Glow balls. Balls that glow.

In a dark room, with low video quality, they look really neat. The music was... unintentional and atmospheric, just what iTunes shuffle had up at the time, but I left it in because
a) it actually works pretty well, and
b) I'm a lazy horse-stealin' sonuvabitch.

2:31 am counts as Christmas morning

I am really bad about giving presents. Really bad. I just don't think of it. Couple that with the fact that I don't have enough money to buy myself a pack of winterfresh gum, and I am in a bit of a holiday pickle. Fortunately I have excellent last-minute oh-shit abilities to pull something together that just barely fulfills the necessary requirements (see my Vassar transcript for details) and so on the evening of December 24th I managed to make things for my brother and sister that I'm actually pretty proud of.

For my sister, I made a goofy-looking comic-book cover of her musician self, Sticklips (who you can hear on MySpace, and is really quite good). For my brother, I made an expansion set to the board game Ashlyn and I made for him last year, in which you play an embattled team of elves trying to keep zombies out of Santa's workshop. I WOULD put up pictures, but I think that might cheapen it a bit since they were intended as gifts, not for me to show off.

Instead, you can have THIS little tidbit. I really can't imagine what these gentlemen could be talking about.

Christmas gift update: I got a box of chocolate liqueur cherries! Chocolate AND alcohol in tiny delicious packages. I am already delightfully allergically buzzed from just two. What a fantastic holiday.

Olives make an excellent sausage substitute on pizzas. (edited post)

Preamble (does anything other than the US Constitution have a Preamble? That's definitely the only place I've ever heard the word used):

Off to your right, behind the capital building, you can see a lovely picture of a dolphin slumming around in the deeps. I am rather fond of this dolphin. Now, to your Slightly-Down-The-Page, you'll see several paragraphs of dreamy keyboard vomit documenting postmortem hallucination. I am also rather fond of these paragraphs. But unfortunately, I really don't like them together and next to each other. But nevertheless, here they are.

And now on to the aforementioned hallucinogenic fiction. If verbose nonsense was mops and I was an elementary school janitor, man would I be set to clean up some vomit.
--

After he fell down the well, he barely remembered the suffocation of submersion at all. His frenzied panic plunged everything beyond the first burning breath of water out of his mind. Instead, the thing he remembered was the cat. The buzz in his drowning ears lowered in pitch as his waterlogged brain slowed, becoming a rumbling purr. He looked up and saw the cat, ethereal as any ever encountered by Alice, sitting on a pebble-strewn shore and watching him patiently. He stood up in the surf, dragged his heavy, watery clothes up with him onto the beach, and reached out for it. The well had gone, and there was no explanation offered or necessary. Here he was, and here was the cat.

It shook its head, ringing the bell on its collar. And then there were more. Out of the waves, out of the pebbles, climbed hundreds upon hundreds of lithe ghostly felines. They ringed him, walking head-to-tail in concentric circles, a sea of shifting ghostly fur and twinkling, tingling chimes. He tried to speak, but his senses gave in to the vertigo of their hypnotic pacing. And then the aural seascape of jingling collars shifted again, to the pattering of rain on the endless South Carolina hills he used to know.

He opened his eyes to gray skies and a warm summer wind, the rain soaking him and warming his spirit. The rustling rain through dogwood and magnolia found his ears, and the rich smell of the Southern soil drifted lazily up to him. He lifted his arms and stripped his shirt off, inhaling this perfect world. A flash of brown drew his eyes to the trees nearby, and he watched the flicker of a white tail bound away through the brush. He chased gladly after it, unsure of whether it was a deer or a cat leaping through the wilds of his afterlife, but joyful regardless. The water closed in one final time, and all was nothingness.

where do you get a green bowtie?

I have three plastic bottles on my desk: a life water I stole from a pizza place, a diet coke I received free from a job interview at "TOMB" a sort of live-action Legends of the Hidden Temple dungeoncrawl in Boston, and a seltzer bottle I bought on the drive up from Vassar on Tuesday to mix with the leftover gin we salvaged from Port Ewen. There's some kind of symbolic trinity there if I want to look for it. Fortunately for you, I don't.

I recently picked up an "Employment Guide" from a free newspaper machine somewhere out and about in Boston, and its contents really confuse me. There were almost no actual job listings within. Rather, it was filled with opportunities for me to go back to school or receive specialized training to become a medical assistant, trucker, or nuclear inspector. My favorite is a colorful panel with the heading "Attention Shooting Sports Enthusiasts! Motivated telemarketers needed to fill immediate openings!"

What?

A note on the walrus above: I owed one to Sasha, but I figured I'd just make it public property. But it's technically Sasha's walrus, so if it gets up to anything unsavory, you can direct complaints over to our lady in Amsterdam.