Publicat la 6 septembrie 2011

Pe vremea când încă mai primeam mașinuțe, eram cu părinții în vizită la o fostă profesoară universitară a mamei mele. Nu eram ca Dl. Goe, așa că ei nu-și făceau griji că aș putea face ceva rău (asta s-a întâmplat într-o altă vizită). Din locul în care mă jucam, am auzit-o pe doamna profesoară povestindu-le cu mândrie părinților mei un episod aproape de neconceput la acea vreme. Fiul ei, student la acea vreme, mirat că profesorul său îl tot apostrofa pe un alt student, a îndrăznit să i se adreseze astfel:

„Hey, teacher, leave the kid alone!”

Ați recunoscut, probabil, unul dintre faimoasele versuri ale nu mai puțin faimoasei piese Another Brick in the Wall, de pe excepționalul album The Wall, al formației rock Pink Floyd.

Era primul meu contact cu Pink Floyd.

Și încă nu venise Revoluția!

Doamna profesoară locuia la Timișoara. Aveau să treacă ani buni până la libertatea de exprimare. Iar în decembrie ’89, tocmai de acolo avea să înceapă prăbușirea zidului care ne înconjura viețile.

Dar acel prim contact a fost atât de puternic — sunt tentat să fac o analogie tehnică, dar mă abțin — încât, de fiecare dată când ascult Pink Floyd, mă trec fiorii sau mi se face pielea de găină…

Coincidență sau nu, primul album Pink Floyd pe care l-am avut a fost The Wall, înregistrat pe o casetă BASF de 90 de minute!

Între timp, l-am oferit unui vecin adolescent, cu gusturi muzicale în formare…

Mai poate fi o coincidență faptul că avatarul meu preferat este o secvență din Comfortably Numb, cu Bob Geldof într-un fotoliu?

Cred că nu!

De fapt, avatarul acesta avea să-mi fie de folos mult mai târziu, după desființarea comunității ascultătorilor Virgin Radio. Împrăștiați care-ncotro, ne-am regăsit, totuși, câțiva dintre noi.

La un moment dat, cineva mi-a spus că mi-a recunoscut avatarul și că și-a dat seama că eram chiar eu, nu altcineva.

Și nici nu era de mirare.

Fotografia fusese făcută în 2007, la Budapesta, la concertul lui Roger Waters, The Dark Side of the Moon — spectacol care avea să includă și episoade din The Wall.

Așa că, dacă primul meu contact cu Pink Floyd a fost o voce auzită cu mult timp înainte de Revoluție, iar primul album a fost The Wall, poate că avatarul acela nu era chiar o simplă coincidență.

Poate că era doar o altă cărămidă din zid.

Publicat la 6 august 2011

Ieri am primit un email prin care unul dintre „contactele” mele mă avertiza că este periculos să deschid un email având un anumit subiect — aparent o actualizare de software.

Deoarece contul respectiv de email îl verific destul de rar, m-am gândit că avertismentul ar putea fi tardiv. Astfel, aș fi putut deschide emailul cu pricina, primit în contul de email pe care îl folosesc mai des, înainte să fi fost pus în gardă. Este puțin probabil să se fi întâmplat chiar așa ceva, dar mă gândeam la posibilitatea asta, în general, nu neapărat la situația mea.

Dacă utilizatorul — experimentat, aș zice — citește cu atenție titlul emailului, își poate da seama că actualizarea respectivă nu se referă la un program pe care îl are instalat pe calculator. Este vorba despre o aplicație online a firmei care i-a furnizat și sistemul de operare. Actualizarea se face fără intervenția utilizatorului, așa că citirea emailului este inutilă, ba chiar periculoasă, după cum suntem avertizați.

Văzând o listă întreagă de adrese de email — am numărat peste 50, printre care multe ale unor persoane pe care nu le cunosc — m-am întrebat care o fi, de fapt, scopul acestor mesaje.

Protecția unui cont de email nu depinde doar de utilizator. Serviciul de email are propriile filtre care încearcă să detecteze mesajele suspecte, iar programele de securitate de pe calculator mai adaugă și ele un strat de protecție. Dar, până la urmă, mai există și utilizatorul, care poate apăsa pe un link tocmai pentru că mesajul pare suficient de convingător.

Cel mai probabil, lista aceea lungă de adrese putea fi rezultatul neglijenței expeditorului. Sau poate că cineva care are nevoie de asemenea liste ar putea profita foarte bine de o asemenea neglijență. Dacă ai nevoie, din diverse motive, de o listă de adrese de email, trebuie să plătești pentru ea. Și cum o poți obține fără să plătești?

Îți avertizezi prietenii să nu deschidă un email foarte periculos care circulă pe web!

Este foarte probabil să se întoarcă destul de repede o listă mai stufoasă decât cea pe care ai trimis-o tu.

Calea către iad este pavată cu bune intenții.

Desigur, nu știm dacă acesta era motivul pentru care mesajul fusese trimis. Poate era pur și simplu o încercare bine intenționată de a-i avertiza pe ceilalți.

Și pentru că vorbeam de o lungă listă de adrese de email, am mai observat că, în anumite situații, emailurile trimise unui număr atât de mare de destinatari ajung direct în folderul Spam, de unde este foarte probabil să nu fie citite. Astfel, inițiativa — lăudabilă, poate — de a-ți salva prietenii ajunge să fie ignorată „din oficiu”…

Cel mai bine, într-o asemenea situație, ar fi ca mesajul să fie trimis fiecărui prieten în parte. Asta înseamnă, desigur, un consum mai mare de timp.

La un moment dat s-ar putea chiar să te plictisești să trimiți atâtea mesaje…

Așa e când ai o mulțime de prieteni!

Dar oare toți îți sunt prieteni adevărați? Pe toți vrei să-i salvezi? Ce-ar fi să încercăm să facem o selecție? Una serioasă!

Oare cu câți prieteni adevărați am rămâne?

Dar asta este un alt subiect, așa că nu îl dezvolt mai mult decât am făcut-o deja…

În fine, cred că cel mai adecvat comportament în ceea ce privește emailurile nesolicitate este un pic de reținere.

Dacă mesajul ne este adresat și îl așteptăm, verificăm expeditorul și conținutul. Dacă nu îl așteptăm, chiar dacă pare să vină de la cineva cunoscut, este bine să fim precauți.

Dacă nu cunoaștem expeditorul, cu atât mai mult.

Dacă mesajul nu ne este adresat și nu cunoaștem nici expeditorul, îl ignorăm.

Iar dacă vreunul dintre mesajele de mai sus a ajuns în Inbox, îl putem declara Spam. Dosarul cu mesaje de acest fel se golește, de obicei, automat, dar nu se supără nimeni dacă îl mai golim și noi din când în când.

Publicat la 4 august 2011

DSPS/D (Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome/Disorder) – sindromul/dereglarea fazei de somn întârziate – este o dereglare/întârziere a ritmului circadian al unei persoane. Dacă subiectul nu are un program de respectat (școala, serviciul), aș spune că un program de somn decalat față de cel al semenilor cu un program de zi (de la 9 la 5) nu reprezintă o problemă.

Situația se complică doar atunci când trebuie să se trezească înainte de a-și fi terminat cele 8 ore de somn pentru a respecta programul impus de societate.

Este ca și cum ceasul biologic ar fi rămas în urmă cu două-trei ore față de ceasul social.

Eu am această dereglare de la sfârșitul adolescenței. Mă întreb oare dacă mi-aș putea regla bioritmul (ritmul circadian) schimbându-mi domiciliul cu două fusuri orare spre apus…

Dar, cum nu mi-am propus să fac această schimbare, îndrăznesc să îi întreb pe cei ce citesc această postare și s-au confruntat cu o astfel de problemă. Știu că probabilitatea este extrem de mică, dar nu mă costă nimic să lansez întrebarea. Să fie acesta motivul pentru care nu am plecat în vest până acum? ;–)

Vorbind de probabilități, 3 persoane din 2000 au această problemă. Dintre cele peste douăzeci de milioane de vorbitori de limbă română, mulți sunt copii, mulți nu au acces la internet, iar dintre cei cu acces la internet puțini sunt interesați de această postare, iar în sfârșit, dintre cei din urmă, câți să aibă acest tip de dereglare?

În fine, chiar dacă aș reuși să îmi reglez bioritmul astfel încât să mă regăsesc printre ceilalți 1997 cu un ritm circadian normal, trebuie să fac față și unei alte probleme: dereglarea datorată muncii în schimburi/ture: SWSD (Shift Work Sleep Disorder)… Dar după atâția ani de lucru în ture, aș spune că nu e chiar rău! Problemele diverse rămân totuși pe tapet…

• Notă, 2026: În textul de mai sus am pornit de la o statistică de 1,5 persoane la 1.000, pe care am transformat-o în 3 persoane la 2.000 pentru a putea face mai ușor calculul probabilistic din postare. Între timp, am avut și ocazia să-mi verific într-un fel întrebarea despre fusul orar. Am petrecut o lună la New York, la aproximativ șapte fusuri orare spre vest de România. Cu toate acestea, continuam să adorm în jurul orei 3 și să mă trezesc dimineața târziu, în jurul orei 11. Dacă mai putem spune că 11 AM este dimineață… Experiența nu este, desigur, un experiment științific, dar este un mic răspuns personal la întrebarea pe care mi-o puneam în 2011.*

I hate the way...

SO many great movies.

