My morning cold has grown… I am really quite ill. Great way to spoil my between-semesters freedom. I got no sleep last night and this morning I feel like I’m worty about a nickel or maybe even three cents.

I’ve been playing lots of games while I’m isolated in my snot chamber. Mostly Ultimx IX and Heroes of Might and Magic III, thought I’m also getting some Quake III in. Man, do I feel like shit.

Wait, can I have this thought? Or is it owned by a corporation…

Man, how shitty is the feeling of waking up and realizing that you’ve developed a mean-ass cold overnight? Ugh. Time to break out the sudafed and the cough syrup.

One never realizes how many truly stupid people are out there wandering around until one starts to read reviews for products on Amazon.com. The intelligence quotient among the human populace in general has got to be somewhere between “none” and “the pricky fucks club.”

Multiplayer games have started to really bore me. Maybe this is yet another sign that I’m not a very social creature.You know, sometimes I get the feeling that the “people people” really hate me because I am a non-people-person. They seem to think that enjoying solitude is an indication of some sort of psychotic tendency or something equally disturbed. Perhaps it is such an indication, at least from their point of view. But of course, I must live from my own perspective…

Just got home from my final class with Dr. Ewa this semester, meaning that I have no more classes of any kind for Spring 2001. A couple of finals next week and that’ll be it. I’m actually starting to feel a little sad that my time at the University of Utah is close to being over. I know the campus and several of the departments fairly well…

Of course, it’s not as close to being over for me as it is for the people who are going to graduate in the first week of May, but I won’t be too far behind really.

I’ve got a bunch of e-mailing to do.

So it’s 2:00 in the morning. What have I been doing? Well… I slept most of the day, didn’t look for a job like I was supposed to, played a few video games until evening… Then, I watched the Jazz in the playoffs. That finished around midnight… And after, I watched some tube. Then, at about 1:00, I wrote the final paper for my Medevil and Renaissance literature class, due tomorrow. Just printed and read it. Once again damn good, especially for an hour’s work.

God, I feel so brainy and so… naughty. Tee-hee-hee. Tee-ha.

Life is nothing more or less than arsenic-laden cake. Light and fluffly, delicious and easy to get down… But you can’t ignore that side order of writhing and twisting painfully in the throes of death.

L’Chaim!

Know that feeling you get when you’re responsible for a project from the beginning, see it through to the end, and realize that you kick ass? I love that feeling.

You’ll know me because I will be taking photos under a red umbrella.

Next book has gone on sale (finally) and is no longer merely on pre-order status. I’m not sure why, but I’m nervous about this one. The more time that has passed, the less safe I feel about the technical editor that worked with me on the project. I hope there are no huge problems. I wish I’d discussed stand-alone Linux firewalls. I wish I’d spend more time testing the chains/tables rules that I set up. I wonder if the technical editor ever reviewed them again like I asked him to?

Ah, well. We’ll see what happenes. It is my final work on nonfiction technology titles, as editor, as author — as anything.

I’m sitting here trying to concentrate on an exam for my Egyptology class. Not easy. Not even true. Really, I’m dreaming of wandering across the north, from Alaska to Nova Scotia. Or maybe I’m dreaming of wandering across Europe. It’s difficult to make out. Whatever it really is, it isn’t class and exams which fill my head tonight…

I feel like spending a night gaming. I haven’t really done that in a while. Too much school and whatever else, you know. But I don’t suppose I will. I want to graduate, after all.

How do you squeeze the poetry out of the tube?

I’ve fallen in love with Northern Exposure. I never gave the show a chance when it was on the networks… I saw chunks of it once or twice, but I always dismissed it as just an interesting pile of character studies and a quaint little comedy. Probably I had an aversion also to it because Lydia and July (a.k.a. David’s little sisters) always called me “Ed” after the character by the same name on the snow.

But damn… I had no idea then how deep it really is. Wow. And I don’t mind at all being identified with Ed now. Not that I ever did… But now it actually gives me a curious kind of satisfaction.

