Forty eight years old. Still not dead. But this year's different than every year for the last seven: this year, I think maybe I know why. I have to explain this again, because I know that my obsession with this question sounds macabre. And I was reminded again this evening at dinner that I really haven't explained well enough, not even to most of my closest friends, what my question has been for the last seven years, and why it was so important to me. So let me start at the beginning:

By the age of 13, I'd come within in an inch of my life three times already, and each time, I'd survived by a combination of skill and luck. And around the time of my 14th birthday, thinking back on this, I realized something: sooner or later, the coin comes up tails. So I did some back of an envelope calculations, assuming that because of my particular distinct problems I would face a 50/50 chance of death every 4 years or so. I already understood, instinctively, the difference between dependent and independent probability, so I graphed it out: how many years can I last? How many times in a row do I have to throw "heads" to make it to a certain age? And I saw the graph had a distinct "knee" at about age 35, that the odds of my making it to 35 were about on the order of dozens to 1 against (as best as I recall, and I'm too lazy to do the math again), and the next multiple of four to five years after that were on the order of a hundred to one against. So I concluded, based on my math, that anything I didn't get done by age 35 almost certainly wasn't going to get done. And if I did make it to 35, I'd better be damned sure to spend the time from then to the next catastrophe getting as much done as possible. I needed to leave no dependents, I needed to leave no projects undone, and I needed to make for damned sure, every day from about age 25 or so on, that everybody I loved knew that I loved them. Simple math.

I made it to 40.

And when I made it to 40, I went back over my life history, totaling up the catastrophes that stood at least a 50/50 chance of killing me, every accident, every disaster, every bad decision, every doctor who wouldn't listen to what I was saying because I couldn't figure out how to get him or her to understand or believe me, every person in authority who massively over-reacted to the irreducible weirdness of my various mental disorders and threatened to shoot me or who set out to wreck my life. I wasn't wrong, as a kid: it's been about every 3 to 7 years. And every single one of them was a close call of some kind. So for seven years now, I've been trying to figure out, with something akin to desperation, why am I still alive? How in the hell do I keep throwing heads? Can I keep doing this? Or am I just playing Russian Roulette with a Tommy gun with one dud bullet in a full drum? Do the odds stay 50/50 the next time? And the next time? And the next time? From now until my luck runs out? Or is there a fundamental flaw in my theory?

Now do you understand? Good. Because I think I do have an answer, now. Maybe. I at least have a hypothesis, and that's more than I had seven years ago: I had one truly lucky day, and that one day changed everything. I've told the story in more detail before, and my friends have all heard it in full florid Technicolor: the story of how I accidentally bought a house. My divorce from my deranged ex-wife left me fragile, and more to the point, friendless: she had spent three years making sure that I didn't have a single friend in the whole world other than her. I didn't know it at the time, but it should have been obvious from the math that I did, in fact, have yet another disaster in my short-term future, about three years out. Had nothing else changed, that disaster would still have happened, and this time, there would have been no one to help me; no one would have even known when I lost everything, had nowhere to turn, found myself homeless and starving and sick, and shortly thereafter died -- right on schedule, at age 36.

But one day when I was 33, sitting in my apartment alone on a weekday because I had vacation days I had to use up or lose, in a fit of boredom I decided to spend an afternoon looking at other people's houses that were for sale, and mentally mocking their stuff. Through a chain of events so improbable and funny that they make a good story in and of themselves, 18 hours later I was the owner of my own house. And not just any house: I had, by insanely implausible luck, stumbled into a house that was almost completely perfectly designed for entertaining. It was also a house that was way, way too big for me. And I was, at least temporarily (I being a network engineer, and this being at the beginning of the dot-com bubble) making a hell of a lot of money, by my working class standards, more money than it could reasonably cost to keep me in food, clothes, and toys. So I did two things, both of them entirely selfish on my part.

First of all, for the next three years, any time an even mildly pretty girl that I knew became homeless, if I had a spare room, I offered it to her. I asked nothing from them; I got my payment because I just plain like having pretty girls around. Creepy, but there you have it. I never missed the tiny amount of groceries any of them ate, they never even showed up as a blip on the utility bills, they were using rooms I seldom used and one of the too many parking spaces outside, and in exchange for this absolutely nothing on my part, I got to eat the occasional dinner with or eat breakfast with a pretty girl. Win. Didn't hurt that I tended to pick them for being well read, artists (I'm a total sucker for artists), and/or good conversationalists, either. None of them were mine. Which was fine; I wasn't looking for a girlfriend, and never minded their boyfriends. (Well, twice. But they were both total jerks, and I think I was more than adequately polite to both of them, enough that I know that they both liked me.) I just liked having the company. And because I've had serious problems with inappropriately-felt gratitude before (it wrecked the closest thing I've ever had to a stable poly triad), I always made it clear to them that they owed me no favors, that just being there was as much a favor to me as the room and board was a favor to them.

Anyway, the other thing I did, for equally selfish reasons, was started throwing parties, and I mean a lot of parties, one every 6 to 8 weeks for the next three years. The Infamous Brad Parties, they came to be known as, because I put hard work and scientific study into trying to figure out how to throw good parties. Although honestly, I hardly had to work at it: I know that my pretty roommates, my fun-house house, and the couple of hundred bucks of free food and booze I threw out every six to eight weeks were the main attraction, not me. Those parties ran me ragged; I don't think I ever once had a good time actually at one of my parties. For me, the fun was over about half an hour after the door first opened; all the fun was the time up to that part, plus an hour or two of "post mortem" and "lessons learned" the next day over breakfast. That part, on the other hand, never stopped being fun, and I sometimes miss it terribly.

And then, sure as heck, as regular as clockwork, disaster struck. I won't go into the details again at this time, but my career was over, as dead as any Kennedy. I got offered more help than usual, but that's not why I survived, that time, not least of which because I turned down most of the help I was offered. I got through that one on my usual combination of determination, skill, and holy frelling cats the tiniest ever sliver of last-second luck I ever had. The money to start my next career was tied up in the house, and had closing been delayed for another six hours, that money would have gone to bankruptcy court, not me, and I might well have ended up under that bridge abutment that's been lurking in my future all this time, waiting for organ failure or violent death. I never want to have that close a call again, I count that one as narrower than the time an armed gang tried to kill me and the only way I survived was to convince them their first blow had done the job.

But the next time, the disaster came early. My own poor planning and lack of skill combined with some truly awful luck to kill off yet another career, plus six layers of emergency backup plans laid in advance, and I limped back to St. Louis with almost nothing, and promptly had almost all of the remainder stolen, first by a couple of teenage car thieves, and most of the rest by two corrupt cops on the St. Louis City Police Department. And when I wore out the welcome on my last couch to crash on after that ...

It got weird.

