I know I should write some proper summary of what I achieved in 2006, and what I look forward to for 2007, but I am just too tired of being responsible and coherent. This is not the annual report of a company you are investing in. Things are always in progress. I obviously can't say what will come up in the future. I don't want to be smug, nor do I want to be perpetually fearful like some people I know. There are some certainties, more or less. The cherry blossoms will bloom. The Red Sox will play baseball. There will be an apple harvest in Greencastle, Pennsylvania. The crickets will sing. And somewhere in a distant galaxy, there will be a supernova.

In the night of this No-Winter, there is a rustling in the trees as hundreds of roosting birds are briefly disturbed. Just as those many black wings flutter, so in the virtual world the particle streams of spams, each with their momentary identity name, flow by my filtered inbox. Virtual people, whom I will never befriend, wrote to me today: Morris Walker, Tony Cole, Thomas Ross, Shauna Cleveland, Ian Mitchell, Robyn Aldridge, Natalie Phillips, and Effie Sadler. Perhaps they will return as real souls someday, or donors to a Sanctuary of Imagination: Eldon Terry, Eddie Graham, Kris Church, Linda Barrow, Ruby Hicks. And they were joined by their bizarre and sometimes ludicrous cousins, also birthed by the same name-probability machines. A cheerful if fleeting hello to Dildy V. Mancilla, Hibbler B. Edgerly, Dessislava Dowell, Mckinnied I. Noonkesteer, and my friend Picklesim C. Lofton. And a happy New Year to those whose existence is measured in microseconds: to Betsy Brock, Allen Strickland, Penelope McDaniel, or the lovely Maiara Caron.

The critics may call my art "derivative," but I am turning derivatives into art. There is a calculus of colors, a physics of penlines. Even if I advance only by infinitesimals, I am making progress. I look forward in 2007 to the lighting of the Great Beams at CERN, which may illuminate the world in ways no one can predict, not even the smartest of theorists. There are certainties in uncertainty. In what the Zoroastrians call this "World of Mixture of Good and Evil," the dualistic conflicts will continue, as we work out in sequential time what another being, virtual or not, sees as all one entire moment.

Posted at 3:22 am | link