Weird Dave is Weird.

You know those days when nothing goes as you need it to, but nothing fails badly enough to warrant a bit fo a sob and some sympathy?

I'm having one of those.

It begins last night, with the Little Blue Pills of Doom.

I've not been sleeping well, not for about three weeks now; I've had no more than three or four hours sleep a night, which has started to affect my ability to think and also my temper. This is not a good thing for work, let alone anything else. On Tuesday, I caved in and went to the drug store. I bought a box of sleepy-time type tablets that were guaranteed non-habit forming etc. They didn't work at all on Tuesday night when I was awake until midnight and then only briefly able to sleep thereafter. Last night, I tried them again and was asleep by 7pm.

The dreams were interesting. Apparently, the pills pushed my body into sleep and left my head spinning, because I remember several vivid elements from my dreams.

Element One: the most awful horror film ever made. Not awful as in scary or gory, awful as in "dear god, did I pay money to watch this?" I remember watching this movie and seeing very low budget effects and makeup. I remember thinking it was utterly unconvincing. And then I was in it. The thing about unconvincing effects is that apparently the real thing is just as unconvincing.

Luckily, there were other people trapped in the movie with me and they had been there for some time. They rescued me from a horrific scene where something tried to make Richard Dean Anderson look younger by literally slicing pieces of his head off in an attempt to resculpt him.

My rescuers were older folks, all drove a volvo station wagon/estate car (there were six people and three cars, and they were all the same car. No, not three identical cars, the same car. Co-location? I have no idea myself) and claimed to be able to help me defend myself. They said they had guns.

Guns are what people never have in horror movies, but even so I was dubious as to their potential effectiveness. My rescuers seemed to be confident, so I was taken to their house to kit up. They had a Queen Anne style house - that would be Addams Family/Bates house style - with a really big garage and a lot of exposed interior walls. They showed me the guns: I was expecting revolvers or somesuch, and what I got was a transparent green plastic cylinder about 30cm long, with a darker green screw-cap at one end and a big metal spring at the other. There was a hole about half way along the cylinder. I was cheerfully informed that this was where the bullet exited, so I was to press the gun to the chest of the target and pull the trigger.

I pointed out that this was retarded. The sole advantage of a gun over, say, a machete, is that you can hurt people from a distance. Granted, the likes of Jason Voorhees are generally depicted as bullet proof, but my contention was that with a high enough rate of fire or a big enough round you could at least make the scary individual fall over andget time to run away.

I was told I was wrong. I then found that I couldn't load the gun; the big spring wouldn't coil, I couldn't put any pressure on it. Someone loaded the gun for me, but I could already see that the bullets were pointing to the screwcap instead of the hole; when the trigger was pulled, even with the exit hole pressed to the chest of the target, the gun would miss.

Now utterly baffled, I woke up very briefly and then went back to sleep and right back to the same dream, wherein I stayed.

When the alarm went off I stopped it and it took me 15 minutes to get out of bed. I couldn't find anything to shave with. It took me five minutes to find the shampoo that was on a shelf in front of me. It took me five minutes to find clean clothes, because I stood in the closet blinking stupidly at everything. All in all I was damned lucky to make it out of the flat.

I got to work, feeling that coffee would help; it hasn't. This is the only thing I have been able to concentrate on all morning, and I can only do this because the little blue pills have started wearing off, leaving me feeling very like a marionette with half his strings cut. As I type, I am making way moretypos than normal because my fingers are having problems registering that they have pressed the keys on the keyboard. My sense of space is off. And I am having real difficulty concentrating on repetative tasks.

It's almost as though a hemisphere of my brain has stopped working. I feel really creative, but can't pursue any mechanical task or exercise much in the way of logic. Like, i want to write but have no idea what to write or how to write it; the only reason that I can type this entry is because I am doing it in metapad and doing it in a stream of consciousness style. Occasionally with my eyes shut.

So it's all a bit mental.

Plus, the MP3 player has decided it can't sort itself out any more and has signalled to me that it needs my help. The oddness of the day means that what I really want to do right now is rush home and spend a couple of hours diagnosing and correcting the Firmware issue. I know I can (one of the reasons I love my MP3 player so much is that I feel very connected to it, having had to fix it myself on a number of occasions. I wouldn't part with it now, not after investing time and brainpower in nursing it through a couple of illnesses, and it has rewarded me by nursing me through my latest patch of oddness) so I will. The poor thing needs a firmware reinstall and a bit of a format; then I think I will reload the various audiobooks I was planning to listen to.

Why am I mentioning this? Because when it became clear that the MP3 player couldn't help itself I immediately wanted to go home, there and then, because I do not have (and cannot get) the tools to fix it at work. That's making me sadder than I ought to be.

See? Told you everything was a bit mental today.