I'm having a hard time titling this post - coming up with a single word that summarizes this post has been more of a challenge than I thought. So "Publicity" isn't really a good fit, but it's the best I could do. As always, I'm open to suggestions.

Anyway, I ran across a couple of items of note while surfing the net this week. The first was this article in USA Today about the newfound freedoms Iraqis are experiencing as typified in their ability to blog. The second was a news item from Yahoo's news service which I found after reading another personal blog post. These two items really made an impression on me, but not for the seemingly obvious reasons you might reach after reading them yourselves.

I was specifically intrigued by the apparent contradiction of "web anonymity" that I gleaned from my initial reaction to the second article. The first thought that went through my mind was "Who do the intelligence community think they are perusing my web postings looking for whatever they look for?" Then, as I actually processed the words in that thought, I realized how silly that was. Isn't the whole point of making (somewhat) regular posts to this blog to put my thoughts and ideas out in a public forum for anyone in the world to peruse? How can I chastise anyone for researching my posts which I've put out for all to see?

Then I thought back to the notion that the Iraqi blogger mentioned in both articles has not had his identity confirmed. How do we know he is who he purports to be? Or that the details he (or she) has put in the blog are even remotely accurate? For that matter, how do you know that anything I post in the Q Continuum has anything to do with reality? Those of you who are reading this because you already know me will understand most of the connections between what I type and who I am. The rest of you who have landed here either by accident or my linking from some other source don't have any way of knowing the validity of any information posted here.

Which got me thinking down a completely different line - what if I created a completely fictional blog detailing the random thoughts and activities of a completely made-up person? As fanatical as I've seen some readers are who post comments on other people's personal blogs, could I generate the same sort of following for a non-entity? And then I wondered, "Has someone already done this?" Are any of the blogs I'm reading presenting the real thoughts of real people? Sure, many have pictures of the supposed authors to lend validity, but how are we to know those photos are really that person and not just someone who lives in a picture frame at the department store? And going to the next logical extreme, is this whole blogging thing just a large-scale societal practical joke and no one single blog has any shred of truth to it?

OK, OK. Back to planet earth now. Chances are that most of the blogs we read are based in reality. The Q Continuum certainly is, and you can verify with anyone who really knows me that this is, in fact, the case. But just the same, do my posts in the Continuum reflect the "real me?" Or is this an exaggerated persona that I've created? It's certainly feasible to maintain a level of anonymity when blogging, even with little or no effort. But if you really put your mind to it, you could certainly create and maintain a blog without ever revealing anything about yourself to the world. In fact, blogging is the perfect venue for getting your thoughts and ideas out in a forum where they can be read by like-minded individuals and never reveal who you are. I'm not terribly worried in my case, because I'm not publishing anything that's anti-government, conspiratorial, extreme left- or right-winged, racist, sexist, agist, religious, anti-atheistic, anti-Semitic, anti-anything. I'm sure that those blogs are out there, however.

Which goes back to my original thought about the intelligence community trolling blogs searching for threats against national or personal security. Should I be concerned about this? Should I care? Am I going to end up on some list in some government agency because of some random collection of words that appear in my blog? Based on the sheer volume of personal blog data out there, not to mention other more traditional web sites, I doubt I'd register more than a blip on some minor intelligence radar somewhere. But considering I'm probably already on someone's list as I had an associate who applied for an FBI internship while in college and I had some relation to a fictional "Free Texas Movement" in the late 80's.

I'm not concerned. As an American citizen, I have the right of free speech, and while I certainly do not intend to abuse it, it does give me the right to publish my thoughts and ideas in this forum for whomever wishes to read them. And if that gets me on another list, so be it. I've got nothing conspiratorial to hide. I'm your average American citizen who happens to be a bit of a geek, a bit of a musician, and a writer wannabe. I have no secrets, no ties to controversial groups, nothing, in fact, that would make me an interesting person at all.

Unless that's just what I want you to think about me...

I had the opportunity to spend this morning in the Emergency Room of Trinity Medical Center in Carrollton. Not because I was looking after someone else who needed to go there, but because I needed to go for myself, for my eyes.

Well, eye, actually. Just one, not both. I was having real trouble with my right eye yesterday and this morning, and I couldn't get in to see my regular physician, and my health insurance company's systems were down this morning, so I just hopped in my car and headed over to the ER of the hospital where my physician has rights. In retrospect, I should have had someone take me, because I was having a devil of a time seeing, both before and after my visit.

