Consummatum Est.

It's been a long and draining 10 weeks or so. More tomorrow, I think. Saw L this week, and she flies out for Korea in about 5 hours. We both agreed not to do the airport thing, as we would both likely lose it entirely. Tonight I'll be over at N's place. I look forward to telling you about her. I don't understand how so much happening can be layered on top of a single ten days or so. Toddled through Liquidation World with C today, stuttering and sleepwalking like a ghost, deep in the throes of the physical crash. Trombones at fire sale prices? Why not.

It was better today. It will be better tomorrow.

Just so very very tired.

Deep and Crisp and Even

Dec 26th

Woke at midnight on the 22nd, the snowfall breaking, and, unable to sleep, gather my things and finally the cat, bundling them into the car at 4 to catch the 5:15 AM ferry. The trip was cold, even the boat's interior icy, and I stayed in the car most of the time. driving south off the terminal was a revelation, the sky dark blue with dawn coming up in the Southeast, the strange geometry making it seem that I was driving south into the sunrise, staring down on the ecliptic, straight at the gorgeous last tiniest sliver of the waning moon. The landscape gorgeous, clear and frozen, deep blues and the predawn, climbing the mountains behind Nanaimo, the snow and the streetlights showing the shape of the land in ways I hadn't seen before.

It's been harder writing, lately. I've had trouble sleeping at night the last couple months, and my mind will not be still. L finally phoned today. She's home to visit, until the 10th, and at some point in there we'll hook up and she'll get her things out of the apartment. (Also at some point she'll be coming out to at least part of her family, something I am glad I'm quit of). I wish I knew some secret to make this less stressful. It is all strangely surreal. Not having any real experience dealing with a living, breathing ex is not helping here. I'm trying to put myself in her shoes and understand what's going through her mind, but it doesn't seem to work. She seems restrained somehow, guarded. I was upset and wondering why she didn't phone me when she got in, but she thought I was still up in PG for Eckhart's Dad's funeral. Why does anything she does upset me, still? How can it be that I have any expectations left, by this point.

Charlie Brown kicks Dennis The Menace's Ass and always will.

From Edge of The American West:

1968 in the Peanutsverse.

What's odd is I don't specifically remember the first Franklin strip, and certainly didn't register its topicality as a child (Vietnam should have jumped out at me, I would have thought), although our elementary schools were packed with Peanuts anthologies, so I certainly must have read it. And once I hit High School it was all Doonesbury and Bloom County, of course.

Still, well done, Chuck.

Aujourd'hui Nous Sommes Tous Americains

Victory.

3:40AM, 24 hours later, and I'm still buzzed. This feels like the world's victory. So many thoughts in my head. It occured to me yesterday, too late, that being unemployed, I had had the perfect chance to go work for Obama, if I'd had a few thousand - even a few hundred - bucks to spare. Not that they needed another volunteer, as it turned out. There is nothing else that matters Tuesday as I hang on every development all day long, staying glued to the computer and the radio wherever I go.

America...Fuck yeah. Jedi messages, when the announcement is made, he with his gal in some pub, I with C and company in a friend's apartment.

I wish I was in Chicago, I say

-me too, says he.

There was a moment - just a moment - when the CBC reporter turned the camera to show the crowd- celebratory? angry? gathering outside the White House, when I held my breath. Everyone in the room listened as I outlined the dangers of the scenario. All you need, all you need, is a few agents provocateurs, turn the crowd into a mob, and you unleash the police and the soldiers you've had waiting...

2002.

I remember being in a massive crowd celebrating Japan's world cup win, in Sendai, in the middle of one of the city's massive shopping arcades, a line of Japanese riot police with shields and truncheons blocking one end as the crowd dances and sings, and kicks a soccer ball into the rafters, bouncing it off a lamp. My friend Mars laughing, plunging into the crowd, wanting to share in the moment, not understanding, not seeing the danger...if that ball breaks that light, the police will charge, and tear gas will be fired, and we're in a cattle chute five blocks long with no exits.

But the ball doesn't break the light, and the crowd stays happy and slowly dissipates, and my Canada Jersey gets high fives and approval from Japanese and Brits, the Japanese for the novelty of the world at their party, and the Brits because of Lennox Lewis just having knocked down some American Champion that day. Who is Lennox Lewis? asks Mars. Who Indeed...