Tonight, since it's a nice 10based number, we watched Ten Things I hate About you.

Julia STyles was amazeballs on Dancing with the stars and it seemed perfect to watch her movies.

Ten things and Save the last, as well as an animation festival.

busy night drawing goofy things and just being.

WONDERFUL weather tonight for a walk.

But ten things;

MAG. NA. FIQUE!!

I hate the way you talk to me And the way you cut your hair I hate the way you drive my car I hate it when you stare I hate your big dumb combat boots And the way you read my mind I hate you so much that it makes me sick And even makes me rhyme I hate the way you're always right I hate it when you lie I hate it when you make me laugh Even worse when you make me cry I hate it when you're not around And the fact that you didn't call But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you Not even close Not even a little bit Not even at all

—

Of course, it's 2am. But since the seal on Ledger is cracked, it seems appropriate to now watch A Knight's Tale.

Remind me why I don't get more writing done.

I went to the store to buy a bag and a card for my friend‘s birthday, I know that something that kind of hurt me earlier was thinking about how I will likely put in more effort than I will receive for things like my birthday or Christmas because to me, I understand how much they matter and how much I wished for them and so I would like to be able to do that for others that I care about. But a part of me would always kind of hurt a little bit feeling about how I would do this thing that I would so desperately want in return, but maybe it’s just the endorphins after a good leg day, but I’m strong enough and proud enough that I can do this with no expectation of return. I am doing this because of the love that I am filled with, and this is not conditional, this is not at all tied to anything I will get back in return, I do these things because that is the love I would like to put into the world. This is the same logic in the same reasoning that makes me proud to smile at people even when they explicitly frown in response, and I’m assuming it’s mostly just because they’re caught off guard, but I will regard this continue to smile and be kind to people and polite, even if I am not treated the same way back. And I am so incredibly happy and proud of myself every time I face rejection like that because that is a sign that I’m alone with my desire of who I want to be, even without the benefits, I continue to be positive and a friendly face. And I am so proud of that fact. I believe that I can do the same thing with presence and giftgiving, it’s a little bit more difficult because of my history and my need for it to some extent, but I can recognize that and still continue to give from the bottom of my heart. And when I think about it like this, I feel warm, because I am not worried about some other expectation about receiving anything in response, I rather just get to enjoy doing something nice. And I think this is the kind of person that I am incredibly proud to reflect on. I made another friend at the gym today, and I talked to a couple new people, and I fell in love with certain songs again to the point where I was singing along on the drive home at the top of my lungs. I caught myself with the drummer mouth while I was trying to pick up the drum line for some of the songs, and then that made me happy because I thought about how the more I imitate, the less I imitate. And today is just one of those days where I don’t need to fight to be grateful and happy for being alive, it just simply is.

Rebellion against a false premis

There is no single route into the work. Style must be capable of meeting readers in different terrains without sacrificing coherence.

We are out for a walk tonight. It is finally the diminishing of a cruel summer. It comes to my mind a wonderful concept of how small we are:

A man can count the number of seeds in an apple. But only god can count the number of apples in a seed.

Huge crescent moon setting tonight in the western sky. Sitting on a bench at the university with a a plaque indicating an event of some sort in 2010.

Lining the ten foot wide walkway are elm trees. The little gold leaves rustle in the warm night breeze. The trees have taken a note from the grasses and slipped into preservation mode against the hear t and the absolute dry at the end of summer.

Perhaps they pray, as do we all, that next week will bring relief from this furnace of existence.

At my feet I can see motion in the cracks of the sidewalk. A closer inspection reveals the little black ants are hard at work in spite of the late hour. I wonder if the grasshopper is nearby in a tiny hammock between two branches of a small shrubbery.

In spite of the breeze, it’s a hot night. As they have been for months. But it’s nothing compared to the daytime.

We started early this morning with the missus headed north with an elderly friend who wanted company on a shopping trip across the Red River. They bought nothing, but it reportedly was worth the time as the older friend needed to vent.

She lives with her sister. They are both widows and in spite of both of them having children, they really have each other. For one reason or another, their offspring see them not at treasures to be guarded, but as resources to be harvested.

And though they really only have each other, they fight like two cats. Sometimes kind and sometimes murderous.

Once she was back, we started prepping to deliver some furniture we no longer need to a new woman in the congregation. I’m not sure what her story is, but she has almost no possessions. So it is very helpful to find a home for this sofa and the table.

Hoping to avoid lifting AT ALL, I call a couple of of young friends. The 16yo is game, but the 25yo is just too busy. So, some lifting, I guess. I hook up my little trailer I have affectionately named Kermit the Towed and, load the table and the couch and head over to pick up Leo.

His mom didn't name him after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. 

Not to mention:
Meet me In St Louis (1944) An American in Paris (1951) Hard Days Night (1964) Once (2007) Cabaret (1972) – Okay, 16 is probably a little young for this weight Fame (1980)

Eeesh. I could be at this all day.

The point is, Leo needs to see the musical landscape. And get a clue.

When I asked him what kind of degree a HS music teacher needed, he answered, 'Uh, not sure, I guess a masters?'.

Seems a bit much.

'How much will that degree cost you?' Prodding to see if he'd considered all the costs.

'Ummmmm, not sure. Maybe, like $4000?' He answered ponderously.

I laughed, 'Per credit HOUR?'.

I encouraged him to look into those little details while he's catching up on all the glorious Musi captured on celluloid.

---

Heading out into the heat, I realize I’ve skipped breakfast and lunch, solved by a stop at Luigi’s for a slice of Mediterranean pizza. I’m so glad they stared a by-the-slice shop.

Luigi is selling a 2006 version of our poor dinged-up Benz. I neither need nor want a new-to-us vehicle. But, the low miles and good price make it very tempting.

I will later go home and get a microfiber and a bottle of goo-gone. A half an hour later, the car looks positively dignified. No perfect, but the damage will be hardly noticeable.

After pizza, we make our way to the QT down the street to fuel up. Walking in to pay, a rough looking fellow sitting at one of the shaded tables comments, ‘I like your shirt! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!’

It is a design of my own from the MyPopYourPop I did 10 years ago.

TEN years ago? Christ!! I’m old enough that 10 years now feels like yesterday. While 10 months ago feels like a millennia.

How. Weird.

I smile at the man. He has the rough edge of a homeless man. But not the complete disarray.

So I go in to the store and pick up a drink, on the way out, I make eye contact and nod.

The man then says, 'Say there, Danger, don't have a couple of quarters you could spare, do you?'

Smiling, I say, 'Sure!' And reach in my pocket and snatch the loose coins flopping around.

Then I used an old trick any time I patronize a panhandler: I ask for more info. I feel like I've purchased the entry fee to a bit of a show. If that diminishes the human, I'm sorry. But it is is a public space and they approach me, so I feel no guilt.

“So,” I begin, “homeless? That must be rough. How long have you been toughing it out here in the raw world?”

“Yeah. It ain't easy. But you gotta do what you gotta do. I've been out on the streets for about 3 years.”

“Three years!” I said. “How on earth do you end up from regular life to no place to live... we're probalby about the same age? Maybe I'm a little older.“

”I'm 53, born April 10, 1973. It's wild. I used to have a job and a family. But then I made a series of bad choices and ended up in prison. While I was inside, my parents passed away. MY wife moved on and I lost everything.”

I was flabbergasted. Though, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. We talked for about 15 minutes and we exchanged names. I related some of my fears as an aging man in the United States with no retirement plan, savings or substantive possessions of value. Essentially, we both saw how tenuous our existence is in this world. Everyone clawing to keep their place and that ledge of place is getting narrower and narrower al the time.

Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to pitch a hope from the Bible.

“You know Robert, I'm a long time student of hte Bible. And I've lived almost every day of the last 40 years expecting the world to scene to shift dramatically. Do yo u mind if I share something from the Bible?”

“Oh, yeah, sure man. I'm a Christian, I'm confident God will fix this eventually.” Robert said.

I opened by app to Psaml 37: 10, 11.

Just a little while longer, and the wicked will be no more; You will look at where they were, And they will not be there.

But the meek will possess the earth, And they will find exquisite delight in the abundance of peace.

“Man, that sounds great... I just wish it would hurry up.” Robert told me.

“I know. Me too. I've been praying for it for decades. And I won't lie, I get nervous sometimes that it won't come soon enough. But you know what the Bible says God CANNOT do?” I asked.

Robert smiled, “Huh... you know I just always heard everything was possible with God.”

“Two things that are impossible for the Creator, Robert,” I smiled “He cannot die and he cannot lie. That means if he says the train is coming' it's coming.”

“I guess that's true. I never thought about that.”

My wife was waiting and it was about 105º. I offered to look for him in the future and explain why we can have so much confidence in God's word.

As a parting farewell, I dug out my last two dollars and offered them to Robert. His eyes lit up.

“Oh! God bless you, man! That's all I needed to get a slice of pizza! I'll keep you in my prayers.

---

We're busy counting the one, two, three, four in front of us. Meanwhile, the Creator is watching not just you and I, but every human ever. And He understands something we cannot comprehend: the complex path that brings all of creation back into its original state.

Eventually all these imbalances will corrected. Perfection, the Bible promises.

Maybe I belong where Robert is. Cast into the wild to figure it out for myself.

I'm suddenly thinking of Samson. How we all start powerfully and with the best of intent. But with time and a series of questionable decisions, we lose our power entirely.

