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You know, tumblr is still kind of good, actually. I suppose if you consider what became of twitter, the bar is quite low, but it's too bad that long form blogging started to be seen as "passé" at some point in the not too distant past.

I vaguely remember when the format was still quite relevant. I had one when I was in college. It was a WordPress site. It started as a free one, the sort that was hosted on the WP servers, but I eventually got all weird and entrepreneurial, what with trying to start up a literary magazine from scratch and so on, so I discovered how web hosting worked, and learned web design, and eventually had my own custom Wordpress installation hosted on a shared server.

I honestly kept that same host for two decades, which makes me feel sad and old. I've been running out of money, and possibly time, and I didn't renew the subscription this month. I just couldn't. My custom email address, the email address I'd been using for those same two decades, is dead now, but it occurred to me that I never got emails I was genuinely interested in anymore. It was just there for password retrieval, spam, and random notifications from various corporate entities. I don't mourn my websites and such, but it's obviously a problem to have the email down for too long. So I caved ... though I didn't renew the same host. I started paying them 8 bucks a month way back when, and I didn't even notice how it gradually became over 20. I shopped around, and found something that was 12 bucks for the YEAR. Now, that's only the first year, but I don't give a fuck, a deal's a deal. That's a huge saving. Anyway, the problem is that my domain names are hosted elsewhere, and I forgot the password ... and the email the domain registrar has on file to sent reset links and such is the DEAD email address. So fuck me, I guess. I've reached out to them and sent them my ID and all that garbage, so hopefully their "ownership" department can sort this little Catch-22 out eventually...Serves me right. But I digress. Nobody read the blog I used to publish back in college, of course. Same as this one. What in this case is largely by design, back then was a source of anxiety for me. Harper and I are both artists, or were. And I began to realize just how much our civilization despises artists fairly early on. It only tolerates us when we generate capital, specifically for the benefit of non-artists. So at the time, I was quite afraid of what obscurity and failure would do to me. Rightly so, of course. It did everything I was afraid of, and so much more. I remember coming down to the front desk to consult with an acquaintance who was working the night shift there, picking her brain about all the blog stuff, how to actually build an audience and so on. She gave me all sorts of advice, bless her, but I just couldn't properly understand or apply it. Something about tecnorati, and some other website that was kind of like reddit but not quite, and aggregators, and maybe actual reddit? I was asking her specifically because she had a semi "successful" blog at the time. I can't remember what it was about. Something to do with nature, maybe? Hiking? Fishing? I don't know.

Come to think of it, I can't remember what mine was about either ... Which is only striking me as a bit odd. It was probably garbage, to be fair. I am sure that's the reason. It couldn't have been much good if even its actual author can't recall. If I had to guess, it was basically just like this ... a lot of ramblings and digressions, except now there's at least a nominal "focus" ... kind of.

I probably haven't changed or grown all that much ... For much of your life, you look back on your younger self, and you often think "wow, I was one silly and goofy piece of jello back then, and I am so glad I grew out of that phase." At some point that seems to have changed for me. I begin to realize that the old me was never a terrible person by any stretch, even if I was a bit cringe and made mistakes and all that, but I felt like a terrible person, all the damn time, especially when I was depressed. And I still feel exactly the same way now, like a terrible person. Except I can tell the old me wasn't that. They were just naive and innocent and still had hope.

Depression is one hell of a killer, you know. Over the past few decades, people seem to have made it out to be the "acceptable" mental illness, or a "universal" one. Depression and anxiety are used as the butt of self deprecating jokes by people who don't actually understand what they are. PTSD is another one. People think that watching a scary movie or weird commercial qualifies as "childhood trauma." Oh, honey, that's sweet. That's precious. I've got OCD too ... people still think it means you're meticulous or like a clean room or some shit. The reality is so much worse. The constant intrusive thoughts. INTRUSIVE thoughts, not impulsive ones. It's not a compulsion to say or do something goofy for your friends to laugh at. It's vivid images of people you love being slowly tortured and cut open by indistinct perpetrators, so violent and horrid that you WINCE, at least once an hour, its detailed worst case scenarios, atomic bombs, home invasions, gruesome accidents, running through your head multiple times a day, so immersive that you have to shake and shake and shake till you can push it loose. I've got all the good "acceptable" ones. The so called "treatable" ones. The ones it's supposedly okay to talk about, except it really, really isn't. It really, really isn't. Harper had 'em too. Harper was the only friend I had who actually got it. The rest have gone away. I am left in the underworld all alone. Fuck em.

