Milestones are an important thing to look at when you pass them. After all, you’d have to see how far you’ve come to appreciate where you are. Milepost 100 isn’t as easy as milepost 1, but it means a lot more.
So begins my life, 5 years ago today, when I had what was left of my California friends over to my house and had a doomsday party, to join the superstitious in heralding the apocalypse as ‘predicted’ on 12/21/2012. I guess those numbers had put people into a tizzy. Or the great calendar-makers of the Mayans just didn’t have any more fucking stone left to chip days into. I’d get tired after marking down 2,000 years, too.
The joke is that the world as I knew it ended on that day. Or, at least it began to.
Three years ago was Eleanor. Even distance like that is crazy to think. A thousand days separate me and him, the one who dug his own grave the eve of the eve of Christmas. That’s a story for another time.
Anyways, it’s a big day. That straight V cutting from the then to now.
In line with a lot of big days, those milestones, nothing of note to surpass happens on anniversaries. At least not yet. There are still symbols I have to reclaim for myself from the past five years, and one of those is still Mount Si. You heard that right, I still have yet to take that summit as my own. The most recent party of friends I was going to go with disbanded at 11 PM the night before we were meant to be off. Oh well. Gonna have to shelve that one for another 4 months again.
Milestones nonetheless.
So I’ve been reading lately. I’ve been reading something that is incredibly precise, intellectually challenging, and cacophonoustically meta. Yeah, that’s right, I combined suffixes to make a new word to describe this beauty.
The book I’ve been enthralled by is House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.
I’m roughly 60ish pages in and I am finding it fucking immense.
I’ve been meaning to get to reading again since I finished Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad way back in February. House of Leaves is the first book I’ve picked up that isn’t poetry, and to get into it properly I put on some Kauf, made some tea, and kicked on the fireplace to get going. I’m going to make it a regular practice to read a chapter of it a day, and so far I’m more than on track, given how dense it is. Definitely check it out if you’re into something that’ll really make your head hurt. It’s worth every page it’s printed on.
Also finished Skyrim’s main quests. Civil War, Dawnguard, Dragonborn, all that stuff. I actually found myself really enjoying the hell out of Dragonborn, not in small part thanks to the Lovecraftian mythos influence. Aw yeah.
Speaking of heads hurting, I need to complete Christmas shopping tomorrow and I am not looking forward to joining the throngs of consumerism out and about. There are only so many people that appreciate poetry as gifts, and my family isn’t going to accept them for Christmas for long. It’s a sort of unspoken etiquette in gift giving that you don’t overstay your welcome, but you also don’t spend too much money. So you’re in a weird limbo where you can only spend so much on a person/household to get them something they might like, and won’t totally be secretly disheartened that they opened in front of everybody. So that’s good.
I should be off. 5 years past doomsday and here I am worried about Christmas gifts. Milestones.
Consume reality! Radio Reality City! Thanks for reading!
Consume Reality! 
I loved House of Leaves. I wore out my copy reading it over and over and I haven’t done that since I was a kid.
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