But not ourselves. Samson may have been in fetters and blind, but he still had a desire to be the man he was before. Someone who loved Jehovah.

Maybe that's what keeps us going. Robert, Samson, me, You... that desire to be the potential in each of us.

Robert's just living day to day. Hoping for something better. Asking for it. But not always responsive when it comes.

Sounds familiar.

And what I said was true, I've been waiting for the train to come for decades. Some waited their whole lives. I might be too.

For some it's harder than it is for others. The right team makes long days short and years fly by quickly as a wink. 
Again, choices.

I'll keep my eyes peeled for Robert. And keep him in my prayers. Maybe you can t0o. We'll both pray for a man who maybe deserved what he got. But then again, who deserves this life?

We were created to worship God. To live, to have laughter and warmth and happiness. Peace all of our days. To be known and seen and valued. Prized and loved. Not commodified or treated as decoration.

My life isn't perfect. I've made some critical errors. Some are extremely difficult to live with. But I can live with them.

I have to.

---

If I got the chance to push those pillars, I'd take it. Bet you would too.

---

I don't think I've ever been in this sort of situation in life. I used to have a lot less to do, and a lot more stress. These days I have just about endless projects but I'm never really all that worried or stressed out about any of it. Sure there are times I'm worn down, tired, and a little irritated but it isn't the same. The things to do I enjoy and if some of it never gets done things will be okay.

We've had quite the summer on the homestead this year. Many things went wrong but we have learned a lot through it all. Right now we are nurturing a heifer that has a swollen knee and another bull got very lethargic and bloated. The bull is on the up and up recovering. The heifer is slowly getting to the barn, she'll be in there tomorrow. We splinted her leg and put a comfery compress on it to help the recovery. We'll give her a long rest in the barn so we can keep an eye on her and give further aid. Our garden was fairly unproductive this year but we still have a harvest. It's been a great year. And we still have a lot to do. But why worry about it all?

The main things we are laboring on now is firewood, garden, fencing (I like to pretend this is sword play, but it's more boring than that), sheep and turkey barn, and bull winter shelter. I think we can finish this all before winter. The only mandatory thing in my view is the firewood. The rest is gravy, and it's likely most or all of that gravy will be pouring in by the time winter hits.

It's been a great year. Love you all, hope your year has been great as well. There likely is not much need to stress about the things coming, gone, or never quite done around the home.

Do you ever stop and think about all the things you have done in life and all the skills you have learned? It's not something I really think about. Not often, anyway. I have a girlfriend who sends me these little memes that list any number of things that someone is supposed to have done, because she knows I enjoy that sort of thing. She tells me her score and persons she works with who also take it, and I am always quite surprised. I have usually done most of the things on the list, if not all of them. Often at a much younger age than the group she is telling me about ,who has done almost none of them.

I used to think that was a generational thing, or a location thing. Maybe a socioeconomic thing. It's probably all of the above, and a little bit more. It is strange how so much becomes lost so quickly. There are things I just take for granted as common sense knowledge that most people I know have no idea how to perform. I would say that in the last decade or so, my perspective of people has changed quite a bit.

We place so much emphasis on diplomas that often teach book skills, but can forget the importance of hands-on training. We also forget that a person does not need to attend a university or college to educate themselves on a subject in today's world. We forget to analyze, question, discuss, and think in a broad direction. We are also not taught to listen. Listen. Listen. We judge persons for their vocabulary, and we weaponize language and dialect. Yet we never know where a good idea will come from or what might spark our imagination.

I think that I am very fortunate to be part of Gen-X. At my earliest years, I was being taught by people who were alive in the 1800s. I was shown skills from people who participated in both World War I and World War II. Not to mention everything that came afterwards. I was taught how to grow my own food. How to track an animal. How to navigate through the woods. How to find clean water. How to gather seeds. How to work traps. How to shoot a rifle. The aspects of working on a car. How to do all sorts of things both inside and outside of the house, before I ever attended school. Obviously, just the basics at that time. But I was a sponge soaking up everything around me, and everything around me was teaching me how to survive without modern help necessarily.

I listened to the stories being told by both men and women. I do not even remember the names of some of the older generation, but I adored them at the time. I learned how to ride a horse. I attended many a rodeo. I learned how to do things that I probably don't even realize that I learned how to do, just by listening and watching. I was curious. That curiosity was encouraged. I quickly learned how to read and devoured books. All kinds of books. Including encyclopedias. Encyclopedias were magical at that time. I deeply enjoyed reading them from cover to cover because I never knew what I was going to discover. But there was always the chance to inspire further exploration.

I ran all over town both on two legs and on a bicycle. Adult totally knew where I was going if I actually told the truth about where I was going. I did eventually get to wherever I said I was going, so that I wasn't lying, but I wandered a lot. I learned to climb high, to take risks, and to be thoughtful in doing so. I learned how high I could go and jump before it started to hurt. I also learned landing the wrong way from a very short height at the right trajectory could break a bone. I aspired to be both a monkey and a dolphin. I wanted to be an eagle. It is fortunate that I could not get supplies to attempt to make myself “proper” wings without being caught.

It is also probably fortunate that I did not live anywhere near cliffs. I would like to think I was bright enough not to do something stupid, but I would not have bet money on that. I was always pushing myself and doing things considered crazy by today's standards. At the time, it was just explorative play and mini adventures. That is all still just my childhood. And it continued to grow as I got into my teens. Then came the adult years. I look at what I have done and the knowledge I have acquired between those years, and I admit that I might be a little impressed with myself. Or rather I should say, that if someone else told me what I know I have learned, I would be impressed with them. It's a little different since it is just me. To me, it's no big deal because it's been acquired naturally.

I am often told that I shouldn't disparage myself. Usually the person who says it doesn't realize I'm not disparaging myself. I'm confident in my skills. I'm also aware of how much I don't know, and I'm not afraid to admit it. There is so much that I don't know, but damn will it be fun trying to acquire more and more knowledge with the years that I have remaining in this particular body.

In recent years, I was conversing with someone and they asked if I saw myself as a renaissance woman. I contemplated it for a moment, and thought how wonderful would that be. I think I said something along the lines of, “Maybe. Or a polymath. I'm just a perpetual student with infinite curiosity.” They then explained how being a renaissance man is a negative thing in today's society. I listened to their reasoning, and was a bit humored. Give me a renaissance man! They are very under-appreciated.

Today, I look around at everything around us. Our entire society uses mechanisms that we cannot recreate ourselves. We cannot make computer chips or many other things by ourselves. The majority of the world does not even have the understanding of how to do it. Much less the multi-million dollar machines required to do it. Hell, most people no longer know how to change a tire by themselves. They're driving this car day after day, and cannot make a simple repair. They can't change their spark plugs. They can't change their oil filter. They can't change the oil. Many people can't follow instructions. Simple instructions.

I think about that. There is fortune in being able to do something with your own hands. Yes, sometimes it is not necessary. Yes, time is priceless. But so is knowledge, understanding, and capability. A vast lack of knowledge and willingness to learn and continue learning is a big part of what is wrong in our world. Not to mention arrogance, hard-headedness, ego, laziness, and selfishness. With a dash of being blind to the big picture, time, and just how essential ecosystems are. Nobody likes vultures, cockroaches, or sanitation workers. Yet without them, we would be royally fucked. Completely and royally fucked.

I wonder where we are going. The powers that be want us to believe it is outer space. That is such an impossibility on so many levels at this time that it is mind-boggling how many people don't comprehend the vast hurdles that have to be jumped in order to make that happen. (Hello, run on.) We simply don't have the data nor the ability to do so much of what is required to make that a reality. We are nowhere near it. We are so far away from it, that we don't even know everything that we need to be looking for.

I suppose that is how it has always been with us, isn't it? Instead of relishing and nurturing what is under our own feet, we look out to the stars and want to be planted anywhere but where we actually grew from. I have no room to talk. I wanted to get away from as young as I can remember. Yet no matter what I've learned, or where I've gone, deep inside I am still that young child who just wants to dig her toes into the soil, and listen to the Earth sing.

Perhaps that is something else we have forgotten—the healing beauty of song and dance. As well as the wondrous orchestra of Mother Nature.

How about you? What have you learned? What do you not know, but hope to one day learn? What experiences have you acquired that are good to pass on?

We tell stories. We make judgments. We stand firm in our ideals. But do we remember the importance and gift that it is to be self-aware, to be capable of sharing, and if one's belief system says it to be true, do we know how to be good stewards? Or do we just flaunt a title with little to no responsibility or accountability for our actions or lack there of? Sometimes, I think that perhaps we are not as self-aware as we like to aggrandize ourselves to be.

I think of all I've learned and all I've done...It is a lot. But it's but a fraction of a fraction of a microscopic fraction of all that is waiting for me to soak in.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

There are three numbers describing how much water one building in Thane will drink, and they do not agree with one another by a factor of more than a thousand.

The building is a hyperscale data centre that Amazon Data Services India is developing on roughly 54 acres in Balkum-Majiwada, land bought from the Kalpataru Group in October 2022. The first number comes from Amazon's own public fact sheet, which puts the approved municipal water supply permit at 0.01 million litres a day — ten thousand litres, strictly for restrooms and drinking water. The second comes from filings made to the State Level Expert Appraisal Committee in August 2025, which described a requirement of 125 kilolitres a day; Amazon's later accounting reconciles this as ten kilolitres for human needs plus 115 kilolitres of treated sewage water for landscaping and irrigation. The third number comes from the Thane Municipal Corporation, which residents say has allocated 12 million litres a day of recycled sewage water to the facility.

