Yahoo is up

I like stock trading. It's a lot like vegas, except for the lack of free drinks, half-naked waitresses, comps, etc.....

So I like gambling I guess.


I've got an interview lined up with Microsoft to join their Exchange crit-sit team. I think I'm qualified, just need to prove that to them I guess. It involves a relo, which depending on how Microsoft does relocations, might make the whole thing irrelevant. We're not quite upside-down in this house, but we're not making much progress either.

We'll see I guess.

Looks like mom qualifies for some special program that will keep her out of prison for her 2 felonies. Some sort of "I'll narc on everyone I know and do drug rehab" program. She'll be on probation for a bit, so thats that I guess.

No real news on the dad front of late.

I've been playing guild wars lately, because its online but free. It does it for me as far as a fantasy fix goes.

I just bought 200 shares of Yahoo - wish me luck

A lot of analysts are saying it's going to go down. I don't know, we'll see. They have a shit load of cash. New CEO, earnings report in the morning.

My psychiatrist said to keep a log of my dreams when I wake from them since they are so frequent. All I recall is waking up being disoriented and confused.

I should update the title of this thing.

I don't know, no political tripe in here so far. I'm too depressed to think how we let our country be run.

I'm tired. Do I say that too much? It's a quarter till nine. The kids were really a handful today.

I think I feel asleep sitting up in the playroom today.

I've sold some of my excess computer stuff on ebay. Wohoo.

There's a big lizard in my backyard

So, here I am. Waking up at 5:30 AM on a Sunday morning.

I used to go to church. I used to have an unshakable faith in God. That's starting to develop some cracks I think. Crumble around the edges. Showing signs of stress fractures. I'd really like to find a Buddhist temple somewhere to visit on a regular basis, get the feel for it. But the suburbs aren't exactly teeming with spiritual seekers I guess.

The closest is a journey to Decatur. Where I do know people, so it would be a dual-pronged mission, but alas, kids and wife keep me from such pursuits these days.

No rest for the wicked

I've been sleeping for 3-4 hours a night, waking in the middle of the night, staying up for a couple hours, then going back to bed for 45 minutes or so before its time to go to work.

Not on purpose or anything, its just whats been happening.

Work has been tremendously busy lately. One of my co-workers is having panic attacks its getting so bad. I don't blame him really. We're totally understaffed. It's a well paying stressful job.

Hopefully I won't be doing it much longer.

I don't know, part of me will miss it I guess, its pretty fast paced. But whatever.

My mother has been arrested for felony distribution, she's looking at prison/jail time, then the state trial will be after the federal one, might have some more time there.

My suicidal thoughts haven't been so bad lately. I think the meds are starting to take hold. wohoo.

God I'm tired

These last few days at work have been exhausting. I'm juggling a lot of projects at once and a few of them are all very active at once. It's been hectic.

I'm tired. Been getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night or so.

I'm just waiting on a plane.

I'm getting ready to make a career change.

Seems strange. I sort of stumbled into IT by accident. My father sort of stunted my curiosity in computers when he got mad at me all the time for spending time indoors trying to program my TI-99-4/A and then my commodore 64.

I could never understand him. Why buy me stuff like that and then limit the time I spend on it? He was always forcing me in to playing sports. I played baseball, a sport I personally despise and always have, for four or five years.

Enough about him.

So I'm doing a career change. For the first time in fifteen years I'll have a non-technical job. I've been wanting to make the transition somehow for a long time now, four or five years. I had hoped my company would grow and expand and I could spend time managing it instead of doing primary technical stuff for it.

I just want a break. Unfortunately, companies don't really grant sabbaticals. I'd love a year or two off to go do something else. Take a sanity break.

But this new job, if I get it, won't be technical really. I'll babysit enterprise class customers, making sure they get the support they need and whatnot. It's a 24/7 job. You are always on-call, but you don't go in (in fact you work from home). I'm a little worried that it won't work out, because it's something new. But it's a dream job as far as I see it.

Well, it isn't working for Google as a site manager, but we all know how that turned out.

So anyway, hopefully soon I'll be doing non-technical work and be in pretty much the same pay-range as before.

I'm sort of treating this like getting married. I'm realising that the only reason I have not to take this job is the fear of it not working out. Can't let that stop you in life.

