Another crucial part of my ongoing process of purification and reconstruction is the strictly physical. And while this terminology - the "strictly physical" - is most often used to refer to, let us say, a relationship which has as its basis sheerly carnal sexuality rather than an emotional or spiritual basis, here I use it in a more encompassing fashion. As a part of my growing depression, my growing quagmire, my nutritional and health-related habits suffered greatly. This proved, over the short term, a very advantageous scheme; by not worrying over nutrition or exercise (the latter never a major concern for me, though as I reached full adulthood and attained an adult rather than an adolescent metabolism, it became increasingly important from an objective standpoint) I relieved myself of a responsibility. This time, however, the responsibility was to myself. And by consuming primarily junk foods, I managed to sustain endorphin release in my brain, keeping away my genuine emotional state in favor of a chemically-created fantasy.

But in the long term, it was more than merely deleterious - this policy proved disasterous, and probably the critical weakness in the overall strategem. At best, it accelerated the arrival of that epiphanic day in which I realized that I had hit rock bottom, that I had nowhere really left to fall.

(But as an aside here, even having hit that proverbial "rock bottom", I acknowledged that I was even so at the edge of a precipice. To continue my habits, to make what had been chiefly a semi-conscious activity a matter of active choice, would have been to trigger another spiraling descent, for it would have done nothing to address the significant emotional or spiritual dichotomy which had arisen within me; and in making that choice, I would have also engaged in significant self-recrimination for making the "wrong" choice. Ultimately, this probably would have been the end of me. Never a person to seriously contemplate ending my life, even from this only slightly-elevated point it is easy for me to now see how near to that terminal conclusion my mental state had been even a few days prior. Cry for help? Not my style.)

So it is this addressing of the physical which forms the third tier of my reclamation (the other two being reform of the mind and reform of the spirit or the heart, representing a trinity which has long been a part of my beliefs: the heart-body-mind trinity as reflected in the coda of action which I abandoned well before I even discovered and adopted it as such a coda, "Strength, or the body; Wisdom, or the mind; Honor, or the heart"). But this is not a cry out against "this too too sullied flesh," as Shakespeare had it. This is not an endeavor to seek immunity from the weaknesses that this flesh is heir to. To sully ourselves, to confront weakness (whether we overcome it or not) is an essential part of the human condition. To ignore these things, to scorn them, is to scorn a central part of one's very humanity. But my purpose here is to recover that humanity, and in that pursuit to better myself, to stand strong against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and to, in the end, make myself better by it.

Better; not perfect.

Of these things, I believe that this most crass, most carnal pursuit will be the most difficult of all. The flesh has never been a thing which has come easily to me; in pursuits of the heart, of the mind, I can excel most greatly. In pursuits of the flesh, I have no self-made structure, no history, none of that essential stuff which proves the cornerstone of my strength in these other realms. Yet here, by my nature, I possess an altogether different advantage. Even as I flee the physical out of shame, out of disinterest, I am possessed of enormous physical potential. When I label myself an "oaf" or a "lout", these are not simply words employed for hyperbolic effect. Truly, honed of form I could be possessed of a nearly matchless physical strength and presence. Even to look upon me is to recognize this potential, obscured though it may be by the ravages of years of incaution and abuse.

(To offer yet another aside, my prodigious physical stature has long been a point of some interest to me vis-a-vis the oft-mentioned Tim. Where I am possessed of what is called a mesomorphic body type, a physical form given to muscularity and large, heavy builds, he is an ectomorph: tall and exceedingly thin. He carries, it seems, not an ounce of fat on him, and to see him this seems exactly right. Perhaps it from my long experience with his physically-slender form, but it is nearly impossible to imagine him either especially muscular or especially overweight. Somehow, it seems as though his form would not allow for either. This is not especially relevant, but I have long found it interesting that we are in build - though not in height - effectively diametric opposites.)

