Days! After millenia in the making, gradually formed in the crucible of time and pressure, coupled in the meantime with a lot of sleeping, groaning, and otherwise being useless—now!, now time to storm unto the planet, redefine the landscape with little warning, emit tons of gaseous fumes in the process, and then yawn gently back into a deep, peaceful slumber.

I don't recognize times of day; I'm over these arbitrary chronological distinctions such as "lunch time" and "time for stories" and "time to get up" and especially "bed time." They have recently done a study of how people spend their day. I raged against the existence of this chart for a while, but in the end ironically spent a good chunk of my afternoon analysing it. It is strangely erotic, useless as it may be.

I can only imagine what other celestial wonders exist beyond the reach of such a magnificent star as Mu Herc, what other beautiful vistas bask beyond. Unfortunately for the opposing viewpoint, it's just more of me and my irritable incoherencies frisking by at the speed of light as time unfurls; in fact it's probably a good thing there's little else out there but carbon compounds and gamma ray bursts, I am prone to stage fright and would likely just forget my lines.

This isn't one of my senseless ruminations, people. But naturally it is quite secret, for no good reason really. Half of you already know anyway. I am not the most talented mathematician of the Middle Ages, but I know the guy who was. It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice.

The demand you put upon yourself for absolute self-integrity and honesty is where it all starts. This is the first trial. You don't need to worry about being honest with others; in fact, there is much to be said about a campaign of deception and subterfuge when properly executed against the world around you (take this website, for example). You, however, need to know exactly what's going on behind the curtain of your mind at all times, to be 100% in tune with every microscopic thought and feeling while the world flounders around in the cloud of confusion that appears to be you. Even in arbitrary matters you need to be precise. There can be no generalities or rounding off on anything--perfection is the key. Avoid superlatives like the plague, avoid any tendency to exaggerate. Lie through your teeth if you want or need to, but know what you really mean, what you're really feeling. If, in some distant corner of your mind, there has been a suboptimal unconscious reaction to the present situation, be aware that not everything is as fine as it might seem.

Once this has become habit, the next phase is the gradual introjection of this affinity for accuracy and its corresponding aversion for all things untruthful. This won't happen overnight. You will naturally put up some resistance to this over the years, but it needs to become a strategy upon which you base all your thoughts and reactions, self-evaluations, and self-criticisms. At first, everything must be questioned, and you will need to do this consciously. After a few years of mercilessly demanding this integrity from yourself, as this modus operandi becomes a part of your mental wiring, you will notice the self-deceit growing slowly quieter and more distant until it fades from your everyday existence altogether. You will have short-circuited the loud calamity of your human condition and will have encountered a peaceful, resigned acceptance of the way you really are.

As the rift between reality and fantasy contracts, you will steadily perceive this same gulf in others growing wider and wider until it becomes a maddeningly open chasm. Around this time, you will know you are in the third phase, because it will drive you crazy, at least at first. The contrast between your tranquil acceptance of the way the world is and the senseless emotional spending of others to keep it the way they want it to be, this will become clear as day, dark as night. And gradually this instrument of emotional measurement will become sharper over time, this sentimental night vision will become focused.

If you can calm your reaction to the self-deceit of others, you will enter phase four and will begin learning to accurately sense the degree of inaccuracy in everything people say. It will cease to amaze you, cease to annoy you, and you will just accept it for what it is. You will start to naturally gauge the factor by which people either over-embellish or under-embellish the message they are conveying to you and of which they have fully convinced themselves.

And that's the key, the underlying strategic goal here: to know people better than they know themselves, to know the truth of a person through the nature of his or her lies. To be one layer of intelligence deeper inside their own mind than they are, which will become a valuable strategic advantage and one you will find yourself using all the time.

The south polar evening was dark and frozen. A blizzard hurled snow on its winds over a landscape of ice two thousand feet thick from surface to bottom. There were perhaps sixteen hours of darkness left before the next brief appearance of the sun over the horizon, though that appearance would last only a few short-lived hours. The blizzard would last much, much longer.

In an effort to get as far away as possible from the onslaught, a thousand emperor penguins trekked single file toward the edge of the ice, three miles away. Arriving at the end of the shelf, the line of black beads reflected off the edge of the sheet of ice, gathering around and about itself like a dangled rosary bunching into an open palm. In this way, the penguins slowly built their life-sustaining throng, what the French referred to as a tortue, or turtle. By the time the last of the penguins had joined up with the group, from overhead they resembled a huge black dot on the blanket of pallid ice.

By that time, in instinctive penguin fashion, the apparently immobile mass had begun circulating slowly. The outside rear layers peeled off to spiral around and inward upon the rest of the group at the front, each body in turn sharing time in the middle of the tortue, that epicentre of remarkable warmth in the bitter polar climate. In proper formation, only one-sixth of the bodies of the penguins would be exposed to the thrashing blizzard at any given time. There were no complaints; just an automatic cooperation in the interest of mutual preservation.

The emperor penguin itself, Aptenodytes forsteri, was three feet tall and all black and white, except for a tuft of bright yellow plumage on its head. On this evening, a thousand of these short, fat tuxedos moved slowly around each other, exposing their sun-yellow heads on the circumference of the tortue for a few minutes each before shuffling to the leading edge to be taken back into the crowd.

