November 20, 2023
[Context: While chaperoning students on overseas study in Perth, Western Australia, I badly burned my feet and back on a beach.]
It is difficult to walk, but today was slightly better than yesterday. Maybe tomorrow will be slightly better than today, and so on. One can only hope; if only life were like that, there would be an end to suffering.
November 19, 2023
Dear readers,
Sorry to have been absent for a couple of weeks.
Things just got busy at work and at home. And influenza really is strong this year, as predicted (I found out long ago that teenagers – especially guys – completely ignore suggestions regarding ways of avoiding illness due to an unwavering belief in their invulnerability).
I’ll try to make it up to you over the next couple of days.
In the meantime, here’s an Apple IIe showing the matrix (“all I see is blond…brunette…”).
September 23, 2023
[Note to self – it’s probably not a coincidence that so many of my better diary entries were written in August. I obviously have more time to think and write at that time of year!]
What strange turns my life has taken. Never would I have in a million years expected to be here, now, in this apartment, typing on an extended keyboard into a Japanese computer, in a Japanese city, listening to the same Cure tape I was listening to back in 1996. Has it actually been 8 years?
Ten years ago I was playing role playing games and drinking in Robbins lounge, getting ready to pack everything I owned into a moving van to move to Ann Arbor. A city I didn’t know, with no money for deposit or rent, or a job. Without a clue. Totally hopeless. Instead of exploring the city, I stayed in my bedroom and played games or typed. What was I thinking? I can’t even get in touch with the few people I met there. Even the ones I knew at ND are either gone back where they came from or no longer answer my emails.
I can still picture them all in my mind. I can still see the rooms I lived in, all the way back home. Even the freshman dorm room which no longer exists, since they tore the building down. How can that be?
It must be this which makes us human; the ability to take the visual and turn it into mental. The capacity to make emotional connections between the world outside and the world inside. The belief that there are two worlds. This makes us human, and at the same time it makes us separate. It is a false belief, that we are not of the outside. Yet there is no returning. Once we start, we can never stop. Even changing languages doesn’t help. We merely start over again from a new perspective, still outside the outside.
September 13, 2023
Sometimes I wish I could put my thoughts directly onto paper. I think all the time, about everything…I see pictures in my head, pictures of my past — exact details of what I saw and experienced. Déjà-vu often occurs to me. It’s strange, that feeling of already having been someplace. Sometimes I can tell what’s going to happen in a matter of minutes. I can’t stand things like that — they send chills up my spine.
September 11, 2023
Just because you aren’t paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.
September 8, 2023
The lecture about Irish folk songs [note: at the time, I was in the Gaeltacht, west of Galway, learning Irish language] last night, two nights ago, whichever (time has no meaning in this place), was wrong. Why do we write, the léachtóir asked; to communicate; the poet wants to communicate.
No.
That is not why I write. Sometimes I write for fun, to play at words, to play with feelings. Sometimes I try to work out my problems myself in writing (I can’t). Sometimes I write just to relieve tension. Sometimes I write because I have to, because if I don’t get these words out of me and onto paper they’ll rip their way out.
September 3, 2023
Why do you blog?
Because I must.
If you ever ask a writer why they write…why they *must* write…there is only ever one answer.
Because they must.
No other answer is required.
And if you do not understand, you should not ask.
September 2, 2023
For all these technological “advances,” we are no better than the ancients. We are still prisoners to our emotions — or to the biological impulses of electricity and hormones whose results we deem emotive.
August 31, 2023
It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
When you believe in a lie, you fool yourself. When you say it with conviction, you fool others.
Get enough people fooled, and you got yourself a new religion.
August 28, 2023
What’s your favorite time of day?
I’ve always been a night owl, always found it easier to concentrate when other brain waves were sleeping and not interfering with mine.
Now, though, I often find the most relaxing time of day is dinner time — because I get to cook for my family!
I never would have said that even five years ago. But the pandemic especially has given me a chance to try out all sorts of recipes, modifying, adding, subtracting as I go. It’s like a chemical experiment 🧪 for our digestive systems!
I can’t wait to get home from work, start up a little Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, or Dizzy Gillespie and fire up the grill/wok/air heater and roll up my sleeves.
Of course, I still enjoy the late late hours of a tipple 🥃 and a three-hour YouTube on the rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire (history nerd here). Not enough hours in the day!
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