Well, I had a rather interesting experience this morning as I was sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast, I had just taken my morning meds. I am 35 at the time of this writing and it's something that had never happened to me before.

Have you ever taken a gulp of soda that was too big and it hurt as it's going down? Has that even actually ever made you dizzy? Well I did that this morning with my Diet Mountain Dew (The Breakfast Drink of ChampionsTM). There it was, too big of a gulp, pain in the throat like I was trying to pass a large rubber ball down, dizziness, and then I thought it was going to pass, I thought it was going to abate, so I went back to doing what I was doing and

I'm on the floor.

Panicked yelling from the wife and pain on my legs from hitting something was very rudely awakening me from a nap. A nap... on... the kitchen floor. Wait, what?

Yep, for the first time in my life, I fainted. Lost consciousness (in a non-sleep way). What my wife saw as she entered the kitchen was me reaching for my medicine organizing container (presumably to close the lid for this morning's division) and then suddenly falling out of the chair and onto the floor.

As you might expect at first I didn't know exactly what the fuck was going on. Before I even opened my eyes I was awake again, sort of, wondering... you know what, I'm not even sure I know what I was wondering. It's hard to put into words but I had that feeling that I was waking up from a nap, and that I had been dreaming, (there was even a song going through my head as I awoke, it might have been the same song that was going through my head before I passed out) and I was literally being rudely awakened by my wife's yelling and the table leg's insistence on hitting my legs. After a few seconds everything became clear and I said something like "Huh? What's... huh?? Umm, wait, I'm fine!"

I actually started laughing. I thought it was funny. My wife did NOT.

It took me about thirty seconds after getting up to remember what was the cause after struggling to figure out just what the fuck happened. When it came to me I said "Oh, it was the soda!" Apparently this thing about getting dizzy from too big of a drink of soda was something that had never happened to my wife so she didn't understand and thought it must be something to do with my diabetes. I've had to reassure her over and over it was just a freak thing from the soda, that I'm fine... well, fine as I usually am anyway.

Man that was weird.

There isn't much information on that online. Have any of you ever gotten dizzy or felt a pain in your throat/chest after taking too big of a gulp of soda?

Anyway. Time to get back to work. My JQuery and CSS is waiting!

I tend to dream rather vividly and rather often. What's strange is that my dreams aren't usually the incoherent mess that most people's dreams are -- they actually make a lot of sense most of the time. I mean, they have the standard inconsistencies like walls changing colours when you look away and stuff like that, but the actual "plot" of the dream tends to be pretty understandable once I'm awake.

Last night was kind of a creepy one that made me think for a bit, but it needs some backstory to understand why. See, I'm a filmmaker who runs a small media production company with my friend James. (The actual story of how we met and started working together is kind of funny, but that's a story for another daylog.) Anyway, mostly this company exists for tax reasons so we can charge people around the area to get videos made for them at low, low prices without it being mad, mad illegal. But our actual goal with the company is to use the money from the commissions to produce our own independent projects.

Typically he'll serve as director and general yells-at-everyone person, and I'll do the little quiet roles that I prefer -- writing in pre-production, editing in post-production. In the actual film industry "writing" and "editing" would be incredibly vague terms, but since we're small-time (more like tiny-time), most of the time they're singular jobs done by yours truly. And I love doing them. That's what made the dream scary.

I woke up slowly, stretching my arms to the familiar sound of loud-ass banging on my bedroom door. My roommate wakes me up this way at least five days out of every week, then tries to play it off as if he needs something from me and had an actual reason for waking me up. It's infuriating, but he's obviously trying to help me maintain a human sleep schedule, so I let it slide. Without him I'd be up until 5AM every single night.

But when I opened the door, it wasn't my roommate -- it was my old roommate, the druggie-alcoholic-homophobe-dickwad who I thankfully hadn't seen in over a year. Since this was a dream, I didn't think anything was out of the usual. He came into my room and did that thing he always did back when we lived together: put on a fake smile, and took a stab at me. "I like what you've done with the place," he said, eying the pile of clothes on my nightstand which I'd neglected to put away the previous night.

Funny tangent: The only time this guy had the nerve to talk to me after finding out I was gay was when he ingested a pile of shrooms right before the fire alarm went off. I couldn't stop laughing at his misfortune. Not mature of me, no, but he was always a prick to me and his homophobia was the last straw that made me start openly hating him.

