Kage Baker was born on Jun 10, 1952. That was yestreday. I wrote a blog about it – a nice balance, I thought, between fond sentimentality and the aching void in my heart that never goes away – between long periods of being asleep. I posted it just before the midnight deadline, and felt very pleased with myself.
I didn’t feel at all well yestreday, so that was nice.
I woke up today and found that the posting did not work and the blog has vanished. Both my Norton and Windows programs updated in the night, which probably contributed; extensive searches have yielded nothing. So there’s Kage’s birthday blog down the tubes.
The only upside is that it is raining. Yeah, weird as that is – June 11th in Los Angeles, in the middle of a drought, and it’s been raining lightly since dawn. Might be climate change, might just be California; it’s happened a few times in my lifetime, June rain. This one is unusual in that it is also a cool storm, not tropical – but that actually makes it even nicer.
Clearly, it is still Cinder Cone Time. This time I seem to have slipped back a yard for the meter I had managed to climb upward. I had a friend once who used to call times like this “Shiva storms” – not everything that happens is bad, but it’s all chaotic and uncontrollable. All you can do is hang on and hope the god has a nice surprise for you at the end. In the meanwhile, one is the floppy partner in an Apache Dance with the Lord of Chaos …
Sometimes you know you are on the edge of a Singularity, but you don’t know which edge. Are you about to enter? Have you gone through? Are you going to be stuck there, spread infinitely thin over the bread of reality forever? Only Time will tell, and someone needs to boot Time in the butt for you.
I shall follow Kage’s own prescription for times like this. Read something beloved. Eat something indulgent. Watch something mindless. Rest. Do something – anything! – else, and let your mind start telling stories to itself in the quiet dark.
And I still don’t feel at all well. But the air smells of wet stone and dark flowers, and the light through the lace curtains is all opals and pearls. Time to dream a bit.
PS: If I find yestreday’s blog, Dear Readers, I’ll share it later.
Kathleen, Kage and the Company 
“Spread infinitely thin over the bread of reality.” That’s a nice turn of phrase.
You wanna hear something weird? I could swear I read the blog post that’s inexplicably missing, sometime in the small, wee hours of the morning. It was a good post, too. When you said it never got posted I thought you had to be mistaken. It was there. Definitely. Maybe I dreamed it.
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It’s running around out there somewhere in the aether.
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Or not. You commented on Kate’s birthday in your post of the 9th, which might be what I’m remembering.
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Kage probably liked it so much she just took it, to share with her new mates
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Maybe Kage’s birthday blog was meant only for her to see. You wrote it. That’s the main thing. None of us who love her books (or who were lucky enough to know her and love her in person—sadly I’m not one of them) are going to forget her …blog or no blog.
I was just promoting her books on our writers’ forum two days ago. So her birthday genie must have been working for me, too. I didn’t even realise it was her birthday on the day I wrote that stuff.
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Thank you! Yeah, she creeps up on you.
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Wait, i read that blog. I commented on it. Or was it the day before. I remember seeing your Facebook post with the link, for sure. I do hate when technology is the problem instead of the solution.
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Technology *is* our familiar now – and like all familiars, it can get out of control, its cage and the house. Sometimes the little bugger paws and licks away at the edges of the wards until it can wriggle through and commit all manner of mischiiefs! And there’s not a thing we can do about it.
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