blatherskite_dreams eatingstars last night i met crOwl in my dreams, a beautiful soul, always excited to hear a new story and to bring love to places where love is needed the most. and a few weeks ago, it was unhinged, running in the beautiful sunshine, her music playing in the background. a long time ago i dreamt of mon working in her garden. maybe one day i will dream of you. 090313 ... jane (i sure hope so. i feel i'm next in line) 090313 ... unhinged my friend had a dream we were in together recently where we were hiding in a closet from someone who wanted to kill us and they found us and she killed them. with her bare hands. he always said that if you dream of someone that means you are together in another reality. or maybe just in your heart. i don't dream much. especially lately. i'm too stressed. my life is filled with thick blankets of dreamless sleep. i wake up with anxiety attacks i can't shake. or i toss and turn til 2pm. but there are no dreams. especially pleasant ones. 090313 ... red blue :::: purple linker http://blather.newdream.net/b/blather_dream.html 090313 ... auburn Last night I dreamed that I was taking my previous best friend(turned enemy) to grad. And we joked about how we were going to be confirming everything everyone always said about us in Junior High. Except the dream was about another girl to begin with. I didn't know her, she just became the one I knew. I guess things are just like that. It doesn't matter how something begins, it just becomes and is defined entirely by the way it ends. 090314 ... raze i seem to have more of these now than i ever did before. last night, misstree was living next door to me and she was playing drums on her front porch. she was pretty solid behind the kit. i got ready to step out onto my own front porch and play a duet with her (my drums were conveniently already outside), but then it began to rain, and she stopped playing and brought her drums back inside with her. in another dream, i lost my last twenty dollars in a bet andru tricked me into making. once he'd revealed the ruse and explained how i'd made a wager on something that didn't even exist, he still wouldn't give me my money back. later i learned from facebook that he'd been dead for a few years. and our run-in wasn't a flashback. so who the hell took my money? 130211 ... raze it was aimee / arwyn's birthday. i had a gig i needed to get ready for, but i was able to steal enough time away from soundcheck to pick her up the last remaining copy of the strangest tennis book ever. it wasn't about tennis at all. i was sure she would love it. she was excited, until she finished tearing off the red wrapping paper and saw the front of the hardcover book. all the emotion drained from her face, and she looked at it like it was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. "i know you're not a tennis fan," i explained, "but most of it isn't even about tennis. there are drawings, like comics, and they’re funny, and sad, and swear-y, and some are really dark..." i mean, there was a bit that focused on the private thoughts of a lovelorn, morbidly depressed chihuahua. and a two-panel comic that showed a grotesque piece of spoiled food overgrown with red gunk sitting on a kitchen counter, a speech / thought bubble in the second panel, inviting someone to eat it. and the words "eat me" were delivered in such a deadpan, near-contemptuous way, it became funny. i'm telling you, spoiled food has more of an emotional range in animated form than you'd expect. 130216 ... raze last night, i was sitting at the dinner table in my mother's house, with daxle and birdmad, reading my local newspaper with a mixture of horror and amusement as i realized someone in my city had traced me here thanks to the one time i posted my email address in "gmail" and took it upon themselves to call attention to blather in print. daxle (who had short blonde hair) reassured me that "we're all basically addicted", and it was unlikely that anyone who read the little blurb in the paper would stick around for longer than ten seconds even if they did pass through. still, i couldn't help feeling like i'd betrayed a lot of people without meaning to. note to self: you are more google traceable than you think. 130217 ... raze endless_desire responded to a compliment on blue in a self-deprecating way. "thank you," she said, "but i'm just a young adult with chronic impulses." 130224 ... raze someone here wrote something critical about me, and talked about what kind of father they thought i was. i responded with some serious venom, and told them i didn't have any children. they got all defensive and explained they saw some "cracks" in my writing. they didn't use any recognizable name, of course. and i could never find that blathe again after reading it the first time. 130318 ... raze suddenly, horribly, my name on this red screen seemed very wrong, the worst choice i ever could have made, with all of its years of wrongness spreading over me like a sick blanket of dread, and looking at it filled me with anxiety that could no more be ignored than it could be dispelled. that was one of the stranger borderline nightmares i've had in recent memory. nothing even happened. 130418 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I had one last week! You were there (and you, and you...) I was a reporter and I had to interview Dafreman. He seemed too old, though; he had a grey beard. He lived on a farm somewhere in Ohio, where he was building an airplane in his barn. He was in the news because he'd released a song making fun of Honey Boo Boo, and Fox News had made a broadcast saying he was her perverted uncle, which understandably made him very angry. Most of all, he insisted he wasn't related, dammit! Then he took me in his plane and dropped me off in Dorval. I was walking around aimlessly for a while, feeling confused that the lakeshore wasn't where it was supposed to be, when I came across the Dorval Library. I remembered I was supposed to meet anne_girl there. The library was having a concert from 4-8 pm, with a different act on every hour. I was excited because it was loud music. At a library. I found anne_girl, who seemed excited too, and we were about to go in when raze walked up to us. I knew it was him because he said something like, "I didn't actually ask you what music you liked, but that's okay." I was surprised because he looked too young. He had this skinny long-haired rocker-kid look, like my friend from jazz class who's actually a classical pianist, and he went on to talk about how he liked the first band that was playing, The Elephants. Anne_girl said they were like The Decemberists, only less about December and more about elephants, and he nodded knowledgeably. We got separated in the crowd, then anne_girl pulled me out of the library after the first act. I was surprised, but she said I'd agreed to help her file her taxes. I said, "Oh no, I'm sure you know more about that than I do," but she insisted I had to do it, so I woke up. I'm not sure what lesson I learned from that... Libraries should be rock concert venues more often? Don't agree to help a friend with her taxes? People don't look like the shape of their words? 130418 ... raze (i like how i nodded all knowledgeable-like in recognition of the elephants that were not so much about december.) 130418 ... raze the crowdfunding website indiegogo had been altered to operate as more of a social networking platform, and a girl from arizona who i'd told about blather for some odd reason responded to my message a month after the fact. she sent me dozens of additional messages that were one-word responses to some of my blathes. i watched them pop up at the bottom right of my computer screen in the same way gmail chat messages do when i'm using google chrome. here on red, there were half a dozen new things in the "today" column on the recent page. i was a little afraid to investigate, worried she might have blathed something personal about me and how i'd introduced her to this place. for some reason that possibility made me very uncomfortable, even after all the personal things i've vomited up here over the years. there was no sign of her in the blathe i ended up clicking on. instead, there was the return of birdmad, saying only, "hi bobby," after something brief silentbob had written. i wrote, "birdmad!" but accidentally created a brand new blathe for the word "runny" in the process. and instead of my single word message, i unwittingly copied and pasted fragments of blathes from three or four other 'skites, none of which had anything to do with one another. i scratched out all the words of this unwanted blathe on a white piece of paper, with a black marker, convinced for a moment that doing this would set some sort of voodoo magic in motion and "break" the blathe i wanted to get rid of, rendering it inaccessible. then it struck me that there would still be links made elsewhere to the word "runny", and if anyone ever clicked on those links to find a blathe that didn't seem to exist, they might be confused. it didn't matter anyway. blacking out the words on paper did nothing to alter what was here in red. so i appended a little note apologizing for the mishap, and that was that. 130504 ... raze i discovered my once-upon-a-time almost-stepsister was an old-school 'skite. i wasn't sure how i felt about that. she hadn't visited blather in years and couldn't remember what name she'd given herself back when she was active, so reading her words wasn't an option. i took a look over here anyway, and it wasn't red anymore. it was a different shade of blue, with purple links. there was no more red_blather. only blue and "other blue". it was a bit of a relief to wake up and see this place hadn't changed after all. 130722 ... raze blather was an indoor swimming pool. i was wading through last summer. there were only five or six people present, but the mood was bright. the pool led into a series of connected rooms with cement floors — something like a sterile, gutted dungeon in several parts — in which someone had created an annoying dragon creature and spread copies of it, and links that led back to it. each room was symbolic of a blathe, and the creature was a form of user-generated spam. each person in the swimming pool was symbolic of a 'skite. i warned brad (a guy i went to grade school with) not to leave the water. once he saw the creature, it would lead to a war, and things would never be the same again. i knew this because it had already happened. blather had become a wasteland of bad vibes and acrimony, and this was the tipping point. i was being given a chance to rewrite history. "look at how happy we were," i told him. i tried to convince him the best way to avoid feeding a troll is to act like he doesn't exist. eventually he'll grow tired of not being able to get a rise out of people, his small-minded games will lose their appeal, and he'll move on when he realizes no one is going to pay any attention to him, just like a child running out of steam after a mucus-drenched tantrum. brad wouldn't listen. he wanted to know what the dragon creature looked like. so i followed him, and we fed the troll, and repeated the same mistakes we'd made before. 130804 ... amy anthropology i've had a dream of the artsy but creepy indoor swimming pool. i found it in a comic book, IRL, too. the monster is chlthulu according to the comic book. it was a scary comic book, drugs and insanity and all that. i was like, fuck this comic book. but that is typical of me. i was especially pissed off because i had had the small, but memorable, dream about it. Neonomicon it was called. i only bought it because there was a reasonable looking woman on the cover. Perhaps the whole thing is one big troll. Perhaps the purpose of the monster is to say eh!, more or less. Yeah, it's like you would swim in it, but you can't. won't. obviously too grossed out. (not to analyze you, persay. this is all my response to whatever i encountered vis a vis yeah right yuck i don't want to think about it) 130805 ... raze you know, i'm kind of tempted to check out that comic book now. i like strange/scary things! and yeah...those dreams be strange business. i had another blather-related one the other night. this time i was trying to tell someone about blather without actually telling them about it. "it's this place..." i said. "i'll just call it 'the website', so you won't be able to follow me there." i thought that was kind of funny [and pretty much what i really would say in that situation]. 130805 ... amy anthropology you have abundant dreaming powers. I still have the comic book... I'll send it to you?.. 130805 ... e_o_i It started with a fellow blatherskite, sort of, when unhinged posted a picture of fireworks on blather. I looked up - my computer was in the room overlooking the street - to see the same fireworks out the window. These fireworks had special effects: confetti and scale-like metal sheets in different formations. Suddenly a metal confetti container shaped like a rocket hurtled towards the front lawn. I ran away, leaping over fences. I realized I was dreaming because fences aren't that easy to leap over. Then my father came by with a car and drove me back home. I asked him, a bit shaken up by the real-life disaster in Lac Megantic and the falling plank of metal at a Montreal construction site, if the rocket ship was a problem. He showed me an envelope from the insurance company that gave him two free library cards for Laval and St. Laurent, plus a gift certificate to Chapters, and he shook his head. He looked kind of embarrassed as well, and he admitted the neighbours were laughing at him because the fallen confetti container looked like a penis. I thought it looked like an old Soviet rocket ship. Perhaps this confetti container looked different to different people, since after all metal reflected different colours. 130806 ... e_o_i I just had an epiphany. The whole penis/rocket/firework continuum is either a reference to the thirteenth chapter of Ulysses or The Key of Awesome's parody of Katy Perry's "Firework." 130806 ... e_o_i I dreamed that past or paste posted an excited message to blather about getting married. (The rest of my dream was about characters from Batman and had nothing to do with this message.) 