darklooks.com

Frankly, if you’re hoping for a close-up rose-tinted (or, if you think about things the way I tend to if unchecked, brown-tinted — and I don’t mean sepia) let’s-all-feel-good/bad about ourselves, this is probably the wrong place in which to sojourn, no matter how briefly.
This time last year things were broadly as they have been since. I have been less in contact with my better friends than I would like, but this is not the venue for an apology. I do the same work. I buy clothes from the same identikit outlets. I still look a little bit scruffy. OK, quite a lot. I still back down a lot and understate on a regular basis. I still contain a source of irony. I continue to remark regularly upon how quickly time passes and how, indeed, it seems to pass more quickly the more of it goes by, which is probably tied up with a very interesting second differential, but at bottom sounds a bit tiring.

Existential revelations ahead; prepare yourselves.
Moral 1: things change.
Moral 2: Things don’t change as much as you think.
Moral 3: Things change much more when you try to change them.
Moral 4: They don’t always change the way you thought they would.
Moral 5: You can’t reliably predict whether that is for the better or worse. Indeed, it’s very likely you can’t say in retrospect either. This is a side-effect of having life happen serially rather than in parallel.
Moral 6: I should have changed more things, but I’m not losing sleep about that.
Moral 7: Despite all the morals, I had fun.
Moral 8: I need to read Ubik again.

And one more thing… I need to read Eyecatcher.