Modular people.
Just plug them in and they become who you want them to be.

I don't know where to find these modular people, the kind where you pull one off the shelf and they will fill the role left by someone who is gone. People are so complex and yet so simple. Every fiber of who they are adds up to something and makes them different from anyone else. If people were modular, we could move on without any trouble. If Bill leaves, then Bob takes his place. It doesn't work. Bob will never be Bill.

I once knew a girl named Christina. She is no longer with us. When I was with her she talked at length about a man she loved. His name was Bill. I told her that I was there for her, that I wanted to be with her, and that I would not desert her. Bill had broken her heart and ripped her in two, but still she longed for him. There was something about him that meant something to her and no one else could ever be Bill.

Bill never called. Bill didn't come to Christina's funeral. While standing next to her body in a coffin at the wake, I overheard her mother talking about how Christina never got over Bill and how much she hated Bill for doing what he did to her daughter. I could not be Bill, but I was there because it was part of who I am. To her I meant something. I was Keith. I was not replaceable, but I played a different role.

We all play a certain role and sometimes we try to turn those roles into something else. I thought about this tonight as I obtained yet another phone number for The Muse, the great love of my life. I need to explain to her that I screwed everything up by trying to change us into something we were never meant to be. She cannot be replaced. Her role cannot be filled by another. Christina's role cannot be filled by another. Your role in my life cannot be filled by another. We are not modular. We are alive and we are valuable to one another.

This is a reboot.

Restart.

I had no idea how refreshing it could be and would be. Listening to 'Asleep' by The Smiths, yesterday, the yellow and the red blurred, floating past me while I sat half-asleep in the warm glow of neon signs.

Weird, isn't it? IM is rapidly losing its message-ness and has too much 'instant' appeal. Blogs tend to be overread and over commented upon, to the limit that even seriousness tends to be replied with a quick, 'hoep youre doing well, haf a great summah!'. No blame, but couldn't we all just get along and keep our eyes open?

I get the feeling that I have this few-hundred dollar novelty item of mine that is rapidly losing its novelty. BLT sandwiches without the bacon, and airports without airplanes. What happened to the alias that I happily used joyfully and spendingly? Why on earth did I ever parade around Central Square wearing metaphorical messages in a metaphorical place, shouting out loud? I feel naked.

I feel naked. Too bad. And I've decided to start again. There goes my E2 T-shirts, there go my slashdot 5w4g or my k5 diary, lj, melo, diaryland, anything and everything. disconnected. It isn't so bad after all.

Its 3:30 and I've decided to write, and I'm glad that any excessive crypticness has decided to dissolve away. Hello, goodbye, hello.

Its here for me to use, might as well use it. Hordes of fingers pointing elsewhere with negative XP to boot don't matter, because I'd rather be on the bottom of the 'Other Users' list than in the middle.

So hello! I exist here for existence's sake, and I vill write forr vriting's sake. Do nott touche me.

Incoherency works. Babbling works. Someone told me once that daylogs existed for the sake of XP. I remember remembering that XP sounded like windows. I also remember that that 'someone' was at level 8 with XP in the 'thousands' level. Reputation is like money, its unimportant if you have so much. Like the grains of rice thrown at weddings. So white. Who eats white rice?

My wife and I signed the paperwork today to actually buy our first home. Holy shit; what a feeling. The loan's approved, the contract's signed, and now we just have to wait for them to finish building it so we can move in. No more apartments for us! In fact the apartment managers were visibly miffed that we actually invoked our "we're buying a house and you said you'd let us go!" clause in their lease ... apparently not too many people actually make use of that these days.

Sorry; this is probably a cruddy day log entry, but hey, I've never bought a house before.

I found my boyfriend's porn last night.

