Arcadian Blues

Menthol blue lips, hair the color of static electricity, eyes of flaming mercury, and skin as pale as moonbeams. She was so fey that she made Tinkerbell look like a Wisconsin farm girl. I didn't know whether she was bringing me a case or a plea for charity. Regardless, I could tell she was bringing trouble, probably more trouble than I'd care to handle. Our eyes locked, and my heart broke. She pursed her lips and sighed. Before she could even utter a word, my heart broke a second time, and I knew that whatever her problem was, I'd die trying to make it right.

It took all my will to glance down at the enchant-o-meter on my desk. It read "Null", which made no sense, because I was obviously under some kind of glamour. I tapped it and the needle bounced a bit before settling back on "Null". I shook my head and decided to trust my instincts. Without looking up I said, "Kill the charm or leave. I'll work for any who can pay, but I won't be anybody's wind up toy."

"I'm sorry," her voice was like honeyed lightning, "but I don't know what you mean."

Denial. Always their first response. Next will come offense, anger, false remorse, and then a subtle re-application of the magic after the earnest promise that it's been removed. On the best of days, I don't have the stomach for that, and today had not even been in the neighborhood of the best of days. I opened my desk drawer and withdrew my Smith & Wesson, pointing it at her and being real careful not to make eye contact. "Scram. I've got work to do and no time for games. Even with pretty little elf girls. Go harass the police or something."

"The police can't help me. Please, Mr. Tyrrell, you're my only hope."

"Then it sucks to be you, sweetheart. Unless you can turn the mojo off, you need to walk out now." I flipped the safety off and hit the laser sight with a flourish. The pistol began to make a satisfyingly ominous hum. "'Cause in seven seconds, I'm pulling this trigger. Six. Five. Four. Three--"

The door closed behind her. Then my enchant-o-meter starts beeping like Merlin himself was here. I shook my head and pressed the reset button. The grandfather clock in the corner read nine thrity-five. This day was already too long, and my secretary wasn't even back from the coffee and donut run yet. Have I mentioned how much I hate Mondays?

Poor Lonely Blog

My poor blog is a twitter widow. Stupid twitter vampire, sucking all the minutes out of my so-called downtime. Someone, pass me a virtual clove of garlic. Or at least the URL for Twitheads Anonymous...

Because There Wasn't Enough Coolness in the World

http://www.myjones.com/limited/wizards

Christopher Moore: A Brief Appreciation

When I first read Practical Demonkeeping I was a seminary drop-out with a penchant for Lovecratian beasties and dark humor. The book resonated with me, to say the least. My second reading of the book was less than a week after I had finished it the first time. The last time I read it was when I was going through my divorce. There's a marriage falling apart in the book, and honestly, I wept while reading it that time. Everything Moore has written has been fun, funny, and strangely meaningful for me (well, I can't honestly say "everything." For some inexplicable reason, I haven't read Fluke yet).

Now we are moving towards the release of Bite Me which continues the story of the vampires begun in Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck. Moore's vampire protagonists are, in every way imaginable, cooler than Lestat, except in the area of actual coolness (where, frankly, Lestat is king, except, perhaps, as portrayed by Mr. Cruise). His books are not for children, at least for values of "not for children" that include "children shouldn't be exposed to scenes of cannibalism, sex, drug use, vulgar language, and demons." Maybe adults shouldn't be, either. But the residents of Pine Cove (as well as the other denizens of Chris Moore's imagination) are a likable, maybe even lovable, group of wacky and wonderful people. I almost feel like a Pine Cove citizen myself, at least while under the spell of the reading of his books. The nearest I've ever had to such literary comraderie are the patrons of Callahan's in Spider Robinson's books (which I was always tempted to read with an Irish coffee in hand, just to add to the atmosphere).

Not all of Mr. Moore's books are set in Pine Cove. The most recent book, Fool, is a Moorean twist on the Shakespeare's King Lear story. A bit of a temporal departure from the contemporary setting of most of Moore's novels, it is, nevertheless, an endearing bit of saucy Shakespearean pastiche (and recently out in paperback for those of who only, um, thriftily read a library copy of the hardcover).

