As a small tribute, my readers here on Xanga for the past week are vicariously celebrated in the story below. The story and the characters involved change on every reload. I think I'll just reload for awhile, cut and paste a few lines, and come up with a new poem (Okay, so that's how I generate all my poetry--now you know).

Anyway, if you don't see the story above, you're probably either not using Internet Explorer or are a behind a blocking firewall. Under such dire circumstances, you can still click here to read the story.

What a strangeness always the world brings when you open yourself up to it vastly.  No room for routine as each succeeding surprise washes upon you like a tingling ocean wave.  One learns how foolish mundane *expectations* can be.  One learns to live like a tourist in a potentially predatory universe… 

To live like a tourist in a potentially predatorial universe seems to me to be not simply a valuable strategy, but an indispensable one. Conversant tourism predisposes one to engagement with a probing awareness, to sensitized discernment, and to activity without habituated involvement.  Precisely: take in everything possible with heightened perception while never settling into a pre-fabricated template—a habit. For it is the nature of habits to inhibit conscious awareness for the sake of optimizing an efficiency in performance of some well-rehearsed structured task ("good" and "bad" habits are the same in this respect). But in a universe which can be changeable and predatorial, yet the structure of which is otherwise largely unknown, habits—either good or bad—may turn into fatal assets without warning.

Stay strong, stay well, and be blessed—all.