Thirteen Minutes To Midnight

And may the Lord have mercy on the people in England

For the terrible food these people must eat

-Frank Zappa, 200 Motels

Well, I'm glad to report the fever broke early this morning, and apart from lack of appetite and a headache, I'm pretty much back to normal. I suspect a good deal of the headache is due to caffeine withdrawal- caffeine, though not severely so, is a physically addictive substance. Granted, the withdrawal symptoms are not as bad as say, nicotine or some narcotics, but still- I hate headaches, having been 'blessed' with them since childhood. However, life goes on. I read somewhere something which surprised me- in certain doses, caffeine is hallucinogenic! It is a stimulant, so this makes some degree of sense. Actually, I drink a lot of coffee, and have never experienced this particular effect. I know too much caffeine will kill you, causing cardiac arrest. This is why energy drinks can sometimes be dangerous, as they have on average about five times as much caffeine as coffee. I don't care much for them myself- Red Bull gives me a screaming headache, just as, oddly enough, does anything with artificial cherry flavor in it. Maybe it's the red dye? I don't know, I prefer my cherries off of the stem, at any rate. Or in a pie. Or in Cherry Garcia ice cream.

On an unrelated note, I stumbled across a pretty good short film, again on the fearnet website. I've always been a fan of short films, and there are a handful of good ones on this site. I'd like to see it expanded, I think there's a definite audience for them. I'll have to send the fearnet guys an email, let them know I'm plugging their site on here, ha ha. But anyway. This particular short is called Polydeus, and has all the great elements of one of those creepy-but-believable urban legends. It centers around an old arcade game from the go-go '80's called Polydeus. It was a very limited distribution, and was on the market for only a manner of weeks. The game screen was said to cause hallucinations, nightmares and uncontrolled psychotic reactions in players. Shortly after it was released, it was pulled from arcades, and all records of its production and distribution were destroyed. As far as anyone knows, it never existed.

So here we have all the elements of an urban legend- first, that it's next to impossible to verify, as the records and proof of such a thing were all destroyed. Second, that no one knows exactly where and when these things occurred, so it's possible that it could have happened. This story would start something like this- "A friend of mine knew a guy who played this video game...", as again, there's really no way to verify this. However, keep in mind absence of evidence is not, as they say, evidence of absence. And there are a ton of creepy factors involved to make sure that this story grabs the interest of the hearer, and in this way, perhaps the audience wants it to be true. Perhaps this is an element of all great horror stories- not that it did happen- but that it could happen.

So at any rate, the week ahead looks pretty uneventful, just another handful of summer days wasting away in the Oklahoma sun. Such is life, at least for the time being. Both the journey and the destination are important- where you're going, and how you get there.