May 5, 2001, Cape Town

A close friend and I recently decided a road trip was in order. We ended up covering just over 4000km in just over 4 days.

The first question people ask me is "Why?".

It never occurred to me that I had to have a reason. Sometimes, you need to do something for no good reason at all.

April 24, 2001, Cape Town

When I was young I'd often swim to the bottom of our pool and exhale all the air in my lungs and lie on the bottom of the pool looking up. The feeling was one of being in a totally alien world, where everyday rules no longer apply. In fact the one rule that we intrinsically depend on (breathe) turns deadly.

April 23, 2001, Cape Town

There are few things better than a slow rock ballad combined with the sound of violins. The combination is darkly seductive.

April 18, 2001, Cape Town

I'm told that the two words in the English dictionary that have no rhyming partner are orange and silver. A friend pointed out that purple seemed a likely candidate too. Odd that they should all be colours.

The idea of rhyming words is an odd one. What makes them so appealing? I suppose the concept is analogous to a beautiful piece of art, or a compelling piece of music, something that captures elegance in a single movement or manages to encompass a complex mood. It seems odd that these concepts should even exist. I think, perhaps, that something is beautiful to us if it has a certain simplicity of representation. The waveform of noise is very complex next to that of a single perfect note. Memory seems to be based on pattern recognition. And the beauty of fractals such as the Mandelbrot Set seems to lend support to this idea.

April 17, 2001, Cape Town

Nothing like a short holiday to make work seem that much tougher :) Back to the old grindstone.

April 15, 2001, Cape Town

Today I ate a mango. This was not the first time. It was certainly not an auspicious occasion. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary here either.

So why do I mention it? For the first time in over 20 years of mango eating (practice makes perfect), it occurred to me that this fruit has a subtle taste I can only describe as 'smokey'. It brought a smile to my face to have discovered something new about something so ordinary. The world is full of surprises: pay careful attention, or you may miss something.

April 15, 2001, Cape Town

I'm not a great fan of shadow. I'm not too fond of dim lighting either, although this does not extend to firelight. Shadow (and in particular dim lighting, the kind you often find in really old houses) suffocate me. They press in and seem to absorb the ticks of my life-clock.

Crisp sunlight is the surest sign that all is as it should be, despite what I may think.

A quote just occurred to me, and although it has very little to do with shadows, it wants me to write it down here. Since when do I refuse the voices in my head?

"When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you."

-- Paulo Coelho

A warning perhaps, to those of us who, like myself, never seem to be satisfied with what they've got.

April 14, 2001, Cape Town

There is too much of the world.

While this ensures that each person is guaranteed a unique life-experience, it also guarantees that each of us will miss out on an infinite number of sights, sounds, people, ideas, places, events ...

The only way to cope with this is to share it. Friends, family, loved ones. They exist, in some sense, as a kind of existential distraction. People who are close to us allow us to glimpse a small part of what we're missing out on. Perhaps then, those who surround themselves with a large number of people are in a way lonelier than those who are content with just a few carefully chosen friends.

Perhaps this is why the most unlikely people often share the strongest bonds.

April 13, 2001, Cape Town

Memories are, by definition, sad.

Ironically, the happiest memories tend to be the saddest memories of all. Memories represent things that have come and gone, and the really powerful ones can be claustraphobic in their intensity.

April 12, 2001, Cape Town

"Ten years ago I met a boy with unruly copper hair, feet that never touched the earth and eyes that opened into an abyss of mysteries. I refuse to never hear his voice again."

-- Author Unknown

Every now and then, Life throws me together with people that capture my imagination, make me throw caution to the wind, or imprint themselves upon my memories in any one of a hundred different ways. Leaving these people behind is always hard, and too often that single meeting is all I'm given.

But sometimes the same sort of sad defiance in the quote above wells up and forces me to do all I can to prevent that first intersection from being the last. Sometimes I succeed, on other occasions I do not. But both of these alternatives are better than the thought of not trying at all.

April 11, 2001, Cape Town

I have decided to disassociate myself from the geek community. For a long time I felt that perhaps I qualified as a (proud) member of this group of individuals.

The single binding characteristic I associate with this group is individuality. The rest of the world would describe them as being 'different', but alternatives abound, some of which are less than pleasant. This group, in particular those members that are involved in computers, have been thrust into the limelight as the world grows more dependent on things like the Internet. But the group extends to include (in my mind) that subset of the human race that has always been a square peg watching round pegs slip neatly into their round holes.

Anyway, I've drifted slightly from my original point. The term geek has become a label, and this is utterly contradictory. Geek has become a fashionable label. It's almost as if the nerd at University suddenly got a cool car and now everyone wants to be his 'friend'. There are two ways to react to this. Either he can grab this opportunity to fit in, however fleeting it may turn out to be, or he can just walk away. I have chosen to do the latter.

The world is a very superficial place, and I have no time, or need, for superficial labels.

My name is James, and I am proud to not be a member of the geek community.

April 10, 2001, Cape Town

Sometimes I sit outside in our garden and watch the world. Often my mind drifts and I snap back suddenly, filled with an incredible fear that I am missing out on sounds and smells and sights that will never be again.