It's not the first time. I have always been aware of its existence; I'm not stupid. It was just the first time I'd happened to see it in a while. I was a little surprised, mostly annoyed. I had just woken from a nap, stumbled to the computer to check Hobby Lobby's hours. I only made it to 'ho' before the website fill-in suggested hotbabesfiles.com or some such. I was still disoriented from the nap and maybe still a little dazed from the smoking and the sex that had led to the nap, and didn't know what to think. I'm not saying I wasn't upset - I was. I was just mostly confused. So I decided to leave, to run away, like I hadn't done in so long. I gathered up my keys and my wallet, and scrawled "Intend to return." with a silver marker on a Scholar's Green paint sample card. Stuck the note to the wall next to the door with a safety pin, hoped he would see it, and took off.

I drove to the Wal-Mart across town and bought seventy dollars worth of random groceries and other supplies, in a mild state of mental turmoil all the while. Considering all the different angles, trying to decide how I felt about the issue. I wanted to discuss it with my boyfriend, but he'd been rather hesitant in discussing stuff related to sex recently as it was and I didn't want it to be uncomfortable for him.

He came out of the computer room to greet me at the front door. I carried in the groceries and he put them away. I sat down on the couch and he went back into the computer room for a while. When he returned, we finished watching Gangs Of New York.

When he went to bed, I stayed up on the the couch for a while longer, trying to decide if I wanted to join him or not. I decided to while brushing my teeth.

When we were nearing sleep, but both still quietly awake, I asked, "Why do guys look at porn?"

"Why do you ask?" he countered.

"Because I don't understand why they do," I told him.

He didn't say anything for a while, then said, "I don't know how to answer that."

I wish that I had said, "Honestly," or, "As well as you can." But I didn't. I drifted off to sleep. And now I'll have to bring it up again.

I woke up this morning when the alarm went off and got ready for work. I ate a cookie, got dressed, and was smoking.. thinking, again, about my boyfriend's porn.

It's not that I really mind, although I do - it's just a little hurtful, a little confusing. I don't understand its attraction. None of it was repulsive or horrid or anything, nothing I saw shocked me in the least. I try to remember that porn is a part of the human sexual sphere, especially for guys. It's as much a part of sexuality as reading books with erotic themes and passages, imagining how someone feels and looks naked, fantasizing about one's lover, just a part of it all, like sex, like masturbation. I guess that it can even be somewhat of a habit, just something you do... But I still don't like it, and I'm not sure if I really accept it. I know that I would rather not find it, and that I would rather it wasn't there at all.

So I was thinking about all this, and I decided I wanted to know -when- it had been, at least. I didn't know how in the world he had time to be porn-gazing at home, and if he was sneaking up in the middle of the night to view it, then I was going to be worried. So I checked his history and that's when things began to be touched with hilarity.

At first, I felt a little sick, a little heartbroken by how much of it was there. I hate feeling that I'm not enough. So I swung real low mood-wise for a while, then went back to the computer..

I wanted to know how long before I'd came across the websites he'd visted them, and I was very perplexed by what was showing on the screen - the date and time said 8:20pm, July 12. That was yesterday's date, yesterday evening. How was that possible??

And then I realized that I'd woken up from my nap at 7:10 yesterday evening, stumbled to the computer and came across the porn, which upset me into running away. And when I came home at 8:30, he had been in the computer room. And then, this morning, I find that he was looking at porn in between then, while I was gone because I was upset about porn in the first place.

I laughed, and didn't bother to find out when he'd looked at the porn I'd seen before he left. History snooping is not a habit of mine. I just went back to my morning.

So, okay, there's this porn thing going on, definitely. It hurts that it's there. And I know why it's there, but I just don't get it. I just don't understand why it's needed or wanted.

I'm a little upset about it, mostly just confused, but I still think it's funny as hell that I return to the computer to see when the porn was viewed only to find out that more had been viewed since I left because I was upset about the porn!

I crawled back into bed with him after I brushed my teeth and took my jeans off. He snuggled up to me and I layed next to him and I continued to think about the whole thing, laughing occasionally. We made love and then we got up and we shared a bowl and he drove me to work. And I wrote this up.

