A sick-at-home-all-day addendum: For some reason, my feverish brain feels much better while I’m playing Aimee Mann in the background. In particular, “Two of Us,” a Beatles cover she performs with her husband Michael Penn on the I am Sam soundtrack. I must have played that song some 100 times today. I have no good explanation.

For much of April and May, largely due to the stress and excitement of starting Cyan, I’d been having trouble sleeping, waking in the middle of the night. Within the last week or so, however, the company has finally started falling into place, and I’ve once again returned to sleeping through the night. I’ve noticed that I’m now sleeping unusually soundly, as if dropping instantly into full nights of REM sleep to make up for the prior insomnified months.

As a result, I’ve begun dreaming rather vividly. Though I hadn’t realized it, somewhere in the weeks of broken sleep, I stopped having dreams. Now they’ve returned with a vengeance, startling in their realism and fascinating for the people and places I’d long since forgotten they recreate. Were I a Freudian, I suppose I’d see these dreams as a window into my soul, a glimpse of my true nature. As I’m not, however, the whole thing just sort of weirds me out.

During the last few months, several readers I know in real life have pointed out that the picture in my bio was getting fairly old, and looked decreasingly like me (a combination of a few years of aging, a fairly significant haircut, and losing the glasses in favor of contacts.) To avoid misguiding curious readers intent on factoring me into their burgeoning fantasy lives, I’ve updated the head-shot. As I haven’t had a set of business shots done since the ones I intended to replace, I fell back, instead, on a cropped version of a promo shot from a no-holds-barred fight. Yes, sadly enough, that’s my best attempt at looking ass-kickingly menacing.

The ritual continues. This time, I forgot my belt.