People came out of the woodwork, including people I didn't even know all that well, including people who I'd barely met once or twice and couldn't pull out of a police lineup (but then, I'm bad about that), people who'd never even met me. And with a level of determination usually only seen in intensive care wards (and one of them is, in fact, an emergency room doctor by trade, perhaps not a coincidence), they would not let me die, long past the point where I cared if I made it through that particular disaster or not. And since then, half of them have stuck around and keep reminding me that they are just plain never going to let me die. Some of them would even grudgingly admit that I'm not much use to much of anybody, any more, but it doesn't matter, nor does it matter that I did get done everything I ever wanted to do in my life by age 40; I'm going to end up as a brain in a jar on Futurama and there just isn't anything that any enemy, or any disaster, or any disease has to say about it, or that even I get to say about it.

Because on one day, so long ago that some of you were still in grade school, I had one incredible freaky lucky day. And my own selfishness in the three or so years after that established a reputation that no long chain of selfish acts has been able to erase, a reputation for goodness and generosity. I have tried to beat that reputation to death with a club of facts and self-revelation for years, because it's just not true, but it just won't die. And that's why I'm alive: because some freaky electrical signal in my bored mind one day, or some mischievous god, put it into my head to look at one house nobody in his right mind would have looked at on the very day the owners put it up for sale the second time at exactly the price I couldn't turn down. Luck. Permanent luck, the kind of luck that no statistics can predict in advance, the kind of luck that changes futures forever. And it probably is forever; because I have that reputation that won't die, people keep putting me in positions to help other people, where it's clearly in my own selfish interest to do so, and keep giving me the resources to do it, and then inexplicably giving me the credit for all their work.

The actuarial tables tell me, based on age, weight, zip code, income, diet, social class, (lack of a) daily commute, and flawed family and medical history that I've got about 30 more years of this to go. I'm about due for another disaster, any year now at the earliest, three to four years from now at the latest as such things go, and then another one every 3 to 7 years after that, so call it another six disasters before total permanent organ failure of some kind overtakes me. But I now have so much more help than I could have predicted was possible back in 1974, the odds are not based on the 2 to the 6th power to one odds against my throwing heads six more times. The odds are that three of those times, I'll throw heads, and the other three of those times, people who think that I'm this great and generous guy will bale me out whether I want them to or not.

I may actually be beginning to be at peace with the idea.

Here in St. Louis, we're going into the fourth straight day of what is, for me, mathematically near perfect weather: highs in the low 80s, dewpoint in the upper 50s, light but steady breeze. Four days of the perfect spring weather we didn't actually get a whole lot of during the main body of spring, this year. I'm in too good a mood, feeling both too cheerful and too mellow, to write about the news stories that interested me the most these last couple of days; this is no weather to be that pissed off, not when the news analysis isn't terribly time critical and thus can wait for when I turn the air conditioners back on, for when the mechanical drone of their fans and compressors swallows up the sounds of the birds, frogs, and insects. So, instead, I'll tell a story on myself. Since it didn't happen to you, it'll be funny.

But first, a spontaneous and unsolicited commercial plug. I haven't spent a lot of time out in the sun since I was in college, so I don't go through a lot of sunscreen. The last bottle of sunscreen I bought was on my way to the 1998 Burning Man festival: Coppertone Shade™ brand oil-free waterproof SPF30 sunblock. This stuff is nothing less than amazing. With this stuff on, my naturally-pasty northern-Germanic/Irish skin was able to stand 4 to 6 hours a day in the middle of an alkali salt flat at 4000' elevation for several consecutive cloudless days at the end of summer, and get only mildly pink. I have yet to find a way to sweat it off; heck, it barely washes off with soap and water, if even that. I have no idea how this stuff works. I know it's a high alcohol content gel of some kind. For all I can tell, once the alcohol evaporates, the active ingredient might as well be tattooed on.

Anyway, last Saturday I had two things to get to by bus, one of them a round-trip in the middle of the afternoon on the proverbial nearly cloudless day. This being St. Louis, it is flatly impossible to get almost anywhere by bus without spending half an hour or more waiting somewhere in the middle of an island of pavement for your bus, then the two to three transfers it takes to get to your destination. Exactly mis-time any one of those transfers, and that one transfer can easily stretch to 35 minutes. (On Sundays it's worse; on Sundays, it can reach slightly over an hour on most of the suburban bus lines. I don't take buses on Sunday in this man's town.) And here it was only about a week from the summer solstice, peak time for sunburn. So, knowing I might well be spending several hours outside in blazing sun, with it in the mid 80s and with the sun reflecting back up from concrete, I prided myself on how smart I was. I dressed in loose, breathable, lightweight clothing in light colors (pastel blue Hawaiian-style shirt from Curious Cat Clothing, khaki AmeriKilt with ecru knee-high hose) and I slathered on the sunscreen.

Sure as heck, I did have one of those perfect screwups on one transfer at the worst possible time, watching my bus pull away just as I was getting off the train, and thus had to spend 35 minutes standing on white concrete in the middle of a vast asphalt park-and-ride lot in the peak of the blazing sun, just as the breeze was dying down. So I was feeling pretty self congratulatory, watching all the people around me waiting for their buses in tight, dark clothes and heavy blue jeans, burning in the sun and sweating like horses, while I was feeling pretty comfortable. And by the end of the day, after even yet more time spent waiting for transfers, I checked the mirror, and my skin color had not shifted in the lightest, not anywhere. The very top of my forehead felt very, very slightly "tight" was all. See how smart I am?

See how dumb I am? I completely forgot to use lip gloss. By that night, I had come to the horrific realization that I had very nearly sunburned my lips clean off. Four days of alternating doses of restorative lip lotion and high-moisturizing lip balm later, they're still uncomfortable, if perceptibly healing. So I guess I score Saturday as almost smart. Oops. Ouch.

Seriously, I'm starting to develop a complex over this, the way some parents are about peanut allergies. The best diagnostician I've ever known looked over a list of symptoms I mentioned in my blog a while back, and wants me to get checked for it, and in the last couple of years, three guys I know have been diagnosed with it. And I don't have a whole lot more male friends than that; as a percentage of the available sample size, the the percentage of the guys I know who've been diagnosed with sleep apnea is starting to get terrifying. It feels like I can't turn around without bumping into another guy who's having to sleep with a CPAP machine. What in the heck is going on here? How did we raise half a generation of guys who don't know how to breathe in their sleep?

Sorry I'm late this morning; Charter Pipeline went down for a couple of hours, last night, just as I was about to post something trivial. Besides, I found a better something trivial to post. (I'm working on something longer for later in the week, probably Wednesday.) I was reading an article over on Massively.com and saw an image from the Despair.com website, something I don't check all that often, so I don't find out about the new Demotivator posters until a while after they come out. This is the one that Massively.com borrowed, and it made me laugh, because it so perfectly describes my experience in online gaming:



Unfortunately for me, I decided to browse the site, to see what else was new ... only to wince harder than if I stubbed my toe. I suppose I stubbed my brain. Oh, sure, now you tell me:



If'n I'd gotten that through my head 10 years ago, I might still be in the computer industry, maybe even still working for The Conspiracy.