130814 ... raze there were commas in blathe titles, and no one seemed to notice the strangeness or suddenness of it. my immediate reaction was to begin compiling a list of all blathes with any reference to red_blather in their titles. naturally. i instinctively knew the first one i found (by sifting through the database one letter grouping at a time) was written by bespeckled, before even clicking on the link. 130822 ... raze i sent an email in response to something someone blathed on blue that seemed to be directed at me. only after the fact did i realize: [a] i got their blather name wrong [b] they weren't the 'skite i thought they were...actually, they weren't anyone i knew at all [c] what they wrote had nothing to do with me even so, i was too embarrassed to send a follow-up email of apology/explanation, fearing it would only dig the hole deeper. 130911 ... (z) (i dreamt of blather as a fully immersive, 3d space where words were nodes in a vast web of connections in a blue universe) 130912 ... e_o_i I want to have that dream. Mine was slightly similar, but not... It was a vision of blather_radio. In this dream I was on my bed, holding a small radio in my hand and adjusting the dial to get the right station. On the blather frequency, anyone could talk to each other, like a multi-line telephone. I spoke into the ether, inquiring whether other blatherskites were there, and I was answered by "evin." I'm not sure if evin was male or female, or whether I'd seen them on blather before, but they assured me they were definitely a blatherskite because they were on blather_radio, and we talked about it being six o'clock. And possibly about cylinders. 130912 ... e_o_i After taking the bus back to my computer (the apparently homeless man didn't appreciate me comparing Jesus to a bus pass, and my computer was a place where I probably wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings), I stumbled upon blather_green. It was mainly active from 2002-06, and no_reason had written a lot of surreal posts because blather_green was by nature surreal. In one, she vehemently denied the existence of blather_purple, and someone who might've been birdmad agreed. Blather_green, real; blather_purple, a figment of the imagination. In 2004, raze, writing as "johnny you-know-who" had posted something about kateri tekakwitha (uncapitalized) so I figured he'd read Beautiful_Losers. I had the intuition that he hadn't liked it because he thought vonnegut (also uncapitalized) was better at "that sort of thing" whatever "that sort of thing" was. I felt like creating a quiz to determine whether Kurt Vonnegut was in competition with Leonard Cohen for blather-greenishness, but I was distracted because when I stood up I realized I was about to have a baby. My belly protruded as if concealing a small football. I tried going into the living room, where my mother was reading, to play on the piano. But I had a pain in my stomach, and I thought, "It's true, these contraction things are quite distracting." I asked my mother if she'd come to me with the hospital - "Sure, sure" - because I was suddenly scared of having a baby. Why did J have to go to United States when I was having a baby? She should be here too... And then I realized that I hadn't been pregnant last week, so logically I shouldn't be having a baby now, and my belly deflated rapidly. I woke up wondering whether my stomach was hurting for some reason, but it was only feeling slightly pinched because I hadn't had that much for supper. My sensations in dreams rarely reflect what I'm actually feeling. Feelings, as in emotions - more likely. But yes. Blather_green! 130922 ... raze i love it! writing under my mostly-real name about a roman catholic saint is precisely what i *should* have been doing in 2004. instead, i was trying to be all mysterious and cryptically verbose under a then-new-and-anonymous name that's now well-worn-and-completely-devoid-of-anonymity. i haven't read beautiful_losers, but after reading what you wrote about it, i think i want to. i've always been curious about leonard cohen's writing outside of music. and i don't think it's as pretty or vivid or surreal as a real blather green would be, but have you seen this, e_o_i? http://blather.newdream.net/b/blather_in_green.html it's pretty nifty, i think. my brain melted a little the first time i saw it. 130922 ... e_o_i (Cool. I've come across a few of the test pages, but I don't think I've seen that one before. I'd read what you wrote about Slaughterhouse Five and I was thinking, I read that, but damn, why don't I remember more of it? I should... so I was already thinking about blather and Vonnegut and time skipping and reviewing books and such.) 130922 ... raze a friend was using my laptop, and i realized too late i'd left blather open in a browser window. they had no real reaction to it that i could see, but all i could keep thinking was, "please don't commit the url to memory. please don't become a 'skite and read all the personal stuff i've said here or, worse, lurk and look over my shoulder without letting me know you're around. please don't commit the url to memory. please don't..." ah, good old paranoia. 131013 ... ever dumbening i just meet them in person. it's easier that way. 131013 ... raze i was in a classroom with birdmad. i'm not sure what the subject was. we weren't really paying attention. he started tugging at the hairs on my upper lip, without explaining why. i thought he was trying to tweeze them with his hands, but when he'd finished, i realized he'd actually been threading lengths of purple string through my entire beard. tendrils of it hung from my chin like car wash fettuccine. i felt like an awkward piece of unintentional walking art. 131018 ... e_o_i Purple braided beard! That image made me laugh. 131018 ... raze the layout of red was more like that of a strange tumblr blog, with a grid of images to click on instead of words. only a few of the pictures were visible. the rest failed to load and were lost in the red, though they were still functioning links as long as you knew where to click. one picture was of ClairE. she asked about two long-gone 'skites who never existed in the real world. she said she missed eating ice cream with them. i considered responding, until i saw my word form (very different from the one we've actually got on blather...more like something you'd fill out on a message board) was already full with the words of someone else about to beat me to it. 131030 ... raze a 'skite i'd never seen here before started a blathe called "tennis match", but it had nothing to do with tennis. i said something about roger federer and they decided i must be him. e_o_i corrected them and called me "johnny jax", and i decided that would be my new nickname. it's got a ring to it, doesn't it? makes me sound a bit like a swashbuckling somethingorother, and allows for saying things like, "this sounds like a job for johnny jax!" 131112 ... e_o_i Ha! I'm just the one to correct things and then get them wrong. But always appreciate alliteration, I say. 131112 ... e_o_i "johnny jax, the swashbuckling somethingorother, has dreamed a dreamed of audacious alliteration! this sounds like a job for error-prone editing epitome!" 131112 ... raze i always do appreciate alliteration! whether it comes from dreams or not-dreams, it's never less than fun. 131112 ... raze bijou was a good witch, and when a man who was half man / half hen laid the perfect egg, she wept with joy. it was the draft in the room that made all the difference. 131119 ... e_o_i The choose_your_own_adventure blathe that raze started was a story with multiple people contributing. And then it started being acted out in real life. The scene that kept repeating was someone going to a train station, only I kept changing it to bus station, but raze switched it back to train station and suddenly I found myself at the Valois train station instead of the Central Toronto VIA one. I was waiting for something to happen. I told myself that he did look like Chris from jazz class, only taller and with a beard, but how would I recognize, say, zeke? I couldn't, I told myself, because he wrote too few words at a time. But I would recognize unhinged because she would have a violin. No one showed up, so the dream changed scenes. 131119 ... e_o_i I was reading an article by theatre critic Pat Donnelly in the Gazette, and she was writing about a play directed by no reason (the blatherskite!) She hadn't written it, but she was directing it. It was called "displacement" (no caps) and it was a love story between two women. Donnelly said it reminded her of La Vie D'Adele except with a lot of dancing instead of lots of sex. She said there was a rather melodramatic plot in the third act that didn't seem to fit, either about the skinnier girl - whom the medium-sized girl had taught how to dance - dealing with anorexia or becoming a witness in a court case. This part didn't seem to fit. But all in all, she said, it was excellently directed! 131121 ... e_o_i (And now I want to see the imaginary play. It sounds interesting.) 131121 ... raze i wrote a silly little one-act, one-scene play on blue, like i used to do sometimes. one 'skite popped up to tell me i'd written "than" where it was grammatically incorrect to use the comparative adjective. "unfortunately, i have to agree," said another 'skite. i fought off the temptation to say something snarky, instead changing my name to "gluten" and writing: then then then then 140105 ... raze someone i've never told about this place somehow found her way here on her own, not knowing i was here too. i couldn't figure out which 'skite she was. she linked to blue and red on twitter. "you guys have to get into this," she said to her followers, whoever they were. "it's scratch poetry." 140115 ... raze same person, but this time i really did tell her about blather, and she emailed me to say she found it fascinating and she'd started blathing. her name on red was *earth*, with stars on each side just like that. the very first blathe she wrote on was "years". then she wrote on "never" and "will". i couldn't tell where she wrote next to complete the sequence and make it a sentence when read from bottom to top on her "who" list. i didn't actually read any of her blathes at all. i got stuck on something some long gone 'skite came back to write under a new name, and by the time i woke up i'd forgotten who they were. it was someone who was around at the time of "sweetheart of the song tra bong" and "cheer up emo kid", but it wasn't either one of them. the moral of the story: if you think every so often in your waking life about people you might once have considered telling about this place but never would now, your dreams will try to answer the question of what they might have written, making 'skites out of strangers who once were friends. 140120 ... e_o_i J. will break up with her boyfriend and start dating birdmad, because they both have the ability to hang upside down in midair while waiting for the bus. And that means, naturally, that I can only talk to either of them if I dress up as King Louis XIV of France. 140122 ... raze two wrote me a letter about a letter i wrote, and it was blue in the places mine had been black. 140130 ... e_o_i In the kitchen where no one dared occupy_the_kitchen sink, he was hugging me. His name was Gwynhyr or Gwinar Pradesh and he was from Pakistan. I ran my finger along his forearm. Near his elbow was a tiny spike-shaped scab extending from his skin. A perfect unicorn horn or thorn in white. This was strange but possible, because I knew that scabs can form extending outwards from the skin and in yellow instead of red. I ran my finger over it several times and then gently nudged it off. It fell on the kitchen floor. All the while I was thinking: "I will write under the word 'crushes' in blather, 'Why do I find this sort of thing so hot'? except I won't write that because nr will think I'm silly, and if I make a joke about not being so much 'horny' as 'orientalist' EVERYONE on blather will think I'm silly." So the kitchen disappeared and I woke up. The ceiling above me told me that Pradesh was the name for province in India, and I could Google that if I wasn't sure, and that Gwynhyr is the Welsh version of Guinevere. Google confirms the first assertion, but seems to say that Gwynhyr is a character in Skyrim and Gwinar one in Final Fantasy. I wouldn't know that; I don't play video games, I play piano. You can't play too many things at once or people will think you're silly. 140205 ... e_o_i Connect nothing, F. said. Well, fuck F. I say that link should be occupy_the_kitchen_sink. 140205 ... e_o_i (F. is not referring to a real person here, but to a character from Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers whom I actually find charming.) 140206 ... e_o_i I felt it important to meet someone else from blather I hadn't met in real life (which is most of you, all except one... as far as I know...) I think it was no reason, and we'd arranged to meet at the library. I could tell it was her because she wore a shirt similar to one of mine, with thin white and blue stripes and a collar. But then I had to go away because I realized I had to sort my clothes, and sorting my clothes meant ironing them, and (evidently) the mere contemplation of ironing one's clothes makes one appear in a remote northern village far from one's native libraries. So we didn't get a chance to talk about experimental pages (which are pages that are experimental). 140221 ... flowerock I dreamed a dream_in_blather. out of body in blather_world, glowing blue hues and words floating around, sometimes in human form sometimes just as words. This was just after discoving blue_blather so I 'spose my mind was just processing and storing it. When I learned to tie my shoes as a kid I had intense dreams about giant cats made of string tying themseves together over and over. new or mysterious things settle into familiar things in my dreams. 140221 ... flowerock I dreamed a dream_in_blather. out of body in blather_world, glowing blue hues and words floating around, sometimes in human form sometimes just as words. This was just after discovering blue_blather so I 'spose my mind was just processing and storing it. When I learned to tie my shoes as a kid I had intense dreams about giant cats made of string tying themseves together over and over. new or mysterious things settle into familiar things in my dreams. 