Fool is not the only one of his books set in a different time period. Lamb, of course, sits firmly at the turn of the calendar, being the tale of Christ as told by his childhood pal Biff. While potentially offensive, the book takes seriously that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. There is no denigrating his deity nor his humanity. There are bits that are completely made up, but it's a novel, one written by an acknowledged master of humor and weirdness. If you want to be really offended, dig up a copy of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man.

So, April 1... Bite Me. Crossing fingers for fast access to the library's copy.

Crossovers Are Dreamy

"So, what do you know about vampires?"

She glanced up from her paperwork to see her partner's earnest face. He was serious. "They're featured in a number of bad novels and worse movies, strangely popular these days with prepubescent girls."

He smiled, "I mean real vampires."

Scully glared at her partner. "Mulder, there are no vampires. Historically, there are anecdotes of living humans drinking blood, or even bathing in it, in an effort to preserve youth or gain strength. In 1983, anthropologists from the University of Maryland documented a tribe of living, breathing blood drinkers on a small island off the coast of New Guinea. But real honest to God undead children of the night? That's too far out there, even for you."

Mulder walked through the doorway and slid into the chair across from Scully's desk. "Ever hear of a place called Sunnydale?"

"No. I'm guessing California, Arizona, or Florida?"

"California. A small town a couple hours from LA. They have vampires."

"And you would know this how?" Normally, Fox Mulder's obsessions were aliens and government conspiracies, usually at the same time. Paranormal, but hardly supernatural. This vampire thing seemed to be coming out of nowhere.

"Remember Dale Cooper?"

Scully's eyebrow raised slightly, "The Laura Palmer case, right?" Special Agent Dale Cooper was the only Bureau agent considered more "out there" than Fox Mulder. Scully had only met him once, and that was years ago before he had gone out to Washington state to work on a murder investigation. Like Mulder, Dale Cooper was an attractive man who gave no warning of his "eccentricity" until he opened his mouth. And then one wondered how he had made it so far in the Bureau. Some men are better seen and not heard.

Mulder nodded, "That's right. You remember when he got back from Twin Peaks?"

Scully shook her head, so Mulder continued. "He wasn't right in the head. It seems a demon had taken over his body."

"Demon? You mean he had a psychotic break?"

"C'mon, Scully, you're Catholic. Surely you believe in demons?"

"Not without evidence," but she supressed a shudder as she remembered her childhood friend, Regan MacNeil. She shook her head to clear the memory. Some things were best left in the past. "So, what happened to Special Agent Cooper?"

"Long story short, a mutual friend exorcised him."

"I can't imagine you being friends with a priest." Mulder might have been less skeptical than his partner, but he was also far less religious.

"Wasn't a priest. A guy I met while studying at Oxford, named John Constantine. Really interesting guy, you'd hate him."

"Another paranormal investigator like you and Cooper?"

Mulder's eyes twinkled, "No, Constantine's an actual wizard."

"Oh, so you met him playing Quidditch? Or maybe Dungeons and Dragons?"

"Mock me if you want, Dana, but John's the real deal. I saw stuff when I was with him that I still see in my nightmares."

"So, this Constantine exorcised Cooper. And what does all of this have to do with vampires and Sunnydale, California?"

"I'm getting to that. Once Dale was himself again, he resigned from the Bureau. Dropped off the face of the earth for the past few years. Until yesterday, when this arrived in the mail." He pulled a small digital voice recorder out of his jacket pocket. "Dale always kept a detailed audio diary of his cases and experiences. This recorder contains entries from the past six months up through last week. I haven't listened to all of them, but what I have heard is... amazing." He pressed a button and the recorder started speaking in the unmistakable voice of Dale Cooper.

"Dear Diane, last night I was able to observe the Slayer in action. Phenomenal. Grace and wit paired with a toughness and, well, power, the likes of which I have never seen before. She makes the Shaolin seem like awkward school boys trying to dance on a planet with excessive gravity. She staked four vampires in the space of two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. I must meet this young lady. Tomorrow I shall approach her mentor, he is called 'a Watcher.' The message I have finally recalled from my time trapped in the Red Room needs to reach the Slayer before the return of the First Evil, which, I feel deeply from the top of my head to the soles of my sensible shoes, will be soon."