See, here's the thing: nobody, and I mean nobody, ever intimidated the Man of Concrete. Not cops, not judges, not politicians, not bosses, not doctors, not specialists, not lawyers, not mafiosi. OK, some mafiosi; there were a couple of corrupt unions in this man's town, back in his day, that he quietly avoided contact with as much as possible. But nobody ever saw my old man defer to anyone to their face. He was perfectly polite at nearly all times, at least by whatever the standards of politeness were where he was. He was friendly without exception, almost friendly to a fault. But I never, even when working alongside him for the same boss, ever saw him make even a token show of deference. And he constantly told me, "Brad, sometimes you have to do what people say, but there is nobody out there who is above you, nobody out there who is better than you in any way."

In hindsight? That was rotten advice, and a life-wreckingly awful example to set.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not politics, I am as clanging brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not politics? I am nothing. And though I bestow all my own goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not politics? It actually changes nothing. Politics is patient, and is helpful; politics is not personal, is something professionals know not to take too personally, not to have grudges over; rejoices not in ideological purity, but rejoices in practical solutions; supports all things, believes in the people, hopes for a better world, endures anything. Politics never fails: but whether there be prophesies, they will fail; whether there shall be spin, they shall run out of things to say; whether there be trivia, it shall fail. For we prophesy unsuccessfully, and we spin to an audience that knows our tricks by now, but when that which actually solves problems and gets things done shows up, trivial distractions pass away. For trivia is trivial, and prophesies get even the most elementary things wrong, but when the rubber hits the road, trivia and prophesies are done away with. When I was a child, I ranted like a child, I understood no more of how the world actually works than a child does, and I had a childish faith in ideology: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see the world as through a dirty window, but in the future, we'll see the evidence face to face; now we know a little, but then we'll know every bit as much about the actors as they know about us. And now abideth economics, history, and politics, these three: but the greatest of these is politics.

No, really, that's more or less how I think. OK, what's really going on above is that I was thinking about something way out of character for me, namely the fact that I am actually falling asleep at my desk while trying to watch the evening's political news coverage, night after night, for almost two weeks, to the point where it's randomizing my sleep schedule. And that's very, very weird for me, because there are three lenses that I use to look at almost the entire world: history, economics, and politics. That's how the parody of First Corinthians chapter 13, above, began, with the realization for me there "abides three things, economics, history, and politics, but the greatest of these is politics," and having put it that way, I couldn't resist completing the parallelism. But no, really, in truth three things are fundamental to my self-image, and fundamental to how I approach and understand and interact with the world. So do you realize how hard it is to bore me with political news?

But the fact of it is this: nothing has changed in months. George Bush and John McCain still intend us to be bogged down in two or more land wars in Asia for at least an entire generation, thinking that's the best tool for protecting us from tiny and largely irrelevant criminal gangs, and nothing's changed that. Congress is too afraid of having something go wrong if they stop these stupid wars, and too willing to keep signing Bush's loan paperwork and too willing to let several young Americans die per day in order to not have to deal with this until they have a Democratic president who won't blame a Democratic congress if things go wrong. Barack Obama is still going to actually win the whole campaign, Hillary Clinton will still say or do anything however sleazy to try to persuade delegates to steal it for her, but she can't so today's particular accusations are neither likely to be true nor at all interesting. And no, we won't know until November if despite John McCain's intention to wreck the country with disastrous unnecessary wars and even more disastrous deficit spending, people will vote for this senile and clearly increasingly deranged old man who only has two virtues: he used to have an honest reputation, and he's neither black nor female. And Hillary's still a woman, and Obama is still black. We've known all of these things since February, at the very least.

It has been at least that long since anything actually changed, so I'm having an increasingly hard time justifying to myself why it's still on the news every night. I mean, I used to have two problems with the Monica Lewinsky story. First of all, it was trivial garbage, something that took at most a couple of nights' reporting to know everything that mattered about it and for any reasonably well informed and honest person to see it as what it was, a right-wing partisan witch-hunt, an attempt to win in Congress what they'd lost at the polls in November of '92 and '96. But my even bigger problem with it was that even on nights in which there was no actual news on the Monica Lewinsky story, it was still the top headline. No, really, I watch the news to hear something new, at least some new detail in an ongoing story; recapping the previous several months' worth of story without adding any new details night after night after expletive-deleted boring night, eventually ticks me off. And that's how I feel about this increasingly pointless and stupid Democratic nominating contest. I just want the damned thing to be over, and if I can't have that, I want the journalists I watch to wake up and realize that even if it's not over, it's not news, or at least not the top news story of the day every day, any more.

P.S. That being said, one thing did wake me up last night while watching the news, briefly: Keith Olbermann was in rare form, at his snarkiest best in a way he hasn't been in months. Check it out. (YouTube copy found via obama_2008.)

For all that I occasionally ask, annoyedly, that the universe once in a while pretend that it exists for some reason other than to annoy Brad, it looks like the universe, or at least USA TV, is giving me two really sweet birthday presents this year. June 17th is the scheduled release date for Burn Notice season 1 on DVD; I'll be pre-ordering that one pretty soon, you bet. And Burn Notice season 2 starts the actual day before my birthday, July 10th. Sweet.

---

Some time in the next couple of months, probably around the end of June, City of Villains is releasing it's first (and possibly last) really big villain-specific software release. As part of Issue 12: Midnight Hour, they're unlocking two new character classes that can only be played by someone who's already successfully leveled a regular villain to level 50. (And 20 new powersets for the 10 non-epic character classes, but that's not the point right this second.) The new character classes are highly customizable elite Arachnos soldiers: Wolf Spider infantry (who later branch out into Bane Spider special forces or Crab Spider police SWAT guys) and Blood Widow assassins (who later branch out into Night Widow elite spies or Fortunata psychic assassins):

So here's how it affects this blog: I'm thinking of an in-character writing project. My thought is that I'll be creating a Bane Spider and roleplaying him as the Arachnos equivalent of an old Soviet KGB "political officer," someone whose job is correcting the doctrinal errors of his fellow Arachnos troops, standing up for Arachnos political values, and of course spying on members of whatever unit he's assigned on for their superiors. The background I'm imagining is born in the Etoile Islands well after the 1964 Arachnos revolution, after high school one (long ago) tour of duty in the Wolf Spiders, BA and MA in History from Aeon University in New Haven, Cap au Diable, Ph.D. in Political Science from Aeon University, recalled to active duty as a Political Officer during the Battle of the Jade Spider in Siren's Call, Rhode Island, captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war in Ziggursky Penitentiary, recently broken out by Arachnos as part of Project Destiny and returned to the Wolf Spiders as a Political Officer monitoring the so-called Destined Ones.

