A short faerie story featuring tons and tons of unlinked potential links.

Once upon a time (this morning), in land very far away (ok, Westport. Which is far away for, say, Jeremy McKean and Dan, apparently.), Timothy woke up refreshed and awake for the first time in a great while. He assembled the various Dell laptop accessories strewn along the side of his bed from the previous evening's pre-sleep browsing, and zipped them all up tight into his laptop satchel. Then, after taking a shower and completing his toilet, he kissed the Jill, and sat in the living room, reading the morning Gawker Media Empire site updates on this laptop (shoutouts to Lifehacker, Consumerist, io9, Kotaku, Gizmodo, and I'm not too embarrassed to say, Jezebel). Then, the Jill came out of the bedroom and kissed Timothy on her way to grabbing her cell phone so she could use its alarm wake up on time. That was delightful and Timothy felt even better about the potential of the day.

Soon after, Adam pulled up in the driveway and Timothy threw his laptop into the satchel and after a brief stint in the cold out-of-doors, found himself sitting in Adam's car, zooming down the highway, munching on the butter rum muffin that Adam had so thoughtfully procured for the trip from the local SunFresh. They had pleasant morning drive types of conversations in which Adam revealed his complete disdain for the Oscar-nominated There Will Be Blood, which Timothy had yet to see.

Once at work, Timothy overheard a conversation about Dan's tattoo raging in the next aisle. He threw his two cents into the ring, and whisked off with Dan to the Hy-Vee convenience store, but not before almost forgetting his cup from the day before, an error that would have likely cost him a whole ten cents had he not caught it.

At the convenience store, Timothy filled his new, smaller 44 oz. cup with DMND. After Dan made his daily comments about the weather to Sam, the Hy-Vee convenience store manager, the one with the possibly Australian accent, and to the other woman whose name escapes your fearless narrator just now, the two of them gallivanted back to work, and seated themselves in their cubes to be ready for the day. All signs pointed to a good day. And you should know that the DMND was quite delicious.

And here's where, dear reader, our story takes a darker turn. First off, Timothy's wireless headset had not properly made the connection to the base, so Timothy would have to use the static-y wired one all morning. Then. as usual, Timothy opened his web browser to Gmail. And he opened his web browser to the ticket taking system. And he even opened his web browser to Fark to check the headlines. But, dear reader, when he opened his Blogger.com page, the text box was blank, and he had no ideas of how to fill it.

Oh, he read Tim Keels' blog, which led him to discovering The Khrusty Brothers, who he thought were great, and he rifled through Digg, and even saw the latest issue of The Compounded, which is as wonderful as he ever imagined it could be back in its planning stages oh-so-many months ago. He saw the Wednesday Penny-Arcade comic, and read PVP, and checked Order of the Stick twice to be sure it hadn't updated. It hadn't, but Rick is sick apparently, and updates completely at random, three times per week-ish. He had already read the Drew and Natalie comics at home, but Revolution in Jesusland had an interesting Jim Wallis interview even.

But he still had no ideas for cloudthreads at all.

The first two calls of the day certainly didn't help Timothy's day to go any better. In the first one, the caller had a very hard time typing the web address that Timothy told her to type. At first, she didn't type the three letters M-L-S when he told her to do so. Then she added an additional S before the M once she did type M-L-S. It took almost 5 minutes to get her to type a website address into her address bar. Ah well.

The next caller led Timothy to believe that he knew how to minimize or maximize a window in the operating system that he had chosen to use, one aptly called Windows of all things, but Timothy's faith in this man's ability to do so without great coaxing and overexplanation was completely unfounded.

Time passed, ages it seemed, and yet there was no idea for a blog. Timothy took his lunch; he played chess against the computer with the French opening, his favorite. He played some Trilby's Art of the Theft. He listened to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. No ideas yet.

He read other websites, and created a Pandora station for acoustic guitar hip-hop, and IMed Dan, and Jeremy McKean, and Brianna, and Jill, and Lolo, and Steve, and Matthew Landes, but none of those wonderful people inspired a blog idea. He even read a nice 16 page scholarly essay on J.R.R. Tolkien's use of sexuality in his Middle Earth writings.

See, the problem is, most days, before he even sits down at the computer, Timothy has an idea of what cloudthreads to pluck out of the air and drop on the page for other people to read. Even if it's something small, he can nurture it into something interesting and composed of ohmygoodness, so many pages. The day before, or the morning of, he decides, and then he's ready to go when he sits down. This day, he hadn't thought of anything. So he promised himself right then and there, to come with an idea for the next blog before getting to work, or he would just end up writing another metablog filler post like he did today.

Oh, and there was a pixie who totally stole a quarter from his desk. This isn't true, but I needed something fantastical to make it a real faerie story.

EDIT: Ah yes. as Jill so kindly reminded me, she is a muse, therefore one of the fey, and the requirement of faeriekind had been met in the first paragraph. Much apologies.