She: “Pain.”
He: “Sorry, I can’t see through it.”
She: “I’d like to see my way through to the end of it, I’ll tell you!”
He: “Word. Where does it hurt?”
She: “I don’t know.”
He: “[…]”
She: “Don’t you roll your eyes at me! You know how, when something hurts, you can usually put your finger on it, press, and it goes ow! I try to put my finger on the spot where this one hurts, and … nothing!”
He: “Well, that pain’s got a nerve.”
She: “Yeah. Find it and I’ll wring its scrawny little neck.”
He: “Uh huh. So sometimes you’ve got parts that hurt, and other times the same parts are, like, numb, right?”
She: “Sigh.”
He: “And they call it neuropathy?”
She: “Uh huh.”
He: “A misnomer if ever there was one.”
She: “You’re arguing with the doctors?”
He: “Sure am. Sounds to me like this is a case of neuroNOpathy to me, and I’m surprised they don’t say so.”
She: “O .. my ..”
He: “What is it with these nerve signals having to make their way through paths? Probably windy tracks through the wilderness, all twisty and full of potholes and tree roots and stuff. No wonder some of those impulses get into wrecks, and others get lost, never to be seen again! We’ve got to get your traffic flow sorted out here, clear out these neuro paths and install some superhighways!”
She: “Not going to happen.”
He: “Why not?”
She: “The neural networks can’t get construction workers these days, any more than any other business. I don’t even wish to think what the backlog’s like.”
He: “Ow.”
She: “No. That’s my line. You can’t have it. You don’t want it anyway.”
The Dudes, with their abject failure of a literary agent, O Ceallaigh (aka OC and The Amoeba), first descended onto the blogosphere from a rented room in Berkeley, California on New Year’s Day in 2006. They’ve moved from California to Maine to Washington to Hawaiʻi to Washington again to Hawaiʻi again (where they’ve finally managed to stay put, for now anyway), picking up a Quilly along the way. They’ve stayed on the blogosphere (on four different sites, two of which have since vanished), while the thing that was the blogosphere in 2006 moved to Facebook to Youtube to Twitter to Instagram to Tiktok. And a lot of, um, stuff has gone down. O Ceallaigh thought it might amuse someone out there to see just what kind of stuff has gone down over the last fifteen years, and how it looked at the time to OC and the Dudes and their gaggle of weird buddies.