And, to the specific point here, I'm thinking of turning the blog over to him periodically, maybe once every week or two. Because the "good guy" politics in this game are so creepy and wrong, it's actually not all that hard for me to imagine defending a Doctor-Doom like supervillain dictatorial regime as the superior alternative, especially from the viewpoint of someone who grew up under that regime and who believes that superhero-dominated America is even worse than it actually is (although how it actually is is bad enough). Imagining playing this character, I'm finding that it's even more disturbingly easy for me to spout, or even write, Arachnos propaganda than it was for me to write the Cthulhu-universe political blog entries I was writing a while back. But I know that few, if any of you, will be interested, so out of courtesy, what I'll probably do is give those posts their own icon, the Arachnos logo, and LJ-cut them.

Time for another quick update to this list, since I just discovered another one: I don't mind lending books, but I've lost track of who even has the following eight books from my library. If one of you has one of these, could you let me know, and give me some idea when I can have it back?

• Camden Benares, ZEN without Zen Masters
• Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice
• Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
• James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
• Wolfgang Lotz, A Handbook for Spies
• P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores
• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

All of them books that I really do want back, eventually, and one or two of which may actually be tricky to find even used.

I don't know if I'm coming down with something, or what. But since Sunday, I'm sleeping 16 to 20 hours a day, and I'm groggy and headachy pretty much the whole time I'm awake. The obvious question is, has my depression come back, especially since I've got some trivial SSDI paperwork to do -- but I'm pretty sure that's not it. The paperwork involved is trivial, I don't feel at all depressed. I'm just, I don't know, just wiped. New symptoms for my recurring depression? New allergies? Creeping migraines? Some kind of weird flu? A micro-stroke? Or just having a bad week? *shrug* It's just annoying that last week, I was groggy and couldn't get anything done because I couldn't sleep; this week, I'm groggy and can't get anything done except sleep. Surely it's got to even out, got to average out between "can't sleep" and "sleeping the day away" at some point.

I guess I owe my readers an explanation. Because when I came back from my December break, I said I had a ton of things I was reading to write about, but the last week or two have been very sporadic. And it's not that I haven't had anything to say. It's that, well, I can't. And it keeps surprising me, but it's still true.

A couple of weeks ago, now, I got one hell of a shock, something right up there with a death in the family. And, in fact, it's hitting me harder than a death in the family would, at this point, since I out-lived all of the family I was ever actually close to long ago. (The Hickses are mayflies, and I ain't exactly young any more.) My closest real-life friends and loved ones know the details; they're the only ones who do need to know. All the rest of you need to know is that I'm grieving a horrible, crushing, crippling loss. And I do that very poorly. This whole two weeks, I've been telling myself that this particular bit of drama does not merit the level of grief I feel, that I need to get over it, pick myself up, and get on with my life. But in that whole time, I've actually slept through the night only once. The rest of the time, I thrash around trying to sleep for an hour or so, sleep for 2 to 3 hours, wake up with my mind racing, and then can't get back to sleep. Then some number of hours later, it repeats because I'm so exhausted I can't concentrate on anything, can't even keep my eyes open. But the brain still races, keeping me from actually sleeping. Even in my dreams, the brain races; no more nightmares than usual, maybe one dream in three, but almost all of them intensely detailed and vivid.

(If you don't know the details from me in person, you don't need to. Even if I had permission from the people most directly involved in the drama, I wouldn't drag it into this journal. I don't care how much of a LiveJournal tradition it is, I loathe that kind of drama-whoring, not least of which because I've never not seen it wreck lives.)

I had occasion recently to mention to someone why stuff like this hits me so hard, by way of comparing and contrasting with others. Gods forgive me for doing something so flippant as to explain it in gaming terms, but it's a handy vocabulary for extending the metaphor of "taking damage." In gaming terms, you've only got so many "hit points," and when you run out of them, you're over. There are four kinds of defense. You can dodge a certain percentage of attacks, you can be hard to hit. You can have armor that absorbs a certain percentage of each attack that hits, you can be easy to hit but hard to hurt. You can regenerate damage, some percentage of as fast as it's coming in, you can be easy to hurt but hard to keep down. In psychological terms, this one is now called "resilience," and there's some tremendously fascinating research going on in the clinical study of PTSD, and who does and doesn't get it at various levels of trauma, all related to the fact that it seems that it's not so much that the people who survive trauma without getting traumatized seem to be the ones who take the hurt, yes, who feel the pain and the trauma, but who heal more quickly than others. Or you can be a brick, you can have so many hit points that it takes a ton of hurt to grind you down.

That last one is me. I don't go out of my way to dodge hurt, and when I've tried, I haven't been clueful enough to be very good at it. When I was younger, I used to maintain a lot of armor to absorb incoming damage, but that just left me numb and dangerously disconnected from the people around me; I had to pry that armor off to be able to survive at all. The god knows how much I admire, and often adore, the people who get hurt, feel their hurt, and then almost instantly get back up and without a moment's complaint or any fear of getting hurt again go on with their lives; what I wouldn't give to be one of you, but I'm not. No, me? I came into this world with a tremendous capability to accept pain and hurt. That extra capacity to be hurt is like a kind of psychological "ablative armor," extra emotional "hit points" before I actually feel any pain. But I repair it, I heal it, very very slowly, and each time I get a little less of it back. I will heal. At least, some of the way. But apparently it's going to take me longer than I thought. And I guess the first symptom I'll notice, when I start to actually heal, is that I'll sleep through the night two consecutive nights.

"In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade.
And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down,
Or cut him 'til he cried out in his anger and his shame,
'I am leaving, I am leaving,' but the fighter still remains."
-- Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, "The Boxer"

My sleep schedule's gone a little random, and my head's gone a little random from trying to fight it; basically, my circadian has backed itself into a corner where I can only sleep during the hours that I most need to be getting other things done, and fighting with my body over this to try to reset my internal clock is making me groggy. Besides, there is an essay I want to write, on a topic that really interests me, but I know for a fact that (a) some of the arguments I wanted to make looked really stupid when I sat down to write them out, and need to be rethought, and (b) it's a trivial topic that's not worth the probably 20 or 30 paragraphs it would clock in at now. No, really, I'm sure. So let me edit this one for brevity, and in the meantime, send you to somebody else's column, with only a thought of my own to supplement it: TheDeadGuy over at Everything2.com, "Get Drunk on History." (Thanks, xydexx, for showing me this.) Great, great stuff.

It resonates with me because it ties in to something I'd been thinking of saying, by way of refutation of one of the criticisms of Barack Obama's now-famous speech about racism. I can't find the link right now, but it was in a vid-cam dialog between two black commentators, and one of them said that the problem with the Obama speech is that it was basically a history lecture, and Americans don't care about history. What I'd been looking for an opportunity to say is, uh, no. Your average extended-cable package has more historical documentary channels, now, than it has cartoon channels or movie channels, only barely fewer than it has news analysis channels. If you look over the New York Times best seller list any given Sunday, there are only barely fewer books of history in that list than there are celebrity biographies, and arguably celebrity biographies are history books, too. Historical fiction, historical romance, historical war movies are all doing great at the box office. The American people love history. It's one of our favorite subjects, one of the top things we spend our own money on to be entertained by.

