This is my brain…

…and this is my brain on Hidden City.

Any questions?

Oh, there are questions? Then I shall endeavor to answer them tomorrow. For now, I am beat.

For several months I have been experiencing near-constant headaches. They vary in effect, moving from "I need more coffee to get through this," to "How much blood is coming out of my ears?" is a space of minutes. Most troubling, though, are the occasional ice-pick spikes at the base of my skull, which are blinding in their intensity and can leave me incapacitated for several minutes, and weak for hours.

Having determined that this is not something I can just deal with until it goes away — the technique I learned from my mother — I have visited my new doctor. He is very eager to get to the root cause (i.e., he's still young enough to care about his patients), and requested that Cigna approve several rounds of tests. Unfortunately, headaches, even the severe varieties, are too generalized to pinpoint the specific tests needed. You just start by ruling out the potentially life-threatening conditions and go on from there. Insurance companies, of course, prefer you start with the cheapest tests, and just hope you don't die of something that would have been detected by the more expensive variety.

Some tests have been approved, though, and tomorrow morning I go in for X-rays and CT scans. As best I can interpret the doctor's handwriting on the prescriptions, I will be getting "C-spine x-ray," "CT of brain w/wo," CT of carotids," & "CT of Circle of Willis*." There are a couple of other utterly illegible items as well, perhaps special prizes or something. All in all, sounds like I'll be having a grand time on Wednesday morning.

As to the potential causes, it's still up in the air. Discussed theories include blood clots, nascent aneurysms, pinched nerves, severe sinusitis, ocular disorders, misaligned vertebrae, brain tumors, hypochondria, hallucinations, alien implants, badly tuned orbital mind control lasers, and excessive orgone buildup. (Ethics compels me to admit that not all of these were suggested by my physician, although he did laugh at my proposals.) The only things ruled out so far are high blood pressure (mine is unnaturally normal), and dietary allergies (because I would already be dead). Any other possibilities I missed?

At any rate, I will let you know, dear readers, if the tests show anything interesting. At the very least I am going to try to talk them into letting me have copies of the pictures. I mean, c'mon, they shoot digital now! How hard can it be? Whose brain is it, anyway?

*Yes, yes, "Whachu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" Feel better now?

To mix my cinematic comedy classics a bit, I'm not dead yet. But until I have a chance to write more I thought I'd send up a flare by posting this link to a review of the Seattle pre-Broadway premier of Young Frankenstein. The Tynes clan seem to like it quite a bit. (There's a link to some official photos, too.)

I still have mixed emotions about this whole film-to-musical thing, and more so about the film-to-musical-to-film idea, but since both Broadway and Hollywood seem to have run out of ideas at the same time, what the hell. It's not like I'm going to skip the Burton/Depp film adaptation of Sweeney Todd.

I ran across this fine vehicle in my parking lot tonight. The photo quality isn't great due to my hurry to get the hell home, but I thought some of you might enjoy seeing a classic hot rod.

Yesterday I visited the City of Miami Cemetery for the third time with my friend Balou. It was godawfully hot, but at least that kept the undead in the ground where it is cooler. (Well, or in Aventura where they can go to the mall.) Here are some photos.

When Elvis died my mother went into a pitch-black depression that lasted almost a week. She sat on the living room floor surrounded by his records, listening to Viva Las Vegas over and over and sobbing. It was the first time I'd ever seen someone so utterly devastated by the death of someone they'd never met.

Then again, Elvis had already made his mark on music by the time I became culturally aware, and it wasn't until years later that I began to appreciate the magnitude of his impact. My mother came into adulthood in the 1950s, and for a socially progressive young woman in the South, Elvis was almost a religious figure. The idea that one of the idols of her youth could die like that — so suddenly, in such an ignoble manner — was simply more than she could take. Each of us mark our changing seasons in different ways; I suspect that for my mother, the death of the King marked the end of her youth.

There's nothing like getting up this morning and discovering that during the night your host reverted your site without asking first. They e-mail to tell me there's no FTP problem, and yet somehow (mysteriously) yesterday's post about the fire is no longer there.

[Edited to see if things are working properly.]

When you wake up with a skull-popping headache you think the days is bad. I'm not sure if stopping to take some photos of a fire and having an explosion rain gravel down on you is an improvement or not.

From a distance

Keeping it cool

More pictures later, as my site seems to be having FTP trouble. The story is here.

Update: still having upload trouble, so I added the photos to Flickr here.

In the halcyon days of my youth I frequented a fine drinking establishment called "The Rendezvous Club." Chief among its features was the bartender, who was the cousin of a friend, and who poured with a heavy hand. His accuracy in measurement was legendarily bad, to the point where if I stopped in for a drink and he was on shift, I knew I would have to watch myself if I was going to drive home.

