Here we are in mid-June and it was perfectly reasonable for me to wear a raincoat today. I love the climate in Seattle. It almost makes up for the traffic.

M's recent mention of future salary increases made me realize that there is not much that more money could possibly do to improve my quality of life. This understanding brought a feeling of emptiness, sort of a pale echo of the pain you feel when you think you still have open water in front of you, then suddenly bang your head against the edge of the pool. I suppose it would be nice to have a second home, property with a view, the ability to shop on the expensive floor of the downtown Nordstrom's, a luminous cobalt blue Audi sedan. These things would definitely be fun, and yet they would change only the details of my existence. More money can't keep my parents alive forever and it can't bring me more true friends. Nor can it guarantee the continuation of the steady stream of small creative achievements which I find so rewarding.

I'm composing this in my HTML editor. I despise invisible formatting.

Today was a good day, despite the fact that I am on my own until Tuesday evening, thanks to M's attendance of a company off-site event at Semiahmoo (which I have been calling, somewhat inevitably, "Semi-Moo"), a salmon cannery that has been transformed into a golf resort on the very northwest edge of our side of the Puget Sound. I met some really nice people in the context of a new freelance project, and I completed a different freelance assignment for a local web development company. It is always good to feel the happiness of closure, the sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing something. It is comfortable and cozy to have one's mental corridors all to oneself for a while, even if I plan on doing not much more with them than watching the reality pet shows on Animal Planet to which I am recently addicted.

I dreamed that I was sliding across ice. I knew that if I fell I would hurt my back and neck, and possibly die, but I couldn't help from doing it because it was so much fun. I didn't fall.

Journal writing is a wonderful activity. It is a refusal to let the stream of life pass away without leaving a trace. It means stopping, ignoring the voice of pain that insists that there is nothing worth writing about, and squinting at the light, trying to make out the subtle language traced upon the rocks of the path that you for once turn around and examine. What are the ferns saying? The clubmoss: does it know something? It is a brief respite from the relentless hike into the future, a journey consisting of countless brief milestones, each bringing satisfaction but also taking one closer to death. How mysterious is our existence. Life can never be boring; to be bored is a failing of the self, of the soul.