Here I am, once again making that old joke about 'dead accounts'. I suppose this would mean that I'm a zombie here, although I'm not too big on the zombie thing. Now I've turned my homepage into a meditation on the concept of Deep Time. I'm also curious to see who has survived, and what is left of them.

I am He Who Was no more, and am now He Who Is, and will cryptically post here in my stupidly pretentious way about once a year, or maybe even less often. Just letting everyone know that I didn't 'rage quit' this place.

Sometimes I miss the days when more people read my stories--and I am still writing stories. Writing episodic stuff was a lot easier here since I knew that people would forget and/or lose interest, and I couldn't get by with a chapter a year, like I do now with my novel.

I wonder if I'll upload a short story here. If enough of you even remember who I was, and have me on your watch lists, perhaps I will just for old time's sake.

I miss you guys--even a little of your occasional artsy-fartsy-ness and your overly optimistic or pessimistic or solipsistic philosophies. Even though I was younger in those days, I still felt so much older than everyone else. Then again, for as long as I can remember I've felt like an old man. I'm weird like that.

I suppose I left this place because I was as much tired of my own snap-judgement of others as I was of being judged myself. I hated looking at the lists people made about themselves and their interests and making judgments, even though I knew that I was wrong for doing so. It's so easy to compare yourself to other people on the internet, and it's such a stupid fucking habit. This place is to me what a tobacco store is to a chain smoker.

The fact still remains that this is where I got started, and awkwardly developed my writing ability, for whatever that's worth. I've not done much with it in the 'real world', but it has given me a means to describe the world inside my head, and if for some crazy reason anyone really wants to know what I'm about, then they can, and I don't have to be a stranger. However, I am a stranger almost all the time; I'm just comforted to know this isn't logically necessary.

This is where I got my voice, and developed my own writing style. I was never optimistic enough to hope that I'd ever be any good, but at the very least I know I have an identity of my own. My standards are such that it's exceedingly rare for me to say that anything has really been accomplished, at least to any level of satisfaction.

Some of you were there when my style set in--I don't know if you're here now, though. I never thanked you for reading my stuff back then, and I should have. So let me say it now: thank you for reading my stuff.

Perhaps I'm just nostalgic. Whenever I do this, I feel a little bit of what it's like to visit my old hometown. Places are all different, and some of them are completely gone and replaced by big box retail stores. Likewise, the people have all changed, and some of them have moved on, and some of them have remained. I am a very nostalgic person, and to some extent this is a fault of mine. For a long time all I could remember was what I didn't like about this place in cyberspace. Now some of the good things are coming back to me. Just the other day I was taking a picture and remembered someone who had once critiqued a photo of mine who said, to paraphrase: "Try not to put the object dead-center--it makes it somewhat boring composition-wise." So I put the object--a tree in this case--to the side, and I thought it did look more interesting there.

And so it is that I can't attribute one value to my experiences here.