To aid me in knowing when to quit, on arrival I would avail myself of one of the many pinball machines on premises and play a few games to test my skill. Later in the evening I would play a few more, and if my score dropped below a certain point I would stop for the night, switching to plain soda and playing until my Houdini score regained its original height. Since I have never been all that great at games requiring fine motor skills, this process would take a while, but at least I had something to do while I waited for the buzz to wear off.

Twenty-five years later it becomes obvious that I was ahead of my time. Those wacky Germans have developed a game using a similar technique to demonstrate to drunken male patrons that they really need to take a cab home. But — and this will surprise no-one — they took it to a new level. It's a driving game, with the screens mounted above the pub's urinals; you steer by, well, by peeing on a metal plate. No, really.

I am sure my brother's girlfriend will be horrified when he reads this to her, as I feel certain he'll want to install one in the living room. Hell, it'll be de rigeur at the Delta House.

Sadly, I'm sure it is far too expensive for me to buy one.

I stepped out of my climate-controlled house and into the pre-dawn Miami soup. It is already over 80°F and the sun is barely up — just another torrid day in the subtropics. Colonel Hoppy got up from his terracotta pot, stretched in that completely self-absorbed fashion that only cats can execute properly, and ambled over to me for some breakfast and a little affection. While he was eating I checked the condition of my alien garden. A bit withered in places from the heat, but nothing dire.

Last night I attended a Miami "blogger" meeting, organized on behalf of some digital movers and shakers passing through town. It was a pleasant affair, if a bit chaotic, and meeting people in the flesh — I won't be quite so retro as to say "in meatspace" — is nearly always a good thing. There were at least a couple of people there I wouldn't mind chatting with again, in a less crowded and noisy setting.

But as is often the case, I felt a bit out of place. While I work in technology, I'm no longer a developer or coder, and if I feel the need to self-identify, I flatter myself that I'm a writer. So when I'm in a room full of people discussing the merits of Ruby on Rails versus other rapid development platforms, or tips and tricks for gaming Google's PageRank algorithm, or just plans for digital domination, I don't have a lot to add. This is not to say I don't understand what they are talking about, because I do. The dirty little secret of geekdom is that the arcane language is a deliberate barrier to entry, much as performing Mass in Latin puts the laity in a position of deference to priests. Pick up the concepts and you can follow along, although executing the described tasks is still a matter of considerable skill.

But this morning as I stood on the porch, drinking coffee among the plants while the Colonel ate his kibble, I found myself wondering for the thousandth time what I am doing involved in this business. If you are waiting for me to describe the epiphany where it all becomes clear to me, don't bother; there isn't one.

This time there's no deadline for the punchline.

Crumbling concrete structures casting long shadows across desolate streets, thick patches of purplish lichen adorning the still-standing walls. Faded, furtive figures cluster together away from the light of the too-bright sun, yellow eyes staring at me as I walk steadily south down the double-yellow lines on the cracked asphalt. I look east toward the place where the beach was, and the glare of the dawn grows brighter until my vision flares into a field of white.

I grope for a moment beside the bed, muscles grumbling. Glasses, lamp, phone. It's 6:15. I could still go back, but not this morning. The apocalyptic vistas remain for a while, double-exposed over the towering heaps of books and laundry; eventually they fade back into the background, visible if I look for them.

It seems that someone at Google is thinking along the same lines as me, as this is today's iGoogle quote:

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. — William Gibson

Hmm, that's got potential.

Sometimes you read something on-line and you shake you head and rub your eyes, because that can't be what it looks like. But no, it is. Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski.

If all you know of Peanuts is what you glanced over in the newspaper funnies, and all you know of Bukowski is that Mickey Roarke was in that movie, and to boot you hate poetry, then you won't like this. But read it anyway, damn it. You might learn something.

Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski.

Tiffany posted an interesting essay on buying locally grown produce in the DC area. I know we have some farmer's market options in this area, but I am self-aware enough to know I won't go to that much trouble. Hell, I tend toward one meal a day as it is, mainly due to laziness. Still, if I didn't live a hermit's life (or hermetic life, perhaps?) I would probably avail myself of the options. I know I enjoy the taste of non-commercial food much more, and it would be better for me, too.

Convenience versus quality: the conundrum on which American society is built.

So let us consider for a moment this thing we call the Internet. In your opinion, what is it for?

The question isn't really rhetorical, it is something about which I've been thinking for quite a while. When you consider other big infrastructures — the interstate highway system, the telephone network — they have a fairly easy to explain purpose. But this inter-operable linking of computer networks around which so many of lives revolve isn't as easy for me to summarize.

My own thoughts are still semi-solid and incomplete, but I am seeking your perspective. So, what's it about? What is it for? Or, for those of you in the corporate world, what's the bottom line C-level executive sound-bite explaining why we need it?