But back in 2008, the moment passes. The crowd stays jubilant. We cut to Arizona. McCain impresses me, his supporters less so. Then Chicago, and Obama rises to the occasion.

O is speaking. , I message. I can hardly follow some of the words across the conversation, will read the transcript later. I don't quite catch the puppy reference, for instance.

What are those sheets? Huge teleprompters? asks JC.

Bulletproof Glass, I say.

No matter. The images are magnificent, indelible. I wish I was there. I wish I was one of them, just this once. But I'm proud of them. The world was at your back.

Later, at home, I continue reading, wanting to absorb every comment on every thread, drink in the joy from all corners of my online 'verse. I post a follow up to Charles Stross on Making Light, trade giddy articles with Rabbit at 1AM before watching Stewart and Colbert's repeat of their live show, then plunge back online. Time enough for caveats and low expectations. The homophobes still run amok, even though the count's not final when I finally crash. I know what he faces, I know just how deep the hole is, but tonight, for one night, none of it matters. Anything seems possible, and all of us everywhere have, at long last, won one. There is shit to do and we need them in the game and run by adults.

I won't be coming home tonight. My generation will put it right.

Victory.

Cleaning out ma closet

(Crosspost)

Really odd things going on with my sleep pattern, almost to the point of being nocturnal. Mom and Dad coming to visit next week, so it's the usual batten down the hatches time. Do you need anything hauled away? Mom asks, but getting rid of an ex's stuff doesn't really work like that. Furniture is easily dealt with and gone long ago. Drawers of photographs, on the other hand, are another matter, and a pickup truck isn't really what's called for. Some sort of emotional electromagnet, maybe. Still, threshed my way through the main closet today, so progress made. Having the right boxes helps.

Webcomics I'm currently following, in no particular order.


Skin Horse
Something Positive
Questionable Content
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Fans!
Order of the Stick
XKCD
The Rack
Penny Arcade

And sometimes PVP, Devil's Panties, Punch n' Pie, Least I Could Do, and a few others.

It's funny, but except for Penny Arcade and PVP, none of these are strips I followed when I first got into webcomics.  A few from that era are still around - Sluggy Freelance, Scary-go Round, and Goats, for instance - but most have folded, or mutated into other forms.  Skin Horse is the sequel to Narbonic, for instance, and the mutation of Fluble (Amazingly, still on the web in archival form even if its official site is down) into the glory that is the Fafblog is a wonderful thing.  But it's odd what an impermanent medium the webcomic seems to be.  I wonder how much of the current web's content will wind up being lost 10 or 20 years from now?

Bonus: Fafblog interviews John McCain:


FB: Now let's get right down to it. Why should you be president?
MCCAIN: One word, my friends: leadership. As a Navy pilot I was shot down over Vietnam, as a member of the United States Senate I was beaten by my captors for five and a half years, and as your president I will continue to courageously endure those beatings for America.
FB: Well you make a pretty convincing case, John McCain, but why shouldn't I vote for a president who has even more experience being tortured, like Congressman Sheikh Mohammed or Senator Jesus or that guy who gets his head exploded at the beginning of Scanners?
MCCAIN: Because I know the problems Americans are going through right now. The American people are angry, my friends. They're hurt. They've been beaten by their captors for five and a half years. And they need a leader who's willing to stop federal tax dollars from going to research harbor seal DNA.
FB: We might lose our jobs and we might lose our homes and we might have to sell our youngest, weakest children to black market organ scavengers for a cardboard box and a can of refried beans, but we'll always be safe in the knowledge that our taxes aren't going to further our understanding of marine biology.
MCCAIN: Oh, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, my friends. Do you realize that federal earmarks last year directed literally thousands of your tax dollars to children's hospitals? Think about that now! Hospitals! For children!
FB: Now look John McCain, everybody wants to shut down children's hospitals, but how're you really gonna do it what with all the Washington gridlock and the Beltway infighting and the fatcat lobbyists from Big Children? I mean Ronald Reagan promised us he'd destroy the government and twenty years later we're still stuck with a functioning public sewage system.