Depression is one hell of a killer. Real trauma is one hell of a killer. There is no healing. I know that now. No recovery. There are occasional remissions and relapses, and then there's death. Fuck, what was I talking about. Eh. Clearly, I am not well.

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I'm dying too ...

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Fuck, I dunno, have a map photo, I guess.

I can't tell if this is supposed to be fiction or one of Harper's sideways realities. What's the difference, though? What's ACTUALLY the difference?

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Brain switched off for a while. Been playing the Persona 3 remake all night every night, but now I am just kind of ... over it? Yesterday I was super invested. Funny how these things go. It's like someone swapped out my brain for someone else's overnight, and just dumped all the memories from the old one into the new one, without accounting for everything else that makes me who I am. Or maybe it's clinical depression and anhedonia.

Same thing, really, when you get right down to it. I haven't felt like cataloguing shit, which makes me a very poor archivist and possibly a bad friend.

I am pretty sure Harper understands, or rather would understand, where I'm coming from, considering.

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And now, you are alone And none of this matters At all

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Harper's Maps (First Installment) Alright, I suppose it's time we get to the interesting bit. Or maybe it's not that interesting. I don't know anymore. When I first started sorting, I was so excited about all these maps, and especially the Metatron and Sidereal maps, as I've come to call them, but, you know ... when it comes right down to it, one cannot mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself, or what have you. One has to try and stay grounded. I am not looking at real places from a great height, even if sometimes it feels that way.

So yeah, here's the thing, Harper would have these dreams, right, but they weren't like regular dreams. I mentioned it before, I am pretty sure. They were more like ... reality shifts. Harper didn't do it on purpose, and they didn't go into their favorite anime or some shitty transphobic woman's wizard books. To hear them describe it, these ... experiences were completely immersive, persistent, and lacking in the usual fuzzy incongruity that characterized normal dreams, and, for that matter, the average lucid dream (of which I've had my own share). They were internally consistent, stable, and bound by a relatively recognizable logic and causation. I didn't get much sleep last night, and I feel like this particular topic deserves a fresher, better, smarter version of me, but I felt like I should at least put something down and start digging in, because otherwise another year or two will pass, and I still won't feel ready or worthy. So, sorry for the fragmentary explanations.

Basically, the following seemed to be true, or, at least, true from Harper's own perspective, experientially:

These dreams, or shifts, were subject to extreme time dilation. This is a pretty standard trope, and is also true, perceptually, of most dreams (you ever hit the snooze button, close your eyes, have all kinds of horrors or adventures befall you, only to find that you've only been dozing for a minute?). What made this unusual was the aforementioned clarity and stability. Most excursions lasted subjective weeks at least, some lasted months. There were hints of some that lasted years. Occasionally, they were shorter, a few days or even a few hours, but those were apparently the exceptions. Harper had no control over when they would end ... from their perspective, trying to "wake up" and get back to "normal" was about as easy as buying a ticket to Narnia at your local Greyhound station. And the time passed realistically ... five minutes felt like five minutes and a month felt like a month. There were no skips or cuts or sudden interruptions.

Harper was not Harper. They would step into the shoes of an established person. Often the same person across multiple shifts. It sounded a bit like a Quantum Leap type situation, except for the following bullet point.

