Ides of October 2001

My cabin is heated by an ambitious little Lopi stove. This winter my family has been especially lazy about wood, so I run the stove only every third day or so, but as hot as I can. The night before a run, the whole building is cooled off, and I sit typing in the highest room with stiff fingers and stinging toes. The air is moist, and when a window is open for oxygen, a draft blows against my face. But when I'm on the computer, I keep my headphones on and I don't feel cold at all.

People who don't stay up all night now and again are missing out. So are people who stay up all night habitually. All-nighters, if you pay attention, tell you a lot about humanity and nature; there are things I know I could not have learned from anything but bashing syntaxen as the sun came up.

The night is violently still. The abstract momentum of human activity -- the number of people in downtown, the steadiness of highway traffic, the continuity of shop business -- folds away in the dark. Walking down an empty urban sidewalk is weird. Humanity has a meta-motion that looks so stable but fades so quickly at night that you think you still hear it.

I never learned to speak well. Clear speech, in any sense, doesn't seem worth pursuing. Maybe I'm too vain to put effort into ephemeral things, but now and then I happily let a poem or some such rot in the woods or float off on the tide. I think it might be a wish that social interaction could be more quantified; that ... darn, lost it.

I love my stove. It's built around an x axis -- most heat-stoves are around the y. The firebox fits stacked pieces end-to-front, which works wonderfully.

I get déjà vu rarely but strongly. I've had two references to today: I found their ends while sucking air out of jars and while scrolling along XMMS's play-list. It's very much like a memory in reverse, but I'm still not conceding that it's supernatural. I'm totally hip to the subconscious-and-unconscious-being-extremely-smart jive, though: my brain's a quirky character, and I'm sure it does all kinds of things without my prior knowledge and informed consent. I remember future-remembering some things I did today, but it seems reasonably likely that I just made up a whole suite of meta-memories.