I hate to see the wasting of potential, especially in myself. Yet here my purpose is not to fulfill that potential - that would of necessity be a long-term goal, if I chose to adopt it - but to provide a realistic physical framework in which to progress mentally and emotionally. I suspect that because of the many miles I have need to backtrack in this realm to recover my health, my pursuits will suffer from it. The energy required to sustain my body alone is immense, my basal metabolism an almost ludicrously-high number. While this renders me a certain advantage in helping to speed weight-loss, over the short-term it is, as I have mentioned, nearly certain to be my greatest stumbling block.

Nevertheless, I will not allow my sins of the flesh to shackle me any longer. I will liberate myself from them, and in so doing shall make possible the ultimate freedom and resurrection of myself from the long dark winter in which I have lived these past years. I am dedicated to this; I will not tolerate failure. And while I have failed many, many times in the past, I have never known myself to flee from that to which I was dedicated.

Probably, to me, the most significant step in my efforts to once again master my life vis-a-vis others is going to be learning how to love other people. This is not a cliché from some touchy-feely self-help guide; it is not some sort of emotionally-detached psychoanalytical advice. Rather, it is really what I need to do. Considering that my life - that any life, really - is going to be defined in large part by how and with whom I interact, relearning how to do this is crucial. There is that concept which floats around, that we cannot love another until we learn to love ourselves; this, insofar as it relates to self-respect and the respect of the boundaries of others, has always seemed quite accurate to me. And now, in my current mentally-dichotomous state, in my shattered self-respect, it becomes particularly poignant, particularly salient.

As I make my way through this incipient personal renaissance, pulling myself by tooth and nail from the miasma of the psychic pollution of my established behaviors, it is worth remembering that I am not the first and certainly will not be the last to make such an attempt. For thousands of years, others have made similar choices, and for so long as humanity retains that essential capacity for both the greatest of failures, crushing and horrid, and the most magnificent of victories, uplifting and surpassing kind, other shall continue to do so. I have never been one to take solace in the fact that others have been through what I have; whether a scraped knee or broken heart, the fact that others have known my same pain has failed to inspire in me a mitigating belief vis-a-vis my own experience. Yet it is a different story, at least for me, when we address something which by all rights should seem tantamount to impossible, the sort of task which only one possessed of such monumental and all-encompassing hubris that it can scarcely be believed should even attempt to achieve. To know that others have walked this path before is not precisely a comfort so much as an inspiration: nothing succeeds like success, it is said, and I am at once wise enough to learn from those who have gone before and foolish enough to ignore my failings and the thousand ways this could go awry. As I endeavor to find again those vincula, those quintessential bonds to myself, the world, and those around me, I endeavor to keep these facts in mind.

Today I encountered by chance something which, provided this novel context, exemplified this for me. It is a thing which you will most likely find familiar. I realize that my specific circumstance is not what the following is about; but it remains that aforementioned-exemplar of my present state, the resolution to endure rather than to submit, to stand forth and take arms against a sea of troubles; and by opposing end them. It is Act 3, Scene 1.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

I'm not sure where everything started to go wrong. Actually, that's not true. If pressed, I believe I could produce a date, location, and probably a general time. But as I consider that, I realize that that, too, is not quite accurate. I suppose that, most accurately, I don't know at which of several particular possible junctures things started to go wrong. I have several in mind, and for each I can devise a compelling argument for why it might be remembered as The Start Of It All. Still, wherever things began, they have led me here.

Three years ago - more less exactly three years to the day, I believe, thinking about it - I left my parents' house in my newly-purchased vehicle (acquired just for this purpose) and in company with my long-standing best friend Tim (who, for all of his cynical bastardy, remains not only one of the best people I've ever known, but somebody who also gets my jokes) and began a trek which would lead me away from home, the only home I'd ever really known, away from my family - the only family, it turns out, I'd ever really known - and towards Oregon. I am to this day not quite certain what inspired me to choose Oregon particularly. Certainly there are obvious compelling factors: the beautiful and charming (and notoriously adorable) Emily (and single - hint, hint, fellows!); the fact that, as it is in the Pacific Northwest, it is often quite rainy and overcast, traits very much in its favor (yes, I know that that's kind of weird of me); and the fact that, two hundred years prior, my surnamesake was involved in a famous expedition which ultimately arrived in the same place. But these are simply compelling factors, and not by themselves why I chose to go there. I just chose it; and while I know why I left home, I remain in the dark as to why I left home for Oregon.