Almost There

(Crosspost)
So, almost wrapped at work, and almost have my obligations discharged. Funny, between being sick all week and being distracted with the election, thanksgiving, and friends (helpful and not) I've slowly chipped away at it and now have only a few final things to wrap. Have all my actual physical stuff home, including my "severence package" task chair, and I'm done with the dollie. So, tomorrow, just have to put the dollie in storage, hand in the keys and do a couple hours' worth of notes, and that will be that. Exept for applying for EI and triggering my credit card insurance. Tradition calls for a booze up. but hard to justify it, really.

The loans people sent another nastygram around for my Ex, which is distressing. I keep telling her to deal with this, talk to them or get her address changed, but she seems to be avoiding the issue. Went shopping for a Mountie hat yesterday, but the available ones are either children's sized or have the wrong shape. (I;m not paying 150 bucks for a stetson that's shaped like a hillbilly's hat, thanks all the same, hat shop owner who doesn't understand the difference between triangular and square corners) Luckily, I have a plan B.

So much to do. Not enough hours in the day. But I persevere. Almost there. Next week I'll be able to get into a steady rhythm of half-days job hunting, I hope.

Notes.

The election was fun, but draining. Working sick was difficult, but being a registration officer was much lower impact. Afterwards did Karaoke and tore the house down with a couple fun numbers (Weird Al and Thomas Dolby), croaky voice and all, and met a new friend who is intriguing. It's not love at first sight exactly, but...what is it?

2)Any story about lower voter turnout that doesn't mention the voter ID requirements is missing something important. There was a small but consistent number of people who were legitimate voters who could not vote, or who appeared at the wrong polling station. ELections Canada is saddled with some onerous rules and does its best on a shoestring, but problems are inevitable.

3)I registered a man who looked more whitebread than I am, who was born in Samarkand. SAMARKAND. which is evidently in what is now Uzbekistan. Amazing, amazing what you see when you work an election.

4) I understand Harper's strategy. It's Rovian 50%+1, playing on pure tactics to peel off the bare number of seats to get the majority. BUt somehow this genius took Quebec -Quebec of all places! for granted. Lots of ugly identity politics in the air, I fear.

I wonder, now, about doing Once in a Lifetime at the next Karaoke. Could I do it justice?

Crossfade

I'm enjoying using my new livejournal, a requirement for joining the MVK board of directors. The posts there are simple, matter of fact. It feels more public somehow, which I suppose it is. This blog feels more like Memoir. I've never successfully kept a diary, but LJ seems easier somehow.

Wednesday was the first board meeting, Thursday was Jedi's birthday and meeting his new gal (I like her, and the Bettie Page 'do doesn't hurt either) and Friday was Elections Canada training followed by sending off a resume, followed by my Mac Dying.



So now I'm doing some wrap up at work, which is also my only computer access until my Mac is fixed, however long that will take. May go to the Island tomorrow for turkey with the niece. All so frustrating and strange. I must remember the old saw about how to eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

Tonight we party like it's 1992.

The song is amazing, The video is incomprehensible,
Ladies and Gentlemen, from the dawn of Nu Metal,

Faith no More.



We were So Happy...
Things worked out better than we had planned
Capital from boy, woman and man
We were like ink and paper
Numbers on a calculator
Knew arithmetic so well
Working overtime
Completed what was assigned
We had to multiply ourselves

A bouncing little baby
A shiny copper penny

And he spent himself
Would not listen to us
But when he lost his appetite
He lost his weight in friends

Baby became a fat nickel so fast
Then came puberty
Exponentially
Soon our boy became a million
People loved him so
And helped him to grow
Everyone knew the thing that was best
Of course, he must invest
A penny won't do (no) A penny won't do (nooo)
A penny won't do (no) A penny won't do (nooo)

But he made us proud
He made us rich
But how were we to know
He's counterfeit

Now everything's ruined (yeah) Now Everything's ruined (yeaaah)
Now everything's ruined (yeah) Now Everything's ruined (yeaaah)
Now everything's ruined (yeah) Now Everything's ruined (yeaaah)
Now everything's ruined (yeah) Now Everything's ruined (yeaaah)

Lovers in a dangerous time.

So on Saturday, after helping set up equipment for a community-based leather party, going home, voting for the beleaguered local candidate (Memo to [Unnamed political party]: when Mr. "Nelson Mandela is a Terrorist" MP sends me a piece of [Unnamed political party] propaganda using his free mailout paid for by [Unspecified Calgary Riding] taxpayers to me six months before an election - well, that pisses me off, son), heading back downtown for the AGM of said organization, then heading back South of the Fraser for a friend's birthday party, I somehow got elected to the board of directors of said leather organization.

