The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

I guess I didn’t realize how upset I still was until after I had written yesterday’s entry and then settled in for a hazy afternoon and evening. I was kept buoyant by a few vodka and sodas and the unexpected kindness of friends, bridging at least briefly our ever-widening gap. To be fair, it wasn’t unexpected because they aren’t the types to be kind, it was unexpected because I had begun to believe (and probably do still believe) that I no longer deserve such kindnesses. That gap is much more of my design, or at least my action (or maybe inaction), than theirs. But, they were there and for that I was grateful. They’re good people even in spite of their tolerance of me.

This morning, I feel better, I guess. Actually, I don’t think it’s a matter of feeling better or worse. I think I’ve convinced myself well enough to be optimistic so that I don’t feel like I’m in as much turmoil as before. I still feel disassociated; I suppose that’s a bit of ‘shock’. But, I don’t want to allow myself any excesses of obsessive negativity when it all seems like it might just be okay. At least it’ll be okay enough so that that one doctor’s original, hasty, and still embittering prognosis can be kept safely drafted away. In other words, there’s no point in me worrying about it. Tuesday comes and then we’ll know more. Until then, I’m satisfied enough with being a bit of a zombie with a penchant for eating distractions rather than brains.

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My plan for this reborn site, at this point, is to try and tear through two to three entries from Shosetsu per day until they’re finished. After that, instead of bulk importing the entries from the following two volumes, I will go through those each by hand as well to address either a lack of proper excerpts or to get rid of any HTML or Textile mark-up.

Unfortunately, a fair chunk of entries toward the end of Shosetsu is missing. I’m guessing, based on my shoddy memory alone, that there is at least one month of stuff that’s just gone forever, maybe a little more. There’s no point in searching for backups because I recall specifically the day that I stupidly rebuilt the server which was Shosetsu’s tiny MySQL home: I had backed up everything except the the partition containing the databases. So, yeah, gone forever.

I also know that I wrote sporadically between Shosetsu and Broken Window but I have no idea where any of that could possibly be. I have a stack of backups that I plan on going through in the coming weeks but I’m not too positive that any of the writing will be in there. Most of that stuff was transient, as my journalistic writing between major projects tends to be, so there would only be a few entries here and a few entries there. If I recall correctly, most of that stuff was over-wrought anyway (although not as catastrophically embarrassing as the stuff I had written between Dogbark and Shosetsu; even if that stuff does turn up, the only thing I plan on doing with it is burning it).

A friend has asked if I was going to be embarrassed posting this early stuff. Broken Window, and everything that comes after it, is good enough and close to or already at my present voice. Everything before it, however, is questionable. I do, however, remember reading over some bits of Shosetsu and liking it but now as I type each entry in, I’m not so certain. Some of it is strictly embarrassing. Too much of it to me comes across as me trying way too hard to write in a specific way; there are a lot of clumsy and heavy-handed adjectives. Some of me wants to re-write it but I’m leaving it as-is, warts and all. The only editing I’m allowing myself is to correct spelling mistakes, add or remove minor words that obscure clarity (such as entire words which were accidentally dropped from a sentence being restored), and, as embarrassing as it is now to admit, I’m correcting all faux British spellings to proper American ones. As gross as that pretension was, I’m cutting myself a little slack: it was ten years ago, after all. I’ve come a long way since then. I hope.

This is a fun project. I’m enjoying the parallel of writing presently as well as carefully going back through the old entries. When it’s done, there will be more here than anyone could possibly care about and I bet not one person will read the whole business from end-to-end. That’s fine. I guess I’m doing this more for myself, to have all of the work gathered in one place: on a server that receives regular back-ups and not scattered all over creation.

For the first time in a long time, possibly not since Broken Window, keeping an online journal feels natural and relevant. It feels like a part of my life again rather than some kind of obligation to an ever-dwindling readership. Yes, of course, the work is as ridiculous and as unnecessary as ever. I still wonder if it isn’t still on the fringe, however, this type of writing: where most everyone else is rattling on about politics or technology, I’m still plugging away like an asshole over the fictions and non-fictions of what goes on about him, building into most every entry a sense of urgency and importance well undeserved by the actual content. The fact that I continue on in such a fashion demonstrates a clear lack of reality in myself and possibly outright derision in whomever stumbles across this verbose and unfortunate place.