[Note: Two editors were initially interested in this story. One editor vanished, because of a few unexpected changes in his life and career. But the other editor bought it, and ran it on his site, in a heavily edited form. Anyway, here’s the entire unedited version of the story. Enjoy. -Scott] Meet Ela Darling. She’s a porn star. She’s a pioneering phenom in the burgeoning virtual reality [VR] sphere of the porn sector. I first contacted Ela over the Internet. Then I discovered that she was speaking at a VR conference in NYC that I, coincidentally, was also attending. I met…
I’ve been feeling great lately. Borderline spectacular, even. Been going to Grouse Mountain on a regular basis again. Eating right. Going to bed early. Stepping away from the ice cream (my most indulgent indulgence). Blah, blah, blah, etc. My ferritin level is back up, which makes a pretty dramatic difference in the quality of my days. Low ferritin levels, as I learned last year, are the goddamned worst. Still sucking down the old iron supplements by the handful. (Constipation can be a real danger when taking iron supplements in this quantity, though it hasn’t been for me so far.) (I wish I was a…
My cab ride with the Englishman and his stylish cardigan was quick and painless. One of the things that I actually like about Las Vegas—maybe the only thing that I actually like about Las Vegas—is that the airport is bizarrely close to the city itself. From the airport to The Strip takes only fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes, if traffic is congested. The Luxor’s main entrance was, like all things in Las Vegas, oversized and melodramatic. It looked like a shabbier version of the backlot of the 1963 film Cleopatra. But the entrance was also somewhat rundown in small ways. Several overhead lights were burned out; bits of…
A bit of science information for us to puzzle over today: My ferritin level is low. A normal ferritin level is about a 100. Mine, right now, is a couple of ticks below 20. So what exactly is “ferritin,” kids? And why do we care about its so-called “level”? I have no idea what the word ferritin means; I was pre-med for a tad less than 1.5 semesters in college. Chemistry is what finally drove me off. Though I do now know that ferritin has something vaguely to do with iron (thanks, WebMD). And I also know this: if your ferritin level is below 20, as mine is, congratulations,…
UPDATE: Welp, I just got off the phone with Yahoo again. Long, painful phone call with a man who I believe was somewhere in India. As usual, he asked me about a hundred “security questions,” most of which I could not answer. (Him: “Who was your first crush?” Me: “…”) Also had a dodgy wireless connection during the call, further complicating matters. Between the two of us, I was able to gain access to the site again, which I am—with each successive Yahoo phone call—becoming more and more resentful towards. Anyway, I have access, so writing is imminent. Wishing this wasn’t such…
As some of you have likely already realized, I’m having website woes due to an internal problem at WordPress and Yahoo Small Business. I’m trying to address it. I’m frustrated that I can’t update (or revise) right now. Thanks for your patience. Hoping to resolve this ASAP. Scott
[Apologies for not writing sooner, folks. Been trying to get back to work, and trying to get back to work has taken a toll on me. I’m getting stronger, and getting stronger means that I’ll be writing regularly again soon. Thanks for your patience.] I woke up in a room which, for some inexplicable reason, I thought was the garage of my surgeon’s private home. I don’t know exactly what sorts of drugs the doctors had given me. Whatever they were, they were obviously potent enough to convince me that I’d woken up in the garage of my surgeon’s private home. (more…)
[Read the first installment here. -Scott] When I was a boy—yes, another post that begins with those dreaded five words—I realized at a young age that I was blessed with two main talents. Talent One was my gift for committing the weekly TV Guide listings to memory. Talent Two was the ability to turn the smallest of concerns into insomnia-inducing, hand-wringing worries. In short, I was a prematurely anxious child who could reliably tell you when 60 Minutes was on (Sunday, 7 p.m., channel 5). Yes, I was quite a piece of work. (more…)
HELLO AGAIN, FOLKS. Been a long time. Apologies for the hiatus. I won’t sugarcoat things. This has been an up and down—well, mostly down—year for me. I’m very much looking forward to putting 2013 behind me and being shut of the whole deal, for various reasons which I may or may not recount in these pages in the future. (more…)
After a string of unseasonably warm spring days that had Chicagoans draping jackets over their shoulders and whistling as they walked to work, things took a turn. The temperature dropped. Clouds the color and size of battleships arrived from Canada. Snow began to fall. I was off from the restaurant two days off in a row—Sunday and Monday. I spent my snowbound mini-vacation in my low-ceilinged apartment reading novels on my futon, working my way through a video game titled The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, and listening to the electric baseboard heater in my apartment tick like…
