I need to tell you something.

I love the Vortex.

I love it with all of my heart and soul.

Everyone in this house loves the Vortex.

And they love us, too.

Show up, more often, and they'll love you, too.

There are other thoughts swirling in my head, pressure to tell you things of import.

Thanks to raoin, for the copy of On Divination and Synchronicity, mech_angel for Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop and a beautifully bound and illustrated copy of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, my step-mother for a giant chocolate chip croissant and some kind of a baked apple dessert, my mom for (so far) Lehrich's Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice which I am, at this point literally terrified to read, and my aunt for both season two of Arrested Development, and The Prestige. Also, wacko1138 lent me J. Michael Straczynski's Scriptwriting.

Good birthday gifts.

Have a good night.

Talk to you soon.

Let me tell you how you do it:

Will you take a little walk with me, this morning? It's a little far, but you may like where we go.

You start off looking for something. Your car, a map, something for someone, anything so long as it has meaning to you. Maybe you're looking fo the place where your car is, so you can sell it. You're looking for the place where you're selling your car. The transaction is taking place, as you speak. You gave the directions, there, you know, but you can't seem to remember them. You need a guide.

You search for your guide, who seems to have mysteriously disappeared into the surrounding area. city-scape, home, Jungle, any place you once felt at home now feels unknown. Almost-hostile.But while you search the city, you gain an assurance that you know where you're going and that the first thing you were looking for isn't that important, anymore. You have to find the guide. The old man, the stodgy professor who knows your needs, and hints at your secrets. You see him across a street, and you walk to him.

On the way, you realise that you're remembering houses of family members who live here, and you know that here are people there, who can help you. A catalogue of familiar faces, this time in the most literal sense of the word. And suddenly they're with you, walking talking. You bring them to yourself as you need them. You're searching in the underground of a building, but there is an over-hang, and a circular opening, all told. Maybe it reminds you of a hidden part of a mall, ot a building downtown, but you know, then and there that you have to find someone.

You have to find your teacher. You have to find the person who has brought you this far, and who you think can bring you even further, and you know that the people in this place will know where that teacher is. As you look out, you see the teacher's family and traits, written on the sky, and in the sides of buildings as if they were sand. You see her family, her children, her loves, her traits, written on the sky, and your companion tells you and your guides that he's become so damned used to al of this. You know that he means "desensitized," and so you smile as he smiles and launches into the building with abandon, setting off to look for this person he's never met.

You are traped inside the world view of another culture. You are in a world view where magical visions are par for the course, and the pattern recognition centres of the brain regularly connect with the currents of quantum information that eminate simply by things existing, near each other. A shamanistic culture, Nairobi. Nigeria. Some Ur- or Archetypal Aboriginal people? They show you how things can be done, and you head off in two directins. You are looking for your car, again, with the registration information, in hand, and you are also heading into the building.

In a room in the building, you are there with everyone who knows what you are trying to do. Your loves, your familyy, your friends-who-are-family. Everyone who has a more than passing understanding with your goals, and the way the world works. The room is shabby. It has stains on the walls, and holes in the floor. There are no doors, but two small ones leading to crawl spaces, through which you can reach other Sections of the room. You're not going to be able to leave, you understand. Not like this. But it doesn't matter, because you're surrounded by people who know you, and that's okay, for now. You take the many-coloured rocks, on the wall, and start arranging them, with an instinctive feeling, because you need to create something, make something that was not there, before, and so you do, and that thing becomes real.

Someone creates a car, and you can step up, but you can't sit in it, for more than a second. It's not real enough, to you. Someone else creates a door, and they leave through it. But it's not your door. You cannot use it, and the place they go, though you can see it, doesn't really exist for you, yet. You set yourself down, with the tools at your disposal, and you begin to create something small, with your eyes closed, because you have to start somewhere. You know that too many things look "real" when you see them a certain way, and so you have to begin training yourself to see them as nothing but what you create. You frame a small door, and you find a handle like the ones on the crawl spaces, and you attach it, and suddenly the room grows cold, dread spreads from this point, out over the entire process, thus far.

You remember the death of someone close. They are represented to you, sometimes, as a wife or a sister or even a mortal enemy, but it may be your mother, father, brother sister, any number of relationships to you. You know what it means, and you must watch the death, again. You have to see the forces that conspired, here, the things that happened to them that caused them to die, and you have to know that it was not your fault. Not this one. There may be others for whose deaths you are responsible. Many, even, but this one is separate from you. This one is not yours. This is the knowledge of the crawlspaces, this flooding cold and pain of forced memories, and the rending horror of divesting yourself of something you've carried, for so long. It sucks all of that away. You were right to be afraid.

You're still there, turning the handle on the door you've made, looking into the crawl space you've accessed, and the turning of the knob is causing a panel in the box that is the entrance to this spce to flip over, again and again, taking pieces off of a small, disgusting thing, at the bottom of the box, each time. Someone behind you notes that it's dead, and exlpains to you what just happened. They tell you that it was necessary to get rid of the hang-ups that you had, there, because if nothing was real, at all, then nothing you made could be real either.

Look at your doors. The crawl space doors hold no special malice, anymore. The door you've created leads to a place you already understand. The doors and things that have been created by others are as usable to you as a chair, or a spoon. But that would be missing the point. You see flashes of everything you've done and been, and everything you could do and could be.

You wake up.

Wil Wheaton on the Benefits of Diconnectivity.

'...Do you know the actual phone numbers of the people you call regularly? Or is that just saved in your cell phone? When you’re online, do you actually know your passwords, or are they auto-saved as well? Do you have a roadmap in your car, or a Thomas Guide? What would you do if you got lost without a cell phone or a GPS device? Have you ever stopped to think about how dependent we actually are on technology, and what we’d do if we suddenly lost it one day?'

He's absolutely correct, by the way.

There have been a few recent studies that show that the use of electronic storage devices makes people more likely to forget simple things like telephone numbers, directions, addresses, etc. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find them, at the moment. Read Wil's post, though.

Good stuff.

Hi.