2023-01-11

homepage/blah/index.html

@@ -16,6 +16,60 @@ ideas' witlessness;
 ideas' witnesses;
 ideas-
 
+2023-01-11
+
+	"Sounds like a pretty one-sided relationship."
+	"Well, yeah." Ada Karina had finished her brief account of a story that
+spanned decades.
+	"Forty five the first time... back twenty three years from that... then
+how old?"
+	"Oh, I uh- thirty. Even, I think."
+	"Eight years. So fifty three. Then you were thirty five, another
+thirteen. That's sixty six years?"
+	"I guess." Ada checked her watch.
+	"You're twenty three now. That makes you eighty nine."
+	"I guess."
+	Howard tapped his fingers on the recliner. A church bell rang in the
+distance; noon. The cafe would close in an hour. He thought to himself. "Older
+than me."
+	"Not physically. Mentally I feel like my brain's on fire. Probably I
+won't last much longer up in my head. But it helps a lot that I'm twenty three
+by all observable quantities. And really it's more like I was trapped in
+a simulation three times rather than that I actually time travelled."
+	"How was it?"
+	"How was what?"
+	"You spent- eighty nine, twenty three - sixty six years working towards
+a relationship. I mean, no matter how good Cassidy is, is it worth it to go
+that long?"
+	Ada thought for a moment. "For a smile? For a hug? Of course. and it
+kills me that it's gone." She laughed. "Yeah. It just kills me." Ada turned her
+head to look outside at the table at which she met Cassidy the second, third,
+and fourth times.
+	Howard Polk had been the owner of the cafe for the previous two years.
+He wondered if he'd be alive for the holocaust, if Ada couldn't prevent it. He
+looked at his knuckles resting on the worn cotton armrest. The burns he got as
+a cook at someone else's establishment decades past never healed, not on his
+knuckles and not on his neck. "I lost someone too, once. The last person I
+cared about. Actually cared about."
+	"May I ask who?"
+	Howard snorted. "Yes you may. The co-owner. Margeret."
+	"Margeret."
+	"Best damn cook I knew. Taught me everything I know. Everything."
+	"What happened?"
+	Howard scratched the recliner fabric and felt the texture. "We went our
+separate ways, or rather, she went her separate way, getting bored of the
+business or the routine or something. I texted, called, messaged back when
+instant messaging was still new. And she sent me a message saying it wasn't my
+fault that she didn't answer and that she was going through a rough patch."
+	Ada turned back to Howard. "What happened?"
+	"She washed up on the shore of the Nile."
+	"Fuck."
+	"I still prefer it to what you said. Even if I don't quite believe it."
+	A timer went off in the kitchen area behind the counter in front of
+which Howard's recliner sat. Ada watched the cook bend down out of sight and
+return to view with a pan of bacon. "I wouldn't believe it either."
+
+
 2023-01-09
 
 	1000 lines since the last Ted story?
@@ -1722,7 +1776,7 @@ worked. I read digests of all active projects in the laboratory and took note
 of one of the room numbers. I loaded both an old program I wrote and a current
 program being developed at NDC onto my wristwatch, opened the door, and ran. The
 other captives ran too, to a different wing of the building in a greater number.
-	Cassidy and I found her dog dead in her apartment two weeks afteer we
+	Cassidy and I found her dog dead in her apartment two weeks after we
 met for the first time in my third twenty-second year. Brick was shot with a
 rifle. The police came but didn't find the round and the killer left no other
 trace. I asked the neighbor across the hall and he said he didn't hear Brick