It is finally sunny today after many hours of fitful, glowering weather that could not decide if it wanted to rain on us or not. It is the sort of weather that makes for maximum suspense if you pay attention to that sort of thing, because it literally feels like anything could happen. It could rain. It could become all picture postcard sunny. Flying ants could descend upon us in hordes and force us to learn calculus. Really, anything could happen.

But neither rain nor sun nor mathematically inclined formicae shall stay us from our appointed rounds! It is time for the science, bitches, and I hope you brought your wigs, because they are about to be flipped.

As Simple As Black And White

We will lead off today with a truly freaky cool (and totally creepy) bit of technology from those wonderful people in the covert surveillance business.

You know, spy stuff.

An outfit called Qwonn Security Products has come up with a material they call Black Ops Plastics that has the remarkable property of being completely opaque – black, even – to the human eye, but invisible to a black and white camera.

That is right, a black and white camera can see right through it. This means that you could hide a black and white camera inside any object made of this amazing material, and it could take footage without even so much as the tiniest lens showing.

Or you could have a whole wall made of this stuff, and be watching people via black and white cameras all along the wall without them knowing.

All in all, it is a big boon for covert surveillance, whether you are a professional spy looking to find out what a terrorist is doing, or merely an amateur pervert looking to find out what really goes on in the ladies’ room.

It’s A Quantum Finish

Next up, we have a story that present an interesting problem : what happens when instant replay tells us there is no winner.

And this is not just any instant replay. Let me explain.

What happened is that last weekend, two sprinters aiming for a spot on the American Olympic track team – Allyson Felix and Janubah Tarmoh – both finished their race at exactly 11.068 and no amount of analysis of the photographic results could determined which of the two placed third and which placed fourth.

Small problem : there are only three slots on the team.

Oh, and here is the kicker : the camera used to record these events and determine result records at a whopping three thousand frames per second, or 3000FPS for you camera nerds.

Imagine that. Three thousand frames a second and none of them show a clear winner. Common sense would say that was impossible, but it’s not. It is just incredibly unlikely. Enough heats in enough events, it was bound to happen eventually.

By the way, The International Olympic Committee decided that the result would be determined by either a tie-breaker race, or a coin toss, athletes’ choice.

I feel bad for the two ladies either way.

Intelligence and Cats

Meanwhile, those great big boffo brains at Google have been doing what any group of billionaire nerds with massive amounts of resources would be trying to do : make the world’s first artificial intelligence out of a neural network of 16,000 computer processors.

A neural network is one in which the individual machines and the connections between them are modeled as closely as possible on the human brain, with each machine a neuron.

The article is annoying vague about what, exactly, they did with said network, but basically, they fed it ten billion images taken from the frames of YouTube videos, and the network trained itself (?) to recognize various objects within those images.

I do not quite fully comprehend, but I am glad that their results seem to confirm the theory that the brain uses specific neurons to recognize specific objects.

But we all know what they were really doing : testing the theory that if you create enough connections between enough neurons and then give the resulting network literally any kind of stimulus, consciousness will spontaneously arise.

Guess 16,000 processor-neurons was not enough. Next time try a million!

Almost a Turing

In a normal week, that would be a pretty amazing result in the world of artificial intelligence. But Google’s intriguing experiment pales in comparison to the news from last Saturday.

Last Saturday was June 23, 2012, and would have been the one hundredth birthday of computer scientist and all around amazing meganerd Alan Turing 100th birthday.

To celebrate, they held the most massive Turing Test event ever, and as is befitting Turing’s centennial, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman won the competition with a nearly 29 percent result.

To refresh your memory, the Turing Test states that if a computer program can fool thirty percent of the judges into thinking it is a human being, it is to be considered artificially intelligent.

So for Eugene Goostman, a chatbot that simulates a 13 year old boy, to come so close to Turing’s target is truly enormous news.

The fact that it happened at an event celebrating Turing just makes it all the sweeter.

The article is sketchy on to how it pulled this off, or even who the hell programmed it, although if you want to talk to Eugene, you can do it here. That would seem to indicate that it was the Princeton AI team who programmed Eugene.

Way to drop the ball there, Pop Sci. Good thing you don’t cover sports or the headline would be “Some Guy Beats Home Run Record”.

But one clue as to their technique might be their choice of a thirteen year old boy as their persona. That way, the chatbot can appear intelligent, but any lack of verbal sophistication will be explained away by observers as, well, he is only thirteen years old.

