Today Is the 20th Anniversary of The Sinistral
Dear Journal,
Today is Wednesday, August 2, 2023. This means it has been twenty years to the day since I created this Live Journal. LiveJournal sent me an e-mail this morning attesting to that, and included this cute virtual gift:
Isn't that cute? You know, I know they're Russian-owned now, but they clearly haven't taken me down yet for my stances on the war (famous last words, hopefully not), and, as I have been so fond of saying, they are one of only a handful of tech companies that has never screwed me over. It's a short list, which includes companies like Dreamhost and Newegg.
Here's my favorite virtual gift from them, from many many years ago:
I've been looking forward to this anniversary for some time; it has been on my horizon for months. I was thinking about it as recently as earlier this week, about how I'd like to prepare something special for the big day. The only problem is that somehow, despite having checked, I'd developed a misremembering of the date: I thought it was in September. If it hadn't been for LiveJournal's own anniversary e-mail to me, the actual anniversary would have slipped by completely unnoticed!! LJ to the rescue again.
Not only did I nearly miss this anniversary completely, but today was a non-negotiable work day, so I'm not even getting around to writing this entry until the evening. It is now a quarter of nine, and the Sun is literally halfway set at this moment! I shall rise now to watch it finishing going down.
* a pause *
And now we are in dusk! My favorite time of the day.
Long gone are many of the voices who once rang out in this place. Cool cucumbers whom I only ever knew here, like Elske and Elisaana. Once upon a time, nearly the entire core ATH cast commented here, particularly Rob and Craig. My sister had her day. Stephen was here for a good while. Miles had his say. Kendra was a cheery presence for a few years. There were unknown passers-by who bothered to write meaty commentary, like Georg. The other Rob chimed in on occasion. Bucephalus. Carolina used to be big on LiveJournal. I think even Amy was here for a minute. John Paul was here for a long time, and still reads on occasion. Other Compendiumites, like Wes. Terry has been here. And the most prolific commenter of all, bar myself, was Michael, even though he hasn't added to his score in the past ten years.
And there were quite a few other voices, too. Quite a few, indeed! For as much as this Journal has always felt like no one reads it, people have read it, and a daring and treasured few have even taken the trouble to write down their thoughts, which, though I have not always acted (or, truth be told, been) appreciative of what people have had to say, has always been the thing to do to earn and maintain my respect. I do love my lurkers, I do, but the people who care enough to write something, who have that passion, are the most kindred. Or at least the passion itself is kindred.
These days, it's usually months between comments. I recently heard from someone totally new, who found this Journal by chance. That was neat. But for the most part, it is quiet here nowadays. Even I don't have much to say, anymore. Or, rather, it has become far less important, and far more difficult, for me to say it.
Yet you endure, Journal. You are still here.
Twenty years ago, I was a very different person. I had hoped to read lots of old entries-remember, here they're called entries, not posts; post is the verb; that's the etiquette here-but due to this coming up on me so suddenly I only looked at a few, yet they aver the obvious: That was a different Josh. Far younger, far brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed (and bushier-haired 😭). One who didn't sigh and moan with every laborious step. One who still had the luxury of dwelling in the illimitable future! I had a long think in the shower after work about what I might want to say in this entry, and one of the things I came up with was that I have very few regrets in the conventional sense. Talk like this often is associated with regrets, but, here, for me, it's not really about regret so much as about recognizing that life has seasons. I cherish my old happiness, and my fiery and flamboyant and sometimes foolish writings here in The Sinistral. If there is regret, it is simply the regret that one cannot go back to visit the old times, even to visit. While it is impossible to "go home again," i.e. to relive the past as your present self, I should dearly like if I could but freshen its memories and feelings in my mind.
I often spoke of how liberating you were, Journal. The Joshes of times past was speaking their truths of the day. Here is the place where I honed so many ideas. For reasons unknowable, in my mind there was something very powerful about my entries almost always being public, so that anyone could read them. It felt like I was exposing myself to the world, and that nakedness brought me great strength, for it is much harder to be struck a true blow for something you have freely revealed than it is for something you have guarded fiercely secret. I have made many powerful admissions and declarations here over the years, and that was an important part in being who I was and becoming who I became. Twenty years on, that openness is the thing about you I look back on the most fondly. To no one but my own spark was I truer.