Time will tell if this is a good idea or not, I suppose. But they need bodies, and as C said Friday night, what's more important to your future? And since that epiphany at Rascal's a few months ago, it's been clear where the future lies, one way or another.

More later. I need to haul a dresser over to Value Village while the sun shines.

***

I didn't go in to work yesterday at all, though there are a few things left to do - there is simply no rush. My South African quasi-replacement (doing the work of three people) radiates a fearsome competence and is sure he can handle everything. Well, who am I to tell him no? I'm just spending a few days cleaning up the home front, putting L's art in storage.

-Any prospects yet? Teak asked on Saturday.

Haven't looked, really, I'm taking a few days to shake the panic out.

-Well, you're very employable.

***

Driving home from the storage locker, I get to Cambie and pause for a second as the advanced Green Turn left arrow ignites. It's physically difficult not to turn left, head east, to the office and/or the many domestic oriented megastores there - IKEA, Home Depot, Staples - as I have done easily hundreds of times. All over now. I shake my head and head straight, an angry and aggressive Richmond Driver already swerving around on my right to speed southwards at top speed, the delay of perhaps 3 seconds utterly intolerable. You go, buddy. The decaying leaves on the recycle bin outside my place formed some kind of burgundy paste, and I note my arm is now covered in wine coloured stripes, along with my shirt. The setting late afternoon sun is golden, dying,wabi-sabi, as I think about taking the long way home. But no good reason to, nothing to do and nowhere to go, so I wend my way back to the place, picking the indirect path required by this city's strange variations on a grid layout.

***

Get home, dive into the cleanup and at long last find my phone, in a place it could not possibly have been that I have looked in several times already. The Republic is saved. Then, remember too late that the 2nd Obama/McCain debate is tonight, catch the last few minutes then dart to the store for cheap Chinese before it closes. The post debate analysis is reassuring, it was hard to tell much from my limited slice. Finally can phone a few folks who have been concerned about my well being, start job hunting in earnest. Mom has been having kittens, in her way. Time to call her.

***

The conversation is smooth enough, but I'm getting tired. We won't do Thanksgiving. Or maybe we will. Fall asleep watching Colbert. No outrage left. Trying to arrange things with L, who wants to send money and hadn't heard anything about anything (Par for the course in her family, so obsessed with secrecy) and wants to know the story but I have no strength for the telling. Safari keeps dying as I compose. why? Exhausted. Barely able to rise at 4 AM, shut off the infomercials, andf the lights, and stagger to bed.

Hey. Dog. Fuck you, Black Dog.

It's about 8:40 Pm on Thursday when everything grinds to a halt. I turn off the CNN feed, close the chat window with JediSchoolDropout, lean back in my (her) chair, and realize I have no desire to go anywhere or do anything, and no idea what I would do, anyways. I should go back in to work, and finish emptying my desk, but even contemplating the thought is strange. ..And then what? Is all I can think, overwhelmed, numb. High school led to university, first degree led to second major, led to third degree, led to Japan led to Library School led to L, led to this job led to heartbreak led to unemployment and to brick wall, sometime in the next week.

Thirty Nine and I can go anywhere, do anything. But the problem with my generation has never been an inability to make choices or recognize the necessity: it has been that we are expected to choose in a game of 52 card monte. As Bruce once said, the problem isn't that we need to pick a door and go through it: the problem is that there are a hundred doors, they open and close at random, and many - maybe even most - have brick walls behind them. Case in point. Nineteen years of my life have brought me through the pachinko machine to this point.

I need to get up, do something. Everything tiny thing is frustrating. I still can't find my phone, the cat wants attention, I can''t even do laundry because some stupid cow has abandoned loads in all three machines. HOw is it Thursday? I have no idea. I recognize the inner brittle feeling, know I need to move, to do something. Alll I can think to do is drive, get some of my favorite Chinese takeout. I am medicating with food but I need to go. The gym is already closed. Knight street and the bridge are wall to wall with construction for miles, so I have to detour absurd lengths to go via Oak. I cannot think of what I did this week. How is it Thursday? I force myself to reconstruct it.

