Begging your indulgence, you are hereby forewarned that this text is:

• The kind of nauseating sentimental fawning that would normally send me running for the hills;
• Squarely and unforgivably in the category of exhibitionist and confessional Web garbage that permeates the blogoverse;

In a word, catharsis.

No one really speaks of this: that our visual landscape, like air and water, is perforce public property. Yet we all live blithely enough in a brand-saturated sensorium — and while we may roll our eyes at the excess of intentional messages in our visual specturm, we remain far from regarding it as what it really is: pollution. A genuine health hazard. The heartbreaker is, to some extent we have allowed this to happen.

The lovely and very tuneful Lydia Crash, creator of piece, a charming design store, coffee source and den of sweet culture, recently reminded me to "be like water."

Thing is, we were discussing relationships, not martial arts. But her Bruce Lee reference couldn't possibly have been more spot-on.

It's gone. Bye-bye.

Yeah, well I woke up one morning and spontaneously elected to avoid being prematurely embalmed. Which meant giving up the fastidious, fetishistic, sisyphean habit of updating my obituary every few months.

Well, not so late really. It's well before midnight. And I feel the uncomfortable urge to post the very kind of insipid, introspective, confessional content that once sent me screaming, hair on fire, running away from the blogosphere.

I don't care much for elections. I'm loathe to throw out the baby of politics with the bathwater of centralized government, so I'm pursuing politics by other means (apologies to Von Clausewitz).