"A 32-year-old man who died after downing dozens of roaches and worms last month to win a python at a Florida reptile store choked to death."

CNN reports the results of the medical examination, and the first comment over there is: "And now the worms are eating him."

Radical Locavore.

A Bizarro cartoon, arrived at via the Wikipedia article "Self-cannibalism," which I found seconds after speculating out loud "I wonder if anyone has ever gotten so hungry they've eaten parts of their own body?," which arose out of a conversation with Meade, who was talking about military training for survival behind enemy lines. For example:

Trainees are taught that when stranded in the field, they should eat what they can find, which can include turtles, snakes, insects and other things normally considered unappetizing. The training helps them overcome their food aversions.

... [A] running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength.

A Special Forces captain swallows a worm to the delight of his fellow trainees. Asked what it tasted like, the captain said, "Dirt. And kind of like a worm. Kind of fishy. Kind of fishy. "

You can imagine why we were talking about that. Just reabsorbing and digesting the classic Obama text: "I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

I was saying: Isn't it interesting that he spoke of the texture, but not the taste? I was going to riff in the direction of portraying Obama as coolly Spock-like — missing one of the 5 senses, but then I veered toward literary analysis. It's a neatly compressed comic line: tough... tougher... crunchy. He sticks with the textures because it's funny to struggle through the tough sequence — tough, tougher — and then get — not what comes next grammatically: toughest — but crunchy! because — ha ha — we all know, whether we eat them or not, that insects are crunchy. In those few words,
you laugh and you're there inside the immediacy of what the small boy experienced. Once there, you can imagine the flood of sensation and emotion for yourself. The author restrains himself. He doesn't bother us with descriptions of how he felt. You've had enough. You've had dog-tough, snake-tougher, grasshopper-crunchy. You were there, eating it too, because you were a boy with a father and what would that be like?

Anyway, I love that there's a Wikipedia article for so many quite specific things that suddenly pop into your head. From the "Self-cannibalism" article:

As a natural occurrence: A certain amount of self-cannibalism occurs unwillingly, as the body consumes dead cells from the tongue and cheeks...

As a disorder or symptom thereof: Fingernail-biting that develops into fingernail-eating is a form of pica, although many do not consider nail biting as a true form of cannibalism....

Who are the true cannibals?

As a choice: Some people will engage in self-cannibalism as an extreme form of body modification, for example eating their own skin. Others will drink their own blood, a practice called autovampirism, but sucking blood from wounds is generally not seen to be cannibalism. Placentophagy may be a form of self-cannibalism. On January 13, 2007, Chilean artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party for his most intimate friends. The main meal was agnolotti pasta, which was topped with a meatball made from the artist's own fat, removed in the previous year in a liposuction operation.

Citations omitted. And I'll spare you the "As a crime" section, which is really unpleasant. The "Cultural references" list is extensive (and suggests that if you can think up anything gross, there are numerous storytellers who've already gone there):

King Erysichthon from Greek mythology ate himself in insatiable hunger, given him, as a punishment, by Demeter.

In an Arthurian tale, King Agrestes of Camelot goes mad after massacring the Christian disciples of Josephus within his city, and eats his own hands.

Stephen King's short story "Survivor Type", about a man trapped on a small island.

King's shipwreck survivor is a heroin smuggler, and the heroin helps him get through the food prep.  There's more on the "Cultural references" list. I won't repeat it all, but it ends with "Radical Locavore."

"If your Big Mac is going to cost about $100 and your Bug Mac is going to cost only $4, people will change to a Bug Mac."

Says Arnold van Huis, the world's biggest expert on entomophagy (the eating of insects).

He believes the rising price of meat will help change diets.

Help? Why is NPR using the word "help" there?

Van Huis says the challenge is to make it delicious. That's where Marian Peters comes in. For years, as secretary of the Dutch insect breeders association Venik, she's been active in bringing edible insects to consumers' tables. And Peters says the first commercially available bug sandwich will be out soon — a wrap filled with insects and peas.

