Dark

Sluggo got a nice de-frag, and now Outrage Express has become more unstable than ever. As I've said, computers hate me.

A while ago, I had to take what looked like a small, albino grasshopper outside. I don't know how it got into the house, but it was perched on the front of my CD player. It looked quite elegant, really; a pale, angular bug against the shiny black disc tray door. I would like to have kept it, but I know it would have been eaten by a cat, so I caught it in a tissue (gently, of course) and released it on the front lawn. May it thrive, whatever it is.

Though the clouds have not altogether dissipated, the night has cooled, and is more pleasant than the previous night. The waxing moon set early, and the long, moonless part of the night was punctuated by periods of soft wind which hummed in the pines. The wind is always at its best on the darkest nights, when its effects can barely be seen, but clearly heard. It creates a sense of vastness then, as though distant speech had been reduced to whispers running along the walls of an immense, darkened hall. And all the time, the crickets measured time, reminding me of the transience of all things human, thus filling me with delight.

Crowd

The thing I've always liked about urban crowds was that being among them is so much like going to the beach. They flow along the sidewalks in patterns set largely by the traffic signals, gather on park benches or at bus stops that are like tidal pools, flow in and out of doorways as waves flow around rocks. Urban crowds are apparent chaos which follows an underlying order. Walking through busy streets, I am aware of myself being part of this fractal geometry in which randomness -- even my own -- is absorbed into a pattern. As anonymous as drops of water in a wash of foam, the members of the crowd are absorbed, their wills subsumed in nature. Here and there, an odd bit of detritus floats; a ranter, a street preacher, a panhandler. They are like the strange bits of marine life caught in pools or washed onto the sand. But even these who stand out are part of that crowd, swept into the great pattern despite their eccentricity. It's been a long time since I've seen one of those crowds. Shoppers at a mall don't generate that sense of randomness generating order which real street crowds bring. As much as I enjoy watching flights of birds or drifting masses of cloud, I miss the crowd, and I miss becoming an anonymous part of it.

Hey! What Happened?

XColibur, huh? I miss Dystopia. I liked the ugly sidebar! That little script thing up at the top of the page that replaces the sidebar is awfully touchy, especially when you have a crappy mouse, as I do. OK, it does look a lot cleaner this way, but it's going to take a lot of getting used to.

My user icon says "ouch!" It's awfully cramped up there in that corner. I guess I'll look at those options they mentioned on the log-in page. See if they've got something better.

Don't you wish that some of the effort taken to create this style had been spent making the site more reliable? I do.