On the principle that things are the opposite of what they claim to be, I’m thinking the Internet has brought information starvation and not information overload. Say a website amounts to 1MB, and you can spend an hour reading it, or a half hour. That’s roughly what a 3-minute song amounts to on a CD, roughly, for the sake of argument. I’m just saying, the information you process in five minutes, in analog, when you walk through a garden or watch a butterfly (fucking butterflies) fly across your yard, and hear the icecream truck’s bell jingle in the distance, and the splash of a kid across the neighborhood jumping into a pool, is vastly more than what you process in hours spent sitting at the computer. The smell of a rose – some roses at least – sending that over the Internet, if you could, how much bandwidth would that use? How many hours a day do some of us spend totally divorced from all of our senses except sight and hearing?

You must be careful. You must please mom and dad. Cause you never know. You can’t be too careful. They take you on lots of trips, they could just leave you somewhere. It would be so easy. Just forget you. Who knows what they talk about when you’re in bed and they’re still up? Sure they love you. So far. Just stay bland and good. Just be good. Don’t feel anything. You can feel at night. You can punish yourself then for bad stuff they didn’t catch. You can feel sad. You can tell yourself your mom’s in the hospital dying, and make yourself cry.

And so, at 43, I catch myself stuck in traffic, imagining my daughter’s funeral and crying. Sure she’s sick, but she’ll be okay, that has nothing to do with it. It’s just fucked up.

Driving home Sunday with a prune tree, two rose bushes, some flowers and a 5-year-old crammed into the Dobl

Summer is over. This weekend was warm, but there was still an autumnal nip in the air. I got some work done around the house, and instead of crawling into a corner with a bottle of Jamesons and a cello concerto I took Gamma to the gardening center and we bought some stuff. I planted two rose bushes and a prune tree. Alpha and I went for a 10k run and I didn’t injure anything. We took the kids on a long bike ride along the Danube and had lunch at a restaurant a few towns away, in a grape arbor outside.

We noticed, at some point, a red ring around one of Gamma’s many mosquito bites. This is a symptom of Lyme disease, which used to be transmitted only by ticks; however our new, improved post-flood mosquitos now transmit it as well. All I can say is, Let’s hear it for antibiotics. She’s feeling rather tired, but the antibiotics should catch it.

Also, if any of you are considering upgrading your operating system from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, be sure and back up all your files first, because it could trash your hard drive if you are a moron.

I have this Japanese friend, I think I mentioned him recently, he’s a nice guy, lives in Austria. Sometimes a little hard to understand, our conversations sort of jump around between English and German sometimes as we seek a channel of communication. He’s the one who recommended I upgrade, as I had complained my PC was crashing way too much. He put me on the phone with his neighbor, who is a Computer Programmer.

Computer Programmer: You’re having PC problems?
Me: Uh huh.
CP: You really should b-b-back up your files before upgrading to Windows 2000 because there’s a big dif-f-f-f-f-erence between 1998 and 2000, whereas 2000 and XP are not so far apart, and don’t usually have such problems.
Me: I was hoping I could get away with it. I neglected to burn a CD.
CP: Heh. P-p-p-p-p-people should always arch-ch-ch-ch-chive their f-f-f-f-f-fffffiles regulary.
Me: … Yeah, well.
CP: B-b-b-b-basic-fffff-ly you can do t-t-t-t-fffff-two things. Reformat your hard drive, or pfpfpfpfpfffff-install a se-e-e-econnnnnd drive and [technical blah-blah].
Me: I’ll t-t-try to get a friend at work to do that.

And so on. On certain rare occasions, when I am nervous or tired, I stammer, and this guy was getting me started. I was afraid he’d think I was making fun of him. Anyway. I’ve got a friend who’ll look at the hard drive this week. And I’m making the most of my computer free time, doing freaky stuff like hang out with my family.

Curious why someone from Germany visited FL three times in quick succession via kinky google searches, even going to the google cache, I looked and found out why.

After searching for over a decade, scientists find a gene associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

While the rest of us were sitting around on our couches gesturing lewdly with cigars, speaking with funny German accents and generally making fun of Sigmund Freud, psychiatrists have been busy debating a new class of mental illness: relational disorders.

This is true, I read it in a newspaper yesterday. They are considering, for example, defining a marriage where the spouses bicker all the time as suffering from a disorder, which will be given a good name; this relational disorder – a sick relationship – will then be treated with your usual psychiatric tools of therapy and drugs. This is good, because such disorders, besides making/keeping people miserable, do seem to cause other problems like various forms of abuse etc.

When I first heard this I thought, heh, the jokes are writing themselves again. And, now everyone’s going to bicker because then the insurance pays for their drugs.

But we don’t get depressed because then the insurance pays for our prozac, do we?

I’m thinking they might be onto something here.