The world is no vampire. There is no heart. All the blood festers in its limbs and the scabs crust over the peeling lips screaming freedom freedom and the gunfire pops barely up through the ignorance. Cain needed no arms. While men have hands freedom has a voice.

Holy Hell. He wasn't a counterfeit bear after all. Not that I would have loved him any less had he been; but I didn't know that.

Watson the dog mistook my ratty old bear for one of his ratty old chew toys. And thus my bear of 24 years was gone, save for a few sea-green scraps and his left ear. There was stuffing everywhere. It was horrible.

But there's nothing to be done. Watson the dog saw the bear as competition and acted like any dog in the wild would: he ate that fuzzy helpless thing.

The bear's coloring had puzzled me for years. Bedtime Bear is blue and mine was an odd green color. I thought perhaps his color had faded over time, but I had a nagging memory of a green lock of hair that I had pulled out, one by one, until it was gone.

Not that it matters now. The only color he is now is the color eaten. I suppose I can dust off my Squishable, Heath Leopard.

And the beat goes on.

It goes like this: Sign in, click on "new post", start writing.

The difference, I think, is the looking backward. This was such a forward-looking device. At the end of each day, my intellectual uprising of sorts, a chance to chide myself and the world. To remember the ones I loved or was trying not to. Forward-looking, buoyed by a delicate arrogance. No good days, no bad days, only my day and the pauses necessary to dream up new distractions.

Just vulnerable enough to keep things interesting.

The dichotomy of Then and Now has found me. Untimely ripped from my womb of ignorant bliss and dashed against the scenery. Cut-out trees with painted hollows falling with flat wooden slaps. Beads of sweat, bright lights and no audience.

There was a time before my brother but I do not remember it. I don't think it was like this.

Then there's this thing. I'm stuck with these things I've written here. Picking through the archives and finding my brother. Once written, a thing is always happening now. That's where I was and where I am trying to return. But the Then is getting farther from the Now. Soon, the day will be replaced. A new February 24th will be painted over the old one. Painted over before I've come back for everything. I am a bad tenant of that last day and all that stuff is still mine just give me a little more time to find a place for it, sheesh. I've been busy with other stuff, is all.

Routine makes my life possible but it fails me now.