How different would it have been if Earth was just Australia, the north and south poles, and ocean, with no other continents or islands? It would be a paradise for Sylvia Plath, for one thing. For her, the entire world would be an enormous metaphor. Would we still exist, and would we be better or worse for it? Australia itself had people on it a long time ago, people who were isolated from the rest of the world for long enough to forget that there ever was a rest of the world. Sometimes I forget that there is a rest of the world, and I live with other people every day.

The people in Australia would eventually have developed technology and machinery of their own and they would be us. Whether they would be one people or whether they would have shut themselves off from each other I do not know. There must be a limit to the amount and type of natural resources in Australia to prevent certain technologies from emerging; a lack of oil might be one. There is plenty of uranium but many other things have to be invented before nuclear weapons - and the reasons for building and using them - can become.

There would be no shortage of marine life to eat. If we kept to the coast we could build boats, and sail the One Sea. Would we explore, without any reason to believe that there might be something over the horizon to explore? Would our boats become ironclads, submarines? And the deserts would be there to be farmed and tamed. But then again the deserts of North Africa have not been farmed or tamed and people have had thousands of years to do that. Some things, however, are beyond human beings and our technology, or more realistically our money. We could theoretically move all the sand from the desert right now and have orbital sunshields to modulate the temperature, but it would be hugely expensive and would take ages to do.

Therefore we are limited by money. Time is money. But time to a machine is nothing. We need to develop robots to do work for us, as quickly as possible. And we need a way to power the robots. It all comes down to power. Once we have portable, safe nuclear fusion, we are set. Or if we could burn soil, or human waste, or sand, or water, we would be able to concentrate on other things. Why does God torment us this way? He gives us the senses and minds to see how beautiful things could be, but puts obstacles in the way. I assume He is trying to toughen us up, challenge us, like in 'Moon Patrol' when the rolling boulders come in on the challenge stage. Yes. It is our duty to insert the coin and continue. We have six billion lives left, easily enough to cycle the score, but only if each life is part of the same game. Many people today are not even inside the arcade. They do not own a ten pence piece. Their names do not go onto the high score table. G-O-D. It fits.

But they say God is dead, and we are trapped in the decks of His inverted vessel, trying to work our way up to the belly, and the vessel is sinking. And who is on the hull to rescue us, if we get there?

You know, there should be an Anglo-Saxon religion. Paganism, perhaps, but it does not have the same following as the middle-eastern religions, and of the supposed pagans few take it seriously enough to, say, defend it with lethal force. And if your beliefs are not strong enough to rouse you to the ultimate extreme they are worthless, a weak compromise for people who, when asked what kind of music they like, reply "oh, all kinds, chart stuff, r'n'b". Such people are lower than Buddhists. Their passivity is not even justified by an ideology. It only takes one man with a scythe to behead an entire field of corn. And if that man was bred and trained to hate the corn with his every conscious thought, there would soon be no corn. Just the scythe, and the sickle. Man and his tools versus nature and its tools. Bring them on, all of them. It is much easier to build a religion around hate than it is to build it around love, and that is where Christianity tends to fall down, as it emphasises love and forgiveness, which are merely a small part of the human condition.

My new religion therefore will have the scythe as its emblem. It is a tool, and it cuts, like a guitar. Harvesting and using corn to make bread and food is fairly complex, and the scythe can be used to feed people, and also to behead people, so it expresses both sides of the technological coin. Each of my followers will be compelled to kill an amount of non-believers per week, the amount determined by the relative sizes of (a) my followers and (b) the others. As my current tally of followers totals myself and my imaginary friend Eugene, this presents a challenge. But challenges and constraints are good, they force one to adopt unconventional solutions and/or poses.

Written language itself is obsolete as recorded sound is now a trivial thing. And as human institutions are automated, and responsibility is divested to machines, there will be no need for human beings to communicate with words, because there will be no need to communicate. When we have attained perfection - our bodies in tanks, fed with heroin, moved and cleaned and bred by our machines - there will be no need for words. Or even other people to communicate with; perfection would come with a single, immortal, perfectly-happy individual living alone on a world of plenty with his or her mind. I have said this before, although not with such clarity of thought and vision, and of expression.

