June/2005: General - It was very sunny. PeeJ ran like clockwork. Talked to a detective (Harv is on vacation) and signed her up for Information First. Played with Moxie. Listened to music. Found new city wallpapers. Talked to a reporter who wants a lead on any arrests in her area. Monitored the forums, made some replies. Fucked around with my myspace account. Read a few comics, including the Doctor Spectrum six issue series. Kept up on some of the latest developments with a few cases we're in the midst of working. Watched the latest episode of Bullshit. Ate some steak and three super-pretzels. Watched the ECW PPV. Blogged. Read some Wikipedia. Read some crime library. Researched some forum members to see how much contributor potential they either have or don't have. No TV, oddly enough. And of course, other mundane stuff that I simply can't remember.

That was yesterday and the day before, condensed in no particular order. Positively idyllic.

It's simply been sunny in general. Everything is running pretty smoothly. I can't even find the muster to go get into serious arguments on the forums. Morphine Jim was bitching that there haven't been any flame-wars on the forums in a while. I figured, "this sounds like a job for AngryGerman!" Then went and looked around the forums... I don't have anyone to mock or yell at. Nobody is doing anything all that annoying. Either that, or Erika just stopped telling me about the annoying people. Take your pick.

For the most part, I thrive on strife. Contributors would probably say that I'm most valuable to the site when there's someone to go counter-point, expose or brawl with. Outside of the novelty of "scooping" and ripping up the Blade smear-job, hasn't been a lot to deal with. Sleepy, sunny professional happiness. Beyond a project or two in the works, there isn't much to wake up for.

It's becoming more and more tempting to make history repeat itself. Back when I became overly contented at the Oratory (long before the work that is PeeJ), I sought out just some random website to write whatever I wanted at. That website ended up being ABrokenCrate.com. I simply randomly messaged the owner, showed some samples and got a main-page log-in. Didn't interact with anyone prior, just started writing often. Worked out pretty well, rose some hell out of nowhere with provocative opinions and watched the site grow. It's getting tempting to just find some small site and do it all over again, maybe even with a different online "handle."

For lack of a better term, I'm a willful "hermit" offline. I don't feel like going anywhere or meeting anyone. What has surprised me though is that the same characteristics are bleeding over onto how I use the internet. I have my little schedule of sites to visit, I go to the few... and that's it. Over the last few months, that "schedule" has mostly tightened to simply be Monticello. There's a lot to read on Monticello and keeping up with it is often a job in of itself.

I IM with basically, the same few people each day and the number of people I regularly IM with about non-PeeJ topics is dwindling. Usually it's simply talking to people that IM me about their lives. I've found that people like to talk about their lives, so I sit, listen, offer some advice or empathy and move on. I still haven't decided if all of this is a good or bad thing. I'm sure the social ninnies would consider it unhealthy behavior. Hell, it might even be so. I'm simply not certain. It doesn't feel unhealthy.

Part of me wonders if I'm "institutionalized" myself to this regimen. Like prisoners do, simply becoming numb and robotic to a fixed usually unchanging schedule. In that sense, perhaps it would be smart to "start invisible" and go have a good run writing on some other website. I'd just do it on my blog, but I'd rather not have this blog become well-trafficked. I don't need a bunch of people I don't know coming here and reading my entires. What's the point? After my slash-jobs on Jennifer Good and those idiot pizza delivery boys, I decided not to update with anything non-personal for a while. I even took the entire month of May off in order to get rid of those stragglers that were hanging around for no good reason.

I know of one thing I'd like to concentrate on doing... and that's working on the patience to do medium and long-form writing of fiction. I tried a small one once during my run at Abrokencrate. It wasn't received too well, but it was rather fun to put together. I've been kicking around an idea of a realistic, ideal "heaven" concept for the last couple of years. I was going to actually take the entire premise and create a long-form story out of it on the Oratory. I got about 12 pages into it and decided it was simply too much of a fresh concept to be used in such a limited manner. The concept was good, it was the particulars that I had wrong. It was too literal of a tale.

There are a few things I'd like to write and perhaps doing so under a new handle on another site. Doing so would give me the opportunity to experiment with pouring out "stab-your-eyes" cynical storytelling in a sterile writing environment without snippets of it ending up in a media piece attempting to smear my position with PeeJ, as happened January of this year. Hmm.

Then again, perhaps it's a stupid idea borne out of the lazy haze of overwhelming sunshine.

Regardless, at least it's sunny outside and inside.