Gary Turner, that fine & noble Scot, has taken it upon himself to try to help us out over here. Locke is too proud to beg, but I ain't. I really am in dire straits, kids, and no coffee and cigarettes and meds is gonna make me meaner'n hell. And you know what that could mean! The library here has free terminals, and if I'm crashing from all those bad habits at once you just KNOW I'm going to release the DOOMSDAY WORM I've been working on all these years down in the Yucatan labs. So please, if only for your own sake, and the sake of your unborn children, give generously! Plus, who wouldn't want a picture of fake vomit on their kitchen wall? Ah, if only I hadn't been such an "acquired taste" all these years. But it's too late to change now. Or... is it??? Here, let me try...

Namaste, motherfuckers!

[well, I'll keep working on it. maybe get some hot tips from Tupak Chopra.]

The money's gone. My phone's been shut off and soon this pipe will go down. So it's looking pretty grim over here at EGR HQ. No, this isn't a joke, for once. If any of you should want to send postcards, I'll be here until they evict my ass...

RB c/o Acme Acres
760 West Moorhead Circle
Apartment F
Boulder CO 80305

I'd like to take this possibly one last opportunity
to thank all those wonderful people in my life who
made me what I am today.
FUCK YOU!

...said his jaws needed a rest, and that, after all, his brain is only javascript. He asked us to thank you for understanding.

Sometimes after a long depression, a time so long you can't remember what you felt like before it began, or when it began, or even why, sometimes after a long time of feeling like you've been walking on thin ice all your life, simple sadness brings a special kind of solace. A relief to let down and feel the world still there, the moon chewed away by time, the night, the city wrapped in its million dreams of which you need dream only one. You. What can I say? Came out on the ice with me. Knowing the danger. Knowing you might never make it back. We none of us make it back, but most pretend we can. Black ice. Let me hand it to Gibson here, speaking of hopeless romantics. Or was I? Lost in the circuits, the exchanges, potlatch of memory, so many of us who have passed this way. The earth shaped to our wandering feet, trekking further, deeper, well past the point, so long ago, of no return. The sky itself eroded by our vision, wondering, in awe, carving constellations into the night, projecting patterns where no patterns are. Once in a great while, once in a blue moon rising, we stop, amazed, and see in each other's eyes this is no mystery, no secret. I know you and you know who knows. Something happened on the ice. Touched us. Changed us. Something like a sadness that is hard to tell apart from joy.

I sit here in this little room, where I have learned to appreciate being alone. Savoring it sometimes, when the shaking stopped long enough. When the ice held, let's say. Which is not always. Not every day. And each time I walk in here, where this deck sits, this old machine on its last legs, barely able to hold these too many buffers open, so crashing, and I think perhaps this is an analog for grief, our metaphors so thin, so etched in substrates we have never seen or touched nor would have wanted to remember if we had. Each time I walk into this room I see a black notebook, the pages black paper, ruled, on which long ago I wrote with a pink gel pen, how luminous, how wondrous in itself...

I went to the South on the Day of the Dead. The sun was a black rose in a turquoise sky. My eyes hollow sockets, my bones rattling as I walked. All this felt familiar. The village children screamed in fright and ran away. They are so beautiful, I thought, but I understood their fear. The women though, some of them, would come out to greet me, weave flowers through my rib cage, around my hips, which they would kiss with great longing, remembering love. And the men, a few of the old ones, would take off their hats and look down. My heart went out to them. Why only now do we see, I wondered, blessing as best I could our blindness. I was looking for you there, a sudden memory from another time. The day faded into night, but I could see everything, for miles. Coyotes and scorpions came to me out of the desert. Sat around me in a circle. I sat down too, there was nowhere to go. I wept. Waiting for you as I have always waited, knowing you will never come.

Baumeister, R.F., Heatherton, T.F., & Tice, D.M. (1993). When ego threats lead to self-regulation failure: Negative consequences of high self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 141-156.

Baumeister, R.F., Smart, L., & Boden, J.M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103, 5-33.

Da's raht, I be convertin' ta black. Mah beloved Nyquil...

...say she won' marry me 'lessn I do. Mah mean ol' mothafuckin' pappy-in-law-ta-be, he say...

"There's a little 'salt-an-pepper' action going on at the RageBoy camp and I'm not talking about the beard on "that [expletive deleted], Dave Winer". Some thirty od years ago I went to school with a girl named Vicks44 and a few months back I got a call from a young woman name Nyquil. You figure it out. Her hair is in Locs like mine as well. What was I supposed to do. I figured Uncle Rage would make a nice son-in-law for me ya know, help me out with the family business but instead, Nyquil is putting RageBoy to work; Housework!"

Mah mean ol' mothafuckin' pappy-in-law-ta-be (doan he look mean?) say to clik on hiz pitcher...

So there I was putting on my most faux-professorial face in the conference room of Land Hall, HQ it would seem for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. What I was really thinking at that moment was the Dylan line from Tombstone Blues that goes: "now I wish I could write you a melody so plain / that could hold you dear lady from going insane / that could ease you and cool you and cease the pain / of your useless and pointless knowledge..."

I was concurrently delivering a short, succinct lecture about how the indigenous peoples of Mexico welcomed the Spanish Conquistadors, and saying this was a pretty fair metaphor, I thought, for how the entire thrust of BloggerCon -- which was celebrating its own success in the Great Hall from which Frank Paynter and I had briefly escaped -- was to welcome with open arms those same old rigid credential-oriented semantic straightjackets from which blogging had, for a few historical moments, liberated us. So come on Legitimate Press, come on Academe, come on Party Politics! On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!

Remember what FM radio was like in the 60s? No, of course you don't. Therefore you will be condemned to an unbreakable addiction to the endless blatherskite of Top-40 "A-List" bloggers who get invited to conferences to underscore their own self-importance. The Medium is Dead. Long live The Medium! I used to be disgusted / and now I try to be amused... Gimmeabreak, OK? Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!

"Edwin H. Land: A Harvard dropout, Land went on to
invent polarizing filters and start the Polaroid company.
In 1947, he introduced the world to instant film."

Ordered a couple other books by the same guy today: Meanings of Life, and Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love