It's easy to make food with bugs in that tastes just fine. We've been eating food all along that has insect parts in it:

The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans is a publication of the United States Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition detailing acceptable levels of food contamination from sources such as maggots, thrips, insect fragments, "foreign matter", mold, rodent hairs, and insect and mammalian feces.

It's not a question of whether insects are in your food. It's a question of whether you want to hear about it and consciously embrace the activity — entomophagy — that you've been engaging in all along.

There are people who want you to like it, and people who are perversely excited about the way financial pressure is going to help you like it.

Well, so long as it's merely a cash incentive, we can't complain too much. And maybe some day Congress could impose a penalty, collected through your tax return, for people who choose to eat too much meat over insects. Don't worry. Congress isn't going to require you to eat insects. They just wouldn't do that. So don't worry about whether it has the power to do something it's never ever going to do. And, by the way, eating insects is not kosher, but if Congress said everyone had to eat insects, and failed to make an exemption for people who adhere to a kosher diet for religious reasons, it would not violate the Free Exercise Clause. But don't worry. Congress would never require you to eat insects, and if it did, it would offer an exemption for religious folk. I'm sure.

What am I talking about? Have you heard of insect politics? Neither have I!

"Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake."

See, this is where I end up when I get to thinking about insects and politics. But please. Calm down. Don't worry about the government and it's plans for the insect. Be very cool, like our biggest politician who is famous cool. Watch how calmly he proceeds with his insect politics:



Whaddya think? That was pretty impressive. He got the sucker.

The National Enquirer says that Obama is "scary skinny" because he's "secretly battling stomach parasites."

Sorry. It's slimy even to link to this. But I'm linking to debunk it.

The pencil-thin president caught the parasites on a trip last year to Hawaii, where he and his family also vacationed over Christmas, according to top political insiders.

If that were really true, people would be flocking to Hawaii to get the parasites so they could lose weight. Oh? You think that's absurd? People wouldn't do that? They get surgery on their stomachs— surgery that could kill them — and that only makes them lose weight because they eat less. If there were parasites that made you ultra-thin, people would buy them and swallow them whole. We'd be seeing ads on the internet.



You've heard of tapeworm dieting, haven't you?

Did anybody honest to God think this would work? Answer: Evidently. A few seconds with Google turns up an authentic-looking advertisement for "sanitized tapeworms" ("friends for a fair form") that appears to date from the turn of the last century. A hoax? Maybe, but it convinced at least one medical expert, endocrinologist Zachary Bloomgarden, who in a 2000 article in Diabetes Care wrote, "Approaches to decreasing nutrient absorption date from the early 1900s, when diet treatment with 'sanitized tapeworms' was widely advertised."

It's a terrible idea, I hasten to add:

An adult tapeworm can grow up to 50 feet long and live up to 20 years. Tapeworm eggs are even worse, as the larvae that emerge from them are prone to burrow out of your intestines and find homes elsewhere in your body. For example, the pork tapeworm can cause neurocysticercosis, in which the larvae migrate through the stomach or intestinal lining and up into your brain. There they form destructive cysts, triggering immune responses that can lead to epileptic seizures or worse. The cysts formed by sheep tapeworm larvae may reach the size of grapefruit; they can rupture blood vessels when they break, resulting in shock and death.

Death, schmeath, you say: will I lose weight?...

That is the way people think. I say if the National Enquirer were right about the President's parasites, somebody would be selling Presidential Parasites on the internet.

And, seriously, I hope the President is okay. And if he's healthy-skinny, he ought to give us some diet tips along with the usual inspiration.

"Mythic Giant Earthworm Not Extinct, Spitting, or Sweet Smelling."

If only it were extinct, we could imagine that it spit and smelled sweet. Is it better to know it's still around, but not that interesting, or would you prefer it gone and looming large in our heads?

Top 10 species are: 1. Earthworms, 2. Algae, 3. Cyanobacteria...

What's so great about earthworms?

4. Rhizobia
5. Lactobacillus
6. Homo sapiens
7. Stony corals
8. Yeast
9. Influenza
10. Penicillium

Aw, come on. If we'd started with anything else — with the possible exception of stony corals — you wouldn't have paid any attention.