I've been getting tired of technology. Things at this point in my career are either simplisticly easy or extremely tedious. There is very little fun left in the work at this point. I'm good at what I do, and I'm thankful that I have this ability to pick things up. But I'm bored with computers at this point. Maybe this career change will be a huge disaster and I'll move back into IT again just for the money, after realising how good I had it.

Or maybe not.

I've had a lot of dreams about my parents on this trip. Stuff that wakes me up after a scene is over. Very intense.

A manager at my work told me he was keeping my mother in his prayers because of her stroke. I wanted to tell him that she doesn't deserve it, that she brought this on herself and all that. But I can't figure out a polite way to say it all without sounding like a complete dick. So I've graciously thanked him for his concern instead.

I guess that's a politically savvy move there.

I sent my daughter a book while I was on this trip. Fedex'd it to her so she would get it while I was gone. It was really cute to hear her talk about it. Me getting a package is a tedious thing at this point in my life. For her it was an adventure. Her comments went something like this "Yes, we were cleaning my car outside and the mailman came and gave me the book. It's about a band. We read it."

She really can pull off long sentences that suprise me sometimes. Pretty sophisciated for a three year old I think. I guess some of my appraisal of her ability is clouded by being her father. But whatever.

So anyway, my son can speak pretty well on the phone too now. Not bad for a 18 month old. When I call I can hear him saying da-da in the background. He must be pissed when it isn't me on the other end of that phone.

Well, enough about this stuff. Time to get ready to hop onto this big ole jet hairdryer.

Strange dreams this week

These dreams are keeping me up. I have one and when it's done I wake up, like the show is over or something.

They are all sort of sad tales. Variations on my life that might have been had I made a choice other than the one I did at the time.

Some sort of mental self-judgement is afoot.

So yesterday I found out why my mother had a stroke.

It's stress basically. That's the short answer. Short answers never truely cover everything in life though.

So she got arrested. Felony possession, grade 4. It was only a matter of time I guess.

She was one year from retiring from working at the Department of Corrections. She got fired (being an addict while working at a prison is a big no-no apparently). Lost her retirement benefits.

sigh.

I was going to take the family up to see her for Thanksgiving, but I don't think that's going to happen now.

So what is this for?

Is this just a mental mastrubation site? Notice there isn't a single comment about politics. I guess that's because I get really frustrated and angry thinking about politics at this point.

We've lost the heart of what makes the United States great. Being in the US at this point is like being in Rome during the slow plunge into the history books.

I guess this will turn more in to a blog about me rather than my views on the world.

Maybe a silly documentary or archeological dig in to my mind, something for the grand kids to go through after I'm dead and gone. Who knows. Maybe no one will read it. Maybe I'll get alzheimers and read it every day to find out who I am.

My mother had a stroke

So my mother had a stroke the other day. And probably a heart attack as well.

I didn't go up to see her, stayed with my family and kids. I feel kind of guilty about that, but I also can't stand my mother. The more she wants to be around me or the kids, the harder it is to tolerate her.

She smokes, she behaves like an attention starved puppy.

Wife and I are doing better now. I'm on Wellbutrin now. It seems to help a lot with mood stuff. I'm pretty happy with it overall. Less thoughts of suicide and depression for sure. That is sort of what started me being on Wellbutrin. It's complicated.

Speaking of a puppy, I've had the urge lately to get a puppy, or a young dog that will play with the kids some.

Strange Memories on Vacation

I was woken up this morning (at Panama City Beach on vacation) by a diaper emergency. Basically there was crap everywhere. Not on my top ten list of ways to be woken up in the morning.

I've been thinking a lot while on vacation, I guess thats partially the point. Get you away from your normal humdrum life and let you unwind a bit. Or maybe its being so close to the ocean. I think being close to something so big sort of makes you put things into perspective a little. Or maybe not perspective as much as cause some introspection.

Do you ever get that feeling that you don't really belong somewhere? That you don't fit in, what you are doing is a charade? Thats basically how I feel about this entire world. I know, it sounds melodramatic. But its true, really. This sort of strange alienation.

I've been out of sorts lately. My internal clock is off. Vacation followed by a seven hour drive and then flying to Scottsdale the next morning for a week is messing with my mind.

I'm in a mobile mindset. Day dreaming about jobs in other cities or countries. Learning new languages and heading out of the country.



It'd be nice to get out of this country.



Bush brought up Vietnam today in his speach.