2003 was an eternity ago. I was wearing the Purple Cloth. Coincidentally, over the weekend I was looking for a clip of Afura Mann from The Wanderers of El-Hazard, completely on a whim, and I ended up finding the TV series on YouTube and watching it, finishing up yesterday. It was only my second time: A coworker of the Purple Cloth; I think his name was Wesley; first introduced it to me twenty years ago. Quite possibly twenty years ago to the month, maybe even the day, because it was late in the work season when we watched it. That Josh, standing upon the summit of Mount Laundry, winding down his time at The Daily and indeed at the UW as a whole for all intents and purposes, and still only a few years into the ATH novelization...was so different. That Josh was two-and-a-half years even from meeting Kendra, itself an eternity again-and the same amount of time that our relationship lasted in the other direction. 2003 Josh was living, that summer only, on 11th Avenue in the purple building, the place with the great and mighty commercial-strength toilet. My prison days were behind me (lol), and my Capitol Hill days were ahead. I had never heard of things like PAX. I have very few photos of that apartment because phone cameras were not really a thing yet; all I owned at the time was my webcam, which was limited firmly to my immobile desktop computer.
It was a good summer. I would come home from work pouring sweat and get my shirt off and into my sweatpants, and let Teague's fan blow on me. I was paying my own way from the Purple Cloth job, and hadn't yet entered the meanest poverty of my life, which would begin a couple months later. There was plenty of good stuff to pirate online, and AIM and e-mails were still a viable way to keep in touch with people. And, beginning that hazy August, this Journal.
I have grown old. I am tired, disillusioned, worn-out, and all scarred up-so that even if all my problems fell away I would not be capable of fully enjoying their aftermath. I was thinking just today, what with news of the zillion-dollar lottery jackpot, that if I won now it would be too late. I don't have the energy, or the desire, that would have been so well-served by that money in the past. Today, friendship means a lot less to me, because for the most part friends have not been there for me. Romance is out of the question, because I am too troubled and woeful. I have no family to draw strength from, except for a sister whom I must keep at arm's length because she can't handle my truth due to the difficulties of her own truth. And I simply lack the energy and mental fortitude anymore to carry out major ambitions in general, with the exception of my creative writing. And with the many health problems that have plagued me since the Troubles, I often feel like death will come at any time, suddenly or semi-suddenly. I have tried my best to make peace with my mortality and the inevitable ignominy and loneliness of it; I think I have found partial success. Certainly, I have done better than most. And in the meantime, all I have left going for me, really, is the capacity of my own psyche to provide good company as I go through the day, and my Art and passion therefor to strive for. Thank the Unicorn for that! I don't know why I still want to write my stories; maybe to paint echoes of all the lives I will have missed out on. Maybe just the derangement of an artist's pure compulsion. But whatever it be, so shall I keep writing until the end, or as close to it as I may, though it will mostly be fiction, for as I said my desire to write nonfiction has wasted away. And yet, for all these years, and for who knows how many more to come, there will still also be you, my Live Journal. My little piece of self on the Internet. The only other space like it would be my repository of commentaries on the Compendium, but those writings were not as dear as these, here, in this Purple Place.
You are always here when I do have something to say.
The words are harsh but it is liberating to speak them.
I was walking home from dropping off my ballot yesterday, and I passed by a bookbinding shop. It got me thinking about my plan to do a limited edition print run for the first edition of my next novel. Eventually I'll self-publish with Amazon because we live in Dystopia and that's how you do it when you self-publish now. But I really like the thought of flipping the bird to Amazon for that First Edition and doing a handful of books that I sign myself. I'll give a few of them away, to friends-friends such as I still have who may be interested in reading. With a few lucky exceptions, my friends are not fan of my fiction. Oh well! 🙃 The non-fans won't be the ones who get a copy. They can go on doing whatever it is they do with their lives.
Of course, I have to finish the damn novel first (whichever one it may be). But that's what I'm good for these days! There's literally nothing else going on but the indignities of economic survival and a whole lot of mental decompression and rest.
I had a thought, recently. I don't know how to put it into words yet. But it goes a little something like this: I have finally, after many anguished years of the Troubles and Post-Troubles, found a way to survive without things I used to need. Friends, family, romance, happiness, ambition. I think the alternative was death, but, because I found a way to make it work...I don't need those things like I used to. And that's a wild idea, isn't it? It sounds crazy, like something a character in a movie would say when they are in denial, and by the end they rediscover the power of friendship or whatever. But it's not like that. It's more like the tired realization, borne of experience at the end of a long life of rejection and defeat, that nothing in this life-beyond the immediate creature needs of survival like water and clothing-is actually any more or any less important than you believe it to be. You can just let go of stuff, or at least turn down the volume on it a whole friggin' lot, and it won't hold such power over you anymore.
