Today in cynical bitching news: Korn has issued a Greatest Hits album, so thankfully the end of that pap is near. Slashdot's design is so ugly it hinders you from understanding. I was also going to complain about Gourmet magazine having zero recipes, but apparently I just skimmed through it too quickly. My bad.

This term from the Apr 2005 Wired magazine's Jargon Watch column is an effect that I've been suffering from at least six months now:

Open Loops: The incomplete tasks and projects in your life that constantly cycle through your head, leading to anxiety, stress, and creative constipation. Popularized by David Allen's work-flow management book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Actually my Open Loops are not stressful but they consist of creative ideas trying to bubble through my otherwise full schedule of wake / drive / work / drive / sleep repeat repeat repeat repeat. My daydreams when I first wake up, while I'm in the shower, while driving to work, walking the halls at work, while driving home, are constantly filled with the next step of a story I'm working on, or an idea for a new story or card game or chess variation. I dictate some of it on tape driving to and from work, but when I'm finally home and in a position to do something about it, I'm creatively burned out. Sometimes I can manage to transcribe whatever Open Loops I babbled about on tape, but by the time I get it all down, I'm too tired and lost the mood to write.

Then I wake up the next day and can't stop thinking about the next scene, a different story, a new game.

I'm not going to be a disgruntled employee who harms anyone, but it's quite possible that my supervisor will note my absence for several days or weeks, until finally someone finds me at work hidden in an abandoned office or cubicle somewhere, surrounded by heaping pages of stories, game ideas, chapters for novels that will never be finished, etc. If I claim "exhaustion" or that my nerves are shot, will my HMO cover treatment to make me become a better cog again?

I actually kicked this idea around jokingly with a friend of mine: if I were addicted to some drug, and if they paid for several weeks or maybe a month of rehab, that would probably give me enough free time to finish a damn novel. I hate working so much, it's seriously tempting. How do you fake a drug test to make it a false positive?