What we hate, for entirely justifiable reasons, are our history textbooks and history classes.

I wasn't going to get a room for Conflation. Not because I don't support the con, not because I can't afford it, but because economically it made no sense when I live 1.2 miles from the event.

Tonight I got back from seeing Avenue Q at the Fox (which is three to four times more awesome, even, than I had been lead to believe before I went, and I cannot recommend it highly enough) to find a note on the door from my landlord. Laclede shut down all gas to our building for however long it's going to take them to find some pinpoint leak or cranky appliance in the basement that's intermittently leaking trace amounts of gas into the basement. Eris only knows how long it will take them, considering that I know for a fact that that intermittent gas leak has been there the whole seven years I've lived in this building.

I have an electric space heater; not a good one, but good enough. I have food that can be microwaved, or cooked on an electric grill, while the range top is out of order. I do not have an electric water heater. I am not going to Conflation without a shower. Unless they get this thing fixed by early afternoon Friday, I guess I may be getting a room, after all. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

(Note to any new readers: If you subscribed to this blog because of my writings on race and politics, it's worth pointing out that only about half of what I write is about politics and I only write about issues related to race a couple of times a year. Barring some unforeseen major news story breaking, I'm probably going to be writing about science fiction for at least a couple of entries, and after that, who knows? Decide whether or not to keep reading my journal accordingly. Or, failing that, there are separate bookmarks with associated RSS feeds for each of the tags in my tag cloud.)

Well, the February election day has come and gone, Mardi Gras has come and gone, Valentine's Day is upon us, and everybody in science fiction fandom here in St. Louis knows what that means. It means it's time for the annual drama about Conflation.

I'm bowing out.

I'm not bowing out of Conflation. I'm bowing out of the drama about Conflation.

You can Google up everything I've written about Conflation by searching for the keywords "conflation site:bradhicks.livejournal.com", but to summarize for anybody totally new: Conflation, which was originally called Czarkon, was one of the first three science fiction conventions to invent a new convention format, the "adult-oriented relaxa-con." From the mid 1980s through (more or less) the late 1990s, it thrived as a convention for people who read science fiction, and for members of associated nerdy fandoms and subcultures, to mingle, preen, and flirt in a clothes-mostly-optional environment. Then, about six or so years ago, the convention's owners decided it needed to be toned down, and rebranded it as a "kid-free science-fiction convention." This year marks the apex of that movement, as they picked a theme for this year's con based on a broadcast-network TV show from several years ago, and as they finished the purge of the last of the remaining adult-oriented programming from the event schedule. Even as late as last year, the guests of honor were a minor (but talented!) TV star with a reputation for partying hard and the host of the Polyamory Weekly podcast; this year's guest of honor is a reality-TV game show winner.

There are many, many people in St. Louis who stopped going to Conflation a long time ago, because they don't like the idea of any kind of sexy fun, or even talk apparently, in a semi-public venue. It makes them uncomfortable. Near the top of the list of reasons we've been given for the format change was to lure those people back. Me, I don't see them coming back as long as the event keeps the Conflation name. There are probably roughly the same number of people, very nearly including myself, who stopped coming to Conflation over the last five or six years because they see it as completely pointless to make a small local general science fiction convention kid free if you're going to wage an all-out war on anything that goes beyond the subtlest of hints of adults-only orientation. No, seriously: what's the point of an age restriction, at this point? I don't get that part at all. If they're going to make it into a replacement for the long-lamented spring regional convention NameThatCon, what's the point of keeping the Conflation name and the age restriction? I don't get it. At all. It feels to me like they've chosen a solution that gives them the problems of both a general SF convention and of an adult-oriented relaxa-con without any of the advantages of either.

But you know what? After all these years, I have finally matured enough to admit that it's not my convention.

Yes, I have a lot of tenure at this event, more than several of the current organizers. Yes, I once (once) loaned them a ton of money without which there wouldn't still be a Conflation, without which they would have gone out of business almost a decade ago. But I'm not on the committee, nor do I suspect I would be welcome. They don't even, in general, ask me to volunteer for anything any more. I'm not one of the con co-chairs, nor am I all that close to either of them. I have no ownership rights in the con at all. So what kind of con I wish Conflation still was is completely irrelevant. It's just plain not up to me. And I finally accept that.

That didn't come easy to me. I can have a good time at a small local general-purpose science fiction convention. I'm going this Friday, and I expect to have a great time talking with and socializing with a lot of wonderful people that I don't see nearly often enough. Any opportunity to spend an inexpensive time hanging out with a hundred or so science fiction fans is probably something that I'm up for, any time. But it will never be as good a time as I had back when St. Louis still had an adult-oriented science fiction relaxa-con for me to look forward to. It's not easy for me to admit that a really good time, something I looked forward to all year every year, is over for good. It took me, well, every bit of five years to reach the point where I can admit that it's gone for good, and to appreciate Conflation for what the organizers now want it to be, not what I still wish it was. But I think I've finally reached that point. If the owners of Conflation don't want it to be an adult-oriented relaxa-con, it's not up to use to tell us they have to host one. If those of us who miss having an adult-oriented science fiction relaxa-con to go to in the St. Louis area miss it that badly, it's up to us to found one.

(Don't frickin' tempt me. No, really, don't frickin' tempt me. I tried to get alienne to talk me out of this a few weeks ago, and she's spent the whole time since then trying to talk me into it. The practical and logistical hurdles to starting up a convention from scratch are huge, and I'm far from equipped to deal with all of them. Yes, I'd love to do it. Yes, I am of the opinion that my experience at running the Infamous Brad Parties for which this blog is named would scale up well, that I could handle actually running such a con. Yes, I'm powerfully tempted, because I miss Czarkon and the old Conflation as much as anybody else in this world. This doesn't make it any less of a bad idea.)

(Logistical details: Unless I get up unusually early on Friday, I will probably get there around 9 or so Friday evening. Given that the hotel is an $8 cab ride from my place, I'd be insane to get a room. That means no, I'm not hosting a room party this year; nothing even vaguely related to the theme that I could come up with interested me enough to spend the money or the effort. That means I'll probably sleep in Saturday and be back at the con some time late Saturday afternoon. I will almost certainly not be there on Sunday. I'm not bringing anything that doesn't fit in my pockets, and I'm probably not costuming for it, or at most, not much. I didn't even bother to get the tux dry-cleaned in time. Hope to see you there.)

First of all, sorry for disappointing you the last couple of nights. I have stuff mostly-worked-out in my head, but I've got to get myself back into the habit of writing every day apparently.

Last night alienne said something to me that felt like it came out of the blue, namely that sometimes being around me makes her feel old. Given that I'm roughly half-again her age, this boggled my mind, because whether or not I'm old should say nothing about whether or not she's old. But she explained it thus: "Yes, Brad, but sometimes you act like you're feeling 500, and that makes the rest of us feel like we're 300."

