Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, i know I have to mourn Vicky, in much the same way i have to mourn Rebel. My friendship with her is a casuality of fear – i’m sure there will be more on this later. I hope someday it comes back, but for now it is as dead as the days when it was normal to just drop by people’s houses – as dead as the days when wwe just watched, eexperienced, and enjoyed a concert instead of videotaping it with our phones..

i wish it were easier to cry.. for my missing friend, for the pain tthat comes with my guesses of what she thinks and feels.. with rebel, it was easy to cry.. but with rebel, i wasn’t crying for something that happened 15 years ago.

I still remember leaving Phoebe’s, bound for Epoch West.. as I hit the rockies, the sun was coming up and I put the Forrest Gump Suite in the deck.

It was a perfect moment. The sunrise, the trees, the music, the sense of freedom and adventure.

I miss you, Phoebe. I will never know if what happened was in my head or in the real world. Maybe no one ever knows.

I miss you even more, Vicky. One of my deepest hopes is that you will someday know what you gave me. I also really, really hope it didn’t hurt you too much. But having been someone else’s other side in that set of conversations, I now have the idea that it didn’t hurt you as much as it helped me. The old Callahan’s thing.. shared pain is pain lessoned, shared joy is joy increased.. Spider was writing about real truth.

I will always wonder about another of my adventures. I had a friend who was in love with someone across the pond, and I couldn’t get them to take the leap and see each other.. I don’t know why, but they just couldn’t get it together to just go there. Finally, in desperation, I sexed her and used every bit of my not very charged sheerish faith to send the entire sensory texture map of my body to him..

Did it make it? I’ll never know.. but it was the most intense orgasm of my life. It was almost a hour before I was capable of coherent speech. Which makes me think.. um.. yah.. that really happened. Technically, I can easily show you how with the help of the sysadmins of Earth’s reality engine it could have been made real. Maybe it was. I like to think so. How about you?

One of the most important experiences I had on my way to becoming polysexual as well as polyamorous was the shocking discovery that laying next to someone you are in love with while they have sex with someone else doesn’t feel bad.

I wonder how many of you dared to do the experiment. I was shocked as anything.. I felt rejected.. and then I took her hand, and then I was a part of it, and then it was just beautiful.

I have a feeling my existence and my willingness to tell the truth is sometimes a bit of a unhappy thing for my parents. I don’t know how to feel about that. I wish I could get over feeling like they were idiots to not take a few more chances. They probably think I’m a idiot for taking so many. Whatever.. I love them even in my anger and frustration at the scars I bear for living with them for 18 years. I wouldn’t live with them again, I wouldn’t select them as parents again, and I wish I’d been smart enough to realize as a teen that a kid can ask for new parents, but I love them.

One of my strongest guiding lights is the idea to never add more pain and fear to a system that already clearly has far too much. I don’t know that I always succeed at this, but I’d like to think intention counts for something.

So, a long time ago I broke a friendship. I’m not sure how I broke it, although I see numerous things I did that in retrospect I would not have done. I know I had no context for dealing with what I was feeling or what I was thinking.

It did result in me learning a important lesson about love. You don’t forget the people you fall in love with. No amount of wishful thinking or pain or indeed anything will make them stop mattering to you. I miss someone so much it hurts, and all my friends know it, and I think they all knew it and knew why long before I did.

It’s one of the great ironies of being a neural net that you sometimes really can’t see the forest for the trees. I’m sure you all know I love Vicky, and I would give anything to have our real life friendship back, and I’m totally incapable of being normal or even sane in text to her most of the time but as far as I can tell I have always been and would always be just fine in person. But there’s no way to get back to in person that I can think of.

None the less, I believe teams solve problems that individuals can’t. So I’m discussing this with most of my friends, one at a time. I’ve learned to reprogram parts of my neural net, and I have no problem with the idea of changing anything that’s in the way of this friendship. At the same time I will freely acknowledge that I have no idea what I’m doing.

On the other paw, I am still impressed with how little Clint knows about love. Yes, he actually did tell me, and I think he meant it, that I would kill her so other people couldn’t have her. I don’t know what you’re smoking, Clint, but I’d suggest stopping, whatever it is. This is so far from love that it doesn’t even fit on the same map.

So, Rebel, my furry four footed friend, left us on thanksgiving. I’ve lost a lot of people over the years, but I’ve never experienced missing someone as much as I miss him. Part of it is that, working at home, I was always around him.. and he was one of the most loving friends I’ve ever had. I talked to him often, and almost everywhere we went we went with him.

Everything reminds me of him.. every meal I would share “puppy taxes” with him.. every day we would walk.. even going to the mailbox reminds me that I’m not doing it as part of longwalk.

Part of me wants to go out and get another four footed friend right away to fill the furry hole in my heart, and part of me wants to wait. I know Gayle would probably rather wait a while.

This track is quite a triumph of technology.. my friend Esen (who I’m sure you all remember from many great tracks in 2004) sent me this as a vocal take recorded on a iPhone!. Stock. No fancy mic, no fancy software, recorded in the audio notes app.

I’ve always loved the track, and I couldn’t resist the challenge – could it be polished up? Without spending too much time on it?

Two hours later, this was the result, which I can’t stop listening to: Arms Of The Angels.

So, I am again avoiding facebook. I’ve set www.facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts on my mac and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts on my PC to help remind me that I’m avoiding it. This time, it was a post of my mother’s that drove me over the edge.. I considered just unfriending her, but I decided that it would be far more productive to just unfriend the whole system.

See, the thing is, Facebook doesn’t make me happy. I think part of it is that people repeatedly post religious and political messages on it, and I have enough friends who are right wing for that to get incredibly depressing – but part of it is just that it’s kind of like reading a list of all the people who are having lives while I am working 9.7 hours a day (my average last pay period)

One bit of good news is that $LARGE_TIME_HOGGING_CLIENT has given me a week off in November and another in December. I’ve given a few days of that to other clients, but I’m currently hogging the majority of it for me.

Anyway, so, if you don’t see me on facebook, it’s because I’m avoiding it

So, at least according to some sites, Nick Mason has stated that U2 releasing their most recent album for free ‘devalues music’. I think Mr. Mason is confused about value.

(Yes, this is part of a recurring series on the topic of value, which I think is a important topic for us all to understand if we want to have a amazing future instead of a dystopian one)

There are some things that become more valuable the more of them are wandering around in the world. A single fax machine, a single computer, not particularly valuable. Two fax machines, two computers, and now you have a network. Add more fax machines or computers, and you’re making them more valuable because more people can use them to get things done.

Music and movies and books are very similar. They form a cultural rosetta stone that can assist us in communicating with each other. They often transcend the notes and words they are made of to capture emotion and spirit and story in ways that aid communication. So, the more copies of a song are out there, the more people have been exposed to it, the *more* valuable it is.

Thinking that scarcity and price define value is a cognitive distortion that can lead to a number of unhappy things. While the free market economy makes it *appear* that scarcity means value, it is a illusion. It might raise the price, but it doesn’t make the whatever the scarce object is able to do any more or be any more, except for the few sick people who get pleasure from knowing they can have something no one else can have.