Mulder pressed the button again and smiled at his partner.

"A recording from an ex-agent, a notoriously unstable ex-agent, is not proof of anything. And what is a 'slayer' anyway?"

"I don't know," Mulder's grin grew wider, "but I intend to find out."

A Minor Note of Geekery

While I have been a dabbler in Linux for a while (Slackware 3.3 on a huge stack of floppies, for those interested), I haven't had a Linux box connected to the Internet since dial-up days. Mostly because I haven't had Internet at home since then. Lately, I have come into possession of an old Dell Latitude D610, which sports built-in wireless (as, I understand from some of my younger friends, is the trend these days). Add Slackware (we're up to version 13 now) and wander into one of the countless free public wi-fi spots (yay MickeyD's!) and suddenly I'm back online outside of the office.

Concurrent with this happy development, my phone carrier forced a data plan on owners of Smart Phones. While I do know some who have argued with them and gotten the plan removed, my battle with customer service was less successful. I can always swap out to my old Nokia brick (about the dumbest phone around) which will let me drop the data plan, but Smart Phones are nice (my current one, perhaps, less so: suffice to say it is running an OS out of Redmond; actually, that's unfair. It's been a decent phone, despite its many critics).

My carrier (oh, why the anonymity: it's AT&T, ok?) is finally getting an Android phone: the Motorola Backflip. So, while not an Eris, it is a Linux phone, and I am due for an upgrade in November. So, maybe... At any rate, thanks to the forced increase in my bill, I now have Internet access wherever I have phone service. Blogging, RSS, web surfing, email, twitter, podcasts, YouTube videos, WorldCat searches, all whenever and wherever.

So this is what it feels like to live in the 21st century? Kinda cool.

A Summer Memory To Help Distract Me From The Long Winter

It was back in those too, too warm days during the summer of 1983, shortly before my sixteenth birthday, that I met her. Well, that ain't exactly so. I had a vague awareness of who she was. She came from a large Catholic family and had a brother a grade ahead of me and a sister a grade behind. She was three years my junior, in my little brother's class, and she lived next to the city cemetery, which is where we first spoke to each other that summer.

Me and my circle spent more than a little time in the cemetery. In part because we liked hanging out among the dead, in part because we were all a bit too weird for normal company, but mostly because it was one of the few places to hangout in a tiny little Midwestern town. The river ran along the small wilderness just north of the cemetery, and the deer trails and fallen trees were as much a part of our territory as the gravel roads between the tombstones. Sometimes we even hauled our books and dice and character sheets out to the old concrete table in the rarely mowed "nature study" area just outside the cemetery where we battled breeze and bugs to play AD&D under the canopy of trees.

Mostly, however, we just walked and talked. We discovered time travel and reincarnation and warp drive and the perfect government and the funniest joke and the best strategy for dealing with the Kauffman retrograde, all while wandering among the silent gravestones. We bemoaned the tiny redneck culture we had been born into and waxed eloquently about the futures our dreams dared to believe in. We were young and foolish and full of ourselves. We were geeky children who believed ourselves destined to be high fantasty romantic heroes arising from our humble births.

But that first day I ran into her, walking in the cemetery, I was alone. It wasn't terribly uncommon for any of us to go on long strolls alone. Some thoughts need to sit a spell in the cool, dark cellars of the mind before they are ready to serve. Given the year, I was most likely reflecting upon the eternal struggle between Law and Chaos and the unique role humanity plays in that struggle (like many, Neil's title "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" described my youth sadly perfectly). In those days, I favored Chaos over Law, but that is hardly the point of this memory.

She was in shorts and a tank top. A cute twelve-year-old with big eyes and an endearingly shy smile, as I learned when I said "hi" as we passed.

That was all, and we both went our own ways. And there was evening and morning, the first day.

The next day, as I was walking to the cemetery, my path took me past her house. This was my typical path into the cemetery, and I thought little of it when I saw her on her porch swing reading. Another "hi" as I waved and smiled, not even slowing down as I strode past the girl and through the gates into my kingdom.

