Wrote that last poem a couple of days ago on the bus… I wish I could say I was thinking about my own death at the time, but honestly it was totally random what came out of me at the time. I did follow it up in my notebook with “Read this at my funeral. Ha!”. Aside from “Where did this come from?” my thoughts after writing it were all things like “Am I going to think this is any good in a couple of days? (Answer: yes, but predictably not as good.) …and “This must be the first poem I’ve written start to finish in months.” That last feels weird because while I haven’t been writing, life has been racing past full-bore. (Full-bore is an interesting phrase to use here, since it, life, hasn’t been “a bore” at all in this time of fast-pacededness.)
Married life, and life in general lately, has been a whirlwind of pleasant chaos.
Anyway, this chaos hasn’t left me time to write. Or rather, I haven’t pushed life aside enough lately to make time for writing. But now, conversely, I’ve been thinking about writing more… which has led, in turn, (finally) to more writing.
Parts of the impetus for this post was the inspired discussion over at Is blogging per se a dying art? (via semifat sediment). I found myself wondering whether it’s useful to talk about “ages of the internet”, which is semantically (in my head anyway) identical to “trends of the internet as a function of time”… which then led me to ask myself whether a single lifetime can have “ages”, which, when my brain then translated to “trends of my life as a function of time”, I found the answer was clearly yes. I hope that makes sense, because I’m rapidly running out of time to elaborate.
One more aside… which I already twittered earlier, but since the tweet was aimed at an individual (not-quite-coincidentally Josh who runs Semifat Sediment) it didn’t show up here. (Better to post the exchange anyway:)
“joshleejosh: Finding more and more obscure crash conditions in my AI scripts. It’s like malfunctioning turtles all the way down.
me: @joshleejosh: What’s underneath the bottom malfunctioning turtle? …is it WINDOWS?! (Interesting to imagine the universe as an OS.)”
So yeah… I find it immensely (intensely) amusing compare the universe to computer systems (and of course vice versa). Rudy Rucker does this superbly, and (in yet another cosmic coincidence) I picked up his latest novel, Postsingular, from the library this morning. I’m still not done reading Day Watch, but I’ll probably put that one on hold until I finish Postsingular, which I’ve already started and has already sucked me in.