It seemed quite natural to state that everything I write after an arbitrary point in time should have your fingerprints on it; that from now I put together strings of letters that have you as their engine. That now is akin to a magical invocation, a discontinuity. Any passing stranger should be able to note as much. In the former, we are aware of the stammering inability to describe in a comprehensible way thought processes and events. With a shake of a head and a dismissive click of the mouth we can reject what has gone before as the rantings of a bloody amateur. Ah, in hindsight it's so easy to criticise the lack of a thesis! Whoever the anonymous blogger is, the one who describes himself as the fusion of man and weblog, deserves to be castigated for a lack of scope and the inevitable jump from idea to idea to idea without ever pinning down even one of them. At Christmas 2008, something happened to synthesise the disparate voices of this author, or to dampen down all but one of them. Like tuning the static and the unwanted banter of disc jockeys and news programmes out of a desired radio broadcast, there was not unity but a singularity which had been promised, but unforthcoming, for years. Details of the event that cancelled the separated-out murmurs and brought clarity and purpose are not easy to come by. Some accounts suggest it was a woman with the initial L; some suggest the marking of someone's birthday; some both or neither. It led, though, to a period of creativity which defined the symbiotic relationship between blogger and blog - and, ironically, led to his uprooting from the blogosphere and into mainstream writing. Romantics will invariably accept the line that a woman - and only a woman - was able to claim responsibility for the surge in directed, coherent output. Such a female, her identity only ever guessed at but not recorded in a way which might lead to her presenting a world which has its breath held with her story, has been one of the classic vehicles of literary history, carrying a multitude of men forward upon the simulacrum of her smile or her voice. Her lack of a name, her lack of an image and a background means that any and all writers can project their own vision of her; there exists within her at once the infinity of the creative devastation she inspires and the emptiness of the idea that nothing which can ever be produced by a mortal can anywhere near match what has already been churned out by the random calculations and brute force of natural selection. It had been asserted in his earlier writings that the fusion of man and weblog had long eschewed the idea of a religious divinity. Imagine, then, his isolation when he was forced to conclude that his muse was the consequence of no more than a bag of genes being shaken up and drawn into the tactile world, and this combination shall henceforth be known as L. Such is the dilemma of every agnostic - why should there exist great beauty, great hope and the inevitable destruction or re-evaluation of values caused by such great beauty and great hope ex nihilo? On your birthday, the universe temporarily ceases to spit out the numbers which are the result of its calculations, and turns its face of close to absolute zero upon itself to briefly contemplate the troubles of the little humans who arrived out of the blue on one of the average planets in a region lablled the Solar System. For those weary, slight beings, the innocuous glance of a woman from the long-dead moment of a photograph is enough to cause them to suspend everything bar the lonely pursuit of the slightly drunken face that pushes itself into view during sleep, during the half-alive moments which signal the end of sleep, and during waking hours.
