roman lizardqueen Theres a science to the clock with every move and overlapping of the crooked golden Roman numerals. Out of everything in the room to live in, I always chose the clock. Maybe because it moved, or maybe because it made time seem to go by faster. That year i probably spent more time gazing into that clock than anything else. It was possibly what saved me. Sometimes I would live in its hands, gliding across the fat golden Roman numerals, sometimes the numerals themselves, hiding behind the V's and I's, enjoying the arial view. We'd play games. I would count as fast as i could in my head beginning with the second hand on the twelve, id stop when the second hand had made a full rotation back to the 12 again, then compare my number to the clocks 60 seconds. Once i nearly quadrupled the speed of the second hand. This made the time go by faster until he left. We called it racing. Racing the clock. 010602 ... Mister Mourning decline_and_fall 011015 ... silentbob the roman empire fell for what is five principle reasons: lets see if i can remember them all. The sin of paganism was rampant in the unpaved streets! christianity was growing enormous they had tax problems, everything was corrupt n shit. Geographical blah blah blah too much something or other. and i dont remember anything else. 011015 ... Eowithien Paganism is not a sin, it is widely accepted and they think that you are weird. 030302 ... phil next thing they'll be saying is corruption isn't bad because it makes people happy. 030302 ... phil I think Silent Bob, that they had no more room for expansion, the climates in northern lands did not support the Roman agriculture. They weren't able to take hold onto these lands. They sustained the empire on expansion. 030302 ... User24 no, hate to disagree, phil, but it was the fact that while they expanded, the centre, rome, was being split in two by christianity; they're principle failing, IMHO, was that once they conquered a place, they considered it Roman, however this was not the case, and all the societies that were conquored became integrated into the Roman empire, like the Borg, but, as would happen with the Borg if it were a real civilisation, the identity became so fractured and mixed that it could not hold itself up. 030602 ... User24 kinda like america, actually. A superpower that has assimlated so many cultures that internal struggle and misunderstanding is rife. 030604 ... z does culture have borders? do the victors still write history? can a whole empire be dismissed with 5 failings? the agenda of our viewpoint is insideous. it frames the questions as well as the answers. 040415 what's it to you? who go blather from