“So? What can I get ya?”

The familiar voice arrived long before the owner did. Gliding from the other side of the bar to this one, eyes fixed on the new arrival.

“Nothing fancy tonight. Just the usual will do.”

“Ya sure?”

“Yeah. Had a rough day. I just need to power down a little.”

A short glimpse of disappointment passed the face of the barkeeper, but quickly made way for a more worried look.
Not taking her eyes of her costumer and friend she grabbed a bunch of bottles. Her tail swirled around a little before producing a glass from beneath the bar.

“Oh… and could you put it on my tab? I’m a tad short right now. Please?”

The routinely motion of mixing and pouring the drink suddenly froze. Slowly and delicately she put the bottles and glass down in front of her and put her head into the now free hands. With a faint smile she said:

“You do realize that ya didn’t pay that tab for about three months now do ya?”

An overly exaggerated look of surprise now entered the customers eyes as she buried her face firmly in her right hand.

“Ah shit. In that case, mind loaning me a bit of creds?”

“I guess I could maybe…”

“Dun’cha worry bout it! Your drink’en on house t’night!”

The voice boomed over a few tables and left a neat little empty line of sight onto a small Orc who, grinning like a happy idiot, raised his own glass in approval before returning to his own business.

“Thanks a lot C, I will pay you back later this week.” And with a quick smirk she turned back to the barkeeper. “You heard your boss. I got a free ride this evening.”

“Like that’s new.
We owe ya for last week anyhow.”

“Nah! Forget about that. Those punks had it coming to to them.”

“Still it’s good to know there’s an extra arm available.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

The barkeeper absent-mindedly finished two cocktails while poking the dark gray metal of the costumers synthetic arm.

Most other guest already left and those who didn’t were deep in conversation. After the last one left the Orc left his table and walked over to the bar where, by now, the two of them had collapsed into each other.
He carried his employee to her room in the cellar and the customer into the guest room. As far as he was concerned it could have also been called her room.
With a knowing smile he thought of how they would be feeling in the morning. Maybe he should prepare some soycaf just in case.

He had to enjoy evenings like this while they lasted after all.

Please don’t ask. This scene has been in my mind for far too long now. I know my storytelling ( especially dialog scenes )  sucks even worse than my usual writing, but I guess I could not help myself.

Or was is lost over time?

I’m not sure. But it’s something that hit me very recently.

So far I made no secret of the fact that I am not all that fond of my older works. Be it image, text or anything else.
But when I scrolled through the archive of a friends blog just a few days ago I made a discovery.

I don’t even know why I looked at the stuff in the first place. My best guess is that I was searching for something specific. But I could just have been bored.

Point is: I saw all those articles. And remembered how I initially read each one of them. What happened at that time. And in some cases even what sparked the entry to begin with.
I even saw some that depicted events or things I wrote about myself.

When I thought to myself that maybe I should check out what I did back then, I suddenly felt sad.
I realized that I could not do so. My archives are gone. Deleted when I switched my web service provider and started this new blog.
I didn’t notice back then. But I had more than a years worth of stuff written in there. Time flies by far too fast for stuff like this to register.
It just accumulates, piles up. And before you know it, the last few years of your life are compiled into a digital archive. Saving whatever you thought was relevant at the time.

The fact that I lost that never really bothered me. I thought I knew my memories. And I do.
And after all. Why should I bother with my old stuff? It’s horribly deformed and the writing is just lacking in so many ways.
But just thinking about a single article from that time makes me see how little of what I thought back then still remains.

Sure. I know what I think about the stuff right now. And most of it will be similar. But it still seems like I lost something in between. Something I would have been able to not recall but re-read. In my own words.

And so, the conclusion dawned upon me. It’s not that I want to read how I wrote back then. What words I used in which way.
It’s about what I wrote. What I wanted to fix unto the page. What was important to me at that very moment. A moment like this.

Here’s hoping that, in a year or two, when I will consider these words to be uncoordinated manglings of the English language, I’ll look at what I wanted to say with them.
And here’s hoping they’ll still be there.

Has it really been 3 months since I started updating this site in a regular fashion? It seems like this was just a silly idea just yesterday.

Obsessive-compulsion-disorder can be rather fun. Or not. Depending on your position.

I’d not say that my case is particularly severe, but it presents itself in more than one way.
Some of them I find amusing, others annoying. And then there are the ones I could not live without.

The fun part is that many people don’t really notice. They just think it’s a bit weird when I proceed to sort and shift the items from my shopping cart in a way that resembles real life Tetris. But they probably don’t think that I’d rather die than not having them arranged in that way. And god help me if they don’t point in the same direction.
There will be blood.

I still remember that one time my sister and a friend of mine rearranged my DVD collection. They thought me insane when I not only noticed but instantly changed it back to the way it was before.
The joke here is that I own a few dozen of them and they are stacked in no particular order beside the one in my head that demands certain boxes are next to each other because of color, lettering, genre, producer or my personal liking of the movie itself.
I can recall the exact arrangement from the top of my head.

Then of course there’s the almost stereotypical urge to wash my hands. And I don’t mean the “In the morning” kind of way. I had people thinking that maybe I suffer from bladder problems because I ran to the bathroom so often.
When I’m working, a dozen times per hour can be considered normal for me.

I could go on.
With all those little things. Like my deep seated need to sort gummy bears ( and any other small confectionery ) by color and size. I then proceed to eat them in a way that keeps the piles symmetrical.
Normal people don’t seem to get why and how it matters that colors are evenly matched.
And don’t even get me started on a tower defense game. If the map does not allow me to build my towers in an orderly way, I don’t play it.

The interesting part in all of this is, at least for me, how I am aware of all that.
I know fully well that I don’t need to do that. Nothing bad will happen if I don’t.

But no matter what I try or do. I’ll wind up falling back into these and many other little habits.

To people really think it’s a coincidence or pure choice that I wear the same sort of clothes for about 4 or 5 years now?