Have you ever done something, sitting around on your own, that you found...unsettling?

I’m sitting here in my apartment, programming some sort of meaningless eye-candy for some customer I’ve never met. I gave up listening to music when I work, so I have to make my own noise. Being a self-employed, work-at-home, recluse-by-nature geek, I haven’t brushed my teeth, showered, or even put on pants today. It’s 5:30 in the P.M., and I need a shave.

So, I’m sitting there fondling the Powerbook, gazing longingly at it’s sleek form, inspired design, and oh-so-curvy air vents, relishing the feel of the tactile-feedback mechanism under the warm, pliant keyboard that, though I’ll never understand, I breathlessy appreciate. I’m a man, goddamnit. A man with needs, such as ergonomic design and thoughtful engineering.

There I am, trying to figure out how to make an image filter process a tiny 25,000-pixel image in under an hour, stroking my computer, sitting around in my underwear at dinnertime, filthy and unwashed, and I realize I’m singing that wading-pool song Gollum was singing when he brained that fish in Two Towers.

Fuck me, that’s creepy.