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January 2004
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Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Alien Duplicate Me

You know, I think aliens abducted me and replaced me with an exact duplicate.

I don't feel like me anymore. I feel like ... alien duplicate me.

Or maybe, I'm a duplicate Jerry that slipped over from a more mellow parallel universe.

That has to be it. The meds don't alter brain chemistry. They make it possible to slip between parallel universes.

It's all beginning to make sense, finally.

-.-.-.-

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Lots Of Spaceships

While going through some old files I found a folder full of drawings I did as a kid:
A Jet-Powered Hydroplaning Yacht

A Super-Sonic Private Jet Airplane

An Underwater City

Lots Of Spaceships



Some Aliens

And An Alien Planet

-.-.-.-

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

My New Brain Chemistry

All is well. I'm getting used to this new brain chemistry. My switching the pill time to evenings is working, though it's giving me some seriously bizarre waking dreams at around 4am ... night before last I woke up and it was like I was in The Matrix with data scrolling down the surface of every wall, across the ceiling, etc. Early this morning I woke up and felt hyper 3-D (4-D?) ... I don't know any way to explain it, it was just weird. Weird and fun. Kind of like I was made out of silly putty. But I was warm and cozy and drifted back to a nice half-sleep.

This weekend I'll be starting the full dosage of the meds. It makes me nervous about what's going to happen when that starts.

Had a great writer's meeting last night. It's always so fun to have friends over, it feels like a little party. My silly android story faired better than I thought it would, but I'm still going to give it a major overhaul. But, not right away. I have three other stories ahead of it in the rewrite pile.

-.-.-.-

Monday, January 19, 2004

Zonked

I didn't take my meds this morning. I'm going to start taking them in the evening right when I get home from work. If I time it right, I should be very sleepy by my bedtime and should sleep through the worst of the side effects.

So far the pattern is thus:

  • Take the pill, and then for about 3 hours everything is fine.
  • 3 to 4 hours after Pill Time, I begin to get high.
  • 6 to 7 hours after Pill Time, I get sleepy (some people get wired at this point, but I start zonking out big time).
  • 8 - 9 hours after Pill Time, I feel jittery & nauseous for about 2 - 3 hours (if I force myself to stay awake).

This weekend I did some writing while on the pill, and I have no idea if the writing is gibberish or not. I lost my ability to judge it. So, this may be a big problem, or it may not. I'll just forge ahead and then let someone read it.

This weekend I got bored with Earth and destroyed it, and from the rubble built Valhalla.

Why? Because it amused my daughter.

Okay, right now you're thinking I've gone total Looney Tunes, but no, this is from a video game that my daughter and I spent a lot of time playing this weekend. It's called Animal Crossing, on our GameCube, and with it you build little cities and populate them, kind of a kid's version of The Sims. I had a city called Earth and replaced it with Valhalla. Heh.

It was way too cold and miserable to spend outside, so we cozied up inside and vegged out. It was fun.

-.-.-.-

Saturday, January 17, 2004

The Martians Are Coming

This is my second day on Effexor XR. I'm already noticing a pattern. Both yesterday and today, about 4 hours after taking the drug, I begin to feel...

Really...

S P A C E Y ...

Like, OOoooOOOOoooOOOooo, yeah, the Martians are coming. Oh yeah.

It's happening RIGHT NOW. I just thought I'd share that with you.

Yeah, and I need to get something to the post office in less than an hour, but ... yeah. I'm not sure I want to be driving right now.

I got some good writing done this morning, and I made some fresh bread, and now I'm tripping on legal mind-altering drugs. If it follows the same pattern as yesterday, the spacey feeling will wear off around 1:00 pm to be replaced by a highly-caffeinated feeling, that will last until about 5 or 6 pm.

Today I'm drinking decaf, just in case.

Moo.

-.-.-.-

Friday, January 16, 2004

Mental Health Day

I have the day off from work today, and there's nothing to do, and no pressing responsibilities (got them all done yesterday). My daughter is at school. So today is a true vacation day ... a "mental health day" in a very literal sense.