I'm not a fatalist. I think we remain in control of our lives and our choices, and that we therefore are responsible for our present condition and consequently our future potentials. So while people try that "bad things happen for a reason" approach for all sorts of nasty events, it's always rung hollow to me. And having been through the wringer, to make a very slight pun, I consider it non-sensical. Sometimes bad things just happen. The cautious, wise, and resilient can often turn tragedy or its aftermath into something great, but that comes from the people so empowered. Nevertheless, as I think things through more and more, as I deeply consider the reality I have endured (and it would be a lie to claim that my participation was more than that), I find that I would not gladly change it. Had my life and my choices been even a little different, a single decision made otherwise, I would logically lose a lot of the things which I have come to consider blessings in the past years.

Chiefly, these include friends. I started my first blog while I was in Oregon, probably out of my homesickness. Had I not done that, I would probably have never come to Blogdrive. I would not have had the opportunity to interact with or even meet the array of remarkable people who occupy this place; Phillip, Britton, Lilith, Angelena (in whose many crises I see a certain substantial parallel to my own contemporary condition), KwstzHdrchX, Gloria, Fallen, Dr. God, and a tremendous number of others whose identities do not leap immediately to mind, most of whom I only barely know but whom I am fully capable of admiring from afar. Though not through a blog, I nevertheless would never have met Syndl, who is, with the aforementioned Tim, probably the closest friend I've ever had and who is beautiful, brilliant, and regrettably already taken (and getting married in a year. Hooray!). Alyred, who, for all of his fiendish plotting and kicking of puppies and such, really is a great guy (like the time he helped me recover my semi-functional vehicle. Speedy, the car, had had one tire on the verge of falling off since the time Tim and I left Denver. Remarkably, the tire fell off not during that sixteen-hour stretch when we were travelling 100 miles per hour on the interstate highways, but instead when I was in the car with Emily, travelling under 10 miles an hour. That was a close one!) who doesn't eat as many babies or kill as many Spaniards as you probably would think. Had it not been for Oregon, it is highly unlikely we would ever have met. And then there's Steve. I'll just leave it at that, and those who know him will understand why.

But there also are experiences. While I did not have an especially glamorous job during my time in Oregon (retail is never glamorous, it turns out), I worked with some pretty amazing people. I really liked that job, as utterly full of horrible gut-wrenching pain (i.e. "customers") as it was. My favorite customer was this kid who was, I think, about 11, who was looking for a video game called Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite or something. I looked through our overflow bin for it, since it wasn't out on the shelves, but couldn't find it. He left, clearly disappointed. Then, about three hours later, I found that I'd overlooked a copy. I felt terrible. Really. Or maybe it was the couple who came into the electronics department, where I was working, with some bread. This wasn't uncommon; customers often came into the department with the other stuff they were buying, and we'd sometimes ring up their stuff for them to help out the front cashiers. Anyway, this couple walks up to me and the guy holds up a loaf of bread, asking, "We have this loaf of bread - what can we do with it?" Dumbstruck by the question and not really understanding what he wanted, I hesitantly replied, "Uh... make... sandwiches with it?" The people looked at each other and laughed, realizing the vague nature of their question. But it was a lot of fun. And sort of a corollary to the previous paragraph, there was the time I spent with my friends in Oregon, several of whom are not even listed up there. I have some fond memories of Jigo's highly off-beat personality, or Becky's almost schizophrenic one. And while it was last October that this happened rather than in 2002, probably one of the fondest memories I have, and probably will ever have, is spending time on this incredibly foggy mountainside with Emily, just talking and wandering around in this pretty dense foliage. I have a picture of Emily I took there, and I plan on getting it framed. I also beat WarCraft 3 while I was in Oregon!