The net result is that sometime during the night Saturday night, I scratched the surface of my right eye. I thought yesterday it might just have been allergies, so I kept the eye irrigated, and I took some Benadryl last night, and it would get better for a bit, but then it would get really bad again. This morning, the irritation that had turned to discomfort had evolved into pain, so in I went. Now I'm on a week's worth of ocular antibiotic and a day's worth of Vicodin for the pain. The good news is that all will be well, and no major damage done to my eye. The bad news is that I wasn't able to get anything done today that I had planned. Oh, well. There's always next weekend...

Outside of trying to keep up with several blogs that I've been following, I really haven't done much reading of late. This is significant, because I've always been such an avid reader. One of the reasons I've been an introvert is because when I was younger, I'd rather curl up with a book than interact with people. I sort of got out of the habit my last few years of public school, but I picked it up again when I started college.

My first couple of years of college, I was in sort of a reading club. Nothing official, but a few friends and I would share books with each other and generally kept up with what the others were reading. Then we'd get into long, protracted discussions about the books and share our ideas. The activity really increased our awareness of the world around us, and we definitely became closer friends because of it.

My uncle and I also share a fondness for the printed word. We found, almost completely by accident, that we're both big mystery fans, and he has been able to point me to new authors over the years on a regular basis. As he's a well-traveled individual, he's also been able to point out great bookstores for me to check out in my not-so-great journeys. And even with all his international forays, he still says the best used bookstore in the world is Recycled Books and Records, right here in Denton.

For the last year or so, though, I've not been reading regularly. I used to wind down the last part of the day by reading in bed right before dozing off, but not so much lately. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the reading bug hit me again. I started listening to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on audio book format on my way to and from work, I finished a book I was halfway through about 4 months ago, and I've started reading Jeffrey Deaver's The Bone Collector. My mind is once again challenged with envisioning all the places and people the words describe, and I feel a swell of energy I haven't experienced in quite some time.

The coolest thing for me, though, is that I've been able to discuss my progress through Harry Potter with my wife, who finished the book within a month of its release last year. We've been able to discuss plot details, characterizations, and where we thing J.K. Rowling has it right and wrong. They've been invigorating discussions, much like my informal book discussion group from college.

So hopefully, I'm back on the reading kick for good now. We've found some new authors we're trying out, and if we like them, there's dozens of titles that we have waiting for us to discover. Plus some of our old stand-bys are still churning out new material, and I'm looking forward to those as well. All in all, it's a good thing for me, especially right now, and I'm anxious to finish the HP book so I can start the wait for the release of the next title with baited breath...

You know, or actually probably not, I got a number of responses to my post from yesterday, including one Opinion posted back to the Blog (thanks, Sean!) and that got me thinking. There are a number of "tales" I have from my college days that I've told to several folks, but not everyone who knows me knows the origins of some traditional "Eriq-isms." So, I'm going to start penning (figuratively) some of these stories here, again for myself if not for anyone else's enjoyment. I want to be able to remember such stories as the stealing of the minister's car and the frat-boy frustration at the astronomy lab, and you may enjoy these tales, too. So I'll continue this trip down memory lane by retelling the tale of the Flying Brick.

My first year and a half in college, I lived with my father. That's another story for another time. But while living with him, I quickly figured out what things endeared me to him, and what things just pissed him off at me. One of the latter had to do with cars. You see, my father had an affinity for automobiles - he used to drag us out to the drag races when I was a kid (not the greatest place for a kid, mind you) to watch him take his souped-up 72 Barracuda down the track. He was quite knowledgeable when it came to maintenance and repair, and he tried to impart that knowledge to me, which made me resist it all the more.

Anyway, when I left home to go to live with him and start college, I was driving an old Plymouth Champ (1980 model, as I recall) that was really beginning to show its age. I had to replace one of the front drive shafts once because the rubber boot around the U-joint cracked, and road gunk got up in the joint and just destroyed it. That helped for about 10,000 more miles, until this boot cracked and the same deterioration started in the replacement. My father decided he was going to help me find a car. Determined that I would never drive a vehicle he had chosen for me, I went out on my own, with my student loan money, and sought to buy a vehicle.

A Volkswagen camper van.

I had looked at a couple in high school, but never found one that had, according to my father, a decent enough engine. But when I looked for one at a college campus, boy did I have a number to choose from. I finally found one in Ft. Worth, drive it several times, took it to a shop to have the engine compression tested, and finally wrote the lady a check for $2000. Then I drove it home.

