a_fresh_start raze is not always a good thing. take this dream i had last night, which can only be called a nightmare, though it did end with some hope. in the dream, someone did something strange to a blathe here. they made it so there were no words. just a few figures holding lit torches. the graphics, crude as they were, made the flames flicker a little. it was pretty neat. made me think of a nintendo game. something was done to the recent page too. there were digital rats scurrying around at the edges of the screen, and there was much more space to scroll in every direction, and the rats seemed a lot more real than the torches. i was starting to get a funny feeling about all the unexplained experimentation. then blather became a physical space, a building, with every blathe a room. someone gutted the rooms, and the words were gone. everything any of us ever wrote. all gone. the first room, what i guess was the entry blathe or the physical manifestation of "go" or "nevermind", was now a bathroom. i tried to piss in a stall but the door wouldn't stay closed no matter how far i pushed the lock out, and cops with loud voices kept coming in and talking and making it impossible to concentrate enough to do my business. i washed my hands when i was done anyway. after a while everyone was gone, and i slept on the floor of that room, not wanting to let go of something i'd given so much of myself to for so long, even if it wasn't anything i could feel a part of anymore. a cat came out of a stall and slept beneath my hand until my snoring woke him up. that comforted me a little. his right eye was a green marble with no pupil. the next day, a gunfight in the lobby of a ballet school. whoever was involved in the red_blather takeover, they were getting wise to me and didn't like that i was interfering with their plans. i fought them off and took no damage. when i returned to that room, that first blathe, it had been painted blue to make it more blather-like, to make it a reminder of what it had been. it was better, but it was still a bathroom. it wasn't the same. it wasn't red. and then geoffrey lewis appeared. because he's a character actor in the dreamworld too. he said he was the janitor. said he'd been the janitor forever. said he'd backed up all of red. every blathe. just in case something like this happened someday. he did something to import all the lost blathes back into the system, and i watched the number of them grow and grow until it stopped somewhere past forty nine thousand. but there was a problem. now that blather was a physical space instead of an internet space, old connections needed to be remade. otherwise, no word within a blathe would transport you to its room. you wouldn't go anywhere. those old connections could only be remade manually. so i walked through a never-ending chain of auxiliary equipment rooms, pressing buttons and hooking up hoses to reconnect almost fifty thousand blathes to one another, watching small dormant circles turn red to indicate active links. i felt like i was restoring power to a sleeping city. i didn't visit many of the blathes or rooms themselves. but when i got to the Ps i found myself peering in on the paediatric unit, where instead of children, doctors cared for the elderly whose minds had regressed to a childlike state. an old man asked if he could leave, if he could go home, and a handsome doctor with wavy brown hair smiled at him and said no, he could never go home again, and there was something sinister and terrible about how glad he was to deliver the news. the only other room i visited was full of hanging clothes that didn't look like they'd ever been worn. the clothing and the room both felt abandoned. i went on making more connections, but it was hard to keep track of where i was, and i was sure i would miss something and screw it up somehow. i returned to the first room once more, nowhere near finished the work i had to do. at least i'd made some appreciable difference. the room was red again. relief doesn't quite cover the feeling i had when i woke up to see it was business as usual on red, with no bathroom and no backwards pediatric unit. the cat was a cool dude, though. he could come visit if he wanted to. 150318 ... raze [ couldn't decide which spelling of p(a)ediatric felt better, so i used them both ] 150318 ... leif I always think that I love blather, but then I read and remember it's the people writing the words I'm loving. I love you, Johnny. 150318 ... leif [and thank you for your words] 150318 ... raze this made me smile in a way that would make me cry if i could cry. i love you too, meg. i'm really glad you're here. 150318 what's it to you? who go blather from