140221 ... flowerock oops. don't know why it double_blathed 140221 ... raze dallas was all over my facebook news feed. his facebook name was "the problem", which didn't make any sense to me, because he's the one who fixes technical problems related to blather, not the one who causes them. i mean, no one really causes them anymore. they just happen. he talked a bit about the database issue in twitter-sized status updates. then he answered a question from another 'skite and said he was still at newdream, but he wanted to concentrate more on his music. and i thought, "dallas makes music?! what?! we must swap music now!" then i read something someone said here, under a name i didn't recognize, about how there was an "expansive brunette" who wrote a lot over on blue, and a different one who wrote on red, each one the yin to the other's yang, or the cream cheese for the other's sesame seed bagel. it was implied that i was the red brunette. i never did find out who the blue one was. 140228 ... flowerock more_things_learned_from_dreams , blatherslite_dreams . (dramatic, specific) 140301 ... flowerock that was meant for today_yesterday (which I just typed as todat_yesterdat , got dat? ha ha) 140301 ... raze no 'skites involved this time, but i had a dream i came here and found there was already a sequel to even_more_things_learned_from_dreams. i was getting concerned about time getting away from me even more than i thought it was, until i woke up and remembered that blathe is only a month old, and it'll be a while yet before it gets long in the tooth. even in my dreams, time_runs_away. 140408 ... raze on blue i found a blathe i'd never seen before called "johnny come back". or was it "come back johnny"? one or the other. a few 'skites whose names i didn't recognize wrote weird / amusing almost-poems to me, starting in 2005. it was flattering but strange, not least because i never really left. 140415 ... e_o_i Synchronicity of sorts: I saw you ("you" as in johnny - I think it was meant to be you) in a gas station store leaning against the wall next to a "musical vending machine." You had a guitar in your hand and, while you were waiting for somebody, you tried to explain how the musical vending machine works, but I was stubborn and didn't listen. How it works: you type four chords into a screen, then in another box explain in detail how you want the song to sound ("you can skip that part" you said) and then type in the subject matter of the lyrics in one sentence or less. The machine makes a song for you and spits out a sheet or two of music paper at the bottom. I tried to remember how one of my songs went: I thought it had good chords but I could only remember the first four: Am, G, F, G7. I said I knew I'd got more interesting chords afterwards. There was a Dm7 somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. You were trying to explain that it couldn't possibly recreate the song I was thinking of, that it was "kind of crappy" for only allowing four chords, and the thing to do was to make those chords unusual, as in I, iii, ii, vii (the diminished triad - it's written with a little round symbol I don't know how to recreate on blather - and yes, for some reason you used jazz/classical chord notation while I used the pop/rock version.) So you played these chords on your guitar, and it sounded good. I disappeared then, because I had somewhere to go. Evidently when I recreate my high school graduation, it requires finding a haunted mansion at the end of the metro tracks - which turns out merely to be a mostly empty school - then dressing up in "princess dresses" with barely-remembered friends, and drinking water out of shot glasses. But anyway. 140415 ... raze a new 'skite on blue with rotating names wrote about hugging someone and wanting to be framed by them. they didn't mean they wanted to be accused of a crime they didn't commit. it was more like they were an image in need of support, wanting to be held. and i realized i'd never thought of using the word "framed" that way. 140422 ... raze i met dallas in the principal's office of my old high school, and he was a she — a beautiful woman, and a self-described "dentist and sound enthusiast". 140515 ... raze the today_yesterday column was symbolic of my relationship with a 'skite who doesn't really exist but felt real enough at the time. the more symmetric the list on the recent page was, the healthier and more balanced our union was. when one side outweighed the other, one of us was pulling away. i could see her without seeing her, just by looking at the words. she had short blonde hair. she was familiar in an unfamiliar way. 140516 ... e_o_i I read in the Gazette how the Globe and Mail hired twenty journalists under strict criteria: all of them had to have driver's licenses, for example. If you don't have a driver's license, you can't be a journalist. Actually, the article continues, they hired twenty-one but the last one on the list got fired and they published all her perceived shortcomings on their blog. Her name's Sarah. I'm worried about how Sarah's doing, so I go to blather, and see someone named Grievance. She's found a way to link anything any blatherskite writes in any forum to their blather username. Grievance has illustrated this with her own name to show everyone that she's okay with it and you should be too. I don't have any discernible thoughts on this plan. Instead I think, "Journalism's for fast writers with cars. Is there any job for slow writers without cars?" 140521 ... raze someone calling themselves something like "sam the king" went around spamming the same story on multiple existing blathes. it wasn't very well-written, and it had no relevance to anything that had gone before on any blathe it was appended to. sure, it wasn't viagra spam, but that was little comfort. sam was a king who shouted just to hear the sound of his own voice, and his voice was full of bizarre misspellings. 140626 ... raze someone i told about blather a little less than two years ago, who only ever wrote here a few times, came back to create a blathe that was a strange, impossible to describe, moving (as in physically moving, not emotionally resonant … though i guess it was that too) tribute to me. it was some sort of wordless balletic art piece in collaboration with another person. after watching it take shape, i retreated into the third person perspective and orson welles took my place. the tribute was destroyed. it was assumed that orson had taken offence to it and had it torn down. to prove it wasn't so, he held a roast in his own honour, starting off the night by insulting himself and praising his friend. there was also something in there about dubbed dialogue in "conan the destroyer". the main thing is, a blathe that isn't a blathe in any conventional sense is still an interesting thing to observe. especially when it's made up of two people seen in silhouette, working together so seamlessly you'd swear they choreographed the whole thing, dangling from their own decorations. 140717 ... raze offense, not offence. stinkin' safari autocorrect. 140717 ... e_o_i It was evening, and for a while I was running outside in a composite neighbourhood, picking up aluminum cans and plastic bottles off the road or grass and putting them into processing machines that lined the streets every few houses or so. The machines made a satisfied whirring noise, and out popped a paper slip with each deposit. I was in a hurry because I wanted to collect these papers that were worth five cents, plus I was on constant alert for bear attacks. Later, when I was in bed, I focused my eyes on an odd black and white pattern on the wall. When I closed my eyes I saw the reverse image - that of a panda's face. I sat up in fear. Those were the lurking shadow bears: pandas! At that moment I was convinced pandas were inherently scary beasts and a lifetime fear of mine. I "woke up," went to my laptop stationed downstairs and saw that Toxic Kisses, using her nickname TK, had written a blathe critiquing this dream. She noted that pandas weren't really bears, and besides they were a stereotypical thing to think about when you thought about China. But she ended on an encouraging note: she was sure I could have better dreams if I tried. 140731 ... raze lately i'm dreaming almost every night that i wake up to find some long-gone 'skite has returned after years of silence. every time it's a different 'skite. funny business. 140811 ... raze a blathe was a thing you could see people inside of, live action style, at the same time you were reading it. someone asked me if it would be okay if they called themselves "jon", and i said i thought it was fine as long as they didn't use the name "ron". i couldn't tell if they were young or old in blather years, but it seemed funny that they would ask me what they should call themselves. 141111 ... tail-devouring snake breast-feeding baby, but with drawings of my boobs. 141113 ... raze someone shot and killed me. then they framed unhinged, using a doctored firing pin, and let her take the fall. so i came back from the dead in the next dream and conned them out of all their money, which to them was a fate worse than death. that's what they get for messing with my friends. 150313 ... raze a 'skite named lafayette made some of my words disappear, and i thought a louisiana city was a strange name for a red god. (no, i haven't been watching old episodes of "true blood"…) 150316 ... raze ungreat came over from blue to say this about someone she knew: "one of so few. you didn't see at all the light in your eyes." 150324 ... raze i was showing e_o_i old manual typewriters. she was showing me out-of-tune pianos. i offered some vegetables, but she said she'd sworn off lunch as a concept. 150508 ... e_o_i I am laughing right now... sworn off lunch as a concept! Lunch is my FAVOURITE concept. I'm philosophical that way. This was a few nights ago: I had a dream that flowerock came to my house (she looked like another person I knew from my grade 11 class, but my age) and she was standing on my parents' front step, tearing up bits of food into a dish for my dog. Then my mom came outside, saw the bits of broccoli in the dish, and objected that she couldn't make the dog a vegetarian. At which flowerock explained that no, she was giving the dog a little bit of everything for more nutrients - and with that, she handed me a Jamaican beef patty to tear up with the rest. And things were calm and happy. (Never have I had a dog, nor has my mother during my lifetime.) 150509 ... e_o_i Why are my blathes not showing up all of a sudden? 150509 ... e_o_i When the bus was I was in successfully dodged thrown bomb (the driver acted unimpressed, saying it was such a small bomb, though I could see he started to drive faster away from it) it turned into a tour van and I was suddenly in a band with raze and two women, one peppy with dyed red hair, the other sulky with black ringlets. See, there was a colour scheme: red hair, black hair, brown hair (raze), and blond hair (me). But Blond Hair hadn't been me originally. It was just an identity I'd suddenly jumped into, and so I was confused by the peppy red-haired girl claiming we were best friends, and even more by the black-haired woman making angry remarks about something I'd done in the past. I couldn't say, "No, I didn't do that, that was Blond Hair before Blond Hair was me" because that would've been too weird. Anyway, Red Hair's hyper demeanor led her to show me something really cool: a thread hanging from the ceiling of a square gym room. I'm not sure if this was still inside the tour van, but the floor was about 20 x 20 feet. Why was this thread cool? Well, you could launch yourself up on it and do all kinds of gymnastic spins, flips, twirls - bouncing off walls, literally - and it never broke or even hurt the palms of your hands. Red got impatient, wanting her turn, and I surrendered the string. I knew, vaguely, that I was dreaming, so I figured I could do all those gravity-defying twirls without a string. But I still had to grab at the air first. It didn't work as well, so I went to the computer room, where I wrote a comment on a site that looked like a hybrid of blather and reddit. A longtime commenter called something like "chronic citizen" not only "liked" my comment, but "believed" it (there was a button for both actions). I don't remember what the comment was. Then zeke gave a mathematical interpretation to the discussion, calling himself "a" and commenting "aaaaa." A professional mathematician disagreed, saying it was really "aaaa" because of the radical sign. (This was possibly a joke about chronic citizen's socialist leanings.) 150517 ... raze i got a long, long email from a long-gone 'skite, apologizing for being gone for so long. and i thought, "that's funny. how could you know i missed you when our paths never crossed?" turns out 'skites are psychic in the dreamworld. 150725 ... raze flowerock wanted to know if venus williams spent a lot of time with someone who was jamaican when she was young, because she thought the way she said the word "freedom" had a decidedly jamaican lilt to it. 151204 ... e_o_i Ha, I hardly remembered the last dream I wrote here, but now some of it's coming back. Swinging from the string, for instance, and the "aaaa"s. 151204 ... raze e_o_i was a participant in an informal dance-off. she was nervous until a friend encouraged her to dance just as she would if no one was around, and she responded with a startling display physical of joy, ending with a standing backflip. she was announced as the first runner-up, just missing out on first place with 125 votes to the winner's 127. there was a mixture of applause and booing, but the boos were only for the decision. everyone felt she deserved to win. 170222 ... raze (holy wrong word order. "display physical of joy" was clearly meant to be "display of physical joy". i swear english my first language is.) 170222 ... e_o_i You can write words in order better than I can backflip in real life! (I have never ever been able to do a backflip.) 170223 ... raze someone showed up here and, in a series of single-line blathes, said something like: "i've come to tell you it's over." "it's all done." "it's finished." only there were a bunch of typos in there, as few words as there were for typos to attach themselves to. initial feelings of knee-jerk panic turned to amused bafflement when i realized this was not someone who'd come to tell us of the end after all, but an anonymous 'skite trying to mess with everyone by creating that impression. the name and the spelling mistakes kind of gave it away. not that i can remember the name now. 170711 ... gja physical display of joy 170712 ... raze i could feel a cold coming on, that ominous sore throat feeling, and i knew there was no chasing it away. but there was e_o_i, and she'd made me some camomile tea in her cheerful psychic way. that i couldn't seem to get the tea to hold its heat did nothing to dull its healing properties. 