It became difficult to imagine life without the journal. It was a constant accompaniment, like a countermelody woven through everything I did. I both reflected the emerging patterns of evolving days and at times presaged coming lines of note and dance. It was not the life itself but more than a mere reflection of the life. Gradually I began to see it as having its own essential force. It was a thing not-quite-alive, but nearly so, like a virus.

As much as I needed a vacation, I worried about leaving the journal behind, the way one would recoil from leaving a pet alone in an empty house. While alive, it has an undeveloped, juvenile consciousness and is unable to take care of itself. So I asked my good friend Doug, with whom I once had some great adventures, to provide the sentience it needed to stay alive during my absence. Susan found this exceedingly strange -- like asking someone else to write in your journal, or paste their pictures in your photo album.

I was still more nervous about what it would be like to live without the ever-present shadow of my companion text, to live perpetually in first person. On my vacation I watched some tourists whose entire perception of their trip seemed to be experienced through the lenses of their camcorders. Their moments of discovery and beauty were transformed and limited by the means they used to record them. This is what a journal can become: a perpetual subself whose constant, droning narrative pollutes even the purest moment with its own descriptive wastes. I do not want to aim a camera at my life. I want to aim myself at my life and allow the narrative to express the trajectory.

Surrendering the para-daily writing allowed me to think for the first time about what it might mean to give it up entirely. It's not that time yet, but the time will come. Maybe not for a long while. Nevertheless, it's good to remember that this living thing, like all others, is finite.

I am ugly

I returned to note that an Irish net-hep zine had included the front page of the Seven Deadly Sins site in a collection of "the Hall of Just Darned Plain Ugliness." While the number of hits their site referred to mine suggests that my humiliation was not exactly broadcast to all the Web, this bugged me. Admittedly, the home page was a messy amalgamation of several stylistic retreads, and long overdue for a brush-up. Work and other amusements have long kept me from embracing the task. Still, I took it personally. It's a mystery why it is so easy to obsess about the unsolicited and possibly uniformed opinions of utter strangers, particularly ones who run a web site that is the color of artificial lime juice containers that one finds at the grocery store. The world sometimes seems like a place where a fight has recently taken place on muddy ground. So many boot prints and so much spilled blood, and no one left around to tell where the winners are.

The last time someone was outright critical of the design of the page was when my girlfriend's ex-husband's best friend said it looked like it had been designed by a 12 year-old girl. A girl! And me a boy. Despite some potential questions about his ability to fairly judge my work, I was unhappy with his assessment. So I used the concentrated irritation generated to power a redesign session that vastly improved things over the former aesthanatotic design.

Now, obviously, that time had come again, and that zine was acting as the agent for some kind of ordained annual pyre, a crucible from which a buffed-up site would emerge as if reborn. The new front page doesn't exactly break new stylistic ground, but it didn't take much time to whip up, and it's a livable space until the next big bad wolf comes and blows my fragile house down. I'll go back and retrofit the remaining pages in the site tomorrow. The things we do for love are sometimes so difficult to distinguish from things done in vanity and anger.