When, five minutes later, I saw her approaching, I didn't think anything of it. If I had lived next door to a graveyard, I would have spent as much time as possible there. Just before we passed each other, she stopped and said "hi."

"Hi, again." I smiled. She smiled back, and my heart came alive.

We talked for a while, and I arrived home feeling a strange and wonderful happiness that lasted well into the night. And there was evening and morning, the second day.

Throughout that summer we would "happen" to meet in the cemetery, where we would talk for hours about life and music and our families and books and religion. We laughed and we teased and we listened to each other with all the intensity of the young, with all of the sincerity of nearly mystical communion. She was, in terms of secrets and trust and laughter and sharing, the closest friend I had ever known up til then (with all due respect to my friends, who were all good and true, this was... different, as I suspect most of them would understand). We never kissed, we never were a couple, it was never that kind of relationship. It was all purely and sweetly good, a magic moment in a time and place where one foot was always firmly planted in the realms of faerie.

And, naturally, it didn't last. The end of summer summoned us back to our regular lives, and that was good as well. It was a brief and delightful interlude in my life, one of many lights that linger in the twilight of my failing memories and dying heart.

The Morning The End Finally Started

"Now, there. My Zootie is a good girl. You can't say things like that about her!"

The speaker was Zootie's mother, Mrs. Gladys Reynolds. Mrs. Reynolds is a paragon of a certain type of Midwesterner: grossly overweight and even more grossly under-educated, clad in the very best of Wal-mart clearance, her head filled with reality TV, crime dramas, and conservative preachers. For some reason, I always think of people like her as human donuts.

Mrs. Reynolds had been called in by our fearless leader, Principal Edgars, to discuss this morning's incident. "Incident" may be too mild a word, since Sheriff Tommy Briggs was also present at this little meeting. Apparently, Zootie Johnson had attempted to drive a sharp pencil into the left eye of Steve Ellison. Steve is a bit of a trouble maker (and perhaps a bit more than a bit), but he's not "let's seriously maim this jerk" kind of trouble. And, to be fair to Mrs. Reynolds, Zootie is a good kid, not the kind to say a harsh word to anyone teasing her (and there were many who teased the girl), let alone one to take up sharp writing implements against her tormentors. But a classroom full of students were witnesses. Unfortunately, the teacher had his back to the class, writing out the quadratic equation on the chalkboard, and turned around just in time to see Steve forcing Zootie's hand (still gripping the pencil) to the desk while calling her a "crazy bitch." By the time I had reached the back row, the danger was over, and I had the lovely duty of escorting the two combatants down to Principal Edgars' office while the rest of the class worked on factoring equations 1-10 on page 52 of the textbook.

"Mrs. Reynolds, no one is saying Zootie's not a good girl," I said.

"I am," said Edgars, shooting me one of those "shut up, I don't need your kind of help" looks. Edgars would have fired me his first year as principal if he could have found even the slightest pretext. Unfortunately for him, I'm a good teacher with a squeaky clean life.

"Mrs. Reynolds," Edgars continued, "Your daughter attempted a lethal stabbing this morning. Her ineffectual weakness is the only reason Steve Ellison is still alive. Beyond being a violation of the school's policies concerning violence, this is a criminal matter." He nodded over at the sheriff.

Sheriff Tommy stirred a bit and made as if he might say something, but Edgars was on a roll. "Priscilla Johnson is a menace. Her antisocial ways have finally culminated in the violence that I believe I warned the faculty of on numerous occasions."

Mrs. Reynolds looked horrified, "You been talking about my Zootie to the teachers?"

"Not Zootie in particular," I inserted, before Edgars could continue his bashing of Zootie (and that was the first time I'd ever heard anyone refer to her by her given name), "but yes, Principal Edgars has expressed concern that some of our students are not as involved in school activities as he would like."

"Zootie doesn't like sports. She likes reading and writing. That don't make her bad."

"No," I agreed, "it doesn't."

