After laughing a little and crying a lot, I anointed myself with scented oils and painted myself in preparation for the ritual sacrifice to follow. Then I remembered I hadn't ate dinner yet, so I nuked up a burrito before typing "lol" into the chatterbox in an attempt to associate myself with the human race and stave off the perpetual loneliness, but all that did was kill the conversation.

I fell in love with the cold moonlight that night, and as the sharp sting of the -20 degree (F) weather stung my face, Mother nature having *finally* figured out it was January, I realized I was a human being. The pain made me feel fully alive for the first time since I don't know when.

Deciding to not go through with the horrible deed after all, I went back into my apartment and fixed my script up a bit, and decided I had, in fact, had a nice day. Being finished, I went out to gaze into the soft, pale beauty of my celestial love, and unable to contain my exultation anymore I threw back my head and howled, declaring to the world that I was here. I was here and alive and in love with the moon, and I had fixed my script and malloc() was, in fact, dead and gone forever, and then I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed until I cried there in the moonlight.

As the tears froze against my face, I went back into my apartment and pondered a world without malloc(), or at least a world where that arch-demon had been safely contained in a magic-circle of abstraction. His power was mine, and I would never risk feeling his bite again. I was giddy, and started laughing again, but I guess those burritos had spoiled, because I threw up in the process of laughing, and projectile vomited all over the wall.

I popped in The Threepenny Opera sound track and sang along to "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" while I cleaned up the mess, and smiled. It was probably the closest I had come in a long time to not taking myself and my depressing, hollow shell of a life too seriously.

The mess being cleaned, I ate some bread to settle my stomach, and read the Onion, laughing so hard I spat crumbs into my keyboard. I decided I should get back to work, so I tidied up my script a bit, and posted it in CUFP. I threw up... my hands in admiration as amrbus helped me tidy up the XSUBS I had been tripping over, and was slack-jawed in amazement when thedamien told me that I had written some pretty slick code.

The lust for life growing inside me again, I wrote more code, beginning a new project that I had thought beyond my grasp, and as my kidneys filtered the caffeine out of my blood and the hours grew old, I yawned... but mostly... I saw pink as the monitor, my apartment, my desk.... everything melted around me.

It was the best day I had ever had, and it was only a dream. I had completely re-written the core of Perl 6, making it completely compatible with Perl 5, and every other programming language ever written, and it was only a dream. The only day I was glad that I had woke up in the morning... and it never actually happened....

And that's my story.