In fact, in the future, using a sub-adult persona might well be deemed to be cheating. I am sure that simulated the text input of a toddler would be simplicity itself.

Just a random number generator plugged into the ASCII table, really.

See you next week, folks!

So, just for the record, here I am, once more facing my daily task of writing a blog entry of a thousand or so words, with a great idea for the kind of substantial and interesting blog entry I always wish I was writing but too damned tired despite trying to sleep all day to pull it off? Because it was too damned hot for me to sleep during the day and now that the sun went down suddenly I feel like I have ten pound of wet cement in my head? Plus a pound for each eyelid? For real?

Seriously, this is what you are telling me? Jesus flying anal fuck, what the fuck is wrong with me that I cannot keep a very small amount of routine and regularity in my life?

I am serious, sometimes I get so damned tried of improvising my way through life because I just cannot seem to maintain any kind of order in my life, because my internal life is so damn chaotic that I am always forced to scramble to adjust all the time… I feel like I am constantly treading water in a sea of chaos and madness, just barely keeping my head above water, and let me tell you, brothers and sisters and twisted misters, that is one hell of a piss poor way to live.

Someday drain this damned pool already so I can get the hell out and do something else with my life.

OK, so maybe being sleepy is making me a little cranky.

But still, I really do get tired of this treading water crap. And yet, I know it is at least partly my own fault, because as I have said before, part of me really is hostile to order and actually wants to improvise its way through life.

After all, that is the only way to maintain total freedom of action at every moment, right? You are only safe (and entertained?) if you can flee in any direction at any moment. And that can only be true if you make no commitments, no plans, no structure, no form, no substance, no baggage.

And yet, another part of me yearns for structure with the passion of the heroine of a romance novel. It is why I have this weird, almost OCD like compulsion to follow through with what little plans I do make. Often when I plan to do something, or a short sequence of somethings, I find it incredibly difficult to change that plan even when things change. I just execute the program like a robot because I am so relieved to be out of the endless pit of formlessness and endless possibility that the idea of going back to having to figure out what to do with myself before it is absolutely necessary is unthinkable. Terrifying. No no, must cling.

It is at these moments that I can see the appeal to some people of fascism. I can understand the dangerous and dark allure of simply not having to decide anything for yourself any more. Just do what you are told and you will be OK. It is very much like childhood.

And I had a fairly unstructured childhood. Other than school, nobody expected anything of me or included me in anything. So I just basically amused myself and stayed out of the way and did not bother anyone.

And the sad fact is, I am still doing that to this very day. I do not know anything else. And I am going to be 40 in less than a year.

Pathetic, is it not?

Man, it sucks to be crazy. And not even the fun kind of crazy, where you have delusions of grandeur or do crazy dramatic things that make the news or at least attract the attention of competent caregivers who can lock you away and take care of you.

(Being in a mental hospital is also a lot like childhood. )

No, it is the very very dull kind of crazy, where you are just a sad person nobody notices who quietly and unobtrusively does nothing whatsoever with his life and dies a lonely and pathetic death at 50.

Assuming I make it that far under my own inept care.

I mean, take right now. I had zero appetite around supper time, so I had a very light meal. Just a little leftover pasta, which I know damn well does not make me very full for long. So now here it is, 10:20 PM or so, and I am very hungry.

So I go eat, right? Simple.

But no, the planning compulsion part of my brain insists that because I planned on not eating again until after midnight, I cannot eat until after midnight.

After all, if I ate now, what would I do after midnight? Eat again? Wait till breakfast? Madness.

And of course, I am still very very sleepy, so I am conflicted as to whether to eat or sleep.

It sucks when basic biological drives are fighting it out, does it not? Food or rest, which one will win? See this epic battle at the Cattledome this Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

Now the sensible thing to of would be to have just a little bit to eat, then go to sleep, then eat my larger snack when I get back up.

And who knows, if I concentrate hard enough, I might just be able to pull that off, defying all odds and previously established patterns of stupidity.

But it is at least as possible that I will just go straight to bed when I am done here, thus guaranteeing that, if I manage to sleep despite being hungry, I will wake up with low blood sugar, feeling horrible and cold and angry, and go through a Low Blood Sugar Incident with all its stages of unpleasantness just because I am too stupid to do the right thing.

