The pain in my heart pulls at me like an incessant child. As hard as I try, I cannot continue to ignore it. The pain stabs, and explodes with deadly accuracy. As hard as I try to drown the screams of agony from my head, it will never go away. Somewhere back down the road of my life is my soul, my spirit, my self. Not only have I driven off in haste of pursuing what I thought was my life, I didn’t seem too concerned to take note of where I was, or even who I was at the time. I thought I had everything. I had freedom, I had love, and I had the immutable determination that I would follow my dreams.

But I got lost, so quickly and so frighteningly. I was sure I was following the right path, but once you’ve lost your sense of self, how can you get it back?

There is no roadmap that can guide me back.

There are no clues that I can follow.

No one can tell me how to find it.

Once my self was lost, my passion, my fire, quickly went with it.

Spiritually I am lost. I have wandered too far. I have turned my back on the very gifts that god bequeathed me. Somewhere down that road, my former self stands in shame. My passion, has vanished.

This pain in my heart will never abate. My only hope is that I can somehow retrace my steps back, pick a path through the woods and find my way again. I have felt this emptiness for so long. Why have I waited so long to face this? Deep down, my fear is that if I do find that place in the road where it all went wrong, that all I will find is nothingness. Nothing would mean that it was all a lie; that I really didn’t have the passion, the energy, any of it.

So, if I don’t search, I will not know failure. But If I do not seek it, I will never know the truth.

I can lie to my family. I can lie to my friends. I can even lie to the world. But I cannot lie to myself.

I cannot let the fear of failure continue to drive and devastate me. The road is long, but the journey will only get longer if I stay. If I don’t take a step now, then tomorrow the same journey will take longer. If I wait a week, even longer still. The longer I wait, the more distant, the more futile it will all be.

I was not put on this earth to waste my talents, my time, and myself. Today, right now, I chose to start walking that journey, that journey to find that which has been lost. I don’t walk with confidence that I know the end result. I just know that I would rather live in failure than live in a lie.

A light rain falls over me as I walk. The fire inside me hungers. I think its about time it was fed.

Gotta love gutsy Jeff Bezos. First he turns e-commerce on its head by patenting the obvious, now he’s trying a new wave sales tactic, selling virtually nothing at all.

As you can see from the photos below, Amazon clearly are trying to drum up the hype by refusing to sell anything.

Ok, so a server somewhere must be out for a latte…

Ahh Rome. A bustling city where one can idly sip cappuccinos from quaint cafes while overlooking ancient piazzas with impeccably dressed Italians zipping by in their Vespas.

Uhm, ok so that’s not really what happened in my recent trip to Rome. So what was it really like? Why read some boring travelogue when you can read my personal scorecard of my trip! Hey, it could be the start of a trend.

Cappuccino: 1
Coffee: 0

Thin Crust: 1
Deep Dish: 0

Harley’s: 0
Mopeds: 1

Air Conditioning: -10
Heat: 1

Sidewalks: 0
Suicidal dashes through traffic: 1

Beer: 0
Birra: 1

Cologne: 2
Bathing: 0

Expressive words: 2
Expressive hand gestures: 2

Men who could be extras from “The Godfather”: 1
Women who could be extras from “La Dolce Vita”: 0

Parthenon: 1
Coliseum: 0

Romans:
Venetians:
(game called due to violence)

Road Courtesy: 0
Road Rage: 1

Restaurants that would prefer not to sit couples with babies: 0
McCaleb party of three, right this way: 1

Forgiveness: 0
Vendettas: 1

Artisans selling handicrafts at tourist sites: 0
Chinese people selling the same crap, stall after stall: 1,057

Mimes who chase people down the street: 1
Half nekked Italians dressed as gladiators looking really bored: 0

And finally:

Taxis who try to sucker money from hapless foreigners: 0
Good ‘ol Texas whup-ass: 1

Judge for yourself. Rome was as visually breathtaking as you would imagine.

The good folks at the hyper efficent Ealing Council (pun) have frozen all parking disputes pending a review by the High Court.

If the review is anything like the reviews done on Barnett and Lambeth Councils, the outcome could take quite a while and eventually invalidate Ealing’s ability to charge the exorbitant rates they do on parking charges.

Thank you for your email dated 1 November 2006.

There has recently been a High Court ruling in relation to another
local Authority’s penalty charge notices (PCNs). In light of this
Court decision, Ealing Council has placed all of its open PCNs on hold
pending the review of the full judicial transcript. Once legal advice
has been obtained on the impact of this ruling on PCNs issued by this
Council, a decision will be made and this will be made public.

Yours sincerely

Joanna Lynch
Parking Representations Officer

As a side note, I LOVE the fact that my dispute was registered over 6 weeks ago, and they’ve only now gotten ’round to telling me it may take months to get my money back. Ealing, is the more odius of Council’s when it comes to Parking fines and restrictions.

When you think of encoding secret messages to pass across enemy lines in WWII, the enigma is the most obvious thing that spings to mind. But fashion design? Sure, looking at fashion design from that era can lead to cardiac arrest from the sheer shock value, but how on earth could you encode a message on those flumpy frocks? Has cryptography run amock?

The answer is of course, morse code. According to the UK National Archives in Kew, those crafty Nazi’s hide secret messages within the drawings of several boring dresses using morse code dashes and dots.

Below is the full translation from the drawing:

Who knew that fashion could kill?