'Cause you can look right through me, walk right by me

Right. I'm not dead. I've been immersed in preparation for my PhD exams, now scheduled for the first week in November; and I've been teaching, which has eaten up a far greater percentage of my life than I expected. The good news? I really like teaching. (There is further good news, but it has an immutable time-delay; in about a week, I can cut the cryptic and explain.) Also, it hasn't been a bad month. On October 6th, I saw the Decemberists at Toad's Place with kraada: that was deeply awesome and the most collegiate day I'd had in years. On October 7th, I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream at Long Wharf Theater in company of spectre_general, hans_the_bold, and the ever-lovely and livejournal-shy Ainsley: that was worth the price of admission for Pyramus' death scene alone. On October 9th, I turned twenty-four. I survived the torrential rainstorm of the last week and a half. Some municipal moron has pruned down most of the trees on my street. I have new musical crack—Orgy and the Dead Kennedys—and Caitlín R. Kiernan's To Charles Fort, With Love is a marvelous collection. The heat came on in my building yesterday and all of a sudden my apartment is in Tuscon.

. . . in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And by way of introducing my return to the world of the living, I offer a song about the exact opposite. Hope you like. It seems to be turning into a musical sort of year.

Void Where Prohibited

In a reflection of glass long turned to the wall
You can find me
Or in the shadow uncast down the long darkened hall
Don't mind me

I'm the space between atoms
I'm the creak on the stair
Drowned more than five fathoms
I'm never there

I'm a paper-doll cut-out and a cat's-cradle clue
I frame negation
An illogical flaw in an obsolete feud
My occupation

Sweep the dust from your eyelids
Brush your beaten heart bare
See us all: we are islands
You wouldn't care

And so carefully I closed the door on my shadow
And so quietly unpicked my fingerprints
Shaping letters in the clay
Counting heartbeats by the day
Even memory wears truth and death away

I'm tattooed with your tears and engraved with your tongue
I'm indelible
A scrap-paper palimpsest since we were young
I'm illegible

There's no need to apologize
Who said you were unfair?
Don't bother to turn on the lights
Don't wait up sleepless nights
The evidence should suffice
I'm never there