As it was written, so it shall be. The external hard drive upon which my media lived has given up the ghost, and with it so too the 100 gigs of music I'd shoved on there in the last couple years. It could have been the little-death that brigs total obliteration.

I will face this. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where it has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thank God for Last.fm, though. My library is more or less available there already, albeit in a less-than-ideal setup for browsing.

This has been one weird week. I don't think I've slept more than 3 hours a night, I've been so busy and energetic, and still so many things remain undone.

The Past is not dead. In fact, it isn't even past.

What I've been thinking about when I should be trying to line up my next freelance gig: the scattered history of my words the internet. Well, the unsolicited ones.

1997 - My first website. It may still exist, somewhere in the miasma, buried in digital rubble under Geocties. It was a class assignment. Hartwell was the instructor, if I remember correctly. He must have been 25 when he taught that class - my age. I believe the site was about the Knights Templar -- cannily, I just posted the text of some research paper I did in Social Sciences -- that instructor was also the faculty advisor of the middle school drama club, of which I was a charter member. I got perfect marks in his Social Studies class, if I remember correctly. I definately remember shotguning cans of Budweiser with a kid named... Justin I think? -- quite a number of times before attending his class.

I am willing to bet my first webpage had an animated .gif of Gokou doing a kamahamaha.

1998/1999 - I certainly continued to goof around with HTML during this time, but the only site that ever went live was a very 1998 "fansite" regarding Dan Simmons' Hugo award winning "Hyperion." The internet not being what it is today - my intelligence was equally primitive, at the time - I was oblivious to most of the allusions to classical and Romantic literature and philosophy. I just thought Keats was a cool name for a cyborg, and Hyperion an awesome name for a crazy science fiction planet.

I wish I still had those books.

2003-2007: Ah, the livejournal. It was everything a livejournal is known to be: angsty, hormonal, embarrassing in the earliest entries (must have been before spell check was standard in every browser), quaint, occastionally revelatory. Over four years, I posted nearly 700,000 words before nuking it. All saved on my hard drive, thank God.

2007+: Who knows? There's this thing, the videogame thing, the fiction thing, quite a few myspace blog posts of substance... it's a mess. And it's almost universally terrible writing, lazy and sloppy, usually written after drinking a little too much coffee or alchohol. If there is a hell, I imagine my punishment will involve hearing the innumerable message board posts I've stupidly made recited to me forevermore.

It's ninteen miles to the coast.

Grapefruit Spoons

He looked up.

"Well?" she whispered.

"There are men out there. Men with ambitions, great ones. I have no ambitions."

"You have that paper cutout of Will Smith's face."

"I cut out the eyes. Stuck thumb tacks in his ears. Thought it would remind me of someone."

"Did it?"

"You tell me."

A grapefruit spoon suddenly manifested itself in his hand.

Looking though my archives, I came to find my "fiction" folder - wherein my scraps of half completed novels and short fictions and one act plays and ill conceived screen treatments and NaNoWriMo projects and other ephemera rest on my portable hard drive - has gone nearly a year without any alterations.

This will not cotton, no sir, and *this I vow*: once a week, every friday, at least a sentence of narrative fiction will be posted. I can automate these blogger things, right? So that every week, at least one sentence will auto post at 1:00AM Saturday?

Let's hope so.