I tend to do that. A little while will go by and I won’t have done any updates, so I’ll do an update that’s not really about anything, but shoddily attempts to disguise that fact by pretending to be about the “lack of updates”. It’s like the snake that eats itself: Ouroboros. Not a snake–a serpent. And now that reminds me about an update I intended to write that actually was about something. Unlike this one, which isn’t.

It’s Sunday morning. It’s quiet. I can only hear one or two birds outside. I can tell the sky is grey through a small gap in the curtains. Somewhere, somebody is mumbling in that typical morning voice. I can’t tell what he’s saying.

More birds now, stirred into action by the baleful cries of a crow as it swooped over them. I try to drink from my mug of instant coffee, but it’s too hot. It might also be too strong, judging by the smell of it. But then, it is Sunday morning.

No, not too strong. Well, maybe a little strong. But like I said, it’s Sunday morning. I need something to wake me up, something to drag me out of the remnants of Saturday night that cling to me like treacle.

Sunday. The last day of the week, or the first, depending on your perspective. I once steadfastly defended the idea that Sunday was at the start of the week, but now… I’m not so sure.

It seems to make more sense that Sunday is an ending–a punctuation point before each Monday. The end of a sentence that’s never been written before. Until now. Until today.

And then: tomorrow.

I’ve grappled with this this question enough times in the past that an appropriate answer might actually be: “The Shrine of Insanity is a website where I constantly attempt to define what the Shrine of Insanity is about.” And that description is sort of apt, because it conjures in my mind a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors, a never-ending cascade of reflections.

Every reflection is unique, granted its own version of events by the particular character of the reflective surface that you are looking into; whether it’s the polished shop window of a fashionable boutique, a cobwebbed mirror left neglected in a back room, or the reflection of yourself in the polarised sunglasses of a passing stranger from the future.

And so, I guess that’s what the Shrine is about. Not self-reflection, although I do my fair share of that, but a reflection of the universe at large, filtered through me. I’m not sure what good that is to anyone, but it’s the closest thing I can come up with to a conclusive answer.

So, I’m writing the Shrine again. We might not be able to upload our entire consciousness into machines yet, but I’ve always seen this place as sort of a primitive precursor to that idea. If not my physical being, then at least my mind, my thoughts, or at least something of my thoughts–that is to say, those that are appropriate for sharing publically–are recorded here.

These words have power. Reading them is like time travel, or telepathy. I write, you read and in doing so we exchange brain stuff. It is like a merging of minds.

Except that I remain safely on this side of the computer monitor. The far side. Detached and scribbling (or if not scribbling, then at least typing haphazardly enough that every few words looks like thsi).

I create this stuff, these words, this conversation (as one-sided as it may seem, you can always comment) out of the sheer “nothingness” of my own thoughts. But, of course, thoughts aren’t actually “nothing”, despite the fact that we can’t catch them in a jar.

Or can we?

I think maybe I just did.