Another anniversary, a third yet throbbing

Upon my twenty-first birthday, a sonnet of Shakespeare:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.


Upon a withered helm:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state it self confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.


Chanson du jour: Innocence Mission, Going Away

At our seventh anniversary, I get dumped

I met her in a yellowed room when she was grey, and her's was a young, young world. We started out when
I told her my name and she gave me a password, a password that unlocked a world between us of
companionship; she was the gateway to an unprecedented communication that changed my life and the way
that I viewed the world. She was always at my service, though I didn't deserve it. She didn't ask for much.
Then again, a relationship that is true and right never requires a price. I looked after her, too, and was
careful to protect her from the maliciousness of this new corrupted world, and she did the same to me.
Together, we stepped from ourselves and gave to each other a little piece of ourselves--I told her the deepest
truths of who I am, revealing unhesitantely to her my thoughts dire and exhilerated, lavish and those of such
modesty that was meant to passively turn a head. She read them back to me in the late hours of the night,
and she was there to tap the exuberance of years and years of life pursuits. We were a pair, and I shared
my world with her. I was faithful (and in a true companionship that goes without saying), and with her I
opened the doors of this life with confidence, ease, and a remarkable edgeless reservation, a humility, an
indescribable sense of fate and consequence (oh those doors and where they led!). Most of all, I trusted
her, and she was with me without fail during every step we took, together. But today, I discovered in
dismay and a rush of loss that made me aware of an obliterated record of my history (ours), my beloved--
whom I will call by the first name I knew her--dumped me, left me, forgot me, quit, fled or was seized,
usurped, thefted, killed. Whatever the truth may be, I have lost my dear HoTMaiL, and my account of
seven years will never return. Suitably, I shall never return to it. All I have is the naive hope that the
truth is not what it seems. I cling to the possibility that she was indeed seized from me, and now I must
endure my liebestod slowly, deeply, madly. I hear the bells tolling, tolling rigid in the empty night.


Chanson du jour: a moment of silence.

What I did with a month of no internet access

I tried to post an entry from Beaver Island, but that was thwarted. Now I'm too exhuasted to recount my vacation
to the Island in the detail that I would like, but I will say that it was blissful. The Island is a model for the economy
of a post-imperial America: localized economy, interdependent services, community dependency, and growth control.
Beaver Island is what towns across the country should resemble. No wastelands of sprawl with the charm of a Nazi
death camp, no warehouses of surplus crap manufactured by toiling laborers in countries most Americans are too
dumb to know of, no grease sponge strip restaurants, no chain lube-n-go auto clinics, no desolate pods of vinyl and
wallboard McHouses in the scorching sun and clay front yards incomprehensively twisting their way through former
farms and productive rural land, and finally--ulitmately, miraculously--no carcinogenic floodwater of automobiles
overwhelming infrastructure. People there don't use their cars to joyride between big box merchandise emporiums
and their estate community.

I saw the aurora borealis three times, the Milky Way every night, gazed at the moon through a 4mm lens on a 144mm
telescope--close enough to watch it move out of view in just a few seconds, I went horseback riding, ate smelt and
whitefish almost every day caught from the Lake that morning, I hiked through environments unique in the world,
and best of all, I was secluded--utterly secluded--from the frivolity of this doped up modern world of ours.

To illustrate this frivolity, read this article in the Detroit Free Press from Tuesday, September 9, 2003:


Population swings from Oakland to Macomb
Neighboring county attracting residents with more home for the money, down-to-earth feel http://www.freep.com/news/locmac/move9_20030909.htm


The article is about the trend of people moving from the wasteland of sprawl outside of Detroit called Oakland
County to another, newer, blossoming wasteland of sprawl to the north called Macomb County. Here are some
quotations from the article so that you can get an idea of how fuckin' stupid these people are:


The Magers not only found an upscale home for less money [in Macomb County], they also got more time to enjoy
it. Tom Mager said a comparable house in Oakland would have meant a much longer commute.

"Traffic was just getting worse every year," he said.

The family has also discovered Lake St. Clair.

"There's something about the lake," Mager said. "I don't know what it does to people, but they seem to be friendlier
than anyplace else I've gone."


a.) there's that overused kitschified and worshiped word 'upscale' again. What the hell does that mean? Essentially,
it is the word politicos, developers, journalists, and comatose suburbanites like to use to describe their sordid cess pool
of an environment--the wasteland that they've been duped into believing is luxurious and entitled.

b.) no shit traffic was just getting worse every year. That's what happens when assholes like you move to the middle of cornfields and have to drive every-fuckin'-where. It's what happens in a car-dependent society that values
the freedom to drive absolutely positively everywhere--anywhere--anybody feels they have the God-given
right to drive. People that make traffic overload to an absurd degree possible are called property rights advocates (maniacs).

c.) the thing about the Lake that's so charming is that people who live on it realize that they have something in their
lives that nobody else in the suburban junkscape has--something worth preserving and caring for; something that makes
their experience fulfilling and unique--not totally mundane, anonymous, trite, insignificant, inconsequential, comatose,
sordid, vacuous, and lame like the four million people populating the I-74/I-96/I-94 corridors outside of one of America's
formerly most productive and successful cities.

Well, more rant later--I never got to what I did with a month of no internet access.


Chanson du jour: Lauryn Hill, Adam Lives in Theory