It's for charudee!

I don't usually do the charity fundraiser thing - I'm awfully shy about asking people for cash and it seems rude and slightly weird when I'm having fun.  But this Druid Challenge muddy marathon is different - it's keeping me awake with good old existential dread. 

So the charity thing is a hook.  It's the big ol' "you can't back down now, boy" that's going to keep me going at mile seventeen when the end is still out of sight and the sleet is coming down.  Yes, I'm exploiting cute little orphan children to push me to the finish.  No, of course I have no morals.

What charity?  Red Cross - "unconditional care in a crisis" is as close to universal good guys as you're going to find.  www.justgiving.com/andygates. 

The Total Perspective Vortex

Time is a funny thing: Every so often it gets all H P Lovecraft on a fellow.  Take today: I've been killing time between dry heaves (nearly cleared, yay) by marking hill forts in OSM.  Nerdlisch!  But while I'm ticking and tagging, the sheer demented continuity of occupation here slaps me like a wet wing across the face: some of these sites are Neolithic, which means that for ten thousand years these parts have been occupied by people doing what people do - farming and fornicating and generally grubbing around in this damp, fertile dirt, busy being people.  Ten thousand years. 

It's at times like these I get a Stig Moment* and fancy I can see the campfires and the glow from roundhouses.  On a clear night, you can see forever.

...and that ten thousand years is trivial unto the span of humanity, which is trivial unto the span of life - that thin film of life on a tiny blue dot that is, itself, utterly insignificant on any cosmic scale.



* Stig of the Dump, not The Stig.  Best kids book evar.