Dad hit the roof. In fact, he tried to ground me for two weeks for buying a vehicle without consulting him. I was in that final phase of my failing relationship with him where I basically told him that he could just try and ground me and see what happens, but after he spent a couple of days cooling off and asking about the van, he relented. When I told him all the checking I'd done before buying it, eh realized that some of what he'd been trying to teach me must have sunk in, so he chose to be proud that I learned something from him instead of pissed off that he wasn't going to get to buy something for me.

Anyway, enough about Dad. This story is about the van. She was a 1972 white camper conversion Volkswagen microbus with all the camper amenities, including the back seat that folded out into a bed, a top that raised up to give some headroom for the cot that could be expanded in the roof, and a small sink with water storage. The interior shone with the glowing burnt orange fabric that was original in 1972, and of course she had no airconditioning if I was driving less than 20 miles per hour. She could accelerate from 0-60 in about a half hour when pointed downhill with a tailwind. Her gas mileage was atrocious, and the shocks were shot, but she was mine - the first vehicle I purchased entirely on my own.

She had such personality, I knew she had to have a name, but I had a Dickens of a time coming up with one. Weeks went by, and nothing suitable came to mind. So when I took her back to Lubbock for the first time, I figured my good friend Dale could help me come up with a suitable moniker. As it turns out, I didn't even need to get all the way to Lubbock to come up with the name.

Just outside of Dickens, TX, on the way to Crosbyton, my regular trip to Lubbock takes me down and back up the Caprock. If you've never been to West Texas, imagine it as sort of a really lame Grand Canyon wannabe. Well, actually, it's not even like that. As you head west out of Dickens, the road grade slopes fairly steeply downhill for a couple of miles, then about 15 miles later, slopes back up, but not quite as drastically. It's kind of fun to drive when the weather is nice, which it wasn't for that trip.

In fact, I shouldn't have been driving at all. The only kinds of rain you get around the Caprock are the torrential downpour, wrath of God type thunderstorms that you don't find many other places. And I was smack dab in the middle of the worst I'd seen to that point in my life. But, seeing as how I was only a little over an hour away from Lubbock, I figured I'd go ahead and brave the storm.

I was fighting through crosswinds that felt like they were blowing a steady 60MPH, with gusts up to 80. The rain was so heavy, I could barely see the road in front of me (really crappy wiperblades didn't help either). The pop-top above the cot was shaking like it was possessed, and my nearly bald tires were barely holding on to the road. I had to keep the steering wheel turned about 90 degrees counter-clockwise just to keep going straight against the wind.

And then it happened.

I had just started down the incline when a particularly strong gust of wind blew across the road. The rubber straps that held the pop-top in place broke from the strain of the storm. The pop-top went up and locked into place, turning into a giant sail on top of an otherwise anti-aerodynamically designed vehicle. I don't recall the next few minutes, as the next thing I knew I was stopped on the side of the road at the bottom of the incline with my hazard lights blinking and the stick in neutral. I could hear myself breathing heavily over the pounding rain and hail. I put on the parking brake, lowered the pop-top, and found some rope to tie it in the down position. I drove the rest of the way to Crosbyton at about 15MPH, and when I got there, I found a truck stop that had enough of a wind break around it that I could stay in the car and pray the hail didn't punch out the windows.

I waited about 30 minutes for the storm to pass, then continued the last part of my journey to my parent's house. Once I finally got in, I called my friend Dale to tell him the story. I didn't really realize what had happened until I told him the story, and we were both sort of amazed that my vehicle and I had survived the trip. I told Dale upon recognizing that fact that I probably wouldn't have been alive if the van hadn't flown like a brick.

Thus she was dubbed the "Flying Brick."

Back in the winter of 1989, I was one of the head instructors at the astronomy labs. Sundays and Mondays were my nights to dole out assignments and corral the students as they came in. My friend Brian and I both worked Sundays, so we would regularly carpool out to the lab site to save gas.

One Sunday, we needed to make some stops at the mall on the way to the labs. Brian picked my up in his truck, and we headed to the shopping anti-mecca a couple of hours before we needed to be at the lab. While hitting the necessary stops and avoiding most of the Sunday evening foot traffic, we bumped into another friend of mine, Melissa, who was wrapping up her set of errands. As it was getting dark and Brian and I still considered ourselves true gentlemen, we escorted Melissa out to her car. That was when we found it.

