KRONOS

Mar 15, 2005 0:07pm

If you think about who you are now and how much you’ve grown in recent years, how far back do you have to go before you were someone who you wouldn’t now trust to make an important decision? This is your most recent medecessor. (I have my friend Hanne to thank for this charming and apposite word.)

There is no decision I wouldn’t trust the Chris of yesterday to make for me, the Chris of today (except perhaps what to have for breakfast). On the other hand, there is very little I would trust Chris -5yrs with (except perhaps what to have for lunch). Since I first came up with this idea in my teens, the TPM (Time to Previous Medecessor, naturally) has varied widely, from hours to weeks to months and even years. On at least half a dozen occasions in my life my TPM was measurable in minutes, as my psyche was hastily remodelled by the brutal hammer blows of Love, Death or Revelation.

What’s your TPM?

Imagine if you could graph the TPM for every moment of your life, with Time on the x-axis and TPM on the y-axis. What would the shape of the graph be? And — even more interesting — what would you *like* the shape to be? A series of peaks and troughs, a line which asymptotically approaches zero, or an infinitely ascending staircase?

It’s difficult to say for sure, but I think my TPM right now is only weeks. Difficult to say because there is nothing specific I can identify as some kind of tipping point. What has changed? Also hard to answer, but I can characterise it as a kind of settling within. Some changes are sudden, violent, the result of deep tectonic forces. Other changes are more elusive and organic, less perceptible but potentially more significant. Time will show.

***

The other night I went to see the KRONOS QUARTET play in Brisbane. Two violins, a viola and a cello. You might know them from the ‘Requiem for a Dream’ soundtrack; at least, that was my introduction. They performed works by Australian, European and American composers, including a rendition of a Sigur Ros song and a Hendrix-inspired Star-Spangled Banner as encores. The evening was sublime. Music can claim to be the greatest of arts, being both timeless pattern and time-bound expression. At its best it approaches Theatre.

As I watched the four players, they seemed to me the epitome of Flow, each utterly absorbed by their instrument, yet relaxed, each completely aware of the other three, yet free. (Perhaps not surprising when you learn the group is older than I am.) I’ve been reading about Flow lately, trying to understand how to get into the zone as often as possible. That exhilarating feeling of being so completely absorbed in doing something challenging but achievable that Time dissolves. Listening attentively to Kronos, I approached Flow.

The psychologist Cziksentmihalyi distinguishes people with intrinsic motivation from people with extrinsic motivation. The former are, in the words of Horace, “complete in themselves, smooth and round like a globe”. The latter are the channel-surfers of life, the ones always looking for distractions because they don’t have sufficient internal resources to weave their own meaning from the world. An extreme illustration of this is how people react to solitary confinement. Some people survive relatively unscathed, sustained by internal worlds — one WWII POW even managed to improve his golf handicap, simply by mentally playing a full 18 holes every day. The others go mad.

If you were confined in isolation, what mental resources would you have to sustain Flow? In my case I’m not sure. I’ve begun to memorise things, especially other people’s words — just in case I’m ever subjected to 12 months solitary confinement. A better memory does have other fringe benefits, of course, but training for solitary confinement sounds a tad more exciting than remembering to buy some toothpaste next time I’m at the local Night-Owl.

***

Time had a beginning, and presumably will have an end. In my case Time will end on Sunday, April 23, 2051. At least according to http://www.deathclock.com, which calculates your Personal Day of Death. It sounds a bit morbid, but I think it concentrates the mind wonderfully to consider the flickering numbers, like the digital count-down to a blockbuster you pray won’t be a non-event.

At the very second I am writing this, I have only 1,454,909,477 seconds to live.

I think I’ll live a little longer than that. Assuming everything goes according to plan, of course. Life is terribly, wonderfully uncertain. In a few short months it will be two years since Veronika died. Hard to believe that she is already so far down the dark tunnel of time. I managed to ignore the anniversary last year, but I will mark it in some way this year. Connecting to the memories, to fortify them against Entropy. And in so doing change them, like an Egyptologist wandering through a tomb examining the dusty artefacts and taking notes.