It seems the influence of cats in my life never ends. Many of you may remember my October 6, 2002 daylog about Sam-the-kitty and his manipulation of me into his slave for all time. (He was really cute, grabbed my leg, purred at me, and said “take me home”. I’m such a pushover.)

It appears there is now a second feline addition to the wuukiee-den. I’d like you to meet Misty, a kitty with a story even more complicated, and I think sadder, than that of Sam.

About a month ago on a Sunday afternoon, pmdboi, mcc and I had gone to Target for various stuff. Got home, parked the car, unloaded all the crap we’d bought, and headed in. At the edge of the parking lot we were greeted by a pitiful looking little cat obviously begging for food. She was timid, but obviously not afraid of humans, and more obviously in horrible shape. Looked like she’d been out at least a month. I picked her up and carried her to just outside my apartment and sent the guys in for a can of cat food. She ate the entire thing, then wolfed down most of a plate of hard cat chow as well.

After she’d eaten and had a long drink of water, a closer investigation of the kitty was in order. She was TINY—her body was mostly the size of a full-grown (albeit small) female cat. She weighed about THREE POUNDS. A cat her size should weigh between seven and nine. Her fur was horribly matted and covered with grass-burrs, made worse by the fact she was a longhair to begin with. She had overly large green eyes and a roman nose, which made her look more like an anime cat than a real one. She may be part Maine Coon Cat, having the long coat, a thick undercoat, and coarse guard hairs along her back. She also has a faint “mask” characteristic of the breed. Her ears are tufted, but her paws aren’t hairy or huge enough to indicate she could be any more than half, and probably a quarter, coon. Her tail is huge and bushy, nearly as large around as she is. She’s a brown and black tabby/tiger marked cat, and each hair is agouti, or ticked with several bands of color on each individual hair. Her face and stomach are a ligher caramel and the bottoms of her feet are black. This lent her coat a very wild look and would be more at home on a rabbit, a ferret, or a raccoon than a housecat. She had scabs on her face that looked like she’d been hit but good with some cat’s claws, and a nasty head cold. She also had a very old, very worn, mostly broken collar with tags on it.

So we left her outside with food and water, wrote down the tag number, and planned to call the humane society in the morning. An hour or so later, there was a knock on the door. A neighbor was holding her and asked “is this your cat? She ran in my front door when I opened it.” Now seeing as the complex is set up such that you must go through two doors to enter any one apartment, that was somewhat impressive. About that point, she squirmed from his arms, hit the floor, and ran in MY front door. “No, but I was feeding her and planning on tracing her tags in the morning. I guess I’ll let her stay the night. Thanks”. So she spends the night in the bathroom—collapsed on the bath mat and sleeping much more soundly than a cat ever should. (She slept the next two days straight, only getting up to eat and use the litter box. She was exhausted.) I held her in my lap later that night, and Sam sat on his haunches, groundhog style, and as gently as could be started petting her neck with one amazingly graceful white paw.

Got up, went to class, came home, called the Humane Society where her tags were registered. Got a name and number and address. S’all good, right? Not exactly. First, their address was close to mine. Too close a range, in my opinion, for all but the youngest of kittens to get lost in. But we call anyway, and no one answers the phone, nor does their answering machine even identify who lives there. Ok, they’re not in, fine, call later. On a whim, check Purdue’s lookup and find out there’s a work number listed as well. Call that number to be told the lady only works two hours a day, between 9 and 11, and oh, she just left to go home call back later. A call home produces no results either.

This goes on. For two and a half weeks. No, before you ask, I did not leave a message. People have and will claim animals that are not theirs in situations like that. But we kept calling, multiple times a day, never an answer, even when we drove home and it looked like people were in. Always she’d just left work “five minutes ago” even when it was 9:30 and she’d supposedly been in only half an hour. I combed the lost pets section of the newspaper, called the pounds to see if anyone had reported a missing longhaired tabby, I combed lost pet websites online, we drove by their place, no signs, no posting, no NOTHING.