Then again, maybe I do those things, subconsciously, just to liven up my life a little.

What I am basically saying is that I am fucked in the head.

I am sure that is news to you all.

Well, you know the drill. Yesterday was links, today is moping.

But in order to protect ourselves from the chilling effects of moping, here is a picture to fill you with a prophylactic dose of bountiful sunshine happiness.

It;s dangerous to go alone. Take one of these.

Heck, take three, they’re small.

There, that should help.

So, did the therapy thing today. Told the doc about all the crap (ha ha ha) that has been happening in my life, and how bad I have felt lately, and that helped some. But I could not help but feel that he really did not get it. Or I just could not figure out how to explain it. Whatever.

I suppose that is just the depression talking. But that is the thing, something we talked about today. What do you do when you know something is not true, yet it still feels like it is true?

I was talking about all the deep self loathing and feeling like I was a horrible disgusting monstrosity of filth and that people would be better off without me that this whole Freudian nightmare with the toilet backing up and my horrible-ness spilling out everywhere touched off.

I told my therapist that if I concentrate, I know that I am not a horrible disgusting bag of corruption, and that if I asked the people in my life if they would be better off without me, they would vehemently disagree. Some part of me knows that there must be some reason people put up with me and all my faults, and mere pity cannot cover it all.

Generally, people’s pity does not last that long. And what about my online friends? I am quite popular with a certain select crowd. I must be doing something right.

So if I try really hard, I can keep the thought in my mind that I must be a charming and likable fellow, intelligent and sweet and wacky, and that is why people like me.

But that thought squirts away the moment I stop concentrating on it under the weight of the enormous feeling of worthlessness and disgustingness that I have been feeling lately. The knowledge is there. The evidence is clear. I am not as bad as I think I am, or at least, not as bad as I feel I am. This whole toilet incident has brought up the darkest, foulest part of my emotional makeup, and I cannot just will or wish all this negative emotion away.

And part of me does not want to, anyhow. I have a deep intuition that I need to hold on to these feelings and feel them fully before letting them go. Only then can I be rid of them forever, instead of just pushing them back down into the depths of my subconscious again.

Like I said in therapy today, the Freudian language could not be more clear. Toilet backing up suddenly from my using it, creating a dirty mess that Joe has to deal with and that then went on to spread to innocent people in the apartment below… stuff that came out of me getting loose and contaminated others… it is like a script for my own personal Hell.

And that freaks me out a little, because honestly, what are the odds that something that so perfectly activated my deepest, worst issues would happen right when I was started to feel pretty good? What bizarre force caused a toilet to back up and spill over hours after I had used it? How could something so perfectly shaped to just fucking wreck me happen at just the right time for it to do so?

This is the sort of thing that troubles a rationalist atheist liberal intellectual like myself. One might call it a crisis of lack of faith. Perhaps it is mere superstition, that desire of human beings to find patterns where there are none, but I cannot accept that this sort of thing as being merely chance. That is in no way a satisfactory answer. The odds against such a thing happening seem far too high.

And yet, what else could it be? I have no belief in the supernatural intervention of otherworldly entities, malign or beneficial, to act as cause for this effect.

Could I have somehow cause it myself? Unless I posit the existence of actual human beings plotting out my life (in which case, they freaking suck at it), what other cause can there be?

Perhaps this really is just superstition. Perhaps this is how religions get started, with this overwhelming feeling that there must be some meaning in seemingly random events that nevertheless leave an incredibly strong emotional impression on us.

Like when that guy empties a whole clip on Jules (Samuel Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction) and none of the bullets hit him, when by all rights and all probability, he should have been deader than disco.

That makes even a cold-blooded killer like Jules start to think about his life and his religion. There is something in the human mind that cannot accept that extremely emotionally charged events that seemingly happen against all odds are just the random hand of fate. Our primate minds insist that things like that can only be caused by a human or human-like intervention.

Someone had to make something like that happen. That is the only thing that makes sense to us.

Mystic issues aside, I still feel pretty bad. I have attacks of just feeling horrible about myself. I feel like the darkness is all around me and it is only by an act of will and mental concentration that I keep it at bay, and if my guard drops for even a second, it floods in.

But maybe that is not so bad a thing. Maybe I am just processing a lot of suppressed emotion, and letting the darkness in slowly, and then deliberately opening myself up to the emotions involved, I can fight back the darkness permanently.

I open my soul to the sky.