My taping habits will now change. Screw Homicide. Time to tape Northern Exposure. Call me pitiful, but I feel like I’m being taught when I watch it.

Other stuff… Wrote a paper in advance for a change, so I’m not stressing so bad today for the paper due tomorrow morning, though I’ve got one due tomorrow evening that I’ll have to write tomorrow afternoon. I wrote some good lines last night. First time in a while that I’ve really been happy about my writing. Thinking seriously about philosophy suddenly as a possibility for grad school. It may be a good fit. I realized that more than anything else, I spend my time sitting and thinking about myself and where myself falls in relation to everything and everyone else… and just what “everyone else” and “myself” mean, really. I mean, that’s my vice if I have one.

Reading Being and Nothingness again, just to bother myself and waste time.

I really have nothing to say today, but I thought I’d put something here anyway to keep up appearances.

Somewhere in the last mile of a thousand mile journey, I seem to be growing apathetic. I hope I can get over it and get on with things. If not, I’d better decide once and for all and do something else with my life. God only knows what.

Apathy. At least it’s free.

Just got back from a long day of money-losing. My taxes for 2000 are done. I have been run through the grinder, penalized, pulverized and pauperized.

I had to file a 1040, a 1040-V, a Schedule C, a Schedule D, a Schedule SE, form 2210, form 4562, form 4797 and form 8863. That’s nine separate forms, some of which are multiple pages long and took quite a while to complete. All of this calculation and all of that money out the door, just to tax an average college student. I could have had someone else do it, of course — I did last year. But that cost me over $300.00 and it turns out it wasn’t even deductible this year because it fell below my standard deduction and I didn’t itemize. What a load of nonsense and shit.

It’s nuts.

National value-added sales tax, where are you? Let’s get rid of this income tax mess and tax people for boats, planes, cars, computers and other non-necessities — at the register. No sales tax on food or (reasonable) clothing or similar items, of course. I’d pay double just to get rid of this shit and of my incredible fear of the IRS, who have been known to shoot people who didn’t pay up…

I’m all in favor of need-based redistribution by a central authority, but there are much better ways to do it.

Heavy, heavy snow right now. It’s lovely.

The birds are calling over the Great Salt Lake.

Nothing in the world is more worthwhile than a flock of seagulls swirling over endless water in the silence and warmth of driving snow. Sometimes Salt Lake City can really outdo itself.

I am a nomad, a vagrant at heart.

I don’t want a home, I don’t want to know anyone. I just want solitude and to move, to be compelled to go and to keep going endlessly. I want to be ill and to be safe in my illness, to revel in it, to welcome it.

I want to always be on the train, to carry my entire life in a small bag, filthy. I want to seem threateningly disheveled to protective fathers and their children. It’s the addiction, the intoxication of a coward — too afraid to self-destruct, I choose instead to run, to run forever and ever, to run until I die alone and secretive and misunderstood, adolescent and self-indulgent.

Who will stop me? Nobody! But that’s a conceit, a show…

I am beginning to understand… I am a greyscale person in a color world. Too many people don’t understand the beauty and elegance of black and white. Color is garish and undisciplined, so common…

Why did Jobs have to kill off Newton? I really need something to hold my entire self in, but I hesitate to lean toward Newton because if something should happen… I could lose my mind. But what else is there? Nothing. Everything today is just a shirt-pocket filofax. No good. No good.

I hate 2001 and I hated 2000. I hated 1999 and even 1998. Whatever happened to the Berlin wall? Whatever happened to proper recessions? Who can I kill? Who can I kill?

And where are all of these damn kaleidoscopics coming from? I want to look out the window and see distance and calm, not immediacy and commodity frenetics. I hate the world as God made it. I hate America. I want to be on old-time television. I want to watch PBS in 1985, but you can never go home again.

It’s never as good as it was or as good as it could have been but it always seems to cost more than it should and the asshole yuppies always seem to eat it up, pedantic uncompromising anal pricks that they are.

I want Mr. Hooper. I want Red Square everywhere. I want rain.

I want rain.