I had a dinner party a couple of weeks ago with my Brisbane friends. Twelve people crammed into my little courtyard of plants and tadpoles, all eating, drinking, talking amongst the candles. It was a good night, a shared memory minted fresh and added to the image-hoard. Vero would have enjoyed herself, like I did those nights in Jinan when friends gathered in her home. It got me thinking about happiness and contentment, how often it lies in the future, or in the past. No matter how many times I tell myself to enjoy the living moment. I think, with tongue only slightly in cheek, that a rough measure of happiness is given by T-GOD, or Time to the Good Old Days. Now, for the first time I can recall, I can say that T-GOD=0.

***

Time. A very strange thing. The physicists suspect it doesn’t even exist, but tell that to those of us stuck on Einstein’s train, our noses pressed to the glass as the light flashes before our eyes, never to be seen again.

Heh. What will my medescendants make of all this? And what is my TNM?

~Chris Darko

p.s. By the way, those growing impatient with my solipsistic navel-gazing over the past couple of years, take heart. I have begun planning my next journey. In 2006 I am returning to the jungles of Papua New Guinea, where Time began.

Victorious Spelunking in the Wireless Cranium

Mon Apr 26, 2004 9:57pm

It’s not easy to write interesting things about your own country. So many of the telling details are invisible to you. Over the weekend I flew down to Sydney. The main reason was to see Radiohead, which – according to the number of CDs in my collection – is my favourite band. But I also managed to fit in an IMAX documentary on the Sun, some theatre, and a trip to the art gallery to reacquaint myself with the treasures of the Shanghai Museum.

‘Victory’ is set during the 17th century in the depraved court of Charles II, where the king fucks his concubine in open view and the widow of a failed revolutionary endures rape and other degradations while attempting to recover her husband’s dismembered body. Barker’s language is vibrant, bloody, hacking into Decorum’s milk-white torso like a manic woodchopper. It was a cruel, bitter play, but also one with an unsparing wit and moments of tenderness, with things to say about life in a changing world. Among other things, it’s an actor’s dream script, and the players attacked it with vim, spittle flying from their lips.

The bleak outlook on the human condition was echoed in the Radiohead concert. Firstly, by the nameless Aussie support act, who appeared to have deluded themselves into thinking that tossing punk, rap, metal and electronica into a blunt blender and shaking furiously would distil the nectar of the rock gods. It didn’t. Not even when the lead singer writhed on the floor. Even their retorts to the (equally weak) catcalls of “You suck!” lacked bite. (In the interests of appearing objective, I should add that some people did cheer for them, so maybe they were better than I thought.)

Secondly, by Radiohead’s emotional symphony to the 21st century.

For some reason I sleep little or not at all before a flight. Usually it’s because I’m packing, even when I’m leaving the country for a year. This was for one night, but I still only slept a few hours before I had to get up for my 5am taxi. It’s the anticipation, I think. Travel lifts my spirits like nothing else I know. The freedom of travel is probably just another form of bondage, but it’s one that makes me happy. My lack of sleep – and a glass of wine – meant I was distinctly drowsy by the time Radiohead arrived on stage. As the night progressed the music took on an increasingly somnolent, ominous air. If the play was organic ego, this was electronic id.

Despite the capacity crowd, the stadium was still. Even the mosh pit was motionless for long stretches, as if the people were attending midnight mass rather than a rock concert. But this was the stillness of an intent audience, compared with the brownian motion that greeted the first performance; there was no mistaking the audience response at the beginning and end of each song for apathy. I enjoyed the entire show, even as I felt slightly disturbed that this is the music that speaks to us. The standout for me was the driving rhythmic bass of ‘The National Anthem’.

The image of the night that will stick with me though was in its dying moments, ‘Everything in its Right Place’. Thom Yorke’s eerie voice finally fell silent and one by one the band members filed off stage, until the screens were filled with grainy pictures of the last one. From the back row but one his crouching body was the size of an insect, but turning our attention to the screens we could see a human figure crawling over an ancient console of knobs and switches, making adjustments randomly, like a young Doctor Who. Finally, he too departed, leaving the machine to play itself. It sounded like a choir of tortured whales. Above the stage scrolled a text message in demonic red: ERFOREVERFOREVERFOREVERFOREV.

Everything switched off.

***

Yesterday was ANZAC Day, when Australians rise in darkness to celebrate our defacto national day and recall the forebears who, at 4.28am on April 25, 1915, went to their slaughter beneath the cliffs of Gallipoli. We commemorate defeat half a world away, not victory on our own soil. One important part of the rather strange amalgam of attitudes and beliefs that make up the Australian character. And I say this as someone who feels chills when the bugle plays The Last Post. Somewhere between starting (and hating) school here in 1989, and today, I became an Australian.