"How come every time alpacas feel like the energy is low at work they have to do the worm from Labyrinth?"

Alpaca:



The worm from "Labyrith":



"Listen, Alapaca, obscure references to 80s cult movies are no excuse for your fuzzy hair, your bushy tail, your fucking face. And why are you always smiling? Are you purposefully trying to make me love you?... [S]top pretending you don't have legs and get back to work." — Link.

"Bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with 'dirt' spur the development of a healthy immune system."

Don't stop your baby from eating his germs 'n' worms!

Hot science news? George Carlin said it decades ago:

The Hudson River was loaded with raw sewage. That's right, we swam in raw sewage. You know, to cool off. And back then the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids every year were dying of polio. But you know what, in my neighborhood, nobody ever got polio. No one. Ever. You know why? BECAUSE WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE. It strengthened our immune system. The polio never had a chance. We were tempered in raw shit. What are you going to do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit? I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're gonna get sick and you're gonna die and you're gonna deserve it because you're fuckin' weak and you have a fuckin' weak immune system.

Tattoos, tattoos, tattoos.

Yesterday, I started a discussion about tattoos. Chip Ahoy said, for himself, he'd always wanted "a snake crawling out of my arse crack," that is a tattoo of same, not an actual snake. For me?

Something tattooed on a spot on the body that moves like an elbow or a knee so that a frog appears to croak or a woman's breasts bulge, or eyes widen.

A tattoo that appears to be a rip in the skin revealing underneath to be steam-punk mechanism of gears and levers rather than muscles...

Like a sly reference to the "In His Image" episode of "The Twilight Zone"? (Video.)

...or perhaps a sack of worms.

A tattoo to look like an alien being born by tearing its way out.

A realistic eyeball on the back of your neck. [When I was a youngster I asked my mum how she knew what I was up to and she answered, "Because I have eyes in the back of my head." Being a literalist, I took her on her word, and for years tried to examine her head more closely to confirm it. She was always such the bullshitter.]

Conversely, a realistic eyeball on your forehead that blinks when you furrow your brow.

Weighing scales that rise and fall depending on your arm movement would be too trite. Reject those.

Something in Latin that makes a person asking appear foolish for having asked isn't worth the joke. Reject that too.

Also reject some long passage or inspiring message that must be closely examined in order to be read. They're pretentious and the reader is ultimately let down for having troubled.

A dung beetle placed on your gluteus maximus appearing to be rolling a piece of dung away from your anus.

A radiation hazard symbol tattooed on your penis. Oh wait.

An archer fish depicted spitting placed near your urethra.

A Boxer dog tattooed on each breast so that when they sag they magically become Shar-peis.

For myself, I've always been partial to Egyptian designs, at least that's what I doodled all through college, and that's the art I sell, so the only tattoo acceptable for myself is a design of my own in the Egyptian style. It would be large, colorful, and dramatic. Probably a winged solar disc with something within the disc, possibly a uraeus.

There's an idea for you, a uraeus on your forehead.

Back to the snake!

Or a snake wrapped around your arm.

Or a gold bracelet with lapis lazuli. But then that begs the question, why not a real bracelet? I always thought if you were inclined to tattoo barbed wire around your arm, then real barbed wire would be much more dramatic.

A crown of thorns across your forehead.

Bugs crawling from out between your breasts.

An "R" and a "L" tattooed on the back of each hand appropriately. Or the word "Down" tattooed on top of each foot and possibly "Up" tattooed on your forehead.

"I'm with Stupid --->" tattooed immediately beneath your clavicle.

A diver hands clasped together aiming downward tattooed on you one side of your belly appearing to be preparing to dive into your pants.

An alligator snapping out of your crotch.

An elf, a fairy, a gnome, a leprechaun, or otherwise, some tiny being tattooed making it's way out of your pubic hair.

Ropes tattooed around your arms and legs so when you crossed your arms or legs it would appear as if you were suggesting bondage.

Robot parts tattooed on working segments of your body.

Open eyes tattooed on your eyelids.

A mustache tattooed with glow-in-dark ink, just for fun.

