It's one of those days when it feels like no one wants to be your friend, no one wants to talk to you, and no one really cares about how you feel.

I might be just getting paranoid again, or perhaps even schizophrenic. I thought I heard the mess on my table talk to me today.

It started with a low rumble. It was the groan of the table on which a mini-civilizaition has grown (to a respectable size) since I first left a spindle of burnt CDs on it. I tried to ignore it, but it just wouldn't go away. Then came the screams of the hundreds of CDs that had been put through the flames of my TDK Cyclone, their scars burnt permanently onto their delicate underbellies. It nearly drove me mad (if it is possible at all to drive the insane even further over the edge), their cries rising in orchestrated cacophony, begging to be melted, thrown away, broken up, anything ... than to live a life of lonelines, having been branded, marked, and left to collect dust for all eternity, and never to be used.

It came as no surprise when the books started whispering (come on, surely you too suspected that books could talk!) among themselves, their pages producing an eeriely serene rustling backdrop that stood in odd contrast to disquiet that blanketed the rest of my desk (or my mind, depending on your preferred school of thought).

In the burning jungle of primordial angst that was the mess on my desk, I sought refuge in the comfort of the waterfall in the distance that were my books. I flipped a page and gleaned the wisdom that laid between the covers....

"Whatever the cause, keeping your Sims employed is crucial to success. Joblessness not only causes abandonment, but it also increases crime."

hmmm...