...so long to give birth?
Announcements by others of the demise of this blog are misplaced.
Here's the word from the goat's mouth, Young Nick:
taliesin's log is dead.
All fragments of mad genius sometimes responsible for this magnum opus are united in an irreversible decision.
Being me, I can't drop "an experiment" without words.
Others can judge whether the experiment was success, failure, or neither black nor white.
François, you're such an idiot when you try hard.
I may be no expert in "favicons", but this site's Rorschach blot you've followed in your browser is a wolf.
It's clearly a wolf. Why you took it for a butterfly is beyond me. Blow it up and look again before I blow you up.
To Jacques, who left word on my ansafone, saying you read in a paper that the latest mess hitting the Factory's fan seems solidified into a long strike on its French-language domestic wires, that's news to me, even if true.
I've been sick, haven't looked at the reports, can't enlighten you further.
To Factory hands, I say there must be a solution, but I damned if I know what it is. I'd suggest it might be a bad idea to drive out a third top boss with other management types. Where would that leave us, beyond square one?
Big news agencies are all in public trouble.
If changing anything upstairs at ours might help, may we not at last consider modifying AFP's ancient statute, while keeping our independence? When the governors include domestic clients who are also competitors, we have an unhealthy "conflict of interests".
Now to stuff of possible broader interest.
I've been way out of it.
What began as a bad cold turned back into the Condition, with complications. Those who endured "taliesin's log", lapping up obscene details and gory illustrations, don't need a repeat. There are no bits of Nick, inside or out, left to show.
The gut balloon is deflating. The waste matter you need sparing slowly returns to what the doctors call "normal".
I planned to stay clear of the Factory until Monday. When told Africa's desperate, I know this. Isn't it always? But when told I was indispensable to editing its woes and joys on Friday, I ate the bait. For an hour or so.
The rest is in my attic. Some call it a brain. The Kid thinks it's the famous tin of peas.
The most astute of the Faithful Five ¾, following a central part of the "experiment", always tried elementary detective work: "Cherchez la femme!"
No beating about the bush. Wise Americans might wipe that bunch of thorns off the map. Here, elsewhere, journalists have learned how parts of your vote are allegedly rigged in advance. Many of us cross fingers with others you'll again make your nation one we only pretended to dislike, without applying that to inviduals. End an obsessive, threadbare tyranny now divorced from reality!
We saw the emperor's new clothes, looked through them. Now it's your turn.
Without ado then, it's always the Woman who's been a problem.
You read of many of them. The Kid is now a bright, often happy first-year lycée lass with a rich life. No longer Daddy's little girl.
The Wildcat's exceptional.
You followed ups and downs with this rare creature. Especially the downs. Of a savage desire become a very close difference, she remains costly in long-distance calls, but when it comes to friendship and love, they come no better.
We shared hells and highs. After fierce fights, "unpardonable" insults and huge laughs, I still say she's a great-looking miracle.
When she gets her man, which she will, I hope he knows just how lucky he is, every instant of his life.
Of course there's somebody else.
There's always somebody else.
Do somebody elses have somebody else?
Ask anyone.
You can waste time with the repaired search engine, dear readers. You won't find her. To do that you need the real world and stories I never blogged and never shall.
Her tale began here as a one-way love story in breach of every "rule in the book". When it became what some laughingly call "serious", I wrote "Milady" out of this place and covered my tracks where she stayed in it.
You might say all the "love" I threw at her was "Here's my ungodly Mess. You just gotta love it, sweetypie."
She's a life and heart of her own and merely liked me a lot. She found me funny, absurd, outrageous, badly behaved and totally terrifying. That was on my good days.
Being the biggest fool in the world, I never realised, until it was almost too late, what she was giving me with the wisest simplicity. I love symbols so much that I've failed to see the obvious signs.
This means absolutely nobody deserves what they get and everybody gets as much as they deserve. There's nothing stranger than justice.
When she denies every word, it will be with irrefutable arguments.