So I do what I can, and I don't aim higher than that. I said several years ago that I had faced the brutal realization that I wasn't going to have the life that I wanted, but that I am still alive and am therefore proceeding into a life if not the life. This is the coalescence of that. I do what I can. I go out when I can. I treat myself with respect and compassion when I can. Have fun when I can. Go exploring when I can. Enjoy a nice conversation when I can. Eat good food when I can. Write when I can. I don't try anymore to be something I'm not. And I don't push myself toward an impossible constellation of projects and dreams. As Amanda Palmer said, I don't want to be the person that I want to be. And even though it's true that "when I can" is sometimes code for "very infrequently," it's still a fair description. I do what I can. And, even though I'm sure it won't sound that way to any human who reads this, things are not that bad. Life is decent. Downright nice, sometimes! These may well be my twilight years, but they are quite decent. And far better than rotting away in a nursing home.
And one more thing on that note: I may not be a habitually happy person anymore, like I once was, but I still have moments of all the positive emotions. Moments that feel fiercely good, because I know they will be gone so shortly, and I am aware as they're happening of how good I feel. I had such a moment just a few days ago, and it was a lovely thing. They're often so incredibly fleeting, sometimes just a few minutes or even less than a minute! Rarely, they're as long as a few hours. But when they come they feel wonderful, and in those moments I come the closest to fulfilling my wish from earlier: I should dearly like if I could but freshen the memories and feelings in my mind-in this case, not the memories and feelings of the past per se, but of the imperiousness, ecstasy, wonder, joy, and thrill that were so commonplace in those days. I still do have those colors, those gears, those modes.
And whether or not anyone believes any of what I've said here...doesn't matter. I write it here in my Journal for me. And for you, Journal: You are a true account of where my thoughts have been, and you remain so now.
This is the 20th Anniversary of The Sinistral. I don't know, and I certainly don't expect, to see a 30th Anniversary, let alone a 40th. But it's not important, and in any case who knows? All that's important is that I am here now, with a lifetime of incredible experience flavoring my thoughts and perceptions. Every day that comes with a lifetime of such experience to color it is the fruit of the harvest. It is what we are all aspiring toward, beyond the mechanical animalistic. I wish I could do so much more writing, capture so many more of my countless interesting thoughts so that others could see them. I think it would be a benefit and a service to humanity! Alas, it isn't in me. Besides: Most people are never gonna be "awakened" by someone else slapping them in the face. People wake up themselves, and the music of our resonance with one another is at seeing others awake. No one stays trapped in the cave simply because I didn't write more. They merely lose out incrementally on the beauty of the world outside the cave...and I can live with that. To each their own. Make your own damn wonders, ye wondrous, if mine aren't fast enough for you.
And now we come to the chimes of ten. Over an hour and a quarter I have written this entry. I could keep going! I think the fare would turn lighter if I did. I think I would probably start to delve into talking about Galaxy Federal or The Curious Tale, or about Silence. I was trying to explain to a friend recently-they could not wrap their head around it-that Silence is my only example of a character who is bigger than the story she is in. That might be an interesting essay.
But it'll have to be another time. I think I've said what I came to say today. Very few things in my life have ever reached "20th Anniversary" status. That's quite a long haul! I am grateful the record exists, even if I never do end up going back and rereading it all, and even if no one else does either. In time it will fade. If my Journal outlives me-which it likely will if I go suddenly and soon-then I will be able to linger on a bit, in death, and haunt my still-breathing contemporaries with cold hard facts about left-handed superiority and the objective beauty of extravagant fatness. In the extreme end, we are all forgotten. So it is vain perhaps to want to linger at all. But I smile at the thought of it.
Life turns out strangely, doesn't it? My very first entry in this Journal was an anonymous lament about Marie, whom I still loved in those days, and her seemingly self-sacrificial nature. Today we are friends on Facebook. She never says a word to me (despite being the one to reach out with a friend request a couple years ago), and I don't have anything to say to her either, nor any particular desire to. She seems to live an utterly mundane life. There is no hint of the passion I once saw. If she still holds onto it, its light no longer touches me. Magic gives way to mundanity, rarity to post-scarcity. It is ever so; and life is strange.