I'm typing this on my work laptop

It's late (for me anyway), 9 PM. I've been trying to get to bed early since in theory I'm supposed to be at work by 7 AM. I think I've been on time something like 5 times this year.

I really try, I really do, honestly. I hate being late. Things just always seem to distract me in the mornings. A long shower, the news, something, it just never happens that I'm ready to go on time anymore.

I've had a host of medical issues crop up in the last year or so. The latest is that I've been having a battle with cluster headaches. Boy let me tell you, really nothing like being hit in the temple by a hammer every 5-10 minutes for a bit. It's awful. Not like a migraine really, no nasuea, just searing blinding pain that brings tears to your eyes.

So I've got emergency injectors of anti-headache medicine handy, and I'm keeping doped up on lortab to keep more of the feelings at bay.

I'm trying this with my work laptop while it's in my actual lap. I wonder how many sperm have died in the production of the blog post? Eh, fry all ya want, I'll make more.

Hm, doesn't quite come out the same way as the chip commercials. Oh well. At least I get an A for effort.

So I've totally lost my interest in playing WoW since i was suspended (still don't know why). I loathe arbitrary punishments, which is why I can't stand IRC rooms and overly-moderated message boards. I'm not certain I'll play again with any interest (or have any fun) until this whole thing is explained to me in something other than a vague form letter.

Work has been hell this week and it's going to get progressively worse throughout the rest of this year.

I'm obstensibly in charge of integrating a sister company into our IT infrastructure by end of year. Something like 400 users. Its a huge political bout that I have nothing to do with, I'm just there to make sure we don't screw up on the tech side of the house.

In addition I'm rolling out MOM 2007 to the environment (to monitor something like 800 servers I guess) and also we're upgrading Enterprise Vault version 5.14 to version 6, so we can then service pack 2 the host OS and then do an upgrade from version 6 to 7 of the entire Enterprise Vault suite.

All by end of year. Oh yeah, we're also doing a full blown disaster recovery test of all our messaging infrastructure before the end of September. And yesterday I had a new software deployment land in my lap that needs to be done asap.

All priority codes are ASAP where I work. Its sort of funny because managers never say something isn't important, there is just this mental strata of ASAP projects that get piled up and then occasionally one of them will be yanked to the surface by one of my many managers and make more ASAP than the rest.

Its teh awsome

So what's the point with this anyway?

I originally started this thing off as a way to vent, that I'm clearly doing. But I also thought I had something to say about the political atmosphere in our country right now. In the world even. But when I go to write about it, it seems somehow futile. I can't really get the motiviation to type out my thoughts on the subject because it's so damn depressing.

I wonder how the rest of America really feels. When they aren't distracted with the high gas price panic (oh noes! It's going to cost me another dollar to drive around for the week!) or the latest Brittany Hilton Lohan crisis or whatever. I must imagine Americans seem awfully shallow people by the rest of the world. I'd say on average that's pretty much spot on.

It seems there isn't really a voice of discontent in the US right now, it's more of a pathetic whimper voiced in the wrong direction.

So anyway, if there isn't going to be a wealth of sharp witted social and political commentary on this site, whats the point exactly? Is this in fact nothing more than a bit mental wank-fest for yours truely? Yeah, probably so. I guess its therapy after a fashion.

This isn't me.

I remember when I was about two, maybe three, and my father and I lived in this appartment in Buffalo New York. We were pretty poor. We sorted change (including pennies) to buy bread and milk. I remember my dad worked as a bartender at a pretty rough bar. He wasn't home most nights. I think I had a small bed to sleep on or some sort of love seat type arrangement, and he slept on a matress on the floor.

We had nothing.

This life I'm living now, in some way just doesn't seem to fit me really. I'm not really sure who I am anymore.

Account suspension, the ruin of society

So last night I received an email stating my WOW account had been suspended for 72 hours. No warning, just bang, pay us for three days of you not playing. The blizzard page shows this is the harshest punishment doled out (with the execption of permanent banning). What was my offense? I don't know.

It probably has something to do with paying some guy in Taiwan to level up my character. Either that or buying gold from www.gold4power.com. I can't imagine anything else I did, I barely talk to any players.