170917 ... e_o_i Close close close. It'd be ginger and lemon for colds. Chamomile is for calmness. Mix it with fennel and it's a bit of a laxative, or lavender and it's a bit avant-garde (it depends what part is constipated, see - if it's the imagination, go with the lavender). I got my Purple Sash in Herbal Tea at the Masonic Order of Tech Support. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but it was at the Ceremony for the Daughters of Cloud-Based Computing. You chant "Print: hello world" at a kettle until it starts to steam. I mean, that's what it all boils down to. 170922 ... raze (note_to_self: remember what teas are for in dreamland.) 170923 ... raze a few nights ago i was leaving a record store in a dream. i looked at the receipt in my hand and noticed the cashier had given me a receipt not for the albums i bought, but for an air conditioner purchased by insecure_goth_girl. i went back inside and told her what she'd done. she gave me change for a purchase i didn't make after she'd already given me change for the one i did make, as if that made everything right. i told the cashier i would try to find IGG at school on monday so we could exchange receipts. it felt like we were students at the same high school, but it was a school that contained whole universes of people who never came in physical contact with one another. like a way station between worlds. best case scenario, maybe i'd be able to send her a message on blather and leave her receipt in some hidden crevice of a water fountain for her to intercept. meeting in person didn't feel like an option. something about the idea of being able to give a face to a name on blather felt forbidden. funny, given how many of these names now have faces for me in the waking world. then last night i found myself yelling at dafremen. it was something about a cake. seemed about right. 201113 ... e_o_i There was a blather gathering and impromptu jam session. I tried to join in on the piano, playing one note at a time, but every note clashed. And then it was time to wrap up. After about thirty seconds. "Wait!" I asked raze, since he was the only one in the music group I recognized. He was putting his guitar away. "Can you tell me which person over there is no_reason?" I gestured to a group in the distance. "I want to ask her if she's my cousin's cousin." "There," he said, pointing to someone who looked like the non-giant version of Lana del Rey in the "Doin' Time" video - bobbed blond wig and retro outfit. But she was too far away and left before I could talk with her. Just before I woke up, in a different dream, tender_square was showing me how to organize my hats. I could only see her arms. "This one goes here, that one goes there..." And I became aware of the necessity of such a venture, because I had far more hats than I'd realized. 210911 ... tender square (this is hilarious because i'm totally an organizer; i could do it professionally, i'm so adept at it) 210911 ... nr ha! now i'm wondering if i am in fact your cousin's cousin. curious what the people in the group looked like. 210911 ... nr also i don't think i look much like lana del rey, but her natural hair colour looks similar to mine. 210911 ... nr actually i'm now remembering a dream-snippet i had a couple nights ago but forgot to mention here. i overheard a phone conversation between raze and unhinged (i was around when it was on speaker somehow? dream logic). raze was uttering randomness, like "and then the giraffe sent the envelope!" and unhinged would chuckle, and then raze would be like "coins aren't for consumption, but the sandwich wore a sweater!" and unhinged would egg him on, like "and then what happened??" and raze would continue, like "the elephant opened it with its trunk and started singing!" and unhinged would be like "no way!" or something like that. some kind of absurdist comedy duo thing. 210911 ... e_o_i TS: possibly the "hats" thing was metaphorical because there's an expression about wearing different hats and in real life I only own four literal ones - two summer, two winter. NR: I think it was mostly women. They were standing and talking. Casual clothes, as if they'd come to watch an outdoor concert, which was maybe not the blatherskite jam session. But seriously on the cousin's cousin part! All I'd have to know is if you're related to people named Lia, Debra, and Melanie. Likely not! I'm just into the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things" at present because I found out my friend J knows a linguist whose book I really liked. A week or so later I met the said linguist at J's birthday party in Parc Lafontaine (which happened right after I lost my hat) and had a fascinating conversation with her and another person about phonetics and the areas where Duolingo was and wasn't effective. But anyway. 210911 ... raze i must now make this dream conversation happen in the waking world. no sandwich shall be unclothed! i swear it. 210911 ... raze i forgot to mention one i had a few nights ago. i was writing a blathe on blue without using a computer. i was standing in the middle of a mall that didn't have many people in it. it was a pretty drab, uninspiring place. nothing was happening. i didn't see any stores. it was more like a way station. i saw an existing blue blathe in front of me and to the left, like a picture-in-picture feature, but it was so smoothly integrated into the world around me i didn't think much about how unusual it was. i wrote a little poem-shaped thing using my mind, watching the words form — not in the "says" box, but in the body of the blathe itself. there were other words from other people before and after mine, but i couldn't see them. i could only feel that they were there. my contribution was eight or nine lines long. it was something cryptic about depression. it was okay, but something was missing, and the ending kind of fell flat. it was the best i could do. i noticed unhinged sitting in a chair in front of me. when i looked back at the blathe, i saw she'd added two lines to what i wrote. to anyone else it would have looked like i edited my own words, but i knew it was her work. her two lines didn't just make for a better ending. they changed the shape of the entire piece. all the interlocking parts worked together in a way they didn't before when the only words were mine. with one small brushstroke, she transformed a middling piece of writing into something profound. "that's amazing," i said. she looked at me and said, "that's the great thing about writing together. we get to fill in the words that aren't there." 210912 ... raze blue was busier than it's been in a long time. the recent page took on elements of the who page and split into four columns to accommodate all the activity. there were a lot of people i hadn't seen in a while. ClairE was one of them. i could see her smiling face through the titles of her blathes. but when i walked into blue, it was a grey garage with no one in it. i walked into red_blather. it was a hotel room that was set up just like the inside of a house. the recent page was pretty healthy, but i wasn't on it. i'd neglected my morning_blathing duties. it was getting late now. i took a look at the who page and saw e_o_i was at the top of the list using two different names. she'd written two blathes as "kirsten" (her name in lowercase letters), and two more as "klarinet". i didn't see anyone else in the hotel room. it felt like i'd missed my chance to interact with the other 'skites and they were all sleeping now. there was a laptop on a desk against the wall as soon as i walked in. it was open to the recent page, waiting for me to take the last red_blather shift. there was a living room to my right and a kitchen ahead of me. i turned left and walked into the bathroom, trying to map out what i wanted to say. i visualized the construction of a blathe, but it was hazy. i felt all the energy leave my body. all i could come up with was a single paragraph. i didn't think it was anything worth sharing. the captcha, though ... that was interesting. it was five characters instead of six. "notme", it said. and i thought, "how many times has the captcha spelled out another 'skite's name like that? this could be the first time it's ever happened. i have to tell everyone." then i noticed i was looking at the captcha from a bit of an angle. when i ducked down to meet it head on, i saw what it really said was "5o4me". that was disappointing. the bathroom became a song i was mixing. piano and triple-tracked vocals. the lyrics seemed to be a commentary on my inability to blathe anything worthwhile. it sounded like i was mocking myself. the song was only about a minute long, and it kept shifting while i worked on it. the ending developed a strange background noise. it sounded like tape hiss. the hiss became layers of grainy synthesizer that almost swallowed up the piano and my voice, and the whole thing kind of mixed itself. the stranger it got, the more i liked it. i walked out of the bathroom and back over to the computer desk. i saw e_o_i was sleeping on a couch in the living room, but she wasn't really asleep. she smiled when she saw me and said my name. my dad was pacing in front of the couch, looking like a worried adult chaperone on a school field trip. sonya walked up to me and offered to fetch me a pair of glasses for my evening blathing shift. i told her i was sure i'd brought mine with me and left them in the bathroom. i took a look. they were right there on the sink. i didn't need them to see, but i grabbed them anyway, and i talked to her about what i might write while i brushed my teeth. nothing that came out of my mouth sounded like intelligible speech, but she didn't seem to mind. it felt good to know i wasn't the last person awake after all. 210917 ... e_o_i Blather shifts: I like it! And I believe you've won the award of "Most Blatherskites in a Blatherskite Dream" at once. Here, accept your crown of construction paper and plastic sticker gems. Some of my favourite songs of yours drift off into strange noises. And I *should* be klarinet! I did have a choir friend named Klara with a K, but I don't think she played the instrument, alas. 210918 ... e_o_i that should be: the award of "Most Blatherskites in a Blatherskite Dream at Once." 210918 ... raze i was flipping through another blather_dream_book. this one didn't have any behind-the-scenes information in it. it was just a book full of blathes. first there wasn't a book at all. birdmad was telling a story about a "basket-ass" crazy person he had to deal with in a walk-in clinic waiting room. the scene came halfway to life. then his story became a blathe i was trying to find in a book full of them. the book was a black paperback about the size of "house of leaves" but not as thick. it was a little over two hundred pages long. the inside front cover was a flap that hid individually wrapped pieces of candy i first mistook for blather trading cards. none of them were things i'd ever seen or eaten before, but i recognized one as a piece of chocolate-covered toffee similar to a skor chocolate bar. behind the candy there were four passes for a free trip to denver. each one had a picture of dallas smiling on the front. i didn't know if the passes were still valid, or if i'd want to visit denver anyway. i was pretty sure i didn't know anyone who lived there. there was no table of contents, no index, and no forward or afterward. each page had four blathes on it arranged in a grid. and they weren't full blathes. they were a single 'skite's contribution to a given blathe. the colours were the same as they are here (the book seemed to be specific to red_blather), and the format was the same, with the writer's name in the bottom left corner and the date on the right. the font seemed just a little off, but it was close enough. i was able to find birdmad's story. then i tried to find myself. the most recent blathes i could find were from 2009, so there was a good chance i was in there somewhere, but whatever was included probably wasn't some of my better work. i was curious to see what made the cut. things weren't arranged in chronological or thematic order. it was all completely random. that didn't help. i thought i found something brief i'd written in the top right corner of a recto page. i looked closer and saw what i thought was "raze" was really "kare". that wasn't me. around the halfway mark, the font got smaller and the quality got a lot worse, with the ink bleeding all over the place. the red background disappeared and the blathes became white squares with black text inside. i couldn't make out many of the words or dates. the closer i got to the back of the book, the worse it got. i saw dates as recent as 2020, but it didn't do me much good, and i didn't see many familiar names. at least i knew the book had been published recently enough that those pieces of candy wouldn't be so stale that they'd break my teeth if i tried to eat them. 210929 ... raze kerry was feeling pretty dejected about studying hard for a test and not retaining much of the information she needed to know. she wrote a long note on the back of her test about how pointless it was to try and answer any of the questions. she got a perfect mark. then she wrote a book. it was a thick stack of unbound pages. the back of the last page was a fifteen-second film called something like "i don't want it to end this way". all the other pages were small pieces of paper with standalone sentences collaged on the front. i tried to carry them all, but it was difficult to keep the pages together. a few of them fell onto the floor. i picked them up and slipped them back into place, knowing they were out of sequence now. i felt like i'd ruined something special. she smiled and said it didn't matter where i started or where i ended. the story would still be the same. 211002 ... raze no_reason asked tender_square, "what do you think is a perfect email?" she answered: "title and contents. no attachments to distract from the message. unless a chair becomes a new bond by seating a shard i thought i'd broken." in another dream, ungreat (who only ever wrote on blue) showed up on the today_yesterday blathe to say this: "ungreat the ungreat is ungreat. it's always been the story of my life." and i thought, "wait . . . that's not how this is supposed to work." 211003 ... kerry raze!!! of course i would be dejected about studying for a test, and writing about the pointlessness, and scribbling stuff on random slips of paper. thanks for helping me pick them up. 211007 ... raze i wish i could show you what your unbound book looked like in my dream. there were hundreds of pages, most of them light blue, and each one had a sentence collaged on the front, grey letters you'd cut out of magazines, but there was nothing jagged or rough about them. the pages started out small and got larger the deeper they went until they were almost newspaper size. it was a work of weighted art even if it wasn't trying to be, and each sentence was a perfect bit of poetry. the book didn't seem to be about anything specific, but it was about everything that mattered. i was reading it in a treehouse. i wanted to stand there and read forever. 