Everyone is somewhere else.  They all are.  Every one.  Glittering jewels of binary code fall like rain and burst forth like geysers.  Everyone is awash in it; they clean their hands like plague flies and touch each others' faces like grooming chimps.

Everyone is like something else.  Everyone is congealing into something they remind one another of.

Now they all remind me of the same things, over and over.

Of course, it's entirely possible and probably probable that this is all in my head.

Still...everyone seems a little distracted lately.

Reading a lot lately.  Lying late in bed with a too-dim bulb of light until my arms ache and my collarbone screams at me to get out of that twisted, barely-supported homage to both the prone and the supine.  I'm a caterpillar turning up to a tempting branch but unsure, unsure, not all the legs let go.

Nibbling at the words.  Steady, I digest them.  And digested, they do give me a strength.  A strength fed by pulp novels and undisputed classics colliding in a cauldron of fusion and fission.  The product is not familiar to me.  I know it only as a vague, uneasy inspiration; all the art and beauty is work, a work, wrought and birthed, calculated from formulae on a clacking abacus and the exponential results swished on a slide rule.

I digest these things, lazy in my bed.  Suffering from the feast of words and not the twinge of any envy.

Now and then, a twinge of disgust as the clouds of industry part and I remember about that time that I was perfectly right about you.