I’ve sensed in recent times that we are finally throwing off our defeatism and beginning to accept that we can achieve as much, and sometimes more, than the other peoples of the world. Of course, any attempt to capture the zeitgeist only succeeds in recording oneself. Perhaps it was just the cosmopolitanism of Sydney, where the buskers near the Sydney Opera House included a dread-locked Jamaican on steel drums, a Chinaman on erhu, some Aboriginals on didgeridoo and drum machine, an American on unicycle, an Asian girl on violin, some bloke on bongos playing half-heartedly to a tape of corny Australian songs, and a couple of true blue Aussies, spray-painted in silver and frozen in ridiculous poses, on drugs. Australian flags were everywhere, as the ANZAC Day Parade finished and the crowds flocked to the foreshore, among them old diggers in suits and medals and wraparound sunglasses.

I read an article which argued that the reason for the success of Australians on the various battlefields of the last century wasn’t supreme sporting prowess, endurance, anti-authoritarianism, moral superiority, mateship or any of the other pillars of Australianism (for Australians can talk the talk, if not always walk the walk). It actually lay in our ability to innovate, to learn new ways of doing things. Our generals were better educated than those of other armies and the soldiers unbounded by ritual and tradition. This may or may not be true (and, if judged solely on my own military experience, not very well-supported) and it is just as much a part of the Australian myth as all those other things. In my mind though it points to one of Australia’s strengths: it is a new country, a slate largely empty of all the tired and dangerous associations that choke other parts of the world. We’re not quite there, not quite ready to embrace uncertainty, possibility. We have yet to come to terms with the Martian landscape at our core – and its people – and we still hang a little too much on the praise of strangers. But in the kind of world we live in, I can think of no better quality for a society to have than a readiness to adapt to change. Even if this does mean mobile phone usage is so high that some mating native birds now triumphantly cry out the latest ringtone.

People often worry about my other parent, America, colonising Australian culture. Perhaps Americans should be the worried ones. Aside from Oscar success, Australians are also in charge of Coca-Cola and McDonalds, those bastions of US commerce. Some might question whether that’s a good thing, but just as business follows culture, so too does culture business. Of course, for all my jingoism, I’m still going to leave this shitty country as soon as I can. How very Australian.

***

It’s a strange world we live in, one where biotech, nanotech, and infotech are all converging toward organic silence. Or death. The knobs and switches are being absorbed into our skin, like a suicide bomb. But I’m optimistic. So long as we can crack open the wireless cranium, and understand ourselves. An Australian invented the black box; perhaps others can help defuse the mind before it reaches critical mass. The former leader of Hamas said, shortly before he was killed, that the terrorists will win because they love death and their enemies love life. If that’s defeat, bring it on.

~Chris

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hydrolith

p.s. You can hear Radiohead live Tuesday April 27 @ 9pm Australian EST: http://www.triplej.abc.net.au

Switch to Normal View

May 18, 2003 5:40pm

The wheels of the Sydney-bound plane lifted off the Hong Kong tarmac and we ascended steeply into the sky, the lights of the metropolis below a Christmas tree jungle. A few moments later we hit rough turbulence. I was flicking through the radio channels at the time, and got to thinking which one would be the best choice if we began to steeply de-scend.

Jazz and pop didn’t fit. Classical could work, but there was nothing dark enough. The comedy channel was out – I might not get to hear the punch line. And listening to the breathy woman on the New Age channel as I plunged to my death – “you are feeling serene and peaceful” – would only ensure my last moments were spent screaming in terror.

No, the only real choice was classic rock. Falling out of the sky to the pumping sound of Don’t Change (“The sky above won’t fall down”) or Don’t Fear the Reaper would somehow be strangely comforting. Perhaps because it encourages the idea that the moment is part of a story – that on the other side of the screen is a crowd of pimply teenagers who’ll go out and buy the soundtrack after the movie is over. Or maybe it’s just that playing air guitar as you skydive in a giant coffin is a great way to go out.

I didn’t find out. But I enjoyed the music anyway. I’ve missed good music this past year, especially while travelling. I don’t think I’ll ever bring myself to pack headphones (it defeats the purpose) but by the end of my trip any old rock song got the blood rushing. Pathetic really. I’m not sure if it’s because I enjoy music so much, or simply because the sound of background music is something that envelopes us in the West, so much so that we’re as oblivious to it’s presence as fish in a sea of electronic waves. Until it’s gone.

