mundens | Whips I Never Should Have Kissed

For the first time in more than a week I woke up without feeling like someone had been sand-papering my tonsils. Before getting up I lay for a while and felt the presence of my lover in bed beside me. This is not new, she's been sleeping here since we got back from Conjunction. But with busyness and sickness and rush and stuff, this morning was the first where I felt relaxed enough to lay there for a moment and savour the idea that she was lying next to me, and had been all night. It's nice.

It's also different. After many months of sleeping alone, and my lover being memories and a voice on the telephone, actual flesh in the bed beside me is different. I say "different", because after so long with a bed to myself, part of me doesn't want to lose that freedom. On the other hand there's so many good things about it! I don't think I need to detail those, do I?

I came to work, and happened to notice my copy of The Java Developer's Almanac 1999. Made me think back to when I got that book, and about all that has changed since then and how far away I feel from that time. Even my personal "year of living dangerously" is now more than two years in the past.

I'm in a different place than then. The importance I attach to things has changed. I'm not sure I know who I am any more now than then, but I do know more about who I'm not. Work is changing, probably not for the better, though perhaps I am being more useful and exercising more power. Role-playing has become a rare event rather than several times a week. That's a shame, but I don't miss it all that much, perhaps I have less to escape from now. I have even considered that maybe my huge collection of role-playing games, war-games material, and comics, needs to be severely pruned. It's not like I'm going to touch most of it ever again, and it's just my dragon hoarding instinct that keeps me from disposing of them. I have even begun to dispose of SF & Fantasy books, something I'm sure many on my flist would consider heresy.

Friendships have shifted, as they do, and I now rarely see people whom once I often did. The presence of the whirlwind in my bed has accounted for most of that, it is hard to maintain ties, or even keep abreast of chores, when my attention and time is held by a lover and her driven work coming to fruition. Some of it is due to the reduced role-playing, and some of it is due to making new friends in other communities, as I explore different, but linked, things, so I apologize to anyone who feels I haven't been paying them enough attention. I do miss you all.

And now I should really do work. Though what i really want to do is contemplate things. And just write stuff down, communicate stuff. For instance, Kenny Loggins Highway to the Danger Zone came up randomly this morning on my music player. It's remarkable how well that song actually captures the feel of combat pilots.

Out along the edges
Always where I burn to be
The further on the edge
The hotter the intensity

It made me think of grinning with glee at the test pilot next to me as I held my head up against the 6.5G that was forcing it and the weight of the helmet into my chest, foot pushing rudder hard to port to escape the spin the hammerhead I'd just pulled at twelve thousand feet left us in, seeing the similar grin on his face as we shared that thrill, shared the camaraderie of each knowing the other was alike in at least that one respect, that we both enjoyed pushing the envelope, that the fact we were one small mistake away from the fibreglass and aluminium shell we rode rupturing and throwing us at the ground now a scant four thousand feet below, was a source of enjoyment and not terror.

P.S. : Happy birthday