I've hardly been able to wait to write. Empty house, late at night. Of course I've got the candles lit, the incense burning - What did you think? Memories spinning in the CD-ROM, coming right out of the screen. Warm light, the smells warm, that woman's sweet warm voice. But it's a lonely, cold night. I don't believe that I see this monitor before me. It seems new; yet I can look straight into this sterile white document and interchange the frame from Bluejack's corner windows, to Joan's dining room, to the room in that dank apartment on Summit, and now this room I call mine back at Joan's house.

Balancing the checkbook. Living a simple life now. I don't make much money, can't buy many things. I don't have many bills. I occupy one room. I am starting to accumulate more clutter, though. It's disturbing me some as I try to find places for tucking away. I like the simplicity, but I wonder how long I can maintain it. I don't want to live so poorly for very much longer. I want a new car. A printer. I would like to take a whole stack of clothing to the dry cleaner. Somewhere I have an entire household full of furniture. I will leave this Saturday to meet it and rearrange it in its new home. I will not live there.

Is it just me or is time flying? (A trite thought.) How much has not changed in this last year? In the last three years? I brought out the journal I began when we first arrived in Korea. I'm reading a wiser self, one who foretold the future with fearful anxiety. (Is that why I eventually came to feel like I was dying?) There is stability at the bottom of the prophesized hole. Been sitting here on the floor of it for years now, at my little desk, staring into a monitor.

I've reread things I've written here over the last year and half. What I've noticed is a repetitive theme of "hitting bottom". I don't feel depressed all the time, just when I let myself take a look upward at the long climb out of here. Otherwise, I'd think you'd say I'm quite pleasant; maybe you'd even envy the way I'm living now. Some have said that they do; some have said that I've been accomplishing and acquiring amazing things since I moved to Korea, and since my return. That is all true, but it's not the whole story. It's not.

How can I write here what I will barely admit to myself? I can't. I don't want you to know that dark place. You will (still) have to make do with the colorful prose and endless descriptions of mountains and driving.

Haven't I said this before? There I am, skipping perpetually into the same groove.

Time is flying. Hope you're not missing any opportunities.