First day at the new job. Many forms to fill out. People to meet. Hallways in which to get lost. Work to do.

I spoke yesterday afternoon with a friend about the consequences of being provoked into a confrontation by an unworthy antagonist. I asserted that by staying on the chessboard, one necessarily validates the opponent. A better option might be to ignore the challenger, and not play his game. Simply step off the board.

At midnight on Saturdays, my local PBS station has been rerunning episodes of the classic British series The Prisoner, which I haven't seen since I was a very small but fascinated child. Last night's episode (unknown to me beforehand), was Checkmate, the episode in which Number 6 literally finds himself as a pawn on a human chessboard, at the whim of others, before once again trying to make his escape from the village.

This image of conformity versus individualism has been a visual metaphor in my brain as long as I can remember. I find it odd that the analogy came up in conversation a few hours before I actually saw the television program for the second time in my life.

It feels like the last few desperate days of summer vacation, just before school begins again. I start a new job on Monday, and I've tried to cram about a year's worth of projects into the past few interim days I've taken off. One of those projects was to see if I could get this site up and running. But now that I have, I may not have the time to do anything with it.

I wonder if this will work.