so i'm rereading the wheel of time series in rabid, salivating anticipation of the release of book the twelfth. some things are falling into place and my overactive imagination is reeling with the possibilities, the most interesting of which i shall detail for you:

• verin, you perfect enigma—my explanation for her bizarre behavior is that she has visited the twisted door ter'angreal in tear (fitting for her being brown ajah), and gotten some clue for victory from the aelfinn, and she's working to bring it about; since she's the only one with the answer, her behavior appears to the reader to be secretive or self-serving or contradictory. she's good, just sneaky and duplicitous out of necessity. also, she is (as far as we know) the only one who knows where the horn of valere is (anyone remember the horn?), which may be the root cause of this. the saying it's time to roll the dice, which she got from her father and which mat uses extensively, is what got me thinking on this path.
• elayne will be at the center of a big cease-fire between the seanchan, the borderlands, and the aiel (rand's answer from the aelfinn). this is the explanation of elaida's foretelling that the royal line of andor will be the key to victory in the last battle.
• siuan will feel the distinctive tingling that signifies moiraine's channeling—that's how she will learn that mat and gang have freed her from the tower of ghenjei. this latter will happen very soon (the story line will begin in book 12, i'm certain), though how soon siuan and moiraine hook up, who knows.
• also related to moiraine's return: she gives thom the names of the aes sedai who gentled his nephew owyn, and one of them will be elaida. thom has a rich history of offing leaders who affront him in some way (taringail and galldrian), so it isn't difficult to see where this one is going. the 'one small thing' moiraine knows about her future is that she and thom eventually marry—they will at the series' end, i think. they have a son and name him owyn.
• slayer kills nynaeve in tel'aran'rhiod, and in an attempt to avenge her, lan fights and is also killed by slayer. either lan kills slayer also, or perrin does later.
• rand dies (everyone sees it coming), but it won't be exactly death the way we all think of it. it'll happen at shayol ghul fighting padan fain, and they'll kill each other, and i like three scenarios for rand's not-quite-death:

  1. he hangs out a while in tel'aran'rhiod, either because he has become bound to the horn, or by some other egwene/elayne/nynaeve dreamwalking voodoo. he's called back later when mat sounds the horn.
  
  2. he actually dies, and in this option, it's true physical death. death as the aelfinn see it might be fundamentally different; living in the 'to live, you must die' sense might mean his thread in the pattern still exists, and will later be reborn (just as he is lews therin reborn); or he's healed by nynaeve and everyone is shocked because omg.
  
  3. there's an interesting theme of threes with rand's character—his actions fall into distinct 'categories' of rand al'thor, lews therin, and 'the dragon' persona—corresponding respectively to the naive shepherd, the formidable madman, and the balanced one rand needs to be. in this one, somehow just the rand al'thor and the lews therin partitions of rand's existence die, but the part called the dragon survives long enough to travel to tar valon (recall the funeral bier viewing) to be healed and sent back into the fray. also: if this is what happens, min and aviendha will also die (they correspond to the rand and lews therin slices respectively)
  
  i'm currently thinking #3 is closest to how it'll be, but i'm really shooting in the dark here.

• fain is bad. also, i think some of the forsaken may be loose.

not the cache we had set out to find, mind you. the locations to which the satellites directed us were respectively 1) a copse empty of everything except ants and scrub and various droppings, and 2) unreachable except perhaps by helicopter. so that bit didn't pan out as we had planned. but it's hard to imagine finding something more interesting, or stranger, than what we did find out there: the journal you kept and wrote in during those periods of time when your mind was so dissociated from itself that it may as well have been dictated by the actual invisible pink unicorn.

enough of my rambling. i'll let the best of yours speak for itself:

it goes on.

to be sure, it does; i'm just not sure whether it should. i believe i'm so enmeshed in my personal philosophy of 'hummers bad' that anything bad that happens to hummer drivers is good. then again, if i were an elf living in the days of the memory of the trees, anything bad that happened upon morgoth would be happy news indeed; this means either i am a good person, or (that is to say, 'and/or') i have lately been reading the silmarillion.

obviously, it is both.

of course, this year's were not so bad, but not so good as to leave no room for improvement.

also! three cheers and a tally-ho for friends' free hot tub! ask him (or his personal financial assistant) how much this 'free' actually costs. go on, i dare you.

whenever i do either i create some sort of meaning from the sensory input.

occasionally i'll do both simultaneously and the meaning gets all tangled in my head so that later when i encounter the patterns of one i'll inevitably recall the other without regard for its relevance at that particular time.


i have brilliant examples, roughly sorted by date read:

jurassic park: jon secada
2001 series: lost world soundtrack
the rama series: u2
the stand: nirvana
1984: the cranberries
atonement: fischerspooner
the dark tower series: in various places, out of africa soundtrack, future sound of london, beck, bad company (who make an important thematic cameo in book seven, not to give anything away), moby


and the input is not necessarily linked to books and music. it could as easily be location and music, and often is, viz.:

my honeymoon: muse
the dormitory in which i spent my fourth year of college: audioslave
the shitty basement apartment where i spent the first third of my fifth: the flaming lips
the road: always beck, always to the dismay of my wife



since i have you here, i feel the need to direct your attention to the most powerful weapon in my geek arsenal. oh how i love to analyze data, and, in the process, to be analyzed.

