In my dream last night I was the subject of an "intervention" organized by my wife & friends. The problem to be addressed wasn't drinking or drugs or anything of an explicit nature, rather my "psychological messed-uppedness", which, I was told in the most loving but firm way, was hurting me and my friends--who loved me but were going to be forced to abandon me "tough love" style if I didn't come to terms with the fact that I'm fucked up and need to "deal with my issues."

Turns out that they had all filled out long questionnaires supplied by the psychological consulting firm that had been hired to help me through my "straighten yourself out" process.

I've been remiss. I haven't written hardly nothin here since before I went to SXSW, which ain't no matter, only I do need to properly put before y'all a recognition of the awesomeness of technician & his wife as hosts, and of just what a swell time I had with atreides & family -- this would just be proper manners, how we send thank-you cards in HuSiverse. . . and also

Just noticed that here a certain HuSian made a comment on my most recent diary. Not in a thread, but a top level response to the diary itself! And, it's funny!

The bartender says "we don't serve your kind in here." A tachyon walks into a bar.

In similar spirit, here's the answer I sent to my friend Andy, who's been a book editor at O'Reilly for 25 years. Below the fold, his original note to me.

ME: "Wow, I would love to chat with him about all this. Short answer is Smashwords.com, but long answer is, I would love to talk with him. It would be like when my buddy the musician Bob Halligan was working in some rented music studio space in NYC. The guy working in the next studio came over to ask if Bob would sit in on piano for an hour or so, as he needed a keyboard player to help him work on rough cuts of a new song. The guy was Paul McCartney. Bob said yes."

You can't stop it.

You can only hope to contain it.

Over on Jane Friedman's blog, I'm the most recent target of opportunity. Subject line: "Building an Enthusiastic Fan Base as a Self-Published Author."  (As if. She is too kind.)

Jane was, until recently, the Head Honcho at Writer's Digest (magazine, conferences, publishing house, etc) & in charge of all those things. Or at least I think she was. In any event she was "publisher" of Writer's Digest, the magazine, and had a finger in all those other pies, including running conferences and so forth.

I've never met her in meat space but she's a pretty close imaginary internet friend. I liked doing the Q&A with her & had high hopes that it would sell some books for me and gain me more twitter followers than Justine Biever, whoever she is. But evidently it's not to be & hasn't made me rich yet. But y'all HuSi imaginary friends may find it to amuse.

Tonight is the night of the Persied Meteor Shower. It brings back a memory.

I think I may have told this story here before, and if I have, and if you happened to have read it and even more remarkably remember it, please forgive.

(NSFW topic wise, but nothing too explicit.)

One night long, long ago, at least twenty years ago, when Dear Wife and I were in very physically close husband-wife proximity, I told her of a hot woman I had seen that day, how excited she had made me. And Dear Wife sweetly responded, "If the situation ever comes up and you see a woman and you have to have her, you just must have her, go ahead and have her, on me. That's my gift to you."

So a few years later, I did.

Cortez the Killer, destroyer of worlds, man of sorrows, peacemaker, industrialist, navigator, sometime rider of surfboards of the Hawai'ian longboard naval architecture, thinker, wearer of diadems from the Southern Heliopolis, gnostic sage, firmware hacker, lounge singer in the manner of Mr. Barry White the black man, reluctant conquistadore, fancier of rose wine with chocolate cake, occasional practitioner of conditional sobriety, storyteller to those few, those very few, drunk enough to listen to him; xenocide, and speaker for the dead, back from a few days in Las Vegas at the Defcon conference (look it up), sits on the porch of a rented house in Beach Haven, New Jersey, listening to those sounds of the waves as may percolate through the headphones playing Neil Young. Later he plans to smoke another cigar.

I've been corresponding with one of the local headhunters -- her firm deals pretty much exclusively in technical writing & user interface people. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a big hiring BuFoo managing vast empires of technical writers, editors, UI people, etc, I used to hire a lot of people through her firm.

Now there is a recession on -- don't know if you've heard about it -- so mostly I correspond with her about   books and general bullshit, since there are no jobs and never will be ever again.

Nevertheless hope springs eternal, so I've updated my resume. Comments welcome.

On average of 1.5 times/day, I take my dog for a walk at the Trade Winds airstrip, a grass field where perhaps one or two airplanes land each week. It's a place where people go to let their dogs "socialize" off the leash.