the iniquitous fist of destruction

The communal vacuum-cleaner is a piece of shit. It moves the dust and the dirt and the beer-bottle caps across the room, but its wheezy lung is too weak to actually pick any of them off the floor. When you combine that pitiful weakness with my hippie-length hair, you end up in a contaminated disaster zone. I shed all the time, sitting naked in front of my desk, madly scribbling (can one use that term?) esoteric perl code, and feeling a soft tickle of spider legs on my back once in a while. A wayward insect? No, just another hair, slithering its way free of my scalp to join its compatriots in the jungle of a low-pile brown carpet. This subconscious delapidation turns the floor of my long-suffering bedroom into a waste-basket of doom, a horrid toxic sludge. You know the 20-second rule? If you drop a piece of food, it's okay to eat as long as you pick it up wihin 20 seconds? Well, it doesn't work in this neck of the wasteland. A piece of bread comes back up gladly, entangled in a forest of hair: some mine, some, naturally, belonging to the two house-cats and a house-dog that have a penchant for sitting down behind my chair and staring soulfully at me as I—oblivious to their presence—type in imprecations and insults into the interwebz.

No small children should be allowed here; they'd be coughing up hairballs the size of my fist after the first beer. And nothing I do seems to help. I raked my room once, coming up with enough hair for 10000 maleficient spells, and the next day the floor turned back into the jungle it was the day before. I suppose the most important question is where all that fucking hair is coming from. I am not going bald, far from it; with each passing day the stupid neglected garden on top of my head becomes wilder and more rebellious. Is it going forth and multiplying?

I should walk less and drink more, that doubtlessly is the answer. Orion is on top of my sky, glaring madly down upon me, daring me to do something utterly useless. I think I'll listen to him, for once.