“Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.”
— Edwin A. Abbott

I have been in rare form all day long. The details have to do with an ambulance trip, debilitating pain, heavy doses of narcotics, and an altered state of perception; if you’re not squeamish, they are

Wednesday:

Woke up at 2 AM in agonizing pain, which was quickly accompanied by its jolly friend “uncontrollable vomiting.” A quick (and unappreciated; I’ve never been in an ambulance before and kind of resent that I didn’t get to appreciate the experience properly) ambulance trip later, I was in the hospital, being shot full of painkillers and run through a CAT scanner…another unappreciated experience.

Diagnosis: Kidney stones. A prescription for oxycodone later, I was back home, where the suffering is the same but the decorations are better.

Side note: Oxycodone fucks you up bad.

Took the last dose of oxycodone on Saturday evening. Who knew it stays in your system for a long time?

So, today I have been totally, utterly, completely high all day long, still feeling the aftereffects from the meds.

I’ve also been in a script from a bad Twilight Zone all day long. Weird shit all around me.

Exhibit A:

My favorite diner just installed a new, high-tech faucet in the men’s room, the kind with the sensor that automatically turns on and off the water. The lighting in the room, the placement of the faucet, and the design of the sink all conspired just so to make the flow of water…cast a shadow on the sensor. So: The faucet turns on, runs for three seconds, turns off. Turns on, runs for three seconds, turns off. Fssst. Fssst. Fssst, Covering the sensor stops it–until the sensor is uncovered.

Exhibit 2:

Same diner. Ten-year-old kid. Two cell phones. He’s on them both. At the same time.

This kid was more important than Henry fucking Kissenger. (Well, okay, my hairdresser is more important than Henry fucking Kissenger, but still…)

When I was ten, I didn’t want to be that connected, and I was a geek! Hell, I still don’t want to be that connected, and I’m still a geek.

Exhibit 3:

Ayn Rand. Someone mentioned Ayn Rand in an online conversation today. Normally, that just makes me testy, but today for some reason it just struck me as absurd, and I suddenly realized exactly where Ayn Rand fits in the Cosmology of Tacit: she’s the deranged mutant clone of L. Ron Hubbard and Karl Marx!

I’m still high. I still feel like the world is about three degrees off kilter. But the mental image of a mad scientist doing the nasty with genes of L. Ron “Battlefield Earth and Dianetics” Hubbard and Karl “What, me Objectivist?” Marx just really made it all worthwhile.