Let it all come out.

Oh right. Depressed, and brooding about it.

I just cannot seem to shake this depressed feeling. It started with the disaster of Thursday night, but it just keeps dragging on. Any time I have a quiet moment to myself where I am not in full blown distraction mode, there it is, waiting to pounce.

And pounce it does, and then I feel horrible, all dark and depressed and hating myself and my life. It is like this invisible weight pushing me from all sides, making it hard to breathe and forcing my thoughts down into the dark, instead of up in the sunshine and blue skies, where I want them to be.

I have to admit, it has me scared. I have felt far more depressed over the last three or four days than I have in the last five years or more. I have felt worthless and depressed and scared and trapped and crazy and stupid and angry from all the pain. I have felt like screaming, like crying, and like putting my first through my computer screen. (That last was mostly Gnometown, granted.)

So obviously, this whole thing with the toilet backing up has unlocked something truly deep dark and bad inside me. It was not just the toilet that backed up because of too much being put through it. That was just the physical manifestation of what was going to happen to me.

And this time, I can’t just get Joe to fix it for me, though that would be awfully nice. Then I could just retreat deep into my shell and not come out until the problem was all gone.

But no, some things I just have to work out myself in one way or another. Whether you choose to deal with life or not, it deals with you. There are no time-outs or do-overs. No matter how many lives you can imagine, no matter how many alternatives you can envision, you only get to live one single precious life, one string of seconds like beads on a wire, and the sooner you accept that and learn to simply live in the moments you actually have, the better.

Still working on that. It is just so darn comfy in this nest of mine inside my mind, with thick spongy walls of non-realtime to protect me from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I am like the Captain of the B Ark in Hitchiker’s Guide, the one who has spent decades in the bath because he just keeps saying “Well, why get out now just when it’s getting comfortable?”

I walled myself off from the world and retreated deep into my own mind at a very early age, probably initially due to being sexually abused when I was very small, not even school age. I do not have memories of the incident itself, but I do remember making the same heartbreaking decision that many other abuse victims make, to just take myself far, far away. To use the clinical term, I dissociated, defocusing my mind away from the here and now and retreating into my imagination and my intellect.

And in a very real sense, I have never come back out. I am still in there, trying to operate reality from inside my fragile shell. Other incidents, like getting bullied rather brutally, would cause me to retreat further and further, shells within shells, wheels withing wheels, increasing my insulation from the world but further crippling my ability to deal with it.

Hard to explain that to the outside world, of course. They do not see that you are trying to deal with things from inside a series of shells. They don’t see the shells at all. They just can’t understand why simple things are so hard for you to do. And why a big fellow like me can seem so weak.

Well, strength comes from the heart, from the soul. And mine is very very weak. It did not grow up with the rest of me. Certainly it did not keep up with this runaway brain of mine. The brain gets stronger all the time from all the exercise I give it, but that soul, the heart, the spirit animating it remains a sad little cripple.

I think at least part of my recent depression must be physiological. My blood sugar is low, I think, and that is a very bad thing. Plus, despite an awful lot of time in bed, I get the distinct feeling that on some level, I am in dire need of sleep. I must be lacking in restful Z’s. And lack of proper sleep can make the whole world seem worse than it really is, and worse than it would seem if you were rested.

Plus, my allergies have been acting up, giving me a runny nose and stuffed sinuses and who knows what else. I have long suspected that the sneezing and whatnot are only the surface symptoms of my allergic reaction to airborne pollen and such, and that the reaction actually causes a system-wide inflammatory condition that can lead to other things, like digestive issues.

So who knows what maelstrom of malady is brewing inside me now. We won;t even think about what the airborne toilet water circulating around for a few days might do to a person. It does not bear thinking on, and I am the kind of guy who will think about damned near anything.

Well, thank goodness I have this blog, where I can just pour it all out onto the virtual page and thus get some kind of cathartic release. I feel better now than I did when I started writing this, and I think I will take a nice long nap now.

Thanks, as always, for virtually holding my hand (and my head?) while I virtually spill my guts. I can;t guarantee that this is the last treatment, but I feel like I am on the mend now, and I have you precious few who read this blog of mine to thank for it.

Thank you all very, very much.

First off, sorry, no Friday Science Roundup this week. My browser did an oops and lost all the science links (and other links) that I had been saving up to share with you. So I have nothing to work on, and I am afraid we will just have to endure yet another day of me babbling at you about my life (so called) and all the crappy things which happen in it.

