There is a brief window every night between approximately 12:30 and 1:30am when I can fall alseep. At 2:00am I come alive, like Casey's other senses in that one episode of Sports Night. The problem is that between 12:30 and 1:30 I usual decide to read and I have a troubling tendency to read books I enjoy. This means I tend not to want to set them down and before I know it 2:00am has arrived and I'm ready for action. Getting your second wind at 2:00am is great for Risk nights, but kind of inconvenient the rest of the time. Yeah, eventually I'll fall sleep, but what about tomorrow? On Saturday, I woke up at 1:00pm; today, I climbed out of bed at noon. I love sleeping in as much as the next guy, but there comes a point when you're wasting time that you'd really rather spend on something else. But, alas, it's 3:30 and Superstud is so funny I've been laughing out loud; so, I might as well try to do something productive with this time. I'm going to rearrange the posters in my room, or to be more accurate I'm going to continue the rearrangement I've been conducting for the past two days.

The Newsletter Must Die
Of late, several people have mentioned to me that I've seemed rather forlorn about the state of The Newsletter. They've urged me to keep a stiff upper lip because this is just a rough patch and soon enough life will be all wine and roses. It occurs to me that some of my friends don't really know me all that well. Regarding The Newsletter, I feel better than I have in months. The reserves are full to the gills with guest columns, staff columns, and features just waiting to be run; without receiving any new material, I could probably put together two full issues, a rare situation in The Newsletter's four interrupted years of existence. More importantly, though, I no longer care. I tried caring, I invested great emotional significance in the endeavour, and all I got for my trouble was disappointment and ingratitude. I'm not trying to the cool, aloof, amoral guy, I'm just done caring. To use a fire analogy, I'm not going to burn The Newsletter down for the insurance money, but if there is a fire I can guarantee you, as the chief of the volunteer fire brigade, that I won't be lifting a finger to put it out. I know the staff well enough to know that it is only a matter of time before there is a fire. A cigarette thoughtlessly tossed aside. Faulty wiring. Some neighborhood kid with a twitchy eye and a book of matches. And by the time it's over there's only a pile of ashes left and nobody knows what happened. It's only a matter of time before The Newsletter burns down, and good riddance once it does.

Don't worry about how I'm dealing with the recent unpleasantness, guys. I'm doing grand. In the sordid history of the affair I've never been better, because now I can be as casual about the whole enterprise as all of you have always been. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

In a mostly unrelated aside, Fahrenheit 451 is a really lousy book. It succeeded only in convincing me to never read anything else by Ray Bradbury. Ick, it was awful.