Not that China lacks tunes. It’s just that the modern variety is generally dire, so I avoided it as much as possible, a difficult thing to do when a karaoke DVD is looping on a long bus ride. Some westerners claim to like it, but they’re usually long-term residents; it’s probably a psychological coping mechanism. Various boy and girl bands compete to see how far they can debase the standards set by luminaries such as Britney Spice and the Backstreet Boys. And if Kenny G is getting a fraction of the royalties owed to him, he must be one of the richest people in the world. Even I began to crack towards the end, playing a certain song from a certain movie to a rapturous class one day as a listening exercise, a listening exercise involving listening to it six times. That’s a lot of listening. If you don’t know the one I mean, be thankful.

***

I have a feeling that if you travel long enough, eventually reality slips sideways and you find yourself somewhere that doesn’t appear in any guide book, somewhere with strange people and stranger customs. And when you email people to tell them about it, it gets sent to all the same names, but the people are completely different from the ones you knew.

I wasn’t travelling that long, as nomadic lives go, but already by the end of my trip cracks in reality were beginning to appear. For example, as I was departing Chengdu from the long-distance bus station a dark tower sprang up from the base of the highway, like a mushroom from a concrete buttress root. Escaping from the nightmare of a Chinese Tim Burton, it was a stack of black and red pavilions with kaleidoscopic corners that kept going up, like a rearing centipede. At the top it split into five demonic turrets, the centre one higher than the rest and capped with a temple roof. I didn’t get a photo, but it probably wouldn’t have turned out, either because of the gathering storm, or because it wasn’t there to begin with.

Later, in Yangshuo, I started to receive messages. I was cycling out in the rice fields early one morning, frogs, birds and crickets meeping, cheeping and chirping, when little signs began popping up from the submerged soil. “Are you ready to see something different?” the first one asked. “The waterwheel is an ancient Chinese agricultural technology” informed another, near a waterwheel. A little further on: “It’s not far away!” And so they continued, hinting at some gnostic secret hidden below the rice pools, and just round the corner, but never quite revealing it.

I never did find out, but whatever the solution to the mystery I suspect I didn’t have the money to pay for it. After climbing the archway called Moon Hill (the arch forms a crescent) – accompanied by one of those crones with an esky of drinks who complains about her weary bones but seems to have no trouble keeping up – I rode back to town and bought a bus ticket to Shenzhen, the shopping mall on the mainland side of the Hong Kong border. There was some doubt the bus would even arrive, due to the ever-tightening travel restrictions. But late that night I was ferried out of town in a pedicab (buses are no longer allowed into town, in case they spread disease) and boarded my very last sleeper bus. From there, it was non-stop buses, trains and planes all the way home.

My last brush with an alternate reality was the one created by SARS and its paranoid offspring. Masked people everywhere, temperature checks even to get into a park, forms to be filled out, white cloaked warriors spraying everything with the dip, patriotic public announcements. The enemy is everywhere, and nowhere. Apparently the death penalty has been introduced to curb the mortality rate. I’m not sure how successful that initiative will be, but it seems I was fortunate to leave before my unmasked status marked me as a counter-revolutionary. (Of course, I’m completely envious of anyone still there.)

***

I still haven’t spent a whole day in Hong Kong, but I saw more of it this time. It’s a lot greener than I thought. And if appearances are anything to go by, surprisingly free. The train from Shenzhen passed an orderly group of protestors with “Falun Dafa is good” printed boldly on a banner, and books by the Dalai Lama are available in bookstores. But there was no time to convert to a cult and no bucks to buy a book, so before I knew it I was on a plane, playing with the entertainment system and melodramatically wondering if Death would pass me by.

A few short hours later I arrived back in Brisbane, almost a year to the day I left for Cairns, with $20 in my pocket and a bag full of film, silk, carpets, scrolls and dirty washing. It’s been a good year for me, and hopefully I’ve imparted a taste of it through my emails, though I could’ve written twice as many and still not scratched the surface. I miss China already; the food, the culture, the people, the little life I built for myself beneath the clouds of Jinan, and the experiences of the road. I’m slowly re-adapting to life in Australia, and after a few more sessions of therapy I think I’ll be able to accept that it really is okay to actually put the paper in the toilet.