Ultimately, I can't track down specific starting point of the nasty stuff I've experienced. I don't know quite where it was that I might have avoided it all. Perhaps different choices would have caused even worse things to happen to me; it's hard to say, and not really worth second-guessing. And even so, I don't think I'd want to change these things, had I the power. I've had more than my share of hard knocks, to be sure; but the price I'd pay for erasing them is much higher than I'd be willing to pay. The major problem is that, even understanding this, I have failed to accept the necessity of those darker events in their creation. It is this dichotomy, more than mere logical confusion, which has been a factor in my failure to move beyond that holding action which has been my life for the past years. Accepting things is difficult. It comes with strings attached, so to speak: I can't blame anyone other than myself for them. No shouting at god, no bemoaning "cruel fate", no dodging the bullet. The bad things in my life, by and large, are my own doing. Fabrications of my immaturities and poor choices, I am a victim only of myself. This, too, will be a difficult road. But this will lay the groundwork for future responsibility. It will make me far stronger to have done it, to have overcome in this way my troubles. It is the lynchpin of all my efforts, and therefore it is here that I will have to devote most of my energies. This kind of undertaking is never easy. But I'm pretty sure I've moved mountains before; so this should just be reapplication of all the skills and talents I already know I have.

I haven't been having a good time of things lately; and when I'm having a hard time, my typical activity is to think through why it might be happening. Lately, some of my brain power has gone into categorizing the analysis I've been making over the past few months, and I've come to a conclusion: the source of my difficulties - or at least the bulk of them - is fairly simple. Namely, the problem is that I've surrendered control of my life. I've spent three years in a holding action, basically just trying to make it through the day without trying to make something of each day. On the one hand, this is not an inherently bad strategy if implemented judiciously over the short term. Time has an ameliorating effect on the harshnesses we inevitably encounter during life, and to provide ourselves some time to distance ourselves from hurt, from loss, from the abrupt transition from child to adult, we might be more able to address the issues themselves. On the other hand, however, over the long-term - let's say, oh, three years - this strategy leads to attrition. Sometimes, it is critical attrition. I think I've reached that point; I'm now facing internal crises in such a rapid fashion, and expending so great a part of my resources just maintaining that holding action, that it has become a losing battle. A painfully losing battle. So the time has come - it came long ago, actually, and I think I just missed it - for me to retake my life. To throw off this lethargy at any cost and start taking steps to command my life once more.

They'll be small steps at first; I still have approximately-constant major internal difficulties to address, and I suspect that this is going to be a tremendously difficult battle for me. Fortunately, the circumstances of my current situation lend me a strength of will which, while I suspect I have extraordinary willpower somewhere inside of me, is rarely actively available to me. For now, my energies are too limited to take great steps; as I said, I shall start small.

Today I purchased a vacuum cleaner. This may seem silly, but it represents something significant to me. For the one part, I have needed one for several months now but have been putting it off. A part of this was financial; the majority of it was simply because even a small step as that would require exerting or attempting to exert control over my life, however slight. For the other part, it has opened and avenue I have been meaning to follow for some time but have not. I have therefore employed this vacuum cleaner to make significant progress in the cleaning of my apartment. It really needs a good cleaning anyway, and while I tidied things up quite a bit last week that was more or less a superficial improvement.

As with the purchase of a vacuum cleaner, the fact that I consider something as mundane and simple as just cleaning my apartment to be a step forward will probably seem awfully silly. But it is significant not only because it is itself a step towards retaking command of my own life, but because a clean home is, I believe, essential as a pillar of the life focused on self-improvement. Call me new-agey, but I do believe in the Eastern concepts of locational energy (epitomized in the art of feng shui, which I do not practice or posses a practical knowledge of, despite my grasp academically of the principle concepts); and while one's home, one's surrounding, is out of order, the energy one will absorb from that place will be chaotic as well.

