Before Sojourn

A few hours later, a sojourn will commence by me and NFS.

To them it would be a trip being expected for long. To me, it strikes a new start in my life, at least, of the past year or two.

A start that will force me to look back, hard and seriously, at my doings in both familial and career life till now.

The road, as I am clear, will be long and arduous. Yet it is a road I have to tread as long as that day of no return has not yet occupied all my circumspection. Though the road to be trod will be done by myself alone, I know I'm not so alone as to have my NFS always at my back.

A new start means nothing clear to me at this moment can be looked upon or ahead of. Back to the ground zero. Going back, or being thrown back, to that ground, however, will be in hope of help me zero in on the meaning and doing of my living. Yes, despite my secret long belief in the meaninglessness of being human.

Evolving

My first attempt of playing with Linux was almost two decades ago. Back then, hard disk storage was 40MB at maximum. It was the time of Win 3.1 or its predecessors. The non-GUI installation interface of Linux was painstakingly geeky. My CRT monitor almost blew up my face due to the integer value wrongly input in the installation. The non-intuitive interface built a steep threshold stepping over which requires the user of solid perceptiveness in almost every way–hardware, kernel, shell, and file systems. The impression left of this first attempt? Almost got killed by an OS. Cool!

After around one decade and a half, the second attempt ensued. It’s a time when Red Hat was not Fedora. By dint of the hardware advancement and better GUI interface with intuitive package integration and management, the threshold was seriously lowered to such an extent that Linux’s solid and secure file structure and its powerful and versatile server build finally lent me access. Interestingly, the more one gets used to the OS, the less dependable on the GUI one becomes. Yet Linux’s multimedia support at this time was still poor, causing much pain to general users. It’s server administrators’ heaven, yet desktop users’ nightmare. Still geeky, lacking the intimacy a general user may find in the Win-doz.

Then a few days ago I had my old notebook installed with the new Debian-based Ubuntu. Pretty amazed at the overall performance. Not only does it boot faster, but the interface is more eye-catching, and its media de-coding almost jaw-dropping. Now it even supports plug’n'play. It’s hard to imagine how much the open source community has worked to get Linux evolved during the years I had no knowledge of.

My old notebook now has its second birth. Faster in running, more solid in structure , more efficient in operating, yet smaller in the OS storage size.

Very proud of being myself back, so many years after, to an old friend.

Bliss & Blood

Summer night. With three typhoons approaching simultaneously. Sleeping on the floor together with N, F, S. Me & NFS. A network system, binding us all here together. This is blood. And this is bliss, watching each of them has their own sleep. Sound and sweet. Yet altogether different. Yet all here together. In this night when typhoons are approaching, when the floor warms by blood.

Tomorrow going to have the fish tank water refreshed and refilled. Too noisy the pumped water is.

Body Deteriorating

“to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.”
~~ Socrates, his Apology.

Body seems to keep deteriorating. Chest sometimes gets so tight that breathing would become an ordeal. Don't know if one can be like Socrates, accepting the coming death happily and peacefully. Or to dispel the fear for an untimely death so easily as he did.

If eternity is night, then the night that suffers insomnia is still haunted by the loss-ness of living. Not losing life, but the living itself always as loss, as continuous losing and lostness.

At that night where eternity should have for one claimed respite, the body being remembered pushes away the peaceful darkness. Yet the body in its deterioration also brings back the faint yet somewhat horrible memory of that night in which awakenings in to the loose-ness of living will never be possible.

Two-foldedness of bodily remembrance.

Zero Count

Everything comes back to where all should restart. How can one have no solicitude for the future, or better, for time itself?

Though time should be passivity, or patience, in waiting for that which one would never lay fast hold of, this understanding cannot dispel the solicitude at present, a present in wilderness with nothing to look ahead of or back at, any more than accrue courage to confront the unknown that is one's equally uncertain fate.

Crying, want to be. Crying. Crying for that nothing in front of which one can shiver only. Tears as a token foreboding a year of throat-slitting test. A token betokens of a year of darkness.

If only tears can be shed.