211007 ... kerry i wish that weighted-art poetry collage book was real. maybe you're sending out some kind of creative nudge. in your sleep. last night i dreamed that i got a really long text from a kid i used to teach, explaining in great detail why he hated me and all the different ways that i suck. i'm jealous that your dreams bring you ideas and inspiration. also are we blathing at the same time?!?! 211007 ... raze (ack! i missed this because i had to go eat dinner, but we *were* blathing at the same time for a minute there.) 211007 ... nr now i kind of want to try emailing tender_square a perfect email using that criteria. 211007 ... tender square raze is a pool shark; i start by sinking solids, but after i scratch he cleans up the table. all of the billiard balls constellate together every time either of us hits them, as though they are drawn to the same pocket, rather than being spread out by the force of the cue’s strike. after raze sinks the eight ball, he clears the remaining solids from the table that were mine. as i rack up the balls again to play another round, his father asks me how much experience i have with the game; i confess that i’m a novice, but my parents used to play in leagues, individually and as a couple. his father rearranges the billiard balls in the rack for me, and removes the azure #2 ball to substitute it with another #2 ball in lapis that he prefers instead. 211010 ... raze (if only i were that good! i was pretty solid with a cue stick for a while there when i was playing every friday at the_loop, but i never got to be a shark. though i did have my moments.) 211010 ... raze the 'skite formerly known as yummychuckle (who never wrote much on red) said she was looking forward to walking with me in the park, but she couldn't go because her husband didn't like squirrels. and yet he was fine with her hanging out in my bedroom without him. i just kept thinking, "how can he not like squirrels?" 211012 ... raze tender_square said, "i'm giving you the word 'pony'. i want to hear an intimate story." i knew what she meant. she wanted me to tell her about something profound i'd experienced with a young horse. but here's the sad thing: i don't really have any horse stories. 211013 ... kerry raze—i was thinking about yummychuckle the other day. i dunno why. maybe just a blather ghost whose presence i miss? 211013 ... raze i know what you mean. there are people i never interacted with on blather that i miss, because i feel like i knew them through their words. sometimes i wonder who they are now and what they would write if they ever came back. it happened the other day when i read what dammitjanet wrote at the top of the "dad" blathe. somehow i'd never read that one all the way through until it came back up on the recent page. it happens all the time, though. i'll read something someone wrote five or ten or twenty years ago, something that doesn't exist anywhere else, written by someone who hasn't been here in eons, and it takes my breath away. in some ways, blather is so strange. all we are here is words. that's all we've ever been. but we're more than that, because the words this place pulls out of us are the ones that are buried so deep or burning so bright they don't have anywhere else to go. i still feel like i know what most 'skites look like — even the ghosts whose faces i've never seen — because their words show me who they are. no wonder i dream about you all so often. 211013 ... raze no_reason was disappointed in a friend who wouldn't listen to reason (hark — a dream pun!), so i started an informal prayer circle in which no one held hands. while i banged on a djembe, a tribe elder chanted, "great spirit, force her friend to do things." i wasn't sure if it would work, but it was a solemn, heartfelt prayer. 211014 ... all the reason it worked! my friend listen to all the reason. i enjoy that there was a drum involved. 211014 ... atr er, listened. oof. and did all the things. 211014 ... e_o_i I was looking at a photo of the first gay wedding at an iconic music venue in Manitoba. The newlyweds both had twin braids and plaid shirts. I knew it was 2002 because several other people were wearing shirts with "2002" on them. Then I was there as a wedding guest, sitting next to unhinged. The bride with darker hair was recounting the story of how she'd asked a famous country singer to attend but she didn't know if he might disapprove of the marriage, and then he showed up and played some songs. Why, there he was! Over there! Bob something. We waved. (Not Bob Dylan, who wouldn't quite fit, nor my fictional Bob Winter, whose dad is from Manitoba but who's more into jazz. Just Bob something. He had a white grizzled beard.) Then some friends of the singer came to sit next to us, talking about something happening in Manitoba. unhinged, slightly drunk, spoke with a southern accent, saying, "It really stems from World War 1 and the early disillusionment with technology." She wasn't showing off, just speaking naturally - with a southern accent! - but the comment seemed to go over everyone's heads. 211017 ... e_o_i I was looking at a photo of the first gay wedding at an iconic music venue in Manitoba. The newlyweds both had twin braids and plaid shirts. I knew it was 2002 because several other people were wearing shirts with "2002" on them. Then I was there as a wedding guest, sitting next to unhinged. The bride with darker hair was recounting the story of how she'd asked a famous country singer to attend but she didn't know if he might disapprove of the marriage, and then he showed up and played some songs. Why, there he was! Over there! Bob something. We waved. (Not Bob Dylan, who wouldn't quite fit, nor my fictional Bob Winter, whose dad is from Manitoba but who's more into jazz. Just Bob something. He had a white grizzled beard.) Then some friends of the singer came to sit next to us, talking about something happening in Manitoba. unhinged, slightly drunk, spoke with a southern accent, saying, "It really stems from World War 1 and the early disillusionment with technology." She wasn't showing off, just speaking naturally - with a southern accent! - but the comment seemed to go over everyone's heads. 211017 ... unhinged (your dream is a little psychic eoi. many times my historical/political comments seem to go over people's heads and i currently wear a fleece plaid shirt i got from the company to work to stay warm in the warehouse) 211018 ... raze in one dream, tender_square somehow found a way to turn her words on a blathe into scrabble tiles. whenever i've seen pictures or avatars show up on blather in my dreams, it's always felt like a perversion. this was different. it felt like art. in another dream, nr gave me a chocolate graham cracker to try in a grocery store. it looked like a fancy teddy graham, but it wasn't in the shape of a bear. it came out of a fancy basket. she tried one too. "cheers," i said. we touched our graham crackers together like they were pint glasses. i took a bite of mine. "i like it," i said. "it's a little salty for me," she said after taking a bite of hers. "if i bought these for myself, i wouldn't like them. but my aunt gave them to me, so ... i don't know." "i don't really taste the saltiness." then it hit me. my mouth filled with such a strong saline taste it buckled my knees. "oh god," i said. "i taste it now. that's horrible." she squirted chocolate syrup on my left hand. i licked the three brown lines she made before they ran down my forearm. the sweetness erased the salt. i adopted a grizzled cockney accent and said, "when things go wrong, get 'er to squirt ya with chocolate syrup! that'll fix ya right up!" she laughed. 211018 ... nr i laughed IRL, too! chocolate syrup is the antidote to things going wrong? i should've known. i also like the idea of liking the taste of something just because of who gave it to you. i don't really like graham crackers, but if my aunt gave them to me, i'd probably take a bite of one in front of her to be polite. 211018 ... raze i think we can revolutionize the modern world with this knowledge. chocolate syrup for president! (or prime minister, depending on the country in which said syrup resides.) at the very least, no sundae will ever be lonely again. 211018 ... raze ever_dumbening and CheapVodka (now calling herself It'sJustTiff) returned to red_blather at the same time. i caught them in the act of blathing, so i got to watch the recent page grow a little longer. he started a new blathe called standing_on_the_water. it was an evocative piece about preparing to surf. she added comments to a series of existing blathes. i should have been excited to see them back, and to have the chance to blathe with them and say hello. but i wasn't. i was angry. because i knew they wouldn't stick around. "here's what's going to happen," i told my dad. "they're going to write two or three more things. then they're going to vanish, and they won't be back for another eight years." so, see y'all in 2029? 211022 ... raze paste! popped up to contribute a blathe called "sainting". it was a prayer card followed by a sentence about how not-very-saintlike he was. i responded with this: "choirs of angels won't sing when i pass. but holy water might boil. and the body of bryce might crumble." i gotta say, it was pretty strange to see a prayer card on blather. 211024 ... raze kali blathed a single line of russian poetry. a bit of fun_with_google_translate told me what the words meant, but i can't remember what the miniature poem was about anymore. i tried to come up with an appropriate russian response. before i could finish the thought, i found a dormant message board from the mid-2000s that had once been populated by a small group of 'skites. the first post i landed on had the truth and endless_desire discussing the first thing e_o_i ever wrote on blue. they got her gender wrong but complimented her writing. i was looking through the archives and feeling like i missed out on being a part of something fun when i found two posts i started myself back in 2002. so i was here without ever knowing it. i used two different names and didn't say a thing about blather. in one of my posts i discussed a book about teddy bears. 211105 ... raze nom was an apple, partially eaten and drying out at the back of a refrigerator, sitting in an open tupperware container with a thin carpet of sawdust beneath her. 211106 ... raze a number of old faces popped up on a new blathe. it kind of felt like a group of people having a low-key house party. the most recent comment was from birdmad. "what this place needs," he wrote, "is a little more anarchistic energy." i countered with the opinion that we already had what we needed. nothing was missing. "but i can disagree with you and still respect you," i wrote. "that's the great thing about blather." he didn't respond. a front-page article in the windsor star showed him standing in a courthouse, wearing a dark suit, looking unsettled. i only skimmed it, but i saw enough to know he spoke with profundity and regret about the very behaviour he was encouraging on red_blather. 211118 ... raze nocturnal stood in a high_school stairwell. when someone made fun of the way she played checkers, her face turned red and she had a sneezing fit. it wasn't anger or embarrassment that brought on the compulsive sneezing, though. it was a paper allergy. 211207 ... raze there were two new blathes on the "today" side of the recent page. on top was "recyclee". beneath that was "gay_whales". without clicking on either blathe, somehow i knew they were both the work of e_o_i. 211213 ... raze unhinged revealed to me the hidden truth of seattle forestry, with middle-aged men sneaking around after dark between tall, slanted grey trees. they didn't do anything. they just took exaggerated steps like they thought they were getting away with something. then yoink popped up on an existing blathe to tell her she was the grandmaster. 211214 ... raze i met yoink. he had dark hair that almost touched his shoulders. he wore a long-sleeved black t-shirt and a small smile. "could you tell me your name, honestly?" i asked him. "it would be kind of neat to know. i've always wondered." "my hame is honestly," he said, and then he walked away. "fair enough," i said. 211218 ... raze (how i managed to spell "name" with an h instead of an n, i'll never know.) 211218 ... raze unhinged showed me where all the best pastries were, but my sticky bun slipped through my fingers and fell through a hole in the floor that led to an underground area sort of like a cross between an unfinished basement and a restaurant kitchen. she slipped between the pipes and told a man who worked down there she was lending a hand to a friend who'd lost his tongue. though her distress was manufactured, she was wearing a red dress, so he believed her. 211222 ... raze nr and romanian tennis player simona halep were riding bicycles on the roof of a small building downtown, both of them cutting an endless circle that looped back on itself. i couldn't keep up with them. i felt vertigo set in after making my first turn. i got off my bike so i wouldn't kill myself falling off the roof. they went on riding and chasing each other, looking like happy children who'd just invented a new game. there was no fear in them at all. 211226 ... raze kerry designed her own wallpaper. it looked like newsprint, but more abstract. there were no words. it came with a pull chain and moved just like a curtain, and when it touched the bottom of the wall it disappeared. 211228 ... tender_square (kerry, i'd like to order five rolls of this wallpaper, stat!) 211228 ... kerry (you got it, tender_square! i’ll give ya the blatherskite discount) (as kitschy as it is i would love to have strange wallpaper in my house. thanks for making my dreams kind of almost come true, raze) 211228 ... tender_square not sure if this dream quite constitutes use of this blathe, but i dreamt that a woman who was ahead of me in my grad program with was on our site. i kept combing through her blathes and i couldn’t make sense of what she was writing and why, it felt like an affront that she was here. she was writing under twenty different usernames, which she included in “you” box whenever she posted. and all her blathes contained were jumbles of words in short lines that didn’t really amount to anything. and yet, i couldn’t stop reading; it was a compulsion, as though i was trying to get to the bottom of her reasoning and purpose when it didn’t exist. 