Walking down the aisle of autos, we witnessed an odd sight. Several drivers who were coming down the row started to pull into an empty parking space, stopped, backed out, and continued down the row past where we were walking. As they passed, we could see looks of frustration on their faces. This happened three or four times as we escorted Melissa to her vehicle, so we decided to check it out, as the seemingly empty space was just a few spaces past where Melissa had parked.

When we arrived at the spot, we were surprised to see a railing laying on its side in the middle of the parking space. It was your standard department store traffic flow type railing - chrome, three vertical posts about three feet tall connected to each other by two additional bars. The whole thing stretched 7 to 8 feet long. While Melissa gaped at the railing, Brian and I looked at each other, grinning. Brian said, "I'll get the truck."

That night, we introduced the railing to the astronomy lab. Brian and I set it up next to the instructors' desk in the front of the main lab waiting room, ostensibly to separate the throngs of excited lab students from the instructors. Though in the lab we referred to it as the 'cattle guard,' it served as more of a conversation piece than anything, as none of us were having to fight off mobs of fanatical students during the welcoming activities each night.

The railing served two good years in the lab. However, when I left the lab to work in greener pastures, the railing was bequeathed to me. I really think that the new wave of instructors just wanted to get it out of there, and since I was the only remaining instructor who'd had anything to do with its arrival (Brian had stopped teaching out there the year before) they figured I should be the one to remove it from the premises. So the railing began the second phase of its life with me.

Once I got it to the house I was renting at the time (which was no small feat in my small Mitsubishi hatchback), the railing took a place of honor along one of the walls in the living room. This large room measured 18 by 22 feet and had one long stretch of wall that spanned from the entryway to the hallway that led to the bedrooms. The railing stood proudly next to this spanse of wood paneling. It served as a conversation piece every time someone new came to the house for a get-together.

Unfortunately, I never was able to put the railing to the use I intended at that house. I maintained a lookout for a very large poster of the Grand Canyon - one that would completely fill the wall behind the railing. I had hoped to find this poster or wall hanging and place it such that when you looked at the wall from the living room, the raining would help protect viewer from falling into the canyon. Alas, that never came to be.

When I moved from that house to the first house my wife and I shared, the railing came with us. In this house, it occupied a position directly behind one of the sofas we had in our living room. This house did not have an expanse of wall where the railing could protect visitors from a nasty fate, but I kept it out in honor of its legacy. Three years later, the railing came with us when we moved to our second house. Alas, the railing maintained a position in the garage during our tenure in this house.

Ultimately, we discarded the railing when we left that house. While I was saddened to see it go where it was ultimately headed when we rescued it from the mall parking lot, I am pleased to know that I helped to extend its life an additional 8 years. I am proud to say that I helped give that railing a useful purpose as well as loving and tender care after it had been abandoned in that parking lot, given up like an unwanted pet left in the country. But I still fondly remember the good times we had with that railing. I sincerely believe it has now gone on to a better place where it can stand proudly alongside its ancestors and peers. I hope that when my time comes and I am standing in line waiting to enter the Pearly Gates, I will recognize my railing as it serves to keep me in the correct queue. And I expect that my railing will be pleased to see me as well, when we can once again be reunited in the afterlife.

Ahhhhhh, Opening Day.

Rangers 12
Angels 4

Hey, gotta enjoy it while it lasts, you know???

Yeah, yeah, yeah...

OK, so it's been nearly a week since I've posted anything. Here's the rundown:

1. Friday night I had to work late at my job.
2. Saturday I drove to Lubbock to watch my brother get married.
3. Sunday was spent recovering from the damn time change.
4. Monday I drove back from Lubbock.
5. Tuesday, I started my new shift at my job (6am-3pm CST/CDT).
6. Wednesday I watched my first game of the season.
7. Today I'm making the update.

So, not much, yet still quite a bit. As I'm adjusting to my new schedule (which is also Tuesday through Saturday), it may take a few days to adjust, but the posts will start coming regularly again.

Maybe...

My wife works for one of the larger school districts in the area. At her school, they have a program to help develop the students in life areas, not just in academics, that meets once a month during a special "class" time. Each of these short classes has a topic and snacks.

In a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, the snack for this month's meeting was brownies, and the topic was marijuana.

I somehow think the message got lost in the laughter...