Yesterday I reported that I'd been prescribed Reminyl. Wrong. That was the name printed on the bag of samples she gave me. Reminyl, as my friend Tim pointed out, is for mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. I came very close to making a fool out of myself, having the phone in my hand and about to dial the doctor's office when I realized I had the wrong drug name.

The drug I've been prescribed is called Effexor XR. In reading up on it, it is supposed to help with depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Hmmm. Check, check, and check. Yup, I hope it works, and if it does, I wish I'd started taking it years ago.

I took the first one this morning. Two weeks from now I should be able to see if it works for me. In the meantime ... I'm relaxing.

-.-.-.-

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Disorder On The Mind

11:11 am - Figurative crossroads are sometimes impassible to me. Is that a sign of some sort of disorder?

Disorder is on my mind. I have a doctor appointment today about my emotional roller coaster rides. I don't know what to expect. I do know one thing, though ... somehow I lost sight of the fact that life is supposed to be fun. I find myself wondering if I need to learn how to have fun. I used to know. Once.

1:44 pm - I'm sitting at my doctor's office. It's official. I've been diagnosed manic-depressive with panic attacks. She's prescribed something called "Reminyl." I hope it works. 2:32 pm - At the school waiting to pick my daughter up. It's starting to rain. There's rain spatter on my PDA's screen. Yawn.

2:45 pm - Uh-oh. Where's my umbrella?

4:30 pm - I read the name of the medicine wrong. It's Effexor XR. The one I'd originally named I got off the bag that she'd put the samples in.

-.-.-.-

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Adventures With Fossils

Today, since it was such a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday, my younger daughter and I decided to go down to the park and feed the ducks.

These are the local quackers:


Notice in the picture below, at the bottom, the rock that's right under the water? White in rectangular brick shapes? I'll be getting back to that rock in a moment.


Feeding the ducks led us to go under this bridge, just for fun:


Once under this bridge, and then downstream, we came to this wonderful climbing tree:


I even climbed up into it. What a great tree! Anyway, from this tree, we walked down this path along the creek:


Notice the rock that this path is made out of? I thought at first it was old concrete, but upon closer inspection, I found it was some sort of petrified sea bottom. Why sea bottom? Well, I'll tell you why:


This, my friends, is what's known as a imprint fossil of an ancient sea shell. I was doubting what I was seeing at first, because, well, there were so many of them!


My daughter was all over this, instantly. She went around finding them loose, and started bagging them like an evidence technician at a murder scene. She also wanted to go home and get a pick and a shovel, and I had to patiently explain to her, over and over, that it was probably illegal being that this was a city park.

The creek runs right by a very nice library, so we went in and she checked out 5 books on fossils and dinosaurs, and she spent quite a bit of time going over them and identifying her specimens. Then, at one point, she announced that's what she wants to be when she grows up: A paleontologist.

That made my heart swell. My own kid, a scientist! Well, I can dream.

After our adventures with the fossils, we came home and played with Legolas, the ex-snake-food turned pet.


Hope everyone had a pleasant weekend! I sure did!

-.-.-.-

Saturday, January 10, 2004

Coffee and Milquetoast

I spent most of the day in glorious goof-off-ed-ness. About the only thing I accomplished was the washing of dishes and the making of dinner (thus creating more dirty dishes). My manic depressiveness was calm today, neither up nor down.

I'm rewriting one of my stories, "Daytime For The Dead," and it's turning out completely different. I'm using some suggestions from my writers group and, especially, avoiding the things about the story that they disliked (and in retrospect, so do I). So, now, about the only thing it has in common with the first version is the name of the main character, and the setting. It's not really my setting, though. I'm blatantly robbing ... er, paying tribute to ... Salvador Dali. The story for the most part takes place inside his paintings. A lot of the plot changes came to me while I was doing dishes.

