sprintf(s,"blah blah %02d bazillion idiots remaining.", idiotflux);

This particular breakfast cereal ("Captain Crunch") is pretty mouth-hostile without milk. By the end of eating a dry bowl of this stuff, I've got damaged rags of roof-of-mouth tissue hanging down onto my tongue. They should call it "Captain Fuck-up-the-roof-of-your-mouth".

Holy shit, I just got email from Douglas.

In every group of friends, there is usually one person who gets to be the bottom of the pecking order. In our group of friends in Hawaii, this would have been Doug. His personality was such that he became very focused on one thing and was not able to concentrate on anything else until the thing was completed. This works good for computer programming, or building things, but when you're out with your friends and you're reading a book to the exclusion of everything else, it makes you a bit dorky-looking. He also had a lot of pent-up anger resulting from his father being a control-freak conservative, narrow minded kind of guy. With a lot of pent-up anger. Oh the stories. During the high school years, in the end stages of Dougs place within the group, we would sit around and pick him apart mercilessly when he wasn't around to defend himself. Not that there would be any defense for, oh, throwing a chair at Kris because he touched his bag of rubber bands. ("He was gonna scatter them all over the place!") Or flinging a fistful of rocks at me from close range because I disagreed with him. Or consistently changing history to show that HE had the correct answer all along and it was everyone else who had the wrong (his actual) idea. Well anyway, After high school ended, we hung out less and less, claiming to be busy with our jobs and what not. We DID spend a lot of time working, but we didn't tell him when we were off. This was because we did not want to deal with his personality anymore. Any personal problems within the group were usually blamed on Doug. He was an excellent scapegoat. After he was gone, scapegoat duties usually fell to Brian, as they are now.

He eventually went off to join the Army. I'm pretty sure he is a different person now, He's going to be a Lieutenant someday soon. He is studying to become a math teacher. Well, now he's written me this email telling me he has email and that I should write him back. One of the things I could never fault him for is loyalty. He would never do what we all did, ditching him because of a personality trait (or two) we disliked. That could make us cliquey and fickle, it could make him desperate and clingy, or it could just be the way he is and we are. If my group were preparing to ostracize me, I would not hear a word about it, I would simply get told less and less about what was going on and where things were going to happen until I was so out of touch that I didn't even know where anyone lived. This is what happened to him, and he was so naïvely trusting that he never accused us of anything.

SO...will I write to him? Certainly. Will he read this and become angry? I don't know. He would certainly be justified. Then again, he still will have no contact with Kris or Brandon or Brian. I guess I'm the one who had the least problems with him. Maybe it's because I'm not very unlike him. For some reason, I commanded enough respect or whatever to get away with the crap that I pulled during that time. Hmm. I think it's the slanty eyebrows. Naaah. Maybe it's my EXTRAORDINARILY BIG HEAD! Hmmm. Actually, there were a few very important differences between us. I don't talk as much. In a situation where he would become visibly angry, I would not. And then I guess there's the edge of catching on to things pretty quickly. Okay, maybe I'm not all that similiar. It doesn't matter. Start comparing me to Brian and I will flip.

Whoa boy, I think it's time to get some sleep.