And after two weeks, this “mystery cat” isn’t acting like she has anywhere she really wants to go. I’ve found strays before who just want a meal and a place to sleep and then go off on their quest to find their homes. And I feed them and pet them and wish them the best of luck in the world, and off they go. The little girl acted like she wanted to be an indoor-outdoor cat (she’d get outside, but not run off, just plop down in the sun), but she sure wasn’t acting like a cat on a quest for someone she loves.

This was looking less and less like a person who really cared about or wanted to keep her cat. I know my calico used to run off a lot in Houston and we’d put up sighs if she was gone more than 5 or 6 DAYS, nothing so long as two weeks. The final straw soon came. Called her work number again. “Oh. Um. They left on a two-week vacation yesterday. They’ll be back in early July.” Another call to the pound produced exactly no results. No, no one had called in about that cat. That is THE fastest way to get your animal put down, you know. Go on a long trip and fail to call EVERY SINGLE SHELTER in town to say “this is our cat, if she comes in, hold her.” They hadn’t even called the pound she’d been adopted from.

As of today, they’ve been back from their trip at least a week now, if not two. There are still no signs or flyers or lost ads in the classified section. And somehow I’m not suspecting there will be.

So now she’s been off to the vet, amazingly the worst thing wrong with her was the cold which she’s been medicated for but still has. No FIV or feline leukemia. She’s put on two and a half pounds, still underweight but looking much better. Her face looks much more normal with the extra weight.

I think she’s going to be Andrew’s cat, really. He’s fallen in love with her, and he’s hoping to get an apartment next year so he can keep her. Otherwise I guess she’ll live here until then. In any case, she’s not going anywhere but with one of us. She’s seen enough hardship as it is. This one’s not going back to the pound. And she’s been named Misty. Short for “mystery cat”, or possibly “Mystique” as she looks like the kind of cat who’d shape shift in the middle of the night just to annoy me or tease Sam. And also, as we all know, “the fog comes on little cat feet” after all.

She and Sam get along fairly well. Sam’s totally enamored of her and dotes on her. She bosses him around incessantly. She used to be horribly afraid of him and hissed and growled every time he entered a room. In a 2-room apartment that’s a problem. Now they’ll lie a couple feet apart and she’ll take a halfhearted swat at him if he tries to sniff her too much, but no claws and no growls. They love to chase each other at all hours of the day and night, much to my dismay. Sam seems much happier—I’ve worried for a while he’s lonely, coming from a multi-cat household all his life. He’s the most gentle creature I’ve ever met, and seems not to realize he weighs three times more than she and could just bowl her over if he chose—he’s an easy fifteen pounds and almost no fat. Instead he tolerates her abuse and pestering in a very even-tempered way, and purrs at her when he thinks she’s not looking. She's a sassy little thing. We considered naming her Donna (as in "prima") but that seemed way too much like tempting Eris.


I am writing this to inform, more than anything else. People ask about Sam, wonder how he’s doing, and genuinely seem to care. So I wrote this as another bit of news about my cats.

What to do, whether or not to keep her, caused me much grief. It was a very hard decision to make and I asked many people for advice in the process. In the end, I chose, and I think I chose rightly. So I’m really not interested in hearing about what a horrible person I am for having stolen this cat or whatever. (Most people have been very supportive but a few have been hostile about it.)

I also somewhat hold the belief at this point that if an animal shows up in my life, there’s a good chance it’s meant to stay there. Our dog, four of the seven cats I’ve had or were part mine, a parakeet, and a rabbit all entered our lives by utter chance. We found them as strays or they arrived at our place or other random happenstance. Owners were looked for. None were ever found, and so the creatures stayed. This has shaped my opinion towards the matter, and I know it. But don’t we all have our own biases?


What follows is a rant of the most bitter and possibly offensive nature. If angst bothers you I recommend you pretend this part of my daylog does not exist and just read the “yay happy wuukiee has a kitty’ part. We will all be better off if you do so.

