There is always this

Confronted of course with the option of abandoning the small animal of the body, and thus one's soul and prospects for any redemption. I consider these endless web-logs as a potentially mephistophelean exchange: I will give up my best friend so that I may write about him in a web log, and make of this relationship a perfect work of art. He may have made the same bargain on his side: but what is this not but another setting forth? Well we all have to set forth for another 20 years or so, and then take another 20 years or so getting back. And when we get back there, wherever it is, we found of course that life has changed us, that we are something else, and that is no big news in some way: but this is what 20 years does: it changes us.

So I go on writing web-logs. In part because it is the only thing I can do. And with each keystroke I lose the animal of my old friend, and perhaps I gain some fragment of a spirit that will last forever, but what is a spirit, my friend, but a ghost, and what are ghosts for the living. Live well my friend, and don't be a ghost whatever you do.