Man, I haven’t even moved yet and I’m already exhausted. I drank roughly my own body weight in Sierra Nevada and Southern Comfort at my going away party last night. Despite that, I had a hard time getting to sleep, and today was a full day of packing and errands.

Stuff goes into storage tomorrow. Blog updates will be sporadic for the next week, depending on when and where I can find wireless access on the road, if at all. Watch for new cameraphone pics on the left, though.

Last day at work. I was awakened well before my alarm this morning by my stomach doing a gymnastics routine. I’m definitely feeling that nervousness/excitement now.

James and Vern worked out a time and place for a going away party tonight. That process was apparently slow, difficult, and took about 40 emails.

The entire development staff went to Iron Grill Mongolian Barbeque for lunch today. How dense am I? I didn’t realize this was my Farewell Lunch until my boss passed me a card signed by everyone and a couple of gifts (a Best Buy gift card and a gag gift of “Software Bug-B-Gone”).

James sent me this link to “Quitting” on This American Life, saying it’s perfect for me right now.

A few days ago, I wrote for the first time in a month and a half. It’s not surprising that I’ve been neglecting it since I’ve been distracted by packing, planning, closing accounts, seeing old friends while I can, watching DVD sets, playing KOTOR2, and having casual sex.

All right, I’m surprised by that last one. Strange how announcing your plans to leave town apparently bumps you up on the Fuckability Scale.

I’d forgotten how good it felt. Er… the writing, not the sex. Okay, the sex as well. But writing again after a long break, starting a new short story, feels pretty good, too. In Seattle, I need to learn how to get words on paper on a daily basis, or whether I can at all.

Oddly, I’m less freaked out now than I was a few weeks ago. The decision was the hard part, then wondering whether I was making the right one. Now that my departure is imminent, it’s all about executing the plan. That begins on Sunday.

It’s 2am and I just found out Hunter S. Thompson shot himself a few hours ago. I’m lying on the floor because I’ve already disassembled my computer desk, fighting fatigue and wondering why this is affecting me quite so much. I’ve only read a handful of his articles; Campaign Trail ’72 currently sits in a box marked “To-Read Pile.” The fact that Thompson died before I got around to it shames me somehow.

I didn’t know he had a painful spinal condition. I did know he hated Bush, even moreso than Nixon, and his re-election probably didn’t help.

He thought America had a “nationwide nervous breakdown” after 9/11, and he’s right. Rural America — Bush’s strongest supporters — are terrified of absolutely everything right now, including boxes of cookies and kids in monkey masks.

Perhaps I’m depressed because we’ve lost a crazy old journalist with the testicular fortitude to call this adminstration “the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.”

Then there’s this, from 2003. It’s harsh, but it feels true. Big Darkness is already here.

If not for BoingBoing, I might’ve missed this NY Times Magazine column about Intelligent Design. Most arguments focus on the fact that it’s just poorly-disguised Creationism, but Jim Holt lists reasons why a hypothetical Designer must have been pretty damned stupid.

There may be a story idea in here.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

[...]

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist…

Is it wrong that I want a “GOD IS MY ABORTIONIST” t-shirt?

The full Hitchhiker’s trailer is now online. Apparently, Zaphod’s second head is still too expensive to have on the screen at all times, but the filmmakers appear to have found a… unique solution.

It looks slapstickier than I expected, but that could just be the limitations of trying to sell it to a wide audience in a short trailer. I’m withholding judgement. Hitchhiker’s has appeared as radio, television, novels, and a computer game, but Adams was never content to tell the story the same way twice. As long as it stays funny, why be concerned with “faithfulness?”

I wish I could extend the same courtesy to Constantine. Judging by this (positive) Salon review, it’s about an angstful loner in Los Angeles who uses his supernatural abilities to battle demons in the hope of rescuing his guilt-ridden soul. Among his friends are a lady cop who is unwittingly dragged into his world, and a guy whose nightclub serves as “neutral ground” for non-human creatures.

That doesn’t sound like John Constantine, but it DOES sound like someone I watched for five seasons on the WB. If Warner wanted to make an Angel movie that badly, they could’ve hired Whedon and Boreanaz and saved a lot of time and money. I want my working-class London warlock, dammit.

If you missed the brilliant opening segment of last night’s Daily Show covering the Jeff Gannon controversy and bloggers in general, a low-res version of it is posted here.

“In my defense, I was drunk, it was dark, and it was delicious. Sorry to scoop your story, ColbertKilledAPanda.com!”

Meanwhile, in the NY Times, Frank Rich covers the Bush administration’s fake news corps and praises Jon Stewart for being less fake than the real thing, and Maureen Dowd wonders how a pseudonymous GOP activist with a history of male prostitution and tax evasion got a White House press pass while her request was denied.

According to Joss Whedon, season five of Angel was an allegory for the War on Terror. Click here and scroll through the Notes to find this:

Joss Whedon mentions that this entire season represent[s] the Bush Administration’s dealing with war on terror. Angel joined Wolfram and Hart hoping that its power can help them fight evil from the inside. When Angel realized that they have been corrupted and the apocalypse was occuring right under their nose, it resembles how the focus of the war on terror went to Iraq instead of the Taliban in Aphganistan where it belongs.

Ummm… sounds like a stretch to me. It certainly didn’t occur to me as it aired, and I’m usually pretty good at picking up on that sort of political statement. But this is apparently straight from Joss, so…