I arrived home to an outbreak of wedding-fever, which was a timely reminder that regular showers and clean clothes are a good idea. I was one of the groomsmen, so a hasty visit to the tailors ensured my weight loss program (travel & sickness is an unbeatable combination) hadn’t left me too small for my britches. Congrats to Simon and Karen, and also to my Jinan tailors, Jenny and Saffron, who’ve just got engaged.

***

Well, that’s it from me for a while. I have to concentrate on mundane matters such as finding a job and somewhere to live. I’m considering another year or so at university (linguistics), but several trips are already on the drawing board, including one going back in time.

I’ll post some photos of this trip to the site once I’ve got them developed and scanned. Some impressions to the contrary, my journey was actually pretty tame – nothing that can’t be done with a judicious reorganising of priorities and a guidebook firmly in hand. So if you’ve got the travel bug, then don’t resist; it’s stronger than SARS and a whole lot more rewarding.

Hope to catch up with all you Brisbanites soon, and everyone else on a bus going somewhere.

Over and under,
~Chris

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hydrolith

“Of course, everyone in China is happy, because the Communist Party is looking after us.” — a poker-faced old gentleman at English Corner, Jinan

the glow

Oct 30, 2002 8:17pm

Memory is triggered by many things.

Smell, processed in the most primitive part of the brain, is easily the most powerful. For me, the heavy scents of boot polish and Brasso instantly evoke the recruit course at Kapooka, “Home of the Soldier”, which was never my home for the 3 months I spent there in 1995. Failing a more unpleasant experience involving cleaning products, no doubt boot polish and Brasso will always conjure up polishing, ironing, push-ups, sit-ups, The Wall, and the nagging, queasy feeling I’ve done something wrong that I’ll get in trouble for any minute.

Taste also carries memory, though vaguely, the buds worn down like river stones by the ceaseless flow of enzyme-rich saliva. Guava is New Guinea. In the backyard of one of our houses was a large (to me, giant) guava tree, perpetually laden with fruit that carpeted the ground below in yellow, toe-squishable lumps. In one of my many forays up the tree I grappled with a particularly insistent fruitbat munching on a plump guava I’d be eyeing for a few days; after I pulled the fruit from his jaws he munched my thumb instead, one of several memories still recorded in skin. The poor creature was subsequently beaten to death by a few broom-wielding hausmeris – local maids – attracted by my shrieks, who then proceeded to cook and devour it when our family turned down the proffered carcass.

[I can't remember if I ever tasted flying fox. I recall little ribcages clothed in soft black flesh cooking in a fire. My friends would kill them with slingshots made from strips of tire-tube (there were hundreds of bats hanging in the seaside casuarinas) and roast them on the ground, so I probably did at some point. Mostly we hunted for crabs, spearing them with sharpened bicycle spokes.]

Touch evokes few memories for me, surprisingly. Tac-til-it-y (what a tasty word!) is for me the most sensuous of senses, except perhaps for taste – which, incidentally, must be why the tongue is the most sensuous organ in the body – so you’d think touch would readily stimulate memories. But though the feel of many things are immediately recognisable, usually no memories stand out from the rest. Maybe touch evokes so many that they blur, merging into one global feeling. In any case, touch is very much of the present. Direct, but fleeting. NOW. Even pain fades quickly; I remember what the bat looked like much more than I do the feeling of its fangs locked around my metacarpal. Thankfully. I certainly remembered not to wave my fingers in front of bats again. But the sensation of fangs-in-flesh is gone, if it was ever recorded. I wonder if endorphins inhibit the memory of pain, as well as enhancing the formation of pleasurable memories? It makes sense: who wants to close their eyes and feel their hand being ripped off by a sabretooth for the hundredth time? Once is enough.

As Pavlov’s salivating dogs discovered, sound is almost as powerful as smell. Music especially. Songs like the SMASHING PUMPKINS tune “1979″ and TOOL’s “46&2″ remind me of driving into university in the mid to late 90s with Paul and Kamal, arguing heatedly over some Deep Philosophical Issue and making wildly extravagant claims to back-up positions we only half-believed in the first place. ENYA is the three of us sprawled out on my living room floor late at night cramming for biol and chem exams. Those were good times. The album “Aether”, by THE NECKS, means books. I listened to it while reading for months after I bought the CD and the calm sound has become infused with the smell of a new book. (Especially “Little, Big” by John Crowley, a book that encourages you to savour the very act of reading a Story.) My CD of the Naxi Orchestra reminds of a memory recorded in a previous email, sitting in darkness and absorbing brilliant sound.

