slimwhitem said:

I tell you what, I'm really digging the new site. Doing some site design myself has made me appreciate the level of effort that went into this.

Just wanted to stop and say thank you all (except bk) very much for all the work you've put into this place

(except bk)

Heferito said:

It's also wild that this is the third iteration of this site that I've signed up for.

Good Friends, wherever Providence has set you,

I take pen in hand this late winter evening to set down a few lines, trusting that by some mercy of wind, water, or wandering soul, they may yet find you. Though once we conversed with great swiftness upon the glowing ether called the Internet, that marvel has now quite failed us, having gone dark in the Year of Our Lord 2026, and no man hereabouts has coaxed it back to life.

I write to you from the wild parts of Maine, where my days are plain and honest, and measured more by light and weather than by clocks. The mornings arrive with a sharp cold and the sound of moose moving slow through the trees, as solemn as ministers. At dusk the wolves make their councils known, their voices carrying across the snow like खबर of distant nations. They keep their own order, and we keep ours, and thus far there has been peace between us.

Our life is simple now. We split wood, draw water, mend what breaks, and waste little breath on what cannot be mended. News comes slowly, if at all, and rumor slower still. Without the Internet’s endless chatter, the mind grows quieter, though at first it aches for the noise, like an ear long used to bells. Yet I find myself remembering faces more clearly, and listening better to those before me.

I wonder often how you fare. I imagine you where last I saw you—frozen in memory like insects in amber—yet surely you have moved on, learned new skills, taken new names, or made homes in places I have never seen. If this letter reaches you, know that you are thought of kindly, and that friendship, once made, does not perish merely because the wires have gone dead.

Should the world knit itself together again, and the great net be cast anew, perhaps we shall speak once more without ink or courier. Until then, I remain

Your affectionate friend and humble servant,
from the Eastern Woods

My Dear LadyA

I fear we have shipped up – a close shave.
I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day
I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve with you.

I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job. It was the younger men that went under first.

Finally I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them. After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.


Good-bye and good-bye to dear LordA

Yours ever

jpkeates

Excuse writing – it is -40, and has been for nigh a month

My Dearest JP.,

I went forth today not to scale some Alpine sorrow nor to wrrestle with the ghosts of love long dead, but to the supermarket—temple of the mundane, where mortals barter coin for bread and think themselves content.

Yet even there, beneath the tyrannous glow of fluorescent suns, I felt the old unrest stir. The sliding doors yawned open like fate itself, admitting me to aisles interminable, where hope is shelved beside despair and both are priced with cruel precision. I took up a basket (light at first, like youthful ambition) and wandered, soon weighed down by cheeses I did not need and fruits already whispering of decay.

Ah! The produce section—Eden, if Eden had barcodes. Apples blushed with an innocence long rehearsed; bananas lay in tragic clusters, already bruised by time and careless hands. I lingered there, reflecting how swiftly ripeness turns to ruin, and how no discount can redeem what has passed its hour.

In the frozen aisle I felt the chill of eternity. Peas entombed in crystal, pizzas promised joy they could never fulfill—how like our passions, preserved in memory yet tasteless when reheated. A child weppt nearby for reasons as profound as any philosopher’s, while his parent negotiated peace with a box of sugared cereal.

At last, I queued—ah, the final trial. Before me stood a man with coupons, behind me one with impatience. We were equals there, bound by the slow arithmetic of the cashier and the judgment of the beeping machine. When it was done, my purse lighter and my spirit oddly so, I emerged into the parking lot’s gray expanse, victorious yet unconsoled.

Thus ended my errand: no epic sung, no heart irrevocably broken—only dinner secured, and another proof that even in the most prosaic of journeys, the soul insists on feeling too much.

Yours,
in exile among shopping carts and receipts

L Q said:

She was that chick who was gathering the money for the calendar. She never completed it and kept the money. Ody vouched for her I believe putting the money up for it, and zoomchick completed it.

Redboxer said:

She married geodave.

Nik was DrNik on here and I've lost touch with him.

L Q said:

She was that chick who was gathering the money for the calendar. She never completed it and kept the money. Ody vouched for her I believe putting the money up for it, and zoomchick completed it.

I suck. :-[

idsaluteyoubub said:

Uh, hi?