This afternoon, I was thinking about that again, and it reminded me of something I've noticed before but never really thought about. One thing that has never changed about me (and there aren't many of those) is that from my earliest childhood to this day, I have always preferred the company of people who were roughly 20 to 40 years old. This has had the odd effect on me that for half of my life, all of the people I thought of as my peers, as my friends, were people who were older than me, mostly Boomers. But the last dozen or so years, most of the people I've thought of as my peers and my friends are people who are younger than me, mostly Gen X and Gen Y (what Strauss & Howe collectively called "Generation 13") and I mostly failed to notice when that changed.

Thinking about it, I think I can reconstruct what it is that I find attractive about the company of 20 to 40 year olds. They're old enough to have out-grown the worst of their childishness. They're educated and/or well-read enough and/or experienced enough to have interesting things to talk about, and to want to talk about interesting things. And equally importantly, they're still young enough that they have spare time to do so. Before about age 20, they're kids. After about age 40, they've got kids of their own, and likely they're owning rather than renting so they have a lot more chores to do, and they've accreted enough other community responsibilities to suck up the remainder of the time. You'd think that after age 60 or so when the kids are grown, the house is paid off and all upgrades to it are done, and when they're done striving to improve their career or even going into retirement, they'd be even more interesting and have more time. But while they do have more time, my experience of people age 60 and up, heck of people age 55 and up, is that they have only two topics of conversation that are interesting to them: who's died recently, and whose organs have failed most recently. Neither topic of conversation is interesting to me, even at the age where my own organs are starting to fail.

Unfortunately, coming up on age 48 in July, I've reached the point where I was when I was age 6 to 15: 20 to 30 year olds do not accept me as one of their peers. That, more than my early retirement or my intermittent health effects of aging, is what makes me feel 500 years old much of the time.

Every couple of days since mid December, I've been getting an email or a journal entry comment from yet another person saying, "Where have you been, Brad? We're worried." Worry less. If anything seriously wrong had happened to me, alienne has the log-on information and would have updated this with word.

No, what has been going on for the last month is exactly what I said I was going to do. The fact is that I had gotten to the point where all I was doing was repeating myself, over and over again, writing only minor variations on rants that I'd given too many times already over the preceding couple of years. Any time in the last month, if you wanted to know what I thought about some issue in the news, you could have done a Google search with "site:bradhicks.livejournal.com" in the search terms and found out. No, really. Sometimes the well just runs dry, and there's no substitute for taking some time off to let the well refill. Now that I've got maybe ten or a dozen columns' worth of stuff I'm feeling like writing about, I'm probably recharged enough to resume.

Nothing much new is going on in my personal life. Thanks to energy conservation efforts, my utility bills have gone down this year by about as much as my rent is forecast to go up, and my cost-of-living-allowance increase to my disability payments very slightly out-paced my Medicare premium hike, probably by just about almost exactly what my grocery bills will go up due to inflation. So I'm pretty much inflation-proof and recession-proof in the short term, and probably even in the medium term. We've had a very dry and mostly mild winter, no problems there. On the health front, I need to get the veneers on the caps on my front teeth replaced some time in the next couple of months, but I'm eating fewer sweets and starches and more fruits and vegetables, so health-wise I'm running more or less good, about the same as I've been. Nothing else more serious than roughly the same colds as everybody else. (No matter how little you get out, when one of your friends works hotel work, you do catch every cold in the world.) I don't have much to do other than read the news and play games during the days, but on the other hand I'm seeing as much of my friends as I could ask for, within an epsilon or two of as much as I could stand. And I even have tickets to Avenue Q next month, for Valentine's Day with a good friend.

While I was taking time off from blogging, I did get a minor boost to my fame. A couple of other blogs, including one by a 2nd-tier (or maybe 3rd-tier) science fiction author, just discovered "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God," so it attracted another dozen or so comments and another dozen or so inbound links. I think there's a measurable risk that this one piece of writing may go down in history as, of all the things I've ever written, the one I'm remembered for, especially if I never get the Forbidden Lore book done. (Fill-in research continues, but slowly.)

But yeah, my goal is to go back to writing something new, some time between midnight and 6:00 am (US Central time) most nights, starting tonight/Thursday morning. Enjoy.

One thing that held me back from writing is that the computer's been horribly unreliable for weeks, barely limping along.

There are four fans within inches of each other inside the case, so it took a while to isolate exactly which one was making the horrible crackling noise that means "cracked bearing." Eventually alienne and I narrowed it down to the graphics card. This took forever, for a reason encapsulated in one of the oldest jokes in the computer industry: "How do you know that the guy on the side of the road is a computer repairman? Because he's changing all four tires to find the flat." But yeah, it turned out that barely six months after I bought it, the fan on my EVGA 7600GS graphics card failed. According to the reviews on NewEgg.com, I'm not the only person this has happened to.

EVGA warrants the card for one year. That's the theory, anyway. First complication: they refused to cross-ship a replacement card unless I paid for the shipping both directions. Second complication: they sent me the wrong replacement card twice, only explaining themselves after the second card. The first time they sent me an antique 6-series card. When I complained, what they insisted that I had to do was make do with the 6 series card until they received my dying 7600, then return the 6-series card for a newer card. It took me some serious arguing to get them to accept that this was not acceptable, and agree to send me a replacement 7600. A week later I got ... an 8500GT. I called to bitch them out over this, and this time the rep (the second rep that time, since the first one hung up on me) claimed that they don't have any 7600s to send me. (NewEgg still shows 7600GTs in stock.) And they weren't willing to upgrade me to a 7800. So they offered me a "free upgrade" to an 8500 -- a card that runs about 33% slower than my old 7600 does. And they say that I'm stuck with it, this is their best and final offer for the warranty service unless I want to pay out of pocket for a trade-in to a better graphics card.

To put it mildly, I am deeply annoyed at this. It's a shame, in one sense, because the price/performance ratio on my EVGA 7600GS couldn't be beaten. Now we know why; they're a rip-off company that doesn't honor their warranties. If I ever buy another EVGA brand product, please mock me relentlessly. I'm thinking that any day now I am going to pay out of pocket for a real graphics card ... from XFX or Biostar or ASUS, or BFG Tech if I can afford them, or any real non-ripoff graphics card company that makes Nvidia cards. I guess somebody I know is getting a low-end Vista-compatible graphics card for $WINTER_HOLIDAY.

The good news is that the dying graphics card meant that I got caught up substantially on my offline reading; I'll have some book reviews written up for you soon.

(P.S. Edited in, half an hour later or so: In fact, I gave up in disgust and decided to spend about $50 more than I wanted to spend and get a real graphics card from a company famous for their "double lifetime" warranty, the XFX 7950GT.)

Nothing sinister or sad is going on. The super-secret project finished over a week ago, I'm not as busy as I once was although I do manage to stay busier than many retirees do. Mostly, I haven't felt even the slightest urge to write. Not for the first time, I'm beginning to wonder if I've run out of things to say.

