Just get it out there, son, just get it done.

  I still have some of that yuck, whether it's sinus or not, is hanging around with me and making life unpleasant. I don't really have anything interesting to say, either, and my brain just hasn't been working lately. I knew it wouldn't work out like this, but a part of me hoped that getting a regular lungful of the good smoke would make everything click, like the last piece of the puzzle.

 It hasn't, of course, because that's not how things work. I keep hoping there is something out there, something I'm just not getting, and when I do, my life's waveform will collapse into place like a row of dominoes. It continues to baffle me that there's so much of Normal Life that continues to elude me. My upbringing wasn't so odd nor have my experiences been all that special, but there you go.

 Nothing is really begging to get out. I'm not playing any games, in particular, and have gotten cold on Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and there's no music that needs me talking about it. The only reading I'm doing is trying to finish The Kolchak Chronicles, a book of short stories based on the Kolchak: The Night Stalker character. I don't know why I'm still trying because they are goddamn awful. It's like The Pink Panther reboot with Steve Martin; even if you don't compare it to the original, it's goddamn awful.

 Jumped-up fan fiction rarely works, for me, anyway. The pre-reboot Doctor Who books were tedious at best and all too often devolved into the writer getting weird about a specific character. Nyssa caught a lot of that weirdness; so did Dodo, bless their hearts. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book by the guy who did the Artemis Fowl books is one of the worst things I've ever read, at least until these Kolchak stories.

 These are just dull. It's not so much they stray too far from the character or the general form of the established stories, they're just dull. And I swear, I don't need to learn about Carl Kolchak's dark past. That's why the television remake was such a turkey. Also, I don't understand why people have to update everything to modern times rather than the '70s - internet, digital cameras, cell phones, etc. - as it really doesn't add anything and just strikes me as lazy.

 I do like William Meikle's take on Carnacki, The Ghost Finder. Good stories, sharp writing, it doesn't monkey too much with the formula, and he makes it all work. Of course, it does help that William Hope Hodgson only got in a half-dozen Carnacki stories, so there's plenty of room to stretch out.  Meikle doesn't add a love interest or too much goofy shit, like people who want to make Irene Adler a recurring character or put any woman at all into Jekyll & Hyde. I have strong opinions about that.

 I don't know what else. The weather's turned cooler here lately and the days are getting shorter. College football season has started but I can't be bothered just yet. I reckon it's time to tie this off. Whatever the yuck that's messing with me wears me out, so I imagine I'll go to sleep after a little while.

 So there's that there then.