Anyway, I got mad at him and said a lot of things I'd always wanted to say. He tried defending against me by saying that he'd fixed my computer problems. He eventually left. I'm sketchy on the details around this part; it's part of the dream that I've forgotten some of. After he was gone, James came round, waving a DVD case in my face. He told me that he had a surprise for me. We sat down on the couch and started watching.

It was a fully-realized, finalized version of a script that I've been working on since 2009. This script was basically the script. Not-funny tangent: I once suggested mailing some scripts out to see if any company would be willing to back us financially. This script was one of the scripts I suggested, and James told me quite firmly that I could send out any other script I wanted, but that one was our movie, and he wouldn't want to work with me anymore if I was willing to throw it away. It was a very dramatic moment in my life.

The movie was perfect in every way, and at first I was really happy about it. I enjoy production, but it's really annoying and the idea of having someone produce all my scripts for me without having to stress myself out with actors and shit can sometimes seem appealing. After a point, though, it became so obvious that James would not be capable of producing such a great-looking movie on his own that I turned to him and said, "This is ridiculous. I'm dreaming, right?"

He looked at me with sort of a disturbing glean in his eyes and answered, "Yes." At first I didn't buy it, as if it was just one of those things that you say in a crazy situation, but then I realized that this really was impossible. I pinched myself. The dream became lucid (meaning I could control myself in the dream).

Once it was lucid, the brain fog of a standard dream lifted and I realized just how scary of a situation this was. James made a huge, ambitious project without any help or input from me, my old roommate (by all definitions a moron) fixed my computers for me, and evidently no one needed an editor in any of this. The only way I'd contributed to anything was--

--with the screenplay itself, but for a variety of reasons I've recently been... It was at that point that I woke up. While thinking those things, I'd ran back to my room and went back to bed. When I woke up this morning, I saw that it was nearly 2PM despite my going to sleep relatively early last night. At first I was convinced that the dream really had happened and I'd actually ran back to bed and fallen back to sleep. But that obviously was not the case.

So maybe this dream wasn't a nightmare in a traditional sense, but it scared me. I've recently been stressed a bit trying to get some writing done quickly for a competition, and I suck at getting writing done quickly. I'm the kind of writer who can do a first draft, and edit, but not both. The only way I can edit my own first draft is if I let a significant span of time pass, and I don't have that luxury with most of my projects which have been created thus far. As a result of this, I've started to doubt that I have any skill at all in writing, and this dream reminded me quite painfully that editing and computers are replaceable skills -- or at least they feel that way to me -- and that my only real worth to James or the company is my writing.

So really it was more disheartening than scary, but I still woke up sweaty. Whatever guys, details.

I think I'm going to try some basic writing exercises to see if I can gain new perspective on my own work without waiting a ton of time between writing and reading. Maybe rewrite the script as a short story (or vice versa in other cases)? From a different character's perspective? Anyone have any ideas, feel free to /msg me. I'd appreciate it.

a moment of stillness
the hands rage in silence
a door creaks
a spot of light lands in a corner
and dies away
the cricket in the distance
doesn't chirp
no water drop slides out
of the faucet
to drip down the counter
onto the parquet floor
    
movement imagined
happens in the mind
it sets in motion
some cells or other
but why do we even bother
why does the hand
for the light switch reach
why won't it rather
those eyes teach
to see the ghosts of walls
that their position firmly announce
as you blindly into their presence pounce
    
the pillow's white may brilliantly glitter
the eyelids may with pleasure flitter
a pleasure idle and trite
the bitter spongy core can't taste
and with the vision's greed defied
fall back blind and chaste
and into the pillow's depth glide

I had a weird dream.

Among the random scraps and blurred bits of my subconscious' store of What the Fuckery, there was a part where two people who were apparently my friends but I’d never seen before in my life were in my room. They were on the bed, him trying to read, and her giggling at an iPhone.

He finally leaned over to see what she was snickering at, then started laughing himself.

“What?” I said, going over to see. “What is it?”

They showed me the phone. On it was one of those websites that has the entire King James Bible on it. At the top of the screen was Mark 3:11, underneath the words were blurred squiggles. But dream-me could read it perfectly.

I started laughing too. It was the greatest pun ever.

“That’s hilarious!

“I know, right?”

“Gimme the phone, I gotta show this to someone.”

