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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Wednesday, July 24, 2002
23:57 - True Confessions

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You know what's really frustrating? Waking up in the morning, sitting down to blog some really thought-provoking topic that you'd recently heard about, and... partway into your entry, realizing that maybe said topic wasn't in fact real at all, but something you'd dreamed.

Don't you hate that? Well, not the "blogging" part specifically-- but do you ever have a dream where something momentous but entirely plausible happens, and then in that all-important five minutes after waking up, it's not at all clear whether or not it actually happened? You know, like finding out you're past due for filing your taxes, or that you've just been drafted, or that some major bill is due, or that you've got some bizarre disease, or that your car has been stolen. I've had it happen to me multiple times with jury duty-- to the extent that I'm to this day positive that the jury-duty summons that I received one day in fact existed only in a nocturnal hallucination. And numerous times I've had to roll over in bed, without having managed yet to open more than one eye, to verify that my car is in fact still in the driveway.

These things are often extremely detailed, you see. When it's happened to me, I remember being very conscious while it was happening-- I remember thinking, "Hey, if this is a dream, then I shouldn't be able to... flip this piece of paper over and read the fine print on the back! ...And look-- fine print! I can't seem to read it, but... it's here just the same!" So bizarreness doesn't seem to become an important factor here.

And in the freakish case of blogging, just as an example, last night I dreamed that I'd heard or read somewhere that the Mac OS installer was the only legal installer in the world. Now, yes, this sounds entirely stupid at any time after five minutes past waking up-- but during that alarm-clock-blaring haze, it seems as though the most important thing in the world is getting to the blog page, finding that URL you were sure you saw, and writing up something compelling and amusing about it.

How wrenching is that bewildering instant when you realize that it was all just something your brain made up.

As Johnny the Homicidal Maniac put it, how do we know that anything prior to our last waking-up is real? The past is a fiction created to account for the discrepancy between our physical circumstances and our state of mind, or whatever the Douglas Adams quote was. Couldn't they all just be dreams?

I don't know why I'm putting this here; I'm sure it makes me sound like a crackpot. All I know, though, is that I have to get every nagging thought out of my head and into a permanent medium before going to bed each night just in case my brain decides to tease it into some inexplicable hallucinatory conspiracy before I've had a chance to think it through in a wakeful manner.

The only legal installer. Gawd, what was I thinking?

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© Brian Tiemann