"Well, I think this morning's events suggest otherwise. Self-involved dreamers are just waiting to snap. Students like Priscilla need to be engaged with other students. They need to have relationships with real people and not just live in their imaginary worlds, where they see real people as invasive and threatening. People like Steve Ellison." Edgars had no love for Ellison, but he obviously had a larger axe to grind with students like Zootie. For the life of me, though, I couldn't imagine why.

Autobiographical Random Nonsense Best Avoided By Readers with Discernment

Once upon a time I knew... everything. Well, everything that mattered. I knew the streets of my neighborhood, the names of my friends, and how to enjoy life. I walked, biked, tossed frisbees, even played a little ball with my best friend (poorly, but with a certain enjoyment). I read myths, novels, comic books, science books, and biographies. I prayed naively, without doubt and without pretense. I laughed and cried freely. I had parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and vague dreams of doing something in that distant time when I finally "grew up." I was in elementary school, and life was good.

Ok, so romanticizing childhood is a favored past-time of old people who feel they have missed the boat. I know just how whack my childhood was: I lived it, right? It was better than some and worse than others, but even then, I knew it was a blessing. A blessing that was dragged through mud and broken glass, a blessing that occasionally found itself lost in a metaphorical desert, bleeding and crying, but a blessing nonetheless.

I liked to draw as a kid. I was never any good, but I enjoyed art, especially in junior high. Painting and drawing, and, to a lesser degree, sculpting. Like shop class and home economics, art class produced something from working with my hands. Like most people, producing something tangible with my own hands was deeply satisfying.

I've always always enjoyed music. Not surprising, since most people I've met do. I have absolutely no skill in producing it. Strangely, in high school ALL of my friends were skilled musicians. One of my friends, a scientist-musician, once assured me that given my love of math, there was a musician inside me, but I'm still skeptical.

But there was never a question about my creative medium of choice. I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Not well, and not consistently, and (until the Internet) not publicly, but working with words, ideas, stories... has always been a part of who I am. At one point, in high school, I thought about becoming a writer, but even in high school, being "grown up" and making such decisions seemed far away (oh, silly dreamer! Methinks you needed a bucket of cold water and a swift kick in the rear).

It's odd, given the opportunities to write available to me now, that I don't. Well, not so odd. What keeps me from trying to produce anything of substance is fear. Fear that I have neither the ideas, the talent, nor the discipline to produce anything worth more than the self-published drivel that appears here. Strange, the ten-year-old me wrote a vampire story: pages of painful plot, silly dialogue, and stock characters. No fear, though. I kept it in a blue binder that had a Battlestar Galactica insignia sticker on the cover and spent hours on it: making changes, adding chapters, etc. Couldn't tell you whatever happened to it. It wasn't my first story, but it was the first one I remember working on.

Old people may romanticize childhood, and I am as guilty as the next codger. But maybe, in our defense, there was something romantic about childhood. Not merely the fabled innocence of childhood, the innocence being a necessary condition for the romance, but some largeness in our souls that, I don't know, for want of a better phrase, lived more than we do now.

Or maybe that's just more rose-colored navel-gazing. Dunno. I think of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien: grown ups who, I believe, kept a romantic vision that most of us seem to lose. In my best moments, I can almost see the grail, shimmering in the last rays of twilight, calling me West. Sometimes, I can sense Chesterton, just beyond the pale, like a Christian Obi-Wan Kenobi, urging me to take up my sabre. But usually, I just pay my bills and take my meds. And, that, as they say, is life.

In the Wake of the Rabbit Hole

jacob login:. welcome root. oh one two seven one eight three two. patch upload complete. sendmail compile in five four three two one.

wh1t3rabb1+: Hatter, you still online?

hatterm: Yeah, Rabbit. What's up?

wh1t3rabb1+: Not much, dullsville in server city tonight.

hatterm: Um...... ok?

wh1t3rabb1+: So, entertain me, man!

hatterm: Your dead end job. Not my problem. Besides, I'm kinda busy here.

wh1t3rabb1+: Do tell?

hatterm: I do have a life offline.

wh1t3rabb1+: So why are you typing right now?

hatterm: She's not here yet, and besides, I thought (foolishly!) that you might have wanted something important. Something related to the game.

