Life goes on. Death stays forever.

Death reminds us that life may not be impotent, but it is sober.

Clean living is not sterile living, just as dirty living is not necessarily messy.

The Fallen

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
But soon the King himself heard of Humpty’s fate. And he was deeply disturbed. So, setting aside his royal finery, disguised as a common peasant, the King slipped unnoticed through the majestic palace gates and into the rough-and-tumble street life of his kingdom.
The King searched everywhere for Humpty Dumpty. After several days and nights, the persistent monarch found him. Humpty’s shattered body was scattered over a 10-foot circle amidst broken glass and flattened coke cans of a back alley.
The King was overjoyed at the sight of Humpty. He ran to his side and cried, “Humpty, It is I, your King! I have powers greater than those of my horses and men who failed to put you together again. Be at peace. I am here to help!”
“Leave me alone,” Humpty’s mouth retorted. “I’ve gotten used to this new way of life. I kind of like it now. I’m fine and I like it here. The trash can over there. . .the way the sun sparkles on the broken glass. This must be the garden spot of the world!”
{the rest}

[via Scott Williams]

The Next Wave

I was almost startled when I found myself at the end of the day. It is as though the path is set, and I have no control over the course....

I think that if one is not careful, this tremendous momentum would carry you all the way through one's entire life, at a ridiculous pace, all the way to the end. I think there will be crucial points in the journey, decisions that will determine whether to stay on this wave, or to get on ones with different momentum, and different courses. The challenge will be to be alert enough and discern those decisions when they are in front of you, and to not just let them glide right by without recognizing their significance.

[via Sojourn Chronicles, emphasis mine]

Recognizing someone I forgot I was
A story true, a mystery to me
{the rest}

[via Unedited Ravings]

Does Your Spirit Sink?

The more life happens to me, the more convinced I become that happiness takes hard work.

And some miserable bastards just aren't up to the job....

From the point of view of coming to terms with my life the feedback was harder to parse. Was I rewriting my memories to suit myself? Was it all a lie told to myself to make me happy, or to present an illusion thereof?

....Is it always simple to distinguish ambition from competition? No. Is it easy to avoid feeling sorry for oneself? It isn't. Is letting things roll off your back as easy for people as it is for ducks? Not usually. In other words, the skills we bring to bear on interpreting the state of our own lives are not applied without effort.

Nothing is free. The spirit, left to its own, sinks.

[via I Am A Cheeseburger]

You’ve Never Been Unloved
[via Randall Friesen]

Are Dads Dull?

(Shocked silence)

There's a Gender Studies thesis here somewhere, I think. Snips and Snails and Daddy-Blog Tales: The Sexual Politics of Parent Blogs. Mommy Bloggers get all of the attention - the conferences, the 'zines, the big-ass corporate-backed community sites and endorsements from Meredith Vieira and Andrew Shue. Dad-Blogs remain a more obscure corner of the blogosphere. Sure, Daddy Types and The Blogfathers are out there proclaiming their fatherhood and making virtual celebration of it. But Dad-Bloggers who don't align themselves with roaming blogger gangs, or openly hang with the chicks, are somewhat harder to find.

So. Evidence of anti-male, anti-father bias in Western culture?

And later on in the linked post...:

I've been doing push-ups LIKE THIS (falls into push-up position) WITH MY KNUCKLES since my wife took my daughter away and I'm gonna keep doing them 'til I get her back!!! Yes!

I'M A SUPERHERO!

Umm...just read the whole post [via Her Bad Mother], it's too hard to explain!

>Make Game.

Do you want text with that?

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction, a new medium for writers which began with adventure games in the late 1970s and is now used for everything from literary narrative fiction through to plotless conceptual art, and plenty more adventure games too. Since its introduction in 1993, Inform has become a standard tool.
Three years in the making, Inform 7 is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided both by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF.

Redemption is not the fixing of neglect; it's the overwhelming of need.