Patient and attentive readers will recall that yesterday, I talked of a certain bathroom disaster. Toilet overflowing, carpets soaked with foul liquid, and so on.

And that had me all freaked out and panicking and hating myself while Joe was dealing with my mess for me, and activating all kinds of fucked up Freudian shit about me feeling like I am nothing but a foul, horrible, pathetic, diseased joke that does nothing but befoul everything he touches and make life worse for the people he cares about, and they would all be better off without me.

That stuff is always there in me, but when one of my bowel movements causes filthy contaminated water to leak out all over the place… it is a perfect real-world nightmare and a feast for my demons.

But I bounced backed OK, or so I thought. When I wrote my blog entry yesterday, I was feeling relatively better about it.

But then, this morning, there came a knock on the door. It was a man who lives in the apartment underneath ours, and he wanted to know about the horrible smelling liquid dripping into his home. Apparently he had complained to the management about it, and they told him it was just runoff from the shower in my bathroom.

But I never use that shower… it’s tiny and claustrophobic and the cold water side of the equation does not work. So unless I feel like getting scalded in a tiny plastic box, I don’t go in there.

Seriously. It’s like a sci fi torture chamber.

Nope, it was poop water, and I had to tell him that. Well, I told him it was water from an overflowing toilet and he got the idea. He also informed me that he had collected it in a bowl, that it had filled one of his light fixtures, that he had to get confirmation that it was not just shower water before he could get the management to do anything, and that… his son had played with the water in the bowl.

All this made me feel super worse and I do not feel that this time I will recover as quickly. It was bad enough that my foul emanations had contaminated our apartment… I had shit where I live, something even dumb animals do not do… but to then learn that my worst fears were true and that the ichor in question had oozed its way to the apartment below to visit foulness and contamination on them… I just wanted to die, to withdraw so deep into myself that my body just crumples up from the inside from the black hole around my heart. I wanted to just run away, to just walk out the door and run and run and run till I drop, then die where I lay. Anything to free people of my wretched foulness.

Maybe find a nice little swamp to decompose in. I mean, it already smells like that.

And people would say “It’s sad that he is gone, but… perhaps this is for the best. ”

And everyone else would nod.

The physical sensations when I feel this bad are something else. I feel tense on the outside, especially in my jaw and my hands, My head feels hollow and I get a pain right on the “third eye” spot where a Hindu would put their bindi. But the biggest sensation is a profound icy coldness right around my heart. It sounds metaphorical, but that is literally what I am feeling at the time. Like there is solid ice around my heart.

I suppose that is my parasympathetic endocrine system trying to fight the sudden influx of negative emotional input and overcompensating as usual. There had to be some happy medium between panicked and numb. Room enough to live, so to speak.

And now I numbly await Act III, which will no doubt be the manager of this apartment complex knocking on our door and giving us hell and asking why we did not tell her about the toilet overflow and probably looking to make us pay for the cleanup costs for decontaminating the downstairs apartment.

So I do not feel very good today. There is a dim and ephemeral part of me, as shadowy and insubstantial as the ghost of a butterfly, that knows that this is all irrational, that these things happen, that this has nothing to do with my being a horrible shit beast… but I am not listening to it.

Not because I think it is wrong, but because I know that it is right on only a superficial way that does not speak to the deep emotions inside. I am forsaking suppression lately, and that means that I am going to feel whatever I feel, even when it is bad, dangerous, and wrong.

And when I come out the other side of these deep dark forest, it will be because I have felt all the emotions that needed feeling and have arrived at the other side naturally, not just taken the shortcut of suppression that leaves pieces of me behind in countless different other forests of the past.

I would rather become more whole. Suppressing everything is a hard habit to break. And it is distinctly inconvenient. Emotions might just barge in and interrupt what I am doing, and I hate that.

But better to deal with them by feeling them than to lock them away to rot in some overflowing necropolis of the mind.

And don’t worry friends, I am not going to hurt myself. This is just me venting.

See you tomorrow, friends.

Yay, more sleeping all day and feeling like crap. Not quite as bad as yesterday, but still nobody’s idea of fun unless they are a masochist.

In fact, the last 24 hours or so have been pretty fucking rough. There are times in you life where the Universe gangs up on you and makes it rain down misfortunes, and all you can do it hope you survive the flood with at least the majority of your marbles intact.

