I really hate going to the VA hospital...

and have to get it off my chest.

See, it smells there.
It smells like sickness and suffering... it smells like slow death.
The VA hospital is not a place of healing- it's a place for soldiers (and sailors, Marines and airmen) to go to die.
It's a nursing home for terminal cases. Some of us just take longer than others.

Going there makes me feel sick and sad and unworthy.
The clink of the gas cylinder, the rasp of the lungs it supports; the shuffling click of the walker or cane... they are reminders of stoic suffering. Little snips of stories far more horrific than mine, riffs of ballads far more heroic.
All of these heroes, come to this dismal place to die.

Some have family there to help them, friends to prop them up. Some have nothing left but pride in comrades long dead.
I lament the multitudes that are yet to come- those yet to join our ranks. Yet to contribute to the miasma of broken hearts and minds, broken bodies and spirits. Those yet to rage and weep in frustration and pain- but never at the hospital.
There, we bear it stoically.

Because whether we acknowledge it or not, we're all there to die.

Heh. Heheheh.

My brain's sizzling. It's gonna be one of those nights.
The question is: do I dope myself into a coma, or do I just roll with it?
See, it's not necessarily a good fizz I've got going. I'm feeling a bit irritable and belligerent.
As I put it to my brother and sister earlier: 'the cosmos is lucky it doesn't wear trousers, or I'd kick it right in the fork.'

~sigh~

So. What are you doing tonight?
I'm toying with all sorts of ideas- most of them require power tools, which I can't do here, so I'm also toying with the idea of going over to the shop.

Of course, that indubitably lead to people running around, shouting, 'What's the meaning of this,' or maybe, 'WTF?!?!?' Admittedly, the second is much more likely, even from friends that are at least as well-read as myself.
Anyway.
When people get all excited like that they get annoying. And inconvenient.
I'd rather not be inconvenienced by anyone I'd regret killing later. My brain chemistry's just not right for casual annoyance.
I toyed with the notion of running down a bicyclist earlier because he was riding slow and wobbly, and that caused the red blinker on his seat post to bob and weave in a way that I found off-putting.
The prospect of the much larger annoyance of coppers dissuaded me.

See? Even with my crazy-eyes on, I can maintain a modicum of control.

The doctors with the cattle prods would be so proud of me.

MWAHAHAhahahahaha!!!!

...because more than two exclamation points are a sure sign of an unsound mind...

Right.
To date, I've jabbered about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles via mass email to my geek friends. I'll do it here this time at least, to avoid spoilers for my lazy, Tivo-ing geek friends out there.

DIVERGENT TIMELINES!
Ha! See- I advanced the possibility last season against arguments of history scrambling, retcon-ing, etc.. As more and more operatives from both sides get sent back, the future a given being came back from may not be the same as the next being's future.

Derrik theorized as much in "Complications"- Monday the 17th's episode.
Sure, about half of the episode was given over to Sarah's fever-tripping, but *shrug* whatever.
Of course, Derrik and I could be wrong, but when I'm in agreement with guy from 90210, I'm almost certainly right. It's the 2nd Law of Bassification, I think.

Right. Y'know- this is much more fun with alcohol. I'll have to do this more often.

OK- what's the effing reference from last week's title? "Mr. Ferguson in Ill Today"? WTFBBQ is that? If there is no reference, it's even better. Inspired, certainly.

"The Tower is Tall But the Fall is Short" was an obvious allusion to the temptation of suicide, regardless of the origins of the phrase. Because it's so true- no matter how many steps you've taken, you've only got to take one more...

Um... what was I talking about?
Jesse. WTF is up with her? I trust her about as far as I could toss one of the tinmen, but then again, she seems to have genuine emotional investment in Derrik. Aaaand she's fucking psycho... Still, she's a hot Austalian with Asian ancestory, so she's welcome to stay.

John finding the photo of Sarah (originally taken at the end of the first film) at Ellison's house is a nice detail, too- that's the polaroid that sends Kyle Reese to the past the first time around.

