Metrics

If I deleted five words of this novel, I would have 44044 words remaining, which would be a nice symmetrical place to stop.

If I wrote another four paragraphs, I would have 999 of those.

These two ambitions? Are incompatible, without a great deal of foolish juggling in which I will not indulge.

Four paragraphs of a hundred words each would also cover the matter, more or less - but I'm hungry now, and I still need to get home. Forget symmetry, think about food.

(But these are the kinds of tricks we use, now that we have metrics. Life used to be much simpler, when I only counted pages. Top copies and carbons, mounting up beside the typewriter. The kids today, they probably don't even know what carbons were...)

[I did once invent a gadget, a primitive counter that attached to the space-bar of a typewriter and clicked over one digit every time you hit it. Not exact, but close enough for Chaz. Only then computers came along before I could actually, y'know, build one. Like my art installations, my inventions are only ever in my head.]

Everything happens in reverse...

...and you should probably pretend I typed that backwards.

So there is this meme (which is not unique to House, but might as well be), where you fix a problem only to discover that it was really just a mask for something else.

So for the last several weekses I have been taking constant painkillers for my evil shoulder. Only these last few days, it's been feeling better: to the point where, this afternoon, I realised that I not only hadn't taken any medication all day, I hadn't even thought about it.

The reason I noticed this? Was the great burning pain in my hip, ooh the sciatica, which is not supposed to hurt this much unless my back is bad, which it wasn't didn't seem to be.

Ahem. It may have been going on for a while, just that I was so loaded with drugs I didn't notice. So I am now diving back into the pills, to make my hurty hip go away; and right now, right this minute? My back is starting to ache.

I am now stepping away from the computer.

I may be some time.

(Except that I won't, of course, because I have books to write. But not tonight. Tomorrow...)