Not that it's anything new, but things like this worry me. It probably isn't too much to say that Bush is the most intensely unpopular President we've had in my lifetime, so I'm sure it's to be expected that he is the recipient of a higher volume of threats than other Presidents within that period; and in such an environment, it is important for those tasked with his protection to remain more vigilant than ever. I don't like Dubya. I don't like his policies, I don't like his politics, and I don't like how painfully awkward he seems when interacting with foreign leaders or representatives. But I do not wish him any harm, both for his safety and the sanctity of the Presidency itself. It isn't just bad for the sitting President when he gets assassinated - it's bad for the whole country.

But even so, the kid who was investigated didn't do anything that could conceivably be construed as a threat. The right to dissent is something guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Secret Service definitely took things too far here. Even worse is the fact that the photograph got to the Secret Service in the first place. This means that some mischievous, stupid, or painfully over-cautious photo lab employee (a job I used to perform, in fact) reported the photograph to the local police, who then passed it on to the Service.

As a person of great moral rectitude, diverse interests, and +3 intelligence, I tend to enjoy the exploration of a surprising array of topics. But there are few I enjoy so much as language; this is not merely because of the fact that, let's face it, it is our one advantage over the teeming swarms of squid people who shall invade in 2017, but also because it's just so damn interesting. It baffles and intrigues me that early humans developed these goofy little abstract and arbitrary utterances to represent certain concrete ideas. And then Don King came along, and devised an entirely new vocabulary which does not, apparently, have any basis in this particular reality, and things got really interesting.

So the point is that language does not seem to me to have been a guaranteed development - it seems more like the invention of a madman, much like a fireaxe (for who else would dream of attacking fire with an axe?) - and this, combined with the diversity language has taken on, piques my interest and also my hunger for a delicious block of cheddar, which is not called "the thinking cheese" for nothing.

Actually, I guess I could have ended that sentence two words earlier and made it a lot more accurate.

Anyway, the upshot of all that stuff is that I'm interested in language. This is why I halfway deplore the devolution into gibberish that the Internet and text messaging via cellphone seem to be causing in the language, but it is worth commenting that a major factor in my stance towards that is because it is easy and fun to rant about it. Of course, language tends to change over time despite such influences, not because of them - it exhibits an extremely apparent evolutionary course (though, I hasten to add for purposes of my own defense, evolution in a non-teleologic sense, which is not a connection many people seem to automatically make when hearing the word "evolution"; they assume it is evolution in the sense of bettering rather than changing). There is a reason unrelated to the squid people that we have hundreds or thousands of distinct languages on Earth today, after all.

Because all of you - every single one of you - care, I present: an update on the state of my cat. Well. My "primary" cat, Oafelia.

I took her to get spayed today, which was something of an adventure since not only did I wake up, voluntarily, at 6am on a day that I had off from work, but it was snowing heavily, was very dark, and the roads were full of people (driving cars, mind you) who, apparently, were inexplicably transported here from the year 1820 and therefore are unfamiliar with such modern concepts as "automobiles" and "snow". And if that sentence confuses you (I just took a few moments to re-read it to make sure that, y'know, it fits together in fashion altogether different from my genetic experiments to make a Soviet-powered Flying Groinal Attack Llama With Shark Teeth which did not fit together very well at all and also required an improbably large amount of post-operative cleanup), the upshot is this: "I took Oafy to get spayed today."

While the negative aspect is that it will cost me around fifty dollars (actually seventy with the innoculations they sold me on), the positive aspect is that not only will she never again spend three to ninety-seven consecutive days constantly yowling at volumes which would make some sort of unholy hybrid of Pavarotti, Aretha Franklin, and an airhorn jealous, but she'll also end up with a +12 bonus to her Fortitude Saves versus Disease and Immunity: Pregnancy. So I figure that's a good deal.