Weird. There's three places where I can always count on my muse to show up.

  1. Taking a shower.
  2. Driving.
  3. Washing dishes.

This afternoon she materialized next to me while I was up to my elbows in dishwater suds. She sat on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs and popping some gum, and said, "Hey, drop all that moral crap from that story."

"Say what?"

"Drop it. No one wants to hear it, and you're only putting it in there because you think it's dramatic. It's not. It was dramatic when Mod Squad dealt with it in the 70's, but since then it's been done to death."

"Mod Squad? What?" She'd lost me.

"Think about it. What is the one common thread between all your literary heroes?"

I frowned, thinking hard. What in the hell was she talking about? My literary heroes over the years... Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, Mark Twain, Jonathan Lethem ... and now Chuck Palahniuk. They had something in common?

"They're all anarchists at heart," she told me. "They buck the rules, they're contrary, they're iconoclasts, and so are you. Write true to yourself."

It was like a punch in the gut. She was right. Lately I've been writing watered down stories, too cautions, void of rebellion. Milquetoast. "Eew!"

"That's right," she said. My muse hopped down off my kitchen counter, sauntered over to the refrigerator, and took my last beer. Then she was gone.

And I have this burning desire to write something.

-.-.-.-

Friday, January 09, 2004

Moody, Compulsive, and Manic Depressive

Well, I started the ball rolling. I called and made a doctor's appointment, intending on discussing my manic depressive symptoms. I am not looking forward to taking drugs, but I have to face it, I am depressed most of the time. Part of it is because of my situation and lack of money (money may not buy happiness, but it definitely makes life more pleasant), but that only accounts for about 1/3 of it. The other 2/3 are inherited. Or intrinsic. I've always been moody, compulsive, and manic depressive. If I'm diagnosed as such, it will explain a lot.

I know I'm very depressed right now. I just want to go home and sleep and not wake up.

-.-.-.-

Thursday, January 08, 2004

One Blonde Rat

Too tired to write last night, so I got up early early this morning. By the time I actually "wake up" I'll have run out of time. It's already been 25 minutes and I'm still working on making coffee. Every few minutes I break out in yawn attacks.

I'm pretty sure we have a new pet. Not one we planned on, either. I am keeping two snakes, and snakes eat mice and rats. A week ago I picked up two young rats from the local pet store as "feeders" but, unlike the ones we get at the Big Corporate Chain Pet Store, these aren't white lab rats, these are what the Corporate pet place would call "fancy rats."

The black and gray fancy rat lasted 10 seconds with the snakes. They turned their noses up at the blonde one.

That's right, the blonde one. We have a blonde rat. I tried feeding it to the snakes several times, but it must not smell right to them, or something. They want nothing to do with it.

And the darn thing is SO CUTE, and it's very sweet and personable. It's living in the "feeder tank," having made a home under a half coconut shell, and I've been feeding it leftover Christmas nuts and pumpkin seeds. One of my daughters named it, which was also a mistake. Since it's male, blonde, and has pointy ears, she dubbed it Legolas, after the heartthrob elf in the Lord of the Ring movies.

I was afraid something like this would happen. Never get attached to the food.

Too late.

I haven't heard whether or not Becky and Angel made it back to California yet. I'm hoping they did in the middle of the night and didn't want to call and wake me. I'll probably get the call during the day today.

-.-.-.-

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Big Plans Leading Nowhere

Cleaning house and washing dishes while listening to the new Pink album. The happy highs come at me from strange places and unexpected times. I love this singer, probably because she has the same spirit as Crissy Hynde (anyone remember the Pretenders?) and she doesn't seem to be afraid of anything.

Becky called tonight from Arizona. So far so good. They got a hotel room.

I called in sick today. [Something I ate, I think. Yuck.] Moped around the house. Made big plans and then didn't follow through. Didn't feel up to it.