Harper's consciousness and the other person's consciousness would merge and intermingle such that they could resume either track almost seamlessly. Almost, because there was apparently a variable period of adjustment and disorientation on both "sides" of the exchange. I have been witness to this myself once or twice. In any case, this was a bit of a "butterfly dream" type situation. Was Harper dreaming that they were X, or was X dreaming that they were Harper. Or both.

Specialized knowledge did transfer, to an extent. Supposedly, Harper learned to speak a dialect of Russian quite well after their first sojourn into one of their more common alter egos, or whatever you'd call them. Here's the thing, it is true that, at some point, Harper suddenly became fluent (give or take) in Russian seemingly overnight ... I obviously thought that they were fucking with me at first. We went to a Russian-born mutual acquaintance of ours for arbitration, and they confirmed that Harper did, in fact, pass the muster. It was fun to believe that this really did come from an alternate reality, though on my more rational days I just figured that Harper either learned it a long time ago and kept it in the back pocket for just such a prank, or learned it specifically for the prank, on Duolingo and whatever. Harper was smart, brilliant even. They could have done it, I suppose. According to our Russian judge, their pronunciation, diction, grammar, and fluency were at nearly native levels. Supposedly, they even recognized and used idiomatic phrases correctly and effortlessly. But it's not like I would know, and that "nearly" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. So I guess the language thing doesn't really prove anything. But, if we are to suspend disbelief for a moment and just take Harper at their word, then yeah, if Harper knew how to do something, their other self would be able to do it to, with minor loss in efficacy, and vice versa.

As implied above, they would shift, or leap, or what have you, into several different individuals, but not every excursion was different. They would often shift into the same few regulars many times over.

While some of their alternative lives appear quite exotic or fantastical from our point of view, they did all seem tethered to some version of our earth. At the very least, many of them were provably alternate earths, with only a few instances being unclear.

We've already established that a short span of time here was a long span of time there. It gets a bit weirder, though, because the reverse could also apply ... the only way they ever got back to being Harper was by falling asleep or losing consciousness on the other side. And if they returned to the other life a few months or years or days later, they would generally resume where they left off. Yes, in case you are wondering, there were some inception style instances as well wherein they'd go to sleep as Harper, become someone else, then go to sleep as someone else, and become a third person, then wake up as either the second person or Harper, or maybe even a fourth person ... it got weird.

Yes, all of this would suggest that Harper could live for a very long time, perceptually, without one or more of their nested Matryoshka selves aging more than a few hours. Harper apparently did a rough accounting of this (allegedly, not every reality had sophisticated time keeping available, but it was close enough for government work) and came up with a pretty terrifying number ... I think they could see on my face that, as game as I was to pursue just about any line of thinking in the theoretical, especially if it was fun, I didn't really believe them ... I kind of wish I at least made a bigger effort to pretend to, because I still remember how they laughed it off and changed the subject while turning away to try and hide the tears welling up. (At the time, the number was somewhere in the late 400s ... so, almost half a millennium of subjective, experiential time).

There is probably more, but I am tired, so I'll end on this one. As number 8 suggests, yes, this whole thing did cause Harper some amount of distress ... but they were pretty good at hiding it, and they didn't share it with anyone they didn't completely trust, or so they claimed. They weren't exactly all "chunibyo" about it, either. They claimed that they used to be, at least in their own private thoughts. Makes sense. If true, who wouldn't be. But, it also makes sense that the charm would wear off after a while, and it would quickly become something to cope with as opposed to something to boast about.

That's all I have in me for now. If you're a stumbler come a stumbling on this blog, the pages I've included above pertain to entries about one of Harper's most commonly frequented realities. They called it Lena's World, sometimes. It was basically a post apocalyptic Russia. That's how they learned Russian, presumably. At this point, I think I might just choose to believe them regardless, just for my own benefit. Who gives a fuck about reality anyway.

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Just to clarify, Harper died despite their connection to and involvement in The Mysteries, not because of them ... This was the shit they got out of bed for, the shit that gave them life. It wasn't enough.