Jagged backhoe bucket teeth tattooed around your mouth.

Mucus tattooed draining from your nose.

Ants tattooed crawling in a line across your shoulder or torso carrying off some treasure like a leaf segment or other bug parts.

Bees laden with pollen tattooed to appear crawling out of your ears as if they [were] flowers.

A raptor on one knee and a bunny, chipmunk, fox, lamb or some other prey animal on the other knee, so that when your legs are crossed one appears to engulf the other.

Wow! Chip was a blog thread unto himself. Such overwhelming thread domination could have silenced everyone else. But we still had Christy:

A stylized slightly tilted fibonacci spiral that starts directly above the center of your left eyebrow, arches up and drops to end in a tight swirl beside your left eye. In blue, a strong blue. With wings coming off the outside edge of the curve that reach up and out to your hairline. A little black can be used to give definition to the wings.

Then, Dody Jane said:

I am going to answer seriously... I was in a writing seminar once called "Writing Family Stories". There was a man in the class of East Indian heritage - he was first generation American. 

He told a lovely story about being taken to India as a child. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. His mother had the back of his neck tatooed with a round black dot. She was not going on the trip. He was going with his father. She told him she had the tattoo placed at the nape of his neck so that God would be able to easily identify him when he looked down from heaven and protect him from harm while on his journey. The way he told the story was so incredibly moving. 

I think this is an ideal tattoo. I told my daughter it is the only tattoo I would sanction. Otherwise, I told her I am leaving everything to charity. She remains untattooed...

See, I hear that story, and I imagine God thinking: There's that kid with the dot again, whose mother thinks he's so special, like I'll be all screw the other kids, this one has a dot.

Freeman Hunt said:

I told my husband about this thread, and he had a recent tattoo anecdote I have to share:

Last week my husband was down in our basement with his friends for their weekly movie get together. One of the men took off a fleece pullover and inadvertently pulled up the t-shirt underneath, revealing what appeared to be a large flower on one pectoral muscle with his nipple forming the center.

"Wait a minute--what was that?! Is that a flower around your nipple? Lift up your shirt again."

"No. That's the only time you'll ever see it."

"Why do you have a giant flower around your nipple?"

"It's not a flower. I'm going to get it fixed. It was going to be something else, but it hurt too much, so they couldn't finish it."

"Well, right now it looks like a flower."

"I know."

Ha.

Ha, indeed.

"Surgeons thought Rosemary Alvarez had a brain tumour, but on operating they discovered the worm."

If you want to see what it looks like -- removing a worm from a brain -- there is live-action video at the link. If it makes you feel like not eating, keep in mind that she got that worm in something she ate. Oh, don't worry! Cook your meat thoroughly -- make sure all the worms are dead.

"Scientists invent microscopic operating table for 1mm worm."

The answer to the question: What's in worm news today?

IN THE COMMENTS: blogging cockroach types:

damn
i was hoping they would have developed
a little operating table for me
i think i need surgery on my right rear leg
after that accident under the fridge last summer
ive been in chronic pain ever since it happened
i am on aspirin with the help of tommy
--he is the boy whose computer i use--
he grinds one up every week and puts out a little each night
it helps
but if they could develop
an operating room for a miserable worm
they could certainly build one for all the sick
and injured cockroaches out there
tommy says the vet wont touch me
id have to be some madagascar hissing cockroach
to get any medical care
its size discrimination i tell you
sizeism pure sizeism

"If the Great White Worm was back after nearly 20 years in hiding, what else might still be out there?"

The life of an oligochaetologist is not easy.

Lengthening the school day for kids.

Is lengthening the school day the solution for failing schools? I think not. In fact, I think it is a morally wrong solution. It's bad enough that children are cooped up and physically restrained for as long as they are to get through a school day. To justify that physical restraint, adults owe children a lot. If the adults are now failing to do what they owe children to justify physically restraining them, it is outrageous to attempt to make up for their own failure by increasing the restraint. What makes it worse is that the solution is inflicted disproportionately on minority kids. Oh, but it's a benefit! It's not as if we're proposing to put them in jail during those long afternoons when they might otherwise be roaming the streets.

