Cziltang's Ratlands

Strange Nights
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So I'm sitting here listening to "Thorazine Shuffle" from a Government Mule concert I downloaded last night. I keep hearing the lyric:

Step right back and watch me now
I'll show you how it's done
Stay right here with me now
Till the damage is done

Pretty much sums up my life for the past few weeks. The Head Rat is having some kind of weird reoccurring muscle spasms which are both painful and frequent. Consequently, she doesn't sleep much and that means she watches TV at night. Given that she has significant hearing loss, there is a certain abundance of volume involved in the process and so I don't sleep much either. I bought her a pair of wireless headphones and hooked them up to the TV, thinking that that would be helpful. It does work for a while, until she starts to doze off, her head drops and the ear cups get pushed away from her head, giving me a much more intimate dose of the Soap Opera Network than I am really comfortable with. Generally I wait a while and then try to remove the headphones with the intent of turning them off and going to sleep, but that usually wakes her up and we start the process again. It's kind of humorous now, but at 4:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning when I've got an 8:00 a.m. meeting it loses some of its entertainment value. Still, I really can't complain too much. Me losing sleep is minor compared to living your life never knowing when your limbs are going to start spasming violently.

And its not like I don't have my own self-destructive tendencies. I am perfectly capable of wrecking my own life without outside help, thank you very much. At least I got over my gravitation toward chemically enhanced self-destruction a long time ago. But on any given night I can still find 97 things to obsess about in the middle of the night instead of sleeping, and while watching TV or surfing the net will distract me for a time, in the end their main advantage over illicit substances is only that they are legal.

But I really hadn't intended to sound like I was in some orgy of self-pity, because I really don't feel that way about it. I had intended to talk about some of the magical distractions I've found now that I took the plunge into the world of broadband. I always stayed away from graphics-intensive web sites and music downloads when I had dial-up because I'm not a patient guy (although there is a certain Zen-meditation quality to the experience of watching the estimated length of time until a download is completed gradually diminish). A few years ago I tried to download a Grateful Dead concert. I started it at 10:00 at night and it was still downloading at 7:00 the next morning when I got up. That was pretty much the end of my concert downloading.

So I'm alternating between surfing and downloading on the one hand and trying to figure out which driver it is that causes my system to crash when I'm trying to click through newsgroup articles and RSS feeds on the other. I still haven't gotten that one figured out, nor have I figured out why my system won't recognize the Ethernet adapter I installed. (That would be the wired ethernet adapter I installed after I discovered that I couldn't set up my wireless router without a wired connection to the computer so the router can be configured before setting up the wireless network, which currently makes my wireless adapter, as the British would say,"surplus to requirements.") Thankfully, my modem has a USB port, so in spite of several pieces of currently superfluous equipment, I am a broadband surfin' fool.

*****

Rat, Jr. introduced me to Foamy the Squirrel tonight. Foamy is found in a series of animated cartoons at the Illwill Press website. These are not cartoons for children, nor are they for the faint of heart or the easily offended. They are vulgar, sick, twisted, rude, obnoxious, socially unacceptable and, in my opinion, utterly delightful. "Coffehouse Propaganda," "Free your Mind," "Kevorkian Scarf," "Amityville Toaster," and "Medicated Baby-Heads" would be my personal favorites.

by Cziltang
Posted: Friday, April 22 2005 11:32:52 PM