Rabbits. Always has something to do with rabbits.

When I get up in the morning, the first thing I usually do is turn on my monitor and see what sort of new things appear in my e-mail boxes, what laughs I can get out of m cartoons, whether or not this fansubbing group has completed another episode, and the definite dose of daily Discordian droppings collected and archived by D.R.T.. Mind you, that's not to say that these dropping are foul, putrid, or otherwise dungworthy. They are more like the dried buffalo chips that provide fuel to fires on the frontier of the mind. They make you laugh, they make you think, they make you wonder who's connected to the Matrix and who isn't.

After that, it's usually a shower and breakfast, then off to class or work, as the day decides. Since it's winter, it's really cold out in the morning. There are occasional snowstorms as well, and this morning was a really bad one. It was bad enough that for minute, I was completely surrounded by the stuff and couldn't see where I was going.

So when I stumbled out of the snowstorm this morning, naturally my first thought was that I had gotten turned around somehow and was in a different part of the city than where I needed to go. All I had to do was find my bearings and a landmark, and I'd be okay.

( And so it begins... )

There are still some things that the Rabbit can account for.

You see, while I was still out in the anthro world, a couple things came to mind. The first was that I had, while I was wandering the streets, enjoyed the concept of the Deconstructulator, a device that showed realtime the sprites in memory while I played Super Mario Brothers. Very interesting, but not responsive enough to my Largo side to want to play the whole way through.

After having gone through the portal, I did read some part of the news - apparently a monkey had knocked over a store or two nearby. When I got back, all I could find that was close was a robber in a monkey suit. There's another reason why I'm not sure that I didn't cross into some relatively unknown part of Subreality. If I had, though, I would have been able to exercise my Writer abilities, and those were definitely not there. There was also a fishbowl gelatin recipe in the cooking section. Lots of vegetarians over there, probably with good reason. I didn't see the movie listings, but I heard someone discussing this movie, or something like it with the appropriate anthros being substituted for the humans. The science section had a slow day, or I was reading a satire paper (much like our E3W) because it had an article all about ice spikes as signifiers of some natural disaster.

Plus, technology said that Microsoft's browser was spyware, and that their own tool proved it. This, I think, may have turned out to have been real on this side of the dimensional void. Well, it certainly was strange enough to be true on this side of reality as well.

I don't really need to cross dimensions to have strange things happen to me, believe it. Just reading the stuff about the Beats is enough to make my life go strange - there isn't really too much you can pin down and say "This is Beat." At the same time, I think I'm beginning to understand what Beat was. And that Beat never really went away, it's just that a lot of the things they had as new and frightening, we've been thinking about and living with for fifty years or better now. It's still there, but we've comforted ourselves with the knowledge that it's unlikely to happen - it's improbable. And so we ignored it - Beats didn't.

The conformity culture and the institutionalization of man were starting then - new to them, very old hat to us. So where are our Beats? Have they all been caught by the mainstream and gobbled in this hi-tech, quick-to-co-opt world? Or is it a matter of turning Beat into Beatnik by advertising and quick mainstreaming?