In Which Mikey Raises Himself From Depression to Manic Nirvana, Spends the Evening With an Older Christian Chic, and Goes Questing 
 
 

It had been a boring day for Mikey, not boring in the sense of not having anything to do but only in the sense of not having done anything exciting for quite some time. Mikey was alone in a strange land where everyone had better things to do than spend time with friends. The only people that had time for friends were people who lived to use other people for things. Their poor unsuspecting friends got sucked into doing all sorts of ridiculous things. Mikey tried hard to find friends that had time and interest to go on a quest. He tried and tried to think of someone, all the time pacing, all the time becoming more manic. Mikey began to enjoy the mania. It seemed like a manic evening could be a good evening. Mikey got out his best manic outfit, something durable and warm with lots of pockets. He put on his best manic face. He straightened his manic attitude and bounced out the door. The first person he saw was the Older Christian Chic. Unfortunately for Mikey, manic people donít think of the consequences of their actions. He bounced up to the chic and said,îHi.î He told her that he was going to an art opening with free food. She said, ìwhy donít I come with you?î Mikey is never rude and did not refuse. The affair turned into an evening. A stop at the opening turned into a somewhat longer visit,the longer visit turned into both of them going to dinner, just because of mutual need, of course. Dinner turned into mildly interesting conversation. Mildly interesting conversation turned into an invitation for Mikey to go watch the chic do homework. It is not quite clear why Mikey went. He possible was hoping for the conversation to stay mildly interesting, or maybe he thought the homework would be interesting. Both were possible. Neither was probable. The homework and conversation were in fact annoyingly boring. As a reward for being such a nice person, the Christian Chic offered to play the dulcimer for him. Mikey, at this point, had to make a really tough choice. Dulcimer or Depression? Given the evening he had had so far he chose the latter. A nice private pity party in the park seemed an appropriate way to spend the near bedtime hours. The park is a wonderful place where one can walk around about half of it before getting bored beyond all belief and thinking of something really fun to do, or just running across the field toward home with the intent of being depressed for a really long time. Luckily our hero hung out around the midpoint before giving up and running home. He decided on what turned out to be a capital little quest. Granted it was an obvious quest, but it was still new, to him anyway. The idea was to follow the river until he found what was making the waterfall type sound. I think the point here is the sum of the total evening and not just the quest so there wonít be much detail. Suffice to list the ingredients: A river, woods, barbed wire, private property, dogs, a large noisy, scared, scary bird, thin ice, rapids, and a road. All the ingredients for a nice quest on a dark, cold night.