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Had myself another good cry for a few minutes there. Anyway, I did manage to sort out Harper's wares and get the storage unit cleaned out before the lease ended. I did most of it on my own, but Harper's cousin helped out once or twice. She's cool. Supposedly, they hadn't even met one another until they were adults, but they got along pretty well on the rare occasions when they actually happened to be in the same time zone and whatnot.

Anyway, I managed to sell off a good chunk of it, and I have to thank Harper for that, because I am not sure how else I'd have survived the past year or so ... but then, a big reason I was like this to begin with, unable to function, basically, was Harper's own decision ... not that I blame them (not really ... I have my intrusive moments, and I think that's understandable and normal, but I mostly blame myself ... and I know that's probably also based in an untruth, but I still feel that way). The stuff that I managed to sell was mostly old commercial nerd products of various descriptions, decks of cards, old action figures, analog cameras and camera accessories, vintage doo dads, old games, and so on. I learned a lot about Americana, 20th century American material culture, and a few other random topics in the process. And this part wasn't so bad. There was still distance there.

I kept some of the rarer and weirder stuff that reminded me of Harper, a few occult books (those go for good money, but I couldn't bring myself to sell them), some Tarot cards, some of the games we'd talk about or play together, and so on. And, of course, I kept all obviously personal belongings, especially those that had any chance in helping me assemble my silly little "catalogue of sorrow," or might give me some insight into the whole "Metatron 369(nice)" situation, which I didn't even manage to get to before I completely fucking broke down.

Ultimately, it's the fucking Metatron that dragged me back here. It was damn mysterious, and I guess I knew I'd get to it eventually. It's still rather hard to know where to start.

I did begin to piece certain bits and bobs together around the time I made my final post pre "hiatus," but obviously I never posted any of it.

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Swept Away

Exhausted. I thought I could do it, thought I was ready. Heck, I thought going through their things was going to make me feel better, give me closure or something, bring me closer. But Harper is so far away. And it broke me. All of this broke me. The world is breaking me, the way it broke Harper. And neither of us deserve this, nobody does. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen or isn't happening. A lot of horrible things happen every single minute of every single day. We just have to pretend that it doesn't concern us or wound us on some fucking cosmic, collective level, and carry on.

But I digress. I haven't posted in two years. quelle surprise. Well, maybe a year and a half. It's hard to keep track. Basic math is probably beyond me. I'm going to go back and delete or edit a few older posts. Nobody is reading, but just in case that changes someday, there are certain parts of the 2022 version of me that just plain burn me to think about. Just the reminder of the grain of hope I felt looking at all those boxes and cabinets and journals. I can still feel the ghost of that feeling. This utterly irrational but somehow deeply held belief that somewhere in that pile, Harper still lived, that I could somehow reconstruct them out of scraps and scribbles, good as new.

The dreams are the worst ... they are always too nice. Some would claim that these are visitations, but I know it's my fevered brain trying to cope. Harper is there, maybe at a party or at my place, or at theirs, just ... hanging out. And at first it's like nothing happened. I forget, because I am dreaming ... my mind isn't all there. But then I remember, and I become confused. "I thought you were dead," I say, not even realizing how tactless that might be. I know Harper wouldn't care, though. Sometimes they just nod sagely or give me a mysterious smile or a wink, as if to say, "And let's make sure everyone keeps on thinking that; you and I know better." Most of the time they go, "I am dead, yet I live," in their best Laura Palmer / Carrie Page in the Red Room impression, with the fake backwards speech and everything. One time they even took their face off to complete the joke. Not in a scary way, though.

It's actually kind of funny at the time. In the moment, I feel like I have my friend back. I feel okay.

I guess I lied. The dreams aren't the worst part. It's the waking up. Anyway, I don't know what I'm going to do about Harper's trove or this super secret blog. I'll put up a little update on the trove's status in a separate post immediately to follow, simply because this one is getting long.

