This morning, when I woke up, I felt like a very, very long time had passed since I went to sleep. Like years or more. I didn’t recall anything more than maybe the vaguest wisps of dreams, so it’s not as if there’s years of experience here. Just a sense of… time has seriously passed.

This is the second time this happened this week. It’s never happened before. Every time I’ve gone to sleep and woken up, I’ve felt like about a night has passed. It’s like I have two internal clocks that have been in sync for my entire life, counting two different kinds of time that have always been in lock-step, until one week when things just started to slip.

Is something wrong with my brain? Is this just a momentary glitch that’ll go away? Are my studies in magic getting to the point where I’m going off on the astral plane for years and years of experience outside of my normal timeline, and I’m not able to remember them yet? Did I rewind myself to the earliest point I could reach after our increasingly-erratic President pushed the global thermonuclear war button? Am I just getting old?

I don’t know. All I can do is keep track of this experience and ask if this is a symptom of anything. Or maybe it’s a totally normal thing that some people get all the time and I’ve just never had it before for some reason.

And as icing on the cake, when I got up and looked at myself in the bedroom mirror, I looked like a different person. Like my skull was a little skinnier than normal. Like I was… vaguely elfin. That’s never happened before. It’s passed, my reflection looks like it always has now.

Weird.

Carnival’s over. Lent’s starting. Excess before ritually giving something up.

Which, really, it’s the same energy as a New Year’s resolution. What do you want to give up doing, what do you want to be doing more of? Not surprising now that I think about it, since Carnival is basically a Lunar New Year celebration.

I’m looking at the calendar on my wall, which is woefully empty of days I noted exercising upon during the past week. And I’m standing here at my computer with a sport bra on because I am about to exercise, and I’m thinking about how several days of having my routine interrupted by parades and festivities is making all my habits stop; I’m consciously choosing to resume trying to exercise more days than not.

But first I find it important to go put this collection of beads and light-up trinkets I caught at Hermes on my bike, and finally clean up the headlight I got that came with dead batteries inside it and put that on there too.

Old beads, faded, nasty. The various blinky trinkets I had have been lost, one by one. The last one got handed to a small child who was driving her new battery-powered motorcycle around and was demanding it. I relented and let her have it, she clearly needed Hermes’ blessings for tha ything more than I do.
These are two years old, I think. They’ve seen a lot of weather.

This pillow normally sits atop the stool in front of my computer; the stuffed dragon lives on a bookshelf. But he’s been guarding these beads and trinkets that I caught out of the air last week at Hermes. When they hit the ground they lose a lot of the magic that was imbued in them by being thrown off a float by a drunk guy with a mask and a giant light-up H on his chest. If that’s not an authentic priest of Hermes I dunno what is.

And heres Falcor with his beads refreshed and a light-up foot firmly attached. And a new light in the front that’s firmly screwed on so it’s a lot harder for random tweakers to steal it when I’m parked in the Quarter.

I guess I should stop procrastinating on exercising now.

A few years ago, I had an encounter. Walking home from the grocery store, I met a friendly orange cat. Outdoors, with a collar, and a tag that said something like “don’t worry I’m an outdoors cat” on one side, and bore a name on the other side:

Wild Dave.

Every time I’d pass there, I’d look to see if Wild Dave was there again. When I’d pass there with my spouse, I’d mention that this is where Wild Dave was and look for him, to no avail. Sometimes I sort of wondered if he was okay since it’d been a while. I think I’ve seen him one other time since then. He kinda became a legend to my spouse. That’s just a name to conjure with, y’know? Not just Dave but Wild Dave. What did this friendly orange boy do to earn this name? Was it just that his human friends recognized that this was a cat who was essentially untamable, whose territory happened to overlap with theirs? Was it an ironic name given to an ultra-domesticated boy? Was there some story in his past that earnt him the “Wild” addition? I’ll probably never know. The mystery sticks in my mind.

Today, my bike’s rear tire went flat while I was at the cafe reading, so I dropped it off at the bike shop a few blocks down, and walked home. My route took me past where Wild Dave lives but I wasn’t looking; I was reading about some open source drama on my phone. Until I heard a polite “mrap” from down by my feet. And there he was. Wild Dave, just casually coming up to me and sharking my feet as if he saw me every day. I bent down to pet him. Then I remembered I was carrying some snacks for the cats who live around our place, and, well, I couldn’t not: I gave Wild Dave some snacks. A car bounced through a pothole a second later and Dave bolted for under a nearby car; when he didn’t come back after a moment I picked up the snacks and looked around, and there he was across the street, in front of the house I suspect he lives in/under/around. So I crossed over and gave him those snacks again, and he rubbed up against my legs, and I petted him.

Rock on, Wild Dave. May your days be long and full of snacks and scritchies.

I dunno, I just kinda like that I am the kind of person who some cats just run up to and say HEY LADY HI, GOT SCRITCHIES, GOT SNACKS?

Late last week, Tugrik died. Complications of Long Covid, so I’m told.

(That wasn’t his legal name. But it’s the name everyone in the furry fandom knew him by. Probably half his workplaces, too.)

Today I dusted off my account on Furrymuck, the social MMO he ran long before “MMO” was an acronym, let alone an abbreviation for “massively multiplayer online role-playing game”. Back then we all called them “muds” (multiple-user dungeons) or “mucks” (multiple-user chat kingdoms) or “mu*s” (multiple-user-whatevers), and they were all done in the style of the text adventure games of the time.

‘t park, d’. That I still remembered. Teleport to the sky above the park that’s the central gathering point there, and go down. Wave at the few people sitting around, connected. Check the bulletin board. Three new messages from K’Has, one of the other admins: the news of his death, with the cause. Directions to his rooms, where his character object would be found, never to be logged into again. And the details of a memorial service to be held on the muck later this week.

Teleport to a destination marked only by a database reference number. Go north a few time, through wide open plains, to a cavern lair. And there he was. Described like he was still alive. Still there. Nobody ever wrote a description of their character sleeping. Nobody ever wrote one of them dead. Well, almost nobody. I know it would have been possible to build a dynamic description that checked whether the player object was currently active, and returned different text when it wasn’t. And I’m sure that’s a thing a few people did here and there. I considered it but never did. And I’m sure someone wrote descriptions of their characters as dead for some bit of roleplay, or personal drama. But Tug did neither of those things. Like the vast majority of users, his description assumed he was there.

And now he’s not there, and will never be there again.

(Honestly he hadn’t been there in a while anyway, the laston command told me it’d been 47 weeks since he last connected. The mu*s are largely in the past for even the people who ran them.)

I sat there trying to remember how to create an object and give it a multiple-line description. I ended up looking through the manuals on Furry’s homepage. Once upon a time I knew this offhand, but that time’s long gone – back around 2012 I decided that I was done spending long nights co-writing horny short stories, a paragraph or four at a time, in turns. You really can’t share that with anyone besides its co-writer, and going back and re-reading them loses a lot of the magic. I wanted to spend my energy on comics instead, and that seemed to work out pretty well overall now that I look back on it.

I dunno if I’d ever been to Tugrik’s lair before. He’d been to mine a few times, there’s a few files in my logs directory with his name on them. But I’ve been there now, and I left

a black rose(#77471)

A hole in the world, shaped like a rose. Now and then its edges crackle with lightning.

Rest in peace, Big Blue. See you in the next world. -Peggy

next to a big blue dragon-horse that will never move again, along with a couple other objects others had left before me.

And now I’m gonna go off and cry for a while.