I should say here that animal cruelty, whether it be neglect or outright abuse, gets my hackles up faster than just about anything else. People who chain their dogs in the backyard as ‘guard dogs’ with no room to run, people who keep “outdoor cats” and leave them to forage instead of putting out a simple bowl of hard food, people who buy a bunny for their kids for Easter then keep it in a rarely-cleaned cage when the kids don’t take proper care of it… these people hold a special place of blazing hatred in my heart, and if I believed in hell they’d be some of the first ones I’d send there.

Gang shootouts, deaths in bar brawls, I can almost see a balance to. There’s provocation and response, and someone did something to make someone angry enough to cause things like that. (Violence against innocents is one thing, but people do a LOT of really shitty things to one another and then act surprised when people do shit back to them.) People do things to provoke others. People ask unreasonable things of others. The only thing animals ever ask of us is a place to sleep, warm and dry, and enough food and water to stay alive. They’d like our love, of course, but they don’t demand it. And no Platinum Visa cards, or designer sneakers, or million dollar sports cars, or bullshit like that. They don’t do things like cheat on us, or move out and drain the joint bank account, or total your car just out of spite. Anger towards other humans is very often justified in my bitter little mind. (Violence, less often justified, but sometimes it is. ) Anger or violence towards animals, I can’t think of a single case. If they are hostile, if they bark, if they bite, it’s because WE made them that way. We trained them as guard dogs, we bought them from puppy mills where they were poorly socialized, and we thought it was “cute” when they did this or that.

Halfhearted animal owners would soon follow the animal abusers. The people that will reclaim their cat if someone gift wraps it and hand-delivers it, but won’t call their pound to see if it came in. The people that take in their animals but neglect them so they run away again. WE once found a rabbit in our yard. Its owners were found, and the animal returned. It kept running off and showing back up at our house, and the owners, knowing where we lived, came over and reclaimed it several times. Each time it showed up it looked worse and worse. Eventually it never showed up again, and I assume it died. It was practically there the last time I saw it. It is because of that incident that I hold my belief that people who don’t’ care enough about their animal to actually find it don’t deserve to have it back. That’s the reason I never left a message and never placed a classified ad. I expected these people to make the first move if they cared about the cat at all. I looked for EVERY sign I could have that they wanted her or were at all interested in ever seeing this cat again, many many times. I never saw a single one. Yes, I took a passive approach with this animal. Maybe you think I should have taken more “active” steps. But you cannot say I did not make a good-faith effort, and you cannot say I did not try. You can, and you may, think I’m wrong. But now, at least, you have some idea why I chose as I did.

The interview began at 9. I arrived at the office 20 minuets early. I had a black suit on with a muted Halloween orange shirt on that I had bought at that Spanish clothing shop in Germany. I had remembered to bring a second set of references and clippings with me.

After I had presented myself they asked me if there was any legal or medical reason I might have in my background that would prevent me from carrying out any of my duties, were I to be employed. I responded with a sober no and looked straight ahead.

I was thinking of the woman’s clipped British accent and about how much I wanted to get this job. I wanted this job more than anything and it was mine to have. All I had to do was sit here and be pleasant with just enough humor and charm and earnestness.

They called back a week later and asked me to come again and meet their client. I agreed and as I hung up the telephone I looked over at her and smiled. She smiled back and we celebrated with a glass of wine and later dinner and later kisses and sex.

Everybody asks that question. It’s because my passport was stolen in Rome and the embassy made me a new one good for only one year. I had to renew it with the State Department when I returned to the US. See look here way in the back, here’s the embossed seal on page 23.

I felt the takeoff of the plane and sat back as it climbed and accelerated into the gray early morning sky. I was glad to be leaving and I was glad to be moving again. The daily commute on the train and the walk to and from the stations and work had defined my life.