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It Comes On In Waves

Exhausted. Haven't really touched the "treasure trove" in some time. Every once in a while it takes on a sort of haunted aspect, and haunting isn't about ghosts and ghoulies, in the final analysis. It's about pain and fear. That feeling when you just can't bring yourself to look at or think about something.

Thought of the day:

We're always looking for reasons and purposes, but forget that those concepts are entirely contingent on time and causality, and are thus irrelevant outside of those contexts. If we are to assume that there is no time outside of our subjective experience of continuity, beyond the Fourth Dimension, or whatnot, then we have to acknowledge that, in the "higher orders" of reality, purpose, as we understand it, is not enhanced or revealed but rather nullified.

Perhaps there is something much greater than mere purpose out there. We might be too limited to grasp it, however.

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Being A Human Is Hard

Been having a hard time with all this lately. I thought now I could finally dive into the pile with wonder, and excitement, and appreciation, and much of the time I do feel those things. But the wound is still quite raw, it seems, and sometimes something just snags, like a hook through the spine.

I'll resume in a bit. Don't worry. *

*Nobody is worried.

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This is a bit of an "in-between" item, in that it has kind of an esoteric origin and kind of a really mundane explanation. I can speak to what's behind it with some confidence, since I was involved in these formulations more directly than a lot of the other stuff. That said, this page barely says anything in itself. I'm assuming I will stumble on more in depth notes somewhere down the line that will clarify it further.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Harper and I got into Alchemy at some point. Like, the old school variety moreso than Full Metal Alchemist stuff (neither of us have seen much of it - I have seen that episode by accident on adult swim once, and it sort of put me off the whole thing). But I am pretty sure the sketches above were from back when Harper and I were brainstorming ways to implement an "authentic" feeling alchemy system into an RPG, which over time led to us pulling apart all sorts of alchemical practices and synthesizing our own and so on. We haven't quite managed to come up with a design that we felt could really support a full game, but somedays we felt like were getting close.

Who knows, I might give it another go in the future. Again, this image is worth including, in my opinion, because it looks neat, but it doesn't give us all that much and my battery is about to die, so I'll leave the post off here.

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Okay, so this isn't strictly relevant to the main thrust of this blog, but it's something I found in Harper's "hoard," which I've also come to inherit, along with their Mercari and eBay accounts. They were adamant that if I were to sell it off instead of keeping it or donating it or whatever, I could make a few grand in the bargain. Harper's storage unit is paid up through next year. After that ... I don't know. The journals, electronics, and so forth I have already hauled in. Those I'm happy to keep at my place ... well, "happy" isn't the word. But you know what I mean.

Their wares are tougher for me, because these items aren't strictly OF Harper, not made by Harper or for Harper, but they are still, in some small way, connected. So I don't like to think about getting rid of this stuff. But that's how you become a hoarder, at the end of the day, and I am certainly at risk, genetically and by disposition. So I guess I'll see. I'll try to sell off as much as I can before the lease runs out, because I really can't afford to be paying for a concrete box. And the rest I guess I'll donate, or maybe keep some stuff for myself. Maybe instead of donating, I'll just abandon the storage unit so it can go on auction and make some other reseller very happy down the line.

ANYWAYS, I am posting this one because I ain't never seen it before and it feels extra creepy to me, and somehow still very much reminds me of Harper. I mean, am I the only one who finds a deck of DARPA playing cards unsettling as hell? What's the deal with the lizard and the foot? Also, why in the world would you use the words "Harvesting Biology" in your department moto?

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I can't even begin to guess the exact meaning or intention behind this one, but it sure does look like something, doesn't it?

Well, I am fairly confident that this was a sigil based magickal working, or is the remains of one, but its precise nature is probably lost to time now. One of those things that Harper themself wouldn't know the meaning of. Such things are produced in the moment and only that moment matters for the working itself. Afterwards, it is essentially a "Dead Sigil," an inert abstract work of art, no different from a collection of doodles.