So I went and showed the joke to several people: my mom, my sister, my brother, a fire man wandering the streets, and a mime who could talk, but only in Sumerian. All of them burst out laughing at the pun.

The fireman made the noise of a duck when he laughed.

“Why don’t more people know about this?” said the mime.

“I don’t know!” I said in the same language. Everyone knew about the Ezekiel one, but nobody knew about this one which was ten times filthier and a zillion times more clever.

Then the mime and I proceeded to switch over to Babylonian and discuss the Voynich Manuscript (it was his diary back when he was visiting Atlantis) and then the prodigal son story. I was pissed off and took the good son’s side.

“The dad was a dick.”

“Well, think,” said the mime, now inside of his invisible box. “The other guy may have gotten a party, but the good one is still probably going to inherit everything. Favorite or not, I doubt the dad would be dumb enough to leave the other one with all his land and stuff.”

“Oh,” I said, perking up. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

The mime was by now thoroughly stuck inside the box, so I had to help him out.

Later on, an OCD woman at the checkout counter in a grocery store was giving me my change. It was supposed to be 2.83, but she was giving me 3.00 even because she liked round numbers when I woke up.

“Thank you,” I said, trying to turn back and see the woman, but only getting tangled in the blankets.

Mom (passing by my room): Who are you talking to?

Me: The lady at the checkout- I guess she’s gone now.

• * * * *

Mom had the day off today, so she decided to drive me to school rather than have me go on the hour long bus ride. On the way, I pulled out my phone and googled Mark 3:11.

“Dang,” I said.

“What?” said Ma.

“I had a dream where there was a really funny pun under this verse.”

“What does it actually say?”

“And unclean spirits, when they saw him, fell down before him, and cried, saying, ‘Thou art the Son of God!’” I closed the phone. “Frankly, I’m disappointed.

That got her giggling, though, so that was something.

* * * *

In psych today we watched a documentary. It was about a transgendered woman who used to be a guy and her brother who had a chunk of brain removed and was a raging asshole and how he was the long lost grandson of Orson Welles and their family’s exceedingly poisonous relationships. It was called the Prodigal Sons.

Life is funny sometimes.

Format SSHHHIIIIFFFFFFFTT!

Like I said at the outset, this is an experiment.

It started, like anything, with an idea. When Randall Munroe drew the excellent second edition of his Internet Communities map, he depicted E2 as a tiny island off the coast of Twitter. I feel like that description perfectly captures my feeling every time I come back to this site from "the mainland" after some months or years away from it. I recognize the geography, the architecture, and a few familiar faces, but by and large I have no idea what's going on or who most of these people are.

Where to start? IRL, when I find myself for the first time in an unfamiliar city, I pickup a local newspaper. E2 doesn't have one. Despite its userbase of dedicated writers and its big team of volunteer editors, E2 doesn't have any kind of organized, human-written curation on a day-to-day basis. "What if it did?", I thought. What if there was a news column I could click on every day that would give me some editorial direction as to what was worth checking out, instead of having to figure it all out myself?

Since that column didn't exist... maybe folks would find it useful if I wrote it?

The format I hit upon as my first thought was to write a thumbnail review of the day's collected writeups, as a body of work. That seems to work okay, but it's a bit dull. Since E2's current pool of active writers is small, many of the same few names show up every blinking day. It's not really capturing my imagination enough to where I'd enjoy doing it every morning. For a daily feature, that's a problem.

My next thought is a week-in-review column, similar to the daily reviews I tried out last week, but posted only on Mondays and summarizing my favorite picks from the previous 7 days. I'll try that next.

Because there is still good writing being posted on E2, right now; that is the greater point I'd set out to prove. I'm sticking my neck out a bit every time I say that among my circle of ex-noder friends, but I believe it is true.

Not to tip my hand too much, but I think it's clear by this point that doyle, iceowl, The Custodian, and wertperch are among my favorites. Anytime I come back to this tiny island and those four familiar faces are all sitting around the local waterfront bar, I am a happy man. If newer, more mysterious figures like rosetinted and BranRainey are also strewn around the bar, well alls the better.

And since this is not an actual bar but a website, it is actually much easier to ignore any people you don't like. All you need is someone to suggest a few noders worth keeping an eye on in the first place, and in that capacity I am happy to serve as an unofficial guide.

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