Sadly, however (sad for my checkbook, I mean), I just got a call from the animal hospital, and apparently the veterinarian, upon unzipping said tiny cat's skin with some sort of multi-class pokey/slicey device, discovered a prospective hernia. While this is, apparently, not an entirely uncommon thing to find inside a cat, and I of course want it addressed as quickly and cat-recoveringly as possible, it is also sixty dollars more. I gave them permission to take care of it (though I was initially wary as the first cost quoted me was $170, which I could not possibly afford in this or any known alternate reality except for the cowboy one and the one where I discovered the HTB protein (if you don't know what that is, ask me. In private.).). Currently my fingers are crossed (though technically they are not actually crossed at this moment, as at this moment they are being used to type this entry), but I have a feeling that Oafy will be okay.

I was going to write an update today about, I don't know, how delicious cows are or something, but instead, after a brief glance at the old Information Superhighway, I've decided to bring you this shocking observation:

PEOPLE ARE DUMB.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit MUST KILL ALL HUMANS
Exhibit WHY??
Exhibit Z

There are days when I hate mankind so very much.

And then there is today.

About a month ago, Employer laid off 150 employees. While none of these included myself, my brother Ross got the axe (which was part of the severance package, if you get my drift). Though the cause of this is a tale both sordid (it involves, for example, a surprisingly larger amount of sheep and tentacles than most stories of any sort, let alone those revolving around corporations) and spooky (the plotline hinges on the collaborative efforts of the NCUA, which is the government agency which insures Credit Unions, Congress, which is the government agency which insures that nothing ever gets done, and Lucifer, the Dark Prince, the Lord of Lies, and Undersecretary of Agriculture for some reason), it is also a very not-yet-invented-by-me one, so it shall not here be adequately explored.

Anyway, having narrowly avoided the heat-seeking rocket propelled fragmentation grenade of disemployment, I became acutely aware that whoever was doing the shooting might merely be reloading. Consequently, relying on my finely-honed instincts most appropriately referred to as "blind terror", I began half-heartedly seeking a backup job.

The reason my search was half-hearted was because, really, my job isn't that bad. I could do a lot better, of course, but probably not without either a college degree or unbelievably corrupt HR department; whereas I could do much, much worse with just the tools available to me. For example, I could have to clean up after the incontinent eldery (as, for example, a nursing assistant), or manually disimpact elephant bowels, or associate my name in any capacity besides "detractor" with the Bush Administration.

These are, of course, presented in order of increasing distastefulness.

More important, and, in particular, more relevant to this post than my search for a new job is my experience in "brushing up" on proper interviewing tactics. Interviewing as a process for determining which prospective employee or employees best suits one's company has changed a lot in the last century. In 1910, for example, the typical interview for employment would go something like this:

INTERVIEWER: I see that based on your new-fangled "horseless" résumé you are a Chineeman. One of Satan's most deceitful creatures! Get out of my sight!!

APPLICANT: ...

INTERVIEWER: Oh, wait. That was the last applicant. Based on your résumé, you're a white male with all of six months of formal education and a predilection for incest and eating horse meat. Welcome to the company!

Whereas these days interviewing is a complicated dance back and forth not entire dissimilar from salamander mating behavior, though with the notable exception that it only results in a net increase in the salamander population on special occasions. Based on my research into the topic of "correct interviewing procedures", I've come to the conclusion that the following represents a concise list of major mistakes one can make while being interviewed:

• Tell anything even remotely resembling the truth.

As we can see from this comprehensive list, the way to succeed in an interview is to not only lie your pants off, but lie the pants off of everybody on the same floor of the building as you. The farther from the truth you can make it, the more likely you are to be hired. While you can certainly accomplish this during the interview itself, the best technique will have you writing your résumé in a dialect of written communication often employed by politicians which consists entirely of lies, and is therefore not entirely unlike the Chinese language. This dialect is called résuméese, and is the cause of my actual job, "key-pushing grunt", being listed on my résumé as "data processing technician". A trained monkey could do my job (though, technically, a monkey trained appropriately could do nearly any job, in this case the monkey would only be very poorly trained), but, through the miracle of résuméese, it is presented in such a fashion as to suggest that, in fact, it requires several advanced degrees, some of which do not, technically, even exist yet, to perform it.

Once you get to the actual interview, the process accelerates. It turns out that at no point should you admit any flaws whatsoever in yourself. If possible - and it is always possible - you should use your response to any question or statement as a platform to flatter yourself and demonstrate how great you are. Lying is great for this. You should also mix in vague threats to the interviewer, making the negative consequences of not hiring you clear. These be directed less against the company than against the interviewer himself.

