Saturday 22 July 2000

Pic of the day: It is summer, but in the shadows it is cool. Another benefit of living in Norway!

Day, delayed

Fell asleep while trying to write my diary. Woke up in the morning feeling terrible. Let's hope it's just a panic attack of hypochondria and not anything serious.

OK, how was the day? Well, most notably I actually had a while in the evening where I was in a bad mood. I felt irritated, as well I should since I was sitting in a hot living room playing Master of Magic on the highest difficulty level. Had bad luck in the game, too. Ahem.

Anyway, I was feeling really grumpy, but I put my shoes on and my minidisc walkman, and went for a walk. The air was cool and filled with unfamiliar fragrances, so mixed that I could not make them out. I had the road to myself, and Enya singing in Gaelic. Soon my mood started to lift, and I went home and wrote another chapter in my pitiful attempt at a novel.

My current pitiful attempt at a novel, that is. There have been dozens of them, at the very least. Oh come on Magnus, don't be shy. There have probably been in the low hundreds, though some stop after a few pages. I have 3 binders of them (I think it's called binders - it's a kind of big quasi book where you put papers after you've punched holes in them; for some reason people don't write much about this in English...) Anyway, there are also floppies, some of them 5.25 inch floppies that fit in my 10MHz 286 computer but not the newer ones.

***

It's strange for me to think of these pieces of fiction. I've burned loads of them now and again in the past, but not for the last 10 years or so I guess. Yet I rarely read them. And when I'm dead, they are going to be burned anyway. What else? I won't be there to finish them. In fact, I'm not even finishing them now. Some of them are so pathetic that I just hope they'll never be discovered, but they tell me at least as much as my diaries about who I was back then. Not so that they are autobiographical ... those went in the first burning, I think. :) But they tell a lot about what was on my mind and how I was thinking.

For instance, many of these people had friends. Indeed, some of the stories were not about any single main character as such, but a group of friends. This was a time when I took friendship for granted. Sure, the friends did not necessarily understand each other, and their guesses about each other's motivations were often wildly off, but they were still friends.

In fact, some of my pitiful attempts at novels in the past were about ordinary people in an ordinary world. No magic, no superpowers, no miracles. Just common boring people. Misunderstood geniuses, misunderstood morons. People who fall in love with people, people who fall in love with computers. Oh, and misunderstood pietists, who thought they were doing the right thing, while no one else believed that.

The more things change ...

***

But anyway, I guess it hasn't been a bad time recently. I mean, when a passing bad mood is like the major event of the day, and it makes me think back to the last bad mood, sometime last year ... I guess that means I have been a lot of happy. :)

OK, I think I can breathe a bit deeper now. I've choked up some bits of dark green goo, making me think that perhaps my lungs look the way they feel. This is the reward for never smoking in my life? :) Well, never smoking tobacco. And anyway, I didn't inhale. You'd think I'd have lungs like a baby, not filled with dark green jelly. But hey, I've told you before that body and soul are tightly intertwined. And given all the strange things I have fed my soul, I guess it averages out.

More in 16 hours time, if I survive and stay out of the emergency room. :)