It was by accident that I met a woman known in every dream in a routinely banal life in a routinely unfair world. Apart from looks as stunning as the Wildcat's but quite different, she too is clever and funny.
Who among us can resist a lethal cocktail of beauty, brains, wisdom and humour?
I "blew it" of course, being the world's blindest grey wolf.
She's neither wolf nor wildcat. I won't tell you what she is. Some people's "magic companions", once known, must stay even more secret than their Names. Ask any shaman.
She gave me two things nobody else did. A second chance, then a third.
She also screwed up.
But what she did "wrong", she did by mistake.
Some people proved ... unhelpful. You know who you are. There's no point in killing you, though it crossed my mind.
A handful have been great.
To my readers with limitless imaginations, I'd say your guesses are bound to be wrong, which is how it should be.
The "experiment" remains a sieve of clues. You can't avoid leaving a few holes when you push a million words in 20 months.
No crime is perfect, except by definition.
Amid all the lunacy and occasional wisdom I hope have given pleasure, I've tried to tell truths as honestly as one can while they're happening.
It's been painful and fun, doing what we all do: reaching parts the others don't always spot. For anything I've said which some have called truly inspired, you have only other people to thank. I simply put bits together...
However, while "nothing's new under the sun", a better enterprise has begun. I'm so sure of it I'm shutting this one down.
I'll leave a few more clues, having been in blogospheric hibernation for so long, but hundreds of thousands of others will keep you abreast of the same musical, movie, science and book discoveries I make.
While others don't write them up in my roundabout way, some say what they think instead of blinding you with common sense, science and stupidity.
There's no shortage of great blogs.
To anyone who's really got something to say, I say "Say it."
The worst mistake we can make is to imagine it's been said before, and better.
This usually proves to be true. Thing is, whoever said it before wasn't you and didn't say it your way. And a few things always need saying...
I've got something else to do. I've done none today, when other things had to be done. But that project and my Factory work will take time and are too different to pursue this log.
Whatever may possibly take me past the million-word mark -- for fans of round numbers -- is too new for this old place.
Yesterday I saw the Shrinkess for the most valuable meeting to date.
To those who miss me at the Factory -- it's reassuring to know there are so few of you! -- yes, I stepped over the line, but tales I hear of what supposedly happened to me are either partial truths or downright lies.
Nobody knows the full story.
Few ever will.
Those who have come here expecting honesty deserve to learn that I'm emerging from my worst ever depression, which felt terminal at its height. I remain as fragile as some call me "strong".
When it comes to "Cherchez la femme", you must look for the man. Such is a life.
To those who know my dear Dad shook hands with death and went critical, some of us hoped and people who knew how to pray did that.
My father's story is little different from anybody else's, with the usual "big problem". It's his own, unique and unfinished. Well, the stubborn bugger made it. He won't mind me saying he's home again and he's fine.
If sometimes you've found my own lows and highs illuminating since I went public, then you deserve to know I've found out the name of my most feared enemy, the killer who stalks me.
Sorry to disappoint those who jumped to conclusions. I'm scared of neither women nor sex.
Winter and nowhere skies always petrified me, but even that made no sense. It's not decay and not death, as such, nor even limbo.
The thing that hides in my inner darkness and has frightened me most all my life is quite simply ... me.
Any reality, especially yours, loyal reader, was preferable to mine. The Shrinkess reckons that finding what's left in the coffin -- which I see in shards -- is perhaps useful but "not indispensable".
She gave her blessing, with reservations, to a decision turned action: sending the mind-drugs to the same place as I did alcohol in 1997.
Forever down the toilet.
For her, what comes next some of us have no choice but to do in the end, winning the war of the sexes. Not out there, folks, but in me. That we're all both male and female has been known since forever.
Reconciling the two is for some harder than for others. This guy won't make do with a cobbled job. I've rediscovered a further paradox which concerns us all, far bigger than our inner paradoxes and contradictions.