-.-.-.-

Sunday, January 04, 2004

Latest From Mars

Latest from Mars ... while ESA will begin trying to contact their poor, lost Beagle-2 lander today using their Mars Express orbiter, the USA's roving lander Spirit landed and is already sending back pictures.

Sorry, but, I can't help feeling a bit of pride that the NASA craft is kicking ass. Okay, a lot of pride. Go Spirit, go! And we have another one landing in a few weeks. The invasion of Mars by Earthbots is full underway.

DoorIntoSummer thinks it's funny that we're supplying Martians with free Jeeps.

Meanwhile, something that caught my eye while I was looking for Martian news: Brittany Spears got married in Las Vegas "as a joke" (but the marriage is real ... to some old childhood friend of hers). Okay, Brittany, there's a bit too many bubbles in that pretty little head of yours.

Another techno-space bit of excitement is that the JPL spacecraft STARDUST flew right up to the comet Wild-2, collected samples, and is now bringing them back to Earth. But not before snapping a close-up picture of the comet:



Very cool!

-.-.-.-

Saturday, January 03, 2004

Goodbye Yard Work

The weather has been remarkable over the past couple days here in north Texas. In the mid seventies. Beautiful! I seem to remember last year at this time we had snow on the ground and ice all over the roads.

Walk outside today, and it feels like spring. The downside is that the grass has started growing again. No doubt within the next week we'll get a hard frost and that will end that.

I only plan on mowing once more at this house. Then, if I can help it, no more yard work for me. Ever. It will be a pleasure to sell my lawn mower at my moving sale. That and the edger, the weed whacker, and the hedge trimmers. Oh, and let's not forget, the tree trimming pole.

Goodbye yard work. I will not miss you.

What I will miss is being able to turn up my TV as loud as I want, and more importantly, to not have to listen to my neighbor's stereo. That's going to be a bummer. Then again, there's always those new noise-canceling headphones. Better living through technology strikes again.

As much as I love this house, I have to admit it to myself, I don't really love this house. I loved the idea of the house. It was the status, the progress mark in my life. I had the Good Job, the new house, the new car, the new family dog. The whole thing. But when my friend Peter died here, it cast a shadow over this house. We never threw much of a party after that. We never bothered to finish decorating it. It was like my family and I just existed here. Never painted, never replaced the carpet. It never really became ours. We never made it ours. It's always been the bank's house. We live in the house that the mortgage company owns.

I don't want to live here anymore.

-.-.-.-

Friday, January 02, 2004

Return Of The King

Okay, yesterday evening we went and saw Return Of The King. Yeah. Groovy. It was fantastic.

But before it started I saw some previews for some amazing looking films. Yeah. Groovy. I can't wait.

But one of them is called "The Butterfly Effect."

Man, am I pissed off. That's the premise of one of my short stories. MINE. I wrote that back when I lived in Dallas, so that's at least 4 or 5 years ago.

I'm not saying that the screenwriter stole my idea. He or she may have read it when I sent it out to a publication, or they may not have. It doesn't matter. It's different enough that I can't file a lawsuit. They probably did come up with it on their own. Whatever.

But from now on, anywhere I send this story off, they're going to say, "Oh, that's just like that movie. Write something original." They'll think I'm imitating the movie.

This isn't the first time this has happend, nor will it be the last. It happens to all writers. Whoever gets theirs to Hollywood first, I guess, wins.

Whatever.

It's just very frustrating, is all. I'm going to pull the story from circulation and just put it up on my website. I might as well. It's no longer marketable.

-.-.-.-

Thursday, January 01, 2004

Happy New Years!

As I've been saying, I have a good feeling about 2004. Let's hope that good feeling means something, and that 2004 will be a year of new and wonderful beginnings for us all. A lot of us have been going through some personal trials and tribulations. Now let's draw a line in the sand and say, "Dammit! Okay! I've paid my freaking dues. Where's my slice of the pie? Give me my freaking slice!"

Oh, yes ... I've had my new years champagne. Can you tell?

Be safe, everyone. Have a good year!

-.-.-.-

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