I was moving to Oregon to live with Bob and his new wife Melanie and their two kids. I hadn’t seen him in months. I had this red Volkswagen Rabbit from a drive away agency and I had packed it with everything I needed. The rider, and me and a guy from the Pharmacy took off out of Chicago.

Sitting with my father eating soup. He’s talking about something but I’m not really concentrating on it. I keep my head down as low as it’ll get. I keep ladling up the soup and swallowing it down and using this as the reason not to look up at my father and talk to him.

I've never tried this before, so here goes.

Anytime I think about my girlfriend, i get all warm and fuzzy inside. Dang it. Of course we love each other oodles, but sometimes I just get the happiest feeling ever when I think about her. Remember, if you will, that I've never been in a relationship like this before. Echo ever thought that I have, she does.

You never know when love is going to strike you like this. Or when you're going to wake up and realize that you can't imagine being with anyone else, ever. Under any circumstance.

Maybe I'm just being silly and romantic but I don't care. Of any woman of my choosing in the world she would be the one, without hesitation. Reach for the stars and you're find her twinkling eyes reflecting into your's. Enter the vast expance of the night sky and you'll begin to conceive of the love I hold for her.

To have someone as sweet as she to love you is better than anything. How do you think this could be? After all, we're just two relatively normal people who have everything important in common. No, it's more than that.

Lift up the skirts of love and what will you find? I've been thinking hard about this recently. For all I can tell, true love is what you find when you've found the one. Especially someone so beautiful, deep, intelligent, creative and inspiring - Deep down inside I feel it every moment but I don't care to understand it. After thinking about it, why would one really want to rationalize it? Never will I fully understand and that's the way I like it!

You are a nerd. You have no life. You have a computer, a vital accessory to the lifeless. You are me. You are everyone. You click, click, click, and decide to pay a visit to your old friend Everything2. Sleep is pointless, 4 AM is a perfectly fine time. No one else could be online, no one else could match you in your empty semi-existence. You check out Other Users. It's as full as it normally is.

Huh?, says brain. No, I'm supposed to be alone and pathetic!

"Ah, these hot summer days are so relaxing. I can just lie on the couch with some lemonade and read a good book" issues from the Catbox. Your groggy 4AM mind cannot make sense of it...

"Hey stupid", says your common sense (where the hell were you?), "They're called time zones. They come with living on a sphere. Deal with it."

Oh, right. Yeah. You knew that. Your brain gets angry at itself for being ignorant. You get an overwhelming urge to stop doing idiotic things. You never want to think an idiotic thought again. Your new mantra shall become "Quit Bitching And Think!" You will no longer partake in pointless self-deprecation and just plain immature whining. That's why you joined this site, right? To improve life and stuff. Your 4 AM mind goes on this ridiculous train of thought which leads to pipe dreams of curing a somewhat incurable disease, or inventing a new energy source, or coming up with an idea for a genius new sandwich.

Your 5 AM mind semi-wakes up. You've been staring at a horizontal rule for an hour. Time to start blinking again.

The next day you recall your vow. You immediately go to the public library to read up on some obscure topic, anything. No, not that one. No, that one's boring. No, that one would be too hard.

"Hey! Quit Bitching And Think!"

Fine. Eenie meenie miny mo. There. I'm going to go get a sandwich now. Take that, procrastination!

You read. You occasionally take a bite out of your sandwich. Oh, sandwich, so delicious. How I treasure the tang of the mayonnaise, the crisp of the lettuce, the glory of the ham, the cheesy- No!. You scold yourself for letting your mind wander, especially about something so trivial.

This is the drive. The human mind. It's not perfect, it never will be, but it must attain knowledge and somehow spread that knowledge. It is imperative that you do this. It is vital to everything on Earth. It must be done, because. Just because.

Procrastination is the enemy. You make excuses, but they are excuses nonetheless. There is some inexplicable pleasure of doing nothing, of ignoring your mind, but that feeling must exist. If it didn't exist then you couldn't fight it.

Go forth and learn. Quit your bitchin'.


I learn the hard way the way of the gun...

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