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January 22nd 2004 in the wee hours
Well…that was a nice break. It seems as if a lot should have happened since I last posted. I suspect it did, though I don’t much remember it. A few things I remember, of course, but enough to account for more than a day or two. I take that back, I spent a week in Orlando in October, right after that last post. I finally saw Epcot; le faux Tour Eiffel was missing from la faux France but the other ten countries seemed intact. Yes, and I lugged the famed Joyce Biography by Richard Ellman all the way down there to finish less than thirty pages, which sent me into a subsequent Beckett frenzy when I read he almost died after being stabbed by a pimp in Paris. See, Beckett was a friend of Joyce and and helped him out with the preparation of Finnegans Wake. I remembered the Beckett/Joyce connection from some time ago, but the biography served to remind me. Coincidently, some time during that Beckett frenzy a brochure arrived from a local theatre advertising that their coming line-up will include “Waiting for Godot”. That seemed rather strange as I recall. In the time than spanned October and the holidays, I wrote two essays of self definition. In hindsight it doesn’t seem to have been nearly as hard as it actually was. I also raked together all the various things I have done in the past 4 years and looked at them. They made me remember I turn thirty this year. I burned them to CD and sent them to people I have never met, just to see what they might say. None of them said a thing. Oh, I also intended to read Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics during that period but never did. I carried the book, which is pleasantly compact, for a couple of weeks and read the introduction at least three times, but never actually read past that. I probably should have read it while I was sitting on the couch at home, but the cover art reminded me of my copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or which is not as compact, so I read random pages from it instead. That all doesn’t seem as important now as it did at the time. It’s hard to remember past the holidays, which were notable. I spent my first Christmas away from home in Wilmington, North Carolina. My Grandmother tells a great story about Wilmington; she left there wishing never to return and found herself moving there within the next two weeks by her own choosing. Actually now that I think about it, she and I went for similar reasons I guess. Anyway, after Christmas, I wrote two more essays of self definition and sent them to people I do not know and again there was no reply. I also stopped to remember when I had more energy and wondered where it all went. I think I have that one figured out. In some ways that’s what prompted the multiple essays, though they were long over due either way. I also created a new design for this site, though I still haven’t finished it. I think I will shoot for getting it up by February 12th. That seems like as good a day as any. I had considered February 2nd, since it lacks that one pesky odd number, but I may write another essay instead. I actually remember more than I thought I did about the past few months. I remember why I like plain white t-shirts, for instance and why Rimbaud disappeared into the African desert at the age of 21. I remember how much I love chance and coincidence, even when it amounts to nothing at all. I also remember the thousand things to ignore and the ten things to appreciate, even if one of those ten amounts to no more than a turtle. So, that’s pretty much it, a few months of my life passing without comment just months before my thirtieth birthday. Make of it what you will, I will probably remember it differently.

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#1
Amy
I seem to recall that a few months before my thirtieth birthday, I wrote you a letter about how stressful it is to turn thirty. I had just found these words on this website: Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it,...

It has since struck me that that is a rather useful skill.
#2
kellegous
ah, the moviegoer, bitter old bourbon drinking walker percy, yes, i must go read that again.

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about kellegous.com

kellegous.com is the personal site of kelly norton, a designer and engineer living in Atlanta, Georgia. Kelly used to be a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab but graduated in the summer of 2006. Before that, he was the Senior VP of Technology Development for Connexxia, a small technology company in Atlanta. He now works as a Software Engineer for Google. (more…)

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