back and such

I'm back.

I've been gone so long, I had time to break my toe, heal it up, and get back to daily running again. Guess who pranced--most dorkfully and barefooted and completely oblivious--straight into a 20 lb kettlebell left lying around in the hallway? Oh, guess...

Let's talk some more about this boring subject for a moment. It was my first genuine broken bone, after all. At first I felt really stupid. Then I felt like a badass muthafucka because I got to tape myself up. I don't know. I get a kick out of this stuff. I mean, I now know the nauseating pain of bone breakage and I got to fix it all by myself. And, as a further boon, I will probably never be kidnapped by foot fetishists. I would rate the experience a 7 on a scale of 1-10.

Ok. Thank you for indulging me. Now I can depart Planet Alienfjords-is-having-a-vainglorious-butch-fantasy and get back to Earth.

First thing, I owe a past-due NaNoWriMo update. I'm not too keen on writing it because I burnt myself out on the whole business. But I'll do it, just because 1) I don't like letting loose ends hang out forever and 2) I already broke my word on the timeline and would prefer not to be even more undependable than I already have been. So that will be upcoming.

Secondly, I have only checked emails and PMs so far and have a lot of catching up to do with blog reading. And I'm looking forward to it. =)

Third, as you've likely noticed, we are rapidly entering into now clearly living in a dystopian surveillance state that is analogous to many evil empires (fictional and otherwise) that I could name and--aside from a few incoherent and/or violent outbursts on the part of people who did not fill their Haldol prescriptions on time--we appear to be mostly taking it like good Germans. (With an extra helping of circus to replace that serving of bread that went missing in 2008.)

The general situation has been going on for a long time, but the urgency of the problem seems to have been kicked up quite a lot in recent months. Perhaps it's due to the bewildering speed with which the last few vestiges of our privacy are departing. Or the rate at which we are making advances in the field of flying killer robots. Or the fact that the people foisting these changes on us seem drunker than ever on power and advancement. Or maybe it's just me, still tumbling down the rabbit hole after three years, having lost my very last scant pocketful of naivete.

This is a matter that rarely leaves my mind. I'd like to write more on it. I'd also like not to be escorted away to the little white room for further questioning before my next plane flight. But we cannot have everything we want, can we?