Robert

"Marlene watches from the wall
Her mocking smile says it all
As she records the rise and fall
Of every man who's been here

But the only one here now is me
I'm fighting things I cannot see
I think it's called my destiny
That I am changing"--Suzanne Vega

How much does one change over time? I think that the best gauge in some ways is how one behaves in relationships. So many changes in my life recently seem to be in the bifocal and lessened memory skills categories--changes that make me think about more capable days in the past. But I think back this morning on relationships and friendships past, and perhaps I have changed after all.

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"I am absolutely uncomfortable with confinement of any kind, social, domestic, cultural, mental, spiritual or physical. In this sense I could be seen as an unreliable companion, a fickle, changeable friend. I'm not. Loyalty is, I hope and pray, one of the qualities I offer to my real friends. It's just that the constant suffering that life presents us with, the inexhaustible variety of objects hurled in our path, makes me more and more determined not to submit to the inevitability of orthodoxy, the dull, mindless pressure to join the mob. I choose to resist the bulling of fate, even if I'm bound to be beaten to a pulp by the mediocrity that encroaches on our daily existence and all the terrible and awesome forces that mortality hurls at us through out our muddled lives".--Bill Nelson

Let's celebrate the sheer absurdity of friendship, and of the ways in which we relate on-line. Let's not point out that "friends list" and "friend" are not synonyms. Let's analyze less, therapize none at all, and regale ourselves with our private stories, for mass consumption. Let's poll, let's roll, and let's find our inner soul--and then retail it, for free, on-line:

Today I worked extremely hard, which made me feel good. Tonight my wife made us delicious stir fry. I revelled in people's kindness for filling out my poll, but when we returned from a brief walk in the neighborhood, LJ seemed to crash a lot. People seem to love to launch attacks at LJ. There's something about 14 year olds and DDOS attacks, I suppose.

I went to ebay.com, and wrote the silliest ad copy I could think of on the spur of the moment for my friend scottm's roots pop/rock CD, "Meet....the Scott M Experience". I've been so gratified by the (few) people who've enjoyed my own CD (and the many people who have not complained), that I thought I'd apply my kitschy marketing skills to a CD of real music. I expect it will take me 5 or 6 ads to figure out a marketing hook (i.e., write something silly enough to actually sell a CD), but it will be fun to try.

I had a lot of fun at the cdbaby.com site, playing with the idea of setting up cheap 'net distribution for "vibrating electric fields".
I also noticed that my wife got us sheet after sheet of Ogden Nash stamps. I feel that life depends on things like Ogden Nash stamps sometimes.

I'm still plugging away at Ian McIntyre's Robert Burns biography. What a curious, hearty rascal of a poet!