Blather, Monday edition

Alone in the office, after hours; sun's still up but the day is drawing to a close. It has somehow devolved to me to be the office dishwasher (except Fridays, when the cleaning lady comes), presumably because I am the least afraid of water and the most annoyed by dirty dishes. I wish that someone else might gather the courage and the wit to wash up once in a while, but I don't actually mind doing it and I do enjoy being alone in the office in these bright evenings.

<rant> for a friend who will never read this: Peel the bragging-labels off your damned glassware, already. It doesn't impress anyone, it just looks really tacky and nouveau-gormless. If the glasses are pretty, then we will admire them no matter how cheap they were, but if they are ugly, then our scorn will only be increased by knowing how much you paid for them.</rant>

Walking home the other day, I discovered a positive proof that time travel will be possible (and actually used) in the future: I found a door where there had never been one before. I have walked past a particular blank stone wall every other day for the last fifteen years, and until then it had always been blank. Now, there is a door in it. The door is clearly very old: the stonework is weathered and crumbling, the paint is chipping, the wood is shrinking with age. Nonetheless, regardless of how old the door may be in world-time, in the personal time of my memories I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that it is new. Somebody travelled back in time and had the builders put that door in, for reasons that I cannot know.

This is what the results of time travel look like: Something changes around us, in a way that is both new to us and much older in the world. We presume that it must have always been there, chuckle over our presumed obtuseness and say "Oh, how can I have not seen that every other day for fifteen years?" But that's not true, we were aware and observant. It was not there yesterday, though today it has has been there for decades.

We are surrounded by time-travellers, meddling in the past in ways that seem trivial to us, although to them the reward of getting this doorway put in clearly outweighs the expense and bother of finding and persuading the stonemason. Perhaps it will be used by somebody's yet-unborn grandmother to escape from a future fire?

That'll have to do for now, my dearies. I am still alive and mostly well, I hope you are too. There is another post in the works, the second in the occasional series of What Second Life Is Really About; it'll be up sometime this week.