Right now I need stability. Order. Calm. Time to collect myself. But I'm not going to find that as if by magic, so the next few weeks are probably going to be hellish as I, to use a military metaphor, strategically employ my greatly-diminished personnel and materiel to achieve a number of minor victories which will secure for me a strong base from which to pursue the larger campaign. Nevertheless, I remain confident in my ability to emerge triumphant. I'm pretty sure I've moved mountains before; so this should just be reapplication of all the skills and talents I already know I have.

So it's a bit beyond my stated deadline of "around eighteen hours". Fortunately, I have exceeded that deadline by only about a factor of, I don't know, four. I've spent the last few days being under the weather, what with a magical bacterial companion who joined me in Turkey and has caused random sporadic ear infections in either ear for the last year or so. It was inevitable that they would sooner or later link up and coordinate their assaults, so I've been spending the last few days facing intense sinus pressure whenever I lie prone. Needless to say, this makes sleeping difficult. And when I don't sleep much, I'm not in much of a mental state to write.

I've been working on another project. A lot of my energies have gone into it, and as you can see my writing here has kind of suffered. I've mostly just been negatively impacted, however, with one thing after another, and hopefully this will clear up soon. On the other hand, as that's what I've been saying since approximately July of 2004, it may not happen quite so rapidly.

Also, in a fun bit of me-trivia which actually has very little to do with me, Tuesday was Oafy's first birthday. Aww.

Today was not a good day for me. Actually, it was pretty much a terrible day for me; the sole mitigating factor of this was that, as it's Father's Day, I spent some time with my family. Also I came away from the parental estate with several new computer games, a new book, my DVD of The Incredibles which has been in their keeping for the past, oh, three months, and this lecture series on Byzantine history.

Unsurprisingly, the last one is the one I plan to enjoy first.

There was something possibly lengthy and probably amusing I was going to write, but instead I realized that I had something more important to write (though not here, in case you were wondering). Anticipate the return to your regularly-scheduled witty commentary in the next... oh, eighteen hours or so.

Despite the fact that I have a bunch of stuff to write about, this evening failed to find me with sufficient time or energy to write about any of those things. Therefore, in the interests of pretending that I actually made an update for today, I present to you the following images. None of them were done by me; none of them are my idea, with one exception which I will explain momentarily.



A random billboard from the computer game Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, which proved both to be a very fun waste of time and to have a bunch of hilarious stuff of which to take screenshots. If you will recall (and hopefully you will, lest you get the hose again), my review of this game was one of the voting options. It'll happen sooner or later, though, despite the fact that it got a whopping zero votes.

In case you can't read the text of the billboard (the angle isn't ideal, and though I brightened the screenshot a bunch it's still a bit tough to make out), it reads:

"Vote Robert Thorne

"Not a murderous child pornographer"

So, as the title of this entry implies, the votes are in! And I eat kittens! Not that the title of the article implies the second point... I just do. Eat kittens, that is. Not imply things; though I also do implications. Like this one time I did a public implication of President Bush, and I was walking all funny and talking in kind of a goofy voice and saying things like, "It's okay, let's get Americans killed pursuing a war under false pretenses!" and "I eat kittens!" But I was saying the second one afterwards when the implication was done, though I was still talking and walking funny because I had had a stroke. Also the FBI showed up!

Anyway, the moral of the story is that there were marginally more votes for a Turkey update than for any of the other brain-tasties that you could have voted for, or stomach-tasties (well, technically it'd be tongue-tasties or mouth-tasties or something, but that sounds much too sexual) in the case of the pony. Also you all have had microchips implanted in your brains, except for SN who didn't technically vote and who also already had a microchip there. For him, I implanted a potato chip in his couch. So, without further adieu (you see what I did there? Eh? Eh??), I present to you: something off topic real quick before I move on the to the Turkey update.

