The Thousandth Rat that Died

The oddest thing happened about an hour ago. (Man, I start off a lot of entries that way, don't I? This really was strange, though, more so than the shoe that stunk up a whole thirty-one floor building; more so than the dog that darted out of nowhere to bite me--even more so, indeed, than the time I let an ice-cream bar melt in my pocket. It was, I dare say, even stranger than the haunted room at the Platinum Club, and that was mighty weird.)

Weirdness on this scale requires a bit of a visual aid to explain properly:

FIGURE A

The x axis, should my handwriting fail to make clear my intent, represents elapsed time, and the y axis, that's my mood, represented by a little smiley face at the top, and a little forky-brow mad face at the bottom.

At (0,0), I get an e-mail: praise, hate mail, a sob story, or this one damn story out of NOWHERE, dude!

If the e-mail contains praise, my mood remains steady for about 30 seconds, at which point I remember that I got exactly the same kind of praise back when my art was terrible, at which point my good mood wavers very slightly.

If the e-mail is a poison-pen missive of malicious intent, my mood remains constant at first, then improves briefly as I show the hate-mail to other people without removing the headers, and share laughs at the hate-mailer's expense with said recipients. Then, I realize I have to get back to work, and I really have quite a thankless job at times, and my mood deteriorates almost imperceptibly.

If the e-mail contains a sob story (eg. "Your art has affected me so much. I was attacked by a dog, see, and I have no face, no legs, no arms, no colon, no ears--in fact, now that I think of it, I'm just a giant eye. All I do every day is stare at your art, which is on my desktop for all time.")--if the e-mail contains a sob story, I do not believe it for a minute, and my mood doesn't change at all. Well, if the teller of the sob story is overtly asking for free art (which happens more often than you'd think), there might be a brief blip of irritation in there somewhere, but otherwise, nothing.

Then there was today's e-mail. It wasn't the first of its kind. Hell, it wasn't even the first one I got today. Over the years, I must've read thousands of these things. It said, approximately speaking:

My rat just died. Thank you for drawing this picture. It made me feel better.

When I read it, that was when the weird thing happened. It was as if my brain was a computer, and it had just run out of memory. You know that thing that happens when you've got dozens and dozens of programs all battling it out for your computer's available RAM, and then you add one more, and everything stalls? You wait and wait and wait, but nothing happens. The little light is blinking, and the disk is whirring away industriously, but your screen isn't budging. You spend the next half hour alternately hovering like a vulture (awaiting your moment, sort of thing), and frantically scrabbling to close programs whenever the freeze lets up for an instant.

My brain thought "Wow...bummer!", then did that. So I sat there for a while, contemplating the e-mail in silence, chin propped up on my knee. My general mood described the line in Figure A, thus:

Wow...bummer.
Bummer.
Bummer
bummer
bummer
...bummer.
bum
bum
bummer.
bummer

bummer

bummer

bummer

...wow.

...bummer.

Then, I realized I was staring mindlessly at the screen, and everything went back to normal. Oops.

I must be most extraordinarily tired. I worked a lot today, with little result. I got an inkblot on a picture I'd spent ages on. Now, I have to trace the sketch onto another piece of paper and start again. It was a commissioned picture, too, not something I could just, you know, abandon. It had to be that one. Twenty pictures I did with nary a blot, and my nib had to give way today? I tried to work on a digital portrait of some rats, too--I've been meaning to get to that one since January--but I couldn't get the colours right. I was hoping for a soft rainbowy effect, something a bit more reflective than usual, and ended up with an unsalvageable morass of muddy hues. That was why I was checking my e-mail in the first place. The ruined picture was mocking me from its unassailable position in my C: drive, and I had to look at something else for a moment.

So, as I was saying, I must be tired. It's hardly surprising. The last time I took a day off without spending the whole time worrying about work was--was...oh, probably about ten years ago, now. Man, I can hardly find the wherewithal to write in my journal any more. All I want to do after work is replay ancient computer games (mostly ADOM). Old games are good, because I already know the solutions, and I don't really have to pay attention. To all outward appearances, I'm cradled right here in my chair, knees resting on my shoulders, ankles crossed, motionless but for my fingers on the keyboard--to all outward appearances, I'm here, but I'm really not. I hardly notice when Stella tries to jump on my protruding toes.

No, don't worry. I haven't completely taken leave of my senses. I'm just sitting here making up silly stories in my head, is all--the same ones I'd be sticking in Notepad files if I had a little more energy. I think I'm up to Chase Scene #396, by now--the little guy in my brain (who always seems to be called Jack or John or Fred) has taken his desperate flight over every conceivable landscape. Sometimes, he even turns around and does a little chasing, himself. I prefer being the chasee, though, when I make up chase scenes. If anybody ever chased me, I'd probably be really good at getting away. I've rehearsed it all in my head so many times, everything from hiding under parked cars to getting false papers and slipping out of the country in the dead of night.

At any rate, my eyes are glazing over. I think I'll go and play ADOM for a while, and dream up a chase scene where

1) My feet are tied together somehow
2) I have a bag of eggs which I need for dinner
3) It's raining
4) There are at least 4 distinct chasers, each of whom must have a well-defined motive,

and

5) I don't get away.