06.24.04 - 6:02 p.m.

Someone has cleaned out the remnants lingering in his mailbox - a task for which I have never the time nor the patience, I think. For all my occasionally obsessive need to keep things around I never look at them later. I have old... well, love or whatever letters stuffed into the bottom drawer of my desk. They gave me such pleasure years ago (before, you know, the internet destroyed the need to write such letters in your own cracked and wild hand) when I received them. I would sit and obsess over them, and write back in obsessive detail, paying close attention to the details of penmanship (mine is bad, but it can perhaps appear erudite, my printing at least, when I think to pay close, scouring attention), stationary selection. Since I was a Poet and a Deep Thinker I could not have kittens or hallmarky religious flowers or anything midwestern of kitschy. I preferred celestial themes, moons to suns, but stylized suns would do, and brown-y paper that looked a bit more handmade. Sometimes I would pick out clever little envelopes and sayings, and I even had a signature farewell line that I cribbed somewhere. Love letters: yours throughout the chaos and madness; Regular letters: throughout the chaos and madness. Because there was chaos! and there was madness!

I'm already off-track. I had a purpose for this entry, a purpose which has since flown out of the window. I just switched off the daily classical music fest (WVPR) and slipped a CD into the computer instead: Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot since I'm going to go buy A Ghost is Born this afternoon. "Radio Cure" is on right now, and I'm listening to the line (which repeats, over and over again) "All distance has a way of making love understandable." It struck me immediately that this was profound and clearly applicable to the whole embarrassing bit above, except: it has NOTHING to do with it. Distance pulls you away from the headlong rush of something. Suddenly, - and particularly for someone as headstrong, emotional, and obsessive as me (I don't show it IRL. I'm reserved and withdrawn except when things click, and then it usually isn't about me.) - the world doesn't end at the edge of whatever particular horizon I've constructed. If distance hasn't made any of that - years ago, any of it - understandable, it has at least made it both endurable and forgiveable. I would like to go back and hold my own hand through some of it, but I'm as stuck in my particular time and space as my old self is. It's all quite brilliant and all quite sad.

I think I've reached a decision about those old letters, though. I'm going to trash them. I loved them as much for what they did for my ego. Everything was a pose. I don't remember any contents, but I don't believe I wish to remember the contents. I can't even remember some names. Ten years ago someone killed himself - how to say it, for me? in my name? it wasn't either. It was because he was crazed and unstable. I suspect I got off lightly with the suicide note. Had he made the transition from crazed-bad-poet stalker to full-blown scary stalker, I would have had a harder time of things. All that and now, ten years out - I don't remember his name. Oh, it was John. John something - but that's what time does, it stretches things until they are thin and watery and meaningless, or until all you have left is not the storm of guilt and self-importance, but just a little contempt and a little sorrow. So, that's what I have for John: a little contempt, a little sorrow. I was just some invention on which he could hang his hat.

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This wasn't meant to be some meditation on my past, though. This entry had a whole other purpose, and just turned around and ate its tail, instead. The original purpose: to whine about someone's constant need to disclaim things I like - or liked, at the time - as overwrought. It seems as if everytime I turn around, someone's feeling the need to apologize for something in which I was involved, if only to - I don't know. But I'm still here, and overwrought and silly as anything may have been, I had fun and I won't apologize, my goodness. If I apologize for my overdramatics in the past, do I apologize for them now? Should I give up roleplaying forever - and the writers I've met - because I'm paralyzed by some addiction to contemporary verit�Moreover, I spent an awfully long time sitting around writing stuff I didn't finish - couldn't finish, really - eh, all that time. Wasted, or something like it. Even if Jaione was thoroughly plundered from Tigana, I still liked her, and I think that the plot wouldn't make a bad fantasy novel, except I'm no good at coming up with fantasy novel themes. I have exacting standards when it comes to novels, and I'm not likely to write something that will live up to those standards and if I write a real something, it's not likely to be fantasy.

What were my (rather grandiose) plans when I was writing the mutual short-story stuff that spun off of the few scenes we played (the scenes, by the way, were excellent, in my memory)? That's what I wanted to write about, to start to expunge yet another ghost of some old creation who has lingered in my mind, who has resurfaced, periodically. I started this entry to exorcise some figment of my mind, and found a different instead. So: Jaione. I never even made it to the point where she was starting to take back the islands. I'm not a great plotter, I've realized. I'm a great texturalist, but not a spectacular plotter so I probably needed some good plotter to whip me into shape after all my maundering ideas. (Oh - and the Drowned God. At the time, I knew that I was stealing it from somewhere, but I didn't know from where! Shortly after that, I reread GRRM and realized what was up.)

Wow - profane to profound back to the quotidian, quite the journey in a few hours. I've run out of time for consideration today, though, so this will have to wait. :(