I demand that you go to this place, and specifically this entry. The former is a blog belonging to a female of some type (my current theory is: human) who has to her credit three significant advantages: she appears to be a fellow Colorado resident; she has superb taste in blog entries (which is the second link: it's one of my entries); she actually linked back to me after copying verbatim my entry. While I wish I'd known about it earlier so that I could give her giant piles of credit for being both brilliant (finding my blog entries worthy of reproduction) and wise (giving credit to me for creating said blog entry), I sadly only recently came across it, after finding some poor fool who copied an entry of Lilith's but tried to pass it off as her own rather than giving proper credit. Also I consider the entry to be one of my funniest, so you should probably re-read it anyway.

Oh, yeah. One more thing: in order for you to put this into proper context, and especially for Gloria who enjoyed me writing about being groped by a Hamam attendant, I once again link you to my previous Turkey entries.

Turkey, Day Zero

Turkey, Day One

Turkey, Day Two (1/2)
Turkey, Day Two (2/2)

Turkey, Day Three (1/3)
Turkey, Day Three (2/3)
Turkey, Day Three (3/3)

Turkey, Day Four

Turkey: Day Five

My fifth day in Turkey was actually the longest day I had there. Not because I or my group hit some sort of crazy time-space portal wherein nothing was as it seemed and The Scary Door loomed in every direction - that being more the central point of Day 11, really - but because this day involved me being overwhelmingly uncomfortable. A lot. For a long time. But I'm skipping ahead a bit.

When last we left our intrepid hero (me), he was on a bus travelling between Constantinople and Bodrum. The former - actually known as "Istanbul", though I regularly call it "Constantinople" in both speech and writing because I'm basically a giant history geek - is of course on the banks of the Bosporus; the latter is quite far south in Asia Minor (or, as I like to think of it, "Byzantine Anatolia") on the Aegean coast. All told, the bus trip there was 13 hours long, and included, in its duration, a brief ferry ride across the Sea of Marmara. This trip was utter hell for me.

The bus itself was not too bad, to be honest. It was in many ways like a greyhound bus, only way better. Instead of smelling faintly of stale vomit, the bus smelled like... well, nothing. Which is a good smell for a bus. Instead of having stained upholstry and bits of trash in the aisle, the bus was clean. And most important, there was a small service staff which offered drinks every four hours or so; this was important chiefly because it allowed me to indulge my megalomaniacal fantasies of conquering a passenger bus. For the ordinary human meat bag, such as virtually everyone on the bus, it was no doubt fine. As mentioned before, however, it was hellish for me.

The final reduction of the problem leaves us with the salient points that: 1) I am a gigantic human being; and 2) the bus was designed for Turks, humans of a build generally smaller than the average American, let alone the average myself. See Day Zero for further details on my difficulties in this arena. Being cramped, my legs crushed and lacking room to stretch or even really move my arms, legs, or self - for a little over thirteen hours - this trip was horrible. The poor schmuck who sat next to me has my profoundest apologies for being a lumbering oaf. Despite the fact that our bus left at 10pm after a very active day, I got maybe an hour of sleep.

Have I mentioned how horribly, horribly terrible the bus trip was for me? Even knowing that I was going to face situations like that, it was still quite bad. Fortunately, it only took thirteen hours to end. Oh, and the driver, for whatever reason, found it unnecessary to use the air conditioning, and for some reason having the windows open didn't help much (or maybe they didn't open, I can't remember for sure). Regardless, it got extremely hot and stuffy in there as well. So... yeah. I cannot stress enough just how completely horrible that bus trip was for me.

