After consideration, I've decided to leave the journalling here altogether. Like all real stories, no beginnings or endings. Just an abortion sometime in the middle of this letter to no one inparticular and everyone inbetween. It's not something I really want to do; there's a nice sort of exspansive community here that I'm very fond of and in the respect that there is the occasional back and forth between another scribbler of ideas and thoughts. That is certainly something wonderful and valued. It makes me think, it often offers more than a few laughs and the affording of time to organize and practice the speech and wire out the perfect wit at high speed once decided upon. And while all of this is happening, there's something gnawing at me. To explain, I'll have to tell something of a story and as things go, that's more than normal for me, seeing as I seem to drag these things out much longer than they need to be. It's not an apology, just a nagging feeling that I've decided to do something about.

It happens a lot.

I feel clumsy and altered. I don't know if it is tiredness due to a somewhat hectic schedule coupled by some decidedly unwanted stress, but there are moments where nothing seems to mesh. Nothing shakes hands and makes nice with one another; my brain and my mouth are like quarelling brothers. I stare at someones knowing I have something to say and as quickly as the thought it there it just up and well...it just goes somewhere else. And those moments are getting dangerously close in their frequency. I can't claim to be witty and full of knowledge or even slightly amusing(though the law of averages allows that much once every year or so), but even still, I can almost manage a conversation with most people. Not today, not for the last little while it seems. I'm stilted and I'm sure it must give off an impression of snobbery(it has in the past), though to be truthful, that's the farthest from the literal truth as you can get. Thrust into the public eye, it seems that I feel the need to be 'on' a lot of the time. I want to deliver the punch, write all the best lines and deliver them with great pomp and circumstance, even though that's not me in the slightest.

There was this girl I knew and she described the sort of situation in a very third grade, bathroom humor attitude, but it really makes sense. She said to me in reference to someone else, that this certain person was the first one she'd met that she didn't feel compelled to do something obnoxious around; that the person was someone she could content herself with just being quite nice around and that person didn't care.

I suppose that's what I'm after to a certain extent. Content in just being quite nice around people, no matter that it seems increasingly difficult to figure out who that contented me is, or if that's someone who hasn't been invented or fully realized yet. I don't know if it matters that I state this here, whether reason is necessary at all, but given that I do have occasional readers I suppose some sort of explanation is order, for myself as much as any of you.

The thing of it is, if you look hard enough, and you read these entries from the year past or so, this is me. This is that person content in just being themselves in the form of words that become code before they become words again and are structured within a scrolling green plane. Nothing's ever easy but that's okay. I have my moments where the world seems to be crashing down around me and I have a lot of history that I've got to contend with. Somedays I'm sitting with it and having a nice conversation, somedays we're at each other's throats and demanding release from one another. Sometimes the weight is light and somedays I find that I'm struggling to remember how to carry it all so it's not crushing me all the time. The point of the matter is that there's a disassociative quality about this method of 'conversation' that allows me to act freely, speak frankly and be that thing I'm trying hard to recognize in myself on a person-to-person, day by day basis. So. I'm going to try and consolidate the two, or at least come to terms with whatever is closest to what I can openly represent here.

I guess that's all I have to say. There are more stories to tell somewhere down the line, I suspect, and while I'm not ruling out the option that they may appear here at any random point, it won't be anytime soon. I'm going to try this out, wear a new suit and maybe get a fedora to go along with the whole ensemble. It's been fun and I'm glad to have met some really stellar people(all of you), and hopefully we'll still find reason enough for contact beyond the comment-reply-comment structure we currently abide by. I will still do some brief business updates and will still hang around to comment and what not, but that will be the extent of it. Thanks for reading.

Lower the shade, we look better in the light of our imaginations,

Dan.