My fellow sentient sex of Stardust, we are not going to have a regular mind meld this week

because I have undergone what I guess I would call a disruptive adventure.

And what follows is going to be a very loose, very to the point, riff, recalling the particulars

of the tale. I hope you enjoy it and my apologies that there is not a proper mind meld this week,

but as you will see, there is a fairly good reason.

Greetings, Wander Dippers. This week has been highly novel and strange. Yes, I know this title sounds

sensationalist, click baity, and perhaps like I am exaggerating, but it is the truth. I was on a path

that does not end well. So what exactly am I talking about? Well, over the weekend, I was out of town.

I started just not feeling right. It started out with my stomach just feeling kind of off,

like I was having irregular pangs of pain. And then probably stupidly, I decided to work out.

I decided to eat a huge dinner. And that really did me. And suddenly the pain went from uncomfortable

to severe. And then when I tried to go to sleep that night, I was in excruciating pain, tossing

and turning, just all kinds of doom thoughts coursing through my head. And I was worried about a lot

of like mundane things that I was supposed to do the next day as well. So after that sweaty

mess of hours, I wake up, I decide, maybe I just need to bro my way through this. Maybe I can

somehow exert my will to get past this by fasting all day. Maybe that will magically heal my

stomach. So that's what I did. I wound up fasting from that night through the following day. It did

not heal me. I don't know. It may have helped somewhat because I did manage to book a flight home,

endure all of that, lugging the suitcases, tolerating the takeoffs and landings and all of those

long airport walks and hunger, I guess, because I wasn't eating. So I make it home. It's late.

It's probably about 10 p.m. I'm exhausted, especially because like I said, I didn't sleep the night

before at all. And actually by the time I get home, I'm kind of just hemming and hawing over whether

...