OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

Not much for today. Just got to thinking about how often I have a tendency to see life in terms of analogies (or are they similes? and what are these metaphors I keep mixing and participles I keep dangling and infinitives splitting?).

So much of life for me has resolved itself as a set of images, simple, usually physical images. These I find I can equate to more complicated areas of my life and gain some insight.

And if there are some parts which don't fit, well, I can just ignore those. After all, they're my images, my ways of explaining things.

You can find them all over my writing, but I have just one I'd like to throw out today, one I found in an old e-mail I sent to someone who didn't turn out as a person to know.

I wrote:

I look upon marriages (perhaps in a cynical way) like train wrecks. That is, there are two people going full speed ahead in life (sometimes with several attached cars), who have decided to try and merge together on a single track.

And that's not easy with two locomotives, with two driving forces which are used to having full control of the track ahead of them (or so they thought). For two to become one can result in tremendous pressure and a lot of heat when the two merge.

Sometimes it's a real wreck, death and destruction for all involved, and sometimes they manage to get merged without major injury. But there's always some jostlings and joltings and everybody gets a few bruises.

And if the couplings aren't strong enough, eventually there will be a derailment. Now I know that's not a very romantic image of marriage, but it is the way I see them...

To add to my image that I wrote, I find that my wife and I have managed to guide our combined train onto a siding and are sitting, steam up just enough to blow the whistle occasionally, enjoying the view here for a while, without the hustle and bustle of the main line.