Keep my nose to the grindstone, work hard everyday.

 So, a little housekeeping. I have some Actual Paying Work due tomorrow. Two pieces of it, as a matter of fact. Since one takes about two-and-a-half hours at 1,000-some-odd words, I don't know if I'll be up for spreading any wisdom here. I hear hearts breaking across the internet, I know.

 I might, might, come back to it after I'm done. I managed to knock out some News last night, and that generally takes much more time. I have some thoughts on the Narrative and how it plays into human misery, but I might want to let that simmer for a bit. I've spent too much time in the past 24 hours playing Phantom Doctrine. It's rapidly becoming a favorite. Finally, got on an Ursula K. Le Guin kick and a Paul Butterfield kick, but who knows where that'll go.

 Anyhow. I may be back and I may not. We'll just see how the night goes. Take it easy.

UPDATE: 9:20 p.m.

 Okay, that's two knocked out and, yeah, it took about three-four hours. It gets easier and, frankly, apart from differing cities, law firms and phone numbers, it's pretty ranch-standard stuff. Like I've said, it's sort of like writing about high school baseball. One isn't much different from the other, the key is keeping them slightly different enough to stay interesting. More or less. This shit is never going to be riveting.

 On the down side, pounding out around 2,500 words has fried my brain and I don't know how to fill this up. I am going to mess around with it for a while, anyway, until I feel like playing Phantom Doctrine in an hour or so. I am going to keep the bit about the Narrative in the simmer for a while, but in short, it goes like this.

 I think far too much of human nature and human history, especially when it goes south in an awful way, is because of our search and desperate need for a Narrative. That is, we want life to be life a story. We want to be the protagonist. We want a beginning, middle and satisfying end. We want our present state to be the inevitable result of human development. In a nutshell, we want life to make sense like a story does because everything we do is based on or taken from something that could be considered a story.

 And life and the universe is under no obligation to make logical sense and, indeed, rarely does. Religions and myths are all stories to tell us how to live, as are philosophical concepts and outlines, but none of us come quite close. Political ideologies and economic theories never quite work in action like they do on paper, but we consider them something to be failed instead of failures themselves.

This inability to match the desperately desired logical narrative and the chaotic nature of our existence drives us crazy. For some people, they cling to whatever their Story is to the point of thinking they should wipe out any other Stories, whether they're in competition or not. Some of us get into absurdism or nihilism and some of us just trudge through life, happy in our ignorance or miserable because the Story's not working out like we're told it should.

 But more on that later, if I ever get around to it. I've hit 500-plus words and my head's starting to throb. I may lie down for an hour before I start playing Phantom Doctrine, because I will be playing Phantom Doctrine before the night's though.