Random Thoughts: The A to Z Blog of the Overactive Mind

  It had 54 smug square stickers. It looked like a Borg flagship named "Flamboyance."  But it wasn't a simple cube. Or a Rubik, whatever the heck that is. Well, it was. But it was more along the line of a little grinning plastic psychopath that broke the will of every kid who once thought they were good at puzzles. In case you missed it, imagine someone you love and trust handing you a block full of colourful, demonic, smaller blocks and saying, "Here, go twist this until it's perfect." So you do. For hours. Days. Entire geologic epochs. Until one day, the gift-giver finds you sitting in the middle of your bedroom floor, cross-legged, unwashed, surrounded by a circle of half-eaten Twinkies and muttering, "red to left, blue white up, yellow always right, right never green, orange beats itself, and where in the world is Carmen San Diego." It wasn't Twister in a twister... EF2 or otherwise. It was you, following the cult of Rubik, but spiralling ...

 Some of life's constants: - Gravity - Taxes - Acupuncture at 50 miles per hour whilst downhill skiing amongst the majestic pines. That last one... probably just me. But a universal constant is the fact that every person who lived through the 80's as a teen was nearly suffocated at some point... by their own hair. And I'm not just speaking figuratively . No, quite literally in fact. Choked out by a chemically-enhanced, ozone-depleting cumulus cloud; a beauty-pageant thunderhead surrounding the dome. If you weren't there, you might believe I'm prone to exaggeration. How adorable. But let me paint you a picture: Imagine your head. Now double it. Now picture it after it's been plugged in to a small nuclear reactor fueled by volumizing conditioner and hairspray. That's your baseline. We called it Monday. On special occasions we added mousse. 80's Hair Philosophy Went Something Like This: If you didn't have to turn sideways to enter through an interior d...

  This alphabetical experiment IS about to close, and before we try to pretend that it was always under control, I think it's only fair - bordering on ethical - to try and explain what this series has delivered to you, the reader, and why. It's all your fault. So this post isn't what about what you read. And it's not the post you needed, but the post you deserve. Outcomes matter, people! You continued to show up voluntarily... those kind of actions carry a little friend I like to call consequence. And consequence has many faces. Sleeplessness Yes, sleeplessness. Not the dramatic, stare-at-the-ceiling blame it on dark roast after 9pm kind.  This is the brain reboot. Like your mind saying, " Dude! You can't reopen long-closed mental tabs like that and expect me not to freak out." There, in between REM cycles, your snoring mind ponders a weird metaphor you read that shouldn't have worked, but somehow did. How? I don't know, I just write this stuff. J...