when you remember that you've forgotten to remember not to forget what you needed to remember...

i'd like to say that i've not much to speak of, but that would be a lie. the truth is that i've had far too much to say for me to filter the signal from the noise, leaving me incoherent and if there's one thing i hate it's using a lot of words to say nothing whatsoever.

today marks one month to the day - 30 days - that i have left in this country. it's all getting... a little insane. there's not so much a surplus of activity, just an increased buzz in the back of my head which i've managed to ignore for the most part. give me another two weeks and it'll be "bullet in the brain" levels, but i'll worry about that later. meanwhile, i still have a job to do, and cash to manage, and stuff to distribute. i now have solid homes for the shit i want to keep, and paying customers for the shit i don't. i've cemented my guarantee'd return to the job i've rather enjoyed for the last half a year. i've even managed to really find out who my friends are, and adequately wash my hands of the wastrels and hangers on i really have no time for anymore. of course, it's after all this has been accomplished that i met someone who seems to have emerged whole and fully formed from the pages of "Mr Raven Meets His Perfect Girl At The Worst Possible Time: A Cautionary Tale".

dear gods... this is the point where i curl up into a ball and rock backwards and forwards muttering "thisisn'thappeningthisisn'thappeningthisisn'thappening" over and over again. forget the cliche'd "where have you been all my life?", how about "where have you been this last year?" still, i choose to believe that timing is everything, and it's important for me to remember that the best things in my life have happened because i let go and rode the flow. trying to fight it has tended to get me dashed against jagged rocks, whereas letting the river take me over the waterfall tends to put me in entertaining situations. it helps that, the nearer i get to 30 (erm... i ask you: where the fuck did that come from?) the more i realise that Right The Fuck Now isn't actually as important as i used to think when i was approaching 20.

you know what they say about love being like a butterfly? sure - let it go, but any geek will tell you how cheap and easy it is to GPS tag things these days so unless that butterfly heads to the backwaters of China a resourceful geek can find it again, oh yes.

psycho-stalker instincts aside though, i've been enjoying having someone around who reminds me what it feels like to have energy and optimism and to live in the moment again. this year's been too much long-term plans and strategies, constantly focusing on events weeks and months in advance, so it's been great to exercise my right-here-and-now tactics. i'd forgotten how alive i felt back in the day when long-term meant working out what you were going to do on the weekend, or during semester-break. for nothing to matter past the coming weekend, or next Tuesday.

i'm not going to go into the rest because... well, i'm not in the mood to commit it to words right now. i'll leave it to say that she's been making me insanely happy (so much so that Shadow's been commenting on it whenever he sees me) and that the only thing keeping me from despairing at the thought of leaving is the though of coming back again.

at the day's end, the trajectory i'm on is climbing to a very definite apex and i know that i'll have a much better perspective on things when i can look down on it all and map it all out correctly. when all that i have is reduced to a couple of bags and wallet thick enough to bludgeon a fat man to death with. when, in exactly 30 days from right now, i'm sitting on an aeroplane over the Indian Ocean and Lou and i are rapidly getting drunker and drunker the further away we get from this place and these people. leaving all this is a delicious insanity - departing the party while everyone's still having a great time and throwing up on the back steps is still in someone's future rather than their messy, embarrassing past... and if the house is boarded up and the party's moved on when i get back then... well... fuck the lot of them. these are the risks we take that make life interesting.