Ten thousand litres. One hundred and twenty-five thousand. Twelve million.

The residents' group WakeUp Thanekars put those three figures side by side and asked the obvious question, which is not “how much water will this use” but “why does nobody appear to know”. That is the question that has been travelling across India for the past several months, and it is the question that, according to a Communications Today report published on 24 August 2026, has coincided with foreign funding for Indian data centres falling from a range of 600 to 900 million dollars a month in the first half of the year to roughly 100 million, with no foreign investment recorded at all in August.

Zero is a striking number. It is also, on its own, a nearly meaningless one. What follows is an attempt to work out what it actually measures.

A Building That Was Never Supposed to Be Controversial

Balkum was not chosen for a fight. It was chosen because Thane is forty minutes from the Mumbai metropolitan region that holds, according to CBRE, some 53 per cent of India's operational data centre supply, and because Maharashtra had made itself extremely easy to build in. The state's IT and ITeS policy offers up to 60 per cent exemption on electricity duty for fifteen years, full stamp duty exemption on land purchased for a data centre, additional floor space index, and single-window clearance. The Maharashtra industries department has earmarked land parcels inside MIDC industrial areas as dedicated data centre parks, and the state has classified data centres as an essential service — which means that when water and power are short, the facility is served first.

That classification is the detail residents keep returning to, because Thane is already short. At the mass gathering on 18 July 2026, where more than a hundred residents formed a human chain, Dayanand Nene noted that the city runs a daily shortfall of around 30 to 31 million litres. Meghna Shetty, an architect involved in the campaign, said that when representatives met the group they seemed to have understood the concerns but had no answers. Jatin Kothare, a finance professional, pointed to the 4,500 air-conditioning units planned for the site. Anuradha Rode, who lives in an adjacent residential complex, described the prospect of heat rejection from a twenty-two-storey structure reaching villagers' houses, and told reporters that the facility belonged in a designated technology park, not forty metres from bedroom windows. Manoj Pradhan, another opponent, framed it as a category error: not a corporate office block but industrial-scale digital infrastructure dropped into a densely packed residential ecosystem.

Amazon's rebuttals are specific and, in their own terms, credible. The company says it uses no water for cooling at any of its Indian data centres. It says the facility will draw power through its own dedicated extra-high-voltage substation connected to the transmission grid, not the local distribution network that serves homes and shops. It says the environmental impact assessment is publicly available on the government's PARIVESH portal, that tree felling was conducted under a valid Thane Municipal Corporation permit — 239 trees felled, 77 replanted, 2,209 compensatory saplings — and that generators run mostly for brief mid-day tests. It has invested 1.2 million dollars through its Right Now Climate Fund in Thane Creek restoration and funds STEM education for 900 students across nine schools.

Both accounts can be substantially accurate at once, and that is precisely the problem. A facility that consumes almost no water for cooling can still hold a 12 MLD municipal allocation on paper. A facility drawing from the transmission grid still draws 422 megawatts from a system that serves everybody. A facility with 193 diesel generator sets on standby still has 193 diesel generator sets. Nene's argument, as reported, was not that the numbers were sinister but that a project of this scale ought to be developed with adequate transparency, proper land-use compliance, infrastructure planning, and protection of the interests of the people living around it — and that the documentary record did not demonstrate any of those things.

The residents wrote to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. They met the municipal commissioner, Saurabh Rao. They sent legal interrogatories. They said they would go to the National Green Tribunal and the Bombay High Court. Flat prices in neighbouring complexes, by their account, fell by 20 to 50 lakh rupees.

An Index That Measures the Right Thing

Two weeks before the Balkum gathering, a review paper appeared on arXiv that supplies the analytical vocabulary this dispute has been missing. “AI Data Centers and the Water Use Feedback Loop”, by Basit A. Akinade, Amobichukwu C. Amanambu, Jonathan M. Frame and Shaolei Ren, submitted on 19 June 2026, formalises what the authors call the Water and AI Feedback Loop: data centres consume water for cooling, water scarcity constrains where they can be sited, and AI tools are in turn sold as a means of improving water system efficiency. These three dynamics are usually studied in isolation. The paper's contribution is to insist they are one circuit.

Its practical instrument is the Water Consumption Impact index, which quantifies a facility's demand not against national or basin-level totals but against the capacity of the utility that actually has to serve it. Applied across ten United States sites, the index produces a range that spans three orders of magnitude: from 0.2 per cent of host capacity to 134 per cent.

That upper figure deserves a moment. A Water Consumption Impact above 100 per cent means the facility's demand exceeds the entire capacity of the public water system hosting it. In national terms it may still be a rounding error — data centres remain a small fraction of any large country's total withdrawals. In community terms it is the whole system and then some.

This is the paper's central claim, and it reframes the Indian argument completely: the AI and water problem is not a national volumetric problem, it is a community-scale utility burden problem. Aggregate reassurance is therefore not merely unhelpful but structurally misleading. When Andhra Pradesh officials say no rural or residential water will be diverted, or when Amazon says its Indian facilities consume no cooling water, both statements can be true at the level they are pitched while telling a resident of Balkum or Adavivaram nothing whatsoever about the pipe outside their house. The index makes the mismatch legible. It also explains why every one of these disputes turns into an argument about numbers that nobody can reconcile: the parties are measuring against different denominators, and only one of those denominators is the one people live inside.

A companion review submitted the same day, “AI Data Centers and Power System Sustainability” by Yuhao Huang, Novarun Deb and Hamidreza Zareipour, runs the same logic through the electricity grid. Its finding is that rapid, spatially concentrated data centre load growth is outpacing clean energy deployment in several major regions — that the problem is not the total terawatt-hours but where they land and how fast. Concentration, again, is the variable that matters. Both papers arrive at the same structural conclusion from opposite utilities.

The Reservoir That Was Already Short

If Balkum is the case where the numbers do not reconcile, Visakhapatnam is the case where they do, and the result is worse.

Vizag receives roughly 410 million litres of water a day from its reservoirs and rivers against a stated requirement of 480 million. Rationing is routine for its 2.5 million residents. Into this, in October 2025, Andhra Pradesh signed a memorandum with Google's subsidiary Raiden Infotech for a gigawatt-scale AI hub, part of a 15 billion dollar commitment, with Adani Infra designated as the notified partner and AdaniConneX and Airtel's Nxtra as build partners. The state allocated 601.4 acres across three sites: 266.6 acres at Tarluvada near Anandapuram, 160 acres at Adavivaram and Mudasarlova, and 175 acres at Rambilli in Anakapalli district. The projected employment figure attached to the announcement was 188,000 jobs.

The objections are not primarily about volumes. They are about process. The 160-acre parcel at Adavivaram and Mudasarlova is endowment land belonging to the Simhachalam Devasthanam, and a public interest litigation now challenges its allocation. Land Conflict Watch's documentation records that around 204 acres of the Tarluvada holding consist of unrecorded “Shivaijamindar” lands whose ownership is undocumented, that survey numbers do not match actual possession, and that transfers of assigned land may run against the Andhra Pradesh Assigned Lands (Prohibition of Transfers) Act, 1977. Fifty-one households, 244 people, were recorded as affected as of February 2026. Compensation for D-Patta land was revised from 17 to 20 lakh rupees an acre after farmer representations, and for unrecorded land from 8.5 to 10 lakh. Many of the affected landholders are Dalit; one described having cleared jungle by hand over fifteen years to make the land workable.

The environmental record is where the compliance question becomes sharpest. The project was classified Category B2, a designation that exempts it from a full environmental impact assessment and from the public consultation that would otherwise accompany one. Around 90 per cent of the Tarluvada site reportedly falls within the Pedda Chukka Konda Reserve Forest. The Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary sits 860 metres away. The Human Rights Forum issued an alert on procedural violations on 18 October 2025, a week after the initial allocation order, and has since pursued matters before the National Green Tribunal's southern bench. The activist group Jal Biradari brought the water case; the Andhra Pradesh High Court asked the state government to respond, and the litigation was listed for hearing on 24 August 2026 — the same day the investment figures were published.

Andhra Pradesh's position is that no rural or residential water will be diverted, and that risk assessment has not been skipped. Google says it will deploy advanced air cooling specifically to protect local water resources. Neither statement addresses the objection actually being made, which is that the paperwork establishing who owns the land, what the cumulative environmental burden is, and which reservoir will supply what, was not completed before the land was handed over. In July 2026, residents and activists marched carrying placards reading “We cannot drink DATA” and “Power for people, not for megabytes”.

Why the Paperwork Does Not Ask

The reason these projects can advance without answering the questions is not evasion. It is that Indian environmental law, as currently written, largely does not pose them.

On 6 August 2026, in a written reply to Parliament, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change stated plainly that AI data centres do not, per se, require environmental clearance under the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006. Clearance is triggered only if the facility forms part of a building or construction project crossing threshold areas — 20,000 square metres of built-up area, or 50 hectares of township development, or 150,000 square metres. The trigger is floor area. It is not megawatts, not litres per day, not tonnes of heat rejected, not decibels at the boundary. A facility can therefore be assessed on the basis of how much ground it covers rather than how much of a city's utility capacity it absorbs, which is exactly the denominator error the Water Consumption Impact index was designed to expose.

