Bowing to the meme carried by Tim Blair, I submit to you three things that just chap my ass:

• Feng Shui (or any mysticism, for that matter)
• Kung Fu in movies
• James fucking Joyce

Jesus, I hate James fucking Joyce. What a simpering, worthless little twat. I think I'm going to file suit in my home state of Georgia to have his name legally changed to James Fucking Joyce. I hate that son of a bitch. I hear from someone or 'nother that some little kiss-ass literary "New Yorker"-wannabe had a fucking "Ulysses Day" jack-fest this month, supposedly because it was the date that was portrayed in Ulysses, by James Fucking Joyce. One goddam day, 11,000 pages. If you need 11,000 pages to describe one fucking day, you need to find a job you're good at.

Whatever happened to appreciation for elegance? James Fucking Joyce needed 150,000 pages to describe one fucking day. ONE! I could describe today in one word: Shit. I could also describe it in 1,500,000,000 words, just like J.F. Joyce. But it would just be the word "Shit" copied and pasted 1,500,000,000 times. I'll spare you the suspense and the outrageous Amazon pre-order fees.

Fuck James Fucking Joyce, fuck the Wachowski Brothers for re-introducing Kung Fu in polite Gesellschaft, and fuck anybody who tells me I need to have a goddamn turtle in the northern corner of my yard if I want to be potent.

And, by the way, fuck the next person who tells me in a bar that belief in a supreme being betrays a diminutive intellect, grasping at the tiniest of hopes in order to bring meaning into an abjectly meaningless existence, and then flips out because I light my cigarette with a fucking candle, because, as we all know, lighting a cigarette with a candle is bad luck for sailors. Fuck sailors, and fuck you Paul, you pseudo-intellectual, self-aggrandizing sack of shit.

Did I leave anything out?

Have you ever done something, sitting around on your own, that you found...unsettling?

I'm sitting here in my apartment, programming some sort of meaningless eye-candy for some customer I've never met. I gave up listening to music when I work, so I have to make my own noise. Being a self-employed, work-at-home, recluse-by-nature geek, I haven't brushed my teeth, showered, or even put on pants today. It's 5:30 in the P.M., and I need a shave.

So, I'm sitting there fondling the Powerbook, gazing longingly at it's sleek form, inspired design, and oh-so-curvy air vents, relishing the feel of the tactile-feedback mechanism under the warm, pliant keyboard that, though I'll never understand, I breathlessy appreciate. I'm a man, goddamnit. A man with needs, such as ergonomic design and thoughtful engineering.

There I am, trying to figure out how to make an image filter process a tiny 25,000-pixel image in under an hour, stroking my computer, sitting around in my underwear at dinnertime, filthy and unwashed, and I realize I'm singing that wading-pool song Gollum was singing when he brained that fish in Two Towers.

Fuck me, that's creepy.