I started this page quite a while ago, with the sole intention of having a place to randomly write about things. Short things. Short fictions. Short not-quite-so-fictitious fictions. What I got was ninety-five posts of micro-stories, suicides, girls, remembrances, commemorations, observations and silly puns. I even had a couple of bad haikus.

I was inconsistent, and most of the writing was bad because it came out of an obligation to write something with a self-imposed deadline (which was the whole idea to begin with because I really didn’t want to rust and die off like I did a couple of years ago and had to rehabilitate), and that pressure wasn’t always good; but I must say that I had fun. Lots of fun. Part of it had to do with the subject matter; and there was really no pressure on me to write anything sensible, which was great; and this was my little hidey-hole, my secret hideout, my Batcave, with far fewer visitors than on my main blog, which allowed me the freedom not to conform to some idea of an audience.

But this is it. This is the end. I suppose it’s no great tragedy, especially considering the small number of people who actually visit, but still, it’s not exactly a happy affair.

I guess I should offer some sort of elaboration as to what’s happened. In essence, I’ve shut down my main blog and have shifted over to my new site. [via darylli.com] While that arguably has nothing to do with this place, I wanted to take the opportunity to kind of start anew on this thing, having been blogging (not here) for two years and a bit. This became a casualty because, as I went along with the deliberations, it seemed to me that it ought to be one of the things I had to leave behind, in some sense.

So, don’t worry, nothing gigantically life-changing has occurred. It’s just kind of a reboot.

The old posts are gone now. I thought of having them remain, but decided against it. Perhaps some day, when circumstances conspire, I’ll put them up again, somewhere else, or collect them somewhere. Who knows? I did think of resurrecting the whimsicalities format on the new site, maybe as a weekend thing or the like, but I’m still thinking.

Looking back, I thought I would have been more experimental with the writing, but a lot of the times, the deadlines just killed the notions. Otherwise, I think I can safely say that this was a joy. Nowhere else would I have thought of noir in the kopitiam, or dared to publish farting haikus. It just seemed to fit under the banner very well, a banner I was and still am very proud to have propped up over my head.

On the other hand, I still have many unpublished drafts that I didn’t finish. Erasure was supposed to be about a man getting erased from the world, a quick dip into metafiction. Superhero Blues #7 is the sequel to the other one I wrote the last time, about how it sucks being a superhero. Birth was supposed to be noise; a conceptual piece that probably must have been seen to be understood. Universal Translator was meant to be a brief fable-ish outing that involved a device that’s a universal translator (duh), all the noise of the world, and an observation on the suffering of humanity. Light-hearted, I guess, but not exactly happy subject matter. Pico’s Day had to do with a boy who met his creator (me, of course). Family Meeting, I think, was inspired by Kafka, and had to do with an annual dinner or something where an extended family meets, and there was supposed to be observations of every single member and some mildly sad overarching theme. I’ll be damned if I remember what Ascension was intended to be about. I think it was some emo thing to do with suicide. Or a break-up. In the woods. had animals and the sly fox tricks the silly brown bear into dying at the hands of humans. It was at first supposed to be in the zoo. The Absurdist had to do with this strange guy in a library, who hides there all day, and is an absurdist. A Bogesian tone to it, as I remember. The Island is a very old idea that has to do with an isolated bunch of people living on an isolated island and their curious rites of passage that pronounced maturity. And in there, a young boy learns the ugly secrets of these rituals and, whether he likes it or not, becomes a man.

I might still write these some day.

In any case, to keep up with old times and whatnot, you can head over to the new site [via darylli.com]. You can also go to my book club experiment, currently still in its infant stages [via lobster shells]. Finally, you can still keep up with me on flickr [via flickr] and Shelfari [via Shelfari].

All right then, that’s that. It was a real joy, this place. And to cram in a cliché right at the end of it, I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing these things. (And I mean it.)

Catch you on the flip side.

d