The rest of the regime is fragmented by design. State pollution control boards enforce standards under the Water Act of 1974 and the Air Act of 1981. The Ministry of Jal Shakti oversees groundwater extraction. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency has issued District Cooling Guidelines. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has convened a working group on energy efficiency and water management in digital infrastructure. Nowhere in that architecture does a single authority hold a consolidated view of what a given campus will draw from a given system. The consolidated view could not be assembled in any case. A Down To Earth investigation of 21 August 2026 found that none of the major state data centre policies requires operators to disclose water consumption through a centralised reporting system, leaving regulators unable to identify emerging risks. It put national data centre consumption at around 150 billion litres a year, projected to more than double by the end of the decade, and cited Planet Tracker data placing India second among Asian countries for data centres in areas of extremely high water stress.

Bengaluru shows what happens when that architecture meets a decade of build-out. Karnataka has 32 private data centres, 31 of them in Bengaluru, clustered in Whitefield, Electronic City and the corridor towards Devanahalli. Nine major operators have committed 24,253 crore rupees for roughly 2,694 jobs. The state government's informal estimate of their combined water use is about 4,000 kilolitres a day; independent calculation, working from installed capacity and the standard planning figure, puts it nearer 20 million litres. The gap exists because, as a water consultant who examined the system observed, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board does not monitor where water goes for commercial purposes, and no agency verifies after approval whether a declared water source matches actual practice. Meanwhile the Central Ground Water Board finds Bengaluru extracting close to ten times its annual recharge, and Devanahalli exceeding permissible extraction by 169 per cent. In 2025, domestic users in the city faced 5,000-rupee fines for non-essential water use. Data centres faced no equivalent restriction, because they are classified as IT and ITeS rather than as large infrastructure.

The national backdrop is not reassuring either. The Dynamic Groundwater Resource Assessment released by the Ministry of Jal Shakti in December 2025 found 730 of India's 6,762 assessment units — 10.8 per cent — categorised as over-exploited, with the national stage of extraction at 60.63 per cent and the over-exploited units concentrated in the north-west, west and south. NITI Aayog's Composite Water Management Index work has long put the number of Indians facing high to extreme water stress at around 600 million.

Against that, in the Union Budget presented in February 2026, India offered foreign cloud providers a twenty-year exemption running from FY27 to FY47 on global income routed through Indian data centres, and the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 moved the incentive from entity-specific approval to a condition-based framework, extending it to leased facilities. The country has built a fiscal regime of unusual generosity on top of an environmental regime that does not ask the relevant questions.

The Bill That Arrives on Someone Else's Meter

The electricity story is subtler than the water story, and in the long run probably more consequential.

Amazon's defence in Thane — that the facility connects to the high-voltage transmission grid through its own dedicated substation and will not draw from the local distribution network — is technically sound and rhetorically incomplete. Indian retail tariffs are built on cross-subsidy. Commercial and industrial consumers pay somewhere between 30 and 80 per cent above the cost of supply; agricultural consumers pay less than 20 per cent of it; residential tariffs sit below cost. Industrial users typically carry a cross-subsidy premium of two to four rupees a unit on top of average supply cost, and that premium is what keeps power affordable for roughly 250 million residential consumers and 150 million farming households. Commercial and industrial demand is 40 to 43 per cent of the total.

A data centre is, on paper, the best customer a distribution company could hope for: a flat load, high consumption, reliable payment, tariffs of ten to twelve rupees a unit. But data centres are also unusually well placed to leave. Open access power purchased through long-term renewable contracts runs at roughly 3.50 to 5.00 rupees a unit against commercial discom tariffs of eight to eleven in Maharashtra and Karnataka, and the economics of a 400-megawatt load make the switch close to inevitable. Andhra Pradesh has gone further, approving private power distribution licences for data centre operators — an instrument previously reserved for utilities such as Tata Power and Adani Electricity Mumbai — allowing a hyperscale campus to become, in effect, its own discom, procuring directly and even sub-distributing unused contracted power.

Each of those steps is defensible on its own. Together they describe a mechanism by which the largest new industrial loads in the country exit the pool that subsidises everyone else's electricity, while the fixed costs of the network they were connected to remain to be recovered from a smaller base. The residents of Balkum worrying about power cuts are worrying about the wrong mechanism. The bill does not arrive as an outage. It arrives as a tariff order.

What the Investors Started Writing Down

Which brings us back to the number that prompted this article.

According to the Communications Today report, the deceleration was not only in value but in frequency: from two or three deals a month until June to one a month afterwards. It found that project documents showed discrepancies between the documented sourcing and level of water usage and the figures quoted publicly — the Balkum pattern, generalised. And it found that investors had begun raising community questions directly and increasingly in writing, with diligence lists now carrying the specific campus water source, the cooling architecture and the power arrangement as named line items.

That last detail is the one worth dwelling on, because it is the only part of this episode that is structural rather than episodic.

A protest is a temporary fact. A written diligence question is a permanent one. Once “what is the specific water source for this campus, and who else draws on it” enters a standard investment memorandum, it stays there for every subsequent deal in every subsequent state, and it stays there whether or not anybody is still marching in Thane. It converts a community grievance into a financing condition — which is to say, into a risk that has a price and therefore a lawyer. The same conversion is visible in independent advisory work on Indian data centre investment, which now treats grid capacity verification at 220 and 400 kV substations, thermal cooling architecture and state-specific permitting workflows as the difference between a performing asset and a stranded one, rather than as compliance boilerplate.

State policy has moved in the same direction and faster than the capital has. Gujarat notified the Viksit Gujarat Data Centre Policy 2026-29, targeting up to 7.5 gigawatts of capacity and an anticipated six lakh crore rupees of investment, and it did so with two hard physical conditions attached: eligible projects must source at least 51 per cent of operational electricity from renewables, and must draw water from desalination rather than from freshwater meant for agriculture or drinking. Dholera Industrial City Development issued a tender for consultants on a 200 MLD seawater desalination plant on 9 July 2026. Karnataka's information technology minister, Priyank Kharge, told the state assembly that data centres were heavy water and energy guzzlers, cited a planning figure of 25 million litres of water per megawatt per year, and confirmed the state's two-to-three-year-old data centre policy was under review with a greener framework and a push towards Mangaluru, Mysuru, Hubballi-Dharwad, Kalaburagi, Shivamogga and Tumakuru.

These are not gestures. A desalination mandate is a capital expenditure line and a physical constraint. A 51 per cent renewable floor is enforceable. Neither would have been written in the absence of the protests.

What the Precedents Actually Show

India is not the first place to run this experiment, and the international record is more instructive than either side of the argument tends to allow.

In Uruguay, Google's proposed facility in Canelones, the department supplying Montevideo, was designed to consume around 7.6 million litres of water a day — the domestic consumption of some 55,000 people — during the country's worst drought in 74 years, at a moment when authorities were mixing saltwater into the public supply. The protest slogan was “it is not drought, it is pillage”. Uruguay's environmental authorities subsequently approved amendments moving the facility to air cooling. The project was not cancelled. It was reformulated, and academics promptly pointed out that the water saving was purchased with additional electricity, which is a transfer between utilities rather than a reduction in burden.

In Chile, Google's 200-million-dollar Cerrillos facility in Santiago received initial authorisation in 2020, then drew sustained opposition over the capital's strained aquifer after litigation revealed the cooling towers would require 7.6 million litres of potable water a day. An environmental court partially reversed the permit, requiring the application to be revised to account for climate change. In September 2024 Google renounced the 2020 permit altogether in order to redesign around water-saving technology.

The Netherlands went furthest earliest. Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer imposed a moratorium on new data centre construction in July 2019 over grid and environmental strain. The constraint has since migrated from planning to physics: in early 2026 the grid operator TenneT wrote to companies in the Schiphol region pausing connection requests because of congestion that may persist to around 2035, and in April 2026 a Dutch judge ruled that the Haarlemmermeer grid was simply full, delaying a data centre connection.

Ireland is the cleanest case of all, because the state publishes both sides of the ledger. The Central Statistics Office found data centres consuming 22 per cent of all metered electricity in 2024 and 23 per cent in 2025. EirGrid's de facto moratorium on new Dublin-area connections ran for years. In December 2025 Ireland ended it — but on terms: any data centre seeking a connection must install on-site generation or battery storage capable of meeting its full demand, and applications outside greater Dublin are considered case by case.

Read together, these four cases describe the same trajectory, and it is not the one either camp claims. Opposition rarely cancels a facility. What it reliably does is change the terms on which the facility is built, and then embed those terms in a rule that applies to the next applicant who never protested at all. Air cooling in Uruguay, permit revision in Chile, self-generation in Ireland, grid congestion pricing in the Netherlands: in every case the concession outlived the campaign.

Relocation Is Not Reduction

The uncomfortable half of that finding is that terms which travel can also travel somewhere quieter.

The economics literature on burden displacement is old and its verdict is genuinely mixed. The pollution haven hypothesis — that firms in resource-intensive or polluting activities migrate towards jurisdictions with weaker regulation — has been tested for four decades with results that range from confirmation in specific sectors to null findings to the occasional “race to the top”, where inward investment raises host standards rather than lowering them. Early surveys concluded that compliance costs were generally too small relative to labour, logistics and market access to drive location decisions.

