nirgle.net - fall 2009

Damn, how intense my excitement has become over the last few days, waiting with bated breath for Mayon to explode. What better parallel in the natural world to my own personal fate than this relatively incognito volcano, this nobody of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, now suddenly shuddering to life with exhilaration, overflowing with potential, set to do its thing "within days".

Days! After millenia in the making, gradually formed in the crucible of time and pressure, coupled in the meantime with a lot of sleeping, groaning, and otherwise being useless—now!, now time to storm unto the planet, redefine the landscape with little warning, emit tons of gaseous fumes in the process, and then yawn gently back into a deep, peaceful slumber.

For a good time, I recommend bearing down on your local bank machine and plundering all the slips of paper that people have deposited into the garbage or left strewn about after their withdrawals. If you are stealthy enough about it, you should be able to spend a good hour standing around in front of the machine, laughing at the bank balances hovering just a few dollars above zero, or giggling audibly at the balances that are below zero, puzzlingly negative. Sometimes you can even detect a waft of barmy depression left behind by the person who stormed off just moments before in search of money somewhere else, like from that same overly generous relative who just never learns. Be sure to leave your own receipt slip behind in such a way that the next person to use the machine has to look in a furiously jealous rage at the size of your account. For the best effect, try jamming the slip into the bank card slot.

When it is time to sleep, I abruptly lie down on my bed, on my back with my arms at my sides, then I close my eyes and fall asleep within seconds. None of this fussy arranging of pillows or getting underneath the blankets or choosing the side of my body that feels right to lie on. I long ago substituted the joy of sleeping, preferring to leverage it for its essential functional purpose once again. Hold the fluff, just give me the burger, like that one advertisement on TV a couple years back. And so now, like when I was an infant and would doze off halfway up the stairs, I'll stop in the middle of an email or a line of code and walk over to my bed, abruptly lie down on my back with my arms at my sides and in a few seconds it will suddenly be a few hours later.

I don't recognize times of day; I'm over these arbitrary chronological distinctions such as "lunch time" and "time for stories" and "time to get up" and especially "bed time." They have recently done a study of how people spend their day. I raged against the existence of this chart for a while, but in the end ironically spent a good chunk of my afternoon analysing it. It is strangely erotic, useless as it may be.

As of today, my ever-expanding sphere of potential causality has grown to encompass 49 stars in the known galaxy, having now reached and extended beyond Mu Herculis. This is no small feat, and I have managed to accomplish most of it sitting right here at my computer in this very pose, this slightly skewed angle of derision, bubbling out my coronal mass ejections of the internet kind. Because of limitations on the speed of light, today is the soonest possible moment Mu Herculis could know about my existence, however frivolous; and actually, right now, quite fittingly, is the first time I have ever heard about Mu Herculis, at least the Mu Herculis that existed 27.4 years ago. So we're bonded now, you could say, in that quantum-tangled sort of way.

I can only imagine what other celestial wonders exist beyond the reach of such a magnificent star as Mu Herc, what other beautiful vistas bask beyond. Unfortunately for the opposing viewpoint, it's just more of me and my irritable incoherencies frisking by at the speed of light as time unfurls; in fact it's probably a good thing there's little else out there but carbon compounds and gamma ray bursts, I am prone to stage fright and would likely just forget my lines.

I can't rid my mind of the filthy richness of my future. It's been there around the clock since September when a casual interest that seemed too good to be true turned out not to be. Having to expend energy and mind-power for the profit of others is a satisfactory state of affairs for only so long, for certain people anyway. My aversion to working for (and reporting to) other people continues to breed on unabated, so with luck I won't outgrow my current mode of making a living before the alternative is fully ready to go.

This isn't one of my senseless ruminations, people. But naturally it is quite secret, for no good reason really. Half of you already know anyway. I am not the most talented mathematician of the Middle Ages, but I know the guy who was. It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice.