Today I ran into Helen Anderson, who I haven't seen in a clear decade, not since shortly after she was jumping out my window for Fate of Dietrich, and who looked almost exactly the same as she did in high school. (I have since widened.) It was faintly startling just to see her and catch up with her, and afterwards I sat in a big chair staring out a window and thought about my life. I had one of those moments where your life exists completely outside of time... like standing on the top of a hill, below which all of the people you have ever met are scattered about a wide plain as the sun sets. You have infinite vision from that hill, and you can pick and choose people and places and moments from your whole life with equal clarity and dispassion, because they're all just on that plain, and no one thing is more or less important or recent or significant than any other one thing. And I suppose what startled me the most was the unbelievable transience of everything I've ever had. There is surprisingly little permanence in my life; even the people or things that have been here the whole time have ebbed and flowed in importance over the course of my scant three decades. And my super-spec hill vision also let me notice that I've been seeking the opposite of that impermanence since I was at least seven years old. There's something to be said for something that really lasts, something whose development gets to be measured in eons rather than nanoseconds. I stand on my hill and look for glaciers.

After the coffee-shop mindwalk I went where the free food brung me, in this case the Reel Asian programme launch party with Co-Podcaster Man, where I ran into Roberto for the second time in a week and was too chicken to talk to Anita and had just about the three best pieces of sushi I've had in at least three years, all gloriously free. Later had a young lady volunteer her beautiful ass to me on the subway, yet I came home feeling surprisingly flattened and watched Revenge of the Sith commentary till I just couldn't do it no more. Maybe my two city-encircling bike rides in as many days have completely discharged my batteries, or maybe daylight savings wrote a cheque that my body can't currently cash, but right now I feel like slipping into a coma and sleeping till doomsday. Or at least Saturday morning.

Michael Piller died yesterday, and that is extremely sad.