Today, my life feels like an algebra problem. If 2n = my father's age, where n = is equal to my years of life, then where does that leave me? By this point in his life, my father had a PhD, a career, and a pair of lifetime commitments.

But I cannot focus on what accomplishments I have not yet achieved. That way lies madness, and I prefer to recognize my glass as half-full. I do have my health, and I do have my hair. I even have a degree, however useless. For the first time in a long time, I can say with great enthusiasm that I do not hate my job, and more importantly, sometimes I even enjoy it. I get to spend a lot of time out of doors. I currently have to spend it in Florida, and this is a source of many problems - but someday that too shall change.

I'm not sure what the future holds, but whatever it holds, I will document and share here.

I was having a good day.

This is what happens when you are paying more attention to your destination than the road ahead of you. Ironically enough, I was on my way to donate blood. The guy in the lane next to me just wouldn't get out of the way. I let my frustration at possibly missing the impending turn distract me sufficiently, and I failed to notice that traffic had come to one of its frequent and sudden standstills in front of me. It was stupid, and I regret ruining everyones' evening - as well as missing my appointment for a blood donation.

Not one of my finer moments.

And for what it is worth, while the bumper is dented, the Texas plate remained unbent and unbroken. I guess that they just make 'em tough out there.

Yoda Derksen (1993 - 2009), self portrait. Taken (with some prompting) the 29th of November, 2008. Goodbye, my little friend and chum. Your purr is always just one room over.

I wouldn't even be using them, except that they are literally the only game in town down here in south Florida. You can tell that they are a monopoly, because only a monopoly would refuse to take your money when you offer it to them. I may even yet look forward to having my service cut off, because their billing department appears to have screwed up my account now that the cable is hot.

Or maybe I'll just have free cable for a while. Who knows? There could be certain advantages to their incompetence.

Mostly, it helps to have a strong source of emotional inspiration. I do not kid when I speak of my need for muses.

Most of what you see published here has actually undergone one or two passes of the editor's pen. I know that it frequently looks rushed, but it is what it is. The above is mostly raw and unstructured. Pure. Call it a thought experiment spilled on the page for the rest of you to read. I have to put it to bed now, because I am starting to read it over - and to edit it. I want to leave this first draft free in the wild unfinished and unrefined.

Ever.

Perhaps it is because I am habitually a night owl - often only starting projects late in the day when my brain settles, or because I am easily distracted far into the night by a good book that pulls me in and holds me away from sleep, but I have never been a morning person.

This is odd, because I do enjoy breakfast. I like pancakes. Waffles. Bacon. Or maybe I just like brunch, and sharing those things with friends. I also enjoy the silence that mornings can offer, and the first few rays of sunshine creeping between the trees, and burning off the low fog that still lingers on the ground like a blanket. A private time when you are alone with the sun and the birds, and together watch the world waking up. It is a feeling like a secret shared. I treasure these things, but perhaps I hold on to those moments because they are so rare that I do not take their joys for granted.

Mornings have only gotten tougher with age. It isn't just rousing oneself to get up from the enveloping comfort of sheets that have moulded themselves to your person in the night. It isn't about having to leave all that to go somewhere undesirable, such as school, or church, or work. These are all things that can be endured, and must be accepted. Some of them can even be anticipated, and looked forward to.

Waking up hurts.

My body has had eight hours unsupervised to fall apart. Eight hours for allergies to inflame respiratory tissues, and for them to become clogged with mucous. Eight hours for wrecked sinuses to release too much moisture and become desiccated, drying and cracking to weep blood that will run down the back of my throat. Eight hours for the barometric pressure to change suddenly, and for those same sinuses and the fissures in my skull to fail to adapt, straining my cranium like a balloon to burst.

Any one of these things can make entering the waking world an effort of pushing through surgical gauze; the memory of anesthesia that does not quite hide the pain - and does nothing to prevent foreknowledge of pain to come. You bury your head in the pillows, and pray for the absence of clarity, because full awareness will bring a sharp appreciation of the stabbing lances between your eyes, or the dull grinding that rolls around beneath those orbs, or the throbbing inflammation that makes your teeth feel loose in their sockets.

Any one of those things - and they never come alone in the night. They always bring a friend.

But you get up. You fight through it. You have to. Your glassy eyes stare at the world, and you cling desperately to bottles of decongestant and Advil, hoping that the medicine kicks in soon enough to relieve some of your symptoms. Your glasses may be on, but you are still looking at the world through a bleary haze. Your throat and eyeballs are a desert, and you cannot focus. The swelling has thrown off your sense of equilibrium and balance, and you stagger. Every beam of sunlight that once seemed your friend holds a dagger that pierces beyond the eyeball to your brain.

And you have to drive to work.

Now.

You do not hate those for whom waking up is easy, but you do wish that they understood. You wish that every morning you woke up was as peaceful or easy as those few you shared with the rooster, and you envy those for which every morning's awareness is not a fight. Those for whom the peaceful magic of dawn is so commonplace that they can hardly appreciate it for the wonder.

In the meantime, there is coffee. It does nothing for the pain, but it does alleviate some of the symptoms, and its method of action is faster in the system than the ibuprofen or pseudoephedrine. It is enough, and it must be enough, because it is all you have left to try before you must rush out the door pretend to be a human being until the other medications kick in.

It is almost hard to believe that this is a trailer for a videogame, and not just the next big special-effects laden summer action-blockbuster film. The once bright lines between videogame, interactive entertainment, and film are rapidly fading.

You can say many things about Microsoft, but you cannot say that they do not take their games division seriously. They are aware, just as Sony and Apple (who as a latecomer to the party has only recently developed an appreciation for such) have become aware of how important to long-term business development establishing a baseline infrastructure of consumer "lifestyle" electronics in a home can be.

You may buy the computer for "business" purposes, but if the "kids" can play games on it, and you can also use it for communication, then it replaces several other subsidiary devices that might be constructed by a competitor. If your basic hardware integrates well or complements other devices by expanding functionality, then one purchase can provide for a whole string of downstream purchases. The game or business machine may also be able to play BluRay discs, which implies that you would need a surround-sound system - and the licenses (remember, kids: you don't buy products anymore, just the license to use them until a corporation executes its "at-will" termination clause of the licensing agreement that you contractually bound yourself to the second you opened the package) to play particular films on those machines. Perhaps you would then like to take your whole music or video library on the road with you? Another purchase - and so on.

An excellent business strategy, and one which has contributed to and capitalized upon the accelerating erosion between various forms of entertainment - and allowed certain media traditionally appreciated "only by children" to mature with those persons raised upon it. A generation of consumers, gradually becoming more sophisticated and complex in the way they consume media - and producing more complex and sophisticated media as they mature. Those lines will have been obliterated when interactive media finally becomes as commercially viable with as diverse a series of topics and themes as film eventually achieved.

There is considerable evidence suggesting that it is already well underway.

Sometimes I wish I had a camera capable of HDR photography. I think old mechanical structures particularly suit the grittiness of the high contrast ratio.

Today, we received your final submission for review. Accordingly, it has been reviewed by the Editorial Office. I am pleased to inform you that your PDF has been accepted by the Editorial Office. No further changes may be made to the document, as it has been forwarded for publication.

Congratulations on a job well done.

Best of luck to you in all of your future endeavors.