One day as I was coming "home," I found the river was in flood stage; my island home was inundated and my shanty certainly had washed away, along with many of my prized possessions.

A


s I slept today, I had a scary dream. I was living in sort of a situation of homelessness, or else I was on the road. Anyway, I was living down by a large river. My Dodge Dart was parked on a road along the river front, and I was living on the downstream end of a small island in the river, in a shanty constructed of salvaged lumber and cardboard. One day as I was coming "home," I found the river was in flood stage; my island home was inundated and my shanty certainly had washed away, along with many of my prized possessions. Most tragic of all was the loss of one of the volumes of my diary, the Abraham Days (which covers October 1988 to March 1989). It's the only paper journal currently in Charlottesville. My Dodge Dart, parked along the river front, had been buried in sediment. I somehow managed to find my way inside, and discovered that the things inside were in remarkably good shape. The rear concave window, however, had been busted out. I was suprised when I awoke to find I'd slept until darkness. I guess I had a sleep deficit from yesterday.

A


h, things are finally starting to get a little interesting over at the Journal of JEL. In a spasm of remarkably readable prose I have been termed "sniveling" and my audience "lazy." For all JEL's bluster, I've yet to be given a coherent reason to make things hard on my readers. Besides, to do so would seem to run counter to the whole idea of the World Wide Web. If I really wanted to challenge my readers, I'm sure I could find a more productive way than writing endless meaningless paragraphs. Some people (Lucy Huntzinger, for example) seem to regard JEL as deep and profound, but in my naïvite, I'm wise enough to see that the emperor has no clothes.

"Genius beyond any I've ever encountered (and a good portion of my friends fall into the near-genius to genius range)." -Elly Cyberpieski

I hope I'm not being too mean to JEL, because that's not my intention. So, in the interest of fairness, a few words of support:
• "He was intelligent, fairly quiet, very quick-witted, and really honest." -Minette
• "Tussing with JEL would be fun. Think of the musings!" -Jessika of Malvernia
• "I think JEL is quite good at times." -Lucy Huntzinger
• "I was ill-prepared for what I found there, and what continued to unfold before me in his emails: absolute genius. Genius beyond any I've ever encountered (and a good portion of my friends fall into the near-genius to genius range). Genius backed up by education (he has a master's degree). A writing style which left me literally breathless. And a vocabulary which sent me (and continues to send me) scrambling for the dictionary with alarming regularity. Now I was intimidated." -Elly Jordaan, from her April 25th, 1997 journal entry.
• "JEL is like Carolyn with a spell checker." -Scott Anderson
• "Orson and I met after six months of email; I'd seen his picture but it didn't do him justice. Neither of us were expecting anything, so we got the unexpected. Six hours after we met face to face, we were tangling the sheets and that was that. Love. " -Plain Jain.

For the last two days, I've had some bitter cold bike rides to work, the kind that make my eyes water and send streams of tears down along my face, which only increases my misery. But tonight, the ride was actually fairly warm. Clouds had gathered and a little drizzle was falling, but it was no big deal.

---

I


'm nauseated by all this windbaggish talk of late regarding the supposed vulnerability of children, especially at the ongoing internet smut conference. If children are so fucking vulnerable, why the hell do so many of them make it to adulthood, where they're useless to pedophiles? Besides, if I was a pedophile (and for all you know, I might be), I'd be riling Randolph in the bushes behind a playground, not surfing the net for stuff not much more revealing than Pampers and Huggies Pull-Ups commercials. By the way, when is Alice Toklas Janet Reno going to crack down on those commercials?

Meanwhile, I sure hope the effort to keep nukes away from terrorists isn't doomed to the sort of failure attending export restrictions on cryptographic technology. My not-especially-solid confidence in the intelligence of the people running this country is always shaken a bit further every time I hear their irrational views about what can supposedly be kept within this country. Um... hello, all I have to do is go to a public workstation at UVA and anonymously email a copy of the for-Americans-only version of Netscape to shussein@palace.gov.ik, and I've successfully and untraceably foiled all your plans! Are the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., that unaware of present technology? No wonder, back in the 80s, they overestimated the size of the East German economy by 900 percent.

today's non-sequiturs Sometimes I used to have my old girlfriend Leslie wear her glasses when we were having sex because I thought she looked real cute that way. -40 degrees Celsius is exactly the same as -40 degrees Farenheit. I only care about Ceej's weight loss to the extent that it affects her status as a babe. Shudder to think: Carolyn is like JEL without a spell checker. A statistical study I made up the other day (with postulated results & conclusions): In an experiment to determine the strangeness of God's acts, "control" buildings with the overall shape and construction of churches were studied for the frequency with which they were hit by lightning and tornados, and this was compared to the number of similar catastrophic accidents befalling actual churches. Actual churches were statistically more likely to fall victim to acts of God than control structures, proving conclusively that God does indeed act in strange (or at least self-defeating) ways. A possible sequitur: Why should anyone praise God if He's unwilling to praise Himself?

one year ago

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?971203