Antikythera thought, initially, that the Antikythera mechanism was designed to produce some sort of anti-love field. Anti-kythera--> Anti-Cytherea, dig? Later he learned that Antikythera meant something more along the lines of "piddling little rock across the water from the island of Kythera," and that the Antikythera Device was actually an extraordinarily cool ancient Greek mechanical computer. He was both disappointed and elated.

Instant message me, if you want. Of course, if you're looking at this homenode, I probably know you anyway--but my AIM screenname = suede1024.

----------------------------

hello world:

you think i'm here with you, and it is true that i talk and walk and move things around as if i really were present-

but the truth is that i'm not. much of the time i live in dreams, and in half-voiced conversations with people who are absent, or maybe just non-existent, and i am everywhere, everywhere at once, and if i seem solid to you, if i seem unmoving and stable, it's only surface tension, it's only all of the vectors balancing each other out, all the particles of me straining in exactly opposite directions. it's always been like that. i remember once on a class trip in college, sitting in the back of a minivan driven by our professor, riding through the berkshires, and passing through all of these places named after other places: florida, troy, hampshire, leyden. i was there and i wasn't, i was in the car and on the walls as helen murmured the names of heroes, shivering in the new england cold and walking under palm trees. and parts of me were moving in the good gray winter air, while others lay in the warm bed of the night before or the night to come and ran fingers through sweet smelling hair settling like a cloud, and others sat silent in a bare room and listened to their parents shouting at each other, and other parts of me were walking through the woods, and there were a few that hopped from snowflake to settling snowflake or ran between them, counting. somebody walk with me, please, i remember half-praying. somebody who will exist in all of the places where i exist, or at least be my neighbor.

these dreams are so real to me. sometimes i think that they are phantom memories salmon-swimming upstream from the wrong end of time, maybe, coming from universes that will never exist, sweet fruit of seeds that never took root-seeds that they themselves plant, really, i suppose, if they are really like salmon coming to mate and die. ghost futures remembered in and generated by memories that will never become memories, memories that will be forgotten before the event.

they are seeping through the quantum foam. electrons entangled with alternate universe versions of themselves, jumping from the nerve endings of one of my alternates to mine; the synaptic gaps of the universe.

how i envy some of them, my other selves, the ones i will never know.

----------------------------

If at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches--how empty and devoid of comfort would life be. (soren k.)

----------------------------

i can't go on. i'll go on. (sammy b.)

----------------------------

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom, like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands. (herm m.)

Tired today, mind a blank. Tried reading some Bulgakov, felt half-hearted, quarter-hearted, drawn-and-quartered, nickel-and-dimed, loose-changed, chinking in my chest? Yes, something of the sort. Not all of this, probably, is straight up depression, although I've been feeling spiky and twisted as my own handwriting. Maybe some of it is just from being tired, bone and muscle and blood. Koshered, cashiered cashed bled white and clean and pure. Maybe some of it is just phantom pain. I am feeling things in detached places. Separated out from the meat of life, some autopsy? Canopic jars containing my brain, yes.

I would like to be expansive and whimsical, ironical and witty. To be quick, quick, that would be a boon, wouldn't it? To be a tease in the world; to be at ease in the world. Easy enough not to worry about the poverty of my self that way.

To be a bike messenger would be nice, slipping through the cracks of traffic, legs and blood pumping. You wouldn't see me passing by, just feel the wind. To be fast fast light and invisible, needing only a well oiled chain and reasonably good weather.

Yeah that would be nice. Or else if I could fall fall fall. just fall forever.

I've wondered: the last thing in your head when you die: does that moment stretch on forever? What boundary could there be there? If time is infinitely sub-dividable, a nano second is eternity, or close enough. Yes thank you Zeno.

Well though what's close enough to eternity? Either you continue indefinitely or you don't, either you are you or you're not. What middle ground is there?

Whatever we are,
we need, I've decided, to hang on to it all with all we've got. All we've got in the end are our thoughts, the words in our heads. To make those words good: that's our purpose, yes? Maybe? When you are your words, when you are the sentence that you speak as you die: make them good. When the book ends: yes yes I do yes. What words could be better?