Today is Wednesday, August 2, 2023. This means it has been twenty years to the day since I created this Live Journal. LiveJournal sent me an e-mail this morning attesting to that, and included this cute virtual gift:
Isn't that cute? You know, I know they're Russian-owned now, but they clearly haven't taken me down yet for my stances on the war (famous last words, hopefully not), and, as I have been so fond of saying, they are one of only a handful of tech companies that has never screwed me over. It's a short list, which includes companies like Dreamhost and Newegg.
Here's my favorite virtual gift from them, from many many years ago:
I've been looking forward to this anniversary for some time; it has been on my horizon for months. I was thinking about it as recently as earlier this week, about how I'd like to prepare something special for the big day. The only problem is that somehow, despite having checked, I'd developed a misremembering of the date: I thought it was in September. If it hadn't been for LiveJournal's own anniversary e-mail to me, the actual anniversary would have slipped by completely unnoticed!! LJ to the rescue again.
Not only did I nearly miss this anniversary completely, but today was a non-negotiable work day, so I'm not even getting around to writing this entry until the evening. It is now a quarter of nine, and the Sun is literally halfway set at this moment! I shall rise now to watch it finishing going down.
* a pause *
And now we are in dusk! My favorite time of the day.
Long gone are many of the voices who once rang out in this place. Cool cucumbers whom I only ever knew here, like Elske and Elisaana. Once upon a time, nearly the entire core ATH cast commented here, particularly Rob and Craig. My sister had her day. Stephen was here for a good while. Miles had his say. Kendra was a cheery presence for a few years. There were unknown passers-by who bothered to write meaty commentary, like Georg. The other Rob chimed in on occasion. Bucephalus. Carolina used to be big on LiveJournal. I think even Amy was here for a minute. John Paul was here for a long time, and still reads on occasion. Other Compendiumites, like Wes. Terry has been here. And the most prolific commenter of all, bar myself, was Michael, even though he hasn't added to his score in the past ten years.
And there were quite a few other voices, too. Quite a few, indeed! For as much as this Journal has always felt like no one reads it, people have read it, and a daring and treasured few have even taken the trouble to write down their thoughts, which, though I have not always acted (or, truth be told, been) appreciative of what people have had to say, has always been the thing to do to earn and maintain my respect. I do love my lurkers, I do, but the people who care enough to write something, who have that passion, are the most kindred. Or at least the passion itself is kindred.
These days, it's usually months between comments. I recently heard from someone totally new, who found this Journal by chance. That was neat. But for the most part, it is quiet here nowadays. Even I don't have much to say, anymore. Or, rather, it has become far less important, and far more difficult, for me to say it.
Yet you endure, Journal. You are still here.
Twenty years ago, I was a very different person. I had hoped to read lots of old entries-remember, here they're called entries, not posts; post is the verb; that's the etiquette here-but due to this coming up on me so suddenly I only looked at a few, yet they aver the obvious: That was a different Josh. Far younger, far brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed (and bushier-haired 😭). One who didn't sigh and moan with every laborious step. One who still had the luxury of dwelling in the illimitable future! I had a long think in the shower after work about what I might want to say in this entry, and one of the things I came up with was that I have very few regrets in the conventional sense. Talk like this often is associated with regrets, but, here, for me, it's not really about regret so much as about recognizing that life has seasons. I cherish my old happiness, and my fiery and flamboyant and sometimes foolish writings here in The Sinistral. If there is regret, it is simply the regret that one cannot go back to visit the old times, even to visit. While it is impossible to "go home again," i.e. to relive the past as your present self, I should dearly like if I could but freshen its memories and feelings in my mind.
I often spoke of how liberating you were, Journal. The Joshes of times past was speaking their truths of the day. Here is the place where I honed so many ideas. For reasons unknowable, in my mind there was something very powerful about my entries almost always being public, so that anyone could read them. It felt like I was exposing myself to the world, and that nakedness brought me great strength, for it is much harder to be struck a true blow for something you have freely revealed than it is for something you have guarded fiercely secret. I have made many powerful admissions and declarations here over the years, and that was an important part in being who I was and becoming who I became. Twenty years on, that openness is the thing about you I look back on the most fondly. To no one but my own spark was I truer.