I predicted with tremendous confidence that most of you would be bored to know what the super-secret project was, and I suspect I'm about to be proven right. As two of you guessed, I was invited into the closed round of beta-testing on the next release of City of Heroes. For those of you who don't know what this means: about a year ago, City of Heroes changed their testing procedures. They had gone straight from closed, in-house testing to public testing. The catch was that public testing didn't even begin until after a total code freeze. It didn't matter how good the users' feedback was; other than typos, bugs that can crash the software, or bugs that can be used to grief other players or exploited for free experience points or loot, nothing we complained about during public beta test was going to get fixed until there was time to re-open the code on those issues. Heck, here it is issue 11, almost two years later, and they're just getting around to addressing the last of the bugs I reported on the first day of open beta testing on issue 5. Well, about a year ago they finally realized that yes, we do have useful input in the design phase, at least some of us do. But to get any good out of it, they have to keep the numbers small. Issue 11 is the third time they've tried this. The first two, the invite-only tester pool was kept deliberately very tiny; this time, they expanded the list to not quite 2000 of the game's 140,000 or so subscribers, myself included.

The closed beta test comes with a mandatory non-disclosure agreement. I think they're making a mistake there, but I can argue their side of it. They don't want naysayers jumping to conclusions and quitting the game because of decisions that may yet be reversed, and they don't want to have to listen to all 140,000 subscribers arguing about the facets of the design that are open to discussion. And I know that I actively hate being under NDA, period. I handle it poorly, I don't like the stress, and in general I can think of almost nothing, not even "national security," that is actually successfully enhanced by human efforts to keep secrets. Keeping secrets is expensive, it's a drag on your productivity, it impairs your ability to receive valuable feedback from people outside of your secrecy loop, and for what? It never works, anyway. Or almost never, anyway; hardly anybody is willing to do what it really takes to keep a secret. Some time look up what Ian Fleming actually did during World War II, look up what it actually cost the British to keep the secret that Alan Turing's crew had cracked the Enigma cypher. I doubt any of those people ever slept a nightmare-free night to the day of their deaths.

Anyway, my politics aside, if I feel this way about secrecy, why put myself through the stress of working 60-hour weeks, for free for a huge multinational corporation, under onerous conditions? Lots of reasons, all of them dull to most of you. For one thing, going all the way back to when I first started playing tabletop roleplaying games back in the late 1970s, I've been a "systems geek," a rules nerd. Probability and Statistics was my favorite class in college; one of my decades-long minor crusades has been an on-again, off-again crusade to persuade educators to replace Trig with Prob&Stat in the high school curriculum, since only a tiny handful of people still use Trig but everybody in the world gets deluged in statistics every single day now. I knew I could make a difference. I was right, too; I was able to persuade them to make a couple of pretty major changes in the design of the Willpower melee defensive superpower that will make a huge quality of life difference for players. For another, I've concluded that I'm pretty much attached to this game, if for no other reason than this: every other game I've looked at in the last year or more, I've known exactly what feature from City of Heroes I'd miss the most if I switched. For example, I'd love it if Tabula Rasa turned out to be the big blockbuster SF MMO success that everybody knows is going to happen to somebody some day, but I'm not willing to give up City of Heroes' costume creator, or flight, to play it. For another, that Willpower melee defense power set that I just mentioned is one that matters to me a lot, as someone who wants to play Stalkers but hates all of the existing Stalker melee defense power sets; I really, really felt motivated to help them make sure that this one didn't suck. See? Boring.

Although speaking of Tabula Rasa, something weird happened right after the NDA was lifted, and although nobody at NCsoft will admit it, I think it's specifically because of Tabula Rasa. See, originally City of Heroes was split across two companies. One game programming company, Cryptic Studios, developed it under contract to another game programming company, NCsoft, the Korean company most known (elsewhere) for the only MMO to come even close to World of Warcraft's numbers, the Asian fantasy game Lineage. NCsoft cut a bunch of deals with a bunch of companies that wanted to write multiplayer games, whereby NCsoft puts up some or all of the development money, and when the game goes live they collect the monthly fees, they operate the server farms, they provide the customer service, and they split the profits with the outside developers. It gave them a much faster way to diversify than developing a bunch of games themselves. One of them, Auto Assault, lasted mere months before going belly-up. Some of them, like the shareware Diablo parody Dungeon Runners, it's too early to tell. Two of them, the free to play pseudo-trading-card fantasy MMO Guild Wars and the superhero MMO City of Heroes, have been moderately successful. That's important to them, and they've known they needed it for a long time now. Their flagship product, Lineage, competes head to head with World of Warcraft, and it's been announced in the Korean business press lately that they're losing a steady 15% of their revenue per year lately, all of it to players defecting to WoW. Hence their urgency to branch out into games that fit into niches other than generic fantasy MMOs.

But they really bet the farm on one project: Tabula Rasa. They diverted at least half of the profits from Lineage to Richard Garriott, the guy who designed the original highly successful fantasy MMO, Ultima Online. They gave him a huge budget, gave him a very long lead time (and forgave several schedule slips on top of that), and gave him very nearly absolute creative control, and told him that they wanted him to seek out the Holy Grail. That is to say, they wanted him to develop the first wildly successful break-through hit science fiction MMO, the first genuinely mass marketable science fiction MMO, the game that would be to science fiction readers and movie-goers what World of Warcraft has been to fantasy and D&D fans. I'm sure they thought that this was a safe bet, when they made it. They even avoided the pitfall that sunk two of Sony's SF MMO ideas, letting him develop his own creative property rather than sinking far too much money into, and ceding too much control to the owners of, some licensed SF franchise.

But I think they're getting cold feet. The reviews have been only modestly favorable. Even after several schedule slips, the game shipped with at least one major system, one the game was balanced around, unfinished and temporarily completely removed. The pseudo-first-person-shooter user interface (which they share, knowingly or not, with Reakktor GMBH's Neocron series of SF MMOs) may not turn out to be the selling point that they think it is, they may have over-estimated the willingness of console gamers to play an MMO and the willingness of potential MMO customers to play a game with a console-game-like interface; the decision to use tab-selected targets and queued attacks that every other MMO designer out there has made may not have been arbitrary or unimportant. And I wouldn't be surprised if lately they're starting to suspect that Garriott, whose Ultima Online is still controversial at best among old-time MMO players, may turn out to be more liability than asset, a prima donna who drags his own drama behind him wherever he goes. Maybe. So maybe this is going to be a huge breakthrough hit. It could happen. Everybody in the MMO industry agrees that SF outsells fantasy in most other media, and will eventually outsell fantasy in the MMO market when somebody gets the breakthrough hit. Maybe this will be the one. But if it isn't, with Lineage slowly deflating they have to have a fall-back position, a back-up plan.

