Neuroticon 6

Tomorrow, gentle readers, tomorrow I'm going to drive for 8 hours to make a goddamn fool of myself. At least that's how it seems right now. I have been going through all sorts of interesting stress symptoms since this morning, ranging from a hot red face that will not fade to going to Belks. My friend S called this evening and said, "How are you doing?" "Fine!" I babbled, "I've just been to Belks and bought some shoes! They're super cute!" "I'll come over," she said, because random Belkian shoe buying is, as we all know, a major distress signal.

Everyone at my work wished me luck and told me if I won any money I would have to give it to the museum. This made my craven plan of just staying home tomorrow under the bed and then lying and saying I had been to Atlanta and failed the test look bad, so I had to give that one up. Okay, I'm not THAT neurotic and I wasn't really going to do that, no matter how comforting it seems right now. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be wearing new shoes, so how bad could it be? Pretty goddamn bad, I know.

Which leads me to the title of this post. Neuroticon 6 is a planet I occasionally visit, an unpleasant planet, but a familiar one. It's a planet where all kind of bad things happen, like you show up to try out for a quiz show and they laugh and jeer at you and then save your audition tape to put up on Youtube with the title Moron! At one point I thought I would write a cogent and funny book of essays entitled Neurotica, and I may yet. If I do it will probably be on Lulu.com and you, given sufficient masochism, might even be one of the four people who buys it. It will have an essay about waiting to drive to Atlanta to fail a quiz show test - possibly this essay, even. Only a bit more obsessively proofed.

So I am hanging tonight on Neuroticon 6, where the bars are glossy and elegant and full of mean strangers and perfectly turned out smart blonde women who look far, far better than I ever will; the beers cost $11 and, worst of all, noone will listen to me babble. My friend S gave me some beers and told me how smart I was, and how it was all going to be okay, which should have made me feel better, and it did for a bit, but now I'm back on Neuroticon 6, revisiting all the various ports of call, continents and capital cities and, hey, major waterfalls. At least I have cute shoes.