So anyway, now I'm bored after the kids go to bed. And as we all know, idle hands do the devils' work. So Blizzard is encouraging me to do the devils' work. If they do this to enough people, society as we know it will crumble. No one will send out thank you cards anymore, women will have to open doors for themselves, mail adverts for new credit cards and home refinance packages will go unread.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Frustration with the national mechanic

So I'm in this class, which, uh, frankly I've forgotten the name of. Its catalog name is BSM.07-03.BSAB06FD71-PHL323 so its some sort of philosophy class.

Anyway, names aren't important. They are merely labels.

So I'm in this class. One of the exercises is to figure out where your moral and ethical maturity is, what level. There is this thing called Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning. You can read about it here. After reading it, I sort of placed myself in stage six. Examining that of course caused me to do some self-analysis about what frustrates me with our country and the world in general. I sort of did a rambling vent that went something like this:



"I'd like to think I'm in Stage 6 for the most part. I think that the rights of individuals should be held in a higher regard than the rights of society in general. For example, I don't feel its society’s place to punish me for not wearing a seatbelt, or not wearing a helmet while cycling. Yes, of course the 'greater good' is served by these ordinances, but they infringe upon the right of the individual to be who they are. If people want to weed themselves out of the gene pool, it should be their right to do so.



Nor is it the job of society to protect me from things I can easily avoid. I don't need smoking to be illegal in dining establishments. If there wasn't a well ventilated non-smoking section I just wouldn't frequent the place.



I feel that our country has lost sight of the rights of individuals. We've lost touch with the harsh realities that made our country what is was in the beginning. We're becoming a nanny state run by the moral minority. Almost oppressive in its character.



There is nothing relative in this that I can see. Personal rights have gone by the wayside in our sad, misguided attempts to legislate morality and security. The worst part of it is that our society often doesn't have a firm grasp on what it is passing laws to protect from, nor the real impact that these nanny-laws will have in the future. Take for example prohibition. Best of intentions right? Make alcohol illegal. Genius. What do we get? Organized crime booms, people get locked up for doing what they've done all their lives, wasted lives and dollars chasing after more moral fiber.



You can see the same thing in the sad misguided war on drugs. A million people a year are incarcerated for marijuana abuse. 25% of the adult population admits to using it. Criminals are making millions each year off its sale. And more people died from consuming spinach this year than smoking marijuana. What are we saving ourselves from here exactly?



I guess what I'm getting at here is that I feel individual rights should be held sacrosanct. I feel that puts me into stage six."

Fathers day

So, Fathers day.


A bit complicated for me. Stressful.


I love my family. Nothing to do with that. I was stressed. Nervous. Agitated.

Why? I don't know. I had to return to this post for final editing weeks later. I guess it mainly has to do with not seeing my father for over a year now. A lot of strange, conflicted emotions over that. Understandable I guess.

It was a good day overall. Emilie is old enough to 'get' holidays now. So she bought me a gift. Was very tickled with the whole concept of a 'daddys day'.

Kids are great. You learn so much about yourself by interacting with them.

Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos

I'm going to go on a technical rant for a moment, because none of this information seems to be accumulated in one spot anywhere.

You can read about how kerberos was developed by MIT, and how it's a fine idea and so forth at wikipedia. What I'm ranting about is how Microsoft implemented it in their active directory, and why it has a bunch of undocumented problems that large (or anally secure) organizations will run into eventually.

The first problem an organization will hit upon, the tip of the God damn iceberg, is that for some reason, some users in the environment will all the sudden no longer get their home drives. Strange things will happen with DFS mappings that work for everyone else. Group policies will cease to be enforced. If you have DCs in slow connection site (especially over vpn or other small packet traffic connections), the DCs will get out of sync.

You'll probably start to see issues when users are a member of around 130 groups. Yes, this includes default groups and nested group relationships. And distribution lists. Not really that hard to get there in any complex environment.

When this happens, fire whoever designed your active directory structure. Start over. You're headed into pain-in-the-ass land. If you can't (say you have SOX audits and other bullshit to deal with), then read on.

The reason you're having issues is that Microsoft by default sends the entire fucking kerberos authentication in one UDP packet. Jesus Christ, talk about stupid. As any network engineer (or even some non-network engineers) can tell you, UDP can't be fragmented. So when your kerberos packet gets too big, it stops working. The machine you're authenticating with will only get the info that fits into the first packet. This could mean you don't get access to an application you should, etc. I found it consistent that users with large kerberos tickets wouldn't get group policy applied at all. Home drives also stopped working. DFS permissions behaved oddly. Sometimes you'd only see 1/3 of the directories you should.

