Dark Currents is Blogger-powered serialized gothic fiction. Not gothic in the Tina the Troubled Teenager sense, but gothic in the H. P. Lovecraft sense. At least, that’s how it has started. It’s the first time I’ve seen Blogger used in this way. It’s set in the present, told in a first-person narrative, and incorporates weblogging into the framework of the story itself. It’s fairly new, so you can get caught up in a hurry and then add it to your regular rotation.

Catching up on my reading, I noticed that Evan’s smitten with Anne Sussman too.

If you haven’t read Anne Sussman’s diaryland entries, I urge you to do so. At the risk of making Randy sad, I have to say that Anne’s writing is probably the best of any online journal I’ve read. Besides being laugh out loud funny ("Full, nubile, female college-student nudity (henceforth to be referred to as FNFCSN) . . . was a damn sight more enticing than FNSNEGOWHN (full, not-so-nubile, ex-girlfriend, old withered hag nudity)"), her words have the full range of emotion-induction. I’m finding it hard to describe the effect her writing has on me, which is just one of many reasons why hers is far better than mine.

Sometimes lunch meetings are wonderful things. Especially when I am invited to the “lunch” part without having to sit in the “meeting” part. Even if the lunch is a few pizzas delivered to the office. And especially when I, though sheer laziness, didn’t pack a lunch of my own. So now I’m full of Papa John’s and ready to tackle the rest of the day.

I was already feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and generally happy thanks to a very pleasant weekend getaway. I got a car almost a year ago with the intention of getting away at every opportunity, but somehow this was the first excursion I embarked on. The setting was Towns County, Georgia, nestled in the mountains of the northern edge of the state. The weather was (supposed to be) perfect for being outdoors all weekend long. My weekend home was The Mountain Room of the Henson Cove Place Bed & Breakfast. That place truly was comfortable. The photos on their Web site do a great job conveying the beauty to be found there. Saturday was spent first walking through the Hamilton Rhododendron Gardens -- early for most Rhododendrons, but still full of color. Though the weatherman had promised me clear skies with temperatures in the seventies, it was chilly and threatening rain. The next stop was Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain. The literature boasts of a view of over a hundred miles, but after a half-mile hike straight up through 33-degree fog, I was treated with a view (if I looked hard and squinted a little) of about four feet. It seems it’s foggy up there an awful lot, as the trees were covered with mosses and lichens that would ordinarily take centuries to grow. Further below and several miles away, the afternoon was closed with a nice two mile walk along a portion of the Appalachian Trail, where I watched a couple families of wild pigs play in the forest. Easter Sunday saw the nice weather predicted, and after filling up on pecan waffles (topped with pecan ice cream and maple syrup) a walk through the Chattahoochee National Forest was in order. Not the whole forest, mind you, but as pleasant a four mile stretch as I could have asked for. Though I missed the “rare black-barked yellowwood trees” that were in the area, I did see some old-growth buckeyes and a whole mess of wildflowers. It was probably the most perfect time to witness the blooming of the woodland wildflowers that blanketed the forest floor in whites, yellows, purples, and pinks. Another couple of weeks and they’ll all be gone. The teeny tiny wild irises, miniature versions of their cultivated cousins, were particularly cute. Note that I’m not afraid to call a small flower cute.That’s just how it was.

As I said, I returned refreshed. Seeing the last period of the St. Louis Blues’s pounding of San Jose was just icing.

I was twenty minutes late to work today because of an extra long commute. Not because of traffic – there’s no traffic out in my neck of the woods. A tree sugeon was operating on a tree down across the road, and I had to wait. I love country living.

I’ve been tapped to direct and play the title role in a 1-act rock opera featuring the music of the Athens based wondergroup the Dictatortots. As a 6 foot 2 inch straight man, the band thinks I’m the perfect person to play the role of “a homosexual leprechaun who discovers the wider world”.

Here’s a nice story about my Waiting for Godot that appeared in the Athens papers last week.

The play… the play went very well. I’ve been recovering all day, and will be recovering all week, I’m sure. I’m going away to the Georgia Mountains to a nice bed and breakfast to recover even more. My body is beaten – my part was very physical, my mind is drained. This was by far the hardest production I’ve been involved with, and I had to use every bit of willpower to hold it together. In the end, it was wonderful. The audiences (smaller than I’d hoped) were very supportive. I was given nothing but praise, as were my actors. It was a wild ride, though. Estragon and Vladimir took act two and ran it through a blender every night. While scraping out the script puree, they always left some in the pitcher, but somwhow it all came back together again on stage. I put three months into three performances. I’m very proud of what we’ve done, but it’ll be good to have my evenings back. I’m not unpacked from my move yet. I want to learn a ton of web technologies. I have plenty of reading to catch up on. I’ve only got six weeks, though, as auditions for my next project are the last two days in May. This time, instead of three performances and a $100 budget, I’ll have a two week run and over $2000 to play with. I’ll tell you what it is in a little while.

Offering another example of a dot com company falling over backwards to provide free services for users, namezero.com provides free registration of domain names (com, org, and/or net). The catch? Well, there’s at least two. First, the domain is actually registered under the name of the namezero folks, though you “retain the right, title and interest in and to the Namezero Domain name “. Second, the created page is really just a frameset with the top 90% pointing at your own content stored elsewhere and the bottom 10% a namezero navigation bar. For an example, you can look at this weblog at www.kestrelsnest.com. If you don’t mind that bar at the bottom of your pages, this might be a neat service. It has web-based and POP email (eric@kestrelsnest.com should get to me, though I haven’t tried to set that up yet) and easy to set up subdomains (again, a frameset with pointers. godot.kestrelsnest.com will take you to my Weblog for Godot , for example.). I’ve yet to find what their revenue source is. I imagine they’re planning on banner ads on the nav bar or something.

Hopped up on man gel: Time Magazine has a cover story about the upcoming availability of a testosterone gel, and the effects it may have on men and society. “‘What happens when men have higher levels than normal?’ asks James M. Dabbs, a psychology professor at Georgia State University. ‘They are just unmanageable.’ "