This account of the excavation of the city of Heliopoli has temporarily ceased operations, but there is plenty to explore. Sit in a ribbon chair, drink some Tang and take the tour.

And don’t forget the fountains.

Photo by ACF

Measure my life in coffee spoons? Nah. Album covers.

Twenty years ago I met a man through my work who said he had decided not to worry about anything anymore. This was a conscious decision on his part. He had decided. It was a decision. Simple as that.

I was young. I found him a bit odd. He carried a large satchel all the time.

“But what about — ?” I asked.

He shrugged. He decided not to worry about anything anymore. Simple. As that.

“But what about — ?” I persisted. “But what about — ?”

Shrugs. I even ran into him at a mall. He still carried that large satchel. No, I’m not going to say he carried his worries in the satchel; it was just part of what made him a little off, a little unbelievable.

I think about him once in a while, even after all these years. I think about the choice he had made and … yeah. Yeah, I see it now.

I still can’t do it myself, and I still think he was a little nuts — but he had made the right decision.

The chief archivist remains stupendously and utterly convinced that computers do not save us time, only shift it.

(And perhaps his next computer won’t be one that requires a three-hour-long update download, the installation of which comes with confusing instructions, and there’s more updates to come. Perhaps when the antivirus software alerts him that a particular file is trying to access the Internet, it could tell him from which program it comes, so he could determine friend or foe and not freak. Perhaps when a program is installing and asks him if he wants A or B, there could be one — just one — little explanation of the consequences of choosing A or B, since neither A nor B is defined in any clear way. Perhaps he could learn whether the instruction “Close all open programs” means his Internet connection as well, which he figures it does, since it’s, um, an open program, though when he does this the other programs don’t seem to like it much. Perhaps someone somewhere could write clear step-by-step instructions for … anything. And all of this after the above sentence was written and prepared as a blog post. Sheesh.)

Every once in a while I get a hankering to write an essay called “How Science Fiction Saved My Life.” But then that starts to sound a bit much and I get over it.

Still …