For data centres the calculus is unusual, because the inputs that generate the objection — water, power, land, grid headroom — are simultaneously the inputs that determine whether the facility can operate at all. That cuts both ways. It means a developer cannot simply relocate to a jurisdiction with lax rules if that jurisdiction also lacks water and transmission. But it also means that when a state does hold water and transmission, the incentive to site there rather than argue in Thane is very strong, and the community that happens to sit on top of those resources may have considerably less capacity to object than a Thane housing society with architects, finance professionals and a functioning residents' association.

Karnataka's revised policy pushing development from Bengaluru to Mangaluru, Mysuru, Kalaburagi and Shivamogga is, on the most generous reading, sensible load distribution. On a less generous one it is the relocation of a contested facility from a city with organised civic groups and national media attention to towns with neither. Gujarat's Dholera solution is stronger, because desalination is a genuine substitution of one water source for another rather than a transfer of the same burden to a different postcode — but it also concentrates enormous industrial development in a greenfield city where there is, as yet, almost no resident population to consult.

This is where the Water Consumption Impact index earns its keep as a policy instrument rather than merely an analytical one. If burden is community-scale, then the correct test for whether a relocation represents progress is not whether the new site is bigger or emptier but what fraction of the receiving utility's capacity the campus will absorb. A 200-megawatt facility on a coastal desalination supply and a 200-megawatt facility on a small municipal system are the same asset and completely different objects. Nothing in India's current approvals regime distinguishes between them, because the regime measures square metres.

What a Pause Is Worth

So: was August a victory?

Taken as a monthly data point, no. Monthly foreign investment flows into a lumpy, deal-driven sector are close to noise; a single large transaction slipping from one month to the next produces exactly this pattern. The structural evidence still runs the other way. CBRE recorded India crossing 1,700 megawatts of capacity in 2025 on 440 megawatts of new supply and projected roughly 30 per cent growth in 2026 on a further 500 megawatts. Cumulative commitments were reported at around 126 billion dollars by the end of 2025. Amazon, Microsoft and Google have collectively pledged tens of billions more. The tax holiday runs to 2047. On 3 September 2026, after the zero month, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said India had the potential to become the world's leading destination for data centres, and put the investment opportunity at more than 200 billion dollars against India's stated aspiration of a 30 trillion dollar economy by 2047. Nothing in a zero-dollar August alters any of that.

The sector's own data cannot agree on the baseline. Tracxn figures reported in July 2026 put foreign investor funding for India's data centres at 738 million dollars for the whole of the first half of 2026, with Nxtra alone raising close to 710 million from Carlyle Group, Alpha Wave Global and Anchorage Capital Partners. That is a run-rate of about 123 million a month, not 600 to 900. The two series count different things, disclosed equity rounds against broader capital commitment, and neither source reconciles them. A sector whose own trade data cannot agree within a factor of five is one where a single zero month establishes very little.

Taken as a signal, the answer is more interesting. What appears to have stopped is not investment but a particular kind of investment: the kind that could be underwritten without asking where the water comes from. The Communications Today findings describe capital that has not left so much as slowed down to read the file — deal frequency halved, questions submitted in writing, water source and cooling architecture and power arrangement promoted from footnote to line item. If that is what happened, then the protests did not repel capital. They raised its information requirements, which is a different and more durable thing, because information requirements do not get bored and go home.

And yet it would be dishonest to call that a victory for Balkum or for Adavivaram, because the specific facilities those specific residents objected to are still coming. The Thane campus has its permissions. The Vizag project has its land, its notified partner, its foundation stone laid in April 2026 and a target commissioning of July 2028. What the residents secured was not the removal of a building. It was the insertion of a question into the process by which every subsequent building will be financed — a question they will not be present to ask, on behalf of people they will never meet, in places whose names are not yet in the file.

There is a version of this that ends well, and it is not utopian. It requires the Environment Impact Assessment Notification to acquire a trigger keyed to load and utility burden rather than floor area, so that a facility drawing 422 megawatts and a municipal water allocation is assessed as what it is. It requires that allocations be published — the single reform that would have prevented the entire Balkum dispute, since the argument there was never about whether 12 MLD was too much but about why three official documents disagreed. It requires post-approval verification of the kind Bengaluru conspicuously lacks, where somebody checks whether the declared source is the actual source. It requires that downstream and neighbouring users have standing before land is handed over rather than afterwards in a High Court. None of these is technically hard. All of them are cheaper than litigation, and considerably cheaper than a month with no money in it.

The residents of Balkum did not set out to move the price of Indian digital infrastructure. They set out to find out how much water the building at the end of their road was going to use, and discovered that the answer existed in three incompatible versions across three official documents, none of which had been reconciled before the land was cleared and the trees came down. The Water Consumption Impact index found burdens spanning three orders of magnitude across ten American sites. Thane found a spread of the same magnitude within a single project's own paperwork.

Foreign investment can resume next month, and probably will. The three numbers still do not agree.

References

1. AI Data Centers and the Water Use Feedback Loop – Basit A. Akinade, Amobichukwu C. Amanambu, Jonathan M. Frame and Shaolei Ren, arXiv preprint 2606.21760, 19 June 2026
2. AI Data Centers and Power System Sustainability: Understanding the Sustainability Implications of AI-Driven Data Centers on Power Systems – Yuhao Huang, Novarun Deb and Hamidreza Zareipour, arXiv preprint 2606.21064, 19 June 2026, IEEE Energy Sustainability Magazine
3. Communications Today – reporting on foreign funding, deal frequency and investor diligence in Indian data centres, 24 August 2026
4. Amazon Defends Balkum Hyperscale Data Centre As Thanekars Demand Its Relocation – Free Press Journal, 18 July 2026
5. 'Heat, Electricity, Noise...' Thanekars Continue to Fight Against Amazon Data Centre – Local Samosa, July 2026
6. Amazon's data centre in Thane: Facts – Amazon India
7. AI data centres do not need environment clearance, Centre tells Parliament – ThePrint, August 2026
8. Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 – Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India
9. Concerns around acquisition process of Dalit farmers' land in the Google-Adani data centre project in Visakhapatnam – Land Conflict Watch
10. Google's $15 billion India data centre project battles water, wildlife concerns – Reuters, 6 August 2026
11. In Bengaluru's water-stressed areas sit most of its data centres – Newslaundry, 16 April 2026
12. Karnataka's data centres 'guzzling water and energy', state reviewing its policy: Priyank Kharge in Assembly – Deccan Herald, 2026
13. Viksit Gujarat Data Center Policy 2026-29 – Chief Minister's Office, Government of Gujarat, 2026
14. Findings of Dynamic Ground Water Resources Assessment – Ministry of Jal Shakti, Press Information Bureau, Government of India, December 2025
15. Composite Water Management Index – NITI Aayog, Government of India
16. Incentives and Laws for Data Centers in Maharashtra – S&R Associates
17. Andhra Pradesh Allows Private Discom Licence To Data Centre: Here's Why It Matters – The Core, 2026
18. New Tax Laws Amendment Bill Clears Path For Simpler Data Centre Incentive Regime – Inc42, 2026
19. India offers zero taxes through 2047 to lure global AI workloads – TechCrunch, 1 February 2026
20. India data centre capacity to jump 30% in 2026; 500 MW supply boost expected: CBRE report – Business Today, 1 April 2026
21. Google plans data centre in Uruguay, using millions of litres of water amid drought – Mongabay, 2023
22. Chile partially reverses Google data center permit over water use concerns – Data Center Dynamics
23. Judge rules electricity grid in Haarlemmermeer is full, data centre connection delayed – NL Times, 29 April 2026
24. Ireland Ends Moratorium on New Power Links to Data Centers – Energy Connects, December 2025
25. Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025, Key Findings – Central Statistics Office, Ireland
26. FDI and environmental regulation: pollution haven or a race to the top? – Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer
27. India data centres attract $1.56 billion foreign capital – Tracxn data on H1 2026 foreign investor funding in Indian data centres, July 2026
28. India Eyes $200 Billion Data Centre Investment – Channel iam, 3 September 2026
29. India's AI Data Centre Boom Is Draining Water: Weak Regulation Threatens Long-Term Water Security – Down To Earth, 21 August 2026

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Inbetweeners 22- The Torment Questline, Part IV- The Warden

I'm going to start this post with a bit of backstory before we jump into the Inbetweeners' fight with The Warden. First we must go back in time before mortals as we know them even existed in the multiverse. At this time the Abyss was dominated by a race called the Obyrith. These were ancient, eldritch horror type creatures, far more alien in form and purpose than modern demons. In fact, they were so alien that it has been said that simply looking upon them can drive a normal mortal mad. Over time, the Tanar'ri rose as the predominant class of demon in the Abyss. Some scholars posit they were originally bred as slaves or experiments by the Obyrith and broke free of their binds, not unlike what the Gyth did against the Illithids eons later. While the Obyrith were individually incredibly powerful, they simply outbred and outcompeted by the Tanar'ri. Making matters worse, so horrific was the scale of their “experiments” and the suffering they caused, that hoards of celestials launched several crusades to wipe them out. So between Tanari'ri uprisings and Celestial invasions eating away at their numbers the Obyrith's declined and faced near extinction. Some still persist to this day, but they are far fewer in number and hide in the darkest corners of the lower planes.