All this can be fixed by doing this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244474/en-us.

For the lazy, all machines (servers and workstations) will need this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\Kerberos\Parameters

MaxPacketSize=dword:00000001
MaxTokenSize=dword:0000ffff

This should be put into the group policy that applies to every machine in your environment. All domain controllers, servers, workstations, etc. It's imperitive that all these machines can pass kerberos tickets using TCP instead of UDP.

Not so bad right? Hit a brick wall with authentication, so you patch or push a reg key change to every fucking machine and reboot your whole environment. Jesus, try to do it during Microsofts monthly patch cycle or something so your management team doesn't think you're a bunch of retards or something. I can't convey to you the look of disgust I got from management when I explained this problem (Microsoft won't call it a bug). A seriously lack of forward planning from the Microsoft development team here.

But I digress.

Next, you're start to run into more issues with any application that runs in IIS. This will crop up when users get into the 350 group membership range. It's variable, since the test of the group name and SID get dumped into your kerberos ticket.

This is a buffer over-run problem in IIS. Read up on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/820129 to get the gist of what is going on.

In a nutshell, you need to add a couple dword entries to the HTTP parameters key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters
MaxFieldLength=dword:0000fffe
MaxRequestBytes=dword:00800000

These numbers are probably higher than you need, but you're already going against IIS's security model by mucking with this, so who gives a shit at this point right? It's all about making things work.

So, once you deal with that. You'll probably also want to take a look at how SQL works with Kerberos authentication. You'll want to get familiar with the trusted for delegation check box in the AD properties of servers, and learn what the hell SPNs are and how to set them (SETSPN is a crappy tool, using ADSIEdit seems to work better).

Take a visit to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319723/en-us to check out Kerberos authentication for SQL.

Check out this for more info on IIS http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324274/en-us.

Good luck in your overly complicated, pain in the ass to administer environment. If you're dealing with these issues, your organization is run by mutants. Best of luck.

Oh yeah, you probably want to take a visit to Microsoft's KB and check out the known issues with large Kerberos ticket sizes and Sharepoint. We've also had to apply the HTTP fixes to our Symantec Enterprise Vault servers since they do their previews for archived mail using HTML and IIS.

Fun stuff.

A TV ad

I just saw an ad for the Rocket Fishing Rod. A garish plastic thing. An orgasmic mix of guns and fishing to any die hard outdoorsman, to be sure. Finally, one must think, I can get the kids interested in fishing by giving them guns and letting them take shots at these fish all day.

I've never cared for fishing, or hunting for that matter. The cro-magnon carnivore will retort with "Well where do you think all that meat comes from then?" or something equally banal.

Suprise, I don't eat meat. Not that its anything about saving the animals or any of that nonsense. I don't really give a shit. Well, maybe a little. But meat makes me sick. Not worth the effort to get aclimated to it. It's complicated. But fishing and hunting just seem too God damn boring to me. Sitting on the shore, or in a boat, or a blind, waiting endlessly for some poor animal with the brain the size of a pea to come along and make you lucky.

No waiting for action in this day and age. No sir. Nothing entertaining there. I want my action fast. Instant results. Have you seen fishing shows on TV? Dear God, you know they've fast forwarded through all the bits they think are boring, and its still like watching paint dry.

Now the hunting and fishing I can respect, is that done in a very real and carnal method. Fishing? No man, not this sitting on your ass drinking beers waiting on a fish to be dumb enough to take a bite on your lure. No, my father once related a tale to me of a man who snorkeled for his fish. He'd get out in the ocean a bit on a small boat, go over the side, and look for the fish he thought he wanted. Then swim down forty or fifty feet with a spear gun, check things out, and if he wanted the fish, he'd spear it, and haul it back up and into the boat. Now that's fishing.

Hunting? My uncle used to hunt bear. Not with a rifle. Too easy. A compound bow and razor tip arrows was his method. I could respect that. No fierce overkill, like an Israeli tank going up against a Palestinian throwing rocks. No this was fair, balanced, plenty of time for that bear to come at you and maul you to death if you didn’t place a shot right.

But if I did eat meat it would only be kosher. No way I could eat that processed mystery meat that comes out of most American meat packing places. To think our beloved Congress has refused to pass laws that would require the packers to not say, sell meat that has feces in it. The American answer to this problem isn't sanitation. No no, that would be expensive, time consuming.

