The shadows of trees cast green and gray clouds on the lawn
As I sit in the glorious sun of a day half-beginning, half-gone...
Another I recall:
There is sunlight on the grasses
Of the fields where I have grown up
And it makes me feel so happy,
Yes it makes me feel alive.
Sometimes, like those two, I remember them easily later. Maybe they have a particularly catchy melody or the words just stick in my head somehow. But countless others songs created like that vanish as quickly as the moment that inspired them.
On Day 48, the moon was huge. Not quite full, but the world outside was blue and bright. So I sang to it. It wasn't a particularly novel lyric, but it was nice. I didn't write it down, though, and have since forgotten the specifics of it.
Here's a recreated "guess":
Great, wise guardian of the night
Thank you, thank you for your light
Day has left and dark is here
But still I feel no fear.
This may not be a heavenly tune
But it's my song for you, dear moon.
Thank you, thank you for your light
That guides me onward in the night.
Day 49: I'm not much good at drawing, but sometimes I stumble onto good luck. I was considering trying to illustrate a little side project that may show up as some of my Good Madness in the future, but before I did this I wanted to see if I could draw a decent kid/knight. These doodles are some of my best attempts:
Day 50: I worked some on a knitting project I'd started ages ago. I meant to give it as a going-away present to a former boss, but said boss has since already gone away, so I'll have to figure out something else to do with it.
Day 51: A while ago I put up an excerpt from a story I'm writing about time travel. I worked more on that today. Here's another excerpt:
I am, of course, in Time as I write this, and you also are within it, further down the river, reading. I guess that makes these words a strange kind of time travel.
What that means is that I cant give you an adequate description of what it’s really like in a place without Time. I’m limited by the language; I have to pick a tense—past, present, future—when none will do. But if you’ll pardon these weaknesses in my prose, I’ll try to tell you what happened next.
First, blinding pain. Inside my head. I can say with conviction and truthfulness that it happened (verb, past tense) because Time still existed as a memory in my brain, if nowhere else outside my mind. The agony. I mentioned a headache before. If you’ve ever had a migraine, you’re closer to the mark, but imagine taking that and magnifying it ten times. Make that a hundred. It was hard to move—if you can call it moving—or to function at all.
Timelessness has a landscape, though again words are limited in describing it. There are things there. There are Beings. There are colors, and what’s cool is that there are colors out of Time that don’t exist within it. The closest I’ve gotten to seeing those colors within Time is while listening to music. A certain swell, a certain harmony or arrangement of notes, and it’s like the color is there, pressing close against the surface of my reality, like a hand pressed flat against glass. My mind almost—almost—grabs hold of it, but it passes backwards and away again in the space of that split second, as the song moves on, measure after measure, the metronome marking the beat like a prison drum.
It could have been all over for me then. Not that anyone would have noticed. Passing from phobia to psychosis, truly losing my grip on reality, would be apparent only to me. To the world outside I was already a nut job. But I mean it. I honestly have no idea how I made it back that first time. Bombarded by the searing pain of a brain not used to existing in Timelessness, disoriented by alien sights and experiences both beautiful and frightening, it was nothing short of a miracle that I was able to gather my thoughts, to remain collected, to envision the natural rhythms of Time and make the leap back in, without doing permanent damage to myself. For a first-timer with no previous exposure to the theory or protocol of the procedure—well, like I said: a miracle.
I arrived back in that moment, the gray moment, on the floor of my bedroom, and the tears started, and I was shaking, and I fumbled for the pain pills on my nightstand. I lay trembling after that, as the grayness shifted and grew more pale. As light descended on the world, I fell into sleep, my mind replaying the things I had just experienced, visions of the impossible.
Day 52: There's this kind of puzzle I love doing that's known as O'ekaki, or Paint By Numbers. It's similar to Sudoku in that you have a grid that you're trying to fill in. It's different, however, in that you aren't filling the boxes with numbers. The numbers are around the edges, and they provide clues that, if decoded properly, help you find the picture in the grid. Each number tells the size of a segment of blocks to fill in on that particular line. By determining which to fill in, and which to leave blank (I denote these with an "X") you solve the puzzle. I've been enjoying solving them for a while, but I wondered how hard it would be to create one. It turns out: VERY. After about five tries, i came up with the very simple O'ekaki puzzle you see below:
Before:
Solved:
Days 53 and 54: I'm lumping them together because I worked on the same thing both days. It's a story I'm writing that's related to the House-Between-Worlds story I told you about before. In fact, if I get my act together they may all be part of the same book one day. I don't want to give away too much plot, but here's a paragraph to give you a taste of what I've been working on:
We’ve been given no names for this world we find ourselves in. We’ve been denied the basic privilege of education. That is to say, what education we get is of Em’s choosing. We are taught what we’d need to know of this place if captured, or if going out to scout. What history we know is mainly our own, of the first rash action with the Door, and how that has led to our misery. What more I’ve learned is from books snatched secretly from attics then hastily returned. Staying up long days reading while my fellow travelers slept. And the photo albums, the sketches. This is how I know about the wars of this world. I read about presidents and princes, dictators and diplomats. And I see firsthand from those photographs just how quickly humans fade to dust.
And finally... a couple weeks ago one of my Good Madness projects involved selecting photographs and formatting a free photo book from Shutterfly. It arrived in the mail! While I can't show every page, here's one:
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