And as an added bonus - I made a point to write this down in my notes, but it was unnecessary because the experience is seared into my memory even amidst the general horror of the surrounding events - after about eleven hours, we made a stop for some people to disembark and others to embark. Among those who did the latter was a very small man with a brown paper bag wrapped around a bottle of some kind. He sat in the seat immediately across the aisle from me; and he exuded a stench so powerful that he could probably knock down a horse from ten paces. Sadly for me, with my human constitution (despite my resiliency which might be favorably compared with that of horses or certain cliffsides) and the fact that I was maybe ONE pace away, I strongly believe my extended exposure to the smell caused mild brain damage. Sir Stinksalot remained on the bus until our journey ended, over two hours later.

Finally, FINALLY, after a bus trip which may have been a mere thirteen hours but was, to my experience, something like eighty-seven decades, we arrived at the Bodrum bus station; or, as the Turks call it, the "bus station".

Actually they call it an Otogar. Shut up.

A delegation of our party went out seeking somewhere to stay, and the rest of us remained at the Otogar, hanging out at a small group of tables and generally being exhausted and feeling unwashed and unshaved if they were me. After about an hour - bringing us to roughly noon - said delegation returned. We loaded our bags into a taksi, and one person - not me - accompanied them to the Mars Otel, the Turks apparently not believing in the letter 'h'. The rest of us continued on foot, in two groups, to the Mars Otel. While the "otel" (I briefly considered the possibility that we'd taken a wrong turn and shown up in London's East End, but quickly dismissed that as the letter 'u' failed to appear in unnecessary places) was nearby, I was groggy enough so as to basically be medically dead.

The Mars Otel was itself quite nice. It seemed to be a somewhat-older building, judging by the doors, but everything was clean and in good shape. There was a pool outside, and some tables with umbrellas on them in a sort of portico; completing that scene was a smallish contraption which looked like it could serve as a bar, if that were necessary. For the moment, it was not; had one used an EEG on me, it probably would have flat-lined.

As at the Side, our rooms broke down with my parents sharing one room, my sister and brother-in-law sharing another, my brother and his girlfriend a third, and myself and my two bachelor brothers sharing a fourth. The rooms were quite nice; though not built to Gigantor's specifications, that was nothing new. Hell, that's nothing new in the US.

I leapt at the chance to use the shower there; though when I say that, I do not mean to suggest that I actually leapt. That would have most likely resulted in me smashing my head through the ceiling, and then collapsing to the ground, comically fracturing the floorboards.

So, I showered. And it was so good. So very good. It was practically orgasmic, having had an extremely busy day in a very hot climate, the bus trip from hell, and another walk in terribly warm weather since my last shower. And, having cleaned myself, I collapsed on my bed. Though I read for a short time, I quickly fell asleep, my exhausted body and mind rebelling now that it was an option. And besides a brief interval of consciousness around 9pm, when my parents brought back some sandwiches for us to eat as a sort of dinner, I slept through until about 8am the next day, which would prove to be another busy day in which I saw one of Pliny's Wonders of the Ancient World. First hand.

Take that, Gloria.

Actually, this has nothing to do with being ten feet, either in length or phalangeal count; but it does possess, very vaguely, a poll-like demeanor. And that's mostly because I'm terribly indecisive about the polling topic, and by that I mean "I care very little about" said topic. And that topic is: what, precisely, is it that I shall write about next? I'll get to all of these - eventually - but given my ability to procrastinate or simply get swamped by work or life, some of them might not see the light of day for months or even years. Here are your options:

1. Another "Scene" - you know, that story which is about as random as I can get, starring Arminnius and Ahmed, and guest starring Mikhail Gorbachev.

2. Another exciting installment of "Coma Dreams", my story which may not in fact be going anywhere, we'll just see.

3. Another exciting installment of that free-writing thing I started starring David and the deceased Michael, and t he eccentric genius of questionable health and humorous taste, Cam.

4. Another update about my trip to Turkey, which actually ended almost exactly a year ago.

5. A review of this game I spent some time playing, Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines.

6. Me shrieking continuously for two minutes.

7. A pony.

Okay. Get yo' vote on. Or... don't. But just keep in mind that I'm far too lazy to actually choose from among these.