Tuesday I sang with Phantom and the gang at the Jupiter, seems job losses are imminent for a lot of our community. Did okay with Something About You and Round Here, too flat and tired by the time I did Side. Wednesday...Wednesday was the munch, only four of us, Shibbari and the host were deep in BDSM philosophy again. Dropped by Jedi's, the two of us commiserating, our conversation rich, expansive. Human history is clear to us, but what to do about it, another matter. Today the fired VP development, a thoroughly decent man, bought me coffee and suggested the time was to move fast, grab what I could, and introspect later. Bird in the Hand, and all. Start getting prospects in the hopper. SportsTalk on the radio, I think of Fireworks,

She said she didn't give a fuck-a-bo-ut hockey, I never heard anyone say that before.

Home, the cat buzzes around me in a quantum shell , curious about my day-olds and fried beancurd and mushrooms, and I wonder when my life became a William Gibson novel, Bulgarian pop music, planetary infonet, and all. But no email from assassins in mirrorshades with a job offer. The analysis from some distant galaxy confirms my suspicions, Palin did okay, but Biden won, The adults are back at last, far, far too late. Sink exhausted into the couch, let Jon Stewart take me out. Sleep helps, food helps. Laundry will help, eventually. Morrison's Invisibles in my mind, the clarity that comes with the gun in the mouth, the inevitable arrived at last as it always did and always will.

I know the secret of magic.
There is only one day.
There is only ever one day, and it is today,
The day of nine dogs, the day of illusions.
Today will always be the day of nine dogs.

Do you understand now?

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies

Half the company has been laid off at a stroke. I feel strangely calm, under the circumstances. I guess your priorities just come into sharp focus at such a time. Why waste time feeling angry? I have things to do. The only galling bit was to be told (in effect) that I wasn't enough of a generalist. Five years of not being specialized enough, and now this. I'm employed until the 17th, but it's mainly in service of wrapping things up. Loose ends and such. Heh. At least I'll be able to retrieve my personal files and music off my machine. The company will be reeling for years. Oh well, as I've been saying since May, Not My Problem Any More.

I'll have UI, and references, and I'm not without resources. But still. That ol' iceberg sure showed up fast, didn't it?

Sauve Qui Peut; or, Arashi ga Kitta.

Did it bother you, needing to deal with your ex's paperwork? Asked C, over salad last Monday, wondering why I was so detached and sealed in my own head.

She was right, of course. I'd been in a foul mood all that week, and much of it had come from needing to scan and send off to L a nastygram from the BCSL people. Her payments bouncing because she hadn't put money in her account, the letters coming to me because she hadn't changed her address with them. I've warned her about this, and about her need to file taxes, but it's ultimately not my responsibility. I think she's gotten bad advice - potentially disastrous advice - on the tax front, but what can I do? Warn her yet again?

Of course, it stirs bad feelings because she owes me a little money. This has happened before, and of course I stepped in each time and did what needed to be done, but no longer.

In the scheme of these things, it's not so much. I have a friend who had his bank account cleaned out and his car stolen by his girl, (he eventually married her) and a cousin who was almost murdered by his wife for the Life Insurance (and if not for the RCMP intercepting the plot when her new lover was a little too clumsy when mail ordering poison, she might have succeded). So, perspective is helpful at staunching- or at least slowing- the curdling of feeling. And it's more the money that she doesn't owe me per se, anyways, that galls, the gifts unreciprocated the year she was away, the inability to remember my birthday, and so on. She has a gift for me, she says, that she will bring back from Korea when she comes back. Of course, she's postponed her return many times, so that only reminds me of other broken promises, so you see the problem. She says I'll see her in the Spring. Sure. But she said that last Fall, too. And then went to the Phillipines, with her lover, as it turned out.

She says, and has said, she will pay me back, and I don't doubt her sincerity or desire so much as her finances and her - well, let's just say that she and I both are bad at keeping things organized, if in different ways. We both thrived in chaos long before we met and will continue to do so as we tumble through the cosmos on our increasingly divergent paths.

