It begins, again, formless, featureless, but the potential is there; arcing, reaching, desperate for shape, form, frution and definition. Dendritic tentacles across synaptic gaps, probing and receptive, we start this process over and over, ignostic but trying...
Once upon a time in Adelaide, city of churches, city of fear, city of junkie bikies mourning childhood dreams in filthy pubs and just trying to get their next... wait that's not where it started. Or it's where it started but it's not where it begins. I live a world away from where I was born, a world away from where I was going, a world away from where I thought I'd be. Largs Pier never felt so far as the centre of the great plains - it took forty years and hundreds of thousands of miles to understand what they meant by 'you can never go home'.
Geocities? Freeservers? Yahoo Chat, Yahoo Messenger, then ICQ, then AOL, then MSN Messenger, then Flaming Words, then DeviantArt, then the long, cold dark. Such vast, glittering and buzzing constellations of people and online places, then one day you look up and listen hard, and aside from the blood pumping in your ears the skies are dark and silent. It's all subtly different, like a slightly tilted frame of a picture you dont recognise, in a room that used to be yours but has nothing of you in it. The house was sold, the new owners stripped it bare and sold it off; the layout is an echo you're familiar with, but the reality is something inherently different. These were my walls, these were my floors, this is not my wallpaper and I must scream...
I'm a father, husband, brother, son. I think we can do better, but we're held back by those lucky enough, connected enough, ruthless enough, rich enough and stupid enough to rule over us. I think we make mistakes as a species and as individuals that we desperately need to learn from, but I don't know if we can. I don't think we should stop trying. For a long time, I was okay with not trying, and not caring, and just subsisting; maybe that's just not enough now. I don't need to write another manifesto.
I'm still here. You could email me. I'm alive.