blather_epiphany DannyH These were the days. My daughter was still just an inevitable impossibility. That tiny flat tucked away off the Seven Sisters Rd in the elbow of the architecture of the church of the big blue square. I was periodically ecstatic and miserable. Finally chasing my dream with all the tenacity of a winged tortoise. Nothing could come between me and my girl. Apart from anything else there wasn't room. But blather was my secret girlfriend. I cloaked myself in the persona of Kontrol, the kind of monomaniacal headmaster you just knew was secretly riven with dark and generous pervesions. I flirted with a red-haired girl from New Orleans. Some of the time I wrote, a novel which is now the thing of which I'm now most proud and most ashamed. But at the time...it was nothing but a mountain to climb. If nothing else I got pretty good at climbing. The descent is the hard part. I learned that later. At night I would dream of ways to twist the beautifully simple architecture of Blather into something with a recognisably different shape. It was a few good months of daydreams before I hit upon the idea of a maze. Fitting index for a twisty tangly web. For a brief time I was famous, or at least my maze was. It tickled my mind to think a sufficient density of people might be travelling through at any one time to pass each other in cyberspace without even knowing it. It came out of a fantastically still and contemlative time in my life, one where time had become truly elastic. Some weeks I would go to work only on Monday and Friday, all the rest was mine. Somewhere in that time I found myself staring at the television in the middle of the day, something I rarely did. What seemed at first to be a huge chimney belching black smoke turned out to have a sister. Strange days. One night I woke up and actually felt like I might be going mad. I forced myself to sit at my computer and record the experience. It was something to do with tesselating crosses, or at least so I thought at the time. I think it may have turned out to be a very worthwhile experiment in being but I can't be sure. The results were rather inconclusive. Eventually we left the flat for somewhere bigger around the corner, wherein me and my girl decided to rejoin the human race, start playing poker and, ultimately, have a child. I think I might have left a bit of me behind in that cramped space in the corner by the kitchen wall, tapping away at a blue screen with bluer words on it, staring into the abyss and smiling like a loon. I must go back there and pick the poor fellow up some day. God knows what he's been up to in the meantime. 061003 ... u24 fantastic. really. i relate muchly. 061003 what's it to you? who go blather from