Side note: At the link, there is an adorable photo of two little girls looking at a worm. Since the newspaper article is presenting the proposal in a positive light, it would like you to picture cute young girls benefiting by hands-on science classes. Please don't picture older boys slumped in chairs.

UPDATE: The same issue of the NYT has this article about a study showing about the time spent in day care:

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

Before the radio show.

In the studio waiting for the show to start, I open the little notebook that I brought to keep track of the material. To pass the time, I photograph some old pages:



(Click here for actual size.)

What was that about? The "accident" must be when I wrecked my car in January 2005. And the National Anthem/6000 must refer to this concert at the Overture Center (which was mostly Beethoven's 9th Symphony... even to the worm ecstasy is given).



(Click here for actual size.)

Well, that's got to be notes for later blogging. Yeah! This.

And here's Joy Cardin...



... ready to start the show.

Listen to the show here (to stream). Or download on the archive page.

Resisting...

I am resisting getting drawn into intrablogospherical squabbles. I hope you appreciate it!

After that long, sole post this morning, I feel I would be doing my regular readers a disservice if I posted what I just composed in my head, which is a response to a couple of very conspicuous taunts that are out there today.

But you taunters -- you know who you are! -- be advised: I could taunt you right back so hard it wouldn't even be funny.

But I want to be funny. I need something frothy and amusing to talk about. Oh, here's a quote. Let's just call it my "Quote of the Day.".. if you know what I mean.... Andrew???.... Anyway, no intrablogospherical squabbling! Really! I mean it. I don't want squabbling! I want amusement! Here's the quote:

The other day I got out my can opener and was opening a can of worms when I thought, "What am I doing?!" --- Jack Handey, "Deepest Thoughts."

"Yardlong, spaghetti-thin worms erupted from the legs or feet — or even eye sockets — of victims."

The horrendous, ancient disease called Guinea worm:

[The worms] forc[ed] their way out by exuding acid under the skin until it bubbled and burst. The searing pain drove [victims] to plunge the blisters into the nearest pool of water, whereupon the worm would squirt out a milky cloud of larvae, starting the cycle anew.

Eliminating the disease only required disrupting this life cycle, mainly by putting a mild pesticide in various ponds. But it wasn't easy to do. Read about the efforts to treat one pond that people regarded as sacred:

[Those who came to treat the pond] found many of the village's women forming a human wall around it....

[T]he women shouted: "This disease is a curse from our ancestors, it has nothing to do with the pond water! If we let you touch anything, the ancestors will deal with us. We heard them crying all night!"

The good news is that the disease is on the verge of complete elimination. And, as the article explains, Jimmy Carter deserves much of the credit.

Karl Pilkington!

There's a little article about this hilarious man in today's NYT:

Karl Pilkington has debated the merits of eating a kangaroo's penis for breakfast, envisioned a wristwatch that counts down the time left in a person's life and proposed a new population control system in which elderly women give birth at the moment of their deaths. He has mused on topics ranging from caveman "bear pants" to dishwashers on Mars, and reported "news stories" about the triumphs of chimpanzees as bricklayers and television talk show hosts. In so doing, Mr. Pilkington, a 33-year-old unemployed radio producer from Manchester, England, has become the object of a global Internet cult, a Guinness world record-holder and the unlikely harbinger of a technological revolution.

Mr. Pilkington is the breakout star of "The Ricky Gervais Show," a podcast presided over by Mr. Gervais, the British comedian behind "The Office" and "Extras," and his co-writer and co-director, Stephen Merchant. In its brief, 12-episode run this winter, the program, available on the Web site of The Guardian (guardian.co.uk/rickygervais), has racked up nearly three million free downloads, the most ever for a podcast, according to the Guinness book. While these numbers reflect the international popularity of Mr. Gervais, the program's title is a bit misleading. The show is almost entirely devoted to the esoteric ramblings of Mr. Pilkington, whom Mr. Gervais has called both "the funniest man in Britain" and "that little bald-headed Manc idiot."