Most memories are stimulated by something that was present when the memory was laid down. But one of my most recent purchases is curious in that, unlike all the other CDs, it evokes a memory that doesn’t include the music. “The Glow” is an 11 minute masterpiece by THE MICROPHONES, the fourth track on “It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water”. I really like the album (though the follow-up, “The Glow Part 2″, is even better). The style is difficult to describe – Amazon.com calls it ‘psychedelic lo-fi’ – but, whatever you call it, “The Glow” is amazing. A few well-chosen words lead the listener through a landscape that slowly reveals itself with repeated listens. If I was an animator, I would animate it, because I can clearly see a little cartoon man sleeping in his cartoon cabin while the wind howls outside and The Glow whispers to him. By the time he slips through the door at the bottom of the ocean, the feeling I have is identical to a moment from my childhood.

I was about 14, and playing ‘Mayhem in Monsterland’ on my Commodore 64. The game was a difficult, addictive platformer. Basically you steered a super-cute dinosaur called Mayhem through alternatively dark and bright lands, collecting magic dust and stars, bouncing and charging through monsters along the way. The aim was to help your friend, the bungling apprentice magician Theo Saurus, cast another spell to make the world a happy place once more. Life and Death stuff. I managed to track down a converted version for the PC last year, and was surprised by how much I remembered. (The fact that I actually have brain cells devoted to the location of all the power-ups on the happy stage of Pipe Land is either mind-blowing or pathetic, depending on how you look at it.) The game was even more difficult than I recalled. After a small dose of nostalgia, I gave up. The child was more determined. I spent weeks and months trying to crack it, getting to the final stage only to die ignominiously on the spikes of a purple caterpillar. Eventually, probability came to my rescue. The screen went black, and there was Mayhem. He was glowing, and grinning just as stupidly as I was at the triumphant musical bleeps.

I’d won.

***

Reading back through what I’ve written so far, I’m struck by two things. The first is that describing the senses invariably leads to synaesthesia, that wonderful mingling of the senses (have you heard of people with the gift of hearing colours, or tasting words?). Secondly, memories of smell, taste, touch and hearing all invoke vision. Smell might be the most powerful stimulant of memory, but sight is the medium. Most memories are as silent, tasteless and odourless as watercolour dreams. Unsurprising when you think how deeply rooted the eyeballs are in the juicy earth of the brain. I think that – except for complete paralysis – blindness would be the most difficult injury to cope with. Then all you could see would be dreams and memories. And which are more unreliable? I remember reading once that some of our most cherished memories are complete fabrications, arising out of what we wish to be true, rather than what was. That sounds true to me; it’s a process I’ve recognised in myself. Not that it can be helped anyway. In a system as complex as the brain (the most complex thing in the universe!) errors are bound to occur, just as they do when our DNA is copied and combined in another human being. Despite the best of intentions, the memory deceives. (Studies of what witnesses saw and think they saw are eye-opening.) And once you dwell on that for a while, you begin to think: “If memory can’t be trusted, what can?” The past becomes merely a reflection of the hopes and fears of the present, a mobius strip in danger of becoming unmoored from reality and floating away. Without a reliable memory, who am I? An amnesiac stumbling about like a duststorm sweeping the face of the world.

But that’s okay. Think of the alternative: an identity as frozen as a doll-face. Things happen. Even if we don’t remember exactly what, they do cause changes in our brains. Neurons reach out to touch each other and are connected. Other connections weaken. Change; growth. Though I appreciate the sentiment behind it, I always feel cursed when someone says to me: “Don’t change”. I want to change; I want to grow. Because one day I’ll stop growing. I won’t cease to change – I’ll be absorbed back into the world from which I was created. But my wonderful, fallible memories will be gone. I’ll exist only in the memories of others, none of whom will remember me as I was. Maybe I’ll leave behind traces in the collective memory, perhaps a book that lots of people have heard of, and a few have read. Connections.

I’d like to think so.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. What really matters is that, like a child told he has to go to bed, I play and play for as long as I can.

~Chris

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hydrolith