And Other Really Bad Ideas typed out on a really nice keyboard

Corsair Vengeance K95

Are you old as dirt? – Do you miss your IBM Selectric? … Well I got the keyboard for you.

“You’re good. The K95 is better.Vengeance K95 Fully Mechanical Gaming Keyboard is made for serious gamers. Cherry MX Red key switches have super-fast reaction times and low operating force, and the key-by-key customizable lighting lets you adjust brightness and illuminate bindings. 100% anti-ghosting with full key rollover on USB ensures that the K95 will keep up. The 18 G-keys are programmable on the fly, so you can adapt and react. And Vengeance K95 has onboard memory, so you can take your K95 with you and play your best on any system. All of this technology is housed in a professional-grade black anodized aluminum chassis for superior strength and stability.The beauty of a 100% mechanical layout. In the world of high-performance gaming gear, there are few things that match the feeling of using a well-designed keyboard with mechanical key switches. Vengeance gaming keyboards use Cherry MX Red switches, hailed by gamers worldwide to be the best of the best. They combine great key feel with super-fast reaction times and smooth, linear travel with low operating force. Vengeance K95 takes the next step with a 100% mechanical layout – there’s a Cherry MX Red switch underneath every key. So, you’ll get that optimal tactile feedback and responsiveness, no matter your fingers go.”

No, Really… I’ve Got This

In January 1955, Albert Camus said, “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

24  years ago I was a raging drunk… In the end it like to about killed me… The drinking that is. It took me another couple of years to realize that drinking wasn’t my problem at all. My problem was that I had patterned my life (to some degree) after Meursault… The “hero” of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It boiled down to “Nothing mattered because Nothing amounted to anything”. (never mind that in the end of The Stranger Meursault got a grip and realized he was wrong… Anyway I never managed to Kill an Arab but I sure phucked up everyone around me. So...

At about 3 years sober I decided that Everything mattered and I’d have to give a $h!t if I wanted to escape dying from drinking insane amounts of Gin… Oddly this is what turned out to be my biggest mistake in life ever.

Crazy People and Rabbit Holes

Here is a truth about me: I have an aversion to crazy people… Well to put it more honestly, I hate crazy people. But somehow I got my head twisted around (Thank you Alcoholics Anonymous) That rather than hating someone regardless of how phucked up they were I should “treat them like I would a sick friend”. So rather than kick dirt in behind them when they went down the rabbit hole I should follow them in and help them find their way out… And this is how I stayed married to ex wife for so long (see: Why is the Refrigerator in the Front Lawn?).

Now if you haven’t read “Why is the Refrigerator in the Front Lawn” you might want to do that now and come back… Done reading? That story is all true though some of the events are taken from half a dozen incidents and some are a touch out of order… Artistic licence… And I did not tell some of the story because it would have only become redundant, somewhat boring and taken the focus off the main character. AND some of it I didn’t know until quite some time after I wrote it… I may or may not get to that here… We will see.

So… Rabbit Holes… Remember Alice?

If you have ever been around crazy, extremely intoxicated or both crazy and extremely intoxicated people you already know this, but you DO NOT tell them they are crazy (or intoxicated for that matter) because when they go down the rabbit hole and you intend to attempt pulling them out it’s harder and even dangerous if you’ve pissed them off and telling crazy people “you’re phucking crazy” is like dunking an ally cat in cold water and wiping your own face off with it… You’re going to loose some skin and depending on the drugs this particular crazy person may be on someone might even get killed.

My Love Don’t Hate the Crazy People plans always began with assessing how crazy and what kind of drugs is this person on and this pretty much required some investigating the rabbit hole the phucking nut has jumped in… And Let me tell you… I’ve been down some deep and very dark rabbit holes with some very crazy people more than just a few times over the past couple of decades and I thought I’d been fairly successful at pulling loonies out of Wonder-WTF-Land and setting them back on the path (Got to keep the loonies on the Path…).

By the time the refrigerator wound up in the front lawn… Some time in 2003… I had decided I was no longer going to stay married to the crazy lady (truth be told I had decided on divorce in 2000… Another duck story goes here)… I had handled her bouts of total insanity pretty well but the toll it had taken on the kids was too high a price to pay… And really, every time I dragged her out of the rabbit hole the next time she went in sooner and deeper (but for a brief spell I’ll never understand shortly after she OD’ once) she was getting only worse. And… It became the scariest time in my life… In the following months I was convinced crazy lady was going to kill one or all of the kids.

The Divorce and Custody Battle was a living hell

I Thought I’d Escaped… But Hell No.

I’d escaped nothing and this is why: Bad Craziness Begets Bad Craziness. Everyone knows that, well, everyone except me, well I kinda knew but… You know… I got this. So many people go down the tubes (rabbit holes) that in my idiot opinion could be saved with a little… Or a lot… (Like a metric-fuckton) of tolerance, patience and UNDERSTANDING. If you are smarter than me you probably already know where this is going… I wish I was smarter than me… 

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Almost nothing is more important than a good tool…

Is there a keyboard out there that’s really worth $150? Yeah I’d say so and if you are going to spend big money on a keyboard I’d say this is the one even if you aren’t a “gamer”… Unfortunately it wont make you or me a better writer but hey… This one feels bitchin’, lights up and makes the right noise for the job at hand.

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