2003 was an eternity ago. I was wearing the Purple Cloth. Coincidentally, over the weekend I was looking for a clip of Afura Mann from The Wanderers of El-Hazard, completely on a whim, and I ended up finding the TV series on YouTube and watching it, finishing up yesterday. It was only my second time: A coworker of the Purple Cloth; I think his name was Wesley; first introduced it to me twenty years ago. Quite possibly twenty years ago to the month, maybe even the day, because it was late in the work season when we watched it. That Josh, standing upon the summit of Mount Laundry, winding down his time at The Daily and indeed at the UW as a whole for all intents and purposes, and still only a few years into the ATH novelization...was so different. That Josh was two-and-a-half years even from meeting Kendra, itself an eternity again-and the same amount of time that our relationship lasted in the other direction. 2003 Josh was living, that summer only, on 11th Avenue in the purple building, the place with the great and mighty commercial-strength toilet. My prison days were behind me (lol), and my Capitol Hill days were ahead. I had never heard of things like PAX. I have very few photos of that apartment because phone cameras were not really a thing yet; all I owned at the time was my webcam, which was limited firmly to my immobile desktop computer.
It was a good summer. I would come home from work pouring sweat and get my shirt off and into my sweatpants, and let Teague's fan blow on me. I was paying my own way from the Purple Cloth job, and hadn't yet entered the meanest poverty of my life, which would begin a couple months later. There was plenty of good stuff to pirate online, and AIM and e-mails were still a viable way to keep in touch with people. And, beginning that hazy August, this Journal.
I have grown old. I am tired, disillusioned, worn-out, and all scarred up-so that even if all my problems fell away I would not be capable of fully enjoying their aftermath. I was thinking just today, what with news of the zillion-dollar lottery jackpot, that if I won now it would be too late. I don't have the energy, or the desire, that would have been so well-served by that money in the past. Today, friendship means a lot less to me, because for the most part friends have not been there for me. Romance is out of the question, because I am too troubled and woeful. I have no family to draw strength from, except for a sister whom I must keep at arm's length because she can't handle my truth due to the difficulties of her own truth. And I simply lack the energy and mental fortitude anymore to carry out major ambitions in general, with the exception of my creative writing. And with the many health problems that have plagued me since the Troubles, I often feel like death will come at any time, suddenly or semi-suddenly. I have tried my best to make peace with my mortality and the inevitable ignominy and loneliness of it; I think I have found partial success. Certainly, I have done better than most. And in the meantime, all I have left going for me, really, is the capacity of my own psyche to provide good company as I go through the day, and my Art and passion therefor to strive for. Thank the Unicorn for that! I don't know why I still want to write my stories; maybe to paint echoes of all the lives I will have missed out on. Maybe just the derangement of an artist's pure compulsion. But whatever it be, so shall I keep writing until the end, or as close to it as I may, though it will mostly be fiction, for as I said my desire to write nonfiction has wasted away. And yet, for all these years, and for who knows how many more to come, there will still also be you, my Live Journal. My little piece of self on the Internet. The only other space like it would be my repository of commentaries on the Compendium, but those writings were not as dear as these, here, in this Purple Place.
You are always here when I do have something to say.
The words are harsh but it is liberating to speak them.
I was walking home from dropping off my ballot yesterday, and I passed by a bookbinding shop. It got me thinking about my plan to do a limited edition print run for the first edition of my next novel. Eventually I'll self-publish with Amazon because we live in Dystopia and that's how you do it when you self-publish now. But I really like the thought of flipping the bird to Amazon for that First Edition and doing a handful of books that I sign myself. I'll give a few of them away, to friends-friends such as I still have who may be interested in reading. With a few lucky exceptions, my friends are not fan of my fiction. Oh well! 🙃 The non-fans won't be the ones who get a copy. They can go on doing whatever it is they do with their lives.
Of course, I have to finish the damn novel first (whichever one it may be). But that's what I'm good for these days! There's literally nothing else going on but the indignities of economic survival and a whole lot of mental decompression and rest.
I had a thought, recently. I don't know how to put it into words yet. But it goes a little something like this: I have finally, after many anguished years of the Troubles and Post-Troubles, found a way to survive without things I used to need. Friends, family, romance, happiness, ambition. I think the alternative was death, but, because I found a way to make it work...I don't need those things like I used to. And that's a wild idea, isn't it? It sounds crazy, like something a character in a movie would say when they are in denial, and by the end they rediscover the power of friendship or whatever. But it's not like that. It's more like the tired realization, borne of experience at the end of a long life of rejection and defeat, that nothing in this life-beyond the immediate creature needs of survival like water and clothing-is actually any more or any less important than you believe it to be. You can just let go of stuff, or at least turn down the volume on it a whole friggin' lot, and it won't hold such power over you anymore.