wh1t3rabb1+: Game, shame, tame the lame, and does this SHE have a name?

hatterm: Not one you'd recognize.

wh1t3rabb1+: And what about our young friend with a penchant for blue gingham dresses and leather jackets? Does she know you're making late night tea with strange women?

hatterm: Why would she care?

wh1t3rabb1+: Oh, I doubt she would. But the question is, does she know?

hatterm: How would she? Some of us don't tweet our lives away. Speaking of: not a word of this!

wh1t3rabb1+: And why not? We've established no one cares.

hatterm: Yeah, well, my private life is, well, private.

wh1t3rabb1+: That's rich!

hatterm: I'd think a paranoid security freak would be sympathetic.

wh1t3rabb1+: Right, one who tweets his life away? I'm all about public things being as public as possible and private things being totally private. You texting your date makes it public.

hatterm: Whatever

wh1t3rabb1+: Anyway, compile's finished. Gotta reboot the email server. Don't do anything with her that I wouldn't!

hatterm: Dude, you're gay.

wh1t3rabb1+: And you could only be so lucky. Seriously, though. When the other she finds out, heads will roll. She might not care, but she cares, if you take my meaning. And even if you don't, I'm outta here )

Since When Does "Do No Evil" Include "Make Deals with Spooks"?!?

Google asks the NSA for help.

As loquacious as I am, I have no commentary. Just a prayer (and a rather strong desire to leave the Internet and buy a cabin in Montana or maybe one of those commercial flights into space, since US government sponsored flights are going to be a thing of the past, so kiss Starfleet good-bye, thank you very much Mr. President... but that, as they say, is another story.)

Snarky Comment

From a web site:

“Many useful academic materials are increasingly available via electronic online access.”

electronic online access? As opposed to, let’s say, “mechanical online access” or “steam-powered online access” or, in deference to the cyberpunks, “direct neural online access”?

Eris Gets Her Due!

An Android-based phone named after Eris! How amazingly cool is this?!? The Droid Eris, makes me wish I was a Verizon customer...

All This For One Little Rhyme?

Lemon Demon has a delightful little tune about the infamous Spring Heeled Jack (lyrics). I make this post only to document my quoting of this line:

And people in the area reek of mass hysteria

For some reason, this line has been making a lazy circuit in my head (completing a lap once every two and a half hours, which, perhaps, sheds light on the size of my head...)

Currently Reading

+ Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel (by John W. Dawson)
+ Against the Day (by Thomas Pynchon)
+ If Einstein Had Been a Surfer (by Peter Kreeft)

Just started Logical Dilemmas. Kurt Godel was the greatest logician of the 20th century. John W. Dawson is one of the scholars responsible for the publication of Godel's Collected Works and is therefore well-qualified to write a biography and commentary on Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems were the subject of my master's project in theology (basically a warning about how not to apply them to philosophical and theological topics).

Against the Day is long, to the tune of over a thousand pages. Mostly, my fiction reading these days is a bit shy of that (by some 700 plus pages). So far, the story is interesting, like most of Pynchon's work, and is filled with a cast of intriguing characters, crazy adventures, and deep wit. I know this will take me a while to finish, but so far, I am glad to be spending time in the company of the Chums of Chance. Hopefully, this will warm me up for the other two large novels I'm committed to reading in the coming year: Anathem (by Neal Stephenson) and The Brothers Karamazov (by, of course, Fyodor Dostoyevsky).

Peter Kreeft has never published a book that I have not (a) thoroughly enjoyed, and (b) been challenged and inspired by. Even his textbook on logic caused me to rethink my long standing prejudice against the "old" logic in favor of the "new" mathematical logic. If Einstein Had Been a Surfer is a conversation among three characters who individually represent science, philosophy, and mysticism (and yet, these are no two-dimensional allegorical personifications. Kreeft's characters are real people, even if they do not really exist). This book is about the search for a "Theory of Everything." The book itself does not present the details of such a Theory (no Nobel Prize in physics for Kreeft for this one!), but by talking around and through and about the issue, the reader is lead to understand better what such a theory would entail. As always from Kreeft, this work is a creative, well-reasoned piece of scholarship that is easy to take as entertainment (I'd say "mistake" but I rather suspect the reader is supposed to be entertained, in much the same way Plato entertained and instructed us with the Socratic dialogues). Recommended if you like thinking about everything.