On particular species of Obyerth responsible for spawning many of the species of Tanari'ri that would later take over was the Sibriex. This absolutely repulsive creatures do not have a single form, because they constantly graft new flesh and materials onto their bodies, making each one a unique, pulsating abomination of fleshly appendages. They are the size of elephants, and have to weigh themselves down with chains or the volatile gasses that bloat their body would cause them to float away. They look more like a series of fetid digestive organs fused together than a cohesive entity, and smell just as bad. Simply being around one is toxic enough to poison and kill a mortal. They have no known life span, and can theoretically live indefinitely by continuing to assimilate new flesh to replace old, decaying flesh. They are as intelligent as they are repulsive, and are obsessed with hoarding secrets and knowledge through experimentation. It was this very experimentation that ultimately drove their kind to decline. One particularly prescient Sibriex realized that the writing was on the wall for the Obyerth, and decided to leave the Abyss. This nameless horror made his way to the lowest layer of Hades, Pluton, which was sparsely populated at the time. There were some undead and creatures that hunted souls, but most of the activity was in the upper layers of Hades. It was here the Sibriex decided to make his home and continue his work.

This Sibriex was an expert on not only anatomy and biological experiments, but also with architecture and machinery. He had grand designs for building a prison the likes of which the multiverse had never seen... one he was never able to build due to the constant state of war in the Abyss. So he set upon the several millenia task of building the Torment. He started small, with a simple prison structure and lab. His experiments and torture yielded souls, souls he could sell for a profit to buy more resources to expand his prison. Over time he began employing the local creatures, the Yugoloth, whose greed knew no bounds. Many of his workers were abominations he build himself within the confines of the prison. The prisoners themselves provided the material to build new workers. And new workers meant more cells and more cells meant more prisoners. His efforts snowballed. Soon, the Torment began developing a reputation among the lower planes, and many demon and devil lords alike outsourced the expensive prospect of keeping and torturing prisoners to the Sibriex. They only knew him as “The Warden” and no one ever looked up on the Warden directly, only dealt with him through proxies. Each addition to the Torment served as an additional layer of insulation, protecting the Sibriex form what was outside. Each new prisoner was a new opportunity. Soemtimes he was paid just to inflict pain. Other times to extract information. Other times prisoners were simply dumped and forgotten about. It mattered not... every prisoner was a resource, and the Sibriex made sure that no part of the body or mind went to waste.

At some point the Sibriex designed the Torment such that it had modular, moving cells. The entire prison became designed be rearranged at will, with every room flexible except some of the core structures. This meant that any floorplan or design was almost immediately obsolete, not that anyone short of a team on Mechanus would be able to survey such a large area methodically. The Torment became a mystery, a massive structure, one of the largest in Hades, as mysterious as it was horrible. The Sibriex built the Jailer to be a figurehead of sorts, a mascot for torment itself. And after that he continued, collecting new prisoners, increasing his knowledge, and inflicting untold horror. His project was a wound in the soul of the multiverse itself. He recorded all of the dark knowledge he gained in a tome, The Tome of Torment. And he did not need to worry about anyone interfering. His prison was located in such a remote area it was nearly impossible to access with an army. Furthermore, he stayed neutral in the Blood War, taking all types, and avoided taking in any prisoners that would draw too much attention. Everything went according to plan for millennia... until the Inbetweeners arrived.

With Lurian leading the charge, the players headed from the Jailer's chamber to the Warden's office. The Sibriex, who I will now refer to as the Warden, was in a bind. His office and the Jailer's laboratory where at the heart of the facility. There were several layers of security preventing most of the guard from being able to easily reach it to avoid a guard uprising from threatening his control. The Inbetweeners had been little more than curiosities. Heroes that somehow found there way down here. Others had before, and the Jailer normally made quick work of them. The Warden had never considered the possibility that they could overwhelm him. He had imperfect information... he did not know that these players had a Far Realm patron who could break the rules of reality at a whim, and did not know that Zariel's top lieutenant had been tasked with ensuring their success. So, when the players were coming, he was not ready.

The first thing the Sibriex did is deploy the guard he did have in the area. Mostly rutterkins, fleshy abominations created from the husks of prisoners by the Jailer, and some mezzoloths in the area charged the group. The players didn't even need to fight, they were annihilated in a mix of radiant light by Lurian and infernal fire by Xivora. The Warden did have one more trick up his sleeve though, a contingency in cases like this. He had one of the most notorious and expensive mercenary quartets in the multiverse on retainer... The Four. And the Four were one of the few entities that could teleport in to the most restricted areas of the Torment. So when the players entered the Warden's office, a massive, two story study that was as large as a library of a major city, they encountered not only a Sibriex, but a Sibriex guarded by four Nycaloths, each with its own unique power.

So let's talk Challenge Rating for a second here. The players were probably level 8ish at this point (give or take). Maybe even lower. They had with them an Xivora, an Erinyes CR 12, arguably CR 13 with her kit. And then Lurian, a Planetar which is CR 16. He was heavily weakened, but the players had him use his healing ability to bring himself back to full health instead of on them. They healed themselves up for the most part, but were still dinged up a bit from the previous fight (Thogg with his disfigured face, and low on spell slots and certain items from the fight with the Jailer). They were facing off against a Sibriex (CR 18) and 4 Nycaloths (CR 9 Each). So it was already a pretty tough fight for the players... but there were not ordinary Nycaloths. The Four gained their reputation, and their exorbitant rate, for their unique abilities. We have:

Armor- One Nycoloth looked like it was made of chrome or stainless steel. It's armor class was 23 rather than the usual 18, making it much harder for the players to strike. Even Xivora only had a 25% of hitting it with her +8 to hit.

Regenerator- This Nycoloth had crimson, sinewy flesh that seemed to flow and roil constantly. Its wounds healed almost instantly, regardless of the type of damage it took. Radiant, fire, it did not matter. Limbs would grow back almost instantaneously as they were cut off. Mechanically, this was 50 hitpoints regenerated per turn, but the ability ends when it is brought below 0 hitpoints. Since a Nycoloth has 123 hitpoints, this is a tall order for the players, and they and their allies are distracted by the other three along with the Sibriex as well.

Whirling Dervish- This Nycoloth attacked x4 per turn instead of x2 per turn, doubling its damage output. Even without considering criticals this give it an average DPS of 72 per turn, enough to potentially take out a player in one round of attacks, Xivora in 2, or Lurian in 3. Narratively, it moved very quickly, and attacked so fast it had motion blurs.

Voidtouched- This Nycoloth is completely black, void black from head to toe. No light reflects off of it, almost like its a cut out of reality. Any melee attack against it forces a constitution saving throw, failure and the attacker takes ½ the damage it deals back as necrotic damage. Furthermore, it gets a flat +10 necrotic damage bonus on all attacks. This means that its DPS is around 56, and that's before the backlash damage from other melee attacks.

The Warden himself hung way back in his office, choosing to let the Four do the bulk of the fighting and picking off opponents with ranged attacks and spells. Squirt Bile dealt 10d6 acid damage, and could be used once per turn plus once per legendary action expended, meaning it could be done several times per turn. he could alos cast hold monster at will, and more importantly, Feeblemind three times per day which is a devastating ability for casters.

So... this was a very uphill, if not near impossible battle for the players. It ended up being one of the most epic fights in the campaign. I don't remember the specific sequence of actions, but I think to start the players and Xivora squared off against the Regenerator and Armor Nycaloth, while Lurian handled the Void and Whirling Dervish himself. The Sibriex sat back and hit the characters with Bile, periodically paralyzed them with Hold Monster. Immediately the group ran into issues. Xivora could not reliably hit the Armor Nycaloth. Lurian held his own against the two, but the damage math wasn't on his side. And the players simply could not do enough damage to the regenerator quickly enough.

Uzo used his ace in the hole, an ability the Interloper gifted him called Temporal Duplicate. It summoned an exact copy of him from another dimension to fight alongside him for one minute. He named this one Twozo. He had avoided using this ability before for a few reasons: 1- It violated the laws of reality so intensely it immediately drew the attention of the Protectors of the Weave, 2- It could backfire, the Interlopers spells while potent were... unreliable, and 3- Uzo had moral issues with sacrificing a version of himself for another dimension. However, desperate times called for desperate measures. And, this was one of the few places the Protectors probably wouldn't rush to. But, even with a second Uzo, it was a losing fight. I think at some point the Whirling Dervish did some of its attacks on the players as well because Twozo was within an inch of his life. That's when Uzo had a master stroke idea. He took all the grenades he got from the Giff, along with the copies of those grenades Twozo had. He had twozo pull all six pins and hug the Regenerator. Each grenade dealt 5d6 damage, so that's 30d6 damage. That's already an average of 105, and I think he rolled well so the Regenerator was taken off the board. But, from there things got worse.

Lurian was critically low on hitpoints. Xivora was feebleminded, and unable to contribute meaningfully to the fight. Feeblemind is an absolutely busted spell that basically melts the targets brain. They are still alive, but barely. No capacity for language, little to no meaningful intelligence, can't cast spells, etc. Kind of turns them into a pug, but maybe they can melee attack a direct threat. And the Warden could cast it 3 times per day, which is absurd, especially since it could cast a spell as a legendary action. The players weren't much better off, and there were still three of The Four and the Sibriex hadn't been touched. BUT, earlier in the campaign, Domilia had communicated with Chauntea, who approved of her going to the Torment to remove the great evil from the world. She basically said that Domilia could call upon her once when the need was greatest, and if the cause was virtuous she would intervene. The bravery to, when they had no need, go further into the Torment to take on the Warden was enough to justify this call. So Domilia was able to cast Miracle (like a specialized wish) and wished that everyone was healed. All HP totals were brought back up to full. The Sibriex was furious, and immediately melted Domilia's brain. She would be a drooling imbecile for the remainder of the fight. With that, Lurian was able to finish of the Void Nycaloth and then with the players, take out the Whirling Dervish as Xivora finished off the Armor one. At that point, no amount of hold monster or bile spittle could stop a pissed of angel, devil, and four pissed of players from killing it.

