"For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave"
[Pink Floyd, "On the Run"]

Three months and fourteen days. I come back bearing no apology, no promises, nor even any reasonable explanation. I bring none of these because I have none to offer. "I didn't feel like writing and wanted some time to myself," is about as much as I can say.

And why am I back today? Sorry, no big epiphany there either. I've spent the last few months doing a lot of thinking, as always, and asking myself a lot of questions, and I'd love to come here today and say "Aha! I've figured it out!" and reveal to you some wonderful and profound mystical truth, like a guru returning from the mountain having fasted and finally "seen the light", but if anything, I've come to feel there's no real light to be seen. That probably sounds really disheartening, but I expect it to actually be quite relieving once I finish digesting it. There's an incredible freedom in discarding the illusory expectations of society and simply living for only those things which you, yourself, have experienced and know to be real. On the plus side, for instance, I think I've not simply gotten over Jenny, but also decided that I can, and will, find real love again and not even the cautiously-guarded love I've allowed myself these past many years since Bernice, but that maybe, just maybe, if I'm lucky, I could meet that truly special someone and experience the kind of sensation-of-falling love I experienced so long ago with Tracey Skinner, after we got together for 15 months, starting on that fateful and memorable night, Saturday, January 12th, 1991. I spoke to Jenny today briefly on MSN, and while there was a very faint underlying "damnit, you're supposed to be miserable without me" still lurking somewhere deep within me, I genuinely felt happy that she's doing well and in a happy relationship. She's a good woman, and a good person, and I hope things work out well for her.
I do, of course, still hope he doesn't eat pussy half as well as I do.
And while that conversation was a reminder to me that I've been meaning to write, what prompted me even more was my walk today, and my sitting in the park, contemplating life, writing a (crappy) poem, and pondering what happened in downtown St John's yesterday. As I understand it, it went something like this:

A 48 year-old woman was sitting her parked pickup truck, engine running, while the driver, her husband, ran inside the hotel on a short errand. It was a beautiful sunny day, hot and humid. As she glanced out the window surveying the area, taking in the beautiful weather, and no doubt looking at her watch and thinking about what they had to do next, around the bend of the parkway, a crane-truck driver pressed his brakes without response from the vehicle, hit a van, hit a pole, and finally ran over a parked pickup truck with his much-larger crane-truck, and crushed Mercedes Gorman to death instantly.

At about the same time, I was headed to the doctor because my foot hurt, only to find out it's probably from eating too many sausages.

Between here and wormfood lies a very indeterminate amount of time, in which you'll likely never find any grand answers that will suddenly make life, the universe, and everything make any more sense that '42'. You can get crushed by a crane just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or get a dizzyingly-intense pain because it never occurred to you that eating red meat every day for a few weeks could cause tiny uric acid crystals to accumulate in one of your joints. Rather, you get that indeterminate amount of time to decide for yourself what purpose you will serve, how best to go about it, and where to start.

A chess grandmaster was once asked "When does one truly become a master of chess?" His answer:

"The day you realize you're going to be a beginner all your life."