Pigdog Journal (Jabber Streams) -- Self-Indulgent Pukes

"The train tracks are less than a mile from my backdoor; and very late at night when everything's still, I can hear the train whistle. It sounds so mournful sometimes, like it's crying. Sometimes, though, it sounds like it's calling out to some distant beacon to say, `I'm coming. Wait for me.' I love listening to the train go by..."

The old BBS classic of "the running story" has made it to the web. Why this form of prose ever survived beyond the 14-year-old autistic set is beyond me. The basic idea: Get a group of people, each one of them writes a bit of the story, one after the other, until you get enough pages to read. Maybe fun for a few friends who can laugh at each other's clever in-jokes, but inflicting this crap on the rest of humanity is a violation of the Geneva Convention. (You can find "running stories" listed right in between "chemical warfare" and "human medical experiments" as something too foul and evil to be inflicted on enemy troops.)

There's something oddly schizophrenic and haunting as the writing jumps helter-skelter from one point of view to the next, from a mind of an author who can write to the mad typing someone crashing the party, characters who act like art snobs in one paragraph become homicidal maniacs in the next. It's bizarre, twisted, not quite funny, and not quite readable. It sucks you in, chews you up, and spits you back up on the carpet like dog food gone rotten.