Drugs are pretty much the ultimate cheat when writing.

Tank glanced in the mirror, brushed what was left of his teeth, and said a quick prayer for Texas

doesn’t really stand up at all to

Tank glanced in the mirror, snorted a knuckle-thick line of Colombia’s finest, and said a quick prayer for Texas.

I mean, in the first one you’ve basically got this guy with weak hygiene, and in the second you’ve got some kinda broken soldier. And shit, the guy’s tough! It takes a full knuckle of drugs just to get this guy religious.

And anyway, the really fine drug books already exist, have for 30 years, and until they come up with some innovative new exciting way to torch your fraggle they??e probably going to stay pretty much written.

“But ah!” you say. “Ah. I’ll just make up some very good kind of fictional drug! And then I’ll finally get a look from that toothsome wench in Workshop.” She is dating a stringy-haired boy who cares about and for nothing, and you think you might have a stab if you could just get your head around this really great fictional drug, you know, something with nanotech or something . . . and I guess, I don’t know, dash off 500 words or so over a couple PBRs.

This is not only utter balls but probably the kind of utter balls that makes people hate reading what you write very very much, and go god! TOR would probably get a big kick out of this and order up 10,000 copies in time for your GenCon signing!

Except that there would be no GenCon signing, and no panel with you answering questions about whether the hovercraft chase on page 114 was an intentional reference to Call of Cthuhlhu. There will only be the cold stares of criticism from people you despise, and a pipe-scented Britmerican saying polite things about knowing your audience in warm, rich tones.

THAT SAID.

If one can be said to miss a substance like one does a guardian angel ??and I guess you can miss a guardian angel, or let’s assume for the moment that you can — then I swear to you now that I miss Ritalin. Have you tried the Ritalin!?

Have you tried it!?

It was utterly fantastic. To be able to put on that mask of competence for a full hour, absorbing facts like I cared . . .

Beautiful. That was the dream part, I guess, actually caring about things that I normally despised . . . being able to look at a stack of cold, black-on-white data like I actually loved it, going hey, going to learn this for a while! Then maybe have some PIE!

The pie would never actually come, because the stuff pretty much kills your appetite. Still.

From time to time I buy things that are going to teach me Japanese. Within my immediate field of vision are two separate dictionaries (1 electronic, one tree-based), Naruto #1, Steel Ball Run #1, a Japanese keitai, that one Doraemon comic about the kid what gets him a dinosaur, 500 kanji flashcards, a kanji practice book, An Integrated Approach to Japanese, Ultimate Japanese, an iPod with Dr. Paul Pimsleur?? Speak and Understand Essential Japanese 1, 2, & 3, and 3 unwatched episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I guess I??l probably take a stab at some of those at some point tonight, when things converge to a point where I can?? really talk myself out of it and nothing new appears on Fark or Slashdot no matter how many times I stab F5.

I guess that I’ve basically programmed myself to run a holding pattern until I die.

And at some point I realized it ??a few years ago, I guess ??and I’ve been trying . . . really hard to break it. Thus the piles of good intentions. I mean, maybe it’s generational, and going through the midlife crisis 25 years early is the new black. But I don’t really believe that. I think that I’ve just got a time limit, here, and that time is running out for me to be utterly fantastic, and that Ritalin ??you sexy WHORE, where are you when I NEED YOU ??let me be the smooth-faced factbot in a T-shirt that I just naturally am not.

Or maybe I am just kind of lazy . . .