Inauguration!

It's been a full and fruitful night, featuring (in no particular order): Runes, Chuang Tzu, royksopp, breaking out the Chinese brush and ink set from Gordon R. Dickson's estate sale that I've had for three or so years and never used before tonight, peppermint tea, a conversation about the University of Wyoming/Texas game, being comforted by a plastic cow, red ink-stained hands, a screaming cat, a garbage truck outside my house at 2:25am (possibly assaulting the cat), a dog barking (in approval of the cat's situation or support for its struggle, presumably), green tea, tremendous personal revelations, learning what eco-friendly home cleaning products can get red ink off of skin and hardwood floors, and at least one sneeze.

Also, the creation of this web-based communication forum.

I don't yet know to what purpose I'll drive this shiny fellow, but I titled it as I did with an eye toward clearing out some of the monologues which would otherwise bulge and grow inside my skull- much like a potato left too long in a cupboard- until a tendril snakes out of my left nostril and I'm explaining to some stranger why the new World of Warcraft expansion is going to utterly rewrite the game.

But that's all for later; now that the champagne's been shattered against the hull, my hope is to slump into slumber. I actually wanted to slump into slumber prior to this, but in a fairly common ritual inspired by Ray, I asked Google if there was anything else I should do online before I went to bed. Google, in turn, led me to this. After watching that, I didn't trust myself to go to sleep, or at least didn't want to experience the nightmare visions that said sleep was likely to contain. I'm listening to The Airborne Toxic Event's "Sometime Around Midnight" now, mostly to get that video out of my head. If I'd just been hearing the song, sleep would be no longer in coming than is warranted by the aforementioned canine-feline-automotive death battle occurring outside. However, the video (I promise I won't push you to watch it anymore; honest) had a lot of the same qualities present in Japanese horror films, and they proved equally disturbing in a Nordic context. Stop-motion, jerkily animated women using unconventional forms of locomotion, obscure objects suddenly the focus of a shot, close-ups of animals doing stuff that would be innocuous if you weren't zoomed in on a portion of their anatomy. Royksopp also chose to add a duck hanging from a ceiling and milk pouring out of a woman's pants, though, which may actually give the video a slight edge in the Department of Disconcertion.

Still, the time it took me to write all this (I cheated and wrote the preceding paragraph's latter half first) was sufficient to listen to "Sometime Around Midnight" about four times, and thus my head is now filled with soaring strings and the vision of a young Billy Bragg, drunk and lonely, that the song inspires. So long as I don't proofread this, then, I should be fine!