Topic: Year-End Speech

[Gulanzon]

Love to me is an eleven-letter word beginning with an "I" and ending with sadness.

If all the world's a stage, maybe this is the last role I shall ever be cast. I may very simply wake up tomorrow living a dream.

Who knows? I may well have died long, long ago. Mayhaps this is just an illusory sequence that I will live for all eternity, unaware of the ultimate truth.

As the nursery rhyme goes; row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Who knows? We may each be dreamers unto ourselfs, floating gently down a stream that terminates at some point, the locus ultimus, merely pawns in some final grand design.

Remember the tale of the man who rescued the turtle and was whisked awake to the Dragon Palace, where three centuries passed in the span of but three days?

What if we each ride our own turtle, and time is naught more than an illusion?

Time does not move. We do.

This year has been long. The space between here and one month ago feels like an eternity, and returning to January first, I feel as if unfathomable hours have passed.

If I am going mad, then I welcome it. The world suddenly has a brilliant clarity, dispositura a perturbationibus.

We humans are creatures driven by opinion - the gift of perception is the curse of confusion.

I think my mind has been remodeled, I may never be any the wiser to this fact, as how can I compare the basis of all my comparisons?

Lum has shattered the shell of perceived reason, and woken me up to the fact that the one true order is the lack of it. Understanding can only be gotten through lack of it. The journey of a thousand leagues must begin with a single step, before there was something, there was nothing - all mean the same.

I close with this line, from Urusei Yatsura:

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely miscast actors."