For example, if you're seeking a job in sales and the interviewer makes a statement like, "I'm a little concerned by your lack of background in the field of theoretical physics," the correct response is not to tear off your clothes, cover yourself in chocolate pudding, and destroy the interviewer's desk with a fireaxe. The correct response, rather, is something like the following:

Hey. What's up? Good to see you. Again, maybe. (Maybe not. And by that I mean "maybe it's not good to see you again, what are you doing here?") Welcome back! We're about to start a magical journey, which is magical in much the same way that those coin-operated massage beds in motels are magical. You know, magically crappy and nauseating, because those are important things to feel when one is tense. Lousy motels, quite frankly, are the only place I know of where you can actually pay for the privilege of feeling worse. It's something I should capitalize on - pay me and I'll gladly punch you in the gut after shaking you bodily! Fortunately, since you decided to visit, you're now forewarned. And as we all know, that's half an octopus (forewarned is four-armed -> half an octopus) towards preventing gut-punching.

And that's really the point, isn't it? The you being here, that is. Not the gut-punching, though I do have several great deals. This is The Second Coming of the Drawing Blog, my home-away-from-home which, curiously, I rarely visit unless I am actually at home. Note the fabulous colors. The cool graphics. The actually-doesn't-suck design of the blog, which was made by my eldest brother. The crazy Lovecraftian tentacle-ankh-thingy which serves as the background for my entries and was made by my youngest brother. The smooth, sultry voice of the author of the text (smoothness and sultriness not included). The spooky hypnosis-inducing subliminal mind power rays.

Wait. Actually, don't note those.

Anyway, If you're going to be spending a lot of time here - and quite patently YOU ARE - you'll want to be walked through what's new with Drawing Blog v2.0. So here's a quick list detailing both what it is and what it isn't.

What Drawing Blog v2.0 Is:

• Ten gallons of fun in a one gallon jug.
• Scientifically proven to cause 11% less rectal bleeding than the next leading brand of blog.
• Environmentally friendly. It even saved a baby.
• Proof that, yes, I truly am a national treasure.
• An outlaw in Peru.
• Powered by enslaved magic forest pixies called "electrons". Science truly has brought us an age of wonders!
• Brought to us by my brother, Ross. You'll find a link to his website joint at the bottom of each page. It's cleverly disguised as a delicious bear claw. Er, paw. You want to hire him. Trust me.
• Equipped with a search function. You'll find it on the sidebar, near the bottom.
• Guaranteed not to attempt autonomous takeover of the world before 2009. After that point, we're all doomed.
• Designed to be viewed on resolutions of 1024x768 pixels or better.
• Rated, on my personal scale of 'one' to 'a shoe', 'J-'. How's that for quality?
• Less than 40% likely to lay Brain Scorpion eggs in your brain, provided you tell all your friends, your family, your pets, and your fern about it.

What Drawing Blog v2.0 Isn't:

• Designed to be viewed on 800x600. I understand why they're laid out this way, but I hate how much space is wasted in standard Blogdrive templates because of that decision. By God, I'm running 1280x1024; I don't need my blog to be 70% white space by volume!
• An alcoholic womanizer with a history of domestic violence.
• Small or not in charge.
• The sort of blog to kiss and tell.
• Quite done yet. The comments page is a little bit off, but it works fine. It should be finalized by the end of today.
• Compatible with alien computers. Use a Macintosh for that.
• An equal-opportunity employer. Statistically, everybody who works on this is a caucasian from a middle-class background.
• A front for a vast conspiracy aimed at controlling the world's supplies of vital eyeball rays.
• Not boring into your soul!
• At liberty to divulge that information.

So look around. Have fun. Eat. Drink. Be Mary. Even if you need gene therapy. I command it!

Well, the last before the MACHO BIG 2.0 DONKEY WRESTLE HUNDRED PERCENT, that is. I hadn't actually planned on posting again before then, but I decided to... um, be nice. Because I'm definitely not 'sploding with Writey Fever, a serious malady affecting one out of four Americans who are myself or one of three other people. Wait, maybe I should call it Writer's 'Sploditis, a horrible inflamation of the 'Sploditory Gland caused by not writing enough. Though actually I've written plenty, I just haven't posted it yet. You see what I have done? So much sneakiness in this one! Anyway, I have come to share some jokes.

