The ride I was expecting to come this morning and whisk me off to a new life has been delayed a bit, so I thought I'd spend the last few minutes of my old life describing how I've historically  gone about making one of these entries.  Please try to keep your irritation and disappointment safely inside the bounds of this table at all times so as not to ruin the day of those who might be happily reading or doing something worthwhile.

     All entries have been created on Netscape Composer for reasons that now escape me.  My main page was written on a special sub-program of Corel WordPerfect 8, but some now-forgotten glitch prompted me to switch.  I've toyed with Hot Dog and a few other web page programs before finally concluding that I'm just too stupid and /or impatient to use 'em.  Looking back, it's a wonder I didn't take one look at kindergarten, exclaim "The hell with this complicated mess!" and devout my life to trying to get that nursery school thing down pat.  I would've eventually made quite the adequate Block Major, I think, with a minor in Medieval Napping Techniques. 

     Once the decision to launch a new entry has been made and the liquid hydrogen tanks topped off with whatever is handy (usually yesterday's coffee), I activate Netscape Composer and decide on a background.  This usually takes some time as I have to check my email first, and that always starts now with Netscape taking me to its home page exactly as if that's the first and most important thing I need to see everyday.  This is about as annoying as the new Time Warner cable box I have now which always starts off telling me about today's pay-per-view specials before I can get my Weather Channel radar fix.  I can't imagine what it must be like to have one of those "free" computers that have ads on the screen all the time.... 
     You know where this is going, don't you?  In five years none of us will be able to get our HMOs to pay for the simplest medical procedure unless we agree to have a microchip implanted in our brains that will bombard our cerebellums with non-stop pitches for Prilosec, Nasalcrom, and that Viagra Bob Dole hasn't needed since telling a reporter he was donating to John McCain's campaign and not Elizabeth's.
     But as they say in Canada, "I digress, eh?"

     Background.  Usually blue.  Blue is pretty, no? 
     Insider's secret: The deeper the blue, the lamer the entry.

     Once the background has been properly interred it's time to slap on a centered table with a white tablecloth and decide what date to smear across the top.  This usually requires some research as my inner clock seems to have gotten stuck about 4:17 a.m. on May 12, 1968.  In an attempt to guarantee that something about every entry is accurate, I never put any date at the top unless it has been confirmed by two independent sources.

     The date is usually in the font style known as Chicago.  It constitutes my one attempt at having some stylistic consistency between my home page and my entries.  I chose Chicago because it's one of the few fonts that looks older than I do.  And I like the sense of stability a font named after a big city provides.  I might have used the font known as Cleveland if it hadn't accidentally caught on fire a few years ago.  I shudder just thinking about what a Toledo font might look like....
     If you don't have the Chicago font installed and consequently have been wondering why the date has always been appearing in Mandarin Chinese or some such default, email me a request and I'll send ya the 43k True Type file.

     After the date I often try to put a quote so that there's some kind of buffer between the hard, unpleasant reality of our place in time and the inevitable neuron-suffocating quicksand of my writing.  That these quotes are usually total fabrications doesn't seem to matter much thanks to the placebo effect.
     Here's an example:

     Linus: "There are three things I've learned never to discuss - religion, politics, and the bowel problems of a friend's family pet."
     Sally: "Well, fuck you, Mister!"

- Sample dialogue from the never rebroadcast CBS special, "Your Dog Has Worms, Charlie Brown!"

     Quite often (as is the case here) these "quotes" are as repulsive and/or disgusting as possible as the result of a sophomoric attempt to make what follows seem a tad less so.
     Insider's secret #1: The color these quotes appear to be depends on the state of the mind of the reader.  This little trick is made possible by inserting the HTML code that goes <href="readermindset/detect/colorbar.spew"> before and after the quote.  I have personalized my site's colorbar so that readers who are extremely intelligent see green, those who would rather be having sex than reading a stupid journal see red, and those who are very very lucky see white.

     Most of the quotes appear in 14 point Arial Black for contractual reasons demanded by their union reps and/or agents.  Most of the rest of my entries appear to be written in 14 point Arial plain, which I've been told is Pepsi's version of Coke's Helvetica.  Anyone who thinks they can tell the difference is welcome to take the blindfold read test and send me the results.

      This finally brings us to the heart of each entry, which tends to consist of a very few, undersized ideas painfully attempting to bring a spark of life to a vast fatty mass of rapidly aging verbiage.  No one has yet asked me, "Where do you get your fatty masses of verbiage?"  Many have asked me, "Where do you get your ideas?"  Go figure. 
     So:  Where do I get my ideas? 
     Sometimes they come to me in my dreams.  Like last night, I had this dream that I was playing Russian roulette with a Salad Shooter and I woke up just before taking a cherry tomato right between the eyes.  Last week I had this other dream in which I fell in love with a woman whose eyes were bigger than her stomach, only to learn after we were married that it had just been an illusion generated by silicon pupil injections.  After repeated attempts to stretch these ideas to fill an entire entry ended with them snapping in the middle and their ends smacking me square in the area of my aspirations, however, I decided I better try something else.
     That something else is the Ideas R Us store.  Most towns have them now, but you have to have been hit in the head with a brick by a Muse to know about them.  While people like Steve Martin and Pauly Shore just send their chauffeurs over to the local Ideas R Us outlet whenever they need a cup of genius, I have to hitchhike there and then wander the aisles until I find something I can afford to take home with my limited IQ.  Needless to say, nearly everything I end up with is irregular, past its pull date, or a cheap Korean knock-off version of an ancient Erma Bombeck whimsy. 
     On those days near the end of the month when the IQ balance in my head is insufficient to purchase even one of these close-out bargains, I settle for writing an entry based on the truth. 
     If low demand didn't keep truth so affordable, I'd really be screwed....

     But enough for now - I think my ride is here!
     And hey - it looks like the driver is a woman with naturally large eyes!!
     Woooohoooooooo!!!
     Oh, no - she's got a Salad Shooter!! 
     AARRGH!
     Somebody  -  please!  Help me get these tomato seeds out of my eyes!!!!