1/9/03 11:30 PM PST: I keep hoping I'll wake up and find out that three-quarters of the world has committed suicide. Not necessarily in my honor, but just for their own good.

I watched The Surreal Life with washed up ex-celebrities, has-beens and never-was types. I've never watched a reality show before (well, I watched some early episodes of The Real World). I couldn't look away. It's so awful and so embarrassing and so hilarious at the same time. It's everything that's wrong with the world. I'm so weirded out.

There's a guy named Phil Watts Jr. who, for reasons I never clearly understood, loves reading my mad lunacy. He wrote in recently, sympathetic to what he felt was me pulling my punches about the passionate and almost spiritual hatred I have for my job (63 days left and counting). I sadly told him that it's not just my job.

I mean, there's tons of horrible things about my job that I don't talk about, here or in person. I act the same way about my creative endeavors (just hit another snag). I act the same way about my home life. About my clients, about everything.

The most important lesson I carried out of 2002 (a horrible, horrible year by any measuring, as far as I'm concerned) is that next to nobody wants to hear my opinions about my life. When I tell them the truth, they don't believe it or they shun me. They're all a lot happier if I just don't talk about it, so I don't.

I've started to work more of those issues into the fiction I'm writing. Nobody seems to notice, even though the stories seem to be well received for the most part. I'm developing a huge meta-story that encompasses lots of the "little" projects I'm working on and makes the one cohesive whole. In it, I'm able to address all my issues -- work, home, professional, and so on -- and that simply has to do.

Anyhoo, I'm short on time and long on things to do. I really like the idea of making comic books, as it's a storytelling medium that really has a lot of tools for communication that no other medium has. On the other hand, it is a wholly collaborative medium, and even when I'm paying people, they just don't seem to perform up to specifications. Or, in the words of Hosun S. Lee ...

"It's okay, I have such low expectations of you anyway that you couldn't possibly disappoint me anymore."

I'm not happy. I haven't been happy ... shoot, in probably about two years now. I'm settling into it. I have a much greater appreciation of my great uncle, who I grew up with as a father. I don't think he was ever really "happy" in my lifetime. He kind of dropped his shoulder and drove his way through it, gritting his teeth all the way. I understand that now.

You kind of get cornered into the madness of mortgages, jobs, exhausting friendships and so on. It's something that, probably, millions of people in this city alone are doing right now. I'm pretty far afield of my original plans, and I'm fairly rudderless. I don't know what to tell you.

I don't really have a point of all this. The Soapbox has room for me to preach and rant -- I'm still planning on republishing my column on contracting the NBA, and I have a few other things lurking around -- but I'm just kind of venting today.

Blah.