220103 ... e_o_i On one leg of an epic journey south - which involved passing through the "state of Philadelphia" - no_reason got off at the same train stop as me, so I asked if I could walk with her for a while, as that'd help me get to know the city I was in. "I know you don't live in the States," I said apologetically, "but Toronto is almost like the U.S....like, the signs are in English..." but the one I gesture to is a highway sign in the same white-on-green as those in Quebec, and the French is above the English. So I decide we must be in the state that used to be part of Quebec* and that meant I could find my way on my own. But I regretted it a bit when a crossing guard directed me to climb a steep, dusty hill for no reason. nr would've told me not to listen to him. *Louisiana was part of New France, if that counts! 220105 ... e_o_i (oh yes: raze-from-days-ago, I just may use those blathe titles sometime if inspiration strikes) 220105 ... e_o_i edits Okay, I just realized that something I wrote carries a very silly ambiguity: climbing the hill "for no reason" is intended as "to no apparent purpose" and not "for no_reason the 'skite". 220105 ... raze e_o_i posted three new blathes. two of them were "judge" and "jury". they were both very short. the body text in the "judge" blathe said: "judge and jury." and "jury" just said: "jury and judge." there was a third blathe titled "judge and jury" that i assumed was a lot longer, but i didn't get the chance to click on that one. 220126 ... raze birdmad adapted one of his old blathes into a graphic novel, but instead of revealing the visual art, he performed the expository text as a dramatic monologue deep in the bowels of a subterranean conduit, proving to a small but attentive audience that a whisper can be the loudest thing in the world if it comes from the heart. 220129 ... e_o_i Funny this should turn up now, when I dream mine! When you posted the earlier blathe, I'd just had a dream that you (raze) and unhinged were at a restaurant me and I started disagreeing about what time to eat. I was being whiny, uncooperative, so you two walked away and said "maybe another time." The next day, my behaviour was bothering me. By way of apology, I said, "I'm sorry about the misunderstanding. It's because I confused some fricatives. Specifically, the voiced alveolar fricative and the unvoiced alveolar fricative." Those are the s and z sounds. Nothing in what I'd said had involved a misunderstanding about s and z sounds. I just thought if I could blame linguistics instead of my own bad temper, the problem would go away. (It occurred to me that raze and unhinged had unwittingly been standing in for my parents - you're rather young for the roles, but anyway - and "fricative" was probably a pun on "friction". I felt guilty because I'd been grumpy to my parents when I had too much linguistics work to do.) 220129 ... e_o_i The more recent dream involved looking at blather itself, where unhinged had posted about a meetup for "five US skites" and said she was there with them now. Then they made a blathe with everyone's name in the "you" field: it definitely included "past" (you're an honorary American now!) and I think "blown cherry". 220129 ... e_o_i Correction to the first one: at a restaurant WITH me. I am not personally a restaurant. 220129 ... raze past wrote a blathe about architecture. the buildings he described became plastic and rubber figurines on a dinner plate, smooth and soft but not willing to be bent. what looked like a featureless bus or an expensive doorstop was really a puzzle piece without a scene to slide into. not that it stopped me from trying to find a place for it to go. 220207 ... past I did recently watch the lego movie with the littles and this is a sideways dreamland glance at the premise. 220207 ... raze i was hanging out with tender_square in the basement of an office building that was both familiar and unfamiliar. we received an apple pie in the shape of a loaf of bread. it was a gift from kerry. she baked it herself. a note that was intuited more than read explained that this was a recipe she picked up from her history professor. "i found the best knuckle of bread i could," she said. the three of us tried to connect through a video chat. though we couldn't see kerry's face, she was able to show us everywhere she'd been in the course of her day, a kaleidoscopic montage of a city more vivid and colourful than i ever could have imagined. the images made the iphone screen i was looking at seem much larger than it was. the most mundane things were suffused with an uncommon beauty. and i thought, "given the way kerry writes, this makes a whole lot of sense." 220209 ... kerry all the blathes were handwritten [raze: i’m no good when it comes to pies but i make a mean cornbread!] 220212 ... e_o_i I was in a large open room in tender square's house, startled at the expanse and the luxury. Large glass spheres, deep crimson, green, gold, and blue like giant Christmas ornaments, were suspended from the ceiling. And I didn't know if she or her husband had made them, so I wasn't sure if I should compliment her for them, but then with a sweep of her arm she pointed to the large window at the end of the room. Stained glass in a pattern like a Piet Mondrian painting shone as sunlight splashed echoes of the window's colours on the spotless tan planks of wooden flooring. The implication was that this part of the art was all hers. Up to, though maybe not including, the sunlight. 220217 ... raze i got a gift in the mail from yummychuckle. it was a book of what she thought were my best blathes. it was supposed to represent the totality of who i was. everything was arranged in chronological order, but there were no dates. it was strange to see the words i'd written here as black text on a white background, isolated from whatever other words i was used to seeing before or after them. as many pages as there were, the book felt incomplete. 220304 ... raze i saw two new blathes from oren on the recent page, after he hadn't been seen around these parts in fourteen years. second from the top on the today list was "here". above it was "there". i kept refreshing the page, waiting for the "everywhere" blathe to appear and complete the sequence, but it never did. 220319 ... raze i was standing in the storefront of a small building with e_o_i and a group of hindu devotees in casual western dress. i started waving my arms around because i felt like dancing. e_o_i told me my movements translated to something very offensive in their language. they were probably going to kill us for what they interpreted as a brazen display of disrespect. but she said she still trusted my judgment. i opened a door at the back of the room. it was an empty cupboard. i sang until a dark portal appeared. the swirling circle that was also a square drank up our bodies and transported us to another place and time. we were both dakota fanning at different stages of her life. she was the taciturn but still-hopeful child. i was the cynical adult. we sat on lawn chairs inside the garage of an auto repair shop and gossiped about the people passing by outside. it felt like a happy ending, or as close to one as we were going to get. 220323 ... e_o_i (raze, I thank your unconscious mind, because this made me laugh after a trying day. Sanskrit semaphore and the phases of Dakota Fanning! I am late getting back to writing things but I wish you calming blather-related dreams, should you want them!) 220323 ... raze i'm glad i could give you a laugh. and your wish came true! i really did have a calming blather-related dream last night. there were about half a dozen of us hanging out in the hallway of my grade school, as if that was a normal thing to do. i even got to play some air drums that became part of a psychedelic furs song that doesn't exist outside of the dreamworld. 220324 ... raze kyla stopped by after not writing anything on blather for fourteen years. at the bottom of an existing blathe, she wrote, "i'm crying in my chair right now. i can't believe this is still here. i want to do a roll_call to see who's still around." only one person responded. it wasn't anyone i recognized. 220330 ... e_o_i Via a Zoom window, I could see and hear raze intoning surreal poetry while strumming a guitar. I thought "Oh, I have to remember some of these lines to put them in half_asleep_thoughts" but I didn't recall any. I wasn't sure whose half asleep thoughts they'd be, either. ... My dream mind assigned Bizzar a visual identity reminiscent of a fellow student's: a woman about my height, more my age than the real-life student's (33 vs. 20), with light brown skin and straight black hair. This hair was in a ponytail with twin blades of shorter strands on each side of her face. She was standing next to a bottle of hand sanitizer as she explained that the "matt" who'd been leaving short, annoying messages on blather had been in her high school. I expressed surprise. "Yes," she laughed. "I was 14. At that age, I thought Gucci was good for the environment because its logo looked like a fish." And she rolled her eyes at her 14-year-old self. "But 'matt' made no sense at all. We were working on a project together and he just wrote how fish didn't eat soap." She gestured at the sanitizer bottle. "It didn't relate to anything." And I was going to say that being silly or irrelevant sometimes didn't mean you were a troll, but she insisted he did it on purpose to sabotage the project. 220413 ... raze nr sat beside me on a couch and cut my hair. she looked nervous, but the way she smiled told me she wouldn't do anything to my hair she wasn't comfortable doing to her own. when she was finished, my hair was shorter than it had been since i was sixteen. and it was perfect. later, i got an email from her asking, "what does it mean when someone cuts your hair in a dream?" i hadn't yet left the dream in which she cut mine, but the landscape had shifted enough that it felt like i had. before i could tell her i'd just finished experiencing the same thing, i woke up. 220415 ... nr meta haircut dreams! i hope it was a pixie cut. though i don't really think your hair was that short when you were 16. 220415 ... raze i'm sad to say it wasn't a pixie cut! but it was the best haircut anyone's ever given me, in or out of a dream. and the moment you unveiled the new me to everyone was pretty epic. it was a lot like the makeover reveal scene in "she's all that". (my latest blatherskite dream involved dallas revealing his secret past as a grocery store bagger while working as a high_school teacher.) 220416 ... raze after wandering into a nice little cafe, i found yev kassem (better known as the "soup nazi" in a famous "seinfeld" episode) working behind the hot food counter. he was wearing a black sleeveless t-shirt. he looked cynical and deflated, and a little sweaty. two women worked with him, taking orders and serving food. he was agreeable enough when a friend who doesn't exist in the waking world ordered a cup of soup for each of us. after that was out of the way, he sat at one of the tables with his staff and took an indoor smoke break. i turned to the now-unattended counter and saw nr standing beside my nonexistent friend. "that's the soup nazi," i said under my breath. i was stunned to see him working again after elaine ruined his business by sharing all his recipes. "who?" nr asked. i leaned in closer and whispered, "it's the soup nazi." she still couldn't hear me. i whispered louder, right in her ear, "that's the soup nazi from 'seinfeld'." i assumed she wasn't familiar with the episode or the character. i was wrong. she smirked and raised her voice just enough so everyone would hear her. "hey. did anyone see the *sign* that *felled* outside?" on cue, all the patrons started chattering and gossiping. "why did you do that?" i asked her. "i wanted to see him suffer," she said. 220506 ... e_o_i kerry, in the guise of an old school friend, tells me to believe in myself. "Because you were good at math in high school," she adds. I don't want to pinpoint the part of this that's wrong - it would seem nitpicky after genuinely meant encouragement! 220507 ... raze i cut a piece of pecan pie and offered it to jane, only i used my fingers instead of a knife, and i held the sliver of pie like it was a slice of pizza, and i called it turkey pie instead of what it was. "you don't have to give me any pie so you don't eat crow," she said. i took a bite. if the piece of pie were a face, i would have eaten its nose. it tasted just right. 220512 ... raze i had a dream i found out every person i ever went to school with was on blather at one time or another. it seemed normal enough to me at the time, but i couldn't figure out what any of their names were on red_or_blue. 220513 ... kerry e_o_i: i love this dream! my dream-self meant it, regardless of your actual math skills. 220513 ... raze i was talking to gabbie on the phone. it was hard to hear her voice over the music she was listening to in her kitchen. the song sounded familiar, but i couldn't quite place it. i said, "i don't know if you remember this, but years ago you suggested we write a story together. if you ever feel like it would be fun or therapeutic for you to do something like that now, i wanted you to know i have a lot more confidence in myself as a writer these days, and i think we could come up with something good." here's the thing: in the waking world, we did write a story together. it just never got an ending. 220517 ... raze user_24 was a very nervous greeter at a dystopic grocery store dinner banquet. he was friendly enough, but he made it clear he wasn't comfortable with me stopping to inspect the frozen jumbo shrimp display case for any appreciable length of time. 220518 ... raze flux wrote a blathe that said only this: "about to get on an endless box about word distribution. but if you elect to do that, you're here." 220519 ... raze amy popped in to finish a poem she started writing in 2021. she wrote about "this blath place" and said she was sad to see it so dormant. i wasn't sure what she was looking at. i stood in front of the old grey recliner that belonged to my temporary_inherited_grandmother and told her we averaged more than twenty blathes a day now. she looked surprised. 220530 ... raze i sent an email to daxle asking when she was going to organize a dance party fuelled by acid-infused sugar pills. i was joking. i didn't expect a serious response. "oh, it'll happen," she said. "i've done it before. no lie." i should have asked what she chose as the soundtrack for those past parties. but the question didn't cross my mind. 220618 ... raze nr won her first-round match at wimbledon as an unseeded player. she came through qualifying to get there and shocked the tennis world. i wasn't sure who she beat, but it was someone who was expected to go deep in the tournament. i asked her how she was feeling after pulling off a massive upset. "i only got an hour and ten minutes of sleep last night," she said. "i hope it was exciting," i said. "why would anyone compete in anything if it wasn't?" "you wouldn't." "that's right." then i haunted the halls of my grade school while eating salted peanuts that were shaped like pretzels. 220627 ... raze i was talking about sports with tender_square. "oh, soccer," she said. her eyes got wistful and went somewhere far_away. "it's like me and tennis," i said. "if there's a match on that i'm interested in, good_luck getting me to do anything else for a while." 220712 ... raze tender_square was trying to remember where she stashed something she wrote. "now, where did i blathe that?" she asked me. "you didn't," i said. "but i alluded to it on twenty_thoughts." (i don't know how many years i've spent dreaming up blathes that don't exist. but it's a lot.) 220715 ... tender_square (of course you would know what i was alluding to on red, raze, with your encyclopedic knowledge of the site.) 220716 ... raze a few nights ago i had this epic dream — the longest one i've had all year in terms of word count — in which i was the star player on a team that seemed to occupy some nebulous place between high_school and college basketball. a lot of strange things happened in the dream, but one wrinkle that didn't surprise me at all was the masterful passing and ball movement displayed by e_o_i. she was my team's starting point guard, and her court vision was a thing of beauty. (i think i played the power forward position. but don't hold me to that.) 220805 ... raze "what about the idea of red and a blue bean like me working together?" tender_square asked. i wasn't sure if it was a blather thing or something completely unrelated. but "blue bean" struck me as having a nice bit of music to it. 220806 ... raze nr told me about her idea to organize a blather jam session where each one of us would play a different musical instrument that doubled as a character in an illustrated story. everyone would drive the narrative, and no one would feel left out. we tried to remember what kerry played. i thought it was either guitar or ukulele, but i wasn't sure. she wasn't around to tell us. we were transported to a random kitchen where nr played ukulele for her nephew-cat. he stood on his back legs and meowed his approval into her ear. he looked like he was sharing a very important secret with her. she seemed surprised, so he meowed again to make sure she understood the gravity of the situation. 220814 ... kerry i didn't look at blather for an even longer time than usual lately and when i did there was someone named colby who had made this whole introduction-to-colby blathe and it was full of memes and pictures of pokemon and kittens and it totally freaked me out. then i was in blather and it was a big dim room with couches and houseplants, and a corner full of dirt where people kept sticking individual cut flowers in the dirt with the expectation that they'd root and grow. one of the bigger plants in the corner moved the curtain (there were corner windows) and raze was like "nooo too much light!" and leaped to close the curtains. we all laughed. nr was there, i think sitting on the couch. then blather became a restaurant and the whole thing morphed into one of those dreams where i'm waiting tables again (dear god) and got even weirder from there. 220824 ... raze this sort of ties in with your dream in a way, kerry: e_o_i started a new blathe that was a game. the idea was to write something using a name that was recognizable without it being your normal blathernym. the only thing i could come up with on short notice was "rays of light", but it felt a little too bright to me. 220906 ... raze leif popped up with a new comment on an old blathe. two posts beneath something silentbob had written years ago, she wrote, "you brought me here, bobby." i was pretty sure he wasn't the person who led her to blather, so it seemed a little odd. she called herself "the morn". 220907 ... raze tender_square wrote a really powerful extended poem. i tried to commit it to memory, but my mind could only snag these two lines: "thought race the day does not bake in half" i can't remember the title. 220910 ... e_o_i tender_square is waiting in line at what looks like the reception of the hotel where I was; my mind's assigned her the outline of someone I saw in the park yesterday: tall, athletic clothes. She asks when the breakfast room opens and the man behind the desk says, "Between 9 and 9:30 every day." "That's very specific," she answers politely...or something with 'specific' in it. The meaning: "That's an unreasonably short time span!" Something about the mix of graciousness and sarcasm, or the fact that I can grasp the hidden meaning, makes me happy. 220915 ... raze tender_square sat beside me in a grade school english class. after the teacher discovered i hadn't answered any of the questions he assigned for samuel r. delany's "dhalgren", she told me, "you look just like the young tough from 'tim tivo and jim jarmusch host '96 minutes'". 221114 ... raze jane asked me to rank my all-time favourite 'skites. she wanted to compare lists. the idea of assigning a numeric value to a name made me uncomfortable, though. i didn't get past the second entry. 221117 ... raze i found flux at the campground that used to be my mother and stepfather's preferred vacation spot. she was just a few trailers down from ours. her place was enormous. it was like a house inside. she sat at a hulking computer desk, blathing things she'd written in a spiral notebook. i learned her true name was acorn. her friends called her corny for short. 221205 ... raze my sister kept asking tender_square a litany of fast_food related questions. "did you ever brush your teeth too long in a mcdonald's bathroom?" "no." "did you ever brush your teeth too long in a burger king bathroom?" "no." "did you ever brush your teeth too long in a tim hortons bathroom?" "no." and right on down the line. 230101 ... raze a series of graphs broke down my entire history of work recording other people. in the top left corner was a blue circle representing dallas and twenty-three albums we'd apparently made together. "that's some kind of commitment," someone i didn't know told me. 230130 ... raze tender_square argued with someone who couldn't be seen from inside a macbook finder window. "we are praising the event," she said. "not talking about a war. you aren't listening." 230131 ... nr i was taking some classes at what i think was supposed to be a university but looked like a high school. raze came by to hang out but wasn't enrolled in the classes, so he was trying to be inconspicuous. it worked until we were in the class where my grade 7/8 english teacher, Ms. P, was the professor, and she singled him out and asked him to come with her out into the hallway. she came back to the class after a bit, alone. raze texted "room 206" and i said i'd go there. but every time i tried to leave, Ms. P. was standing in the hallway. eventually i was able to leave and got to room 206, where raze was just hanging out. "she (Ms. P.) came to check, and just saw me sitting on top of the toilet," he said (as in, sitting on top of the lid/using the toilet as a chair). apparently that classroom needed a toilet. 230217 ... nr i should mention that room 206 was empty. apparently if you try to attend classes you're not enrolled in, your punishment is to sit alone in an empty classroom. 230217 ... raze given the amount of dreams i continue to have in which i feel out of place in a classroom setting, this feels eerily prescient. (and i'll have you know i was blathing while i was sitting on that toilet.) 230218 ... e_o_i The setting: a retreat or camp, where I relaxed in a common area, a large central cabin with wooden walls. An old-fashioned TV was build into the wall, indicated by a diagonal slope above the machine. On either side of me sat kerry and flux, who wanted to show something they thought would amuse me: the opening shot of A_Clockwork_Orange synced with, as flux said, "the relevant Epic Rap Battle of History." Except the sound was fuzzy and the picture kept fizzling out. So kerry turned to me, businesslike, offering the remote. The TV was now a computer, see, and she wanted to see me demonstrate my coding skills, since I'd made a pun about programming on blather. (True: BASIC and C++ in basic_bitches.) But I didn't know how to do that - I searched my dream-memory and found no previous knowledge of coding, with a TV remote or not - so I began to wake up. 230222 ... kerry i'd been gone from blather for so long. everything i wrote wound up on blue. i wondered if i'd forgotten the rules? if red was gone? when i found red it was a giant chalkboard and there were indeed rules. it wasn't a tangle of words but an ongoing narrative we were all expected to contribute to in a specific way. raze stood next to me and explained it. he was probably nine feet tall. i could still get in on it, he said, if i followed the rules. i said okay because i didn't want to be locked out forever. 230226 ... raze if i'm being completely honest, this hurts to read. even if it's just a dream. all i've ever tried to do is make people feel welcome and safe here, while fighting to keep this space sacred and alive when no one else is writing. if i've only really succeeded in doing the opposite of that, maybe i shouldn't be here anymore. the last thing this place needs is a gatekeeper. 230226 ... kerry please don't read it that way, raze. you aren't a gatekeeper (and you weren't in my dream either). now that i'm reading it again i see how it sounds that way. to me, this dream was more like my own subconscious giving me shit for not writing lately. and some anxiety mixed in there too, like, what if i lose my momentum? what am i missing out on? i see the rules in the dream as my own rules: keep writing, keep blathing, because it's sustaining. 230227 ... e_o_i amy (adaptability, etc.) emailed me about something, and I was in my parents' kitchen, replying. As soon as I hit "send" I realized that I'd only talked about myself - curtly, but selfishly - and in a way that was irrelevant to the question she'd asked. I looked out the window at the newspapers spread out all over the backyard. I thought of sending a longer email to explain why I was so preoccupied: that recently I'd been afraid I was pregnant, which is why I didn't have a chance to clean the newspapers that had fallen on the back lawn, which is something my dad was getting after me to do, adding extra stress. Then it occurred to me I'd probably told her all this already. (The unrealistic part in all this: that the kitchen has wifi. Naturally, no pregnancy scare either; this was probably in reference to the part of the group_work presentation that talked about abortion laws. The newspapers pretty obviously represent the tax papers I still haven't put together.) (Also, I've missed communicating with blatherskites, but I don't know why my mind picked amy - the last time I interacted with her, she wrote something I thought was snobby towards someone else (a person I also got frustrated with later, for different reasons - why do I keep holding grudges and then pretend I don't? arrrgh, self). Anyway, rereading that conversation a year later, I worried that maybe my silence was taken as agreement. Maybe I was cowardly not to say anything. Then again, maybe it's better for me to hold my metaphorical tongue than lose my temper. And if amy is here, I don't want you to beat yourself up for something you said a while back. You've also written many insightful and compassionate things, and there may have been previous arguments I didn't know about. Plus I think everybody has said stuff they regret.) 230416 ... raze a gathering of 'skites was half online chat, half in-person gathering. most of the names were vaguely familiar without ringing any serious bells, but i recognized zedel. i wrote a brief message telling him it was always good to see him around, not sure if i wanted to use proper punctuation or stick with all lowercase letters like i do here. he didn't respond. i wasn't expecting so many people to show up. i didn't think there was going to be enough food for everyone. i would have to go without so others could eat. 230707 ... raze i discovered a blue blathe from 2002 i couldn't remember starting. the title was "jamie's birthday turned out just as johnny hoped". i called myself "johnny nyah". it was a sort of an e-card for yummychuckle. i read a recent blathe of hers in which the words became a video clip. "i don't know who the shark's father is," she said. 230718 ... raze nr's eclectic filmography was described in voiceover, complete with clips of some of her work. the title of the most high-profile flick she had a leading role in wasn't revealed, but the scene in which she rode a horse through the ruins of a city at once modern and primeval was as striking as the expression of indomitable fury on her face. 230727 ... raze i met doar in the basement of a stranger's house. he looked nothing like the man in the picture i saw a million years ago. we didn't really have anything to say to each other, but his smile seemed sincere. 230729 ... raze bizzar was a picture on the cover of a magazine. i hugged her anyway. 230829 ... raze i learned kingsuperspecial's first name was phillip, when i'd spent the last two decades and change sure it was aaron. my world, she was rocked. 231005 ... nr i was somewhere that kind of looked like a cool brewery or tap room, and it was fairly busy with some kind of event going on. i was sitting at a table with my friends who we'll call matt and annie. i got up from the table to look at a bulletin on the wall, and then i turned around and raze was right behind me.  "oh hey! how long are you in [my city]?" i asked him. "i've moved here," he replied. "how long have you been here?" i asked. "i just got here last night," he said. apparently that exchange was enough information, and he came and joined us, rounding out the table for four. then that scene disappeared and we were all milling around with a bunch of people in the next room, looking at exhibits of some kind. after a little while i looked around and didn't see matt and annie anywhere, but raze was standing a few feet away looking not too pleased to be there anymore. i wonder what he witnessed at the exhibit. 231016 ... raze (my best guess: there was no squirrel-themed art on display. HOW DARE THEY.) 231016 ... raze i found birdmad standing in my stepfather's mother's kitchen. he looked nothing like himself, but i knew at once who he was. somehow he knew me too. i said i missed seeing him on blather. he said he was waiting for something disastrous to happen in his life so he'd be inspired to write again. he told me for two years he and his wife had been living in the same house without interacting with each other in any way. i asked how he knew she still lived there if he never saw her. he said he heard her coming and going at odd hours. i thought that sounded pretty disastrous to me. but i kept the thought to myself. 231028 ... e_o_i I got a gift in the mail from no_reason: two bags of loose-leaf tea. "Oh, how nice," I thought. Except I didn't quite know what it was. I figured it was "spice" to sprinkle on top of already-made tea. When I did that, she appeared and told me, "You're just adding tea to tea." Then she disappeared, and I figured I'd start all over, making a second cup of tea with the second bag she'd sent. I was steeping it when I looked at the label. This one had "salvia" in it, an herb that caused hallucinations in a small percentage of the population. "Do not take it alone," the label advised. Alone as in by yourself or alone as in without food? I took it as the former and waited for Mom to come home. I was at my parents house. She showed up while the tea was still hot, so I drank it and then glanced out the living room window. Instead of the street I saw a wide field filled with ivory sculptures of mythical creatures - fauns, satyrs, etc - many in circles. The image was still but I felt I could be absorbed into the scene, I could wander into it and be swept into dreams, perhaps a different dream for each animal, each position in the circle relative to the animals. It was a strange feeling but not an anxious one. Later, I told my parents, "I did have a hallucination! But it was a still image, not a moving one," as if this mattered. Then I added, "It felt like I was dreaming. Of course, I was dreaming - I just didn't know I was asleep." (This, too, was said in the dream.) 231120 ... e_o_i (So I looked up "salvia" and it's the name for the sage family, but there's one type that's a drug - salvia divinorum, which has hallucinogenic affects. I remember hearing the name before but hadn't thought about it for years.) 231120 ... raze soma somehow figured out how to post a gif at the bottom of a blathe: a clip of tori_amos dancing while wreathed in candlelight. 231206 ... raze the 'skite responsible for great blathes like national_geographic popped back up and turned his ever-shifting blathernym into a commentary on his return, calling himself "welcome-backtyl". 231221 ... Soma I went and sat on the beach at 4am. The sky was falling down in beautiful auroral shimmers in the early morning dark, and I was alone in my fleece pajamas. I knew that blatherskites would be there soon because after all, it was the end of the world. So when raze pulled up in a minivan and saw me sitting in the sand, I didn’t need to do more than say hello for him to know who I was. “I figured you’d be here.” he said “but not in your pajamas.” I laughed against the salty breeze, my arms still curled up around my knees. I watched e_o_i get out of the minivan, and saw a tendril of smoke I knew belonged to Jane. They were going to get coffee at the McDonald’s first. Those Golden Arches illuminated the rocks and sand off that shore like the moonlight that would never shine again. Then we all went to the beach together, the night swallowing us up and the roar of the ocean drowning out our voices. We were sad, or at least, I was. This was it. The end of all things. But we weren’t alone. 231223 ... raze (what a beautiful, thought_provoking dream. if_the_world_should_end, it would give me comfort to know our red_family was together when everything went dark, firing one last collective blathe into the firmament.) 231223 ... raze anna_began sent me an email that was hosted on a website similar to quora. "you don't have to tell me your real name if you don't want to," she wrote. "but i want you to smell me." she explained: her boyfriend was always telling her she smelled. she wanted to know if her scent was pleasant, and she didn't trust him to tell her the truth. this segued into talk of attractiveness "if p1 is pan's ass and p1 is roxy music". i didn't have the heart to tell her she'd assigned a person's posterior and a trail-blazing band the same value. 231226 ... raze i listened to the first song on the billy_joel album "turnstiles" with daxle, only instead of "say goodbye to hollywood" it was something with dissonant electric guitar and an almost shoegazey sound. this was recorded long before shoegaze was even a thing. i was surprised to learn she was a fan. we completed each other's sentences while talking about how billy got his squished nose from boxing lessons because he kept getting bullied for carrying piano books when he was a kid. later, we watched an animated film in a theater. one fish struggled to save another, carrying its unconscious brethren in its mouth, and the earnestness of the gesture made me cry. 231227 ... raze blather was a bathtub, and every blathe was obscured by a patch of rust that stained its body. user_24 didn't think a toothbrush was the answer, but i scrubbed until all was white again, and we waited for words to appear. 231228 ... raze i read a piecemeal handwritten_blathe by birdmad. it was about an older man he crossed paths with a few times without really getting to know him. a retired guitarist who gave him a sculpture he made as his last living act. bird became a high_school principle. then he was a black squirrel. i brought him to the park i walk in but worried he would want to stay there long enough to forget how to get back home. wherever that was. 240109 ... e_o_i This was a while ago and just a snippet of a dream scene, but I was reminded of it by seeing a blathe of kerry's today: I was with a dream-group of made-up or remixed people, and I recognized kerry even though she'd dyed her hair bright red. She had on a dark hood and two tails of vivid hair trailed out on either side, symmetrical. I wanted to ask her if she was cosplaying a videogame character, which one I wouldn't know, but she left before we could talk. 240111 ... raze birdmad had his own little corner of goodreads called "birdmad's barrage of belligerent book reviews". it didn't live up to its name, though. all his reviews were pretty positive. 240117 ... raze nr wrote this about a book she'd just finished reading: "i liked it so much, i had to borrow words that aren't possibilities." 240122 ... raze there were half a dozen names on the who page i hadn't seen in years, including once_again and x. the recent page had at least sixty things on today's side. when i sat down to try and ride the unexpected wave of activity, everyone was gone, and i was alone with a long list of blathes. 240127 ... nr i would like to read a book that would make me say this. 240127 ... e_o_i Someone wrote about a blather birthday (like raze did in real life) and signed it "z". "Oh, zeke's back, at least for this! Haven't seen him in a while," I thought. And I forget the contents of the blathe, except that I summarized it with the phrase "Three generations of phonologists." Did that relate? Not at all, probably. 240203 ... raze i landed on an ancient blathe where i'd written the coordinates of a nonexistent place using symbols instead of numbers. ever_dumbening chimed in to say they made good hotdogs there. 240211 ... Soma I woke up in a haze and had an epiphany– a blathe so profound that it would stop all the fighting and bring understanding. But I was so incredibly tired. I fumbled for my phone in the dark. As if Atlas lifting his burden, I raised my phone. The screen blazed to life like the first star in a dark heaven. 5% battery life; just enough. I pressed the camera button and thickly words dripped from my lips like honey. It was far too slow and the battery light was blinking, lower, lower, lower. I fell asleep. When i awoke i viewed the video to transcribe what peaceful prophecy I had been gifted, but found the tongue unknown to me. I emailed it to Raze, so that they might pass it on to EOI. The linguistics department was off no use, the tongue was not one known to our world, and I wept bitterly. —- Today I went to listen to that phone recording. It was not there. The memory of hope and agony and loss was but a dream, though the feelings still rang sharp within my bones. 240215 ... nr dreamt that raze told me he was going to try not to have as many half_asleep_thoughts. i asked why, and he said in order to get better sleep. that was all. 240215 ... raze (at this point, i really would give up the bulk of those brain blips if it meant i could get enough rest to feel halfway human again. lately, a lot of them seem to come in the morning when i'm sort of snoozing and about to get up, though, and not so much when i'm drifting off at night.) 240218 ... e_o_i raze had given blatherskites individual puzzles to solve. These word problems turned into "escape rooms" but what I was transported to wasn't a room. Instead, it was a narrow stretch of beach between cliff and sea. The gentle swish of wind and waves reminded me of a scene from the film Coil, where the protagonist is swimming in a quiet pool but dreams she's by the ocean. The idea was to find clues that would let me go somewhere else, whether by walking or teleportation, but I didn't feel stuck. But I felt a little bad that I didn't solve the riddle before the dream scene changed on its own. (Or maybe I did solve it, by remembering the last pre-COVID movie I'd seen in a theatre. Maybe that was the clue that let me teleport.) 240218 ... e_o_i (Soma, those descriptions were beautiful, from the scene of inspiration down to the longing for a thing that's only in a dream. And I'm not surprised Concordia's CMLL dept. couldn't help! I think they're out of their depth when it comes to dream language (dream_language? dream_word exists, anyway).) 240218 ... raze silentbob came back. i can't remember a thing he wrote, but it was nice to see him again. 240301 ... raze daxle and mon became the same person somehow. their last name was oshamatu. 240302 ... e_o_i I'm on an online video chat with raze and an only-in-the-dream-world blatherskite. She's Scandinavian, with small dark cheery eyes and a blond braid. When I have to sign off, I tell raze, "It's nice talking to you and Sierra." "Seraya," he corrects. Then she appears: unmuting herself, she looms large on the screen. "Sraya" she says in an accent I can't quite imitate. But I go with raze's pronunciation for a silly pun, attempting to bend her name into my leave-taking phrase: "Well, seh ya later!" 240313 ... raze in a public bathroom ― the kind you'd find at a campsite ― nr told me of a dream in which her mother revealed she was selling the house they shared. we talked about the dreams that are mundane enough to convince you they're real, and how unsettling they can be. outside, hoppy's_daughter was grazing with a black rabbit i'd never seen before. neither one of them had any fear of us. i realized i'd left my camera on a picnic table and ran to grab it. both bunnies were gone by the time i got back. i feigned smashing the camera against the side of a house. "my head's the thing i should really be hitting," i said. 240319 ... raze i don't remember the title of the blathe he created, but peyton reappeared after a long absence and said this: "good news. i just signed up for cocoa, and now it lets me come here and write. man, what a strange 726-year-old site." (and i thought, "is blather really *that* old? can't be.") 240321 ... raze e_o_i was playing piano in the other room. i was about to open the lid so the sound could breathe a little better when i_woke_up. 240327 ... Soma The ocean and sky roiled in midnight blue and purple as if there were both one element. No clouds in white or cresting peaks in my view. Dallas stood on the edge of the shadowed sand, lapping waves miraculously averting from his boots. His white cowboy clothes are flapping in the breeze of the oncoming storm as he gazes across the soil-less expanse. He turns to me, faceless static with a toothpick The sense of a smile creeping up my spine like ice. And I look down the steep hill of shadowed sand, almost a cliff, that stretches down like an impossible climb in reverse. "This too must grow" he says, and I don't know if he means the ocean, the land, or my fear. 240329 ... raze i offered pony something from my fridge. she grabbed a can of dr. pepper. i was doubly surprised — both by her drink of choice and the discovery that there were carbonated beverages in the house. 240402 ... e_o_i pony was collecting a three-part writing project by her, Soma, and me; she was the one who made the main blathe that would link the three parts, as a hub and index. At first the blathe titles weren't underlined and she worried something hadn't worked...but then they sprung to linking life. One of them was a word with an extra vowel added. When I woke up, what remained in my mind was "Eorache" (a parody of The_Lord_of_the_Rings had one the Eo- characters called this), but it seemed that this dream_word had an extra "u" after another vowel. Anyway, my interpretation of the topic - not necessarily what the others wrote about - was "time when someone sexually harassed you but the situation was funny as well as uncomfortable, and the fact that those two emotions about it coexist also makes you uncomfortable." (The thing is, I *have* a story like that. It involves a drunk teenager on a bus.) 240405 ... raze i was trying to tell pony something profound i'd written on the body of a white pen. when i reached for it, there were dozens of other identical pens around it. they all fell to the floor, stripping me of the words i wanted. 240413 what's it to you? who go blather from