Finding Love in Moonlight

What follows is fiction. This is not about anybody. Don't make any such assumptions, because you would be grievously mistaken...

I first saw you on the first of December. You were the moon, gently reflecting the light of the sun, bringing his light to my cold and empty night. Daylight is too bright for a sinner like me, too much of his revealing light shining in every crevice of my lies. You brought his light in slowly, waxing first from a mere sliver, giving me time to adjust to what I was beginning to see. At first I mistook you for a star, a twinkling angel in the firmament of my twilight, a bit of dazzle to distract me from the vast dark expanse of my vision. As the nights wore on, you shone more brightly, more fully, until at last I could not help but realize that you were no star, but a reflection of our star, the one true sun that lights our lands. So, you were the moon, and in your fullness, at your brightest, I saw only the light of the sun and learned therein that the day was not my enemy but rather my home. Funny, how at your brightest, I saw more clearly your flaws, your craters, which cast the only shadows in his light upon your face. Yet far from despising you, I loved you more, both for the individuality of those "flaws" and for the courage to allow his light to reveal them to everyone. For you cared only for the truth, for bringing a bit of the sun's light to those of us who crawl around in the night, covered in mud and slime, fearful of the heat of day. Men like me, who lived more like worms than men, until one night we might by chance look up from our blind writhing to see you there, smiling down at us. What I did not realize at the time, what I could not have understood at the time, was that I only saw your smile because of his light. Everything that I came to see, everything that I came to love, starting with my love for you, was only possible because of the sun's light. Without sunlight I would never have seen more than shadows, without the reflected sunlight on your face, I would never have known the beginnings of beauty. Though I now walk in the day, under the fullness of the sun's life-giving light, I cannot look upon his beauty directly. I still must see it reflected, his light bouncing from every created thing on this earth to bring joy and wonder and delight to my newly-opened eyes.

Sometimes, I miss you. I miss our long walks under the night sky, back when the only light I knew was what you reflected. I miss our animated discussions, our silly jokes, the enchanting sound of your voice: your singing, your laughing, your soft whsipers of love and hope. I miss you, and the missing hurts like a lost child. Without the moon, they say there is no life on earth. Yet, I still live. I live, and I am grateful... grateful that you brought light into my life, gave me the courage and the hunger to enter the daylight, to live as a human creature should live. You were the moon, and you gave me my first taste of real light, which led to real life and real love. It is too late to say everything I want to say, and that merely is what it is. But it is never too late to look up into the sky and whisper, "thank you." And so I say, "thank you."

Just Wondering

Counting backwards as the flame gets higher,
You tell yourself that there is no fire.
The heat you feel is just a lie,
You're much too bored to have to die

The cell phone rings, then drops the call,
Figure you miss one, you missed them all
Dinner's burning, can you smell the smoke?
It's just you cooking, and baby that's the joke

Wearily you laugh, tearfully you cry,
Tomorrow always comes, but never answers why

this moment

baby buddha
dressed in blue
how your mommy
must love you
bouncing on her
old brown knee
laughing at
eternity

Time to Return

Too long gone... no readers (which is mostly fine, though some of you I've missed like the dickens!) Time to retool this thing as a place to think and ramble (oh, wait... that what it's always been). Anyway, we'll see if we can start this thing up again. Even if it's just me, I can pretend to be in conversation with the nebulous and vaguely self-aware Internet.

Later (hopefully, tomorrow...)

Pneuma

the wind is my friend,
my lover,
my soul;
it fills me from the inside,
it moves me from without;
in it i
dance,
sing,
laugh,
run,
and,
sometimes,
fly;
the wind is my ocean
upon which i surf,
within which i swim,
it is my calm and my storm,
i know no other song
than its howl and whisper;
i know no other caress
than its breezes and gusts;
it is my spirit and my breath,
it is my life