Excerpt from C.S. Lewis

From his book, The Weight of Glory:

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
That Religion should be relegated to solitude in such an age is, then, paradoxical. But it is also dangerous for two reasons. In the first place, when the modern world says to us aloud, "You may be religious when you are alone," it adds under its breath, "and I will see to it that you are never alone." To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek calends.

Good stuff.

This hasn't actually happened yet, as such.

Every time I look at my list of people I have friended and been friended by here, I realize just how few of them actually regularly post (yet somehow still remain active; is there no expiration date on ljs?), if at all. It then, inevitably, strikes me that much time has passed since I have spoken with this or that person, for various reasons. It makes me sad, to be sure, but it also makes me think about how easy it is to forget about people. Not just forget about them really, but forget the facts about them. Things they like, things they've told me and I them, their history and such. It's a bizarre feeling when you realize that certain people you were, once, at least minor friends with, have become nearly complete strangers again. As I have only my own mind to work with, I do not know whether this is a common occurrence with most people, or whether this is yet another peculiar quirk of my mind (I swear I have a memory like a sieve some times). I suppose that it does happen to us all to some degree. We return for a school reunion years later and discover we barely remember half the people we used to know. Still...
***

On an aside, I must say that I am having an on-going struggle with the use of semi-colons. I get the general gist of semi-colon use, but malheureusement (unfortunately), I do not quite have the same inherent, and natural, grasp of them as I have of most other english speech. Either I didn't read enough books with semi-colon usage to have picked up the how-to, or, uh, something. The problem I keep running into is that I very much feel that most of my sentences are not quite complete and need the semi-colon to continue, but I can't very well have nothing but semi-colons bounding about. Tisn't proper. I should get my hands on a copy of Pure Drivel again sometime. There's that one excerpt of Martin's where he uses only a single period in a rather large bit of writing, while still managing to keep the whole thing grammatically correct. Pure genius.

Classical Gangstas

Incidentally, I absolutely abhor replacing "er" with "a" in words, but saw no other way around it in this particular instance. Damn you, rapers of language!

Anyway, a thought popped into me noggin this evening while driving home and seeing a suspicious looking convergence of vehicles and people in a place not usually so full at this time of evening. I heard a blast of "gangsta" rap (how white do I sound right now, honestly) and it further solidified the potential gang happenings in my mind. Basically, it occurred to me that gang people do tend to have certain musical types associated with them.

I want to meet the gang that listens to classical. They'd be all like, "we rock it old school, bi-yatch. This ain't your mutha-f'ing sh**, we down with the m-f'ing Mozart!" And I'd be all like, "word", and then I'd run in terror. Or in the words of Xander, "I laugh in the face of danger, then I hide until it goes away." Anyway, I think it'd be awesome to have this tough looking group all chilling with classical music. They could go to war with rival gangs over whose style was the most under-appreciated of the period, or who got the most 18th century action. Or they could fight over the various interpretations of musical theory, heck if I know.

They could even have sweet gang names like, well, I haven't actually got any cool gang names involving classical composer names done up in a street manner, but I imagine it would be quite amusing. Heh, instead of the Suranos, or whatever the hell they're called, we could have the Salieries, or some such. I am open for suggestions.