June 7 1998, Sunday

O

h the hangover this morning! I knew this was going to be a hard day to get through. I felt as if I was dying. My neck had wounds from last night's experience at the Black Cat, while genuine cats (black and white off c e n t e r cats) both insisted on sleeping on top of me while I lay face down in bed moaning.

In the morning for awhile I had enough strength and appetite to cook myself food, some chicken that had been marinading for weeks. I gradually became nauseated as I ate, and I had to return to bed. The only real comfort came from the hot waters of the bathtub, so I took two baths today.

During the second bath I was in an unusual mood and wanted to read. I found myself reading Mutants, a collection of science fiction short stories. The story I read today was "Liquid Life," written in 1936 by Ralph Milne Farley. It was a delightful little tale about a virus that had somehow attained superhuman consciousness and taken over a salt pond in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The thing I liked most about the story was the way it raised various scientific objections in my mind and then proceeded to answer them. I was especially impressed by the author's seemingly modern awareness of the fact that viruses never remain lethal over the long haul (since it is detrimental to do so).

I

n the evening I noticed that Nancy's Computer was showing the blue screen of death. Oh shit! It claimed to be unable to read from the C:-drive. Little cachunk-cachunk-cachunk noises were coming out of the white tower of Pentium power. This was, to put it mildly, a bad thing. Similar things had happened a few days ago, and I'd run scan disk and it mapped out a few bad sectors and everything was fine. But today, the situation got worse and worse with every attempted reboot until the computer couldn't recognize the presence of a C:-drive at all. Such nasty things inevitably happen to aging mechanical devices, but it seemed grossly unfair that it was happening during my stewardship. I seem to have bad luck with other people's computers, I don't know why.

So, unable to get up on the Internet, I watched teevee and worked on my musings using my laptop. Later on, Nancy's computer was working again, so I backed up some things from her hard drive and uploaded a few things to the Internet until the hard drive problems resurfaced and rendered the computer unusable.

The Mayor became concerned by my lack of musings updates and gave me a call to see if I'd ever made it home last night.

T

here was an interview with Matthew Drudge on C-Span at night while I sipped my vodkatea. I like the attitude of Mr. Drudge, and the fact that he's fucking shit up and provoking established-media-tut-tuttery with his editor-free one-man-show. He's a good role model even if his politics are reactionary.