Coded green.

Saturday 29 September 2001

Country road

Pic of the day: The road just gets narrower and narrower, doesn't it? Or is it all a matter of perspective? (Photo from my vacation on the farm earlier this month.)

Detached

I don't know what to say. I know how I feel, but it looks so wrong when I write it.

A friend asked me for some help yesterday night, to find some witty things to say about various categories of men. I think I should have been able to help with that. But I couldn't. I was too removed. Perhaps if I had been there. But I could not think of anything. It's gone.

For almost as long as I remember, I used to be able to say funny things. Hit the nail, as it were. It was my weapon when I was small and weak. But now ... it's gone, too. Human humor is more and more eluding me.

***

I'm not depressed, as such. I enjoy life. I enjoy the happy melodic trance music I play in the background. I enjoy the smell of my Aquaman after shave. (Yeah, it smells a lot better when I return to it after a couple weeks. Go figure.) I enjoy a good book. I enjoy meeting friends on IRC, even. But I am ... detached.

I can't keep asking someone to tie me to the world of humans. I've left that to another for so long. I don't have the right. But I can't really do it by myself. It keeps slipping away.

I don't remember exactly when I stopped roleplaying on MUDs. It was gradual: I spent more and more of the time there alone, doing my own things, avoiding contact with other players. And then I decided there is no reason to pay for being online to avoid people. I can do that offline.

I'm still following a few of the threads on the AR online forum. I'm still reading a couple online journals. I list it like it were an accomplishments, the things that used to be a big part of my life. Even on IRC, I tend to just hang back now. Making the occasional comment from the corner. I'm in my porcupine form all the time now.

***

Warning: Spoiler for Watchmen, the graphic novel.

At the end of the graphic novel "Watchmen", Dr Manhattan decides to leave this world for good. (He has just found his girlfriend, such as it was, sleeping happily beside an old acquaintance.) He is not angry, not even sad, rather he looks thoughtful, but detached. He says goodbye to the guy who engineered the horrible catastrophe in New York to save the world. This one says: "But I thought you regained your interest in humans?" "Yes" says Dr Manhattan. "Perhaps I will create some."

For some reason this scene has been replaying in my mind a lot lately. Even though I'm not a timeless superhuman, and I don't have a girlfriend, and she's not with someone else either, I think. But I understand that guy.

Not that I have any plans of going away. Not as long as I can avoid it.


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