And in more or less the same order you left them in.

First, our Internet died. The connection was fine, but the DNS was dead. Could not find a single website in the world. As far as my Firefox was concerned, Google was a made up word I just typed into the address bar to mess with it. So, no outside connectivity.

This was at about 1:30 AM today. So I decided this was as good a time as any to have my late night popcorn snack, and wandered out to the living room. Julian was there, using our main computer, and I told him about the Internet problem.

(Just as an aside, it was during this problem that I realized sometime : Internet used to be a service, like cable. But increasingly, it’s a utility, like power. I am almost as confused about what to do with myself without Internet as I do when the lights go out. Sad but true.)

So Julian unplugged our router and our cable modem box so they would reset, and when we plugged them back in, everything worked again. So, yay Julian! He saved me from the horror of having to watch normal cable TV instead of glorious Netflix for an enter fifteen minutes!

It was sad. Me, who was practically raised by television, had almost forgotten how the damn thing worked. I have been so spoiled by the Internet that I found myself just staring at the television for like five seconds before I could start thinking “Oh right… switch to the cable box channel… and um… grab the other remote here… and then… choose a channel? That seems so arbitrary now… ”

But I muddled through, and Julian said he fixed it, so I was able to finish up with some lovely Netflix at last. Then I go to my room, expecting my Internet to be working, but no : then I see that the nice friendly two computer icon that represents the network in my System Tray has changed.

Instead of two computers, it is now one computer and a big red X. And that means only one thing : “A network cable has been unplugged. ”

Yes, in fixing our Internet, Julian had somehow unplugged my computer from the router. Joy! And by now, he was in bed, so I was on my own.

And I tried, I really did. I went back and forth between the router in the living room and my own computer in my bedroom like three or four times, but I could not make it work.

So then I had to wake up Julian and get him to fix it for me. He performed some arcane ritual he learned from previous times this had happened and voila, Internet. Yay! I could waste hours of my life playing Facebook games again.

But then I went to the bathroom.., or tried to. Because when I stepped onto the carpet in the little hallway leading to my bathroom, my foot went squish . and left a distinct footprint behind. Horrified dread overtook me, like in a horror movie when the person finds the first bloody footprint, then realizes a trail of them lead to a certain door…

So I squish my way to the bathroom, and yup. The bowl is full to the brim with filthy water, there’s more on the floor, and that is what I just squished through to get here. Lovely. The toilet overflowed.

And what is more, it managed to do that after I had left it with the bowl half-full and no sign that the water was flowing at all. That is a first for me. You cannot even turn your back on that god damned toilet when it is perfectly quiet. Fuck.

But then again, I was not in a great state of mind when I left the scene that time. You see, this all started with me havin a pretty severe attack of Irritable Bowl Syndrome cramping and whatnot, brought on by my nemesis, rice.

For supper, I had eaten some rice pilaf that I made recently, and looking back, I thoughtlessly ate it way too fast, which is a very bad thing to do with rice for me. My system has trouble handling it as is, wolfing it down only make it worse.

So that lead to a pretty bad attack of cramping, forcing me to sit on the bowl and sweat it out. Then when I thought I was done and had laid down as per usual when I have to recover from one of these attacks, another one came along and I had to go in again.

But I handled it pretty well, I must say. I kept my cool and did not freak out, just told myself that I knew what caused it, and it would, well, pass.

And predictably, when I was done the second time, everything was backed up toilet wise, and I did my best with he plunger to fix it, but after these attacks I usually need to lie down because they are, quite frankly, quite the punishing physical and emotional experience, so after tangling with it for a little while, I gave up, figuring I would finish the job when I felt better.

And I swear, I had no indication that water was still coming in to the bowl when I left it, or I would never have walked away.

Worst part is, I just could not handle the disaster myself. I get the feeling I just do not have what it takes to cope in a crisis. So I had to just tell Joe about it when he got home from work, and then he had to deal with my horrible mess for me, and I feel deeply ashamed of that. I really do not like making a mess that someone else has to clean up. Especially… well, that kind of mess.

So while he was cleaning stuff up, I was having a severe panic attack, feeling like absolute garbage and freaking out big time. So that was pretty bad too.

So it has not been a fun time for me lately. No wonder I slept all day.

I was afraid to wake up!

