Angular momentum

Old but good from xkcd.

Love and need

I was driving back home after my vain shopping attempt to find suitable containers for recyclables (recycling seems to have at last started here). A road was closed due to works, so I followed a queue of cars on the obligatory dirt track detour through the dusty woods, round an army camp.

At the entrance of the camp, there was a big sign addressed to the responsible citizens and trainee war machines leaving it:

Drive slowly! Your parents love you and need you.

Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde

I have come to accept I am two people.

One of us is a lively, energetic, tireless individual, who reads avidly and enjoys all the good things in life. He sleeps well, he walks kilometres on end, he travels, he engages into conversations. He is after the company of others. He is hardly interested in the internet.

The other is aloof, morose and sombre. When he is not silent and observing others, he talks very little, usually to make a wry comment or offer dry humour and cynical aphorisms. He looks like he cares for nothing. He is virtually narcoleptic, sleeping as much and as often as possible, and usually badly, troubled by baroque dreams rehearsing all his fears. He drives everywhere, cursing the weather that keeps him car-bound. He is a loner.

For years I have fought the second guy, the Outpost resident. I have fought him and I have resented him and I have reviled him. Now I have finally come to accept him. He shares a number of common traits with the first guy, after all. He’s got his own good points, too: he is patient and restrained and he is the author of this, after all.

Comparatively speaking

I had been away for so long, I could hardly remember how this place feels like, how it lulls me and turns me into a narcoleptic, how it imbues us with instant misery. Whatever.

I had been away for not so long as to expect the kind of renewed dynamism and generalised optimism people seem to have developed in the Outpost in the meantime. Things are maybe looking up.