SUMMARY:  I view the world around me as a giant laboratory.  It's not a great laboratory, mind you, but we all have to do the best we can with what we're given to work with.  I almost never get to type up my findings and present them in front of appreciative peer groups using the very latest in cheesy bulleted spreadsheets.  My control groups are almost completely out of control, and I never get to wear a starched, white coat that screams "I am important, dammit!"  The odds that I will ever win a Nobel Prize for Advanced Cynicism are now reckoned by using numbers that do not appear on the most sophisticated graphing calculators (try dividing a horrible, painful grimace by the level of serum cholesterol you can no longer metabolise, and adding the particular shade of brick red your face becomes when dealing with the prerecorded message that is trying to sell you something over the phone and you will have some idea).  Still, as woefully inadequate a laboratory as it is, there is always a lot to be learned.

The major difference between the World Laboratory and the ones in which teams of people research and develop new gewgaws that consumers of the future will suddenly decide that they can't live without seems to be the following: In a standard laboratory, one sets up experiments.  In the World Laboratory, experiments set you up.  This would seem to be the difference between deduction and induction and, if that were so, one would expect to come to the same results in a roundabout fashion.  This never happens.  The World Laboratory produces the irreproducible which is the antithesis of what those well-funded churn out and is, interestingly, the only thing that need concern us.  The World Laboratory has taught me, for example, that a person can throw a teabag in a perfect parabolic arc towards a trash receptacle in the next room and the teabag can still veer off at a 90-degree angle to land on a stack of important papers in complete defiance of Galileo's observations about a projectile in motion.  I have learned that no object is so inanimate that it is not capable of being spiteful.  My lab assistant (a housecat named Fish) has demonstrated to me that cats can disappear entirely from this plane of existence and reappear suddenly under your feet, but only when your hands are full of precariously balanced objects.  The operating principle for most of the lessons taught by the World Laboratory seem to relate to the law of "once, and if nobody is watching".

Now that I have accepted the fact that the World Laboratory is not going to coöperate with any attempt to impose an orderly experiment upon it, I am forced to determine the nature of the experiments that have been imposed upon me.  The common denominator of most of the recent experiments seems to have to do with the principle of adynamic entropy.  For those who are not of a scientific bent or are not familiar with the ways in which I abuse terminology, I will try to break this down for you.  The prefix "a" negates the word which follows; the word "dynamic" refers to that which is in a state of change or motion; the word "entropy" refers to the increase of disorder in a closed system; and the words "adynamic entropy" together represent the principle that your life can be turned entirely on its head without anything new happening to disrupt the stagnation.

EXPERIMENT A: This experiment, beginning several months ago and persisting into the present, involves placing obnoxiously loud and chronically peurile teenagers into the apartment directly above the test subject/ experimenter (viz. Me).  The equipment for this experiment consists of several obnoxiously loud teenaged friends who do not, apparently, ever sleep and are living "on their own" for the first time and have never discovered that there is a world around them.   You will also need several newer model cars, each plastered all over with bumper stickers bearing messages taken from the most grating Christian koans imaginable ( zum Beispiel: "Real Men Love Jesus", "My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter", "In Case of Rapture, This Car Will Be Unmanned", "Pray Hard", "Jesus Died For You So That He Wouldn't Have To Live Without You", et cetera, ad nauseum) parked in everyone else's assigned spaces.  Add some very severe snottiness when asked to turn down their music at 3 am or move the hell out of my parking space, and let simmer for months on end.

It seemed that the intuitive thing to do when the teenagers began responding to my requests to knock it the hell off with snorts of annoyance accompanied by the rolling of eyes and the gnashing of teeth, would be to call the apartment manager.  After having done this on three separate occasions, making sure that the apartment manager, the property manager and the owners of the property have all spoken to these kids and sent them two written warnings to cease and desist antagonising the unhinged guy who lives below them as well as filling out three distinct incident reports, I had thought my part in the affair would be over.  Not so.  After several months, the wretched children are still above me and keeping me from sleeping through the night three or four times a week.  Every week.

This experiment has demonstrated that official channels can not be relied upon to resolve problems (especially when those problems involve teenaged girls who actually can, it seems, giggle their way out of anything resembling personal responsibility).  We will have to see what results can be obtained by regularly letting the air out of the tires of the obnoxious Jesus-mobiles.

EXPERIMENT B: This experiment takes years to set up and involves the failure of a property owner to repair any outstanding structural problems if those problems can not be seen by a casual observer. The equipment for this experiment involves a roof that has needed to be repaired for several years and a storm with 60 mph gusts of wind followed by a solid week of torrential, flooding rain.  This is then followed by weeks of surly construction personnel with several metric tons of very heavy, very noisy equipment.