It's an ancient one, often told.
This is where I again draw attention to the Blogroll on the left. I've chosen carefully, so it contains nobody but people I consider gifted, often funny, brave and original in dozens of ways, all worth meeting and special.
Some I won't name are more special to me than others and have given me more than they know by telling me their own stories.
To those who wanted to strip almost naked online, I'm particularly grateful. Keep at it. The same goes for others who prefer clothes but share treasures.
I disagree with ideas some of you express or illustrate about politics, art, religion, sex and dirty linen, but you're there because I admire the way you do it and love a good row.
My problem is that the very few people I have closer to hand are, of all, the most Special and they'll get most of my time.
"Daddy, Daddy, can I tell you a joke?"
"You can try, darling," I told the Kid last weekend, while you still would have agreed I wasn't fit for most company.
"It's a 'blonde joke'. Just to make you suffer a bit more!"
"Go on, then."
Sam says there are other versions. Here's hers:
"A blonde goes to the doctor with horrible tummy pains. He gives her lots of suppositories because they're both French. The woman takes them for a week, feels worse every day.
She goes back to the doctor in a mess and says: 'It hurts more than ever!'
'Did you finish them as I said?'
'Oh yes, doctor.'
'Maybe the treatment wasn't long enough. Here's another prescription and I'd like you to takes these pills too, one three times a day, with meals.'
A week later, the blonde shows up again. She looks terrible and can scarcely walk.
'Doctor, doctor, why can't you help me? I've never been ill before, scarcely a cold.'
'It works for nearly everyone else.'
The blonde rummages, takes the last suppository out of her handbag.
'These taste so horrible too. It takes several glasses of water just to keep one down.'
'Oh my poor girl. What have you been doing?'
'All you said, doctor.'
'You're not meant to eat them.'
'Doctor, I may be blonde but I'm not just a dumb pretty face. Do you really think I'm silly enough to shove capsules up my backside?'"
OK. It may not be funny, may not even work unless you're half-Frog. But it made me laugh and it's so true.
All real creativity seems inextricably linked with pain. They go together and there's no way I'm stopping creativity. Why does it take an elephant so long to give birth?
I dunno really. Do you?
Does it matter?
The person who accidentally opened the grave for me -- I will hunt down anybody who persists in the wrong ideas -- gave me the present of my life. The most wrong of all are those who say that this person kept me from both Factory and work.
She did no such thing. All you need to know of what she's done is that she helped show me what has always been wrong with me. Better still, she gave me many clues to how I can find my own resources to heal the wound.
I hate those who said this blog's been a novel in disguise, wanted more of its cast. You're despicable, unkind and mean. But she, in adding irresistible encouragement to jump over the edge, is by far the most wicked of all.
I've never detested anybody as much as I love her, with all my heart for the rest of my life.
She's the real one for me, always was and will be. The fact that she's "not mine" has sweet fuck all to do with it. Nobody belongs to anybody else.
Some of you said this would end in tears, smiles and a love letter, the best song and poem I can manage, maybe a few flowers.
How right you were. What a woman once took from me and another one gave me back, I'm not telling. It's a paradox. It's a fiction and it's true. It's my version of a story some of us take half a lifetime to understand.
It will take me ages to turn it into an art form. I need all the help I can get with it, but only from the few very people I've asked and the ones who've said "Yes. Great idea. Let's do it."
The blog won't vanish but I'm done with experimentation. Cue Ted Hughes please! What comes next will be extremely hard work and it's much more "for real" than any virtual accomplishments you may have liked or loathed.
Je vous embrasse, tous. Sorry if that embarrasses the guys. Thanks to everybody who's been a part of this part of the show. You must neither rejoice nor mourn over the farewell.
May your gods go with you. I'm borrowing the white goddess, but don't worry, since there's more than enough of her to go round, has been since the first human people invented her.
Au revoir!
Oh yes. I'll be back. And someone else will be with me...
7:02:31 PM link 
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