Monday, November 21, 2005

Ironies of Life

Its funny, when we're growing up we make ourselves these little promises: Oh i'll never do that as a parent, oh i'll never be that gawky teen trying to fit in, oh i'll never be the person who lies about studying, oh i'll never be ______. you know what i mean. thing is, 10, 20 years down the track, if you have any metacognitive faculties at all, you realise you haven't quite stuck to the things you planned to.

oh what a tangled web we weave
when the future try we to perceive


In this case, I always looked at people who let their blogs go dead and thought to myself "Gee I'll never do that! I will always have time and creative energy!".

And yet look at my blog today. The most recent entry was 3 months ago! Hardly inspiring, i might say. ("Downright shoddy and disgraceful!" scream my detractors. Although me HAVING any detractors by now is about as likely as a 3-month old corpse having detractors. Come to think of it, the line there between analogy and reality is very insubstantial, like soggy bread.)

So... yes, I'm still alive. No, I haven't started another blog. No, that isn't a cunning ploy to cover up the fact that I HAVE in fact started another blog, and wish merely to put you people off the scent/track/trail (i provide alternatives in case you protest that you are not hounds/deer hunters/wild pigs in the jungle).


The truth is that I have simply fallen to the depredations of Time, and - to harp once more upon that lovely Law - Mighty Number Two of the Thermodynami persuasion says that things get less and less maintained as days pass us by. For the last 3 months, this blog has been testimony to that.

Now, however, I arrive, a bolt out of the blue, Anti-Physics Man!



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Long windedness is all very well, but you and I both know that everything above the stars was really my way of saying "I'm Back!" But then, we wouldnt have it any other way, would we?


Time steals through the night of Life
A dream, from which we soon wake
A thief, a crow, he snatches the shiny
Leaving only dross.



I look at the world I find myself in these days and I dont really like what I see. Hell, half the time I can't even believe some of it is real. We've got people threatening Australian leaders on one hand, citizens of Singapore dropping like flies (the murder/suicide/accident rates do seem to be increasing alarmingly), terrorist threats virtually around the clock, and to top it all off there's a book fair on at Bras Basah that I quite possibly will miss.

But seriously, I think that we're approaching something big. Either the Biblical End Times - a possibility I in no way discount, by the way - or we're heading for collapse into anarchy, where the world as we know it will burn, and new civilizations arise from its ashes. I'm a firm believer in the idea of cycles in Humanity's existence - initial steady but slow growth, period of developement, stagnation, Renaissance, and war peppered through it all as the necessary goad - and I'd say its quite possible that the events we see now are the lead pipes to 2005's Rome.

But who knows? I'm also a believer in the idea that the world today isn't really that much different to the world 2500 years ago (you can change the clothes on Homo Sapiens, and give him some cooler toys to play with that make more flashes and sounds, but nothing incredibly substantial is different) so maybe all that's happened is that we're more aware of the world around us than we were 30 or 40 years ago. Who's to say if the Beatniks and company were better off?


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I've been wondering about starting a book blog. I'm not quite sure about the existence of decent ones at the moment, and I don't know how well mine would be received, but I think it wouldn't do too badly, since I'm open to pretty much any genre, and I read 2 or 3 books a week :) let me know of any opinions or ideas! Email address is on the left.


While on the subject of books, Book 11 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is out, and honour of the immensity of that I started again from book 1 recently. I'm finishing book 9 now, and I can't wait!




I can't believe soon it will have been one entire glorious, wonderful, love-filled year. I love you to pieces!




Here I end, the savour of joy renewed
Still sweet upon my lips.