This is usually by design. Some chaotes burn their sigils after charging them and activating them during a moment of gnosis. This method, on the other hand, is a sort of fusion of sigil creation and gnosis - the process of making the image is meditative in itself. Once it is done, with every element organically planted for a purpose, the process can recede into obscurity, a bit like a dream. The upshot is you get to keep the cool image. Theoretically, it can be charged to maintain its power, in a passive or reactive capacity, indefinitely, and can thus be used in the creation of Amulets, Talismans, Wards, and so on. However, if the caster is not around to maintain the charge, it will likely revert to ink on paper without at least a primer on how it works, which is rarely left behind.

So that's what we're looking at here. The specifics are impossible to ascertain and likely irrelevant. I recognize some of the symbols and cyphers Harper used in other contexts, and the circular glyphs with angular and triangular symbols contained inside were, again, something they liked to use quite a bit across the board. I was always a bit more straightforward in my practices, but Harper was a great deal more visually inclined than I am. For now, I'm holding off on trying to catalogue the individual glyphs, however.

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I figured I'd start easy. I can explain most of this page. Sort of.

The cool looking diagram at the top-left most likely has to do with Harper's interest in "Resonance Tuning," which is a somewhat obscure variant of the more popular "reality shifting" phenomenon taking the Gen-Z paranormal world by storm (who wouldn't want to fuck off this plane of existence to a better one if they could). These circle diagrams often represent overlapping realities within a sort of "fuzzy" model of the multiverse, wherein multiple universes can coexist on the same resonance frequencies and even overlap due to something Harper called Subject Oriented Superposition (google isn't helping me with this, so it may be a Harper term, or possibly one used by one of his friends or associates from a study group or meetup they went to - I went to a few of the local ones with them, but I'm much more socially inept and introverted than they were, and that's saying something). Anyway, I sort of understand the idea, and sometimes I can even buy into it, but at the end of the day it's just an idea. Makes a certain amount of sense once you break it down into simple analogies, but that's a whole process in itself, and I don't have the spoons right now, especially since nobody but me will read this any time soon. I'll probably add an explanation later, maybe when this comes up again. Anyway, the circles are sometimes labeled, but in this case it seems more of a conceptual illustration that anything else. The round symbols in the external circle are likely simple numerals from one of Harper's codes. In this case, I believe these are a 6 and a 2. Not sure what they mean, but they are probably two separate numbers.

Speaking of numerals, that gets me to the bottom of the page. The rhomboid symbols were probably another code Harper was working on / formulating. It's unclear if they actually finished this one and used it elsewhere, or if they were just idly messing around. I may be able to verify later.

Harper loved making their own pictographic encoding systems, seemingly just for fun, but also for use in sigils and such. Occasionally, they would actually encode information in this way, but I am not sure there was a deeper purpose to this beyond it being sort of part of their aesthetic. After all, it's not like the Witchfinder General is on the prowl these days, and if Harper wanted to avoid suspicion, simply writing things down is less suspicious than writing it down in obscure personal code.

The round glyphs at the bottom were likely more abstract elemental and conceptual symbols. Again, Harper messed around with those a lot. They had a thing for circles in particular.

I think the "Z" shape and the surrounding bits are part of a sigil, but they could also simply be a doodle.

The letters at the top are a bit odd. I thought it was a gematric breakdown, because of the number 17 circled and pointing to the letters, but that doesn't seem to add up correctly at all. Could be one of those things where Harper themself wouldn't be able to tell me what this means or meant in the moment.

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Notes On This "Great Work"

So, Harper left behind a lot of material, and part of my Work will involve sifting through it and trying to figure out which bits are of bona fide "occult" significance (pertinent to their Dreamwork, alchemy, paranormal investigation, successful or otherwise, and other such stuff), which bits are pure nerdery (fiction, book/movie/tv theory crafting, story/game/video ideas, concept art, etc.), and which bits are "fine art" and/or doodles.

