ok I missed the memorial day post. i was busy doing stuff in meatspace. here it is late, but here.

i am just tired of the nonsense i heard this year about veterans on memorial day. it's not that i don't appreciate or love veterans. those of you who know me in meatspace and a great many of you who know me in cyberspace know this. I have spent years and still spend hours each month listening and doing what i can to heal the aching minds and souls of veterans. it's just that we already have a national day to remember them by. it's called veteran's day.

this is memorial day. it's for remembering(memorial) those fallen in combat. by definition a veteran is one who didn't fall in combat. they survived and became veterans of the war. whatever war it happened to be. on memorial day we honor the ones who didn't come home or if they did it was in a bodybag. there have been quite a lot of them over the years.

so i spent some time thinking about them.

that and loperamide HCl is a miracle drug.

something happened today to make me realize just how strong my wife is.

some background. counting today I have puked less than dozen times in my nearly three decades of existence here. my aforementioned nearly perfect wife has some health problems. they are incredibly complicated and not really something i want to talk about here. one of the worst complications is something that is remarkably similar to but not the same as IBS. the gist is that when the trigger event happens(a particular food, stress, etc) her body stops at the point where her stomach joins her intestines. every thing above that point is ejected immediately out the top, and everything below is sent very rapidly out the bottom. the whole process takes about an hour. it takes days to recover from the effects.

some time last night or this morning I ate something that didn't agree with me. I am not sure exactly was it was but i have my suspicions. the end result was that the above event happened to me for the first time in my life. I can honestly say that this was the single most unpleasant physical experience i've ever had. take note that this statement comes from a guy who has been laying on the ground unfortunately conscious while six much bigger guys kicked the shit out of him; from a guy that has had the cinch strap from his saddle break while ascending a rocky streambed and in the resulting chaos had his beloved quarterhorse step on him at least five times. this was much worse than either of those things. I survived this but not without a lot of whining and bad language.

the point to this story is that this horrible physical ordeal that i just went through is something she puts up with on a regular basis and with virtually no whining on her part.

oh yeah and opera5 for linux kicks ass! for all the hard core open source zealots who go berserk about the qt libraries. look at netscape and then look at opera. then go shut up.

one of the things about writing is that you have to do it almost every day if you are gonna be any good at it. right now I don't have that possibility. maybe in august or september. but the cliche "make hay when the sun shines" is just what I have to do right now. still I have things to say about what is happening in the world almost every day. where I can I'll talk about it here but else I might dig up some old thing i wrote.

so in honor of the morons from the earth liberation front getting headlines again. the only thing I really have to add is that these assholes will generate so much bad press by doing stupid and counterproductive thing that now, when the nation really needs sensible productive eco terrorists they will cause the focus of law enforcement types on the whole subject.

and for those of you who might be looking to me for guidance in just what needs to be done? Forget it! I have a wife and kids and just can't do that kind of stuff anymore.

sorry I haven't posted for a month. I've been doing lots of thinking and the like but find that much of it I can't post here. work is ... well, work and i can't go into any detail here lest my former boss(who stuck his neck out to get me here) think i am whining. There are things going on in our country that I am concerned about that I also can't talk about here. I need some things.

A literary agent with connections to publishers that can get shelf space and don't mind publishing really thought provoking and controversial fiction.

about seventy five thousand dollars, although that could potentially be handled by the above.

a web host immune to subpeonas from the united states

about three weeks off to finish the novel for the above purposes