Five Things I Miss About Being On The Lam

5.  All those mini shampoo bottles at motels.

4.  Growing a beard.  Not bothering to shave was a nice form of apathy.  Plus, I felt all manly.

3.  In-N-Out Burger and burritos.  The American West has some good, quick, cheap food that the American East does not.  On the other hand, getting a good slice of pizza or a decent cheesesteak could be a herculean task, so it was ultimately an unequal trade-off.

2.  Survival as the only expectation.  I used to want a pegleg, because in the face of such a handicap all that society demands of us is to simply survive -- getting through the day becomes its own achievement, and all the expectations for success and adulation etc etc become moot.  Being on the lam is kind of like having a pegleg in that way.

1.  Spending all day, every day with Dr. S.  Although at numerous points we were about ready to strangle one another, it was still nice to have her around.  As great as it is that she has a fulfilling job and a steady paycheck and all that these days, I am selfish.  Also, did you know that she can't even answer her phone from the OR?  Hmph.  It was never a problem for me to interrupt an autopsy or two, but apparently that doesn't fly these days (or so I've been told... numerous times).

In other news: Georgetown lost to Ohio?  WTF?  This whole first round has been full of some pretty monumental cratering so far.  My bracket looks like crap right now.

In Which I Attempt To Shame One Gibson Praise

I'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to JD and the Skinman, who spent their first remotely springlike weekend working on a building project out here in the middle of nowhere.  As it turns out that I have no appreciable construction skills, and Dr. S's demanding schedule precludes much time spent drywalling, their expertise and labor was invaluable.  Those are two guys who know their way around tools.

(Entendre only partially intended.)

So, yes, our "basement remodel" is finally complete, and nearly fully furnished.  (How many other couples do you think have argued over the placement of an in-home centrifuge?)  Also, I did manage to catch a few lessons in the ways of the handyman, so as to be at least slightly less useless in the future.  My next project: attempting to build my own chicken coop, which is itself a subsidiary of the "Mulder becomes a master gardener" scheme.  Everyone needs a good post-apocalyptic skill or two at the ready, right?  Just in case?  Right now all I've got to rely on is my sneaking suspicion that, should we fail, Dr. S will still somehow come to rule us all, and I'm pretty sure she'd keep me around as her concubine.  But I figure I still better have a backup plan.

Oh, and Gibson?  Way to be too cool for your elders, kid.  You missed some CRAZY fun.  And nobody knows fun like a bunch of repressed, middle-aged ex-or-current-feds.  Booya.  (That's still a phrase, right?)

Just Wondering...

Does being nearly fifty years old and driving around air-drumming to Hendrix officially make me That Guy?

(I should add that the only radio alternative was Taylor Swift, and something tells me it's better to be That Guy than to be that guy.)

Further Elaboration On Points Discussed In Previous Post

It turns out that this blog, much like so many casefiles, is getting fact-checked by the fastidious Dr. S, whose scrupulous honesty apparently extends into the digital realm, a world virtually defined by its potential for misrepresentation and reinvention.  But I've been told that's "beside the point."  So, a correction from the previous post: the American appetite for tales of extraterrestrials is alive and well-recognized by literary agents.  They did find the relationship between the two leads unbelievable (in the words of one well-dressed New Yorker who deigned to meet with me: "Two people this good-looking spending seven years nearly celibate, despite their constant proximity and admitted attraction?  It makes all the alien stuff seem downright realistic."), but more than that, I've been told that my writing style leaves something to be desired.  Something about riffing back and forth between extended ruminations about symbolic meaning and Jungian systems of interdependent consciousness and quippy one-liners is not "saleable" these days, I hear.  Personally, I blame the rap music.

But I think I'm growing to like this little piece of virtual real estate.  I picked the design purely on the appeal of its name -- "ChaoticSoul" -- a little emo, perhaps, and it would have more existential and historical resonance as something like "Dark Night of the Soul" -- but the notion of confronting the chaos within one's own subconscious as a necessary process to attain enlightenment is present within Eastern religions, Western theologies, and shaman and pagan rituals around the world, so I think I'm OK with using it as a template upon which I might pour my thoughts.  Plus, I'm trying to move a little more into the digital realm generally, given that my office is so strewn with newspapers that I'm just a few extracted livers away from a thirty-three-year hibernation.

Oh, and finally, to address the security concerns that you all seem to have: if They decided to track us down based on our Internet presence, I'm sure recent online purchases have them far more concerned than anything I could write here.  Do you know you can get gene sequencers on eBay for under a grand?  It's true!  And on a related note, if you know any nerdy high-schoolers in the state of Virginia who want to help save the world for their science fair project in the next two years, just give 'em S's email.

Let's Get It On

I am officially making the leap from a man wanted by the federal government to just another crackpot mouthing off on the Internet.  How the mighty have fallen.

I had no intention of blogging -- let's face it, even the word is stupid -- and thought instead that all of my literary meanderings would fit nicely into a novel.  One of those 'based on a true story' kinds of things that piques people's curiosity and makes them realize, through narrative rather than analysis, the unseen mechanisms by which power operates around us (like a Dan Brown book, except actually good).  Featuring a dashing and brilliant FBI agent and his beautiful, ass-kicking, walking textbook of a partner as the heroes, of course.

According to just about every literary agent in America, though, the appetite for aliens just isn't there any more.  (Plus nobody found the relationship between the two leads to be "plausible."  Plausible, my domesticated ass.)  Anyway, as crushing rejection after crushing rejection poured in, the lovely Dr. S -- lifemate and the wrangler of my sanity -- suggested that I vent my creative energies with a blog.

I continued to resist, until 2010 brought with it enough snow that we were essentially stranded and housebound here in the middle of nowhere.  Here I'm finally freer than I've been in years, and yet I was as isolated as ever.  So: blogging is now being attempted as a psychological solution.  Hey, it's cheaper than Valium, and the blogosphere is at least as weird as anything I've ever investigated before.