But in any case, I should count on no financial help from that quarter. Certainly not in a timely fashion, or enough to change the big picture. How many early colonies or besieged cities scanned the horizon looking daily for the relief that would never come? I feel shamed, and petty, to think of it at all. But it chafes, slow and unyielding. All I want is a gesture. A card, even. Something to keep in my pocket while I cut my way out of the trap in which I've been caught. This is Stalingrad, and the snow has started to fall, and it's sixty miles of Russians and landmines between me and anything resembling safety.

So, what to do? It seems, now, that junking this job unless absolutely necessary is to be avoided. For the storm has finally come, and like most of my generation, I am still paying off the debt of 1980's educational policy. How is it that I didn't lay a solid foundation in my 20's? writes my new acquaintance the sex columnist, but of couse, almost no one our age did, because there were no careers to be had, and no one had any idea what to do about it, least of all our elders. Education is valuable for its own sake, they said, and Student Loans are a great deal. It's free money! When I hear my baby boomer colleague complaining about how kids today don't seem "passionate" about education and learning, or I read that professional flibbertygibbet Margaret Wente yack about how we've all done it to ourselves with our Student Loans and Credit Cards, I want to commit an act of violence. Or introduce them to my English Advisor, a briulliant woman who was still working as a sessional instructor in her late forties, her Phd juat allowing her to be a better class of temp.

We were all fleeced, you fools. It's a casino and the game is rigged.

Anyway, priorities. Redouble my efforts to pay down debt, whatever the cost. Perhaps a second job. Well, after the election, anyway, which will see me working as a registration officer. Anything will help. But what about all my friends, my countrymen, in worse positions than I am? I at least have options. I'm afraid for you all. Even L, rich family or not.

We have been standing and talking when we should have been running. And all my years of education may have done is let me see, clearly, what is coming, and what it means as the snowflakes start to fall, ere the snows begin to swallow us and everything we hold dear.

The cake is a lie.

It's been strange, seeing what gets in this blog and what doesn't. No great chunks of biography, just small, often cryptic notes. For every one I write, at least three don't get written, or hang around under drafts. For four months I've been reevaluating everything, and yet my perspective keeps changing, shifting, and I keeping seeing new possibilities amid the deaths of old ones.

For example, I met someone on a personals site with an entertaining blog, who, while a curvy gal herself, has decided to date only men lighter than her. Why? because the people you hang with have an influence on what you do, and who you become. A heavy partner will make you heavier, an active one the opposite.

The horrible thing is, she's right, you know? It sounds so very cold, but on the other hand, you are what you do, and being inactive will kill you. It's not the weight, it's the lack of exercise. In May, I found myself turning away from a lot of my hobbies - gaming and so forth - because they were sedentary. Married men's hobbies, Settled hobbies. Not places to meet women. Instead I got active, hit the gym, poured energy into constructive things. And I kind of miss the craziness and the horrible energy and the not being able to sleep, because damn it, when you sleep an hour a day you get things done. And yet when I started to sleep and I started to get back to normal and see my friends again socially, what was the first thing to go? Time for exercise. And when I have gotten out and met girls? Well, I've been doing a lot of things with C, but they tend to be things like shows, and gaming. And that's not what I need. Or what she needs, either, come to think of it.

Is that really it? A choice between friends and no exercise (and an early exit), or exercise while snubbing friends?

People say that you need balance. But my life, thanks to my sedentary work that I have to drive to, is already unbalanced. My coworkers eat like birds, trying desperately not to let the job kill them. I step outside and see dozens of programmers and office types desperately jogging around the compound in their every spare moment, trying to stave off the inevitable. It's madness, all of it. And it's my life, at least for a few months yet.

Is the answer really to throw it all out? Throw it away? Renounce my deskwork and do what? Become a day labourer?

I need to throw out scads of my life, I know. May made that clear. The things that used to bring me joy suddenly turned to poison, to reminders of things that will never happen. I have a bookcase full of books about Japan, for instance, against the day I would return to Japan to work, or get that fourth year of Japanese and go work for Monbugakushoo. I could have been a Japanese bureaucrat. There might even still be time now. But I won't go back there alone, and my dream of going with her is dead. She'll go with her lover. Maybe I'll go in five years, or ten. But it's a young person's game, and so all those books have to go. I've started already. I could have been a Lawyer. Could have gotten a masters in English, or Theatre. But there's no money for such things, certainly not if you're over 30. I doubled down on a Library degree and a job with my all-but-fiancee's family, and the house won, hard.

