime, I think I'm going to start working a little on some of the opening credits sequences.

The latest Mythbusters was sort of lame. One of the myths was that a piano will explode or snap from the released tension of its strings if it's in a fire, so they set a piano on fire and it didn't happen because the strings, when heated, loosened and just kind of melted. Their conclusion was that the myth was busted, which -- overlooking the fact that a single fire is not representative of all fires -- I guess I can agree with to an extent, but I don't think they tested it thoroughly enough: If the application of heat was somehow more focused, creating a single weak point along the very tense strings, it's possible there would be more snapping. Anyway, when they didn't get any results the first time, they just blew up another piano with C4, thus illustrating that the show isn't so much about science as it is making things explode. Disappointing.

Anyway, what themes did all y'all choose for Gmail?

I'm going to try to sleep again, I guess.