For those of you who enjoy dialing in to my site, I regret to inform you that there will be no entry today. Perhaps tomorrow. Come back tomorrow and there may be an entry. If you see this message tomorrow, then there will be no entry tomorrow either. For whatever duration of time you observe this message, there will be no entry. Below are some words which do not constitute an entry, so be warned: for the duration that you observe the words below, there will be no entry. Has this happened before? That is to say, have there been previous Palinode entries that were, and are, in point of fact, not entries? No. That's ridiculous. Is tautology? Of course.

But you shouldn't take my word for it. These words clearly look like an entry, so who's to say that previous entries have not actually been something else altogether? Am I the one to say? You'd think so, because you think I'm the author, you think that these words and all the Palinode entries emanate from me. You would be correct. But you would also be correct if you concluded that you could not trust my words, since I'm not sitting in front of you right now, talking to you and drinking your Kahlua straight from the bottle and borrowing your computer to upload an entry. Which I'm not, because you don't have any Kahlua left, so why would I come over? Besides, this is not an entry, but a regretful announcement that there will be no entry today.

What these words constitute, in point of fact, is the label on the box. What box? The box that contains the entry. Inside the box there are sheets of paper which may or may not contain the words that comprise an entry. Today's entry, as a matter of fact. If there is an entry today. Positioned over the sheets of paper is a delicately balanced bottle of Kahlua. It is your bottle of Kahlua. I swiped it from you the last time I came over. So there's one mystery solved. The Kahlua holder is wired to a random number counter. When the counter hits a particular number the bottle will tip and the entry will be obliterated, and you will forced to tilt the box over a funnel to retrieve your sweet festive liqueur.

The counter may display the fatal number any moment now. It may never display the number. So until you open the box you have no idea whether the entry exists. I've pointed out several times that today's entry does not exist, but as I've mentioned you can't trust me because I'm not in front of you right now, drinking your Kahlua and silently judging you by the behaviour of your cat. I'm not on the couch slugging straight from the bottle and wondering if I can borrow a DVD, all the while shaking cat fur off the blade of my palm.

By now you've probably concluded that the box I'm referring to is figural, and not just in the sense that everything in language is figural, and that I create the figural even out of the actual by the act of speech, by referring to it, eg., I refer to your cat and its double is invoked and shedding figural fur everywhere. The truth is that your conclusion - that the box I refer is not only referentially but actually figural - is erroneous. If you want proof, go look for that bottle of Kahlua you've been saving for that house party later on this summer. Aha! Not there, is it? It's in the box. I copied this entire text from the label on the box and put it up on my site, mostly because I was too busy to take the time to create an entry, which as you know exists only in superposition. If you open the box the superposition stabilizes and then you have the choice of reading my latest entry or sucking the Kahlua out with a straw. You'll get super wasted that way.

Oh, and sorry, by the way.

parode - exode