1) What do vegan zombies eat? Graiiiiiins....

2) What do dyslexic zombies eat? Briiiiiians....

You better believe it's coming. Just around the corner, really. Yeah, that's right: 2.0, baby!

I'm bothered. Extremely bothered, really. For some reason apparently well beyond my understanding, I've lost something terribly important. Whether this is a permanent or temporary loss is, for the moment, immaterial. I've lost it. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that I do not actually know exactly what I've lost. If it weren't for the obvious changes brought about by this loss, I might take the lack of knowledge of what I've lost to mean that perhaps I'd lost nothing. This, as the previous sentence implies, is not the case. If you've been paying attention for the past, oh, four months, you know where this is going.

I've lost the passion for writing. That's not true, actually. I've lost the drive to write, I think, but that's not quite encapsulating the concept like I'd like it to do. This is, as in the above paragraph, probably not aided by my uncertainty as to the specific nature of whatever it is precisely that's been lost. But I just don't feel the same urge to write something, to entertain or ruminate or... whatever I might have done on a given day. I look at the things I wrote last year, and I remember how deeply satisfying writing was. How I would sometimes use my entire lunch hour hurriedly writing an entry because it was bursting out of me like some sort of horrible alien baby lodged in my chest. How I once spent several hours tweaking an entry to get it just so. And now it's... not. It's different somehow, and the only realistic variable - the only variable worth considering in such a matter, given the simultaneous facts of the personal nature of writing and the profound variability of any person, especially myself - is me.

Maybe it isn't that I've lost something. Maybe it's just that I've changed. I don't want to say "grown", because I have a hard time accepting that growth can lead one away from something like self-expression. That much seems more like regression to me.

A part of this I recognize all too well, actually. I've been here before, in a way. A part of this overall lack of drive is my longtime companion who goes by many names but is most perspicuously called I'm Not Good Enough. Like most people who share certain intellectual traits with me, I suffer from a reasonably persistent low self-esteem. No surprise, and I can usually just blow off the clouds of doubt because they are chiefly composed of bullshit. Still, there's always that factor, that little fragment, which aspires to seep in and strike at the least convenient of moments. And given my own personal code of conduct, there are actually a lot of moments for that to happen.

Of course, there's something to be said for a realistic appraisal of one's abilities. I know I am a good writer. I might even be called an excellent writer. But all one has to do is take a random sampling of the various people around blogdrive to see that I am not an exceptional writer. I write well, but I do not write memorably. Sometimes I will put down a book and think about how remarkable the author must be, how noteworthy he or she is - and this is an impression which will stay with me. I note this sometimes also when reading other people on the Internet. I know that some people get a kick out of my writing, and I think that's great. It is, in the end, exactly why I write. But there are people out there who write truly breathtaking stuff with a casual grace which far surpasses my talents of comprehension or replication. I want that ability, to so effortlessly create. To be, in a word, memorable. Noteworthy. It is a state of affairs which requires an awareness of my strengths and my limitations - fundamentally, that however good I am there exist so many people compared to whom my talent is as paltry as a gnat is to me.

Of course, this is essentially self-evident. There is no "pinnacle" of talent, per se. The saying about there always being someone better is quite literally true. I understand that; it hasn't stopped me before, and I see no reason why it should be the principle factor explaining my recent sort of ennui vis-a-vis writing now. That said, I cannot deny that it is a factor, and probably, at this point, the only one I can really identify or understand.

Darkness.

You must run, David. Escape.

<Run... escape? What? Who are you?>

Do not be afraid, David. Of me.

<But who are you? Where am I? Why can't I move?>

The name matters not. You are safe, but only for a little while. You are asleep.

<Asleep. This is a dream?>

No. And if you do not run, you will die. This must not happen.

<Why? Besides the obvious, I mean.>

Strip the candle of wax and the wick cannot stand. Remove the wick and the wax will not burn. It is necessary synthesis. You must avoid your death.

<I've made a point of it so far.>