But in the meantime, they already did own part of a game with a distinctly science fiction-ish universe, one that the MMO industry press lumps in with EVE Online and other science fiction games. And while it went through a brief struggle about a year ago to retain customers, it's been modestly growing almost every month since it launched 3 and a half years ago. In talks with the programmers on that project, they clearly found out that those programmers were starting to hit certain built-in limiting factors, certain "walls" in the game code, that were going to cost real money to punch through. And that's money that the other part-owner of City of Heroes, had no interest in matching, because they've bet their company's future (I think stupidly) on a licensed superhero MMO, Marvel Universe Online. What's more, I know from watching their representatives complain bitterly about it time and again that both companies were sick of City of Heroes players blaming the conflict of interest within Cryptic Studios, with them being invested in two competing superhero MMOs, for everything that went wrong with the game. So both companies stood to benefit if Cryptic just sold City of Heroes, lock stock and barrel, including voluntary transfers of every single City of Heroes developer but one (already mostly retired from the project) designer emeritus, to NCsoft. NCsoft would be free to do what they've already announced that they're doing immediately, namely almost tripling the development budget for City of Heroes expansions and maintenance and upgrades and repairs, protecting their investment in one of the company's too-few games that's actually gaining in profitability. Cryptic gets rid of a nasty conflict of interest.

It could be very interesting. The consensus reaction among the players is to drool over the prospect of them tripling the development budget, with one caveat. We've known the game needed major funding soon for a while now. Too many of the features that people have known the game really wanted or needed for more than three years now have been languishing on a list: the list of suggestions that Cryptic had concluded couldn't be done affordably, because they'd require rewriting or redesigning too much of the game. There's only one thing that's got us worried. If Tabula Rasa tanks and the whole company ends up having to ride on City of Heroes (with some support from Guild Wars, if it continues to sell), will management back in Korea keep their promise to stay hands-off, to keep trusting that the original City of Heroes design team know what they're doing? They say they will ... but everybody knows what a verbal promise from a corporation is worth.

Hunter S. Thompson is said to have once told a room full of journalism students that he couldn't recommend a life of alcohol, violence, drugs, and insanity to anyone ... but in his case, he pointed out, it worked.

The particularly malevolent forms that bureaucratic neglect took back when I was a constant victim of violence and bullying as a small child left me famously with a set of symptoms little short of a post-traumatic-stress disorder. When I have to deal with any of the bureaucracies that have left me powerless and helpless in the past, whether government agencies that have been particularly awful to me like the DMV, or any insurance company, or even most doctors, I relive my abuse all over again. The result is a level of aversion that (depending on the level of pressure) ranges from procrastination to massive permanent sleepiness to (in one notable case) partial catatonia, all accompanied by crippling depression. And I know what's going on here: my nervous system is attempting to do its flat level best to simply hide me from the bullies and their faithful bureaucratic and administrative helpers until somebody else attracts their attention and it's safe for me to go back out. When neither fight nor flight are options within reach, my body and mind react to perceived or actual threat with a powerful urge to "turtle up."

And you know what? I'd do this less often, maybe, if it didn't periodically work. You know how one of the characters in Peanuts once said that she believed that there was no problem too big to run away from? I've had one of those weeks that proves that adage dangerously true. (I say "dangerously" because, like my well learned lack of fear of being threatened by guns, one of these days it's not going to be true and I'll be in even bigger trouble.)

Winter's coming, and I had set this fall as my fairly-firm deadline for getting the driver's license taken care of, especially after concluding this summer that there is, after all, enough slack in my budget to cover a cheap used car plus auto insurance and repairs as long as I kept the actual driving to a minimum. Step one in this process is, obviously, to deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles, where my old lawyer has assured me they did, eventually, admit that I paid my back taxes and all I have to do is retake the test. Oops, no vehicle to retake the test in, and it's been a lot of years since I drove. So step two is to deal with the DMV, step one is to call a driving school and take some refresher lessons. Great, now I have two bureaucracies to deal with, one of total strangers and the other one that's screwed me over with malevolent neglect (at best) multiple times before. So okay, calling the DMV is step three, calling the driving school is step two; step one is to call my doctor and get back on the anti-depressants, side effects or no, for as long as it takes to deal with the stress.

Then, while I was already in procrastination mode over that, I got a new problem. When I first shaved my head a decade and a half ago, I found under the hairline a small, flat mole. Suddenly and without warning, about two months ago, that mole started visibly growing, and fast. Lovely, thought I, Brad's first cancer. Did I ever mention that melanoma is what killed my mother? And that we Hickses have such an awful history with doctors that we all learn to fear them and loathe them the way most Americans feel about the IRS? So now I needed a dermatologist willing to accept a new patient, willing to bill Medicare, to biopsy a potentially cancerous mole, right at a time when the news is full of horror stories about long waiting times in the US to see a dermatologist for anything other than cosmetic surgery. Great. OK, now it's a panic attack.

Except something truly weird happened to me about a week ago: some time in my sleep, the whole mole just fell completely off. Seriously. There's a faint discoloration where it used to be, but not even the tiniest bump that I can find either by eye or with my fingers. I panicked, hid in bed, and the problem went away on its own.

And reading the news this week, I think my other problem went away on its own, too ... mostly because of bad news for the rest of you. The local office of ACORN has totaled up all of the subprime mortgages here in St. Louis that are about to go to foreclosure because they can't be refinanced, and estimated that once you factor in what those foreclosures will cost the lenders, what the vacant properties will cost the city in lost property taxes, what declining property values due to increased boarded-up houses will cost the neighbors and cost the city, what reduced consumer spending, and other costs that the total loss over the next couple of years to the St. Louis metro area will be around a quarter of a billion dollars. (Mike Garrity, "Foreclosures Spiking In St. Louis, Costing Entire Community," KSDK-TV 10/23/07.) And that's in a housing market that national economists are saying will actually do better than the national average, because we missed most of the upsurge in housing prices that lead to the worst loans in the country being issued.

But wait, it gets worse. That estimate was made before the dollar started tanking, falling so sharply that "the green peso" has reached equity with the Loonie, so sharply that OPEC and other exporters are threatening to stop accepting dollars directly and price everything in Euros. This, by the way, would be a good place for me to remind you that the last time the US got bogged down in a land war in Asia, in some tiny little country's civil war we couldn't manage the national commitment to win, but couldn't manage the political courage to withdraw from, and that our national political leadership was deranged enough to think they could finance entirely through borrowing, this is exactly what happened then, too: energy prices went through the roof because oil exporters repriced their products against the dollar, leading to the crippling combination of runaway inflation and galloping unemployment. And it's happening all over again, with incomprehensible levels of lemming-like stupidity in the recent history of the financial services industry standing in for the similar levels of stupidity in our manufacturing industries circa 1970. These next couple of decades are going to be rough.

And, at the same time I'm absorbing all of this national and regional news, I got preliminary notice, through the news, of just how this is going to affect me personally: preliminary estimates of the Social Securit