Around two this afternoon I crawled away from another long day of playing Fallout 2 on the laptop I keep in the bedroom for days when I have no reason to go out and lotsd of reason to stay in and/or I want to fuck up mailing lists to which I subscribe by posting via AOL Version 6.0 for Windows (which insists on sending everything in HTML Format -- my God I dread these urges I get to download Version 7.0, having refused to go with 6.0 for Mac [assuming one even exists]).

My goal was to enter my office here at the Millenial Condo to do some work on my latest lame idea for a novel, determined to blast through the conventional style ... to untie myself from my interpretation of Modernism and flesh out chapter one which I lamely began yesterday until I was overcome by cravings around word 364 and retreated to my bedroom to watch CNBC and the History Channel and convince myself I didn't want let alone crave anything.

So I sat my butt down and turned on my Power Mac 4 with its dual microprocessors (which, I'm convinced, compete to see which can be slower) and, as anyone who has suffered through a year of writer's block will tell you tends to happen, I immediately became distracted and somehow found myself going through every floppy disk I had ever made looking for no good reason when I came across one marked Orange Mars.

Believe it or not, folks, people have bemoaned that old place located smack in the middle of GeoCities. As you may recall, the Orange Mars Virtual Opium Den was a creaking Victorian maze of a place run by the Emperor - in - Exile Himself and the entire Family Hee. It included such places as the Hunter S. Thompson Library, the never popular but truly amazing Cosmos Papadarou Museum of Natural and Unnatural History and Planetarium, and out back, around the Reflecting Pool, the world reknown Ho Chi Minh Memorial Rehabilitation, Re-education and Recreation Center where Dr. L.U. Minayshun cared for those in need of a break from the world for any number of reasons.

Everyone figured the place was pretty much so much cyber smoke and ashes after the "suspicious fire/explosion(s)" of December 31, 1999/January 1, 2000 in which just about everybody involved was either presumed dead or on the lam or just denying vehemently they had ever heard of the place.

Anyway, for you nostalgia buffs and history geeks, here's a glimpse of what the Orange Mars Virtual Opium Den was like in its hey day:

The Entry a href="lib.html">The Hunter S. Thompson Library The Den proper The Ho Chi Minh Memorial Rehabilitation, Re-education and Recreation Center