The long dark junk food of the soul:

What kind of shape is your somnia in? It’s four-o-nine and mine is fine. I really need to quit coffee until I get this figured out. I don’t feel bad. I’m just too restless to sleep. Maybe the new video game system is rotting my brain. Can video games cause insomnia? I know if the flashes happen too quickly they can trigger epileptic fits in people who are prone to them. Maybe my medulla has gone oblongata as a result of all this digital tomfoolery.

This evening’s recap: I had been working my way through the temple of Pandora, which was deep in a desert and strapped to the back of the last surviving titan, who is doomed to crawl around in the sand until the winds rip the flesh from his body. I had to kill three sirens and a mess o’ Minotaurs to find the place. Anyway, I had only just survived the combined onslaught of several hundred harpies and some undead archers, and I had taken Pandora’s box from the temple, when Aries sensed my victory and the consequent threat to him. He hurled a Doric pillar at me all the way from Athens, Athena’s city that he was ravaging at the time.

This dude Aries is about a city block tall and tricked me into killing my wife and kid earlier, which I only just learned in a series of flashbacks triggered by the caresses of a half clad oracle, hence my current blood vow to avenge Athena and my wife by killing the god of war. So, the pillar impaled me tonight, about two a.m., at the moment of my victory over Pandora’s trap laden temple and I was sent to Hades.



Luckily, on my fall towards the river Styx I was able to thrust my twin daggers, bound to my wrists with magical chains by Aries in exchange for a vow of servitude, into the body of a ship captain that I had killed much earlier in my quest. I killed him on the same day that I got the memory card and defeated the hydra for Poseidon. So now I am busy trying to climb out of Hades while being forced to kill again all the creatures that I sent there earlier, only now they are all stronger and on fire. Is it any wonder I can’t sleep?

On top of all that I’ve been watching The Gilmore Girls first season box set that Vanessa loaned us and Rory’s grandfather is in the hospital. I assume he’s going to be ok for now, as they were just getting to know each other. Then Rory and the boy with the D name (Dean I think) are dating now. The guy that owns the coffee shop knows about Lorelai and the English teacher from Kissing Jessica Stein, he always plays the verbal types and at one point says to her, “Hey, we both have the wordsmith thing in common”. That’s just the sort of Dorothy Parker line you’d expect from Dorothy Parker Productions.



In addition to that I’ve been watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica, which I picked up from Net Flicks, and in the last episode I have here Starbuck is breaching the upper atmosphere of a planet in a flat spin after taking out a Cylon raider. She’s lost in a risky venture attempting to atone for the death of her lover, Captain Adama’s son.

And in chapter two of Thomas Pynchon’s opus Mason & Dixon I am tracking his recurring structural hat tips to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as the whole book is going to be told in flashback and he’s already parodied the line about the Buddha without his lotus flower, only he’s suggesting that his narrator found enlightenment, but then lost it again. Pynchon has also taken Conrad and linked him with Foucault’s Madness and Civilization by asserting that the narrator chose his sea voyage over bedlam, as in a box or out to sea were the only two cures running at the time.

I always thought that V was an attempt, a successful attempt, at turning modernism and postmodernism into characters and having them fight it out. I think he’s doing to same thing here with all the early American schools and various key figures of the enlightenment. I’m told that there’s a talking owl coming up so that means he’s throwing n a little Clash of the Titans as well, fits in nicely with my whole God of War trip.

See what I mean about the coffee… sun will be up soon and I imagine so will I. I’m just sitting here mainlining media, surfing the internet on a laptop while my consoles buzz around me.

Helpless to avoid the blitzkrieg of datum the fish while away their time trying to get me to accidentally feed them as I feed myself: off schedule.