Believe it or not, this is much harder than it sounds. Harper was a person of many interests and talents. They taught me, and this is perhaps the most important thing I could take from the friendship, that a person can look perfectly unremarkable to the outside world, perhaps even be judged on the spot as unsuccessful, unremarkable, a loser, and contain seemingly impossible multitudes barely beneath the surface. It is not unusual to embellish the accomplishments of the recently departed, but I was always genuinely impressed with how much Harper got done, all things considered.

I feel like there are a couple of decades worth of work in just the sketchbooks and notebooks alone, not to mention the digital stuff. That is, this stuff dates back to Harper's teens, and they were in their mid thirties when, you know.

To add an extra wrinkle to the problem, the physical journals, notebooks, and sketchbooks are very rarely dated, and Harper was known for having many of them going at once, because they basically collected empty sketchbooks they found at thrift stores, including the one we worked at, a steady supply, and basically just grabbing a random one whenever the need or mood arose. There are a lot of books full end to end, and a lot with empty pages in the back, still waiting for Harper to grab 'em. When possible, I am going to try and estimate time and context, but there will be cases where I simply won't be able to conclusively tell what was a doodle from when Harper was in Highschool and what was an occult diagram from last year. And I'm just going to have to accept it.

Since a lot of this material is personal or simply irrelevant, I will only be including that which I find to either be directly linked to the matters at hand or mysterious enough to add in, just in case. Sometimes I might share sketches and such just because. I don't know, maybe. Where possible, I will add commentary, context, and conjecture.

Anyways, I'll start with a handful of the little ones, those pocket sketchbooks Harper had a special affinity for.

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The World Ended In 1962

So here is where it starts, the pursuit quixotic. My mom had this friend she knew from college, and they were like two peas in a pod back then. But then they both moved. For a while, they talked on the phone and by snail mail, but then there was this huge gap where she went to work abroad, my mom's friend, that is, and they basically lost touch completely.

This was in the before times, like pre-social media, pre-cellphones, even (well, they had them, but they were more like a novelty and looked like a brick, like that bag phone The Dude got in The Big Lebowski when he was supposed to do the drop off and Walter fucked it up). You still had to pay long distance fees or just plain send letters back and forth, and since my mom's friend, let's call her Mae for ease of reference, was constantly being shuffled around for work, there wasn't even a fixed address or phone number, and it just became too much trouble, I guess.

Anyway, fast forward several decades, and they both find each other online, and start talking again, and it turns out, small world that it is, that they'll soon be neighbors again. So yeah, Mae and my Mom became like two peas in a pod again.

I was in my teens at the time, and we'd all have dinner together, so I sort of got to know Mae's kids, Harper and the other one (who doesn't figure into this story so I won't make up a fake name for them) a little bit. Not exactly super well, but since they were both several years older, and back then that seemed like an insurmountable abyss insofar as casual interaction was concerned, but they were both cool. We mostly played video games in the basement once we finished eating and the adults kept chatting up a storm upstairs.

So I actually didn't properly get to know Harper until after I got back from college and got a (supposedly) temporary job at this used bookshop / thrift store combo using the Mae/Harper family friend nepotism hookup.

The job itself was ... fine. A bit dusty and tough on the old sinuses, but peaceful, and nothing I couldn't handle with a bit of Benadryl. At the time, it was a big enough deal to actually get one after college. Shit was hitting the fan, which is par for the course these days, but was a bit of a surprise to quite a few people at the time.

I liked being around the books and bric a brac, and Harper was technically Manager during most of my shifts, and they were still cool. So we started talking, since the shop was tucked away a bit and there were usually only a few customers browsing the stacks and shelves at any given time, and then we actually became friends. Like, proper friends. Peas in a pod.

We'd carpool together and hung out quite a bit outside of work as well, just talking, driving around, goofing, playing games, making silly videos, et cetera. We shared a passion for the weird and spooky side of things (the occult, Forteana, weird fiction, and so on), and there's never a shortage of that going around. Harper is the one who turned me onto Twin Peaks and The Prisoner, and I got them into the House of Leaves and a bunch of Unfiction stuff, and so on, and so forth.

