Tired of hearing about it yet.

I totally had it coming. I knew it before I even thought about starting. Bad karma. I had it coming for a long time. Some people like to say, "If you play with fire, you'll get burned." It's more like, "If you do stupid things, stupid things will happen to you." And you will deserve it. Because you did something stupid.

It's like a self-inflicted wound. Well, it is a self-inflicted wound.

I almost lost my zombie story. It's hard to explain to people what that feels like. Sometimes bad things happen to you and you lose something you worked hard on. Maybe it's the song you spent a week writing and recording. Maybe it's the drawing you spent six hours on. Maybe it's the painted you spent a couple of weeks on. It's all frustrating.

But I've been working on that story for almost a year and a half, now. Not constantly, just off and on. But I started it a long time ago. I made people, not characters. I made a giant sandbox for them. I planned all kinds of things and dropped my people into my sandbox and started watching them struggle their way through my story. And I almost lost all of that effort. It's not something you can just start over with.

Hours of frustration and struggle later, I yanked out the thumb drive with the story on it. I saved the story, I saved the world. Because the world needs zombies. And I deliver.

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Past the butterfly wall.

Spontaneous pneumothorax is a collection of air or gas in the space between the lungs and the chest that "collapses" the lung and prevents it from inflating completely. Spontaneous means there is no traumatic injury to the chest or lung. There are two types of spontaneous pneumothorax: primary and secondary. Primary spontaneous pneumothorax occurs in people without lung disease. It occurs most often in tall, thin, young people. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket but I can't answer it. We are in the middle of rehearsal. It is not an uncommon event. We continue to play. The strap of my saxophone cuts into my neck. The nylon is rough against my skin. I look out of place. Everyone else is dressed casually; shorts, shirts, shoes optional. There I stand, a button down shirt and slacks. I'm entitled to dress up a little. It's my birthday. My phone vibrates again. I always used to roll my eyes whenever I saw those scenes in movies. The phone call. The bad news....

I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...

Pseudo-science (like psych).

I consider myself a man of science. I try to approach problems and deal with them logically, using observations previously recorded to handle new problems. So of course my interest was piqued when someone I knew posited that men are needier and more complicated than women. An interesting theory. But to properly examine it, one must understand the concept of sexual selection and its two aspects: male competition and female choice. Which brings us to point one: men are needier [in relationships] than women. This is true. In a natural/primal setting, the males are generally love-'em-leave-'em kinds of guys. Their main objective is to reproduce as much as they can. Humans, in their infinite wisdom, have decreased the emphasis on this to the point where it has become a footnote in male purpose. Civilization dictates that, instead of finding a partner for the sole purpose of reproduction, males find females for life companionship. With the effective removal of their natur...

everything is fine

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