On the evening of 4 July 2003, I was distracted from securing my plants on the balcony to brace them for an incoming storm by the fact that the roof of my apartment building had been blown off and several of my neighbours had streams of water gushing through their electrical fixtures.   Since it was a holiday, the property manager, the apartment manager and the landlord were all unable to be reached.   Since it was a very bad storm, the electrical crews, the fire department and all emergency services had all been dispatched to take care of the many other emergency situations and were, therefore, not immediately available for comment about this particular emergency situation. When the fire marshal finally was able to arrive, he immediately informed us that it was, in fact, an emergency situation as we had suspected all along.  He declared the building unsafe for occupancy and  demanded the evacuation of most of the tenants.  I then spent the next 48 hours bailing buckets of water from the building and helping my neighbours move any belongings that they could save (somewhat mercifully for me, very little of their belongings were able to be salvaged).  The reason that I was able to be so helpful was that, while seven out of nine apartments were gutted and damaged, two apartments miraculously dodged the bullet.  Which two?  Against all odds, not only was I able to stay in an otherwise derelict building, but those obnoxiously loud punks immediately above me also managed to ride the coat-tails of Unbelievable Coincidence (although, since they were so new to the building, they decided to spend the time the rest of us were bailing and hauling water damaged property to hide away and prepare for their next party).  Every night for the next week there occured a new storm which not only increased the damage to the building, but brought the fresh threat that I would be electrocuted or have the ceiling fall upon me (as it did to my landlord on the night of the 4th, when I was standing about five feet from him).

After the first week, and after it had finally become apparent that I would not be evacuated and lose everything I own after all, the construction began.  It continues at the time of this writing.  This involves someone with a hammer (pneumatic or standard, they like to keep one on their toes) making a severe racket at around six or seven in the morning (a few hours after the kids upstairs have packed it in).  They then keep this going in shifts until about five or six in the evening, when they decide that if they don't stop they would be finished too soon and would have no reason to keep coming back.  My laboratory assistant/ housecat, Fish, spends the time that they are shaking the building's foundations by trembling in a corner with her eyes the size of the base of beer cans.  Once the racket has finally stopped for the day,  she takes approximately two hours to relax and then spontaneously throws up.

The point of this experiment is obviously to demonstrate that stress is bad for one's health, and that prolonged stress is bad for one's prolonged health.  While my reaction has not been as severe as my assistant's (viz.  Fish), I must confess that my digestive tract has not escaped entirely unscathed, either.  Of course, my symptoms do not seem to be more than a fist-sized ball of muscle in my stomach that has not gone away for several weeks now.  I will continue to watch Fish for signs of loss of hair and motor control.  I will also make sure to note any loss of hair and motor control that seems to be out of the ordinary.

CONCLUSIONS: Without taking the time to delineate the various other experiments that are constantly going on around me, the two outlined above should be enough to substantiate the following hypotheses: The scope of the World Laboratory to dish out crap upon the unsuspecting is absolute. There is no aspect of one's life that is safe, and any feelings of security that one has cultivated are based upon a refusal to acknowledge the facts.  More importantly, and I believe we can now elevate this theory into a general law, there is no enemy so malovent that they would not still be preferable to people with their heads up their asses.  To paraphrase Doors frontman Jim Morrison, people are odd when you're an otter.  And those people will, by their odd inability to think of anyone but themselves, make your life exponentially more miserable than they could have done if that's what they had intended all along.

Few World Laboratory experiments actually result in the abrupt lifestyle changes that the subject (viz.  Me again!) is absolutely convinced must necessarily follow.  No matter how life-threatening, dire, maddening or extreme the events going on around might seem to be,  they usually aren't sufficient to push you out of your rut.  This researcher is formally proposing the theory of adynamic entropy to account for this.  Under this theory, unless the subject does something amazingly stupid or self-destructive, the tendency is one of constant and gradual decline rather than abrupt change (which would, as likely as not, produce positive as negative results).  The theory of adynamic entropy might best be summed up as the principle that whatever doesn't kill you whittles you down into a burnt-out, desolate shell of your former self. I accept as an axiom that a series of relatively small, but protracted surreal events are more debilitating to one's constitution than larger, more brief, crises would be.

There are two famous, hypothetic experiments cruelly performed upon imaginary animals that are germane to these findings (there would be three if my laboratory assistant, Fish, would let me work Schrödinger's cat into all of this, but she has put her paw down on the issue of cruelty to imaginary felines).   The first is the famous Camel-in-Traction experiment, wherein it is determined that an imaginary camel can only sustain a finite amount of weight (added in increments of "straws") before its back breaks.  The second is the well known Boiled Frog series in which it was determined that a frog in a pot of slowly heated water (raised in increments of "teensy bits at a time") will adjust to the changes and allow itself to be boiled alive. While we do not endorse cruelty to real or imaginary animals, the author felt it would be remiss for him to ignore any potentially valuable, imaginary data that fluttered his way.