A noise from the sickly green smog arising from this fetid swamp? A stirring, a rumbling, a sound like a broken washing machine spraying soapy water in huge, sobbing bursts of sudsy doom! Could some unspeakably grotesque spawn of the seminal juice of this rotting sea and the ever fertile womb of the tomb of thousands of foul beasts be just now emerging from its wretched den to feast upon the living?

Nah, it’s just me after a long, hard day of long, hard sleep. So relax.

Yup, had one of my Sleepy Days today, and that means today has been sort of unpleasant. I sort of brought it on myself a little, I suppose, with the new no-napping policy. But seeing as I was having these days when I was napping at will anyhow, it probably has nothing to do with napping or not, or even the Zopiclone I took this morning.

It’s just that I do not yet get enough REM sleep, so sometimes my body just put our foot down and says it is time to pay off that sleep debt, in full, right now. And I will keep on being sleepy and needing sleep until I am all caught up.

Even now, after sleeping for most of ten hours (minus pee breaks) today, I still feel like I need another solid session before I can even approach the thought of being back to normal. The burden of sleepiness weighs heavily one me, and I have to keep moving or I will slip back into slumber no matter what I am doing.

I suppose the Zopiclone plays some small role in making this a little worse, a little heavier than the Sleepy Days I had before I started taking it. Before the drug, I did not face quite this much danger of just drifting off no matter what I am doing, like I just did between this sentence and the one previous to it. I just had to yank myself out of dangerous reverie where my thought began drifting and I could feel myself falling asleep as I drifted off with them.

And of course, I had me some fucked up dreams.

The biggest one took place, of course, at some kind of science fiction convention at a big hotel, and the plot revolved around me finding out that there was going to be an “all male” (nudge nudge wink wink) party in a private room, and I was invited.

Well, I got myself invited by being really flirty and cute with this one cute guy. (So, score. )

And so the Horizon Goal (in that you are always approaching it but never reach it) was this party for me now. It sounded like an awesome place to be, a party full of gay geeks like me. Fuck Ing A.

But then, of course, stuff kept popping up between me and my goal. First, the problem was that the person who told me about the party and from whom I charmed an invitation did not exactly remember what room it was happening in, and so I had to go around looking for people whom I knew and who might also have been invited so I can get the proper room number.

After all, you do not want to be knocking on random doors asking for the gay party room, do you? Might get some pretty snippy answers.

Also, while I am going around and around this hotel, I keep having what I can only describe as psychic visions of a tragic scene in which an adorable tawny tabby kitten is exploring a freeway overpass and goes through a crack in a piece of junk wood lying there, and plunges to its death on the freeway below.

The last part of the vision is always me looking down at the shattered body of tjhe kitten, and thinking “I dropped it… ” with a terrible feeling of guilt.

But somehow, I knew this was someone else’s memory, not my own, but as I progressed through the dream, the visions came stronger and stronger, so eventually, despite the fact that I was with someone who was my date for this party at the time and trying desperately to get my shit together and not mess that up, I had to basically stop in place and let the vision totally take me, and just describe what I was seeing to the people around me just like a psychic on TV.

And when I did that, one of the people who worked for the hotel said “We have to put a stop to this!” and another replied “It’s too late… they already know. ”

And it turns out I was diving some sort of deep dark secret about how the hotel was built, or something like that. It gets kind of indistinct after that. Dreams do not need to worry about clearing up loose plot threads. They are like bad movies that way.

The other notable sequence was one where I turned around to back down the corridor with my hotel room in it, only to find that it was now filled with a weird sort of combination buffet and trade show, with people showing off various foods (including dark purple lobsters, WTF) like they were people working a station at a buffet restaurant, as well as people who had trade fair type booths.

And they were really packed in there, so that it as a bit of a squeeze to go through the corridor and I had to sort of smile and greet the presenters as I went through.

At one point, I ended up in conversation with some guy trying to sell me on some amazing new diet product made from eggs, and I listened politely for a while, but then I told me that I did not find his claims plausible and that it just seemed like another bogus panacea to me.

Then the next booth over, they were selling some kind of fun science-toy type product where these tiny little crystals would turn water into this clear goo that bounced like a rubber ball and has a neat weird wobbly squishy texture. Much more my style.

And that is where it all ended. There were other bits and pieces, the usual wondering where I left something or going back for something I forgot or whatever, but they were all dull and routine, not worth noting at all.

Other than that… I guess I slept well?