* Ah-Choo! *

Thanks to overexerting myself and getting very little sleep the last number of weeks, I have managed to catch myself a cold. This is the first time I have been sick in over two years (I'm not counting acts of self-indulgence). I took the afternoon off work, and I should be getting some rest instead of playing on my computer.

Not only is this a sick day, but I am considering this day off work a mental health day. I feel like I have been going slowly insane for a number of weeks now. I am in a desperate need of a break, and a full nights' sleep.

I think it would be an adventure to spend a little time in a mental institution. I would consider it a demented party game, when the men in white show up at my door, strap me in a strait jacket and haul me into the back of an ambulance. I'd have a heyday bouncing off the padded walls, muttering some post-apocalyptic gibberish to the observers whom hide behind two-way mirrors, while they all write "clearly insane" in their notebooks. I'm sure they'd give me injections of some unknown substance; "vitamins" they would call them, that would instead sedate me or make me impotent. They would take away my whiskey and cigarettes, and I would probably raise hell with the nursing staff, begging for a fix. I would go even more crazy, not having access to a computer, likely trying to make an email client out of a calculator and coconuts. And those therapy sessions, every one I'd feel like I'd be giving the sermon on the mount, telling everyone else that it is in fact, they who are truly insane, and I'm here to cure them -- only to be thrown into isolation without dinner or cigarettes. I'm sure after a while both the nursing staff and I would grow tired of my little game, but at least I would have a carefree holiday for a couple months.

I am sure this would be a fun game in this day and age, but I would not have wanted to be committed to an insane asylum in the 1950's. The treatment of mental patients for much of history was an exercise in human cruelty. These nightmarish practices still haunt people today, to the point where many people will deny the fact they have a mental problem for fear of what treatment they would receive at such an institution. Electro-shock therapy, and lobotomies were common practices not so long ago, practices considered more like butchery than therapy. By today's standards, these therapies resemble the torture practices of the Spanish Inquisition.

I'd better lay down before I start writing about some other depressing topic. While I recover from this nasty cold, you may all send cards, flowers or money.