As I mentioned in a recent post, I recently moved back to the west coast. This is probably a bit of a surprise for people who follow .NET Rocks, as I didn't make any mention of it on the show/in the blog.

Well, the reason is simple.

<lying mode="RightThroughMyTeeth">

Carl tried to murder me with a pick-axe he had named "Mildred."

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OK. Maybe that's not exactly the truth. I mean, the pick-axe incident was irritating, but it wasn't enough to get me to move. No. I've deceived you.

Allow me to clear things up.

<lying mode="LikeADirtyRat">

I was actually a plant working for an elite anti-drug task force, sent in to uncover the center of a global organization of opium dealers operating from a small hidden base in New London, Connecticut. This blog, my online persona, and my position as the co-host of .NET Rocks were all part of an operation meant to get me in close to the leader of this worldwide band of thugs and scum.

The leader, of course, was none other than Carl Franklin, a man who saw no limit to how far he'd stoop to get his mind-enslaving product into the hands of junkies, criminals, and animal molesters hailing from every country on the planet. Shipments would come into New London onboard submarines by way of the Long Island sound, transported off ship at midnight, and driven in caravan up to the office of Franklins.net where they were meticulously packed by child slaves into hollowed-out copies of ASP.NET Programming and passed on to "students" who then distributed the foul poison to their contacts within the Connecticutian border.

Fortunately, a tip from a Sudanese transvestite stripper led me to Carl and the other criminals at 302 State St in New London, and they'll be serving the next 160 years in Quantico cells. I saw to that myself.

My work here is finished.

</lying>

All right. I made that up, too.

The truth is much less glamorous: I didn't adjust well to small town life.

New London is a town of around 25,000 people. That's about 1/40 the size, in population, of what I'm used to. It's about 1/400 of the largest city I've ever lived in.

In poem form:

New London is small
And rather dinky
Were it a finger
T'would be a pinky

For the people who have grown up in such places, it's no problem. Home is home and all that. But, for me, after a couple months of being there, I found myself suffering from a sort of strange claustrophobia. I'd get in my car and drive up and down portions of I-95 just to feel like I was in a larger place. I'd purposely avoid the local coffee shop and drive fifteen minutes north to go to one in the neighboring town. If there was shopping to do, I'd choose the furthest grocery store that I knew of. I felt like New London was an elevator, and that it was stuck between floors. I did a lot of pacing in my apartment at night.

I had a dog once. He was half Australian Shepherd and half dingo. He didn't adjust well to living in our house. His genes had risen up through time in a continent approximately 7,830,768 times larger than the home in which we were living. It wasn't a good transition. He went a bit nuts (tried to dig a hole back to Australia through the linoleum in the wash room).

We eventually gave him away, and he's been quite happy ever since, living on a large farm in Colorado. While I very much would have liked to have held onto him, the truth is that he needed a significantly larger area in which to exercise his little doggy legs.

My little doggy legs also needed a larger area.

This dawned on me in no small way when I made my trip to New York. While there, my brain felt completely lit up. I could breathe easily again. I didn't feel like I had to pace because I had the option of walking all day long and still not coming to the end of the place. It was fabulous.

After getting back to New London, the feeling vanished. I started getting antsy again. I didn't sleep well.

I'm just a guy who's used to a certain amount of stimulation, and New London didn't provide it. Nor did the surrounding areas. In the quiet and relaxing environment offered by New London, I found myself alone with my thoughts, which is a horrible way to live. I try to stay the hell away from my thoughts, and there in the peace and quiet of Connecticut, they were ganging up on me night after night. It reminded me of the first few lines of the third stanza of T.S. Eliot's "Preludes":

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.

Nobody should have to deal with that kind of introspection. Waking up at 3:00 AM to come face to face with horrors from your past isn't pleasant. Being alone in a small town, without the distraction and noise of a larger city, is no place to be when it finally comes time for you to think about all the harm you caused the world when you stole that individually wrapped caramel from the candy bin at 7-11 in 1984 and greedily devoured it on your way home, stopping in the kitchen to kiss your mother "hello" on the cheek, still with the odor of that pilfered candy on your breath and the black mark of your offense burned forever in a shadowy silhouette on your soul.

I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream, it's my nightmare. Crawling, slipping along the edge of a straight razor and surviving....But we must kill them, we must incinerate them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army, and they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie, for those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them.

Oh, the madness.

Oh, the horror... The horror...

Anyway.

I considered staying on the east coast and simply moving to another city, but I wanted to think about it a bit more first. The past several months of my life have all happened because of a decision that I made on a whim.

It was fun, it was an easy decision, and I'm glad I did it, but I want to stop for a little while, regroup, and figure out what I want to do next. I have some plans, half of which are completely reckless and would endanger what precious little dough I've managed to save up over the past few years, while the other half are only kind of reckless and foolish, endangering only a portion of what precious little dough I've managed to save up over the past few years. Either way, my wallet is clearly in danger.

Whatever happens, I'm still doing .NET Rocks. I love the show. Carl has given me the best job I've ever had, and I have no intention of leaving (by my own will). We're going to be buying some equipment soon that will make it possible to transmit high quality audio across a regular landline, allowing us to do the show from two different coasts without it having to sound like we're talking to each other over a pair of low-fidelity tin cans connected by thousands of miles of poorly-insulated and frayed string.

For the listener at home, nothing has changed. For the readers, my posts might appear, on average, three hours earlier each day than they have for the past three months.

And so it goes.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

After Blog Mint [?] :

Brian Jepson has left instructions on how to get MonoDevelop up and running under OS X. I've gotten started on the list, but there seems to be about 48.2 hours of compilation involved for some of the steps, so it's taking a while. Maybe somebody will release a binary...