Caffeine Free

Bugs!Through the Scientific Process I have made a discovery: drinking caffeine makes me stay awake.

Shocking yes, but science doesn’t lie. I thought I’d developed a tolerance to caffeine what with the years of swilling Coke non-stop. When I got sick a while back, I swore allegiance to the Un-Cola for a while, and ended up sticking with it. It didn’t take too long to ween myself off the Coke, down to one a day and then none at all for a week and a half. I can’t shake the Lymon monkey, though, so I’m still going through twelve-packs of Sprite and 7-Up. But at least it’s a start, and even though I remain a fat-ass, I’ll be a well-rested fat-ass.

After a week and a half caffeine-free, I was actually getting to bed around midnight and feeling slightly but noticeably better off. This weekend, a home intruder left a pack of Cokes, and I’ve been drinking them, and I’m back to being up at 2 AM, watching “Lost” (sure, I would’ve done that anyway) and making rambling blog posts. A connection!

But I have been having cooler dreams, which is the only point of this post; I want to write it down before I forget. Last night I was part of a mystery-party contest in an old Japanese castle in Kyoto. Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario Bros. and Link and Donkey Kong) had gathered people who work in videogames to solve a murder mystery, using a Nintendo DS.

That part is just because of what I’d been doing all day; reading about E3 on the internets and then reading a Japanese comic book about a murder mystery in a German castle. The cool part, though: I was in Miyamoto’s secret lab to find the crucial clue that would unlock the whole case. I found that he’d been cross-breeding different species of plants and animals, and his secret lab was a giant terrarium.

The whole table was littered with Chinese take-out boxes, which I’d assumed he’d been eating out of while he worked. Suddenly, one of the boxes unfolded and started hopping across the table. When it moved, you could tell it was a tree frog, but when it stopped, it looked exactly like a take-out box. Kind of like a stick bug, or the insects that look exactly like leaves. Miyamoto explained that there was so much litter now, that insects that used leaves and sticks as camouflage would stand out, so he was working on versions that would blend it with urban environments.

He then said that since I’d discovered his secret, he was going to have to kill me. He pulled out one of the Wii remote controllers to club me, and then my alarm clock went off.