February 11th, 2007. 1095 days. and counting.

It will be three years, tomorrow. Three years without that which is more essential to me than food or drink or rational thought.

Every psychological test I have played fair with (it is easy to cheat when you know what is being looked for, the legacy of having taken a psychology student for a lover) tells me the same thing, over and over. It is my mead and my manna, and I am intentionally starving myself to death, or at least into silence. This time, the spirit has held up more resolute than the last time. I did not expect to maintain my oath for so long, the fates have been both cruel and kind in this. I have avoided illusion, but also avoided opportunity for real connection, real resonance that might bring an end to this gnawing drought of passions.

I said more than a year ago that I have accepted the notion that I may, through chance and happenstance and my own subtle preconscious sabotages, stay on this road for the rest of my life. I have accepted this. Not with a glad heart, but an earnest one, as one comes before God (or should), knowing the trail is difficult, the rewards modest (if you take the path I have taken and renounced the reward of an afterlife) and there are those who cannot comprehend your choice. I do not ask them to, if you stay your hand to gain the assent of everyone before you act, you will cripple yourself from action.

This week I will make my final committed public performance...there are still possibilities for April (Morgantown) and June (Amarillo), but they are not locked in and set into the stone, cut into the bone. I will embrace this Valentine's Day reading as a final public performance, to give it the legitimacy of a wedding night.

There is an irony in a monastic Amomancer, but better the elusion of a lie than the illusion of self-deceit.