Of course, you've listened to these podcasts, haven't you? If not... you're so lucky! You have so much fun ahead of you. Gervais alone is great, but Gervais talking to Pilkington -- sublime!

I love the way the two are so completely dumb and smart at the same time. Like, in the 12th podcast, when they start talking about Wittgenstein's remark that if a lion could speak, we wouldn't be able to understand him. Gervais restates Wittgenstein's point so crisply that it's clear how smart Gervais is, and Pilkington starts down a thoroughly Pilkingtonesque line of thinking: it would depend on the lion, maybe you could understand a lion in the London zoo, better than a worm at least, what could a worm tell you, even if it is English, etc. It's so purely stupid, yet you'd have to be quite brilliant to be capable of saying it.

...

Somewhat related: I talk about that Wittgenstein quote, Koko the Gorilla, and Mardi Gras.

Another sip of the hallucinogenic tea.

With an important freedom of relgion case involving hallucinogenic tea pending in the Supreme Court, I'm surprised that my blog comes up second in a Google search for "hallucinogenic tea." But, good lord, look what comes in first!

At oral argument yesterday, the government argued that it had a compelling interest in banning the religious use of the drug out of concern that the drug, if permitted to the religious users, would make its way out to recreational users. But with that story coming up first in Google, the recreational use of the drug may seem none too enticing.

UPDATE: The hallucinogenic tea in the Supreme Court case is made from an Amazonian plant called hoasca. The unfortunate man who lopped off his penis drank tea made from Angel's Trumpet. In any case, hoasca causes intense vomiting, which is (according to the linked article) useful to Amazonian people who suffer from dangerous worms. And, no, I'm not trying to set up a penis joke. Make your own penis/dangerous worm joke.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 21.

It's Day 21 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) This page, perhaps my favorite in the whole set, is strongly influenced by Mark Beyer's thoroughly brilliant comic "Amy & Jordan," which I'd just read.



(Enlarge.)

"What effect is all this blogging having on the brains of bloggers?"

Ask Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide. Why it's a good question:

[O]ur mental activities actually cause changes in the structures of our brains--not only what we think, but how we think as well. ... After surveying the general range of materials that the blogosphere has to offer, we believe the following basic largely supportive conclusions are warranted:

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.

First, there are blogs and there are...well, blogs. The best of blogs are rich in ideas and promote active exchange and critique. Rather than creating closed communities of like-minded troglodytes, these best blogs foster conversation, interactions with other blogs and other information sources, and invite feedback from their readers. Posts can form "threads" or links to other Web materials where readers can examine primary source material or articles that offer competing ideas and views. Blogs that follow this format are far from simple substitutes for television or video games. In fact, they are an ideal format for promoting critical and analytical thinking....

2. Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.

To remain popular with readers, blogs must be updated frequently. This constant demand for output promotes a kind of spontaneity and 'raw thinking'--the fleeting associations and the occasional outlandish ideas--seldom found in more formal media.... Raw, spontaneous, associational thinking has also been advocated by many creativity experts, including the brilliant mathematician Henri Poincare who recommended writing without much thought at times "to awaken some association of ideas."

3. Blogs promote analogical thinking....

4. Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information....

5. Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction....

Bloggers have solitary time to plan their posts, but they can also receive rapid feedback on their ideas. The responses may open up entirely new avenues of thought as posts circulate and garner comments.

Read the whole thing.

Great post.

I feel that I came to blogging with a brain ready to do exactly this and previously severely frustrated by an inability to do this. And I am also very aware that blogging has really affected my mind, mostly in good ways. For one thing, it's gotten me past that severe frustration of not blogging.

As I write this, the little kid across the street is screaming: "A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah!" And I'm already thinking, I want to blog about that.

Then I realize I don't need to start another post. That quote and my wanting to blog about it fit quite well right here, illustrating what blogging has done to my brain. In some ways, I feel I can think more clearly and quickly about what matters — in a bloggish sense of what "matters," which includes that worm quote. And I have a cool feeling of being able to pay rapt attention to whatever I'm thinking and writing about while still being ever distractable.