So I do what I can, and I don't aim higher than that. I said several years ago that I had faced the brutal realization that I wasn't going to have the life that I wanted, but that I am still alive and am therefore proceeding into a life if not the life. This is the coalescence of that. I do what I can. I go out when I can. I treat myself with respect and compassion when I can. Have fun when I can. Go exploring when I can. Enjoy a nice conversation when I can. Eat good food when I can. Write when I can. I don't try anymore to be something I'm not. And I don't push myself toward an impossible constellation of projects and dreams. As Amanda Palmer said, I don't want to be the person that I want to be. And even though it's true that "when I can" is sometimes code for "very infrequently," it's still a fair description. I do what I can. And, even though I'm sure it won't sound that way to any human who reads this, things are not that bad. Life is decent. Downright nice, sometimes! These may well be my twilight years, but they are quite decent. And far better than rotting away in a nursing home.
And one more thing on that note: I may not be a habitually happy person anymore, like I once was, but I still have moments of all the positive emotions. Moments that feel fiercely good, because I know they will be gone so shortly, and I am aware as they're happening of how good I feel. I had such a moment just a few days ago, and it was a lovely thing. They're often so incredibly fleeting, sometimes just a few minutes or even less than a minute! Rarely, they're as long as a few hours. But when they come they feel wonderful, and in those moments I come the closest to fulfilling my wish from earlier: I should dearly like if I could but freshen the memories and feelings in my mind-in this case, not the memories and feelings of the past per se, but of the imperiousness, ecstasy, wonder, joy, and thrill that were so commonplace in those days. I still do have those colors, those gears, those modes.
And whether or not anyone believes any of what I've said here...doesn't matter. I write it here in my Journal for me. And for you, Journal: You are a true account of where my thoughts have been, and you remain so now.
This is the 20th Anniversary of The Sinistral. I don't know, and I certainly don't expect, to see a 30th Anniversary, let alone a 40th. But it's not important, and in any case who knows? All that's important is that I am here now, with a lifetime of incredible experience flavoring my thoughts and perceptions. Every day that comes with a lifetime of such experience to color it is the fruit of the harvest. It is what we are all aspiring toward, beyond the mechanical animalistic. I wish I could do so much more writing, capture so many more of my countless interesting thoughts so that others could see them. I think it would be a benefit and a service to humanity! Alas, it isn't in me. Besides: Most people are never gonna be "awakened" by someone else slapping them in the face. People wake up themselves, and the music of our resonance with one another is at seeing others awake. No one stays trapped in the cave simply because I didn't write more. They merely lose out incrementally on the beauty of the world outside the cave...and I can live with that. To each their own. Make your own damn wonders, ye wondrous, if mine aren't fast enough for you.
And now we come to the chimes of ten. Over an hour and a quarter I have written this entry. I could keep going! I think the fare would turn lighter if I did. I think I would probably start to delve into talking about Galaxy Federal or The Curious Tale, or about Silence. I was trying to explain to a friend recently-they could not wrap their head around it-that Silence is my only example of a character who is bigger than the story she is in. That might be an interesting essay.
But it'll have to be another time. I think I've said what I came to say today. Very few things in my life have ever reached "20th Anniversary" status. That's quite a long haul! I am grateful the record exists, even if I never do end up going back and rereading it all, and even if no one else does either. In time it will fade. If my Journal outlives me-which it likely will if I go suddenly and soon-then I will be able to linger on a bit, in death, and haunt my still-breathing contemporaries with cold hard facts about left-handed superiority and the objective beauty of extravagant fatness. In the extreme end, we are all forgotten. So it is vain perhaps to want to linger at all. But I smile at the thought of it.
Life turns out strangely, doesn't it? My very first entry in this Journal was an anonymous lament about Marie, whom I still loved in those days, and her seemingly self-sacrificial nature. Today we are friends on Facebook. She never says a word to me (despite being the one to reach out with a friend request a couple years ago), and I don't have anything to say to her either, nor any particular desire to. She seems to live an utterly mundane life. There is no hint of the passion I once saw. If she still holds onto it, its light no longer touches me. Magic gives way to mundanity, rarity to post-scarcity. It is ever so; and life is strange.