All I can do now is simplify, and so I have been. Giving things away, selling some other stuff, giving some of her things back to her Aunt. But there is so much yet to do. I have been sleepwalking so long, and I awake from dreams, and I awake, and awake, and awake, yet never seem to reach daylight. I am a trained librarian working as an accountant, and the time has come at last, dispassionately, to weed.

Prospero or Faustus, either way, the end is the same, if you want to save yourself.

I will burn my books. Ah, Mephistophiles.

Monstrous Wheel

I want to write, but don't seem to get much time to really get into the details of what's going on. It's been a busy week or so; in the past 10 days I have seen (and heard from) easily 90% of the people who are dearest to me in the world, friends of twenty and even thirty years' duration, loved ones near and far, related and not.

And yet, as I settle to the end of this odd vacation, I find myself mulling the news of my friend's niece, who at 14, went to the doctor last week for a soccer injury and thanks to a random question discovered she has cancer of the bone marrow and the lymphic system, with no clear origin point.

Beautiful, athletic, sparkling. Fourteen. My niece's age.

It makes me angry, in a profound and subtle way. Words seem irrelevant, in the face of that. Except perhaps in the sense Ondaatje meant in White Dwarfs and Other Worlds, writing of the deaths of stars and mutilation of mules, of snuffing out of talents and cutting out of tongues, profoundly sad and yet refusing to surrender something to the dark, something small, human, undefined. Dignity, perhaps.

So after such an obscenity, what would I want to write of, anyway.

Wryeclan '08

I'm recovering from the week's reunion, nursing a few insights in what used to be my maternal Grandfather's basement, reading Charles Stross' Singularity Sky while browsing on dial up and otherwise hiding out from the late-summer Alberta heat:

1) I had no idea the reunion would hammer home my new singlehood at every turn;

2) My career path seems to bear no resemblance to anything my profession has anticipated, to judge by the capricious and unreasonable demands for even the most entry-level of positions;

3) I am rapidly accumulating demands on my time, not all of which are helpful. And on That note, i get to juggle quite a few of them this weekend. Heh.

Ah well, I fly home tomorrow. All will be well. And Stross is really enjoyable.

If I am so smart...

Why is it I've spent all week killing myself for my day job and various social obligations, only to now, finally having driven a stake through that project, find myself pulling an all-nighter before a 7AM flight (Bus at 430!) just so I can fire off a couple applications and maybe get some packing done. I clearly need to be doing something differently.

And one of the postings, I now see, evidently wants not merely references, but reference letters. For on call casual work with no guarntee of hours. Five years experience and I can't get an interview to answer the phones at XPL, and now this.

Why oh why did I ever enter this field? It surely seemed like a good idea at the time...

"What I'm saying is, I like you"

One interesting consequence of being attracted to intelligent women is that you sometimes find yourself hanging with people who are so smart that it makes them socially awkward, and they can be difficult to have conversation with because they find it so difficult to tone things down to your level. But when someone of that ilk takes a liking to you and wants to take you shopping for something a bit flashier, well, you just say yes, stupid, once you wrap your head around the fact she's not making fun of you. And try not to feel too much like a tongue-tied adolescent when you're around her. It's strange how many of us were shy growing up, now that we strut around in enough leather and harness to outfit a Roman legion, but there you are.

LadyFlourine has a boyfriend, has her pick of play partners, (all of whom are as intimidated as I am) and that awkwardness makes her hard to converse with, and yet somehow she sees something of interest here, and just wants to hang out and do normal things. She also gets a glint in her eye talking about piercings and eyeing my virginal skin, but she's just joshing.

...I think?

Choose your own adventure!

Someone you know, who you have told very clearly that you "could only be friends" has done her best to hold herself in check but has made a pass at you. Do you break her heart now and cut off all contact or try to compromise and almost certainly break her heart later anyways?

Do it now! turn to page 73

Do it later! turn to page 101


Fuck, I hate being put in this position. But you know? Some women must feel like this All. The. Time.

So for Today's dating site adventure...

I had to give the brush off to someone I believe to be a closeted transsexual who wrote every communication in rhyme. It was like having the Riddler come on to you, in a bad dress.

Hey, they can't *all* be fun and titillating stories...