Hello

My name is maht. I am a "blogger" residing in the city of Chicago, which sits beside an enormous lake. It is a humble city, but I am permitted to tell you that it is perhaps the largest Chicago in the world. It is certainly the largest on the surface of the planet.

I am returning to "blogging" after an absence of nearly 40 years. I have been informed that I spent the first 20 years in a catatonic state, rising occasionally to dance when a good song played on the radio, but otherwise unengaged. They tell me that I then heaved (or possibly hove) a long, weighty sigh and fell asleep for another 20 years.

They tell me these things over and over again, at ear-splitting volume, because they seem to think—these doctors and nurses who come around every thirty minutes or so—that I am either deaf or stupid. I do my best to be both, as I hate to disappoint people.

When I get tetchy, I point out that although I have been living in seclusion within their walls for nearly 40 years, I am still only 33 years old. This makes one of the nurses cry. Every time. I don't want to have that kind of power over her.

In my day, I kept what would probably be called an "analog blog." Although this is already short for "analog weblog," it can be further reduced to "anablog." We kept these "anablogs" by moving an ink-filled tube across a pulverized mass of tree flesh known as paper. When we finished a thought or a page, we either ate the paper or burned it as fuel.

It was essential that no one ever know what we had written. Something about Communism, I think.

Before that, "blogs" were kept by carving symbols into clay tablets, which were then baked in a kiln for six hours, ground up, and used to make sidewalks. Some of these sidewalks still exist, and if you lower your head right down next to them you can almost feel the amateur poetry and the stories about children, pets, work, entertainment, and a host of other things from these long-gone days.

A nurse has just been in the room. She told me that it is not necessary to put quotation marks around all of the terms relating to blogs. In the stunned silence that followed (How did she know what I was writing? Do I write the same thing each day? Or are they merely watching me?), she stabbed me in the leg with a needle filled with a clear fluid. I do not mind being drowsy, even though it does not mean I will fall asleep.

I told her I am 33 years old, and she did not cry, because she is not the nurse who cries when I tell her this. Instead, she looked at me for a long moment and then spoke:

"At night, I hear two women fighting noisily in the street outside of my apartment," she said. "If I hear the sound of breaking glass, then I will also hear a police siren after an interval of seven to thirteen minutes. The darkened living room of my apartment will flash blue and red for a little while, and then it will be both quiet and dark again."