At the launch meeting for our new team blog, Object Reference Not Set, we pledged to enforce only one rule:

“Complete editorial freedom…”

This rule didn’t even make it past the first post. On the chopping block? My old, Google+ profile.

May it, like the phoenix, rise from the ashes into something…different.

Rest in peace, old faithful.

My father killed himself with a potato gun (in front of my mother but outside the pantry) when I was six years old. The potato gun didn’t scare us; he often cut himself with bad poetry or fresh salmon. You don’t think about potatoes in their most mortal sense when you’re a disaffected, drug-addicted youth. We buried him in the backyard pool, which we filled with plankton. Sometimes, when the moon’s just right, you can still see the flies swarming over his grave.
The cannibalism of the years that followed seems only natural when compared with the vegan gluttony of our youths. My sisters and I began working as shoe salesmen for local choir boys, but only the family dog really had a talent for it. We hired and fired Egyptian slaves, but Scandal had other games for us to play. The first sister died from salmonella poisoning at Disney Land. It was Vogue and en vogue that caught the nation’s attention.
School was compulsory, of course; and those of us that remained largely ignored it. We studied particle physics in the garage and practiced fencing on the roof. The second sister died of dark matter exposure, and we burned her on a funeral pyre of our own making. The seventh sister was immaculately conceived that year. In these early years, we invested heavily in Swedish bubble gum and nineteenth century guns. It was a time of self reflection and turbulent bathing.