My best memory of them is watching Twin Peaks the Return together, both of us for the first time, every week. What a blast from the past.

Anyway, we were at Harper's place, same basement we used to play video games as kids, watching the Return Part 8. If you, my possibly nonexistent digger or stumbler of a reader are familiar, you'll know it was a doozie. There was some buzz on twitter ahead of it airing, but I didn't really pay all that much attention.

Anyway, I'll mostly avoid any specific spoilers (as if it's possible to actually spoil that show). Suffice it to say, that episode was "lit as hell" in the parlance of our times. CW: Gif below is wibbly and wobbly in a way that can cause some discomfort, especially if you're photosensitive, so I'd recommend scrolling past it asap.

Anyway, we turn to each other, mouths agape, in that "I don't know what the fuck we just watched, but it was awesome" sort of way, and it actually took us a few minutes of digestion to get a proper conversation going. You know, tossing about theories, going on tangents, and so on. Then we decide to watch it again, to see if there's any hidden puzzle box nonsense we missed among all the weirdness of David Lynch doing a really messed up Kubrick / Malick / B-movie tribute.

I had to urinate a few minutes in, but since we'd watched it once, I told Harper to just keep it going. It was one of those twenty minute long wides that Lynch does sometimes, so I figured it would still be going by the time I got back.

Anyways, I was quite correct. I had left during the countdown to the Trinity test, and got back a few moments before the camera jumps inside the mushroom cloud. The image of Harper sitting there, in that narrow room, on that old boxy couch, with only a stark, black and white rendering of a nuclear blast for illumination, transfixed once again, is weirdly burned into my memory. Something beautiful and almost immanent about it, you know. I almost wish I thought to take a picture. Not that I had a camera that could do it justice back then.

Anyways, I took my seat and we resumed watching. And then Harper turns to me, all serious, and goes, "You know the Cuban Missile Crisis?" I tell them of course I know the gosh darned Cuban Missile Crisis.

Harper pauses for a second, "First of all, I promise you that I am NOT high right now."

"Okay, this is going to be good."

"What if, like, the world ended in 1962?"

"Yeah, that was one fucked up week to live through, I bet. You know, Khrushchev ..."

"No, listen, what if they, or most of them didn't live through it. I mean, like, what if that's what actually happened? What if this timeline we live in is, like, an exception, or a fluke."

"Aren't all timelines equally valid? If we go by that logic, at least."

"Alright, I've never told anyone this before, cause they're normies. But you're my one and only Twin Peaks friend, and that shit's like a blood oath. Do you ever have dreams, or visions, or whatever, where you're living a totally different life, where you're not even you, but everything IS real. Like 100 percent real. Cause I'm pretty sure I've got at least one other self, and they live in like the post apocalypse. And they're definitely not even a version of me, you know. In that world, I was never born. I think I'm actually Russian in that world. Like, I speak fluent Russian ..."

Now you can think what you want, but that was one amazing fucking night. That was one of the best fucking nights of my whole fucking life. I miss nights like that one. I miss Harper too. Fuck, I miss them so fucking much ...

Anyway, that's sort of how I became the sole inheritor of the most important parts of their meagre "estate." Not only did Harper leave me their consoles, games, art (both their own and collected finds, prints, and commissions), books, and DVDs, but also several boxes full of journals (many of them dream journals) and other assorted manuscripts, as well as a few other choice pieces of arcana. They had showed me some of this bounty before, including a few magical hours on that one amazing, mind bending night of talking, laughing, and creeping each other out, but I didn't get the full set until after they were gone.

I wept over that fucking box pretty much every time I tried to pull anything out to actually look at it. For the longest time, I just couldn't bear to do it. Anyway, that's all I've got the spoons for right now. Some things are hard to think about, even two years down the line. I need a palette cleanser, a snack, and some sleep ...