It was a truly epic battle, really fun to DM. When it was all over, the players were able to loot the Warden's office. The issue with his loot is it was all hella evil, and the players weren't. As a reminder here is what they got:

Tome of Torment- This book had everything the Sibriex needed to build and control the torment. Spells for building the walls, schematics for the cells, spells to bind and torture and siphon energy from it. Group can use it (really evil) or sell it as it would be of great worth to Zariel (to use) the Interloper (to study) or celestials (to destroy). Also has instructions for building horrific fiendish constructs like The Jailer.

Barrel of Souls- 723 tormented souls are trapped in this barrel. Group can do as they like– huge value in lower planes markets.

Rod of Torment- Ziv will try to snatch this one up. It has 6 charges per day and can use the following abilities:

Inflict Wounds (3rd Level- 5d10 necrotic damage)– 1 charge Hold Monster- 2 Charges Finger of Death- 3 Charges Imprison- 5 Charges

DC on all saves is 17.

Helm of Domination- Once per day, may attempt to enslave another creature. The creature gets a Wis Save DC 17. On Failure, the creature is fully enslaved. Wearer may only have one thrall at a time. If the creature succeeds its saving throw, the Wearer must make a Wis saving throw DC 17. If they fail, they take 1d6 psychic damage per HD of the creature they were trying to control. The enslaved creature must do anything the wearer commands, but it can attempt to break free if it is ordered to do something that puts it in serious harm's way by making another saving throw.

Bag of Void- Like a bag of holding… but the things never come back (unless they can planeshift). Goes to a plane of existence meant for rubbish, though living creatures are exiled there as well. It is cold, rocky, always twilight and devoid of any native life.

Torture Orb- When activated, every living being in 30 foot radius of the orb must make a con save DC 15. Failure and they take 2d6 damage and cannot act that turn. Active until orb is turned off or shattered. Constructs and undead are immune to this effect, as is the individual attuned to it.

Xivora did end up taking the Rod of Torment as payment for helping the players and almost dying. I think Domilia protested a little, but the rest of the group was fine with it, plus they weren't really going to stop her. Domilia was terrified of the Tome of Torment falling into the wrong hands, and kept it so that no one else could use it. The Barrel of Souls was also seized by Domilia, who was conflicted. They were incredibly valuable, but also she was morally opposed to the trade of souls. She couldn't simply release them though, because undoubtedly many of the 723 souls were wicked, and releasing them into the multiverse could have really bad externalities. These souls will come into play in a future post. Rotlog took the Helm of Domination but I'm not sure if he used it much. I think maybe once. The Bag of the Void was funny, because they weren't' sure what it did at once but realized when things went into it they never came back. The did use this one a few times to dispose of particularly unwanted things. Not sure what happend with the torture orb... maybe they gave it to the Interloper? Either way we didn't see it again.

Lurian took over the Warden's console and set all of the prisoners free. Throughout the prison was the din of guards being overwhelmed and slaughtered by the countless prisoners... creatures that had lost any humanity or semblance of mercy after so much torture. He figured he would let the prison tear itself apart. Somewhere, Victoria the vampires cell opened... But more importantly, Uzo had cast Temporal Duplicate there, and the Protectors were aware of a disturbance deep in the Torment.

I'll end there, next up we will explore Lurian's character in more detail.

My children don’t know who I am.

They think they do.

They grew up in my house. Sat at my table. Heard my rules. Felt the weight of my decisions. They’ll tell you I was strict.

I wasn’t that strict.

They’ll say, “Dad, we got cell phones later than everybody else.”

Yeah.

And looking back, that might’ve been one of the best things I ever did for them.

Because while everybody else’s kids were wandering through every dark alley the Internet could manufacture, mine had to wait awhile before somebody handed them the whole world in their pocket.

But here’s the thing.

My children know pieces of me.

So does my church.

So do my friends.

And I know pieces of them.

Because nobody walks around completely exposed.

We wear masks.

We lock doors.

We build separate little kingdoms online. Facebook gets one version of us. Instagram gets another. X gets another. Then Mom walks into the room, or Grandma, or somebody from church, and suddenly we straighten the halo and polish the wings.

Look at us.

Saints.

Yeah, right.

That’s why I don’t want the performance.

I WANT THE REAL YOU.

When somebody says, “Watch your language. He’s a pastor,” I almost laugh.

Why?

If that’s who you are when I’m not around, why manufacture somebody else when I walk into the room?

I can’t minister to somebody who doesn’t exist.

Give me the real man.

Give me the real woman.

Give me the anger.

Give me the questions.

Give me the doubts.

Give me the scars you keep covered.

Give me the truth.

Because Jesus never needed somebody to clean themselves up before He could see them.

And neither do I.

Here’s something else people may not understand about me.

The man behind the pulpit isn’t exactly the same man sitting beside a hospice bed.

Same Jesus.

Same Bible.

Same faith.

Different room.

Different need.

At church, I may preach Pentecostal fire.

But when I walk into a hospice room, I’m not there to put on a show.

I LISTEN.

Sometimes the person wants Scripture.

Sometimes prayer.

Sometimes they want to talk about God.

Sometimes they want to talk about their dog.

Sometimes they want to tell me about the war, their marriage, their children, the thing they regret, the person they never forgave.

And sometimes they don’t want to talk at all.

So I read the room.

Not some psychic foolishness.

Not fake prophecy.

I’m watching.

Listening.

Paying attention.

Because sometimes you can see heaviness hanging on somebody before they ever admit they’re carrying it.

You see it in their shoulders.

Their eyes.

The silence between their words.

And something inside me says:

There.

That’s where it hurts.

Maybe that’s experience.

Maybe that’s discernment.

Maybe sometimes it’s a gift of the Spirit.

I don’t always know.

I just know there have been moments when Scripture came into my mind, and I spoke it, and somebody looked at me almost stunned.

“I was just thinking about that Scripture.”

And I think:

Lord…

You did it again.

That’s why I need Jesus Christ with every human being I meet.

Because I don’t know everything hiding behind somebody’s eyes.

Neither do you.

We barely know each other.

Sometimes we barely know ourselves.

But I’ve got pastor friends who will tell me exactly what they think, even when they know I might not like it.

I treasure that.

No costume.

No polished preacher voice.

No religious theater.

Just truth.

And I want that from the people in my congregation too.

Don’t give me the church version of you.

Give me YOU.

Because I don’t want to minister to your mask.

I don’t want to pray for your performance.

I don’t want to shake hands with the cardboard cutout you drag into church while the real you is bleeding somewhere behind it.

I want to minister to the person underneath.

The one who gets angry.

The one who gets scared.

The one who has questions.

The one who sometimes wonders where God is.

The one carrying something nobody else knows about.

THAT PERSON.

Because that’s the person Jesus came for.

And when I don’t know what to say, I trust Him.

When I don’t know where the wound is, I trust Him.

When I don’t know what Scripture that person needs, I trust Him.

And every once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary conversation, God puts something in my path that I never planned.

A word.

A Scripture.

A sentence.

One little thing that lands exactly where it needed to land.

And suddenly Proverbs 16:9 isn’t ink on paper anymore:

“The mind of man plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.”

I planned the conversation.

God directed the step.

I walked into the room.

God knew who was waiting there.

I saw the face.

God saw behind it.

So no.

I don’t need the fake you.

I don’t need the polished you.

I don’t need the Sunday-morning version of you.

Give me the real you.

Broken edges and all.

Because Jesus already knows who’s behind the mask.

And thank God—

He knows exactly how to reach them.

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Memory

I learned to sleep away Upon this toboggan dream Mercy and this light Forever with a friend Nightstead and miracle A bonnet for this hope And in query night The Holocaust is lost For you, my Friend And faithful Earth In embellishing This landing Capes of knowing when And solid few To catching them Across a war to carry In hollow fear But such entice Our ice was of the enemy Thirty thoughts of must be doves To go unto the altar And why for air to surface This land of febrile bight To proceed with night Abandon this And weary few, my home In such to be no other But this pen at day And solo cross to cover Won to be in this This head of more And fairy tale Of history and land We’ll take a few And risk forever Nunavut by day To there and glad Escape if Euro peace And gold in glad escape What timing everything A pay for then be gone What solace then Heaven at her keep And on this day Return the army away In finite land and us the other In our numbers keep Begone to this road My Heaven walk At pace and scurry then This fightless crown Who hurried to the city And why to men Whose history at the neck Would maim us here For thirty hold And heist to here But me and you Cross, extend my life The game is at a query And alas as told The brightening of hue For forty inches rain And blue abyss to call What nightsprung To this of light I saw you in the American In rose palette And hurried pace My Sun away And wishing war To take you, words In cleverness abandon Why to Copenhagen do you view The rights we have undone To this we shall Requite in thus appeal This troubling thing This hostile bait To solemn then agree We are gone And doors alight With name and pleasure for A listless try That men would be so lucky But I am sorry And in evident dispose Take my dress and perfume Across to then your due But marry won’t And Auschwitz then unview I miss my miss And there grow old To Nunavut.