only now, for the first time ever, am i listening to a cd i got months ago. months! okay, here's why. the album is actually four cds meant to be played simultaneously. the logistics of this are challenging at best, but the result is worth it. except for the weird screaming in track 2. and the dogs at the end. get three friends with speakers and party down.

playing battle for middle-earth makes my head spin. sure it's a big advertisement for the movie trilogy, but it's a dang fun one. and dang pretty. you can't go wrong with mumakil and grond and ents. dang dang.

and i just finished the farseer series by robin hobb. i got an unwanted spoiler when i started, and then it turned out to be completely false. i kept waiting for a certain person to die and then the person kept not dying, and not dying, and in the end, finally didn't die. it was all very confusing.


our prospects involving countries east of the atlantic improve daily. hopefully this won't turn out like the failed las vegas bid last spring. hopefully medical conditions remain as they are. unlike last spring. though we might have saved ourselves the hassle of a national security letter, so maybe it all works out in the end. the bright sides just keep getting darker these days.



there's some bad news. jesus was trampled at wal-mart by middle america stampeding toward the 'half-price tripe made in china holiday sale' table.


dear jesus,

i'm sorry we always forget to invite you to your birthday party every year.

love,
matt.

excuse me whilst i build a time machine to take me to april 2006.


[aside: the beginning is the end is the beginning. i saw it coming.]

that's right: now you too can experience the double joy of matt's bathroom and drew's art. interested? you should be. disgusted? probably that too.

waterfalls and hot springs, and sometimes both. the plop of elderberries on slow, deep water. a tent, a sleeping bag, a pillow, a wife. sunscreen and bug spray and deodorant and biodegradable soap. a perfectly cast line, and the fish!—inches and inches and inches of cutthroat trout, all tauntingly catch and release. tinder, kindling, down-and-dead wood. fire island (no relation). the unabashed horror of the scat can. the love/hate relationship with the inflatable kayak. the shock of cold water on sun-warmed skin. sore muscles. bruised hands. torn feet. pancakes and eggs and horrible little fake-meat turds almost every morning; contrast with well-smoked salmon followed by an abundance of spaghetti. river otters on the opposite bank, for which cutthroat trout are not catch and release. running to catch up with the boat. a long-overdue tan. a long, long night drive in another man's diesel truck pulling another man's trailer whose lights refused to light, attracting the attention of a nice gentleman in a dark blue suit and a black and white car who told us what a good idea it would be for us to drive two hundred-odd miles with the four-way flashers on—the same ones that would begin to make strange scraping noises very late at night. arriving home and the subsequent race for the shower. a long, sad unpacking.

and that was my exciting vacation. holiday. thingy.

my parents just returned from their own vacation holiday thingy to the uk. they mock us with their postcards. 'oh hello, landlocked americans. today we got lost in camden town market, had fish and chips in a pub, and had high tea with h.m. the queen herself! also we got take-away, took the tube, and went to the loo. tomorrow we're going to formally separate from the roman catholic church. cheerio, fatties!'

damned tourists.


i'm only beginning to understand the bbc radio version of douglas adams' hitchhiker series. it's so superlatively different from the book after about the sixth episode that following it becomes a chore (albeit a very enjoyable one, due in part to the fact i am strangely attracted to lintilla's voice) for my book-familiar memory. and why have i not yet seen the movie? the answer to that is unknowable.


dear anyone: we must play risk.

i
am not
happy.

oh wait: i'm working full time now, so i am happy.

how does a guy reconcile his own accounts? easily. life zeroes itself. for, as always, everything averages out in the end.


my wife read the new harry potter book last weekend, and now she laughs at my feeble attempts to figure out who the half-blood prince is. (hint: it's me)

who heard the alarm only distantly this morning, and slept past his ideal waking time? who over-brewed the tea this morning, turning it into bitter bitter badness that even his ever-loving and -longsuffering wife couldn't choke down? who has a case of the mondays? the answers is me.

it continues. every paper cut I can remember receiving has arrived on a monday. it is a scientifically verifiable fact that, per unit of area of skin affected, a paper cut is the stupidest type of injury allowable by the laws of physics. it must be a monday. I never could get the hang of mondays.

perhaps on the bright side I have figured out what I want for my birthday.

0. 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine. no not really.
1. booba? kiki? yes yes really, but hard to find for sale. (a friend of mine experiences this. when she closes her eyes, my voice is blue, and round.) the machinations of the mind are an utter enigma.
2. some bloody answers. yes yes really but not likely on the scale I'm hoping for. do they even exist? it is an open question.


days go by and in the end no one knows where all the when went. yesterday's rain is this morning's fog; perhaps that has something to do with it.

or perhaps it's just a sodding monday.