Someone got in Quotendquote by searching for “flowers, craniums”. This makes such beautiful, senseless sense. Flowers, craniums. Like cloud, dollhouse. Like singe, swim. It sends the brain in two opposite direction so it stretches between them like a rubber band, until it recoils and tears both meanings away and sends them crashing together. Yeah, flowers, craniums: I can see that now.

This house is seldom quiet. In the morning, before the city settles into its humdrum workday, it rattles with the subway cars tearing the tracks beneath it and the cars pushing and screaming their horns in the thick traffic. Then, when the city does settle, every two or three moments are marked with an old car dragging its transmission on the gravely road or kids shouting after a lost ball or a great truck moving slowly and bellowing in a giant’s voice. In the evening it’s the same: the subways cars shaking the foundations of the earth and the many cars above grounds rattling and crying like a mob in an earthquake. In the late evenings it’s the kids with their loud cars stereos: in the night, the drunkard hobos fighting over the best benches. Always someone around, making sound to let you know they’re there.

Then it gets quiet, for an hour, for a morning if you are indeed in luck. Maybe it’s a Sunday and nobody goes to work; maybe the snow fell thick last night and all the cars are stranded. In those rare moments you can hear the many birds chatting in that one tree next to the house, and they are nothing like the birds you knew as a child in the country. They’re louder and they all chirp at once, never conversing in their bird tongue, as if oblivious to the sound of others. In those moments you realize that in this constant city noise, all the birds have gone deaf.

I want to write in this blog, but more than that I’d like it to be old and huge and forsaken. Imagine it: Quotendquote, a tome of ancient net lore, shut forever in 1998 like the best of the internet. Or like the Mundaneum, a proto-internet one hundred years old , slowly rotting in a freezing Brussels building and covered in geological eons of bird droppings. You’d have to climb in through the eighth floor windows to get in. You’d have to use a candle to light the long, dark corridors. The root directory will be shut, the navigation too old to work. You’d inch yourself though the posts by hacking the URLs, by guessing page names, by hunting obscure hyperlinks. There’ll be hundreds to read if you wanted them bad enough, but you’ll never get the full picture, never find who I was, or why I wrote Quotendquote, or why, suddenly, one day in April 1998, I stopped writing.

On Thursday they announced they were able to distill passion. They would bottle it and sell it in little vials. It would taste terrible, but you could mix it with orange juice. On Friday the world ended.