Twenty-five years ago today, the big news was a floor plan. A new apartment in Hamden, Connecticut, move-in date on the 12th, very exciting stuff. You can almost feel the anticipation radiating off that brief, hopeful post. New address, virtual tour link, the whole deal. Life was about logistics.
A year later, May 31st got a little more complicated. There was riding, there was catching up from the weekend, and there was a workplace grievance about mandatory opt-out donation envelopes that honestly still holds up as a legitimate complaint. Two posts, two very different energies: one about miles, one about the particular injustice of being voluntold to care.
Jump to 2012 and things get genuinely strange. Brain-machine interfaces, virtual-people theories, a character named Carrie extracted from a simulation, bots infiltrating intermingled suspicious theories... it is a lot. Part three of Discrepancy reads like someone fed a philosophy dissertation and a mountain bike race into the same dream. The 300-mile, 24-hour race in Spokane makes a cameo, which somehow feels right.
Then things settle back into the physical world. Little Belt Mountains, empty trails, real solitude. Desert light and cholla cactus in a gallery from Virgin, Utah. And a winter adventure at Fort Stevens rounding out the record.
May 31st, it turns out, has always been a day of motion, whether it was packing boxes, logging miles, escaping simulations, or just pointing toward the next open piece of country.