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Tiredness comes in tides, heavy waves crashing down, flowing back until finally they begin to recede, leaving behind renewed awareness along with the assurance of their return.
The only times I've watched sunrise have been nights like this one, staying awake just because. From Trevor's back porch I can see the trees slipping into the orange-tinted mist, and the mist into a darkness that cracks and melts with all the haste of a glacier.
I wonder, now that I've started to detach, just a little, from a year's worth of hopes and memories. Whether I'll ever find anything like what I thought this was. Whether I can settle for less. How soon I can begin to rebut doubts like those.
Coppery rays are joining the leaden glow. Anybody can be a god with colors like these shining against them.
posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2004
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The birch in our front yard just dropped a third of its leaves, and many of the rest are yellow. The calendar speaks favorably, and the air's damp warmth should reassure me, yet I'm unsettled.
The events of the last few days, if any, have failed to impress themselves upon my memory. Monday I remember waking from a dream that my brain must've invented as a marvelous distraction, involving slo-mo fight scenes, bottomless pits, and driving tanks on switchbacks, and after stumbling out of bed I wrote for about an hour, in an attempt to scrape the feelings from myself and transfer them to an easily disposable sheet of paper. It didn't work and I haven't thrown the paper away. Tuesday I went to the library and spent most of the day reading, though I also remember detouring through the woods behind the Greenway, getting my shorts bloody from scratches inflicted by my bike's front third gear, and being rather affronted at the sullen gaze of a small dead catfish. Yesterday I read more, finishing All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson, which I liked.
And now the pool seems a good idea.
posted on Thursday, June 24, 2004
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Clouds today were so high and thin that they appeared to have been painted onto the surface of the sky. We went to Raven Rock for Father's Day. Huge spiders, rocks that would scoff at the term "boulder" if they deigned to speak, plenty of trails to scamper along.
Today's blog entry will not be a particularly forthcoming one. I'm now going back to reading, playing games, listening to music -- anybody's thoughts but my own.
posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004
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So I was flipping through the ol' Latin-English dictionary today, looked up the word nimbus because I wanted to. It means "storm cloud." Damn straight, thought I. And then I started wondering if there's a Latin adjective meaning nimbusish, stormcloudish. It seemed to me that the word should be nimbosus. Hoping I'd guessed correctly, I looked it up, and there it was, right below nimbus.
Portus Nimbosus means "stormy haven."
Nimbirector is a word I made up. It's meant to mean "storm rider."
Imber Cinerum means "rain of ashes."
I like all these very much.
I'd also like to add that people who post on their blogs pictures of themselves wearing substantially less than the usual amount of clothing either a) should have genuinely attractive bodies or b) are very silly people, and by "silly" I mean "deserving of infernal torment."
posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004
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I was deleting spam from my inbox the other day -- a routine task for me and millions of others. On this seemingly unremarkable occasion, I opened a suspicious-looking e-mail and learned of yet another opportunity to increase my penis size, reverse baldness, and vaporize my mortgage, all with one cheap, accessible, and stylishly illegal drug. I was about to refuse the offer and consign the message to the trash folder that seems to take up half of my Hotmail space these days, when my laserlike gaze, sweeping toward the Delete button, stumbled upon a few lines of text, remarkably plain beside the frantically colored advertisement.
The sentences were gibberish, as if borne to English by the hands of a skilless but enthusiastic translator. Randomly generated, I decided at first, to increase the probability of the advertisement being picked up by a search engine. But the words seemed too random and meaningless to register on anyone's search query, and there would be no need to put them in sentences.
From there, I started thinking about the possibility of using spam to send encrypted messages. One advantage would be the lack of a designated recipient; spam goes to all and sundry, so nobody would know who it was intended for, even if they noticed a hidden message. I'd guess spam is also more likely to go unnoticed by Echelon or whatever techno-spook bureaucracy is currently in vogue. An awkward and circumspect method of communication, probably far inferior to other approaches, but perhaps weird enough to be briefly useful.
And no, I don't really believe my spam mail has hidden messages.
posted on Monday, June 14, 2004
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Tonight I went for a late walk, as I now have to do at least a few times each summer, accompanied by the requisite melancholy music, trying to find something with which to painfully come to terms, but my attempts at this rapidly devolved into creating impressive-sounding names and titles -- "The Eternal Guardian of the Iron Wasteland," that sort of thing -- to my eventual chagrin when I noticed what I was doing.
You haven't lived until you've seen a hundred fireflies flashing in unision. Some may take issue with this, postulating that vital function is better established through wanton sex, the use of dangerous drugs, extreme sports, cultural or religious muckings-about, or simply breathing with grave emphasis and listening to the blood rush vigorously through the byways and avenues of one's ears. Such suggestions really ought to be taken with a grain of salt, and never at face value -- that is to say, they must be rejected out of hand.
That spectacle took place nowhere I was tonight, though I've seen it in more graceful places in better company on happier nights. Tonight there was little but a few fireflies flashing in their best approximation of random, but that scene was enough to hold my glance for a moment, and my thoughts for a while longer. Each flash is miniscule, yet brighter than any star in the sky, especially on a night as clouded as this one. Those stars, massive in truth, are fairly inconsequential to this bastion of life. Strange to think that all our own affairs could be rendered still smaller by a quick jaunt to Orion's kneecap. Not that such a thing could happen anytime soon. You can reach for the stars, but they'll only be eclipsed by your hand.
I have no idea what that means, but such a phrase surely must have some use in a world as large as this one.
posted on Tuesday, June 08, 2004
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