mcgees.org

I don’t need to write them.  I don’t need to embed them.  I downloaded some OpenOffice.org macros from the web, and for the life of me I don’t understand what to do with them.  In the morning, when pain meds have faded, it may be very clear, but, be a dear anyway and answer my question: “I have a .sxc file that I want to be able to use in any arbitrary OpenOffice.org Calc document, new or old.  What do I do?”

I can’t bring myself to actually post this on a support group, because this is “so obvious”, apparently.

From my chair this afternoon, I heard Sebastian incessantly licking something plastic-sounding.  After quickly running through a list of plastic-sounding things that could kill him, I decided this is one of those things I was better off not knowing, and went back to work.

I just went to go make some lemonade, picked up my 1 lb. bag of generic sucralose, and found it covered in, seriously, like a two-millimeter-thick sludge of greyish bodily fluid.  Three guesses.

So: Splenda transferred to new bag, hidden from cat, and mental note added: check on weird licking sounds.

Has it ever bugged you that there is only one “h” in the middle of “Threshold”?  Of all the double-letters to do away with?

Anyway, my feedback rating crossed 500.  Hoorah!  I had hoped for that to happen in March, but I fell behind.  I am now be-purple-starred.  And as the Sibs decided some years ago, Purple is the Atheist color.  So I’m sitting pretty.

Great Engrish:

My shoe is off, my foot is cold
I have a bird I like to hold
My phone is off, in bed I've rolled
And now my story is all told

On April 2nd, Representative Monique Davis of the Illinois Legislature, during a session, condemned Jewish activist Rob Sherman for “destroying what this state was built upon”, shouted in open session, told him to “Get out of that seat, you have no right to be there!”, and commented, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous.”

Oh, wait.  Did I say Jewish?  I meant Atheist.  Brad Sherman is atheist, an activist, and an American.

If Sherman had been Jewish, the airwaves would not have stopped shrieking the story for the last six days.  Monique Davis, a black, female legislator, went all 1841-Mississippi on Sherman’s ass, and there was barely a murmur in the media.

Some of you who get your news entirely online will contend “Oh, everyone covered that, Josh!”  What I want the rest of you to do is, if this is the first, or the first detailed, report you have encountered of what happened, to post, “I didn’t know about that.”  You with me?  The usual suspects can go ahead and tell me I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m just asking the rest of you to be honest about this.  Did this get the coverage it would have if, for instance, an Atheist legislator (Ha!  Must be a fucking incredible duck hunter!) had told a 71 black woman that she had no business in a legislative session?

(You can see it buried deeply in the Chicago Tribune.  I know the Web has a way of flattening sites, but just note what column it appeared under, when, and where.)

Want to see almost real-time video of an eagles’ nest off the coast of California as it is alternately fed by Mom & Dad?  Go here for the eaglecam.

Linux users in X have it great.  Type mplayer http://media1.vcoe.org/eaglecam1 in a shell window, set the window that pops up as “always on top”, and just hang it somewhere on your screen(s).

Thanks, Amal!

I’m alive.  More to follow.

The wee hours, the hours after midnight but before the sunrise, are not kind to a crippled bipolar bachelor.

There is too much to think about.  Too much happening, too much not.  Too little comforting breathing beside you, that you have spent a decade learning to expect.

There is no motivation to read.  No desire to let television wash over me.  Just an urge to take a mallet to the mocking green LEDs of the clock-radio.

I am thinking of redoing my bedroom.  Vinyl floor with a fabric runner between a proper futon at one end of the room and the ensuite bathroom at the other.  Prolific shelving on two walls.  Hanging linen “dressers” for folded clothes, the rest of the clothes on hangers, in the recessed part of the third wall called, by the architect, the closet.  Maybe linen, again, to define its wall, currently demarcated by decrepit sliding-panel doors, their track long since damaged to the point where it is a battle of wits, will, and vertebrae to move them.  Serious blackout shades for the windows (pull-down shades sandwiching lead foil would just about fit the bill.)  The walls: satin black.  And all LEDs?  That is what duct tape is for.

Sleep, death, opiates.  They have the same draw, and they all have the same feel: velvet, and quiet, and soft, and undemanding.  Butcher’s “Perfect, endless darkness”.  And all with a riptide.

Maynard James Keenan named one album “Opiate”.  He named another “Undertow”.  I don’t think this is an accident.  They could be the same name.

When it’s two o’clock, three o’clock, and you’ve taken all the assistive chemicals you can safely consume, and you bob on the water — bounce, bounce, bounce — and wait for the riptide to catch you, wait to be pulled under, pulled in.  Wait to take a breathful of darkness.  And wait.

Consciousness?  Overrated.  Stimulants?  Keep them.  I don’t get the urge.  I just want to sleep, to die, to glide, to be free of the soundtrack and perseveration and scheming my mind — me, I guess — explores, constructs, deconstructs.  I come up with great ideas, yes.  I come up with ideas for companies, for novels, for throwaway lines of novels.  I come up with solutions to technical problems I didn’t even know I was working on.  I find optimizations and melodies and connections.  I find everything a hypomanic 148 I.Q. should.  But I don’t find sleep.

Someone once said that computer programmers “don’t like drugs that make them stupid.”  But that’s not quite right.  Not stupid.  Just still.  Or silent.  Or gone.

2:43.  2:43.  2:43.  2:44.

I once went to a nice restaurant by myself, before going to the theater by myself.  There was another lone diner, a man, sitting next to me.  The waiter approached him, and he held up the menu and asked if they had anything with potatoes.

Potatoes?  What?  I mean, as the main course?  Or, nothing else matters but the potatoes?

It was a nice restaurant, and the waiter kept his composure.  I’m sure he’s been asked stranger things before.  He points out the menu items that come, by default, with potatoes, but helpfully notes that potatoes can be added on the side of any item on the menu.

We’re both sitting alone.  I want to go sit across from him and ask him, “Why potatoes?”  He’s in a suit.  I’m in a suit.  I’m having lobster ravioli, and he’s jonesing for potatoes.

Potatoes.  Potatoes.  Why potatoes, of all things?  2:47.  2:47.  2:48.

Reread.  2:50.  Have to push “Publish” at some point.  My readers are patient, but reading the transcription of every minute on the clock for the next fortnight — the fortnight to come before I can sleep — is pushing it.

2:51.  How do you stop an out-of-control mind?  Where is the sandy incline for when your mental brakes fail?  Where’s the fucking button to turn this machine off?  148 kilos of pure suction.  We don’t want to be stupid.  Ha.  Why not?  Can’t stupid people sleep?

PIC line.  4mg Dilaudid.  Saline push.  Stat.  I said, STAT!  Shit.  No nurses.  No wife.  No son.  No Dilaudid.  Just me, and this award-winning, much-lauded freight train of a mind.  This problem-solving machine that can command six figures and ruin my life.

2:58.  Good night.