Instead we bombard all our meat with radiation, leave the crap in the meat, just kill the bacteria that comes along with it.

Say, whose hungry?

A strange muse strikes

I spent over an hour battling my alarm clock this morning. The constant fatigue of five hour nights of sleep over the last few years are starting to take a strong grip on me perhaps. After forcing myself out of bed, I debated the virtues of going to work today or staying home.

Weak arguments on both sides caused me to sit staring into space for several minutes. If I stay, perhaps I can sleep in until 7:30 or so. Get some more rest. Keep these goddamn migraines away. But then the kids will wake, and like the rising of a full moon in a 50s werewolf movie, chaos would ensue. If I went to work, I was likely to fall asleep somewhere in the hour long commute. But I wouldn't burn any more of my PTO days, of which I am running low this year.

As I pondered this situation, sitting on the side of the bed, I sort of went into a daze. What does this all mean? If I stay home, would I really get any rest? Not likely. If I fell asleep on the way to work, would the accident be fatal? Probably not, with any luck I'd be knocked unconscious and hauled off in an ambulance. Maybe wake up in a few days with a concussion. But well rested nonetheless.

Hm....what to do...what to do.

Suddenly I realized I had wasted ten minutes so far and figured what the hell, off to work I go. I'm a gambler at heart. I like taking chances.

Strong urges of suicide and waves of paranoia chased me on my voyage across town. I was convinced the police or perhaps the FBI were following me. Watching my every move. Listening in on my brain waves in an unmarked van perhaps, or maybe a remote flying drone hovering overhead. Any police officer in his right mind who knew my mental state would pull me over in an instant and lock me in jail, for no reason whatsoever. The thoughts and images flashing through my head were certainly grounds enough. Where was the posse coming to lock me away, or dispense justice on the spot via a firing squad?

What had I done wrong? Why the paranoia, doubt, suicidal thoughts? I don't know really. Perhaps part of an acid flashback was in play. The stress my family exerts upon me is of no help either. My mind is something like a pressure cooker, sitting for days on a setting any sane person would never use, left forgotten to bake until the slightest tremor would cause the whole damn thing to explode, sending ceramic shards and hunks of plastic in all directions. A culinary ticking bomb with no real target. Instant mayhem in disguise.

I had a mental break down last night. It was an ugly thing. A total loss of mental discipline. I'm unsure what brought it on. It only lasted a little while, yet it was one of those time/space experiences that seems to last forever when you're in its grasp. Like the two seconds before a car wreck you see coming but can't avoid, your mind so fired on adrenaline that if you were watching close enough, you could see all the matter around you slowly decaying according to its individual half-life. The physical aspects of it were quick and precise. I'm still trying to cope with the synaptic short circuits that were left behind however. Permanent cerebral flotsam of a sort.

I'd been slowly working up to it all day. By dinner time it felt as if my spine was going to quiver out of my body. A strange sensation, as if I was picking up psychic vibrations from someone with a definitive dislike for me. But who? Could be anyone really.

After dinner, with the kids asleep, my mind was finally left to its own devices. Nothing external to nudge it along, no simple expectations to fulfill. And that’s when it hit. My mind had had enough, damnit! Fuck all this, it seemed to say. No thoughts processed through my mind for some time. A total synaptic traffic jam was in swing. All lights were green, wrecks at every intersection. The kind of total traffic fuckup that leaves city planners awake at night. I finally came to my senses some time later. My face and shirt wet with tears (or drool, one can never really tell).

I was so exhausted that I desperately wanted rest. But my mind was buzzing with this strange agitation. I couldn't think straight. What had just happened to me? Am I falling apart? Have things gotten too strange? How did this happen? These were all clearly questions that had to be addressed, but first I needed to unwind. Calmn down, relax. I took two xanax and made a large glass of vodka with some coke mixed in for color. Pounded it down, alcoholic iced-tea of a sorts.

I had had a call from a private investigator earlier that day. A confused kind of call. Someone looking for my fathers motorcycle. A Harley-Davidson, as I understand it. I had seen the bike a few times. Smallish, pretty, all chrome and polish and silver paint. I've no idea where it is. Or my father for that matter. He traveled off for parts unknown over a year ago.

The vodka and xanax were starting to mellow things out, put life into perspective. I should write it all out. Inflict this madness on the outside world. Clear the mental air, so to speak.