A hundred metres into the march, one penguin, with bright red plumage where the yellow would normally be, nudged out onto the periphery of the group, standing out from the rest. This particular penguin, head gazing out into the white nothing, followed his cue behind the other members on the outside of the group, taking his turn on the frosty, wind-hammered exterior. He moved slowly around the circle like a red dot on a yellow, rotating compass rose, coming to a stop at his new place on the leading edge of the assembly. Then, with a shudder of his body, he stood there at the edge and peered around, scanning the horizon, which was now about twenty feet away in the blowing snow. He turned inward to face the crowd, and was soon overwhelmed by a wall of bouncing black, white and yellow blobs moving around to protect him from the blizzard hammering his black backside.

And so the tortue waddled slowly and warmly into the wind.

Pay no attention to the unexplainable object that Hubble picked up the other day. Go on, swing the curtain shut and be done with it. I had ordered that in the mail a little while back and fully intended to get to it before you did, but for sleeping in that one day. See, my laziness and proclivity for lethargy have betrayed me once again. I should have been up and alert and waiting to usher in our new guests, but alas the salvation of our planet has returned from whence it came and we'll simply have to wait a bit longer. There was a point to this message but I think I dropped it while running across Devine Street.

So what else was I supposed to do? I shut my eyes gently and closed my fists, gradually upped my heartrate, expanded to fill the space I occupied, became extremely luminescent and then poof, just as soon as I had arrived I was gone, and people began filing out, apparently satisfied with what they had seen.

What then? What else could I possibly do if I weren't doing what I'm doing?

Well, I have been gently easing into my master plan to launch a series of increasingly addictive web projects that explode in popularity and end up generating enough revenue to cover operating costs and make me a ton of cash at the same time, with no further work on my part needing to be done. I took a couple weeks off from work about a month ago and wrote the first thousand lines of code for the first project (which will remain under wraps until its alpha period is over of course.) Now that I am back from my vacation, the time I spend advancing this first project toward reality has become rare again. So if I suddenly found myself unemployed, I would be able to throw myself fully into these projects once again, thereby bringing my early retirement date even earlier.

Of course, this wouldn't mean for me what it would mean for most other people. Sure, I would relax, worry a lot less, and work out a lot more, but I would still stay engaged with day-to-day project affairs: making a morning stroll to the server monitoring room to check on various graphs, trim the bonsai trees, etc. That will really be the apogee of my existence as a geek: strolling into the server room, having a peek at a couple graphs, admiring my steadily increasing revenue chart, and then taking the rest of the day off.

But let's be practical here: pretty much everything has been done already for the web (hasn't it?). Things are just copies of old things, and you know, with the law of diminishing returns, that sort of thing, each copycat project is less popular than the one before. So let's assume I don't start an internet revolution (I will, but let's assume I don't), then we'll need to talk about other real life jobs.

I wouldn't mind working at the casino in some capacity, either as a dealer or security guard or cashier in the cage/bank, or even just as a janitor, cleaning the place up for ridiculous amounts of money. I reluctantly admit that I already spend a certain portion of my leisure time there, sitting nondescript at the blackjack tables. And in my tenure as a casual gambler I have observed how much fun the dealers seem to have as they keep the spirit alive at their tables. I think it would an enjoyable job. I would be a trick dealer, too, flipping cards around, spinning chips, and riverdancing on all natural blackjacks. I could definitely dig a card dealing job, even if meant the occasional bout of standing.

I think I also have the capacity to be some sort of lab rat. If I went back to college for a few years and got a diploma (perhaps later a degree, if it didn't require that much more work) in chemical engineering technology, I'm sure there would be plenty of opportunity in the chemical valley for a mind like mine. If word on the street can be trusted, the valley currently consists of an aging workforce that will soon retire, and the freshly emptied positions will need to be filled with new people. I don't consider myself much of a physical person, i.e.: I'm not somebody who would crawl into tanks and pipes and install/repair things, or do anything else requiring being on my feet for that matter. But I could see myself sitting in a monitoring room all day, making surprise glances at the gauges on the panels in front of me, trying to catch them sneaking past their limits. I would be a hard worker like that. What?! Fire in tank 21?! That's a blackjack in the oil section, boys! Move out of the way... give me some leg room... watch these moves!

But the self-profiting web project thing. The graph-watching idea. Code that generates money. That's where my future is.

Actually let's forget the pomegranates, let's go over to the banana stand and wonder how much money we have wasted on blemish medication and hair colour that has been all for nothing anyway, when we could have been spending it on smear campaigns against the Higgs boson, also known as the harbinger of our destruction. Curiosity killed the cation. We have no right to be messing with God's particles, or even mentioning them in public. Let's grab this bunch of yellow bananas here and call it a day.

As a kid, I used to have these experiences all the time, while waking up, while lying down, while spacing out in the classroom, etc. I remember them clearly and want them again. Only now they seem to be spreading increasingly thin and can only be found here and there during ectopic bursts of happiness, on the bus, on the dancefloor, or while browsing internet auction sites.

Those transparent 8" cake domes they put over cakes to keep them fresh. The hit of this Christmas retail season (everybody's getting one) are objects which look like those domes, only these are fully enclosed and watertight. Instead of cake, there is an inch or so of water along the bottom and a swiftly rotating glass disk above with a small hole in the middle. As the disk turns, the water shoots up through the hole, creating what appears from the outside to be a refreshing light mist which mushrooms up and inside the dome, a pristine waterfall of absolutely clear water that erases the flaws in everything it touches.

From the outside that's what it appears to be, but in this dream, in the time of this dream, people have reached a high enough level of existence that, as easily as they once simply drank water, they are now able to introject the purifying essence of this object directly into their soul, and their very nature is renewed, their spirit flushed of all ailments. This is coming, this is far far away, but it is coming. For now, it is still something we have to wake up from. But I know this is where we are all heading, if only we last long enough.