's all for now. I'm gonna wander off to bed, I think.

I've gotta move to Australia...

and I don't even like beer.
See, I've known about the rabbit problem down under for years. It's always raised Australia's esteem in my eyes that one could get a blasting permit there to deal with rabbits.

But I just learned today that they've got a feral cat problem as well. Make no mistake- I like cats. I don't much care for strays or unmanaged indoor/outdoor cats, but I like cats.
But these friggin things are like... land-based Great Whites- they just cut a swathe through anything in front of them.

And I really want to move down there and kill the damned things for fun and profit.

I'm bored.

Obviously, part of the problem is the fact that I'm had limited mobility due to my back for, oh, two months now.
Another part is the fact that I'm not working.
But even then... you complete the work they pay you to do, and you've got four hours left in the workday.
This is where people always pipe in with "Show some initiative," or somesuch.
What initiative?
Shall I start doing in the janitor's work when I run out of my own? Do I get their pay for that (under the table please- I may not be an illegal, but I want their benefits, too)?
Shall I do your filing? Do I get a cut of your pay for that?
*sigh* It's immaterial, really- I'm not working- but the principle remains.

Pratchett claims that boredom, rather than intelligence, makes us human. In all the world, only a human could wake up and think, "Oh, how dull- the world's the same as yesterday. I wonder what happens if I take this rock and bash that head?"

I mean, I probably spent twenty hours, all told, on the goggles I made for the Halloween party, but my art is so often a temporary diversion- I can only work on something so long before I need to step away from it. Granted, sometimes that step away can last for months at a time a some projects, but *shrug* that's how it goes.

Anyway. I'm sure the goggles were meant to illustrate a point, but it eludes me now. Huh.
Fuggit.

I don't casually kill people these days...

...not that I ever did, really...
My point is, I don't kill people- not because it's wrong to kill people, but because of how inconvenient it is.
I mean, I don't see any reason to go through all the effort to conceal the act, which means some guys with loud cars and lots of bling (yeah, that's right- I mean the cops) would want to talk to me about it. Probably for a long time. This would inconvenience me.

Does that make me some sort of... bureaucratic sociopath? Or just a lazy one?

I lack a pithy headline. Sue me.

so... I was thinking about chemistry, electricity and politics earlier...

Anyway- gun control.
I was thinking about the whole pro-control argument that holds that the framers of the US constitution intended the 2nd Amendment to cover state militias, not the private citizen.

Er... what state militia would that be, exactly?
The National Guard, you say?
But the National Guard is, and has been, a federally controlled entity for at least the last century. The last operation of an honest-to-gods militia would probably have been the Mexican-American War, give or take a few years.

Besides- if the the National Guard were our state militia- that is to say, a body of armed men mustered at need for training or the defense of it's home state- where then, have massive quantities of these formations been for the last ten years?
Deployed (arguably offensively) overseas.
So much for the defense of the states and the rights thereof.

So. Who's your militia?
Who would be the last option, the final sanction, if the federal government went rogue.. er, any more rogue?

Yeah, Yeah- I know

Get bent. I haven't really felt the urge... for roughly a year... or so.

Last night, though, I casually generated some ideas that were rated "fucking brilliant", so I thought I'd go ahead and throw them out on the web so I could call dibs.

1) Political Singularity: a point in space/time in which idiosyncrasy causes a (usually political) idea to have infinite density, creating a black hole within a polity.
ex.: Fat-free Pork-Barreling; a sugar-coated proposal to ban sugar; free health care

2) Dogma Implosion: an event occurring when an individual's or institution's rhetoric structure becomes so dense (often due to high hypocrisy load) it collapses upon itself, resulting in a super-dense mindset that acts as the foundation for the next dogmatic structure.
ex.: organized religion; George W. Bush

So, anyway... yeah.
Those were some concepts I tossed out while on the phone with Daniel, simultaneously playing soccer with Lex in the back yard.
Somebody go copyright that for me- like the man said, "I want a quarter every time somebody says it!"
;)